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]

[Jez123]

thanks to a specific US school lesson subject.

@RedBar - was this from classrom.google.com? I had a lot of traffic from there yesterday. I am intrigued but I can't see what the context is as I can't login on that site.

[Cralamarre]

@browndog,

I was looking at my stats from the past 30 days to the same 30 days last year, and despite 90 odd additional articles, I am 20% down (some of that can also be put down to having a terrible time with webhosts). When I dug deeper, it was the high word count/high traffic articles that took most of the hits.

I'm in the same situation. My traffic isn't down from last year, but it's exactly the same, even though I've been adding at least one new article every week for the past year.

The problem, for me, is the old 80/20 rule. 80 percent of my traffic comes from 20 percent of my articles. And the articles that make up the 80% no longer bring in the traffic levels they once did. Most are down to just 25 percent. One article that was bringing in 16,000 visitors a month, year after year, is now down to just 4000. Another that brought in 12,000 visitors a month is down to 3000.

And all of these articles have the same thing in common. They're all very long. They're not "padded", but in those days, I tried to add everything I know about a subject into the article, believing it added value and gave me more credibility. Now those same articles, full of potentially interesting sub-topics and side-notes, are hurting. Meanwhile, competing articles that stay on track and stick to the point (and are much shorter because of it) are now outranking them.

The one thing I think Google is heavily rewarding these days is relevancy. How relevant is your article to the search topic? Longer articles can easily go off-topic and cover more information than what the user was searching for, making them less relevant. Shorter articles have an easier time staying on point and are therefore seen as being more relevant.

As an experiment, I'm going to completely re-write one of my formerly-popular articles, streamlining the heck out of it and removing everything but the most relevant information. I'm willing to bet that traffic increases.

[Cralamarre]

I wonder if Google is aware of this and returning results in which the average person can get their answer as fast as possible without the need for a dictionary or a degree.

Even if readability on its own is not an official ranking factor, it does affect user experience. So over time, articles that are easier to read, along with being shorter and more on-topic, should do better.

[justpassing]

It might be off-topic, but as a I user, if a page has too much text, written too small, (and worse, if between paragraph there are ads), I goes elsewhere.

[hurwith2]

@Cralamarre - I bet they are/

[RedBar]

@RedBar - was this from classrom.google.com?

Nope, a traditional school subject, geography, however a specific aspect of geography about which I have a lot of information both for my widget trade and of interest to school teachers/pupils.

This happens every year in the autumn and then rears its head again in the spring, I assume for exam cramming?

I never wrote this particular section in mind for schools!

[Cralamarre]

Most of factors that Google is using are not "visible". We can "guess" things only from what we see. Let's say tomorrow, a site with a red bar at the top, outranks other sites, then will we assume that the red bar is a ranking factor?

I agree that we can only guess from what we see. But what I see, and what I think a lot of others are seeing these days as well, is that shorter articles, laser-focused on a specific topic, are outranking longer articles covering too much other information. Instead of "word count", we should be thinking about "topic count". How many other topics are also included in your article? It used to be that covering more topics in the same article meant that the article could rank for more keywords. But these days, I think it's just the opposite. You won't rank for any keywords. The target topic count these days should be 1.

And of course, make sure your site has a red bar at the top. :)

[Rndm]

I have a hobby related info site with no affiliate or ad networks, but does have 2-3 ads (sidebar) that I sell directly within my niche.

The site has been on an organic decline since Feb 2017. Started at 2%, but I am currently down just under 30%. I was reviewing GSC keywords over the last 16 months and 1 thing that I noticed is that I have lost a lot of impressions/visits for keywords that I would consider transactional. I just thought I would add in my thoughts as I have read a lot about ecomm losing transactional keywords in this thread lately.

[justpassing]

For those reporting loss (or gain), it might be interesting , beside the niche, to mention if the site is HTTPS, if it was included in the mobile first index, the speed report, technical things like that.

Some sites are still evaluated based on their desktop version, some based on their mobile version. Of-course nowadays, with responsive design, it's the same content , and it's just the layout being adapted to the size of the screen. But may be there are technical aspects that Google is taking in consideration. For example, for a site in the mobile first index, simulated 3G speed, simulated lower CPU, simulated rendering time, can be part of the ranking, while for a desktop site, these criteria may be way less important.
If Google also looks at the content above and bellow the fold, this is absolutely not the same on desktop and mobile.

