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.

[southernguy]

Since August I have been riding this roller coaster ranking ride, I have two sites in (very low competitive niches) that have maintained their rankings without a hitch and there is nothing spectacular about them.

It can be hard keeping a focus when your sites and income is dropping. I have several sites which I have recently just let expire. Many of these were hit in August and have not recovered. Two of my biggest sites are still dancing around and they have seen spikes of high traffic during these fluctuations only to tank again, however, actual spikes in traffic do not equal conversions.

In December I decided to go the blackhat route and buy a few expired domains throw up some mediocre content and hit them with links, so far so good. The issue is it takes almost as much effort to do a crappy site as it does a quality one but right now "at least in my niche" (fitness and bodybuilding) there are a lot of churn and burn sites.

I personally would like to see some stability in the rankings but I guess that's not going to happen at least for a while, right now "for me anyway" it's just about giving the Google machine what it wants.

In the meantime, I have been keeping a close eye on the overall search market share and noticed that since January there has been a small but gradual increase in Bing gaining in search, while these are small gains maybe it is starting to show peoples displeasure with the results they are getting from Google.

[Jori]

I'm not even hoping that bing or another search engine will rise. Because I'm not sure I'll do better on those...

But by principle, I do hope that Google will get some competition.

I don't know for you guys, but this is mentally difficult. Sunday, I was like "everything is over honey, let's search a decent job". Monday, It was more like : "oh maybe we can wait a little longer".

How do you say that in english ? Emotional elevator ?

[Milchan]

@jori

probable the phrase your looking for is 'emotional roller coaster ' - yes agree, Ive been living that for many months now but decided to start an exit plan some time ago.

[AlexB77]

Partial recovery of traffic on some of the keywords, which was almost lost AMU, but only partial as those keywords are all over the place in SERPs at the moment. The overall loss of traffic is between 15 - 20%. Semrush Sensor reporting some volatility across most categories with News being at the top of all. Once again, we have not changed anything and have no immediate plans to do so, at least for the foreseeable future until things are settled down a bit. The only problem I see with our site is that we are in many categories and when one category is settling a bit the other starts jumping up and down.

[aristotle]

Some websites may depend on one or two main search terms (keywords) for nearly all of their google traffic, whereas other sites may get most of their traffic from a very large number of different search terms. Other sites may be "in between". These differences should be taken into account when trying to analyze the effects of an update to google's algorithm.

[RedBar]

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

Totally agree, I have one such site about 20 years old which has shot onto the first page for many widget trade keyword terms however, considering the huge improvements for this specific site, traffic has not increased by as much as I would have expected it to. My feelings are that there is so much advertising real estate above the fold that many visitors simply do not go any further.

Then again I know nothing and I haven't known that for very long!

[JesterMagic]

@Milchan re snippets and knowledge panel - Google presents this information like they have fact checked it and it is true. Unless the information is taken from Wikipedia I don't trust it (and even then I may double check). I know the information in our niche that is presented in the snippets and knowledge panel have the appearance of being true but in fact about half of it is either old and not true anymore, or just plain wrong. When I look at niches that I don't know much about, the information in the snippets and knowledge panel looks like it should be correct but if our niche is any indication I have to believe that about half of the information has inaccuracies in it.

[swright]

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.

Similar case here. I have lots of KWs that have kept their rankings but clicks dropped. Some of them have dropped in impressions, but for a lot of them impressions have dropped just a bit but CTR has plummeted so clicks are down by a lot. Many of those are #1 spot keywords that have kept their #1 ranking.

[Milchan]

@jestermagic - yes i see the same in our niche, incorrect info shown in the snippets a lot of the time. It is certainly a problem more and more as google moves towards displaying these "answers" more and more. It is misinforming people whilst at the same time damaging the content producers who provide correct info.

[tangor]

All of this is examination of "all eggs in one basket", and I get it! I also wonder if any are taking long and hard looks at all the OTHER possibilities for monetization which are available---but not cut and paste "set it and forget" kind of things.

The one-trick pony "adsense" has been rode hard and put up wet and is showing signs of wearing out, past prime, long in the tooth, and riddled with worms (parasites).

That said, autopsies are often very illuminating and provide paths for future steps/protection.

Then, too, there's comfort in "talking about it" (whatever that common grief might be) to get past the hurt and continue existence.

However, autopsies on the Black Box are rarely concrete and clear-cut ... often too much decomposition has set in.

OR ...

Deal with what is going on and take steps to get on with something else!

[elguiri]

Some of minor downs from yesterday have been reversed today. (US market) Clearly a lot of noise in the rankings, but nothing too major for the moment.

[universenet]

Next explanation is more close to what google doing now (from olgade website)

You may have noticed that when you search for something using Google, the search results comes back with irrelevant or less important information, this change will help the system understand search queries in other to respond with correct responses in other to satisfy users. The main aim of this update is to ensure user satisfaction.

Now is time for machine learning to show what search results are not good...so this kind of results now helping Neural technology understand level of search
We can expect soon show "good results" in google search
Only this is logical what google doing now...

[Jori]

So they're showing on purpose ugly results for machine learning heh?
Seems logic. But do they need to do it for months?

