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]

[Shepherd]

Pure coincidence I'm sure but as the "right now" real time reporting seems to be struggling this morning our conversion rate is very high...

Side note: Lots of people love watching the real time stats. Every night on my local news, during the weather there is a computer in the background showing the news website's GA on the real time stats page. I always get a chuckle when I see it.

[KaseyM]

@Shepherd that's pretty cool - how high have you seen it?

[Shepherd]

It's funny, I would have thought it would be more but mostly in the 100 - 200 range, highest I remember seeing was around 400. About 1.4 million people in the viewing area

[jmorgan]

Yup my real time stats are pretty alarming at the moment like everyone else's. Hope it's just a bug.

[browndog]

Mine real time stats are terrible too.

[browndog]

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

The original content would have been published (and crawled) earlier than the copied content.

Google are quick to tell webmasters they should not engage in certain SEO tactics, but reward scraping by big brands.

[penitentman]

@Shepherd

Pure coincidence I'm sure but as the "right now" real time reporting seems to be struggling this morning our conversion rate is very high...

My conversion rate is high today after being very very low tues, wed, and thurs. Alas I need to wait for SC stats to catch up so I can see what kind of traffic I've been getting all week. But this could be the "refresh" we've been waiting for.

Yup my real time stats are pretty alarming at the moment like everyone else's. Hope it's just a bug.

I've seen my real time stats at 0 when I definitely had visitors. I even went to my site myself and saw the real time visitors go to 1. I almost fell on the floor fearing I've been manually de-indexed... After a few paces around my office I came back and the stats were normal levels again. Those are the moments in this business that shake me to the core. Our reliance on Google is very real and scary.

[Cralamarre]

I've seen my real time stats at 0 when I definitely had visitors. I even went to my site myself and saw the real time visitors go to 1. I almost fell on the floor fearing I've been manually de-indexed...

Yep, Halloween must be coming up because real-time stats today were scary as hell.

[kup97]

Hi all,

I too have had the same issue with regards to real-time stats on analytics today. Usually, the site has around 800 active viewers throughout the afternoon and evening but at one point it dropped to 50...then jumped to 250...then spiked to 850 then down to 300 and then up to 500. Strange! I have tried to report the issue to google. Has anyone heard anything from Google officially about the problem?

[HereWeGo123]

Yep. Been having the same issue with real time stats all day long since early morning. Seeing about 60-80% less active in real time than where it should be, and then sporadically it reverts back to normal for a few moments and then back down. Looking at hourly traffic stats compared to same day last week, traffic is even slightly higher today than last Friday. Adsense revenue is good too. So clearly theres a reporting glitch in GA real-time

[kup97]

It's so annoying as I based what articles I share to my Facebook pages off how well the real-time stats are! If they're low, obviously I'd share an article to boost them up. But without knowing the true numbers it's hard to have an idea of how well everything is doing and make decisions accordingly. I'll post any updates here if I see any from Google.

[NickMNS]

What do your logs tell you? The only way to know for sure if something is wrong is to check your raw access logs. 100 users in the first 5 minutes of the hour followed by 0 users for the rest of the hour is equal to 8.3 users for every 5 minute block within an hour. This may not be a problem but a signal of volatility.

[lostshootingstar]

The insanity continues today. We started off pretty strong, or at least as strong as last Friday. Then, around 12:45pm ET some kind of switch flipped, and this is what we were left with the rest of the day. [i.imgur.com...]

And of course last week was already down from the week prior to that, which was again down from the week prior to that. I cannot stop the bleeding.

[Simon1984]

I am alone seeing a significant increase in conversion rate today.

It's been horrific all week. Traffic is continuing to drop each day, but just pointing the conversion rate out in case it's similar to anyone else and helps us figure out what's going on.

[koan]

@ichthyous I'm glad you're able to make people pay for copyright infringement, especially the big players who should know better (and should fire the culprits). I feel like Google never cared enough about rewarding the original creator.

[browndog]

You should be registering all of your posts, articles, images with the copyright office in Washington DC as soon as you create them

I've never heard of registering posts. How much does that cost? I'm in Australia, so not sure I'd really register something in the US.

I had some crazy nutjob send me a threatening email telling me to get her content off my site or pay for it, and if she caught me using her content again, she'd file a claim against me. The thing is, I wrote the article 6 years prior to her site's creation, wrote it myself (so didn't farm it out to somebody who may have copied it), and had never heard of or visited her site. I called her out on that, she refused to respond, even screen shotted her email and posted on her Twitter feed, she reported me to Twitter. Still haven't heard her explanation as to how I copied her content. I'm still really miffed about that. I've been in this industry for 16 years, and ALL other players (who focus on this specific niche, not the broader topic) have behaved in a reasonable manner. She's the first troll I've encountered.