And of course, make sure your site has a red bar at the top. :)

Bet that in a little while, you'll see "SEO articles", recommending this ? :)

[RedBar]

Bet that in a little while, you'll see "SEO articles", recommending this ? :)

I've been doing SEO since 1993/4, it's about time I was publicly appreciated in my silver anniversary year:-)

[Milchan]

looks like we have a general consensus here that long form articles no longer perform aswell and seem to be seen as less relevant / suited to user intent than shorted ones - this is were many of us probably base our statements of "low quality / thin content articles" coming above us. Seems for sure the goal posts have shifted and that shorted , to the point articles will be favored against longer one even if the actual authority, writing quality, factual accuracy etc is better in the long form articles.

So from this Im thinking a good tactic would be to break down longer articles into multiple smaller articles trying to clearly segregate precise subjects , internally linking to each other in a clear structure. Im redesigning / rebuilding my entire web site (for several reasons not just trying to reacts to the seo / google issues but to vastly improve user experience, automate more processes so that ultimately I can reduce staff and costs) and will be keeping this idea in mind as I do so.

[Shepherd]

So from this Im thinking a good tactic would be to break down longer articles into multiple smaller articles

Yes, that makes things much easier on the Knowledge Graph bots...

[Cralamarre]

So from this Im thinking a good tactic would be to break down longer articles into multiple smaller articles trying to clearly segregate precise subjects , internally linking to each other in a clear structure.

Exactly. Google looks at articles the same way people do. It scans them, largely relying on headings and subheadings to determine what the page is about. So at the very least, longer articles should be broken down into shorter, clearly-defined sub sections, each with their own heading. That was another big mistake I made in the past. Instead of breaking things down into bite-size chunks, my pages looked more like a "wall of words". But, you learn as you go.

[Milchan]

the other thing im doing is trying to move information type content to non eccommerce type pages - by that i mean I currently have key informational content on product category pages (with product lists further down) and I firmly believe that because it is on a clearly eccomerce type page it is "penalised" for informational type queries , so the idea is seperate that part out to article pages that provide link to take to the eccommerce sections should the visitor wish. My main concern with this is that the site might be categorized as a eCommerce site overall and that the informational type pages still be "penalised" as a result of them being part of this.

[browndog]

The problem, for me, is the old 80/20 rule. 80 percent of my traffic comes from 20 percent of my articles. And the articles that make up the 80% no longer bring in the traffic levels they once did. Most are down to just 25 percent. One article that was bringing in 16,000 visitors a month, year after year, is now down to just 4000. Another that brought in 12,000 visitors a month is down to 3000.

Yep, me too. My former highest ranking article used to bring in 30,000 visitors a month, it had 140 visits last month. It has a word count of 1,800. The no. 1 article in Google on the same topic has a word count of 248. But I still think Google has changed its algorithm to focus more on shorter, easier to digest content. My article, when it sat in no. 1 position was always viewed favourably with thousands of shares.

[Atomic]

My former highest ranking article used to bring in 30,000 visitors a month, it had 140 visits last month. It has a word count of 1,800. The no. 1 article in Google on the same topic has a word count of 248. But I still think Google has changed its algorithm to focus more on shorter, easier to digest content.

Really? This is the only explanation? That sample size of one is not very compelling.

[browndog]

Okay.

[lostshootingstar]

Our traffic still appears to be erratic, unpredictable, and generally down a little bit each and every day. However, tracked keywords remain stable in rankings and are not the worst I've ever seen them (but far from the best I've seen them).

I'm still frustrated, still annoyed, still angry that Google can't detect thin affiliate sites over actual service providers with better, more informative, and more factually accurate content.

[heisje]

Sorry to spoil the party (re: preference for shorter, to-the-point, relevant content) but such content has equally been obliterated, in my experience. Anything truly of some worth has been slaughtered by G, to push more traffic to G properties & ads.

.

