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]

[justpassing]

I just checked my site's domain authority,

How do you check your "domain authority"? If this through third part sites, then it is "their" appraisal of your domain authority, using "their" criteria, but this is not Google's perception of your site authority...

@skynet84 I am sorry to see your figures, that is really a big-big drop. Is your site HTTPS, did you receive the notification that it was included in the mobile first index? Is it all your pages which have seen their traffic drop? (uniform drop), what about your average ranking position / impression (as reported by the GSC)

Does your site deliver enough signals of "authority" in this domain? Like for example, do you have a mini bio of the author of articles (you?) at the bottom, which "might" gives information to Google to estimate the legitimacy of your article on the subject. (Of course any one can claim to be Ph D with xx years of experience and so on)

[browndog]

skynet84, I'm really sorry to hear about your site, that must be gut wrenching. Have you checked webmaster tools for a possible manual penalty?

[whoa182]

I have no idea what's going on right now, but many of my keywords are dropping into oblivion. From the top of Google to page 3 or worse. It happened just a few hours ago. Is there another update going on?

[skynet84]

Browndog no manual penalty. Everything is clean. I have lose everything.

[sofie77]

Same here. In the last couple of hours I lost everything. After the EAT Update on 1 Augst I lost 80% of my traffic. At the update on 16 Oktober I lost 4% and NOW (today) I am complete destroyed. I am with all my (rest) keywords after page 4 or not anymore in the list.

It looks like a penalty.

This is a black day in my life and I have no idea anymore. I am in that business since 16 years but whats happening in the last 3 month is unbelievable. Its the first time that I say, I have NO idea anymore whats going on.

[jmorgan]

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.

@Cralamarre Do you think this might have something to do with Google making snippets and Q&A entries increasingly more prominent over time? Users have less incentive to click through to a website if Google has already answered their query.

[RedBar]

Google is way beyond broken now, you cannot hope to contend with this.

This morning I was checking on a keyword1/2/3 for which I have the registered trademark and keyword domain and for nearly all of this year no longer rank after being #1 for years and years.

To my surprise, from nowhere at #7 is a .co.uk name I had never heard of before so off I went to look and there I found an Italian restaurant in London. Wtf, I thought?

Now bear in mind I supply specialised construction products, my immediate thought was that they had used my keyword1/2/3 product in a refurbishment or something however I could find no mention of it nor an image anywhere. Google's referring url was quite strange:

example.co.uk/%3Fjoin%3Dkeyword3/keyword1-keyword2/

Therefore I went straight into the page source and there it was, their reservation form:

<form action="/?join=keyword3%2Fkeyword1-keyword2

Obviously this was a form copied by the site builder from, I have to assume, a keyword1/2/3 site selling my product.

The question has to be simply, WHY is this site ranking on the first page of Google for this term purely from three keywords in a form?

You've lost it Google, you have completely and utterly lost the plot, there is no one on this planet, and certainly not at The Plex, who could construct a page for a three keyword term, with no on-page reference, no trade backlinks and get it to rank on the first page, period, you are broken.

Do all you like with your sites, add stuff, delete stuff, SEO as much as you want, it simply will not matter if this is the way Google is going to treat us all.

[MayankParmar]

Close to 50% traffic drop here. I don't know what happened this/last week. We're suddenly kicked out and I am clueless, sad and upset :( Our site is a reputed brand in the niche with decent amount of backlinks and impressive well searched articles.

[Cralamarre]

@jmorgan,

Do you think this might have something to do with Google making snippets and Q&A entries increasingly more prominent over time? Users have less incentive to click through to a website if Google has already answered their query.

I don't think that's been a problem for my site because I have quite a few articles that show up in the snippets and they do very well, with no sudden drops in traffic. The articles that lost up to 75% of their traffic are all very long articles, with nothing that would really fit into a snippet.
These days, I actually try to write in a style that's better suited for those snippets, hoping my article appears in them.

[Milchan]

It guess it depends on the article really - for a search that can be answered by a short snippet 100% then that would likely effect click through rates for the site but for many searchs and articles the snippet is more like a teaser to show the user if the article might match what they are looking for. When my pages are displayed in snippets I usually get more traffic as the information is more long form that a simple quick questions/answer type search for more things.

[Cralamarre]

@Milchan,
I've also noticed that the snippets often appear to answer a query, but have actually left one or more important steps out. The other day I searched on Google for how to do something, found the answer in the snippet and thought I was good to go, only to realize afterwards that an entire step in the middle of the process was missing. I went back to the snippet, clicked on the article's URL at the bottom, and found the complete answer. Unfortunately, by that time, everyone was dead (just kidding).

Seriously though, in this case, the snippet failed to provide the answer but did get me to click on the URL.

[Rndm]

Very curious. When people here say articles, are they talking about service type pages, supporting pages, or blog type articles?

I ask because while I shared stats about my personal blog above I work on lots of mid-large B2B, Healthcare (hospital), and Higher Education sites. The majority of converting organic traffic to these sites are to service/supporting type pages which are fairly static. Yes they get traffic to "articles" but these pages don't convert at near the same rate as they are very informational.

It sounds like the majority of people here make their revenue from ad clicks. Obviously how you monetize your site effects your SEO strategy.

