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.

[aristotle]

whoa182 -- Congradulations on your site's recovery. That chart is pretty dramatic.

One significant thing for me is that you apparently didn't see any positive results from the improvements you made until this update. You made the improvements but had to wait for the update to see the results. That suggests to me that the update released your site from a penalty.

My guess is that your site was under a Panda penalty. It's a sitewide penalty generally thought to be due to overall poor or mediocre content. My other guess is that the most important change you made was this:

All pages determined to be low quality were given a 410. Over half of my pages were very bad (very old blog posts).

[Upstate8987]

For those who have lost positions in the SERPs:

Are you seeing some of those positions slowly crawl back up this morning? I'm seeing more than a handful of keywords that were previously high (Top 10 pos.) that dropped last week after the 12th to position 15+ come back slightly (up a few positions over yesterday).

Anyone else?

[Fatlossplanner]

@upstate8987... I am not noticing this.. Glad that your rankings are getting restored... This makes me feel optimistic about the current situation..

Please keep every one on this thread for any progress you make since quite a lot of them got hit with this update...

[randle]

Are you seeing some of those positions slowly crawl back up this morning?

Haven't seen much in the way of improvement, perhaps even a slight continuation down.

We got dinged a bit across the board, but one thing in particular that took a good tumble were query's that had a location, like a city tacked on. Positions of that nature are the ones that dropped the most, and have not recovered any. So for example terms like "red widget" lost a few places, but terms like "red widget Pittsburgh" dropped like 50 spots.

We don't do anything to optimize for elements like that in a query, perhaps G is working on location factors, but who knows at this stage of the game its early to really glean much - could be something entirely unrelated to that but it is a clear trend for us.

[HereWeGo123]

@Update8987

Are you seeing some of those positions slowly crawl back up this morning?

I actually just came to this thread to ask everyone the same question and then I saw your post. While I’m still noticing some volatility in the SERPs it does feel that it slightly settled down since yesterday (at least with the different KWs I’m specifically checking.)

In fact, for some KWs that I noticed some minor slips after this update, since yesterday and even today so far, there was some moderate improvement in ranking. Can’t call it a reversal just yet but some signs of optimism. Perhaps the update is somewhat settling down and readjusting (wouldn’t call it a reversal at this time.)

I made a long post on Saturday in this thread (page 5) sharing my preliminary observations and I want to reaffirm those observations. Content for which I saw we slightly slipped for tended to be weaker, thin and outdated content, while content that I noticed us stay strong for or even grow, was content that we felt was of stronger quality and with clear cut takeaways for targeted readers. I’ve notified this pattern consistently across various KWs that I’ve been checking since googles announcement of this update.

[samwest]

This "update" is terrible. Just got my Google Insights "report card" and everything is down 20 to 30%, expect bound rate, which is way up, yet not one thing on the site has changed....only visitor behavior. Many short surges followed by long zero runs.

[bostongio]

We're seeing almost daily volatility in all of our keywords. Usually just a few positions up and down movement.

We're seeing more .gov resources in the SERPs for our keywords than we've seen in the past. Generally, the information is okay, but it's usually pretty out of date and not updated with any kind of regular frequency.

[seo2019]

No improvement in rankings as far, however I’m seeing a noticeable improvement in bounce rate.

My thin content pages remained stable during this update however my pages with quality content took a hit.

[ichthyous]

It's leveled off and two days of very slight bounce back, but still lower than it was...which was in turn much lower than pre-Sept. 2018. Last time I got hit in December all my competitors except for the top ranking one went down too...this time #1 ranking site dropped the most, and #2 and #3 (me) dropped a lot. Many of the middle tier competitors that were static for months surged upward this time.

I do think there may be a freshness component at play here...archive sites like mine are just not able to refresh content so easily across thousands of pages. I am using a plugin on my site that adds schema data to the header, including when the page was published and last modified. My question is are simple edits to the page so that the page date is fresh enough to really make a difference? I last modified the pages en masse a couple of months ago and it didn't seem to make a major difference.

