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]

[jmorgan]

My traffic is a bit down but checking some of my keywords their rankings remain steady (maybe shuffling 1 spot up or down, no big deal). Like others, I too am a bit bewildered as to what's happening.

Having said that, I checked the patterns across the last 1-3 years and a drop in traffic does seem consistent to some degree for whatever reason at this time of the year.

Also, as I said in my previous post, some states in Australia are having school holidays, so if you have a decent amount of traffic from Australia, it should pick up a bit next week when the holidays end.

[BushyTop]

Throttled traffic this morning... :(

[oddnumber]

Struggling here too. If ever there was an update to send retailers (certainly in our market) to AdWords, it's this - especially on mobile search. I can't detect any one particular constant. One minute we're being returned for a particular query, the net we're not. Then we're back again.

[JesterMagic]

This past weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada. If some of you get a larger % of traffic from Canada this could be the reason for the increases or decreases.

[Cralamarre]

Yesterday, for me, was the worst day so far since the beginning of September. But as I mentioned yesterday, the exact same thing happened on the exact same day last year. Traffic bottomed out for no apparent reason, and then recovered the following day. And just like last year, traffic today seems to be recovering. I have no explanation for it, but something about my site and the second Wednesday in October don't mix. I just hope the recovery I'm seeing this morning continues. Anyone else seeing a recovery from yesterday?

[lostshootingstar]

Alright guys, what do you all make of this? I've noticed that the vast majority of the traffic I've lost since August has been desktop traffic. Desktop traffic is down over 40% (!) comparing yesterday to a Wednesday in the middle of August. I have been in this industry with the same website and raking for the same keywords for 9 years, and this is NOT seasonal. And I understand that desktop users are slowly dying off in favor of mobile, but surely this is too big of a difference for decaying market share.

Desktop traffic: [i.imgur.com...]

Mobile traffic: [i.imgur.com...]

In general our website ranks pretty much the same on Desktop as it does on Mobile, so I just cannot understand this. I have gone to great lengths already to ensure everything works properly in all browsers on Desktop. I received the mobile first indexing notification on Sept 20th, but this was happening prior to that.

I have no idea what to do with this information. It makes absolutely no sense.

Anyone else who has lost traffic in September noticing anything similar?

[Cralamarre]

@lostshootingstar,
Are you sure another site didn't suddenly start outranking you on Desktop? That seems like the most obvious answer. I know that when you're dealing with rankings on the first page of the SERPs, even a change of one position can have a big impact. I don't know what else it could be, other than maybe the Analytics code isn't loading properly on your Desktop site. The odds that 40% of your desktop users switched to mobile overnight are pretty low.

[Atomic]

@lostshootingstar, I was checking your dates and it seems you are comparing a Thursday (10/4) with a Wednesday (8/8)

My rankings are better on mobile than desktop and have slightly improved recently. But my desktop traffic is up and mobile is slightly down.

[lostshootingstar]

Yeah, good catch Atomic. I was playing around with dates and took the wrong screenshot.

But it's the same with the right dates: [i.imgur.com...]

@Cralamarre I suppose it's possible some group of keywords I'm not currently tracking has fallen off. What I can say is that we are a national service provider (USA) and 98% of our traffic comes from keywords like "cheap widget repair chicago". We rank for thousands of cities, and dozens of variations of the keywords for each city, so losing a major city or two should not account for 40% of visitors going away. It would have to be a wide spread drop, and I feel like I would be able to see that in my tracking.

I dunno...

[linkbuildr]

Seeing a lot of FAKE medical sites, especially in the cancer niche, ranking top for related keywords offering 100% fake claims and cures. Absolutely bonkers.

[Gregorich SEO]

@linkbuildr

Seeing the same for some queries. I even found a site that scraped my content and reworded it now outranking me. They're an information site and I'm ecom so they win for E.A.T.

