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]

By forcing me to pay for AdWords?

First, I don't think google is trying to make businesses use adwords, I think google is currently trying to encourage searchers to click on ads.

As for your specific niche Gregorich, maybe just collateral damage. I'm not privy to the restrictions on cannabis ads. is this a worldwide ban? Medical also? No ads for anything when a searcher searches for a cannabis related term?

FOLLOW UP: After a couple of quick searches I see shopping ads here in the U.S. for cannabis related searches.

[Gregorich SEO]

@Shepherd

Interesting. But how do the current SERPs force people to click on ads?

To your second question, I'm just now seeing ads pop up for my niche (here and there). It must have just started happening. Even Walmart is now selling vape pens for weed concentrates. But for the most part, not seeing many ads. It's not impossible to get ads for cannabis-related ANCILLARY products like vaporizers.

[Shepherd]

force people to click on ads

Well, I said "encourage", not force. With enough testing and data google could easily return a SERP that optimizes clicks on ads.

[Gregorich SEO]

@Shepherd

Seems they'd have to place pages with non-engaging title tags and meta-descriptions that don't match the user intent at the top so people would rather click on an ad.

[Shepherd]

Or re-write titles and descriptions... which they do. But really it doesn't even have to be that nefarious, it's simple A-B testing, reshuffling the results to achieve the desired outcome. Definitely something many have noticed over the last few months. Those that observe and understand notice organic results that maybe are not quite the best they could be. The average searcher reportedly hardly notices the difference between the ads and the organic results.

[Milchan]

What if Google is simply favoring pages that best answer search intent, regardless of their overall quality?

Ive stated this before but I dont believe they are best answering user intent though, I dont think they know user intent as well as they profess to. I see it in the serps with my own eyes - i was just doing a search then for some keywords that do ok for and noticed that now the number on result is about a completely different subject than the search matter - the web site it is from IS relevent to the search and they have some pages that would be relevent and correct to be in the number one spot , but the page in that spot is NOT about the subject searched for.

One of results in a very competitive keyword I do pretty well and come in at number 3 yet I would be the first to admit that there are LOTS of other pages that should be above me for that search and that I dont really have EAT for it. Yet for many of the keywords my site should be and was for a decade number one for and that we certainly doing have EAT for and the best content , we now come below low quality sites such as low quality blog articles full of incorrect information , or thin content sites that are backed up with lots of paid for links.

What google says it is doing and trying to do simply does not reflect reality in so many searches - i see it in my niche and I see it in my general personal searches. Why it is , Ive no idea - if it benefits them or not or just that they are trying to pass too much over to AI too soon and its not working .

[Gregorich SEO]

@Milchan

"or thin content sites that are backed up with lots of paid for links."

I noticed the same thing.

Except I also noticed the site was informational, not ecom (like me). And the keyword had informational intent. So I figured Google was matching readers searching for information to an informational site rather than my biased ecom site. Even if the informational site had paid links and thin content.

I think you're correct in that they sometimes don't understand true search intent. But in some cases I think they're just trying to link people to content that is less likely to be biased.

[Milchan]

@gregorich - yes that aswell, overall informational sites , or more accurately sites that are "presented as" informational sites and not transactional sites so better in the serps. It is like ecom , or more accurately the ecom sites that present themselves as ecom sites, are punished or weighted down in the results. Sites that run on eccommerce CMS systems struggle to come above sites that run on wordpress , sites that use schema "product" struggle against schema "article" even when the content of the ecom site is far superior in an informational sense than the other sites.

This suggests to me that the algo or the AI is not as "intelligent" as they like the make out and that it cannot differentiate between an ecom site that provides quality informational results and a a site that presents itself as an informational site but is in fact a gateway to a ecom site that has been create purely for the purpose of directing people to the money site yet has content of a lesser quality than the ecom site that is upfront and honest about its intent. That is my main gripe with all this - the user intent weather informational or transactional isnt being served in the best way as they are being served with lesser quality information in many cases - the decision on what is the best info to serve them is not being calculated in an accurate way and people that have tried to game the system now seem to be getting rewarded even more than the sites that have tried to follow the google web masters advice of making the best content, following the rules etc.

[ichthyous]

Sites that run on eccommerce CMS systems struggle to come above sites that run on wordpress , sites that use schema "product" struggle against schema "article" even when the content of the ecom site is far superior in an informational sense than the other sites.

@Milchan I have been suspecting this for a while now. The only change I have made in my site in the last few months is adding 'product' schema to my pages and my site has dropped dramatically and continues to drop. I changed it this weekend to 'article', but it takes a while to get all the pages indexed. I hope this helps because I cannot think of anything else that might work.

[HereWeGo123]

@jmorgan – Well said. Completely agree. Naturally, Google's goals have always been the same since day one. They just refine the essential core methodology and make it better, to achieve the same result they always wished to achieve. To echo what you said, when webmasters embrace good principle on how to solve problems for their target audience (through all sorts of creative means possible), their principles will naturally line up with Google's.

