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.

[lazywebdev]

hey all - anyone notice an unusual spike in pages indexed in GSC on 6th/7th March?

[NickMNS]

So to puts thing into perspective on my end.

First, yesterday marked the 1 year anniversary (March 17,2018) of my peak traffic. From that day forward my traffic has been on a steady decline. Actually a sudden decline followed by a steady decline.

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday I saw sharp increase in traffic, in the end it was +20% week over week.

Now for perspective, year over year I am down 59%, and compared to a day earlier, pre 20% bump, I was down 65%. The increase in traffic puts me back to December levels.

There is still a long road ahead...

[No5needinput]

@ lazywebdev Indexed or crawled? I have a large crawl spike on 11-12th March.

[ichthyous]

@thepointer As Nick points out this isn't new for me either, I've seen a huge increase for the last three years or so. Most of the sites just come and go all the time. I don't bother to even report the pages anymore to Google and request a takedown.

I cannot speak to the effectiveness of the negative SEO attack, but I have more of these kinds of sites linking to my images than is even possible to count and adding them to a long disavow file hasn't helped me at all, my site has been dropping steadily since Sept of last year with only a brief recovery of some of the loss for about a month, then just kept going down further.

I do use cloudflare CDN, but these sites link to the page as well as the image. Having thousands of links to your pages from spam sites hosting walware cannot be good so those get disavowed. Unfortunately cloudflare's anti hotlink feature also blocks Google images, and I've never been able to get it not to do that even with their workaround, so I don't use it. But yes, it is very plausible that innocent sites with lots of their images getting scraped are getting hurt now.

[NickMNS]

The increase in traffic puts me back to December levels.

I forgot to take into consideration the fact that yesterday was a Sunday where traffic is typically much lower. Regardless I probably should wait a little longer to see "A" if this traffic boost holds and "B" to see over the span of a a week or few days how it all averages out.

@Ichthyous

my site has been dropping steadily since Sept of last year with only a brief recovery of some of the loss for about a month, then just kept going down further

I experienced a very similar pattern. My issue is two fold:
Rationally / logically based on all the Google has said about the topic, I tend to believe that this spam is not having a direct link to my ranking issues. So I fear that blocking the hotlinking will cause more harm than good.
But at the same time, if it is causing an impact than loosing traffic from Google image search seems like a small price to pay to regain all the other traffic.
There is just no way to know for sure.

A while back I tried blocking the hotliking with Cloudflare but that was utterly useless in my case as my images are SVG's, and their hotlink protection is only for png/jpg/gif. There is method for blocking htolinking using CloudFlare workers that will allow Google and other SE's through, but it isn't fool proof and it costs money.

[martinibuster]

I have more of these kinds of sites linking to my images than is even possible to count and adding them to a long disavow file hasn't helped me at all...

If disavowing the scrapers linking to your images does not work, then that is a strong signal that those links were not causing your issues.

It's quite common for publishers to report that disavows did nothing to help. That's because the links were not the problem.

Veryl likely the problem lies elsewhere.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:28 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2019]

[lazywebdev]

@No5needinput Crawled - yes my error. Large crawl spikes on some site. Those with large crawl spikes have all dropped. Those without haven't. Makes me concerned that the other sites might be recrawled shortly and more upheaval is to come.

[edited by: lazywebdev at 3:30 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2019]

[samwest]

This "update" feels just like the first Florida update, totally punitive across the board...another cash grab by Gorg.

[Mark_A]

For me, March 12th and days following have been noticeably down on expected traffic.

The shape of last week is just lower than a usual week of working days.

Will be interesting to see what this week brings.

I have no viable plans to radically change the site.

[aristotle]

First, yesterday marked the 1 year anniversary (March 17,2018) of my peak traffic. From that day forward my traffic has been on a steady decline. Actually a sudden decline followed by a steady decline.

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday I saw sharp increase in traffic, in the end it was +20% week over week.

Maybe google's algorithm gave your site a one-year duration penalty, and it expired yesterday (:

[tangor]

Traffic up, generally a good thing.

Revenue down (adsense) not a happy thing ... but then again the growing number of young folks surfing the web are NOT spenders, and may be among the most reluctant spenders we've seen in decades.

Just something to think about. IOW Know your users and their demographics.

