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]

[thejimster]

Regarding the ecom vs informational train of thought..

Ecom seems like it would be much more likely to suffer from trust issues due to the fact that ecom sites will have concrete review data all over the web. Most of this data will have star ratings, which is very easy for an algorithm to understand.

There are many facets to the "trustworthiness" of reviews as well, like links, and if some review sources conflict with other review sources. How are each of the review sources weighted? Does the conflict between review sources force the algorithm lose trust?

[jmorgan]

I get the feeling Google keeps "updating" their algorithm because some execs (Pichai?) found some of their favorite sites not ranking high enough.

[Shepherd]

ecom sites will have concrete review data all over the web. Most of this data will have star ratings, which is very easy for an algorithm to understand.

In a perfect world, yes. The interwebs is a cesspool and every, EVERY, review website is just an ecom site. Review websites should carry about the same weight as blog comments on wordpress hosted blogs.

[southernguy]

@jmorgan Yes Pichai may have something to do with it but Google has tried to supposedly ramp up their AI, unfortunately, John Giannandrea the head guy in front of that project was hired by Apple several months ago. Now it seems they are having problems running things but who knows.

[Gregorich SEO]

Hi all,

As I've already mentioned, I lost more than 80% organic traffic after the Sept 27th update.

I'm updating my content to better meet Quality Search Rater guidelines. But honestly none of my competitors who were hit same day were hit this bad. And their backlink profiles/content aren't necessarily better than mine.

I can't help but think it has something to do with this...

Someone at my company had applied robots.txt to all our pages in such a way that Google was unable to crawl our total number of pages (roughly 4k) for Smartphone. This was during the mobile first indexing roll out.

The crawl errors began early September and when the Sept 27th update happened, we were at around 3k crawl errors for Smartphone.

Do you guys think this might have anything to do with why I was hit so hard? Now that the crawl errors resolved last week, will I recover?

Thanks.

[justpassing]

Do you guys think this might have anything to do with why I was hit so hard? Now that the crawl errors resolved last week, will I recover?

It's sure that it can't help. If pages can't be crawled (blocked, unavailable), they won't be listed in the index. This is obvious. Googlebot should find them now that you fixed the issue. It can take a while to reindex these pages, and rank them, It can be fast, long, I have no idea. If your site has a good authority, it can resolve fast, otherwise it can take a while.

Meanwhile, continue to work at your site, ensuring quality content, no technical problem (https, speed, broken links etc), as well as good ux.

Good luck.

[KaseyM]

My disavowed links file has been going crazy today.


One second it's there and the next I get an email saying it has been deleted.

[BushyTop]

Bizarre on and off traffic again today, low conversions.

After a massive weekend.... I just have no feasible explanation.

[oddnumber]

We\re still doing the weird in and out shuffle for a number of big hitting keywords. Can't be mobile-first related as the ranking drop is not across the board.

[Milchan]

Bizarre on and off traffic again today, low conversions.

After a massive weekend.... I just have no feasible explanation.

last few days I have had a increase in traffic combined with a massive drop in conversations. nothing makes sense anymore and I have honestly giving up trying to make it do so.

[pritz]

Very lesser number of conversions. There is no consistency in month-on-month conversion numbers this year.

[Mark_A]

I don't look moment to moment, but over the last 7 days we are 13% down on G organic compared to last year.
Despite adding quite a lot of new focused content.

Even direct traffic is up yoy by comparison.

[justpassing]

compared to last year.

May be people are more "busy" this year. There are natural disasters a bit all around the world, USA, Europe, Japan. This beginning of autumn is warm, so those who are not facing hurricanes and flooding may enjoy the weather. Midterm election approaching, etc, etc...

[ichthyous]

My position in SEM rush recovered just a small bit and now is plateaued at 17.5%.That is a bit lower than where I was normally ranking at the start of the year with many inquiries and sales earlier this year. Then the entire summer stopped cold... Traffic was much higher and my positioning in SEMrush skyrocketed above all of my competitors. But oddly it resulted in very few inquiries sales. It could be that customers are anxious this year, but I'm not getting inquiries from USA, UK, Canada, Australia, or anyplace else like I was earlier in the year and my international sales have been strong for several years now.

Google is working double time to manipulate the results and make it so that even when you do rank well you don't benefit from it. I am seeing my site pushed down to page two for many terms that I used to rank top 3 on, but fortunately I'm still ranking well for other terms...it could have been much worse. One of my main competitors suddenly dropped from 24% to 7% in SEMrush at the August update and has not recovered at all. It must have devastated their sales and is very scary to see such a large powerful company laid low.

[Milchan]

Very lesser number of conversions. There is no consistency in month-on-month conversion numbers this year.

The thing I find most surprisingly / confusing is that all previous trends have disappeared. For years and years Sunday has been my best conversion day without exception but for the last couple of months it has pretty much turned into the worse yet it is still the best day traffic wise.

Can anyone think of a good reason why the previous correlation between traffic and sales has all but disappeared.? The only I can think of is that the results being served are now less relevant to what the users intent was (the exact opposite of what google professes to have improved)

[justpassing]

Out of curiosity, I often see people saying they are checking their ranking at sites like SEM rush, etc... but why don' you check your ranking at GSC directly? First of all, I would assume that GSC has much accurate data. And secondly, how reliable can be an external tools, considering that SERP is different from one user to another?

[Cralamarre]

I know there's probably no way to do this, but what Google really needs is a feature similar to the Suggested Videos column on YouTube. That's where all the traffic is. I have several videos on YouTube that rank #1 for their search terms, but even being #1 on YouTube Search doesn't bring in much traffic. Just like being #1 in Google's search results doesn't seem to bring in as much traffic as you'd expect. 52% of all my video views on YouTube are from the Suggested Videos column along the right. YouTube Search, on the other hand, only accounts for 17% of views, even when my videos are ranked #1.

