Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019

[BushyTop]

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System: The following 23 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4937425.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 8:43 am on Mar 13, 2019 (cst -6)

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Seeing some changes this morning. Anyone else. UK.

[ichthyous]

What is very noticeable on my international sites is the huge reduction in USA traffic, many of my hitherto untouched sites have been well and truly demoted or even removed completely from the G.com SERPs.

@redbar I'm seeing the same thing. I'm US based but I've had very high traffic from the UK for more than ten years. Last year my traffic from Australia was very high and Canada is always steady. In total international traffic was about half of my traffic.

My international traffic has now dropped between18%-50%+ depending on the country, with perhaps one or two countries staying steady. This is hurting my business a lot because my UK, Australian and Canadian customers have always provided a nice chunk of sales over the years.

My site is relevant to them and the CTR in those markets was always higher or much higher than in USA. That traffic was helping to keep business afloat when my USA traffic started to decline last September. I can't say I'm surprised, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and knew it was only a matter of time.

[Milchan]

"Reviews" are also 100% UGC and probably the most valuable content for Amazon or other sites.

Whilst reviews on some sites are useful, Amazon being one that is relatively useful, I find for the most part they are just another tool for the blackhats to utilise. Google reviews themselves are terrible for this and places like Tripadvisor, Yelp etc are completely skewed with fake results both positive to up rankings and negative to attack competitors. The worst thing about all these is that most, or at least a very significant amount of people, just believe them blindly and the companies that hosting the reviews dont care that they are fake and do nothing about it.

For me the internet is broken now in so many ways and I dont know if we will ever manage to get back to the "good ole days" of 5 or more years ago.It will either get more out of control and vicious and /or big companies and governments will just consolidate their control over everything.

[tangor]

@swright... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Thanks for the insights!

[tangor]

For me the internet is broken now in so many ways and I dont know if we will ever manage to get back to the "good ole days" of 5 or more years ago.It will either get more out of control and vicious and /or big companies and governments will just consolidate their control over everything.

Is there any doubt that is the direction? While chasing adsense and lost income I fear too many have overlooked that very real possibility.

[samwest]

After a brief recovery, right back to zilch and zombies. Nothing but mobile and tablet visitors. Zero conversions. Oh I get it, APRIL FOOLS from Google.

[southernguy]

Same here, started seeing some dismal recovery with some conversions which completely stopped Sunday. :-(

[NickMNS]

With March over and about three weeks worth of data since this update, we can start to look back and see if there are any emerging trends.

Going strictly by the numbers my delta for March vs. February for number of users (GA) 0%, for the last 3 weeks vs the same 3 weeks last month (Feb) about 5% increase. Essentially, it would appear from these numbers that I have not been impacted by the update.

But if I look at impressions in GSC, I see a distinct trend, until mid March impressions were declining slowly but consistently, with the lowest point occurring on March 10th. Since the update impressions are increasing albeit still slowly, but at a rate that appears to be roughly the same as the decline.

Is this the result of the update or the result of the changes that I made shortly before. Who knows. I just hope the trend continues.

[RedBar]

If a site(s) has remained static or with a slight increase or decrease then you've probably come out of this debacle ok however reading various forum boards without a doubt the majority are all reporting pretty hefty losses, 30% appears to be the average with some reporting up to 50% even for well-established sites.

Obviously there must have been winners for so many to have been losers therefore just who/what were they?

Large generic corporate sites, shopping sites, Wikipedia? I haven't a clue apart from seeing many poor quality widget industry pages.

[Mark_A]

Just having / had a very quiet Monday. I don't know how people calculate that they are 20% or 40% down with G organic, I can just see trends in my analytics. At the moment we haven't achieved a normal week for some time. Of course it is true that if we are down someone else should be up and that is indeed worth a look. Off to look ...

[v008370]

I'm one of the people who have lost 50% of my traffic

Look at this here - this is my site performance over the past few months. You can see the March 14th plummet.

[i.ibb.co ]

This is one of my top search terms. My ranking has increased post-March 14th, but look at the traffic/impressions. It's plummeted.

