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.

[broccoli]

Yes, Pinterest were hit pretty hard last March and again in this update. They were rising sharply from early January onwards and this update has halted their rise. Their Alexa chart looks very much like mine, which is why I’m playing around with this tin foil hat theory, wondering whether I have anything in common with and can learn from the big sites that have been hit.

Google went after Pinterest specifically last year and deindexed all their category landing pages:
[bloomberg.com...]

@RedBar Thanks for the response! Does everyone in your image niche have the same style site?

@Lagonda Core updates are mostly about technical factors rather than user experience. That’s why they often surface thin content from authority sites. Quality based updates and backlink refreshes appear to be on a different cycle and are happening every 2-3 weeks at the moment.

[aristotle]

In short, my "success" back in the day was in long tail keywords. I never ranked good for "big keyword", but I had a ton of "how to small keyword when big keyword" kind of things, and google was very precisely showing my pages for very precise queries. It was wonderful really.

That sounds exactly like a "content farm". When Panda was originally rolled out in 2011, google said that it was mainly aimed at content farms. Most of the sites hit by Panda, either then or later, have never recovered, but instead have continued on an overall long-term decline.

[StoneSolid]

Haha, indeed it sounds like it, but that definition doesn't apply to my site. For starters, my site isn't that big, and it also involves a lot of pics and videos, all related to a specific niche in which I simply can't rank with "main keyword", despite the fact I got broad and detailed coverage of the "keyword" itself.

[glakes]

There are a lot of Amazon sellers complaining about a 30%+ drop in sales. One seller noted Amazon lost short phrase positions in Google and gained in the long tail. I definitely noticed a decline in my Amazon sales, and my website more than made up for it - until today. My fingers are crossed that today was an anomaly. I'd much rather see Google sending converting traffic than hand over 15% of every sale to Amazon...

[Dannnn]

Hey everyone,

I've been following this forum for years and this thread in particular since the middle of March. I'm in a health related industry and I've certainly noticed some of the things mentioned in this thread.

Whilst doing my own research, I've noticed 2 things that have heavily affected my industry / site.

1. Branded searches - I've noticed that brands are getting a higher weight in the SERPs. Today (25th), I searched for a particularly popular brand in my industry. Their own domain occupied the first 15 positions in the SERPs. This isn't an exaggeration and I have some screenshots. There were results for pages on their site that in my opinion do not belong in the search results, such as sign up pages, careers pages, even the login page. I've seen often seen 4,5 or 6 results on the first page when searching for a brand, but to go into the 2nd page and display 15 branded results isn't something I've seen before. Clearly a terrible experience!

2. The intent of the results has changed over the past 2 weeks - Whilst searching for certain health-related terms, I've observed that more and more informational sites are being displayed in the SERPs rather than Ecommerce sites. In the past, simply searching for a health-related product showed a number of Ecommerce websites occupying the top 3 or 4 positions, followed by the informational sites. Now, the Ecommerce websites are pushed down below informational sites and often into the 2nd page. These are Ecomm sites have occupied these positions for as long as I can remember.

I've seen somewhere (can't remember if it was in this thread or doing external research) that 'intent' was mentioned and I know there has been talk of the previous "medic" update, but I can certainly back up the theory of 'intent' being the focus here and its certainly affected my health-related industry.

Over the past few days, I have seen hugely differing results and some Ecommerce results creeping back up, but informational sites are still dominating at this time. Hopefully G won't continue to show 15 results from the same domain going forward...

[Martin Ice Web]

Selen wrote

I agree this still looks like a beta test, not real results.

robzilla answered

It's not a test, it's a roll-out. These results have already been tested, and the data must have looked good.

I say:
if this is machine laerning then the results haven´t been testing at a wide range. Machine learning needs input for verifying the output.
IMO google can only guess how their core algo change will effect the serps.

My observations are:
brand items are completly killed for ecommerce. All items that we marked as brands don´t sell anymore. Its the non branded items that still have traffic.

[valiraikkonen]

Hello everyone,

I also just registered to share my experience. One of my financial websites was hit very hard.

It is a EMD and was ranking #1 pos for almost 4-5 years, traffic on this keyword is big. On 13th March was put on #2 and on 21 March was thrown on page 2, #12-14. Today it ranks on #20 positon. It's true that in the last year we lost some important backlinks from some important newspaper websites (but still have a lot from other websites).

Today the first positions for this keyword are filled with bank websites. None of these websites have adsense.
The bank that occupies the #1 position also has a blog with rich content.