Anyway, I know it's not possible for Google to have a Suggested Articles column, since once you've clicked out of Google, you're gone. But that's really the problem with search engines like Google. Most of the traffic goes to whichever site appears at the top, and then the user is gone. Any chance of another site being clicked on disappears. That's not the case at all with YouTube. Even if your video wasn't clicked on in the search results, you still have a second chance with that Suggested Videos column. And in fact, Suggested Videos is by far the biggest source of traffic.

[Cralamarre]

And on a more relevant topic, traffic is down today. It's pretty much the same as last Monday, but since last Monday was a holiday in the US and Canada, it means today isn't going so good.

[HereWeGo123]

@Cralamarre – Of course depending on what Niche you're in, typically from our experience, national holidays that fall on a Monday (like last week's) tend to be higher in traffic. More people are home, more advertising going on, so naturally, for at least parts of the day, consumers are online searching stuff. But again, of course, this isn't applicable to every niche and industry. So if your traffic today is similar or slightly lower than last Monday, it may not be a bad sign, after all. Just my two cents :)

[Cralamarre]

@HereWeGo123,
Good point. I should have specified that I have an education-based site that relies a lot on the school year for its traffic. So anytime there's a holiday (like last Monday), my traffic drops. Sorry for forgetting that little detail.

[aristotle]

In my opinion it's not very enlightening to compare your traffic with the corresponding day from a year ago, because that doesn't tell you what happened in betwen. There could have been several big up and down swings. A full chart that covers the whole period, especially a monthly chart, is much more revealing, since it shows what happened in between. A longer time frame, such as 5 or 10 years is even better, for it shows the long term trend.

Looking at monthly data is also much better than looking at hourly or daily data, because a monthly chart smooths out the meaningless short-term random fluctuations.

[awong316]

There was another large hurricane in the southeast US last week. I was reading an article that some counties don't have schools that are even operable anymore and don't know when it's possible to start up again. There is also something like over 500,000 people that were without power in the last week, so the last thing I think they're going to do is browse the internet.

[NickMNS]

@aristotle

In my opinion it's not very enlightening to compare your traffic with the corresponding day from a year ago

I agree in general, but I suppose that it is specific to your own situation. Over time I have made significant changes to website, my site does not look like it did last year. Moreover, my traffic patterns have changed over time as well.

A longer time frame, such as 5 or 10 years is even better,

Here I disagree, my site 5 years ago didn't look anything like it does today. I imagine that the websites that many people have today didn't even exist back then. 10 years, my site didn't exist.

I feel that it is best to check different time periods, today to yesterday, today to same day last week, last month., week over week, etc... Depending on the volatility and changes that were made different time frames may be more or less relevant. Lately I've been focused comparing the current day to the same day last week, but given the recent updates, I've been looking back to same day in the pre-update week.

Note, that it is a good idea to select your time frames such that they align by day of the week as opposed to day of the month because traffic patterns are heavily influenced by the day of the week, eg: Saturday traffic is usually the lowest and Tuesday or Wednesday are the highest (at least in my case). So even if you pick 30 days, if you compare a 30 day periods with 5 weekends to a 30 period with only four weekends then the difference could be measurable.

@awong316 events, even relatively large ones such as the recent hurricanes are unlikely to make any significant difference unless your traffic is localized and targeting the affected region. 320M people in the US, 500k is not even 1%.

[naimisha]

My website affect from this update, keywords are not in search, I trying to understand what was its aim, not find the specific reason.
How my website can recover from this update?

[jmorgan]

@naimisha Nobody knows anymore. Google boosts sites in one update, then literally two or three weeks later demotes the same sites.

Best to just focus on improving your website, because, what else can you do that's in your control?

[RedBar]

Best to just focus on improving your website, because, what else can you do that's in your control?

Whilst this is an admirable concept, what is the point of doing anything when Google simply destroys a site willy nilly? I have one specific .com site affected by this update that has had all traffic to it disappear ... Today so far 1 PV, yesterday 1 PV, and I haven't a clue as to why, it meets all G's criteria but one, the previously unrewarded, now G it is unrewarded, are you going to do anything about it? Nah, quite simply you haven't a clue.

As an aside note I have closed several .asia sites over this last year thanks to lower and lower to negligible traffic. G had simply cleaned them out of their SERPs.

Has anyone else seen/done the same?

[justpassing]

what is the point of doing anything when Google simply destroys a site willy nilly?

May be time to stop building sites for Google, and start building sites for users. 2/3 of my traffic is not from Google search, and I am fine with this. when Google hiccups (up or down), I see variations of course, but this affect only 1/3 of my traffic (which of course, is already a significant amount). If a site has quality original content, then it will succeed no matter how. People will find it, will use it, will talk about it. Sure it's not going to be instantaneous, but this is a solid base to develop a business.

[RedBar]

May be time to stop building sites for Google, and start building sites for users.

Huh?

Maybe you had better learn what my sites are before criticising them without any knowledge of them whatsoever.

If a site has quality original content, then it will succeed no matter how.

And this is the biggest load of BS propagated on the web, period.

[justpassing]

Maybe you had better learn what my sites are before criticising them without any knowledge of them whatsoever.

Indeed, but if you rely exclusively on Google's traffic, there is something wrong in the business plan. I never heard that Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, etc... relied on Google traffic to become successful ...

And this is the biggest load of BS propagated on the web, period.

It works for me, I have no reason to think that this is "BS".

[pritz]

Many of the keywords get new positions. I'm sure there is something happening.

SEMRush is showing 9.4 and Rank Ranger is showing high volatility...

Is anyone seen ranking changes?

[edited by: pritz at 12:53 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2018]