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]

[imbckagn]

Changes I saw yesterday in the finance niche have all rolled back this AM.

[Cralamarre]

@MayankParmar,
Any rollback today with your site?

[ichthyous]

My site is continuing to hold steady after a 25% drop on Sept 26th. The only thing positive I can say is that two out of three of my biggest competitors have fallen so far down that I guess I should feel fortunate I haven't fallen more (yet). My top competitor just keeps climbing though. Not one tick downward through all of this, just a slow daily advance higher. That strikes me as just as unnatural as the sudden decimation of the others. Only Google hand picking winners and losers could produce that result.

[samwest]

Anyone else notice a traffic spike anomaly on 10/22?
I saw it across the board. Super converting.

[BushyTop]

We're seeing some changes, but this update has returned far different results to what was returned in the initial 'medic' update.

We got slapped initially by medic, but following this latest update, so far so good.

[lostshootingstar]

My traffic is all over the place but I haven't seen the SERPs in our industry change in like two weeks. Usually the SERPs are always bouncing around. Very strange.

[Milchan]

Anyone else notice a traffic spike anomaly on 10/22?
I saw it across the board. Super converting.

nope - terrible day for me , 2nd worse day of conversions this month in what has been a bad month. After a couple of ok days on 17th/18th , from the 19th through to 23rd was terrible. 24th and 25th a slight uptick but still terrible and today zero so far.
The last 4 or 5 months things have just been falling and Im looking at possibly my worse month of the year. I have been cutting costs in every way I can but I have no choice but
to let staff go the end of this month.

[skynet84]

Rollback here too

[Cralamarre]

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a problem with Fetch as Google lately? Today I get nothing but "Temporarily Unreachable" errors when trying to submit my latest article, or fetch any page on my site. Search Console shows no crawl errors, my robots.txt file comes up as "allowed" when tested, and pages all look normal when viewed on Google's Page Speed Insights. Traffic is normal. No complaints. And yet Fetch as Google keeps showing "Temporarily Unreachable".

If I do just a Fetch, it's fine. But Fetch and Render gives me the error.

[MayankParmar]

@Cralamarre Semrush is green for all keywords :D Traffic is a bit up as well but it's weekend now.

[Cralamarre]

@MayankParmar
So things are looking better today? That's great news.

[Cralamarre]

Quick update on my previous post about Fetch as Google (I tried to edit the post but I'm too late). After enabling Lazy Loading for images on my site, the Temporarily Unreachable error disappeared. Must have been a problem with the images not loading before. Please ignore my previous post about it.

[lostshootingstar]

My images are all hosted on CloudFront and aggressively edge cached and over-optimized. Googlebot still usually shows them as being temporarily unreachable, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

[Cralamarre]

@lostshootingstar
Thanks. My images are hosted on Amazon, and I do see them show up as temporarily unreachable quite a bit. But I've never seen them actually missing from the pages.

[NickMNS]

I got a nice traffic spike this afternoon. Not algo related, viral content. I got about three days worth of traffic in a few hours. The point of this post is that similar conditions that have lead to similar spikes in the past, but those spike have never been this big. After being negatively impacted in big way by the recent updates, I would have thought that the result of the conditions that lead to this would have been more muted, more muted than similar spikes from the past. But it was the opposite.

Today is set to be a record day. Unfortunately my prediction is that tomorrow will go back to being normal.

[mosxu]

Only zombies here for 3 days now... bless them

[EditorialGuy]

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a problem with Fetch as Google lately?

I've used "Fetch and Render" a few times lately, and each time it's failed on the first attempt with a "temporarily not available" error. It's worked fine a few seconds later.

[expmrb]

There are some weird SERP tweaking's since Friday. When the traffic is rising its extremely good and when it falls, its like that our sites have been vanished from the face of the Earth.

[widgetized]

Halloween Sale is now running in my website since 25 October.

Since that, all the traffic I got is non-converting / zombie traffic. 0 sales.

Looks like Google has set a threshold for my website so that my overall earnings are the same every month no matter what promotion or sale I will run. I reached the quota days before 25 October, now I can't go beyond that, I will have to wait for November.

Should I remove the Google Analytics tracking in my e-commerce platform? Maybe Google should not know EVERYTHING about my site...

[heisje]

Should I remove the Google Analytics tracking in my e-commerce platform?

Yes.
.

[justpassing]

Should I remove the Google Analytics tracking in my e-commerce platform? Maybe Google should not know EVERYTHING about my site...

Your profile shows you are from Italy, so if your site targets EU audience, there might be another concerns about using GA, ... the GDPR. I know there is an option to anonymize data collected by GA, but still, I am not sure this is really 100% GDPR compliant.

[widgetized]

My website targets the world since I sell digital products. And yes, I took care of all the settings related to the GDPR when Google warned me about it last year. Still, every now and then I think if it would be better Google not knowing what works well - or what doesn't - on my website in order to use it against me.

[Milchan]

strange there doesnt seem to be any posts today on this thread! Anyway, its been another terrible day for me as hardly any conversions. What confuses me though is traffic levels are not much different but as weeks ago , but conversions are even worse. Bounce rates seem higher also so it seems to me that any traffic google is getting me is less relevent for the user than before which is exactly the opposite of what they say the algo changes do.

[mosxu]

@widgetized

Both Visa and recently MasterCard report your transactions to google, there is no need for analytics to influence the “quota”

Quotas are not confirmed they exist but you may be right since SALE promotions have had no impact. Conversion rate is almost double when a sale is on and you can not say that there are visitors who do not like a SALE.

[heisje]

Both Visa and recently MasterCard report your transactions to google

Hello? where did you get this from? Financial / Banking secrecy may only be lifted by state authorities, strictly on grounds of suspected criminal activity. Card transactions are by law 100% confidential. Nobody reports card transactions to Google !
.

[NickMNS]

Financial / Banking secrecy may only be lifted by state authorities,

True on an individual basis. But I doubt that holds for the aggregate. The credit card companies are selling data like everyone else. Think of all those rewards programs, why do you think they exist?

[NickMNS]

Here is a link to an article from the Verge:
[theverge.com...]

[heisje]

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information. We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards.

Of course. Because providing & receiving individual personal transaction data is illegal.
Get a better understanding of what the linked article says.

We now better get back to on-topic discussion before moderators get wind of this detraction :)
.

[mosxu]

Link VISA and MasterCard purchases to show a conversion.

There is probably no ecommerce tracking need for google but for us without it is shooting in the dark.

[aristotle]

Just looked at the end-of-month stats for one of my sites, and for the past few days the home page is literally getting pounded by stealth bots from several AWS IPs. Hundreds of hits per day. It's the same person behind it. Over the years I've seen this occasionally on all of my sites.

But it makes absolutely no sense. I haven't made any changes on this page for a long time, so if it were a scraper they wouldn't need to crawl it every few minutes. On the other hand, they're not coming often enough to knock the site offline or even slow it down, if that were the pupose. It makes no sense.

I don't want to take the trouble to block these IPs, but may have to if it doesn't stop fairly soon. Just one of the stupid things you have to deal with sometimes.