Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2018

[broccoli]

The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4918232.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 4:08 am on Oct 1, 2018, (PDT -8)


I seem to have recovered most of my rankings from before my suspected mobile-first Fred penalty, apart from the very highest volume ones, where an annoying thin-content site is still pushing me down.

The traffic to my site has doubled to about 4K. I’m still well off the 10K figure I was at before the March update pushed up a bunch of low quality sites in my niche.

No corresponding increase in adsense earnings though. As I’m a viral site I see weird, unnatural adsense drops after traffic increases all the time. CPC is still the same but CTR has halved. I hope it settles down. If not, my entire niche may no longer be financially viable.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:11 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2018]
[edit reason] Cleanup after thread split to new month [/edit]

[RedBar]

Indeed, but if you rely exclusively on Google's traffic, there is something wrong in the business plan.

There you go again making assumptions with absolutely no information whatsoever, maybe you should have written "if one relies" then it could be taken as a generalised view.

My business has been around since 1840, some 158 years before Google appeared. It amazes me at times on this forum board how many people make blasé statements with no facts.

[broccoli]

@pritz Yes, my rankings for some of my high volume keywords have slipped again in the last couple of days - and I had only just got them back! I’m seeing some evidence of a further push towards big brand authority sites. A high umbrella relevance low authority niche site got pushed down on some of the high volume searches in favour of slick corporate sites from outside the niche.

[lostshootingstar]

Seeing a big shakeup in the SERPs for our industry today. Some up, some down for us personally. Still very early in the US but traffic seems to be a bit lower than last week.

[jmorgan]

SEMRush showing 9.4 but still the same boring traffic levels for my site. Would have liked to have seen a boost.

[jmorgan]

Whilst this is an admirable concept, what is the point of doing anything when Google simply destroys a site willy nilly?

Look, I know where you're coming from. My site seems to go up and down based on the whims of Google for no apparent reason. For them to like my site one update, then not so much the next (literally a couple of weeks later) makes no sense to me and suggests they may not really have any idea what they're doing and are just constantly adjusting their algorithm based on fickle reasons (like may Pichai calling the tech team demanding to know why his favorite site isn't ranking well).

My point is I can't spend my time worrying about Google and which sites they feel like ranking well at any given moment. That's beyond my control. All I can do is focus on improving my own website.

[broccoli]

Could they be split testing again? My rankings seem to have reverted.

[EditorialGuy]

Could they be split testing again? My rankings seem to have reverted.

Isn't it likely that they're testing all the time (and with multivariate testing, not just split testing)? Wouldn't that be part of the AI/machine learning process?

[Milchan]

without a doubt they are constantly running a multitude of tests that as you suggest are likely self adjusting due to the AI - at this stage we would all be very surprised if we found that they werent doing that.

[KaseyM]

Yep - volatile today!

[Spiekerooger]

Big ranking changes today in Europe.

[oddnumber]

Some movement in our niche too - nothing TOO dramatic, but certainly more than the daily push'n'shove that one would expect.

[RedBar]

What an almighty mess!

I have exclusive, branded products that have been #1 for years which can NOW only be found by using "keywords", in the regular SERPs for some of these products I am only finding, literally, a couple of results copied from my sites, nothing else in the SERPs is remotely related to the search.

Fubard beyond belief.

[massimodefilippo]

You cannot trust in google anymore.
I stop to spent time and money for a search engine that act like crazy, that play with life and business of people.
When I search something now I go to bing where I see what I am searching for, not the most important factories!

[jmorgan]

So everyone that is dirty on Google, have you switched to, say, DuckDuckGo yet? It would great if everyone did, because I'm ranking higher than all my competitors there.

[BushyTop]

We're starting to see better results.

Hope that it continues for us.

[HereWeGo123]

Seeing substantial volatility all day yesterday and early morning US too. One interesting thing I notice is that when manually checking our rankings for various keywords, I would get one set of results and when I refresh, I immediately see a different set of results with our site ranking higher. Almost on all searches.

[oddnumber]

One interesting thing I notice is that when manually checking our rankings for various keywords, I would get one set of results and when I refresh, I immediately see a different set of results with our site ranking higher. Almost on all searches.

That's exactly what I was seeing last night here in the UK - alarmingly, sometimes our domain didn't appear but after a refresh, there we were. We've stabilised now from what I can see.

[RedBar]

So everyone that is dirty on Google, have you switched to, say, DuckDuckGo yet?

I did ages ago and much prefer their regular SERPs results, their image SERPs needs attention though.

DDG/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/ZapMeta/Ecosia I rank either at #1 or 2 for my keywords plus the listings below me are also very good.

[HereWeGo123]

@oddnumber - and did you notice that real time traffic was lower during those “need to refresh” moments until it stabilized?

[oddnumber]

@HereWeGo123 - not REALLY, although it was organically a slow traffic day any way (as it has been lately). The fluctuations were fleeting though. I ran the same searches on three devices at the same time and the results varied wildly, more than you'd expect. It was as if there were two separate indexes being called.

[broccoli]

So everyone that is dirty on Google, have you switched to, say, DuckDuckGo yet?

I've started using Bing and Ecosia a lot on my phone. They have nice apps, and Ecosia are promoting themselves like crazy. I'm hopeful Ecosia are going to attract the younger market (unlike Bing). I've realised through my experiences this year that their search results are often better. I'm doing a lot of DIY work at the moment, and often I need to search a quick answer for how to do things while I'm on site. Google keeps showing me youtube videos and pages of product listings. I don't want to have to click through a rambling video on my phone on site. I often have to go to Bing to get relevant forum discussions and how-to pages, and I just ran out of patience with Google.

