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.

[Histerius]

International business oriented news website, traffic going up strongly in last couple of days but earnings still low. While I'm here, we see a lot of strange links in search console, our normal links end with /rss-articles but we don't have such links. And G of course says 404 for all of them. Any idea what is that?

[Fatlossplanner]

All we can conclude is that it's test of our patience... Big G has again made hardworking webmasters nervous... I hope it's all temporary...

[tangor]

@Fatlossplanner ... Welcome to Webmasterworld. Sorry it is under such trying circumstances.

[JS_Harris]

I'm already fed up with seeing so many results in both serps and youtube that I cannot read.

English titles but the page or video is in Urdu or Hindi. Why is google showing me so much stuff I can't understand? Why is it even ranking with english titles when there isn't a word of english in the page/videos? Is this foreign spam? I can't imagine it's intentional but it's been going on for 4 days now.

[tangor]

Most of my yt searches are appended with -hindi -urdu

Makes a big difference in results!

[seo2019]

Some of my keyword rankings shot up to page 1 on the 12th and 13th March.
Then they dropped to page 2 and continue to fall.

Anyone else seeing a drop or a jump and then a reversal?

[Fatlossplanner]

@tangor thanks... We continue to see huge uos and downs... Poor quality pages are now ranking... High quality pages gone for a toss... Poor planning by Google to roll out the updates if at all its rolled out...

[Fatlossplanner]

@tangor are you from India or Asian country? If yes then may be it's happening due to that.. YouTube shows local Content... But I get it even I am seeing same behaviour

[ManuelQS]

Big drop seen here on sports and fitness ecommerce. Not only my sites but the hole sites of the sector. Some blogs with high traffic and huge brands are showing up now on the top 10, the top SERP are filled with "keyword + brand" titles and EDM domains

[Martin Ice Web]

This one will for sure give a big kick for amazon business.

Good that they call it a quality update i wouldn´t bee able to see this right now.

[RedBar]

I do assume everyone is checking their SERPs with clean browsers?

FWIW, at long last I have dislodged an excellent Chinese widget trade directory for many widget keywords ... for the moment.

[Fatlossplanner]

Will try to check in next 2 days if it improves... If it doesn't goes well then will probably try to give Google what it needs.... I.e. Low quality thin content...

[vetofunk]

Two of my sites took a huge hit during Medic. Looking at yesterday's traffic from Google, while we are up 70-90% above last week, overall we are about 75% back to pre-Medic traffic. I made a ton of changes over the past 7 months to fix issues with both sites, so I am not sure if that helped, or if this was just a roll back?

[RedBar]

or if this was just a roll back?

In my sector nope, too many things have changed, promoted/demoted, however I am seeing the occasional very strange result like a 1 star, 1 transaction, Ebay seller ranking at #1 for the #1 keyword term in my widget industry ... I guess/hope that Joe Public simply ignores that result?

The next few days will be interesting to see IF traffic increases or whether it's all simply about the ads these days?

[Cralamarre]

Traffic was up 10% yesterday over the same day last week, which was unusual since my traffic usually dips during March Break week. Maybe I did benefit from this update after all.

[HereWeGo123]

@vetofunk – What kind of changes have you made since August's medic update?

One thing I have been noticed with this update, along with other updates is that when I'm manually checking the SERPs manually to see where we're at, I will initially, at first, get a set of results with us appearing lower. After doing a refresh, we are back up where we were before. If I restart the browser and open incognito, that issues does not occur until after I do many searches. Anyone else notice this pattern?

[martinibuster]

Anyone else notice this pattern?

Yes, it's been that way for many years now.

That's why I use about six different browsers with a minimum of four different browsers on each of three computers. Plus a VPN.

[HereWeGo123]

@martinibuster

Yes, it's been that way for many years now.

Yeah, and it makes me wonder, during updates, part of the reason for irregular volatility in real time traffic could also be this reason – users are getting a set of results, which obviously they will not refresh as we do. But eventually, it settles down. I've seen patterns where our traffic was slightly down in RT, while this issue was occurring. Once that refresh issue stops, traffic reverts back to normal.

[Fatlossplanner]

Did anyone in this thread notice significant drop in traffic?

[martinibuster]

But eventually, it settles down

It's also propagating across different data centers. So if I log in at home and view SERPs it'll be different if I log in at a different ISP and view the same SERPs. That's probably because you're hitting a different data center.

As the algorithm rolls out, some things are presumably dialed in more precisely, to presumably restore quality sites that may have slipped because less appropriate sites went up.

[broccoli]

@fatlossplanner Yes, my traffic is down by a third - 15K page views -> 10K page views and I’m devastated. I’d only just recovered my traffic levels from last March’s core update, and now my earnings are back down to dangerously low levels. Google keeps rewarding the cheaters and copycats in my niche and has me, the white hat originator of the niche, pegged as the bad guy.

[Fatlossplanner]

@broccoli I am too feeling frustrated about this... I haven't done anything wrong and #*$!ty thin contents are ranking, heck pinterest pins are able to out rank me.... It's not really an upgrade it's moving back... Or may be it's rolling back it seems... I have lost almost half of my traffic... Google has officially announced webmasters can't do anything to fix this #*$!... We need to wait and wait...

