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]

[NickMNS]

One thing I am noticing is that my GA numbers vary by a large margin between bots-filtered and bots-NOT-filtered mode. Is it possible that Google updated it's list of known bots? Which would mean that we're not seeing such a large drop in actual users but rather we have been seeing a growth in bot traffic over time, and that traffic was "corrected" at one point in time.

Note that this does not account for the full drop in my traffic, but it is significant.

[ClosedForLunch]

@NickMNS Interesting point. As a side note, I recently ran an experiment by having two different GA tracking IDs on one site. While both trackers returned the same number of total visitors, how they segmented them into organic, direct and referral visitors was very different. I couldn't determine which tracker was telling me the truth. Maybe they both lied.

[glakes]

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.

When I have customers tell me they could not find us and our products in Google, I respond by telling them to use a different search engine. I back that up with a simple reference to Google's search results not being diversified and geared more towards paid placement. Hopefully some customers give it some thought or check in Bing, Yahoo, etc. afterwards which would validate my statement.

Now the sites they couldn't drive into paying for advertising will certainly have to pay, or perish.

Many sites have failed and others shall fail too, but there are those that will live on. A good businessman will build relationships, which my company continues to do. As long as our email and fax machines can still accept purchase orders, we will survive. And when Google buries us to favor a big spending Chinese importer's products, it is Google that looks like the fool. But for us, at least at this point, Amazon has replaced Google and does drive a good amount of sales and keeps us in the eye of consumers.

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'll second that!

I agree with all of what you said 110%. I had to respond to some of your key points because just simply liking your post was not enough.

[tahiti]

Guys I am sorry that I have to circle back to the "zombie topic", other relevant threads I found were closed.

To members who were affected by Google zombies (same amount of traffic, extraordinary low conversion rate) - what does your site return to Google "cache:" search. Does it return a 404, or a recent cached results? Affected badly and am trying to figure out why.

[MayankParmar]

My rank for some keyword is back to normal. Fingers crossed!

[Robert Charlton]

To members who were affected by Google zombies (same amount of traffic, extraordinary low conversion rate) - what does your site return to Google "cache:" search. Does it return a 404, or a recent cached results?

tahiti... regarding the 404s returned by some cached results, it's been discussed a lot, and John Mueller has taken great pains to let webmasters know that it doesn't affect your rankings, and that "it doesn't mean anything". Apparently, it was due to some sort of internal reporting problem in the Google serps (my fuzzy wording here).

Recent copy of cache error 404
May, 2018
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4902307.htm [webmasterworld.com]

If you read the thread, you'll see that I also mention other aspects of the cache which John emphasizes won't be helpful to you right now...

...there are a lot of things you can't tell about a page by what you see in Google cache. Cache dates, eg, don't really relate to when page was last spidered, etc etc

As far as "zombies" go, IMO the term has been pulverized into meaninglessness, discussed from so many different angles that I don't think bring it up is any way useful, but that's up to you... It's only bandwidth and time. ;)

[Robert Charlton]

PS: It perhaps is worth noting that Barry at SER reports that the volatility that's happening in the serps appears to be another update. See Barry's latest...

October 16, 2018 Google Search Algorithm Update
Oct 17, 2018
by Barry Schwartz
[seroundtable.com...]

In one of Barry's most heartfelt passages, he says...

Trust me, I am even getting tired of reporting on Google search algorithm updates - we've had so many but there are numerous signs of another update. One that touched down yesterday late morning, October 16th.

So, for those of you experiencing chaos, I'd wait for things to settle down, and simply make general improvements on your site. Google's been in the process of surfacing content it hasn't been rewarding previously... and possibly this new material is good, possibly not... but, as I read Google's boilerplate on this, Google is not downgrading your material so much as bringing new, possibly meritorious material to the surface. Probably worth your time to see what about this material Google might be liking, but not to get emotionally involved with it, and give it some time before making any deep changes. Good luck.

[aristotle]

Google's been in the process of surfacing content it hasn't been rewarding previously

Why was it previously un-rewarded?

[Shepherd]

Google's been in the process of surfacing content it hasn't been rewarding previously

I'm having a hard time buying into the google company line on this one. Not seeing any "new, previously under rewarded" content showing up for the searches I watch, only declining positions for our content. Now maybe, spots 4 through 27 were all previously "under rewarded" equally and the updates pushed them all up equally above our content but that seems odd. Maybe our issue is completely unrelated and it's pure coincidence that our declines move in lockstep with reported updates... maybe.