[Cralamarre]

@Atomic,

Really? This is the only explanation? That sample size of one is not very compelling

On its own, it would not be compelling. But when many others with similar articles have experienced the same results, it becomes very compelling.

Time to re-write an older article and see what happens.

[broccoli]

@browndog

The no. 1 article in Google on the same topic has a word count of 248.

What kind of site is it from?

[Atomic]

@Cralamarre I think there are plenty of other reasons for what's being described. Personally, I see sites ranking higher that are larger and possibly more authoritative. Because of that, they need to do less to rank higher.

[Jori]

Above me, I have a result with no content. It's just a FAQ with the question about the topic, but without answer !
But it's a highly authoritative website in a Google point of view (big company) but with absolutely no legitimity to speak about this particular topic.

[Milchan]

But it's a highly authoritative website in a Google point of view (big company) but with absolutely no legitimity to speak about this particular topic.

That is a definite problem with googles algos - they just automatically give big brands or sites with lots of inbound links authority for anything just because they are big brand without any actual proof or check that they are an actual authority on the subject of that page. Authority can be achieved by have good online marketing teams and without the actual requirement to know the subject.

A concrete example I can give is the site [trip101.com...] which has a DA of 60 but when I recently checked the articles they published for my area / niche (after them approached me about them writing an article for my site) I found that all of those articles contained anything between 50 to 100% of absolute incorrect statements - yes I found one article that every single thing wrote was not true! . Yet google sees this site as quite authoritative . This makes for at best a bad user experience and at worse much of the advice I saw on one article could put people in physical danger if they followed it and visited the places they suggested - I know this because I am authoritative on the subject.

[Cralamarre]

@Atomic,

Personally, I see sites ranking higher that are larger and possibly more authoritative. Because of that, they need to do less to rank higher.

I just checked my site's domain authority, and it is higher than any of my competitors. Yet my site has lost 50% of its traffic over the past couple of years, and the biggest drops were from long articles with lots of related but unnecessary information. These same articles were hugely popular for years, and yet now they're not. Authority level does not seem to be a factor.

[edited by: Cralamarre at 12:33 am (utc) on Oct 25, 2018]

[ichthyous]

That is a definite problem with googles algos - they just automatically give big brands or sites with lots of inbound links authority for anything just because they are big brand without any actual proof or check that they are an actual authority on the subject of that page. Authority can be achieved by have good online marketing teams and without the actual requirement to know the subject.

I'm not so sure about that. In general, yes the large sites have so many links that it drives them up. But I have now seen two of my top competitors, both huge companies worth tens of millions and billions respectively, drop off a cliff and fall dramatically down in ranking. It happened to the first one in August and it has not recovered at all, and the other one just dropped off a cliff yesterday. It fell so far that it's either a glitch or it's going to be very hard to recover quickly. This is terrifying as if it happened to them it can happen to anyone.

[Milchan]

they could be engaging in dodgy practices and that has caused them to be penalised maybe? its impossible to know really but I do know there are plenty of sites that are seen , or at least treated as, authoritive and they are not deserving of it

[EditorialGuy]

But what I see, and what I think a lot of others are seeing these days as well, is that shorter articles, laser-focused on a specific topic, are outranking longer articles covering too much other information.

Our longer articles that are focused on a specific topic (and which don't cover "too much other information," but do provide more information than most other sites provide) are doing quite well.

IMO, pagination is also useful--both in terms of SEO and pleasing readers--when the topic and its subtopics lend themselves to a logical page structure. It's an approach that has worked well for our site over the years.

[skynet84]

Big drop today. Again second time after first august. On first August I have lost 70% of traffic. Now I have lost 90% of traffic.

First August 2018 from 7000 visitor day to 3000 visitor day
25 October 2018 from 3000 visitor day to 200 visitor day

Website category: Health
Language: Italian
Domain extension: .com

Original content write by my hand, spend my last 6 years in this project with really hard work, now lose everything. In fact from 20000 (20k) visitor days to 200 visitor day destroys completely me. Always respect guidelines. I’m depressed guys, feel really
Useless.

[browndog]

What kind of site is it from?

Animals. The no. 1 ranking site is a global brand which sells food and drinks. The article isn't about food or drinks.