@everyone

Also did competitor backlink comparison of the sites that now outrank us for our biggest keyword. Our backlink profile beats theirs in all areas.

This update seems largely on-page and based on E-A-T.

Google is favoring informational sites over ecom like mine. They're assuming the content will be less biased (even though many informational sites have affiliate links in their content to, you guessed it, ecom sites).

80% drop in traffic. No upswing.

Reevaluating or content guidelines based on QSR guidelines AND looking into building affiliate relationships with the information sites that have replaced us in SERPs.

Fingers crossed.

[broccoli]

I’ve never been affected by devastating ranking changes before this year. Has it always been like this, or has Google lost the plot?

[jmorgan]

Well, in the past we would have to wait 2 to 3 months for an update, and now there's been 4 or more in the last 2 months. It does seem a bit crazy, as if Google is doing some experimenting or has regretted some changes it had put in.

[EditorialGuy]

Google is favoring informational sites over ecom like mine. They're assuming the content will be less biased (even though many informational sites have affiliate links in their content to, you guessed it, ecom sites).

If Google is favoring information sites over e-commerce sites for certain queries, mightn't it simply be that they've made an adjustment to the way they judge "user intent"? A lot of queries could go either way: If I search on the name of a new widget, for example, I could be interested in learning more about the widget or buying it, depending on how far along I am on the product research and decision-making spectrum

Google's use of multivariate testing and AI could come into play, too. If user data suggested that (for example) an informational result for "widget wc-1 thingamabob" was a more satisfying result than a transactional result for a given query (all other things being equal), then it wouldn't be unreasonable for the algorithm to skew toward informational results for that query in the absence of other clues. And it wouldn't even be a matter of "them" (Google Search employees) making that decision. The decision would be made by a computer and artificial intelligence.

[justpassing]

Google is favoring informational sites over ecom like mine.

"People" are favoring. It's not because Google lists sites in a given order, that it means that people are visiting sites in this order.

If I am looking for information about a given product, I'll skip all sites which spinet looks like an ecom site, to find one which is providing information.

Also, when people are looking to buy a product, they will not just type the name of the product, they'll add additional words, which can tell the context of their search. Like "buy" , "where to buy", "price", etc... And to me it sounds perfectly normal that, if someone is not adding such hints, Google serves information sites first. But again, at the end this is the people / human who decides what to visit. Being listed first might help, because you have more exposure, but if the title / snippet doesn't not match what the person is searching, he'll scroll down.

[Cralamarre]

Not sure if everyone saw this already, but here is a link to the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. Definitely worth a read: [static.googleusercontent.com...]

[southernguy]

@Cralamarre I would like to believe in their guidelines but right now I have one site outranking my website position 1-8 it has poor scraped content, poor load tines. What it does have is many 301 redirects form high authority domains.with lots of.links In the meantime my purchased expired domains in other niches with 2-5 pages with lots of GSA links are ranking nicely.

[Cralamarre]

@southernguy I just saw the link to the guidelines and posted it, hoping it's helpful to people. Can't hurt to know what Google officially considers to be a high or low quality site.

[MayankParmar]

Yeah, I have a similar example here, @southernguy. My one competitor is outranking my 1000 words article with their 150 article which has pathetic load time, fake content, broken internal links and a comment from reader that calls the article fake and clickbait. This surely meets Google's guidelines :)

[Cralamarre]

@MayankParmar,
With respect, I think we need to get over the belief that word count has anything to do with quality. Here's a link to an article where John Mueller states that things like word count, as well as backlinks and external links, are not used by Google as indicators of quality: [seroundtable.com...]

[NYCTech]

We've cleaned up just about everything that could result in Google penalties of any kind, but still haven't had a full recovery. I'm speculating, but does anyone else think Google may penalize sites based on the political ideologies of people associated with the sites? I've seen evidence that right-leaning websites and individuals have been penalized on Facebook and Twitter; could Google have incorporated something similar into search rankings?