Whereas people who are constantly thinking in terms of how to “manipulate” Google intentionally are the ones who reap the consequences. I cannot stress enough (just as most can here) on how many times I've seen sites flourish and be so successful and rake in millions, and employ dozens of people in fancy offices only to wake up one day to have to make the decision of letting go more than half of the staff if nearly not all, all due to a Google algorithm update. Why? it was obvious to me that it would be a matter of time until they get slapped hard.

As cliche and old as it sounds by now, having the perception of focusing on user intent and satisfying their problems is the key ingredient to success.

[Gregorich SEO]

@ichthyous @Milchan

I noticed this as well. Many of the winners of the update have "article" schema in their blog, which I'm now adding (as well as "dateposted" and "datemodified").

But to be honest, I'm only noticing informational sites win out for informational keywords. For category and product keywords that are more transactional, other ecom sites with tons of trust signals on their home pages (Trust Pilot widgets, etc) are beating me.

We're adding similar trust signals. As well as revamping content on our category pages (we stupidly aimed for word count and keyword density since that's what Google kept rewarding us for previously). But now I think it's time to focus more on EAT and UX. Word count should vary depending on what we're seeing at the top of the results now.

@HereWeGo123

I think I was one of those sites that grew using growth hacks and is now tanking :(

[edited by: Gregorich_SEO at 12:02 am (utc) on Oct 23, 2018]

[RedBar]

Wow ... HereWeGo123 ... You've defintely drunk the Google coolaid!

If YOU really believe Google has your best interests at heart, then comprehend naiveté.

Google does not give one fig about you ... and especially so if you are any good at it!

[HereWeGo123]

@RedBar – I'm not saying Google has our best interest in mind. It has its own best interests in mind, no doubt about it. It needs to please its investors. I am implying that in order to “accommodate” Google's best interests, it's about us focusing on users, as that's what Google wants to do. How else would Google accommodate their best interest if not focusing on the user? I might've struck a nerve with you. Did you have a site that got hit that was a surprise? And if so, are you saying that to this day you were not able to find a strong reason why Google “should not” have hit your site?

Penguin 4.0 came out and Google began saying that links that Google sees as bad no longer suppress you (but Google only discounts it) and the only way you can get screwed by links is if you get a manual penalty. Well, in recent months, things started surfacing (even from Google) that technically a site can get an algorithmic penalty due to bad links, even without a manual action.

[EditorialGuy]

What if Google is simply favoring pages that best answer search intent, regardless of their overall quality?

Or, to look at it in a more realistic way, let's say (hypothetically, just for the sake of discussion) that there's a scale of 1 to 10 for "best answer search intent" and a scale of 1 to 10 for "quality." Maybe "quality" is the tiebreaker, or maybe a combined score from each (with who knows what weighting) determines the ranking. My point is simply that Google probably isn't making a binary choice between "best answer search intent" and "overall quality" when deciding how to rank pages.

[HereWeGo123]

@EditorialGuy – I will agree with your theory. One site (a) we've ran “accidental” tests and published content that we believe was good. We answered questions, provided facts, but it was “information-overload” and at times would deviate from primary user intent. The content became too academic and literature like, even though our site has authority and links from extremely high-places. At the same time, on site (b) we published a similar article targeting the same user-intent with similar keywords but the content was more direct, less information, and overall shorter. I would say it was less in “quality” but more clearcut. Site (b) outranked site (a), even though site (b) has significantly less traffic, authority. I've begun to be more inclined to think that Google is factoring in user intent/relevance and overall presentation FIRST and then quality. Obviously, this isn't black-and-white and the two variables play a role in conjunction with one another.

[Mentat]

Something is broken @Google.

I see rich snippets for my articles with very old dates.
It's like they use very old information.

[EditorialGuy]

@HereWeGo123: Interestingly, we've done something similar: Our main site is heavy on long, in-depth articles, but we also have a secondary site for people with shorter attention spans or more limited English skills that presents a Cliff's Notes version of the same information. For us, the "in-depth" site is the one that receives most of Google's love. (Obviously, there are other factors at work, such as age and number of inbound links, where the long-established "in-depth site" clearly has an advantage over the newer site.)

[pritz]

I’ve 15 domains all belong with various industries (B2B) and different audiences. From 10/16, I got nothing in terms of conversions. No leads. Even I have put lots of effort to identify the reasons, but I can’t.

SEMRush shows down with the “visibility” which are same as before 10/6.

October-2018 is the worst month for us in terms of lead or conversion. Is this the sign from Google to GO FOR PAID? Right now I can see many Ads on my targeted keywords.

If anybody has the solutions, why it is happening and how to come out from this please help.

[MayankParmar]

We lost huge chunk of traffic :/ Any new update?

Also, how come some articles are showing up in Google with future date?

[oddnumber]

Something is broken @Google.

I can't argue with that, Mentat. Since 27th September some of our pages aren't being served for their main keyword, replaced instead by poor quality, old content pages from sites of dubious relevance and authority.

I can only hope that this is a transitional period to something better but I'm doubtful. I've never seen SERPs in such disarray for our niche.

[Shepherd]

How else would Google accommodate their best interest if not focusing on the user?