I genuinely can't make sense of what is going on.

[i.ibb.co ]

[StoneSolid]

@Milchan

For me the internet is broken now in so many ways and I dont know if we will ever manage to get back to the "good ole days" of 5 or more years ago.It will either get more out of control and vicious and /or big companies and governments will just consolidate their control over everything.

I prefer to be optimistic and work harder and harder.. but I do agree, things are totally out of control.

By empowering big brands and putting a cap on displayed number of results, google efficiently eliminated 99% of struggling webmasters from the internet.

Question of the day - is there even a point in starting a brand new website anymore?

[NickMNS]

@v008370

I genuinely can't make sense of what is going on.

Impressions are shown only when an impression occurs (this seems obvious!), but there is no measure of queries for which you are eligible to receive an impression. Rankings are measured based on impressions. If no impression is recorded, then no ranking. Previously you received many impressions for a wide variety of queries (high number of impressions), but you may not have ranked highly for many of these. Now you are receiving fewer impressions but when you do receive an impression you rank higher than before. As a result you see a drop of impressions and an increase in rank.

[v008370]

Hi nickmns - the bottom graph is the average position/impressions/clicks of one query

The average position of the query has risen but the impressions and clicks have plumetted

[NickMNS]

@v008370
First Welcome WW.

The average position of the query has risen but the impressions and clicks have plumetted

Yes, that is exactly the point. The average has risen, but this new average is drawn from fewer data-points. Basically you rank higher on average for the impression that you continue to receive. What your data doesn't show you is the all queries for which in the past you received impressions but now no longer do.

Number example:
BMU (before March Update) you received 1000 impressions and you ranked on average at position 10. AMU (after) you receive 100 impression and rank on average in position 5. What you are not seeing is that BMU you received 1000 impressions for 1000 queries, but now AMU you only receive 100 impressions for the same 1000 queries. And previously you average rank was based on 1000 impressions and now it is based on 100 impressions. AMU your ranking has suffered so much for the remaining 900 queries that you do not get the impression and thus do not get a ranking measure either. But lets assume you did, say for the 900 missed queries before it was 10 and now it is 100, the ranking you do get are now at 5. (5*100 + 100*900) / 1000 = 90.5.

Also note that you may still rank for all the same keywords as before, but there maybe some other facets or dimensions (such as geo-location, or browsing history) that determine whether or not you still receive impressions for as many instances of the keyword queries.

I hope this make sense.

[v008370]

thanks for the reply and it does make sende.. but the search results must be haywire if my average position is 1.9 but I'm not ranking for most of the queries. This is unprecedented levels of fluctuation in my experience and it renders the average ranking stat meaningless.

[Rlilly]

Im seeing more and more non mobile friendly sites getting decent positioning.. So much for Google Mobile First index...

Google parades and charades.. they con jobs.. the LINK is everything no matter what they say, link is king.. one of my competitors was no were to be seen, stated buying crappy link in blog posts heavy with anchor.. HE IS ON FIRST PAGE NOW...

[koan]

Yes I can confirm that my UGC sites traffic took severe beatings in the past 1-2 years, with the disappearance of long tail traffic and Adsense not showing ads on pages with too little traffic, their income have imploded.

[swright]

thanks for the reply and it does make sende.. but the search results must be haywire if my average position is 1.9 but I'm not ranking for most of the queries. This is unprecedented levels of fluctuation in my experience and it renders the average ranking stat meaningless.

Go to GSC, and then compare two periods - before and after the update/drop in traffic. Then look for the keywords where you had the biggest drops and look at the difference in rankings - did the drop occur because the rank for the KW went down or for some other reason. Also look for queries for which you have zero impressions (or a huge impressions drop) after the update and see what their rankings were in the previous period. Then you might check manually these queries (from a browser in privacy mode and with the location set to the locale you want to investigate). Do they still rank in the same spots but for some reason you are not getting traffic for them anymore? Those zero impressions KWs might be the ones that your site no longer ranks for or their ranking dropped beyond page 2-3 so people don't get that far when searching for an impression to be recorded.