[universenet]

who know how long time..maybe 1 month...from 12 march to 12 april
Dunny Sullivan said that we can not do nothing about..he said that we can not fix it..is from google side..so why try to fix if can not fix..just need wait..
of course they never say directly and clear what they doing but soon we can expect thwt artificial inteligency will full manage google search

[universenet]

is really interesting how many non secure and non responsive websites are in google search only if you try search next in google
"weather forecast"
simple searching what many people doing but results are out of mind
Some sites are there what I never saw before

[jmorgan]

is really interesting how many non secure and non responsive websites are in google search only if you try search next in google "weather forecast"

Every single website on the first page of Google for "weather forecast" is SSL-enabled. What are you referring to?

[universenet]

keyword weather forecast handle 500 000 000 pages search in google
So.. if you see ONLY first page is wrong
Just see few more pages
Weather Forecast keword is for massive search
in next pages coming some insider websites

[robzilla]

Responsiveness (rather, mobile-friendliness) and HTTPS are not defining factors, or at least not in a very impactful way. So you shouldn't be surprised to see HTTP URLs or fixed-width pages ranking (though you'll probably see the latter less and less on mobile searches).

The idea that the results are intentionally "bad" as a means of "training the algorithm" seems to me very misguided, but that shouldn't be a surprise given the quality of the source (the "olgida website"). Don't believe everything you read, and try not to think about machine learning in such simple terms. The sort of AI that feeds into the algorithm these days is much more advanced. Because it's so difficult to understand, however, people tend to gravitate to simpler "explanations", so there's quite a bit of misleading information flying around.

[edited by: robzilla at 7:16 pm (utc) on Apr 7, 2019]

[Fatlossplanner]

I have lost 90 percent traffic and can see thin Content ranking... What's bizarre is that even pinterest n Facebook page is ranking... I have given up seo now and started focusing on Other traffic sources.. It's painful n slow but atleast won't have a dependency on unstable Google who lives to play with so many webmasters... Now I can write contents more freely and on my terms... It will take time but then I know dependency will go away from Google one day...

[EditorialGuy]

Tyler Bishop of Ezoic recently wrote a blog post titled "Can small sites with low domain authority outrank large sites in Google?" In it, he says:

"While it may seem like large websites are always at the top of Google search results, the truth is that search results grow more and more diverse each year. This means that large sites lose more real estate to smaller sites, medium-sized sites, rich snippets, video content, and other types of search results every year."

He goes on to support this assertion with empirical data, including charts. See:

[blog.ezoic.com...]

FWIW, our own site outranks large publishers in our sector for many, many queries (some of them quite competitive), and that trend has become more pronounced in the last couple of years.

[robzilla]

Thanks for sharing that article. The phrase "query deserves diversity" has been around for a while. (Maybe we need to add "query deserves authority", something that's probably played a role in the "Medic" update.) With a better understanding of queries through neural matching comes a better understanding of what queries (or rather, users) need, and a broader understanding of a query might lead to more diversity in the SERPs.

[universenet]

robzilla + I agree with you..
I do not belive some things in some site..
All sites are fouderd by google search .. google discovering them
some can be even "unique" but garbage can be "unique" too
Some people losing traffic 30%...some losing 50%... some losing 90%
Their sites are worse 30% or 50 % ? No
They lost some "important links " maybe? maybe yes..maybe NO
Is some machine learning arround? YES and NO
So what is true?
True is that google do what they want.. NO need be real reason
Today some things like https and mobile friendly is important.. tommrow is not more...
Today links are important.. tommorow not more
Important is next...
Google earning same or bigger money no depends what update will be
So,...they can play arround with updates..
You can have better links and worse traffic... depends about algorythm.. and algorythm is secret...
Alwaays will be secret

[Upstate8987]

Anyone else seeing a lot of their keywords come back with a vengeance?

Over the weekend, back up significantly on a variety of categories.

[tangor]

Related or not, just sharing:

April 3rd, one managed site which g has dissed recently, a "We Love Bing!" search box was added as an ssi on all 38 pages. By April 5 g's traffic AND USER CONVERSIONS to the site were up 12%. Client's suggestion which seems to be paying off.

NOT SUGGESTING you do the same, just an interesting factoid that we don't actually know what this rollout is about!

[ichthyous]

With regards to the March 12th update, my site dropped on the 12th and then again on the 18th and has remained at a very low level since then...yesterday I had only 38 clicks to my site! Despite the insanity this weekend with everyone's pages vanishing, my SEMrush ranking has actually improved somewhat, but clicks reported in GSC are just awful. Has anyone seen a recovery in traffic from this update on the 12th?

[universenet]

Last 2 days for one of my website visits grow ..slow but grow to 10000 a day

[broccoli]

@Upstate8987 My traffic has increased considerably in the last 48 hours.

[universenet]

Google SearchLiaison
@searchliaison

"For many searches, surfacing fresh information often ensures the best relevancy. However, sometimes people want to find older yet also relevant information. Our tools have long made this possible. Now we’re testing new before: and after: commands to make this even easier...."

They testing all time... playing... playing
So this is why search is from time to time even much diferent

[EditorialGuy]

They testing all time... playing... playing
So this is why search is from time to time even much diferent

Makes sense. What's relevant for the query will depend, among other things, on the searcher's state of mind. Discerning "user intent" is is trickier than just matching keywords against keywords..

[robzilla]

So this is why search is from time to time even much diferent

Note that the before: and after: operators need to be included in the query for search results to be affected.