My theory is that our content, ranked well in the organic results, has a detrimental affect on adwords CTRs and CPAs.

[Shepherd]

So as a continuation, maybe the "under rewarded content" is the adwords advertisers...

[Milchan]

So, for those of you experiencing chaos, I'd wait for things to settle down, and simply make general improvements on your site.

I think this is the new norm really and things arent going to settle down - it is only a guess but it looks like google has handle more control over to AI for its algorithms and it will be in a consistently adjusting state so we will always be seeing movement that we wont be able to work out why exactly.

[penitentman]

@Lostshootingstar @NickMNS @broccoli

I believe Google is messing around with the long tail. It's a much more complicated job investigating the aftermath of an update on sites that live by the long tail kw. Do you guys have geo targeted pages and/or have a lot of traffic from long tail? I'm waiting for a couple more days worth of Search Console data to fully investigate what might be happening but I do have the 16th. My spot checking of KW's compared to the 16th data in SC is not matching up. My ranks are higher now than what SC is telling me they were on the 16th. Maybe the rankings have refreshed? My conversion rate has tanked since the 16th. Once I have enough SC data what I usually do in these instances is use the comparison date search for my queries. So I will compare the 16th-19th to the same period the previous week. I study the differences and usually find 1 or 2 common kw's across all the query data has been omitted or included. Or I find geo location trends. Now, about zombies. Some kw's lead to higher conversion rates than others. This is simply the proverbial "zombie" traffic. Google changes your kw permutations and tests out the behavior of the users then "refresh" the results based on that data analysis. The refresh could come a day after the update or months. This is a volatile process that goes around and round. Avg position may be up but what about your impressions, clicks, ctr, and overall kws that you rank for @Lostshootingstar ? All these factors need to be studied to figure out how this volatile process affected your site.

[adama]

Hi Everyone,

I'm monitoring 20+ sites and a lot of the movement has been on the sites that require high E-A-T, mainly health, similar to 1st Aug.

One thing I have noticed is if I track keywords from UK I see some bad drops, but tracked under a city, town or region in the UK everything is fine.

Not sure why I monitor UK wide as desktop or mobile Google always finds your location or at-least a near by location.

Any one else seeing this pattern?

[broccoli]

@penitentman I have an internationally targeted site. I used to get people showing up for a lot of really long tail or unique queries. When I was under a suspected penalty they all but disappeared. I've noticed it coming back a bit during recent updates. Sometimes my rankings will go down but I'll get more visitors (presumably I start appearing in the very long tail that's hard to track) and vice versa. Sometimes I drop out of the search completely for one or two of my high volume keywords and then pop back in again a few days later which is really stressful. It's chaos at the moment. I'm not a product website, but I have some kind of zombie effect happening with my adsense. Some days my CTR is appalling, other days much better. It used to be a lot more consistent, but then, considering how low my traffic has been since March (about 4K users a day, down from 10-15K), some of that will just be the normal noise you get when your traffic is low.

[penitentman]

@broccoli What has your Adsense data told you about those low click days? Have you looked at those days in SC? In adsense my impressions are usually consistent with clicks. Earnings fluctuate a little more based on the CPC or CPM the advertisers are bidding and paying for my traffic. Do you ever look at the advertiser and their ads individually? I once found that a adsense ad from a certain advertiser was causing the screen view to jump to where that ad was on the page. Real shady stuff I should have reported to Google but I didn't wanna upset the apple cart and get them looking into my websites. So I had to block that advertiser manually. I caught this when I all of a sudden saw clicks skyrocket out of the clear blue. So the moral of the story is that these large jumps or dips can sometimes be pinpointed with tedious testing and analysis.

[ichthyous]

My site depends heavily on a high number of long tail searches, but I am seeing drops across the board with all my keywords. I had slightly improved but my ranking in SEMrush dropped again today. Interestingly, out of the 20 competitors that I track most held steady or dropped slightly, one dropped off a cliff a few months ago and continues to drop now, and only one (the largest company with the biggest budgets) has improved their ranking. I have read here that SEMrush ranking no longer correlates closely with actual ranking in google. That may be the case, but big drops in SEMrush do correlate with drops in traffic on my site. These days I cannot seem to predict when I will have a traffic spike... Yesterday my ranking dropped but I had inquiries one after the other all day. It's on / off with Google these days, nothing in between. Nothing to do but to sit and ride it out and work on other more productive things for now.