[Robert Charlton]

...one of my competitors was no were to be seen, stated buying crappy link in blog posts heavy with anchor.. HE IS ON FIRST PAGE NOW...

Do not imitate. It's likely that there are too many variables for you to know whether that's why he's ranking.

Do pay attention to how long he stays on page one.

[Marketing Guy]

Could be unrelated, but in GSC a few expired domains I built sites on no longer show their preexisting links. John Mu mentioned the other day (https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/b6koze/if_search_console_doesnt_list_an_indexed_link/) that if links aren't displaying in GSC they're probably being ignored (or words to that effect). Could Google be negating links to domains that have changed owners?

That could potentially affect a lot of sites. Those that have gained natural links post-changeover would remain relatively unaffected. The more a site relies on expired domain links (either directly or via PBN / guest posting / others link from expired domains), the more it could be impacted.

Just speculation - the domains I was working on were experiments so not enough data from those to make a call. Client sites are all relatively unaffected, with a few increases (none are or get links from expired domains). Expanding on the speculation, with the prolific use of expired domains for PBNs, it's reasonable to assume that it's an area Google may look at.

Tough to gauge how competitors would be affected by this (3rd party tools would still show inbound links regardless of how Google factors them into the equation).

Anyone with a better data set than me care to offer some input?

- Was your un/affected site an expired domain? If yes, did you build links after acquiring it?
- Was your un/affected site getting links from expired domains?

[v008370]

Thanks swright. My specific example was a keyword i was ranking around 4 pre cu. After cu I'm ranking 1.9 but imprssions anf traffic have plummeted for that kw. There's other examples but thats the most pronounced.

[BushyTop]

@v008370 have looked specifically at devices.. that can throw average rank.

[Cepro]

Google seems to never stop fluctuating. I'm having big falls

[Martin Ice Web]

today we see another big hit (germany, ecom)

And it seems allways the converting traffic that is lost. Crap traffic from google is at an alltime high.
I wonder why google users donīt change to better alternatives?
Iīm thick of google showing me every query the some odd sites whatewever i refine my query.

[v008370]

The fluctuations are insane. I havent seen anything like this before.

[elguiri]

To what extent is there a disaster bias in this thread? People are faster at reporting their losses than their gains or no changes.

The visibility trackers I use show quite a lot of movement across my sites (US) over the last few weeks. Shows as negative yesterday. Some minor losses of traffic here, some minor gains there. Overall, things are ticking along OK. (For which I am very grateful).

Presumably, if someone is losing, someone else is gaining. I appreciate this is often Google itself as it pushes its own real estate in the SERPs, but it would be helpful if those seeing growth or remaining steady also reported from time to time.

In online marketing, as in life in general, we need more balanced reporting.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Further drop, the third week in a row. It's just insane...

[Milchan]

Seems to be a drop again today for me also.

As a complete aside but another example to demonstrate how google automation/ai seems to be lowering the quality of results was something I saw yesterday. After watching a tv program I searched for the name of one of the guests 'Jason Williamson' to find out a bit of info and it returned a knowledge panel that contained information that was clearly about several different people of the same name. According to the knowledge panel Jason Williamson is a British musician / singer of the band Sleaford Mods (the one I was searching for) which also an assistant professor at the University of Virginia s McIntire School of Commerce having worked for Oracle and others. In the lower section it lists both a list of albums and a mix of books by both the musician and the professor.

Of course this is a single incident but I do seem to be seeing more and more inaccurate results in the SERPs especially in the snippets

[jmorgan]

To what extent is there a disaster bias in this thread? People are faster at reporting their losses than their gains or no changes.

Very much so. People are more likely to post to ask questions as to why their site dropped in the rankings. I've done it myself.

Whereas if your site got a boost, you'd probably interpret as an incentive to keep working and moving in the right direction rather than posting on WebmasterWorld.

[Selen]

Bias or not, doing my example searches for something like: {industry_name} jobs in {country} - one result on first page did not mention the {country} on page at all, even in the HTML source. And a couple of other top results related to a completely different country (which names were in their Titles and H1).