So, after reading all your posts, I just want to confirm with you: 1. brands have gained a lot after this update comparing to the publishers and 2. non-adsense websites are ranking better.

[robzilla]

if this is machine laerning then the results haven´t been testing at a wide range. Machine learning needs input for verifying the output.
IMO google can only guess how their core algo change will effect the serps.

Google is a data-driven company, they don't (need to) guess. Once an algo change rolls out globally, you can be sure it's been tested at "wide range". With ~6 billion queries per day to experiment with, it doesn't take all that long to reach statistical significance.

non-adsense websites are ranking better.

That's too specific. It's not about AdSense.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[Martin Ice Web]

Google is a data-driven company, they don't (need to) guess. Once an algo change rolls out globally, you can be sure it's been tested at "wide range". With ~6 billion queries per day to experiment with, it doesn't take all that long to reach statistical significance.

Data and user real behaviour are two different things. Only the feedback from user behaviour can proof the algo.

(Look at the last US votes: All data driven companies told something very different!)

[RedBar]

@RedBar Thanks for the response! Does everyone in your image niche have the same style site?

Nope, I was the first in my global industry to do this in the mid 90s then many of the large global suppliers followed my lead and did the same. It was a very logical thing to do since the larger image page also carries lots of widget product information required by architects/specifiers/etc.

Many widget companies in the 90s/00s copied my coding since it was, and actually still is on a couple of my sites, perfect for what was required and code-error free. Even to this day on mobile these pages still perform well but are not responsive ... I am actually sorting this out and within a couple of months will be completed, I'm halfway there.

The vast majority of retailers really do not need to post this product information therefore usually only have pages with 200 x 200 or 300 x 300 images.

The remainder usually use the lightbox method which I also have on a couple of small niche widget sites. I like lightbox however no matter how well it is SEOd it can be difficult to rank for competitive keyword products, for non-competitive keywords it's usually fine and for anyone who wants to post lots of images quickly it's ideal.

[billgoiaba]

Sorry to hear this from you guys.
I work in a company in the health industry. Our website organic traffic basically grew 40% in the last 2 weeks.
And it was on the 5 digits per week. So it was not small.

Until August last year, we were having some shy organic growth, almost inexistent.
From August on, we started to get a beautiful natural growth, adding some hundred clicks week over week.
In the last 2 weeks, we had a huge increase, a steep 45 degrees curve with 40% increase.

We've been producing articles and content for a long time and provide a good UX, even though it's not marvelous.
Hope we can enjoy this a bit more. :)

[robzilla]

Data and user real behaviour are two different things. Only the feedback from user behaviour can proof the algo.

Isn't that precisely what happens when they test algo changes with a subset of users? They get real user feedback. Once you reach statistical significance, it's unlikely that throwing more users at the experiment (like when you roll out globally) is going to flip the results.

[edited by: robzilla at 12:48 pm (utc) on Mar 25, 2019]

[Milchan]

TL/DR:
Google search is now much dumber than it was.
Backlinks are everything, literally.
Good content is good to have but not necessary.
PBNs are a must have, coz all your competitors already have them (as scary as it sounds, it is the truth).

I agree with this. I cannot come above my main competitor simply because they have a PBN and various paid links from blogs. I know for a fact that google has been made aware of this and provided with clear evidence of it and they have taken no action what so ever no penalized them in any way.
For all of googles shouting about webmasters should concentrate on great content , that they penalise and can detect fake links, paid links, PBNs etc it is all nonsense and they simply do not care. If you competitor is using PBNs and has more links than you because of it they will beat you regardless of their content , the quality of it , the fact that it is clearly scraped and spun. Google dont even seem to care about user experience anymore.
Google cares about Google and nothing else.

[whoa182]

Regarding backlinks...

This morning I've been looking at mentions, links and looking to see if anyone has used my images on my sites. Some common things I'm noticing is that :

1) New bloggers without knowledge in SEO have no problem giving a regular dofollow backlink if they found my content useful.

2) Experienced bloggers with SEO knowledge are using my images and mentioning my website as the source but quite a few are using a nofollow link and giving credit that way or simply giving a mention under the image or when quoting part of my text.

They have no problem giving dofollow links to .gov sites like pubmed and big authoritative companies. I'm guessing this is done on purpose, not because they think the content is low quality, they just don't want you to gain authority by giving a regular link.

Is it possible that just being mentioned on websites will make a difference instead of backlinks?