[zapmachine]

Our main ecommerce site has lost massive traffic in the past week and the seprs are a mess in the niche right now. what a disaster in terms of organic traffic.

[Selen]

I noticed a couple national newspapers from Europe that own very reputable news sites in local languages, like Italian or Spanish:

1. Registered a .com domain.
2. Take the content from their national domains and translate it (possibly via auto-translators) into English. Then publish this English content to their new .com / English website.

Result - an overnight "reputable" news source in English language that ranks higher than small, but established English sites that have existed for 1-2 decades. All it took were some strong links from their national website.

I imagine all national reputable websites, in all commercial niches, could do exactly the same. The little guy will never win.

[mosxu]

I have stopped worrying about updates, all are a joke.

They are trying to convince us to pay more but for what? Bots pretending to be researching products?

[broccoli]

It felt punitive to me too. I’ve been rising and rising with every quality update and this was a huge punch in the gut. I suspect they will never let my site rank as it should do. I think it’s been caught in some averaging machine learning algorithm that compares my site to other sites in the niche and subtracts a score from my site because my links and my content are different to the people who came along after me and copied what I did. I’ve been labelled a black hat and a misfit and that’s it. I’ll rise during quality updates and then get beaten back down by core updates before I can get my traffic back. What am I supposed to do?

[whoa182]

Makes me concerned that the other sites might be recrawled shortly and more upheaval is to come.

Both of my sites were crawled a lot before this update. I saw around a 4-5 x higher increase in pages crawled for my main site with about a 15 x increase in downloaded bytes. The pages crawled was quite high for a number of days, but now has settled to about 2-3 x my previous pages crawled (per day).

It started around the 2nd of March and then I recovered on the 12-13th. My 2nd site hasn't really seen much of recovery and I've not really worked on it anyway near the level I overhauled my main site.

I haven't seen a recovery of all of my keywords or articles. By the looks of it, without my new articles, I'd still be much lower than pre-August. Unless in time I recover those old long tail keywords over time. But as JM says, the internet changes over months and years, and so does user intent. So, you can't expect to always land where you were before (if you recover).

I have over 15 years experience (offline and online) with my main topic but only 2-3 years with my other site. So the quality of my articles is much better for my main site.

By the time the update came around, I made sure I accomplished the following on my main site:

- All pages determined to be low quality were given a 410. Over half of my pages were very bad (very old blog posts).
- Similar pages were merged to create stronger pages where intent and/or topic were similar.
- All pages were given a tighter focus and edited for clarity, spelling, and grammar.
- I created a lot of new posts between August and now that were I would say are my best so far.
- I did zero link building.
- Other improvements: Fixed bad links, massively improved speed, better internal linking, better navigation menu
- All metrics on Google analytics had improved significantly.

My 2nd site which didn't recover (at least not yet)
- I quickly went over with Grammarly and scanned the articles to check for mistakes (They might still exist, so I need to go back).
- I fixed bad internal links.
- Improved site speed.
- Built no links (site has very few links because it never had enough time to accumulate then naturally other than spammy ones).

For me, it was the site that I spent the most time on that got rewarded. The 2nd site, I barely touched it other than quickly fixing a few things. The 2nd site got hit in April 2018. My main site (which has recovered the traffic but not all keywords) got hit in August.

Does Google take into considering the entire site when re-evaluation it during these updates? Or just a sample of pages. I wondered if it were possible that some people are "on the edge" where sometimes Google crawls a good part of the site and other times a bad part and this is why.

One mistake I kept making over the last few months when I tried to recover was removing the 404's from my Search Console and marking them as "fixed". This, I believe, resets the whole process and so my poor-quality pages were never removed from the index until I did it properly and assigned a 410.

Google crawl rate and traffic increase

[imgur.com...]

[vicky2885]

During this core update, our website’s traffic dropped about 30% to 40%. It’s daily organic session dropped from 140K to 90K. I began to work for iMobie English site since 2014, and our daily organic session rose from 8K to 150K, and we have never been attacked by Google update algorithm. We also have 5 site in Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and also with the similar SEO strategies as English site’s, and all of them function well, and did get a big rise in traffic in recent years.

Last year, our French site was attacked in March update, its organic traffic dropped about 20%. Because we are using the same methods on all sites, French site is the only victim. We didn’t make any change or recovery actions on French site. Then it did recover in August update, almost back to the level before March.