In business you focus on the customer. The user (searcher) is not google's customer.

google is constantly optimizing the SERPs for the benefit of google and google's customers. As they should.

Also, it should be noted that the SERPs are not just the organic list. The SERPs are the pages that include the organic list. and all the other things like ads, images, videos, knowledge boxes, etc.

Where some see "SERPs in such disarray" google sees them as optimized. Think about that, your interest and google's interest are not aligned.

[pritz]

implemented some of seo techniques according to google guidelines

What type of techniques?

[broccoli]

I’m in a kind of games/quiz/meme niche. Google can’t actually make a qualitative assessment of the content in my niche except to go on user signals and backlinks. My site has performed extremely well in the past because it gets tons of backlinks from users. However Google has devalued backlinks, particularly the kind of backlinks I get from users on forums and personal blogs. It’s also stopped measuring social sharing because of fake news, another user signal I performed extremely well on. So Google has increasingly been ignoring the very strong signals my users send them.

If it were all about the user in my case then I would be winning on site metrics too. I have better EAT signals than my competitors, better visual design, better written supporting content on my pages, and a better actual product. I’ve spent the last few months working extremely hard on those factors, which to be honest were pretty good already.

I measure engagement rates by whether users fill out and submit a short form. My bounce rate for most pages is close to 20%, and time on page is around 4 minutes, which is pretty rare and something I’ve worked hard on. Users only need to spend about 10 seconds on the page to get what they’re looking for, but they stay for a lot longer to play around. If I have an anomalous page I’ll assess it and make changes to the design and options until the bounce rate reduces. I had a pretty big success with one page in this regard recently. It hasn’t made the slightest difference to that page’s rankings.

In my niche I know that pages with longer forms have a higher bounce rate. The competitor with the terrible site that dominates the niche presents users with a form so long and complicated it makes even me bounce when I’m trying to assess their product. They’ve also been in an extremely high volume traffic position for over six months now and they still have NO backlinks from their users on blogs or forums. If it were all about user signals then by rights Google should have booted them down the serps.

I’m sorry I just don’t buy the “just focus on the user” and “just make great content” lines from Google anymore. It’s still all algorithms and Google still makes mistakes, and Google still has an agenda about which pages they want to push to the top of the serps. I’m just collateral damage. So either I take a technical analysis and figure out what they’re looking for and adjust accordingly, or my site fails. In my case I believe it relates to topical SEO and changes they’ve made to how they reward relevancy, because that’s where my site is weak in comparison to the sites outranking me.

[jmorgan]

Out of curiosity @broccoli, how many ad units do you have per page (for the most common pages)?

[justpassing]

games/quiz/meme niche

just make great content

...

[broccoli]

@jmorgan Two. I used to have three. I removed an ad unit in early September because I was worried I might have a mobile specific ad penalty after getting moved to mobile indexing. I got some of my rankings back but I’m still a long way down. No way of knowing for sure. I just noticed one of my competitors added a third ad unit right next to their submit button, so lets see how that goes for them.

@justpassing That is in fact my point. I put the user first. My site is NOT one of those sites that makes you click through ten ad plastered pages to get a lame answer. Why else would I be fed up with the way Google is ranking my rivals?

[aristotle]

We keep seeing stories here about how google is ranking worthless garbage above useful high-quality sites. It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that the site has gotten an algorithmic penalty, quite possibly panda.

Panda is thought to be a site-wide penalty. At the time of its original roll-out in 2011, google said that it was mainly aimed at content farms, but it actually affected a huge number of sites overall.

Originally panda was a separate filter "stuck on" to the algorithm as an added piece, but later was said to have been merged into the main part of the algorithm, although its weighting can probably still be adjusted. Some members have suggested that google may have increased its weighting in recent updates.

[Milchan]

@aristotle - that might be in some cases but it doesnt explain what many of us are experiencing and that is the serps jumping around on a daily / weekly basis . Today , again im seeing lots of movement in my niche with lower quality sites jumping up again in places where I was ahead of them yesterday. It seems to be doing this on a regular basis and I dont think panda would be a an influence on that.

[HereWeGo123]

Looking back now, it definitely appears that all Google was trying to do was “phase” out the term “Panda”, even though it still exists today more than ever. The effects of “Panda” are widely potent today as they were since 2011. Just as before, when a major update rolls out, some sites experience an uptick while others get “suppressed” and it takes the next big update or two or three (Panda) for a site to maybe “recover”. The only difference now is that it rolls out much more frequently on a larger volume than ever before. I think that's what Google meant when they said, “Panda is now baked into the core algorithm” – Another way of Google basically saying, “Hey, Panda is just going to be rolling out MUCH much more frequently”. I think this strategy was intended to try to eliminate the large volume of chatter and speculation. But I think that did not work, and if anything, stirred up even more chatter. Perhaps this was Google's way of trying to decrease their volatility in their stock and speculation among their investors.

[aristotle]

Milchan -- I don't remember when, but some time ago google announced that panda is now updated in "real time". So if a site is right on the "edge" of a panda penalty, then it could jump back and forth between being penalilized one day and free the next day. That could explain why some sites jump around in the search results.