[edited by: ichthyous at 5:40 pm (utc) on Mar 19, 2019]

[Fatlossplanner]

Low quality thin pages are ranking for me and high quality in depth articles took a hit... Strange.. I am going to experiment by writing low quality article and see how it goes.. Perhaps that's what Google needs i.e. Low quality articles...

[HereWeGo123]

@Fatlossplanner

Low quality thin pages are ranking for me and high quality in-depth articles took a hit... Strange..

That's a very interesting observation. I do want to share my two cents on this though – In the past with what we thought was higher quality content didn't actually turn out to be best for user experience. in other words, we thought that the more information we stuff, and the longer the piece was, the better the quality was. And quite frankly, we would see our “shorter content” perform better (even in somewhat competitive KWs). It's not so black and white when it comes to assigning a word count. But from what we've learned, too much information that's not always relevant isn't the best for the user. Over time, enough users will become sub-consciously irritated and will hit the back button on the browser. That will translate into user signals to Google over time, and eventually, the URL may lose a spot or two. We've come to realize, that the best way to go about it is to get the best information for the reader but presented in a very user-friendly format.

There's often a misconception that “quality” content often equates to necessarily LONGER and more INFO STUFFED articles. This may or may not be the case in your content as I haven't read it, but just something to keep in mind.

[seo2019]

I might try something similar, to test it out.

[seo2019]

Question, I have a page with 1,500 words that was doing very well before the update. It was ranked page 1 position 2-3 for months.

Now I’m on page 2. If I decide to prune the content on that page and cut out a lot of the irrelevant information will this hurt my rankings further?

I’m always nervous about deleting content.

[southernguy]

I do notice that there are some still very long content articles. In many cases what I see ranking are articles written for say an 8-year-old.

Short paragraphs with very short sentences throughout with lots of blockquotes etc. It drives me nuts reading stuff formatted that way but I guess if that's what's working.

[HereWeGo123]

@seo2019

I’m always nervous about deleting content.

I hear ya. I feel the same sometimes.

But ultimately, put yourself in the relevant consumer's shoes. After reading your content as a consumer, what was your experience like? Did you feel that it was easy going, and well explained for you to wrap your head around or did you stir up more confusion? Were your questions answered or were you lead on to form more questions and receive no additional clarity? Did you get more confused after reading the piece before you arrived on the site? To evaluate our content quality, sometimes it takes some reverse role-playing. We have to get into the mindset of the consumer and read our own content. If there are parts of it that sound too “academic and literature like”, we've found that to be a turn off for readers. Does the content revolve of the main user intent or does it deviate far off from the subject matter (that can happen if we “stuff” too much info, that in theory is useful, but is it relevant and useful for the particular users and subject matter you're targeting?)

Pruning, in theory, may work, but again, it's not a black and white answer. It has to be done strategically based on the analysis of your content. In some cases pruning may hurt, while in others it may help. We've seen both scenarios take place.

[seo2019]

Cheers thanks for the reply. 🙂👍

[Fatlossplanner]

@seo2019 please don't delete anything from long articles as we still don't know if the rankings will recover... Instead try creating a short 700 to 900 words article with clear cut details and see if it ranks in a month's time.. My observation so far has been short articles are out ranking the long forms... Atleast here in weight loss niche...

[seo2019]

Short articles are doing well in the educational niche too.

[EditorialGuy]

Shortening or padding articles, deleting old ones, etc. because you think it might help you recover from an algorithm change is a terrible strategy. First, there's no assurance that it will work. Second, even if it does work in the short term, your knee-jerk changes could prove counterproductive the next time the algorithm is tweaked.

Remember the expression "First do no harm."

[mosxu]

“First do no harm”

Do not change things this is all we hear when we call AI failing to explain no conversions periods. I guess AI needs time to spread the few buyers left searching.

But stil where is this plenty traffic coming from for big bucks as well?