One of my programmer friends says a lot of the programmers in his office have switched to Bing to get answers for programming problems because the serps are better for forum discussions. I agree, some of the "authority" sites google has chosen for programming questions are barely in English and full of coding mistakes.

I also use them as a gauge. If I rank better on other search engines, then I know I'm under some kind of mysterious algorithmic panda/penguin penalty from Google.

[hurwith2]

Lots of action!

[ichthyous]

Wonderful, another drop down today for no apparent reason. It's clear that Google simply intends to rotate who is on top and who falls periodically throughout the year so you cannot rely on steady traffic anymore. Even when you do have good traffic, the conversions are low.

I'm seeing shifting patterns of traffic as if we are all the mice in Google's lab experiment. For example, I saw a big and sudden shift downward in CTR when my impressions were very high. Now my CTR is much higher and impressions are down. It seems that Google may be trying to maximize CTR while lowering the overall number of impressions. Could this be a way of spreading the number of impressions across more domains and giving more sites a shot at being seen?

As far as I am concerned, I see many more inquiries coming in when the CTR is higher and impressions are lower than vice versa. At this point I am ready to try Facebook ads again. I cannot have Google squeezing my site for weeks and months.

[lostshootingstar]

I know my comments are always doom and gloom, but things are really getting pretty dire for us. Whatever the heck happened yesterday is one of the most frustrating things I've experienced in the 10 years I've been running our business. I did some manual (incognito) spot checking of rankings yesterday morning and noticed many of them were up a good amount. I thought "Great, maybe we'll have a good day".

I was wrong.

Somehow traffic dipped another 10% over last week, which is already down 30-40% from August. I just cannot comprehend that I even have this much more to lose at this point. Ahrefs is starting to show that my manual rank checking was not wrong, rankings across over 500 keywords are actually up. How on Earth is my traffic dipping even further!? It's like something is broken.

[RedBar]

I have exclusive, branded products that have been #1 for years which can NOW only be found by using "keywords",

Further to my post above, for the moment, the SERPs are looking more "normal" again, what the heck are they doing? How do they expect businesses and the public to trust them when something's there one minute, gone the next, only to return until whenever they deem so?

[ichthyous]

How on Earth is my traffic dipping even further!? It's like something is broken.

Google has finally reached the point where in order to bring in additional incremental revenue they need to kill off sites that rank well for organic search, it's that simple. They need to grow revenue or their entire business model and certainly their stock price will tumble. At this point the only way left to do that is to take over the entire first page and make ranking well in organic search valueless. Now the sites they couldn't drive into paying for advertising will certainly have to pay, or perish. Any webmaster who feels confident that their site won't be hammered is a fool...eventually it will be your turn to get inexplicably whacked. Google can pretend it's AI, or anything else...but it's just all about their bottom line.

I for one would gladly pay Google if their ads increased my revenue. But alas, I have tried many times and Google adwords just don't work for my business. I would love to try their display network, but at $10 per click on the sites that count for me it's way out of my league. Facebook display ads are much cheaper, and do send traffic, but do not convert well or bring in sales. They are just window shoppers.

[pritster]

Looking through the posts I can see how hardworking people are currently juggling their lively hoods all due to Googles consistent volatility which started 2.5 MONTHS ago! It's becoming clear that Google is no longer a viable search engine. They have fooled us all over the years indexing our sites and extracting useful information to use in their mobile app services (like maps/images) so that the mobile user is instantly gratified without having to search for the information. The sooner we all wake to the fact the better off we will be. I say time to wave goodbye to greedy Google & block Googlebot from indexing our sites. If they can't index and extract and build their armoury of services then in time nobody will use them. Then they might start listening to good webmasters and SEO who work very hard to meet Googles guidelines ! As people have already said there are plenty of alternative search engines that are out there waiting for this opportunity to arise.

[NickMNS]

@Lostshootingstar I'm seeing similar outcome as you in terms of traffic. Yesterday was bad, really bad. Like you, I just do get it.

Ahrefs is starting to show that my manual rank checking was not wrong,... It's like something is broken.

The relationship between Keyword and Search Results is no longer one to one. Overtime Google has morphed this relationship to the point now where there is no way for an outsider to reasonable measure or assess it. Personalization, geolocation, knowledge graph, carousels, AMP and variety of other factors have made it impossible to determine one's rank. What is position 1 today?

Ahrefs, and other similar keyword ranking services are returning a result that is based on their sample of the search results but it is clear that this sample is not representative of the actual result. This is the same when one does a manual search. With a manual search one's sample size is even smaller and less likely to be representative.

[Gregorich SEO]

@NickMNS

SEMRush keyword volumes have been way off for a month.

Most are N/A and the highest volume keyword is only 6k a month when in reality it's more like 49k.

Anyone else notice this?

Why would this happen?

[broccoli]

Could it be personalisation or localisation? Could they be messing around in the really long tail - aren’t 30% of searches supposed to be unique phrases google has never seen before?

Something weird is going on. Volatile rankings accompanied by adsense freaking out again and giving me an RPM so low I haven’t seen it since 2012.

I’m exhausted. I’m going to take a tip from evolutionary theory. There’s no point me concentrating on quality content on one site in the current conditions. It’s the wrong survival strategy for a volatile environment. I’m just going to copy my competitor’s technique and churn out a bunch of low effort sites. If something sticks I can fix it when google has either returned to sanity or eaten itself.