[ichthyous]

Something major is afoot...I am tracking the SERPS of the largest stock image company in the world and over the last two days it has lost more than 50% of it's placement according to SEMrush. I saw something similar happen to another very large site that ranked a rock steady #2 in my competitor list for years. It dropped off a cliff over the course of several days in August and has never climbed back up.

I have only one competitor that continues to climb relentlessly. It is a very large company and I cannot see anything particularly special about the content pages, they don't even contain schema info. The company does however run a massive amount of ads all the time. SEMrush shows it is running almost 300 different ads at a time on Google's ad network. Not sure if there is any correlation, but of the 20 sites I track it is the only one to increase ranking and not ever fall in the entire time I have been tracking my competitors.

[Cralamarre]

@Rndm,

Very curious. When people here say articles, are they talking about service type pages, supporting pages, or blog type articles?

My articles are all education-based, mostly step-by-step lessons. I find that when I stick to just the steps (the "how" to do something), my articles do very well. It's the articles that also include a lot of explanations (the "why" to do it), as opposed to just "how" to do it, that seem to suffer the most these days. And unfortunately, most of my formerly-popular articles that now bring in 25% of the traffic they once did are heavy on explanation and theory. Apparently the only theory anyone likes these days is the Big Bang Theory (and not the actual, science one).

[whoa182]

I was checking my backlinks, especially ones coming from more authoritative sites in my niche, and noticed I that one of my old backlinks with a good DA/PA has an expired certificate.

Can Googlebot still crawl the site and index these links or will the expired SSL certificate affect it? Browsers currently block people from going on there unless you bypass it.

Or is this unrelated to my sudden ranking drop early this morning?

[sofie77]

Its 100% unrelated and yes, a crawler can still open and process the page even with a expired certificate.
I send you a private message, please reply to me @whoa182

[MayankParmar]

It's really bad guys :( It looks like everything is over.

[Kdonner]

I will have to agree with @skynet84, something is really happening again in the health sector.

I'm watching something very close to August 1st.

Nor do I say that it is a fluctuation, and really a new repositioning of the serp.

[Cralamarre]

@MayankParmar,
Are you in the health sector?

[sofie77]

It's really bad guys :( It looks like everything is over.

yes, for my health page too. When I watch my analytics its saying -100% since yesterday. Earnings are complete down.

I will have to agree with @skynet84, something is really happening again in the health sector.

I'm watching something very close to August 1st.

Nor do I say that it is a fluctuation, and really a new repositioning of the serp.

yes similiar to August 1st but more aggressive. Looks like a 50+ penalty. But I dont think its a penalty. Google just dont want this kind of health pages anymore in the serps. We have to find the biggest dominator. Now we reached the bottom...that means its easier to find a solution, because we can only go upwards...

@MayankParmar would you please reply to my private message. Thank you so much.

[engine]

Saying traffic is down doesn't really help others much.
What might be useful is if you can describe something such as whether your mobile traffic or desktop, or both, or images, or news, or local is affected. Is this regional, country-specific, etc. You get my drift.

[browndog]

My live traffic is showing a 50% drop today, I hope it's a glitch.

I'm digging around in Webmaster tools, and I just don't understand why the site continues to drop. One 'authority' site always rates well, but I am noticing insurance sites featured prominently in the results. My biggest article (by far) has been overtaken by Wikihow.

[idanb]

Hello Guys,
Report for my 2 websites , 2 different lang , Nich = entertainment\information

English site , ltd= ".com"
From 6000 a day dropped on 24th to 2500 (25th is looking the same so far)

Spanish site lang , ltd= ".com"
From 1000 a day dropped on 24th to 200 (25th is looking the same so far).

website aged = 1 year, i never build 1 single backlink, only unique content and great analytics stats


looks like many of my pages disappear if im looking for the "keyword" in google, but if i am searching for site:domain.com intitle:"keyword" i can see the page is indexed.

i belive its kind of devalue for low trust domain.
i have another website that is stable(thank god so far), i belive he has more trust because if you are looking for the "brand" domain in google, i got big blue map on results. other sites that decrease in ranking doesnt have this.
i think this update related to domain trust.

[ultravi01]

I've seen lots of fluctuation in the finance sector ever since Oct. 16. Seems like things are still moving around quite a bit. Have to wait and see. Hopefully things will settle down.

[MayankParmar]

@Cralamarre No, tech niche.

[HereWeGo123]

@MayankParmar – sorry to hear that. Since you're in tech, are you competing with big players in the tech product review business (CNET, Verge, etc.) ?

[sofie77]

Rollback today

[MayankParmar]

@HereWeGo123 Yep but I am covering many stories that compete with same or less authority sites. I was outranked by some new sites :( And I don't show up in Top Stories even when I am the source of the story.

[justpassing]

I was outranked by some new sites :(

How old is your site? May be when your site was new, it was also outranking older and more established sites :)

Is your site HTTPS ? Is it fast? Do you run the Chrome's Lighthouse audit tool to see if you are missing some optimizations?

[Shepherd]

Just saw a fun SERP test(?). Double answer box. The first one was the standard wikipedia answer box and the second was promoting a google ventures backed site.

So... 4 expanded ads, 2 answers boxes, and a "people also ask" box before you see an organic result.

I've been saying it for years and I'll say it again, you're spitting into the wind trying to get "free" traffic from google. google is the competition, not a friend, not a partner... a direct competitor.