[whoa182]

Traffic is up 90% for me since this update and rankings are still climbing for lots of keywords. Peak day is on Monday with Friday's being the lowest traffic day. So it'll be interesting to see how things are early in the week.

Sorry to hear you guys never got rewarded in this one. I already stated what I did to recover (above), so I won't go over it again. My content is definitely not thin, and the content which was rewarded the most seems to be pages with a clear focus and long content (2000-3000 words).

When I thought about "broad core", I took it that I needed to think about the whole website, not any one individual page. @fatlossplanner, if the pages really have nothing wrong with them (and the site as a whole), then maybe that is correct. But Google stated that you need to think more broadly about the site, and not any particular individual page.

And by way, fatlossplanner, if that is your site, it actually seems pretty decent, but I couldn't find any links to buy the products. So I'd have to go back to Google and search for the product. It'd be better if you had an affiliate link where I could just go to buy something straight from your site. That would look better in Google's eyes than the user returning to the SERPs.

You have a review for "best red widgets for x and y" but you have a list of 20+ products with nowhere to click to buy. I'd have to leave the page and go back to Google to find another site to buy from. I think it would benefit the user to have links on these review pages to buy the products listed.

Just keep going and working on the site, all the content that is not doing well right now might start to rank just as well as before or better in the future. Don't give up and keep pushing forward... I wish now that I continued to make content even when it was barely making a difference. At least now I know, not to give up so easily, and things can (in the long term) turn around.

I bet Dr. Axe is also really happy right now!

[edited by: whoa182 at 10:40 pm (utc) on Mar 15, 2019]

[RedBar]

Google has officially announced webmasters can't do anything to fix this #*$!

In fact you may have done absolutely nothing wrong and there is no magical "fix" for good sites, quite simply you may just have to roll with the dice and accept it for what it is.

Alternatively, if you have plenty of spare time available, you could examine in-depth the sites/pages which are now ranking above you and do what they're doing however, if one's pages are that good what's the point in changing them because when the next big update comes along you may lose out again and one's original pages may return?

This is a true story. Just over a year ago one of my sites that had been #1 for many years for my industry's #1 keyword widget product term simply disappeared, it didn't matter how far I went down the SERPs, it had gone. Now bear in mind not only do I own the keyword domain, I hold the global trademark for it, I introduced it to the global market almost 40 years ago, everything about this specific widget success within my industry was down to me.

Interestingly Quora who ranked for this widget on the first page actually cited me in their first paragraph as THE informational and image source for this widget. A couple of months ago a new #1 appeared in the SERPs from a very large US corporation with a 2018 date and, basically, they had badly re-written my information however it was a very, very poor attempt.

Meanwhile I did nothing, our sales were fine and the site was #1 on ALL other search engines then, out of nowhere, two weeks ago my site suddenly reappeared back on the first page and is currently floating between 1st and 5th.

Don't ask me how or why, I did NOTHING, I've seen this happen several times over many years on Google with sites and, more often, images. I assume it's a glitch/bug that they have no idea exists or have any idea of how to resolve it.

The thing is, unless one is a HUGE company and Google really loves you, it is very unlikely that any of us can do anything about what they have done.

Devil's Advocate Time And Not Aimed At Anyone Specific: How many of you are absolutely 100% sure that your pages are THE best for your widgets or how many of you have been extremely lucky with your rankings and traffic until now and have been caught out by this/any update?

[tangor]

Side thought for those constantly checking:

Flush your browser(s) cache, shut the program down, then reload, THEN login to read the stats. DO THIS EVERY TIME. You will be amazed at the reporting differences. What this means is "Don't forget the COOKIES." :)

I suspect many are keeping a tab or dedicated browser logged in and hitting refresh. You won't get the same results as when you come in clean EVERY TIME.

[broccoli]

@redbar

I assume it's a glitch/bug that they have no idea exists or have any idea of how to resolve it.

I’ve seen this happen on some of my pages in the last few months. Disappearing from serps they’ve ranked well in for years and years. Then suddenly popping back in again weeks/months later. I’m sure they have a penalty system and it’s unstable and buggy.

[whoa182]

It seems that the posts that didn't recover from this update were posts about curing certain conditions/infections using natural products/supplements. And no, it's no woo-woo stuff, some of the ingredients have been tried with very positive results in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies (which I cited next to the claim). The same ingredients are also (more recently) mentioned by sites like Healthline, which are ranking for the keyword phrases

So it makes sense... if you're going to make these claims about curing x y z, you're probably going to need some credentials and a much higher level of EAT.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Guys, who were hammered 12 March: did someone noticed partial roll back today? Is anyone there?

[sk7411]

Guys, who were hammered 12 March: did someone noticed partial roll back today? Is anyone there?

It’s a weekend and i am still cautious to call it a rollback , but theres a slight uptick from yesterday and continuing , we were hit hard on march 13th , march 14th being the worst trend , however 15th and today brings a little hope .

[seo2019]

Anyone know why websites will little to no content are getting ranked higher than content rich websites.

I thought Google did not like thin content pages?