[EditorialGuy]

@mosxu: Just because a site owner is unhappy with AI (or with what's perceived as a consequence of AI) doesn't mean that it's wise to flail around blindly.

[tangor]

AI is pretty primitive right now (despite all the glowing hoorah spouted everywhere)... As far as I am concerned AI is about as smart as a six year old ... so make sure your readability score is somewhere between 5th grade and 6th grade...

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Not kidding.

On the other than, your CONTENT will also dictate what your readability will have to be, so keep that in mind as well!

Note: For those whose native language is NOT English, but wish to direct their site/products to English speaking countries, get a native born English speaker to review your content BEFORE YOU EVER POST IT! Content of any kind needs to sound/read natural.

[tangor]

Note: If mods want to break the above out to a new topic, that's okay.

[broccoli]

Just a reminder this is a core update not a quality update - I believe Google have denied it was about quality (not that we can trust them). If your pages have been reranked it's more likely to be about technical measures like keyword density/LSI, and/or social, and/or backlinks. I've heard analysis from people who do scientific testing that sites that moved on March 12th had something to do with keywords and social. No clarity yet on what they changed on March 13th and 14th.

I wonder whether the coming Google Plus shutdown has affected any part of this update?

[blackswan79]

Hello to all!

This is my first post here. First of all, sorry for my english (not my first language).

I think I have something to say that may give some hope to most of us. I did a full analysis to my keywords and this is what I've found after this google update:

1. I see some top results showing facebook post or pinterest images boards
2. Some of the top results are now from old sites with high DA
3. A lot of those old sites are not beeing updated for some years
4. Some of those websites doesnt have https
5. Some of them doesnt even are mobile ready
6. Some top keywords are not even exactly what the user is looking for. I saw one situation were the first 5 results are only contextual related with the keyword but not the keyword itself


I also noticed that in the last 2 days the organic traffic seems to be recovering gradualy but in a very volatile way. I believe that in the next days, when the algorithm understands that old sites doesnt mean good UX, having https or beeing mobile ready, organic traffic of my website will increase again, altough not sure if it will be back to normal.

Some context about my website: it's a travel magazine based in Portugal and multilingual. Most of the keywords that I lost were in portuguese but I lost them only in Brazil. They keep beeing in the top positions in Portugal. I didn't lost any keyword in the spanish and english versions.

So... I really believe that things will improve in the next days (they are improving already in the last 2 days).

To all of you that are speaking about making changes I can only advice to wait some more days (1 or 2 weeks). Good luck to all!

[whoa182]

@fatlossplanner: Long articles rank just fine... My longer articles are ranking way better and with more long tail searches. If it was your site I saw, you have good articles, but I seriously got frustrated that I couldn't click anywhere to buy the product. I didn't even want to... but it's not a good UX imo if you don't give the user what they want. I would have to remember the name and go back to Google, rather than going straight to Amazon or another page to buy it after I read all the reviews.

[tangor]

@blackswan79 ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Good observations! Best of which is give it a little more time.

Historically each of these g updates has a harsh front end, a relatively quick recovery (for some, not all) and a new normal is established ... usually not quite the same as previous.

Meanwhile, the black box remains opaque and so many times we are left guessing.

[ichthyous]

I wonder whether the coming Google Plus shutdown has affected any part of this update?

@broccoli If you search and read posts on searchengineland and other sites the anticipated effect is supposed to be minimal. However I have about 600 backlinks to my site counted from Google+ posts and shares. Perhaps the +1s dont count for much anymore but I suspect than anyone losing large quantities of backlinks is going to feel it one way or another.

[JS_Harris]

I examined the intent of all the new keywords I'm receiving impressions for and find that they are primarily transactional but I don't sell products. I guess I'm now trusted to sell them or offer them from 3rd parties where, prior to March 12th, ranking for transactional queries was quite difficult and not something I put resources into since my content can't satisfy a desire to buy.

At least two of my competitors who do sell products and tried to corner informational topics as well have lost ranking on transactional queries and I now outrank them for information.