[Gregorich SEO]

@justpassing

@EditorialGuy

Good points. What do you guys think about this though? I noticed Quality Search Raters have been instructed to seek content that won't harm the health of readers. In that case, aren't the new rankings also based on QSR's opinion, not just KPIs, multivariate analysis and AI?

In some cases, I'm seeing content that's a definite thinner rewording of my content. With no clear indication that the site is more informational than mine in the SERP appearance. And yet they're outranking me.

In other cases, yes the user intent seems to have been reevaluated, as the results are more informational than transactional.

[EditorialGuy]

In some cases, I'm seeing content that's a definite thinner rewording of my content. With no clear indication that the site is more informational than mine in the SERP appearance. And yet they're outranking me.

Have you considered the possibility that Google Search isn't perfect? And no, I'm not being snarky: It seems to me that a search engine, like the Web itself, is always going to be a work in progress.

[Gregorich SEO]

@EditorialGuy

Yes, I've considered it often these days my friend (insert laughing and crying emojis).

Happy Friday.

[broccoli]

I found a guy on twitter (@tehseowner) who thinks the recent instability may be Google split testing different algorithms. It’s worth reading his thread. One algorithm pushes authority sites and the other algorithm pushes small quality niche sites with no backlinks. He says the guy with the best content in his niche has all but disappeared during some of the changes.

It does seem possible. I’ve had an incomplete recovery from a penalty in this update, but my traffic pattern for the couple of weeks or so looks like the humps of a camel. I noticed a big surge in authority sites followed by a falling back again a few days ago. Although in my niche the small niche site getting rewarded is anything but quality, just high relevance. I did wonder when I got hit in March if Google had some kind of underdog algorithm they were using to penalise medium weight established sites and uprank new niche sites.

@NYCTech I’m paranoid about that too, especially after reading about the leaked internal report entitled “The Good Censor.”

[EditorialGuy]

found a guy on twitter (@tehseowner) who thinks the recent instability may be Google split testing different algorithms. It’s worth reading his thread. One algorithm pushes authority sites and the other algorithm pushes small quality niche sites with no backlinks. He says the guy with the best content in his niche has all but disappeared during some of the changes.

That's a good point. Google has always been a data-driven company, and when different algorithms and results are being tested in the wild, what you see and someone else sees may be different as well (even without taking personalization into account).

[lostshootingstar]

I don't think there's even any question they are split testing at least two algorithms right now. It's black and white for our industry. When rankings in one target city change, they all change, and then in 12-24 hours they go back to exactly where they were, all in unison. It's very easy to see this for us.

[Milchan]

"People" are favoring. It's not because Google lists sites in a given order, that it means that people are visiting sites in this order.

If I am looking for information about a given product, I'll skip all sites which spinet looks like an ecom site, to find one which is providing information.

Also, when people are looking to buy a product, they will not just type the name of the product, they'll add additional words, which can tell the context of their search. Like "buy" , "where to buy", "price", etc... And to me it sounds perfectly normal that, if someone is not adding such hints, Google serves information sites first. But again, at the end this is the people / human who decides what to visit. Being listed first might help, because you have more exposure, but if the title / snippet doesn't not match what the person is searching, he'll scroll down.

The point some of us are making though about this is that the informational sites are not infact just informational sites but ecom sites and many ecom sites are also informational sites (often providing better info) but google doesnt recognise this. My site used to rank high for informational searches and people would often tell me they used it for research aswell as some purposes and it was the best resource but now seemingly I am "punished" because my site uses an ecommerce cms .

[koan]

If new algorithms targets fake news or demagogic sites, it may affect right leaning sites and individuals, not because of ideology, but due to association with this low quality content.

[Milchan]

If new algorithms targets fake news or demagogic sites, it may affect right leaning sites and individuals, not because of ideology, but due to association with this low quality content.

why would right leaning be associated with low quality content? There is plenty of fake news for both the right and left views.