Then from September to November, 2018, we made 301 redirect non-English sites (except Japanese ) to English site, and become 4 sub-directories, like, /de/, /fr/, /es/, /ar/. After this 301 redirect, our German site got a rise on traffic and sales, French site dropped about 10%, Arabic and Spanish keep as normal.

Then in this March, our website is attacked by this core update, all sub-directories dropped about 30% to 40%, including English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic. While our Japanese site is normal, doesn’t get a rise, or drop. Even we have a sub-domain site in English site, it is also very normal, didn’t drop at all.

Therefore, I am a little doubt that the French site was attacked by this update, but it is a sub-directory of English site, this makes the whole site attacked, but I am not sure about it.

After reading all the posts in this thread, at this moment, I am thinking how to recover our website, I plan to do from the following aspects ( I know my ideas may not comprehensive, I will appreciate that if the SEOers can give me some advice. Thank you in advance):

1.Improve the website structure and inner link structure. Semrush always remind me some pages are orphan pages, or get only one link.

2.Fix grammar and spelling mistakes, and other mistakes on pages that make users don’t feel good.

3.Complete the author profile, Contact us, About us section. We only have a short bio that doesn’t offer users too much info about authors or company.

4.Fix duplicate contents. We had written many posts on similar topics in 2014, for example, fix iPhone Touch ID not working, we wrote the different pages on Fix iOS 11/12 touch ID not working, Fix iPhone 8 touch ID not working, etc. Although they are in the same topic, some of them can rank in first page in different keywords.

5.Deal with thin contents. At first, the articles we wrote only have the solutions in our products, then we find the featured snippet always are the articles with default solutions and with free tools. Then we changed our articles’ contents. While many old articles only have thin contents.

6.Link to other website instead of only mention them without links. Sometimes, we write some review articles, it mentioned some tools from other websites, we didn’t give the links, only the brand or product name mention.

7.Avoid Over-optimization in pages. Normally, when optimizing some page, we rearrange the contents of article from the Google Webmaster tool’s search query keywords, and emphasize this article’s relevance on these query keywords, instead of users reading experience.

8.Then I follow the Google E-A-T guideline to adjust and improve our site. And also study the featured snippet results.

That’s all I thought about, I know they are not comprehensive. If you find anything important, but I didn’t mention, be free to tell me. Thank you very much! And also hope all guys in this thread can get better result in the future updates.

[prica]

Did someone checked his rankings in other countries with the same language? Seeing a lot of domains winning e.g. with the co.uk and loosing in US or sites loosing in DE and the exact domain winning in AT and CH (all three German language index)

[bostongio]

We're a health education site, online for over 20 years. We compete against many of the big names, but have done well in terms of keywords for certain areas, many times having had an important keyword on the 1st page of the SERPs. We have a very large content site and don't sell any widgets.

Medic was a mixed bag for us. We seemed to have gained some traffic from it and were up nearly 30%. But then we were impacted somewhat at the very end of the Medic update, at the end of Sept/beginning of Oct. 2018. Our traffic went down 13% during a time of the year where we normally see an increase of 4-10%. That means our overall gain from Medic was maybe around 15%.

We recovered slowly over the past few months, and were feeling good about our upward trajectory. Until this core update.

Our nightmare started on March 13. From March 13-18 compared to prior 5 days, our organic traffic from Google is down nearly 30%. Most of those 1st page SERPs have gone down to 2nd or 3rd page (generally moving from somewhere in the top 10 results, down to 15-25).

So basically it looks like we're now down 15% from our pre-Medic traffic levels.

[anfrox]

@vicky2885 @prica I have a web app website that's 3 years old. It is operating in a quite a fresh niche that got ultra-competitive very quickly. We had localisations in sub-folders e.g.: /de, /fr, /it and others. We got hit in early August last year but then grown since the end of month. We also got slightly hit with all updates thereafter but a recovery followed every time with further slow growth upwards in position and traffic. Until now. After this update our localised pages lost 80% traffic overnight, I can see our website's keywords go off the serp's completely everyday and I am also seeing G pushes local cTLD websites over .com's with sub-folder translations. Our website loading speed is good, we use all modern best-practices and try to adhere to mobile-first approach.

I am also seeing a huge amount of spammer sites linking to our images, they are also present in GSC. Been disavowing all of them since the last week just to be safe.

[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...