My take: if you're an ecommerce site trying to offer helpful information about products you should probably ease up on the sales pitch type content. "Everyone loves widgets"... no, not everyone does. "The only thing better than...." full stop, very arbitrary. Sales text, which tends to be filled with grandiose statements which perhaps a bot can actually verify now, is a bit more toxic now than prior to the 12th, imo. Stores trying to sell product will always be biased about said products but that doesn't help customers if the sales chatter is strong and the fact meter low.

Example: Over the past 3 days google has displayed a page about widget specs more for the query widget parts than widget specs. The CTR for widget parts is zero, my title does not convery that I sell parts. The CTR for specs and information is over 50%, the title very much tells you to expect to learn about the product.

[BangkokBaby]

From this core update, is anybody now receiving an all-time high in traffic?

[seo2019]

@JS Harris interesting, how do you examine the intent of keywords?

[seo2019]

@broccolli I understand that this is a core update. However I find it hard to believe that it has nothing to do with quality.

My website has circa 20 pages, all pages have social media and similar links. However the pages with heavy content got hit.

About 5 years ago I had a travel website, I trimmed down about 50% of the content on the home page I.e. unnecessary content page filler. The following month it jumped from page 5 to page 1. It is risky though.

[Martin Ice Web]

I wonder if this update has something to do with google rolling out Q&A feature in serps?

Every time in the past when google launched its own service with stolen content they demoted the original websites in organics.

I hope that the politic will not keep watching google absorbing the whole free net. It is time to stand up and fight against this behaviour. I am not int Q&A section but this will hurt so many lifes again and google does not pay a dime for the stolen content.

[JesterMagic]

Ugh That Q&A feature in the serps is the worst in so many ways. Google makes it look like it is their own and a lot of it is not accurate. Not easy to read the conversation that may result from the question.

[whoa182]

Things are moving around quite a bit in the SERPs in the last few hours. Looks like they're tweaking things with another update or it's not over yet.

[broccoli]

@seo2019 That also sounds like it could potentially be a keyword density/LSI issue. Run your site through a TF/IDF tool, comparing each page to other pages in the same serp.

[Milchan]

@blackswan79 - welcome to the site !

I can agree with some of your post. I saw a bit of a recovery the last 2 days , yesterday seemed like "pre update" traffic and results , but I expect that to fluctuate still for a while even if it is any kind of recovery.
In regards to "Some top keywords are not even exactly what the user is looking for" - ever since medic update I think the search results are a lot less relevant and I often find it harder to find the results I want. Im finding myself using bing and duckduckgo a lot more now in order to find what I want. Seems like the AI google is relying more and more on just isnt capable of understanding user intent in the way google purports it to be and results returned just seem to be in the area of the subject not the results I actually want.

I think your numbered points are things that seem to happen just after a core update for a while and are simply a case of everything being reprocessed. It could be that it applies the logic in layers one by one so each pass changes the order, with the first pass including simple things like domain age, site age, DA (or DA type scores as google doesnt use DA exactly - thats a moz measurement) which means older sites that used to do well might show up again, then next passes check for things like "quality" , backlinks, social signals etc and resort. Just a guess but something like that is probably happening.

In regards to multilanguage and location based results , they have been messed up since medic also. There are all sorts of weird results wereby if I search for a keyword in english , whilst being geolocated in a spanish country (language set to english) I can get results with English titles but spanish content - which clearly isnt my intent. I.e if I search in English I want content in English regardless of my location. Also trying to find "widget shop near me" stopped giving good results after medic. Not sure if it is any better now to be honest as I gave up using that as it was useless. I remember trying to find the details of a Vets in my city that I have searched for before on google maps and it was showing useless results. when previously it worked well.

[HereWeGo123]

@broccoli

Run your site through a TF/IDF tool

Can you please provide some recommendations for such tools? Thanks!