[broccoli]

@penitentman

It always happens during algorithm updates. I’ll notice a traffic spike and an increase in income, then suddenly my earnings stall. I assume it’s tripped some sort of invalid click algorithm in adsense. My CTR, RPM etc drop lower than normal, then I’ll finish the day or the next day with an income about a third lower than average.

I never noticed it before my rankings & income went to hell this year. I don’t know if that’s because google is behaving differently or because when you’re earning a decent amount it all smoothes out.

What’s really frustrating is my traffic doubled with a rankings increase / suspected mobile ad penalty lifting at the end of September a couple of weeks after I removed one of my three ad units. I had one good traffic appropriate earning day then my adsense RPM halved, my coverage decreased, and I’m earning the same amount if not slightly less than before.

I wonder if this bout of volatility will have the same pattern as the last one, with the high ranking sites getting a boost followed by the lower ranking sites clawing it back a day or two later.

[Gregorich SEO]

When I Fetch and Render as Google, I see Google Bot cannot see any of the images in my content.

My shopping cart, filters and menu icons at top of page (we're ecomm) are also blocked.

Do you think I should unblock the images and shopping cart?

[Milchan]

yes you should unblock - from what ive seen if your blocking things google can penalise you so a better approach is to allow google to crawl everything and use meta tags like noindex and noimageindex to try to control thigns you dont want indexing.

[Gregorich SEO]

@Milchan

Ok, fixed. Thank you.

We had robots.txt blocking our content around the time the update hit and have been tanking in the rankings ever since.

[browndog]

I was just searching for a topic in my niche and the no, 1 article is written by a major brand (think Mazda, Starbucks, McDonalds). It is an almost exact copy of my article (layout, stats, points...in the exact same order), yet outranks mine (they are 1, I am 7)...where is the credit for original content? I write it, they get top spot and I'm no. 7, despite being the original author. What the hell is Google doing? How is that fair or credible? To paraphrase 'create unique content'...which your brands can steal and rank no 1 for. Just wow.

I've been playing with SE's, prefer Bing To DDG, but both are better than G which always shows domain crowding. Same site, 1, 2 & 3 positions.

[justpassing]

where is the credit for original content

Agreed. But, how can Google (or others, robots and humans) can tell which is the original content?

First of all , and it's sad to say, from a user point of view, it doesn't matter who is the original author. If you have twice the same article/content, for a user it doesn't matter to read it at Site A or Site B. The result is the same, the user get the information.

Secondly, how can a search engine knows who is the original content's author? SE can (should be able to) identify if two pages have a similar content, but how to tell which one is more authoritative and deserve credit (higher ranking)? Age of the page? The page published first, takes the priority? This is not that simple, Google is not indexing all pages instantly so a page discovered first, doesn't mean it's the original content, same, a page discovered later, may still be the original content. And of-course, don't trust date printed on pages or in headers :).

Additionally, and still from a user point of view, if you are presented two sites with the same information, which one will s/he choose to visit ? I don't know how much representative I am of the population, but I know that if I have to choose to visit between the site of a major brand, or the site I've never heard about, I'll visit the brand site because I'll "assume" it's more truthful. (I don't mean this is the right/true). So , in that case, it will sound normal that Google prioritize brands to non-brand sites. Still I am not saying this is right and I regret this kind of short cut, but it follows a logic.

[glakes]

how can Google (or others, robots and humans) can tell which is the original content?

The first indexed page was typically posted by the original author.

it doesn't matter who is the original author.

It can matter, especially when a consumer contacts who he/she thinks is the original author of the article. That original author may be an expert in their field, well educated on the topic, licensed, bonded, etc. whereas the person who stole the content, and is presenting it as their own, is a fraud. We see this often with Chinese businesses involving knockoff products.

how can a search engine knows who is the original content's author?

Google crawls and indexes pages, not authors. The original author has control over how their work is released and where the original article/story is posted should be given preference by default.

I know that if I have to choose to visit between the site of a major brand, or the site I've never heard about, I'll visit the brand site because I'll "assume" it's more truthful.

