Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2018

[lostshootingstar]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4913603.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 12:54 pm on Sep 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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It's a holiday weekend in the USA, I don't think anyone should really worry about traffic volume until next week.

However, I did see some negative ranking shifts yesterday that are concerning and can't be explained by a holiday.

[RedBar]

Traffic seems to have dropped a bit today. Anyone?

Within normal parameters for me since I never expect it to be consistently constant!

My parameters?

80-120%, anything outside of that and I have a quick look around to see if anything is untowards in either direction.

[Cralamarre]

Traffic is still going strong here and on a consistent upward climb. I just keep plugging away, adding more content and hoping for the best.

[renatovieira]

My traffic simply disappeared today.

Certainly a lot more updates :-(

Tourism, USA

[samwest]

^ It was Gooney goo goo. [youtu.be...]

[yollo03]

I noticed something odd yesterday. In webmaster report the number of domains that linked to my site shot up and today they are back down. Did anyone notice anything like this in their report? My guess is that google is having problems updating the backlinks.

The other option is that there was some kind of a 'quick' update in the past 24 hours.

[Mark_A]

Last 3 months Google organic is 13% down on the same period last year. Bounce rate is slightly higher but time on site is greater now. New users are 19% down. All told it isn't looking healthy at the moment. Direct traffic is way up, which is a consolation, except it is hard to know exactly why.

[Mark_A]

So, there seems no correlation between spending on Google Ads and Organic search results, because we are spending more and getting less. I suppose there should not be a correlation, but it might be nice for G to allow its actual paying customers an easy ride :-)

[yollo03]

There is no correlation at all. I know a big brand that got hit by a manual action. They spent over one million dollars on google ads. They begged google to lift the manual action off and they refused. They didnt care how much money they spent. This was a few years ago, its not recent.

[Jhurwith]

@BushyTop, we seem to see similar trends. My traffic has not rebounded since early last week. I thought it was due to storm but it seems Google Algo update also in effect.

[lostshootingstar]

Similar here as well. The rankings I track seem to be within normal range, but traffic just never recovered after a drop that I had *hoped* was due to the storm (we have 100% US traffic and Irma last year really affected us as well). I'm not really sure I understand what is happening exactly which is frustrating.

[BushyTop]

We're getting decent traffic today, but I'm thinking it might be seasonal.

[Cralamarre]

I feel like I'm late to the party, but I just received email notification from Google letting me know that mobile-first indexing has been enabled for my site.

I doubt it will have any impact on my traffic, but I guess we'll see. So far traffic is going strong.

[Jhurwith]

@BushyTop We tend to see a drop now due to seasonality but it feels more than that. Last year, in the same week, WOW was positive. This year, not so much. @Cralamarre, we tend to similar stats as well.

Also to keep in mind, last year, in Aug. and early Sept. there were FL and Houston Hurricanes. Therefore, YOY comps could have been better than expected.

[Sally Stitts]

@Cralamarre

I feel like I'm late to the party, but I just received email notification from Google letting me know that mobile-first indexing has been enabled for my site.

Me too! Just this morning. Maybe they just sent out a "new batch".
Seems to have taken forever.
I will be watching closely for any benefit (or detriment).
.

[aristotle]

I don't have any sites about hurricanes, but somehow the Statcounter entries for one of my sites have been showing a lot of visits from north and south carolina these past few days, even though you would expect traffic to drop from that region due to the difficuties people face there. Well it's especially odd because that site has nothing to do with hurricanes.

[WebEnthusiast]

So my observation about the last weekend we had. Our numbers as well as index-level (measured with Sistrix) went down at Friday a bit. As we figured out we started to becoming more crawls from Google Mobile bot. At Monday all come back to normal, we had a bit of less users but the level of transactions stayed the same as before Friday. In Monday the Google Mobile bot hit the ratio 90% to 10% for Desktop crawls.

Could it be that what most have seen have something to do with Mobile First Index? Do you guys tracking it, did any of you who went down was already in MFI?

Important note, we have not yet received information that we are in Mobile First Index in our Search Console.

[MayankParmar]

Just received mobile-first indexing mail here

[BushyTop]

I haven't had the mobile first indexing yet.... ¬_¬

[JesterMagic]

I have received mobile first indexing for a minor site a few months ago but not my major one. My major site last week for a few days had Google bot indexing the site at 7 times the normal number of visits. I wonder if this means I may get the mobile first index email for my site soon.