[jmorgan]

Is it possible the real time stats now reflect a shorter period of time, so instead of whatever it was say 10 minutes, it's now down to 5 minutes (I'm just plucking out random numbers here).

If that was the case, someone should have told us I guess.

[EditorialGuy]

I've been seeing more volatility in the last couple of weeks than I normally do. At this time of year, our traffic is always in a slow decline (it will continue to slide until mid- or late December), but this year's decline has involved more daily zigzagging than usual. Average rankings in Search Engine Console have also been bouncing up and down by a couple of places.

The variations aren't massive (they're in the single digits, using week-over-week comparisons), but they're definitely bigger than usual.

[Cralamarre]

My real-time GA stats are still showing the same nonsense today. Way lower than they should be. Maybe this is Google's way of telling us not to focus on them.

[kup97]

The feature should be working though, why have it if it shows incorrect numbers? I rely on it to gauge when to share content, but Google is less than helpful when you try and reach out to report the issue.

[HereWeGo123]

We're still seeing very low GA Real-time stats all through yesterday and this morning (US) too. 1000% a bug. Just checked our overall traffic (and logs) from yesterday (10/19) under Audience > Overview, and see higher page views, users, and sessions than previous Fridays. Adsense revenue was good for a Friday too. So if you're also seeing abnormally low real-time traffic stats, don't worry, it is a glitch with GA real-time stats.

[dethfire]

Yeah GA real time is off the past couple days.

[MayankParmar]

Analytics real time is 2 and I thought I am kicked out.

[HereWeGo123]

@dethfire - does your traffic appear normally for yesterday just under regular audience overview stats?

[breeks]

Traffic normal - Real time - jacked :)

[jmorgan]

Almost a relief in some ways not having to bother about real-time stats anymore. It can be a bit stressful, yet exhilarating, at times.

[Cralamarre]

@jmorgan,
I completely agree. I was actually just thinking to myself, "What did I do back before real-time stats were added to GA?". I know one thing I didn't do was stress myself out staring at analytics every minute. And I got more work done. I'm kind of hoping Google does not fix the problem any time soon.

[HereWeGo123]

@Cralamarre – I'm the same way. I get on a roll and start working very productively, and then distract myself with real-time. I feel so much better when I don't look at it.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issues with real-time reporting today who have Tag manager?

[Robert Charlton]

Issues with real-time reporting
It's a known issue at Google. See separate thread here, posted yesterday, referring also to Barry's SE Roundtable report....

Google Real-Time views... problem with real-time stats
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4924852.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Note that while the delay may be inconvenient for some, word from Google is that it shouldn't affect your Google rankings.

Recent algo changes
That said, as I understand it, the algo change Barry reported earlier and which I cited in this thread, has been described as affecting 100% of all sites, and in some cases its effects are major.

I'm not privy to any more information than anyone here, but most likely I read more. When there's enough for me to post more than a lot of guesses, I'll post my thoughts. For now, I'm thinking that overall quality requirements on all sites have been turned up a notch, and that "needs met" in the Quality Raters guidelines are most likely a larger factor than before.

[NickMNS]

For now, I'm thinking that overall quality requirements on all sites have been turned up a notch, and that "needs met" in the Quality Raters guidelines are most likely a larger factor than before.

I'm going to respectfully disagree. I have two websites in completely unrelated niches. My main website has been severely negatively impacted by these updates. The content is objectively high quality and "meets the needs" of the users. I have second website that I was unable to get any traffic to since its creations over 18 months ago. It also has high quality content, but in addition I created a few pages that I'm less than proud of. The pages were created, after the initial build because I felt that logically they needed to exists, but since I had no traction with the site, I invested very little time on these pages. Since these updates I have started to get traffic to this second site, to the lower quality pages that do not fully meet needs. The high quality pages that do meet specific needs still get no traffic.

More to the point, regarding my main website, I checked out my main competitor for one specific keyword for which I had a high rank, the competitor is position #2 and I am page 2, maybe even worse now. The competitor's page was devoid of any content at all. The page simply had a bunch of sections stating "no data" with links asking "user's please create some content for us". My page provided a fully populated with high quality pertinent information about the entity in question.

I'm not claiming that my website is the best and should rank #1 for every relevant keyword, there are certainly improvements that can be made, as is always the case. From the evidence I have seen as it relates specifically to my situation, there is no support of the theory that EAT or Needs Met or any other aspect from the GQR has taken on more importance. This maybe the case in some other niches (I can't say or know), but it hasn't been the case in my niches.