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]

[Milchan]

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.

I spent some time getting a good lost list of bots together some time ago and set up an nginx rule to return 444 response to them which helped reduce them a reduce my AWS bandwidth costs considerably. Blocking Ips though is more of a pain as of course they will just change sooner or later

Another one of those annoying things I have to deal with is stupid referral spam in google analytics - every week I have to add a new filter to block domains like "worldwide-seo-services.com" or some other domain with seo in it that is sending referrals to non existent pages and messing with my numbers. Why they think this is going to get them my business I have no idea.

[NickMNS]

Another one of those annoying things I have to deal with is stupid referral spam in google analytics - every week I have to add a new filter to block domains like "worldwide-seo-services.com"

No no no! The referral spam can be stopped with a single filter in Google Analytics. Set a filter to "include" >> "traffic to the hostname" >> yourdomain.com. This will eliminate all referral spam, specifically when spammers are sending fake referrers to your analytics. This will not eliminate referrals where bots/bad-users got to your website and include a fake referrer info in the request header.

[ichthyous]

Lots of theories being tossed around regarding the possible algo changes or penalties which decimated many sites on 8/1 and again 9/26. My site has not recovered at all, and in fact continued to trend slowly downward the entire month of October. I am looking at possible remedies:

1) I changed my schema type to product on most of my content pages about two months before the drop. Changed it back to 'article'
2) Slowly updating links from profile sites linking to my pages that use keywords in the anchor text. I am getting rid of the anchor text.
3) Upgraded my server and pages are loading faster with a lower server response time

The fourth thing I am wondering about is hotlinking to my images. I have a massive amount of hotlinking going on and since 99% of it is from spammy scraper sites that come and go I am wondering if these links to my domain are negatively affecting my site now. I tried blocking them with cloudflare, but CF also blocked google images and I don't want that. Any opinions on this?

[NickMNS]

@ichthyous I'm experiencing similar decline, I've been bleeding traffic all month long. However, the past few days have been the first sign of stabilization on my part.

I have the same issue with hotlinking. While it is tempting to believe that the resulting links from those spammy site would have an impact I'm fairly confident that Google can see through the spam and simply ignore them.

[engine]

@heisje and @NickMNS

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 !

For the record, we covered the story here and you probably missed it.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Back onto Google updates, you might want to make a note of this, too.
Google News Feed on Google Mobile Home Page [webmasterworld.com]
That's a significant change, and i doubt it'll ever be the same again. Remember, this will affect traffic, depending upon your sources. Further up in this thread i suggested looking more closely at the source. ;)

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS My traffic is still trending lower even in the last 7 days, I am now at the low point for the entire year. I also doubt that hotlinks have anything to do with it. I am really wondering about the inbound links to pages, and especially links using anchor text. This could be an effort by Google to knock out link building campaigns.

[Milchan]

The fourth thing I am wondering about is hotlinking to my images. I have a massive amount of hotlinking going on and since 99% of it is from spammy scraper sites that come and go I am wondering if these links to my domain are negatively affecting my site now. I tried blocking them with cloudflare, but CF also blocked google images and I don't want that. Any opinions on this?

You could look at setting up a rule in apache or nginx that only allows linking from your domain or from google

[justpassing]

You could look at setting up a rule in apache or nginx that only allows linking from your domain or from google

And empty referer. But it will have no impact on Google affecting positively, or negativity a site. Googlebot, will still find the image at the spammer site, and Googleimage bot will also still access the image, since Googlebots are not using referers.

[ichthyous]

You could look at setting up a rule in apache or nginx that only allows linking from your domain or from google

I've tried various sets of rules in .htaccess and none seems to work. I think that's because the images are served from a subdomain img.sitename.com. The htaccess rules should work from what I am seeing, but don't. I've tried updating the rules to use the subdomain and moving it to the subdomain folder on the server, but still didn't work.

[heisje]

For the record, we covered the story here and you probably missed it.
[webmasterworld.com ]

@engine : many thanks, apprecited!
.

[whoa182]

Seems like something is happening again. Many of my keywords have dropped like it did on the 25th. :( Hopefully, things will return to normal after a day or two like it did last time. A bunch of non-relevant articles in front again.

Edit: It looks as if my keywords have gone back to where they were on the 25th (after they dropped). Maybe Google is doing some a/b testing. But if this sticks, then I'm done. To the job center I go! :'/

[MayankParmar]

It looks like more sites started to appear in Top Stories, is anyone seeing this on their end?

[System]

The following 18 messages were cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: google/4926691.htm [webmasterworld.com]
3:04 pm on Nov 1, 2018 (PDT -8)