[seo2019]

@broccoli perhaps. Let’s say the issue relates to key word density. Is there any safe way to remove this content from your website with out harming your existing SEO or SERP position.

[Selen]

My observations / speculations. It seems that I don't see sites that have Adsense in top results any more - anyone noticed that too?

Consider this - Google search is now plastered with ads from top to bottom. So the searcher has a lot of opportunities to click on (very relevant) ads. IF he didn't, then the chances of him clicking on an Adsense ad on a visited page are very low. That's why, considering the fact that user experience is always better on pages without ads, Google AI would tend to give rank priority to pages without ads.

So it's possible that now Google doesn't "protect" sites with Adsense and they rank lower due to lower user experience.

[broccoli]

What *seems* to happen with these core updates is that thin content from authority sites can rank higher in the serps because short articles typically have a higher keyword density and the site has more link power. These articles seem to fall over time as the quality updates drop them down again and surface better articles. (This is my theory based on what I see happening in the serps I follow.)

*IF* the drop relates to keyword density, you would simply rewrite the content to have a keyword density similar or just marginally higher than the top few results, as Google measures each page in the serp against the other pages. It’s a delicate balance because Google seem to fiddle with different ways of ranking on-page content all the time. You don’t want to stand out too much in case they experiment with penalties for being too keyword heavy, which is something they have been known to do (and something I’ll be checking again with my own site!) The best way to blend in is to keep your content to a similar length, style, and keyword density to what is already ranking, with keywords in the same places as other sites, e.g. about the same number of heading tags with exact & partial match terms.

But it is also important to ensure you’re still giving your users the content they need, because quality updates relate to factors like return visits and bounce rates, and if you don’t provide a good user experience you will fall over time.

I’m afraid I’m not allowed to name tools on the forum, but if you do a search for tf idf tools I’m sure you will find some useful software.

[EditorialGuy]

Google search is now plastered with ads from top to bottom. So the searcher has a lot of opportunities to click on (very relevant) ads.

Not necessarily. It depends on the query. (Some informational SERPs have no ads, while others have only one or two, even when the searchers are researching how to spend their money.)

[mosxu]

Why only one or two ads if there is space especially on desktop / tablet?

[Selen]

It feels like news results (including very old ones), .edu, and .gov pages have been inserted into Google index.

[HereWeGo123]

Noticing major shifts. Anyone see the same?

[whoa182]

Yup. Things have been moving a lot since earlier in the day. Some of my articles and keywords were thrown from the top 3 to page 3 in the last few hours. Even a few crappy reddit posts are beating me for these keywords, too lol. But things are not stable in the SERPs, so let's see where it settles (again).

Edit: Just checked a keyword phrase/article that was ranking number one. Once again, the website that copied my article and linked to me as the "original source" is ranking instead of my article. As it was prior to the Core update last week.

Wth

[seo2019]

Strange that authorities sites with short articles are now ranking better than authorities with more content.

Hoping this update will settle down so we can figure out what to improve.

[Fatlossplanner]

My competitors have copied the Content and now they are ranking and I have been pushed to page 3 for a keyword for which I was ranking one... Strange original contents rank at page 3 and duplicate ones are at first page... Furthermore, few reddit posts and pinterest is out ranking me hilarious something is extremely wrong... I am really feeling disgusted with this update...

[ManuelQS]

I got several sites that sell fitness equipment and machines online. After the update, the SERPs for most of our top keywords (which we were 1-3) were filled with Amazon as #1 followed by hypermarkets and second-hand selling platforms which have poor content. Now the second-hand platforms are taking the 1st position for all the keywords and Amazon it's now on the 4-5th position.

I wonder when will the SERPs settle down so we can find a pattern and take back our place on the results.

[nordland]

I have done well with Google. in the last 2 weeks I have doubled the traffic, but what I see many write here, (my long articles are outperformed by short articles.) It may be that people are not so interested in reading 3000 word articles, but they want simple and quick information? Like Moses in the Bible who walked around in the desert for 40 years, according to google map it would have taken 6 days.