[mosxu]

There is not a lot of room in that mobile index

[RedBar]

Just received mobile-first indexing mail here

How were you notified, through GSC?

If so then I'll never see it!

I've been mobile for years and don't need Google to tell me this and does it really matter? Why? I'm seeing non-mobile sites (under rewarded?) appearing from nowhere ranking well!

[Cralamarre]

I've been mobile for years and don't need Google to tell me this and does it really matter?

As I understand it, "mobile-first indexing" and "mobile friendly" are two related but different things. All mobile-first indexing does is list your site in the SERPs based on the mobile, rather than the desktop, version of your site.
As long as the two versions are the same, with the same content, then theoretically mobile-first indexing should go unnoticed. I certainly haven't seen any changes with my traffic.

[lostshootingstar]

It could affect your site if your competitors are doing a very poor job with having equivalent content on their mobile sites and you make gains that way.

[Cralamarre]

It could affect your site if your competitors are doing a very poor job with having equivalent content on their mobile sites and you make gains that way.

Again as I understand it, if your mobile site is not up to par with your desktop version, Google will continue to index your desktop version for now, and will notify you of any improvements needed for the mobile version. They won't just index a poorly-designed mobile version at the expense of a perfectly functional desktop version.
So it's unlikely that there is anything to be gained from mobile-first indexing, at least for now, even if your mobile version is superior to your competitors.

[justpassing]

Just to say that, 5 days ago, i received a notification, that one of my site was moved to the mobile-first index (my other sites still didn't receive notification), and since , the traffic is increasing a lot, I am now at twice the traffic I used to have, and all the "new" traffic is from mobile devices. This site itself is mobile friendly since 2 years, and I didn't do more. So I don't know why Google picked it up now, and not before.

[Milchan]

ive recieved the mobile first indexing email today but was fully expecting it as had noticed a lot more activity in the last 10 days regarding the googlemobile bot on my site and an increase in 404 reports from some old url structure I removed months ago appearing in the crawl errors / smartphone errors section.

The serps seem all over the place for me in the last week - not even bothering to try to analyse it too much because there is no point really

[JS_Harris]

I received mobile first indexing on all sites on July 18th, which is ironicaly the day Google announced that slow loading sites would not perform well and so were going to have to wait.

I think they started with the fastest loading sites and moved their way down maybe?

Note: I don't see any difference in rank, mobile first indexing isn't ranking factor influenced. I doubt it's the cause of any ranking fluctuations unless somethign is wrong with your mobile site and visitors are leaving it quickly. Check mobile vs desktop bounce rates.

[glakes]

After getting the mobile first index notice a couple months back, nothing changed for our site - traffic and the underwhelming number of conversions remained the same from Google. If this is the best the top search engine can do, well then they need to take a look in the mirror since Bing is outperforming Google on just a fraction of the traffic.

Right now Amazon dominates Google's SERPS for our keywords. While we are getting plenty of sales from Bing and Yahoo, with Amazon dominating Google there is little converting traffic they are sending to our products. Since we're on Amazon, it compensates for Google's desire to give Amazon all the top SERPS with domain crowding that pushes us independent site operators out of view. Had these shoppers searched for our products on Bing or Yahoo, instead of Google or Amazon, they could have purchased them for less money and received lower shipping costs too.

The latest survey I saw, from Survata, polled shoppers and 72.1% will start their product search on Amazon this holiday season. This is one of many different studies I have seen that show search engines lucky to get even 25% of first product search traffic. If there is any advice I can give to my fellow ecommerce store operators it is to not waste much time on Google. Yes, Google is a search engine behemoth but shopper have abandoned Google and other search engines. It's more important to be seen where the shoppers are, and few are at Google.

[frankleeceo]

I saw no correlation for mobile first indexing among my sites. It seemed that the size, speed, traffic were entirely random. I did see another batch of notification this past couple of days.

[whoa182]

I also got the email as well.

Is anyone still seeing wild fluctuations for some keywords? For example, in the morning a post might be at #5 on the first page, then a few hours later it will be on page 4, and then a few hours later it will be back on the 1st page. This is happening for quite a few keywords.

I also noticed that almost all of my images have been deindexed.

16/09 - Site 1 had 628 images submitted and 348 indexed. By the 17th that dropped to 86 and then 32 on the 19th.
Web pages indexed 326 out of 328.

14/09 - Site 2 had 94 images submitted with 50 indexed. By the 18th it has 2 images indexed.
Web pages indexed 82 out of 85.

Anyone know what's going on here?