Most consumers will do the same and for the same reasons. Unfortunately there are some big brands out there that know this and could care less about taking anothers work and presenting it as their own as they know there is little the original author can do to stop them. And with search engines rewarding such acts, it remains quite profitable for big brand offenders to continue these practices.

[justpassing]

The first indexed page was typically posted by the original author.

Yes, but for example, when I create a new page, at my site, and put a link immediately on the front page, and in the sitemap, and post it on social network, the first visit of Googlebot is usually only 20 hours later. I am sure that a "big" site does the same, the page is crawled within minutes.So, let's say I post my new page, a "big" site visits my site, grabs the content and posted it, who will be indexed first? Or else, the solution would be to create a page, without link, or mention, to submit it to google, wait for googlebot to eventually visit (in spite of lack of inbound link) , and only after to make the page public.

By the way, the "worse", is about image. You can post an image you did yourself, you can host it (same URL as your domain), and hot linkers can still outrank you :) (I mean "hot links", those which are just putting a link to your image, and not even hosting a copy).

[bwnbwn]

Gregorich_SEO I would never have my shopping cart pages indexed makes no sense to have these pages in the index.

[glakes]

but for example, when I create a new page, at my site, and put a link immediately on the front page, and in the sitemap, and post it on social network, the first visit of Googlebot is usually only 20 hours later.

As the original publisher, you have control over how your work is released. If you have concerns about others stealing your work, then rushing to push the page into the masses is not necessarily the best long-term strategy. If the page is about a breaking news story or hot topic, you would have little choice but to hit while the iron is hot. But even in doing so, pinging Google with a notice of a sitemap change/new page should greatly reduce the time it takes for Google to make its first visit to the page.

So, let's say I post my new page, a "big" site visits my site, grabs the content and posted it, who will be indexed first?

What are the odds of a big brand doing this so quickly? Not very high. Most big brands will have a human behind the scene snagging the content and possibly spinning it slightly, all of which takes time. It's the auto scrapers that will snag the content and post it immediately, many of which are known scraper sites to Google. Those of us that had our content stolen by big brands typically don't see the theft occur within hours, but many months or even years later. In such cases it should be quite simple for Google to determine which page is the original. But back to your question.... If both the creator and a big brand have a similar page indexed around the same time, the big brand most likely would win out. First to index should be, in a perfect world, who gets credit and reaps the benefit of their work. But once again we go back to how a new page is presented to the world - as the creators we have control over how we release new content and can do so in a responsible way that minimizes the risk of another having our work indexed before us.

the solution would be to create a page, without link, or mention, to submit it to google, wait for googlebot to eventually visit (in spite of lack of inbound link) , and only after to make the page public.

When a new page is added to our site, Google visits the page in under a minute or two. This works on even new sites, where the sitemap is updated and Google is pinged.

Regardless of being crawled or indexed first, it means little to Google. That's the big problem for the lesser but often more creative little guys competing with big brands. Domain authority tends to win out, and big brands know and exploit this flaw in Google's algorithm. How sad it is that Google has abandoned the little guys, especially when they themselves started Google in a garage.

By the way, the "worse", is about image.

I completely agree. How I hate seeing our images posted on Pinterest.

[ichthyous]

@browndog @glakes Perhaps those of you slaving away to write articles and create images that are being stolen are missing the bigger picture. You should be registering all of your posts, articles, images with the copyright office in Washington DC as soon as you create them. You can sue and get damages from anyone stealing your work. I have six attorneys around the world working for me because I finally had enough of my content being used without payment. Copyright infringement settlements are bringing in so much money now that it has been a huge boon to my business.

[Cralamarre]

I know GA's real-time stats are not something to focus on, but having said that, is anyone else noticing a delay or drop with them? According to my real-time stats, my site is pretty much dead in the water this morning. But the hourly report is showing that everything's fine. I'll go with the hourly report (which I know is something else I shouldn't focus on, but I like to stress myself out).

Edit: Seems to be better now. Must have been a temporary glitch. I love my life.

[KaseyM]

@Cralamarre

Had same thing. Nearly packed up for the day to head home.

[Cralamarre]

@KaseyM,
It still seems lower than it should be. There's no way my hourly reports would be as high as they are if my real-time stats were even remotely accurate. But before anyone says I shouldn't care about real-time stats, I'll end it here. I just wanted to know if anyone else was experiencing the same issue today. And now, back to your regularly-scheduled program.