[BushyTop]

Seeing a massive influx of G bot activity from the 23rd. More than ever. Any guesses to what that might mean. In my experience its usually, good, but I could tell you now in today's climate.

[NickMNS]

It looks like my gains have been rolled back. Sunday last week I saw nice gain of about 25%, which subsequently settled down to about 10 to 15% gain that then remained steady for the whole week. Now as of yesterday, that has been rolled back and it is look like I back to where I started.

[Cralamarre]

My traffic has been slowly but steadily increasing since March 12-13. Last week's traffic was up 25% from last year, and today is continuing the upward trend.

[Jori]

@whoa182 : yes, If I recall well, G has already said that "mentions" are good for you. Not like a link, but still, good for your brand.

[robzilla]

good for your brand

Or bad, perhaps. Depends on the sentiment.

[vlexo]

Things got better after a pretty poor start to March for the website I work on from Thursday last week.

If it sticks like this, then I'll be happy.

[seo2019]

What’s the common denominator in relation to the March update.

Did we drop in SERP’s due to content issues or lack of Backlinks?

[ichthyous]

My traffic is not improving at all. It dropped on the 12th and only very slight recovery.

I used this opportunity to redesign my home page and some other critical pages. I had a full screen slideshow taking over the home page and I reduced it to a panoramic slideshow so the content is pushed up higher. Also pared down the image sizes and removed unused assets so pages would load faster.

The biggest change was to the text in the internal links on my site. Whereas before the link text repeated the word "widgets" for every category ("brown widgets, Grey widgets, green widgets") now the links are pared down and only refer to the category type ("brown, grey, green"). I am hoping that this may help more than it hurts... Im about to see very soon. Removing the same "widgets" keyword from my footer links did not seem to help, but it sure looks better and less redundant to visitors.

I also removed the schema markup from pages. I suspect that the original published and original created dates in the schema markup might work against sites like mine with a lot of products that stay in inventory. They are updated all the time, but it's not fresh content. I'm hoping that removing this date info might help... Does anyone have any insight about that?

[EditorialGuy]

I think you need to understand the queries deeply and then try to satisfy as many possible users as you reasonably can.

Or try to satisfy your target audience. If the people you're focusing on like to read and research, in-depth or long-form content will serve them well, and that should pay off in better user metrics, more backlinks, etc. (especially if your competitors are concentrating on filler-quality fluff for people with ADD).

[Mentat]

1. I saw a -25% in traffic on 12 March and again this week-end.
It's like Panda all over again - nightmare.
2. The main problem seems to be on the long tail, but I've also lost some major kw, like from the first page, to page 20!
3. It seems to be the silver bullet for me, as I have no more expenses to cut anymore.
Low traffic and abysmal Adsense payment = death of my site and company.

It was fun while it lasted...

[robzilla]

Or try to satisfy your target audience. If the people you're focusing on like to read and research, in-depth or long-form content will serve them well, and that should pay off in better user metrics, more backlinks, etc. (especially if your competitors are concentrating on filler-quality fluff for people with ADD).

Sure, but maybe try to serve those with smaller attention spans (or interests) as well, e.g. by adding summaries to go along with the in-depth stuff.

But I agree that satisfying "as many possible users as you reasonably can" isn't necessarily a good goal. I suppose that's why I added "reasonably".

[StoneSolid]

@Milchan

I agree with this. I cannot come above my main competitor simply because they have a PBN and various paid links from blogs. I know for a fact that google has been made aware of this and provided with clear evidence of it and they have taken no action what so ever no penalized them in any way.

Of course, I don't know the exact case / site you're talking about, but I do can tell you one thing:

PBNs have evolved. I see it all the time.
No more quick sites with scraped content and default template.
Nowadays, good PBNs are hard to be recognized even by experienced webmasters, and from what I understood on forums, google got some office section (in India or wherever) that does such "investigations". If a PBN is nicely written, with unique articles and media, they simply don't penalize it.

It is kind of funny when you think about it....
Comments, blogposts, all kinds of things that involve backlinks are penalized to hell and back.

I wonder if anyone at google ever ask themselves - who even "naturally" links to anybody these days?
Webmasters want sales and advertisement clicks. No one wants a traffic leak because of big link in the middle of the article "hey check out this awesome site.."

[whoa182]

Someone used one of my images before from my site and so I asked them to credit me for it. They sure did! WIth a rel="nofollow" :D

[EditorialGuy]

who even "naturally" links to anybody these days?

Some of us do. My policy is to use links the way they were intended to be used, as citations: e.g., if I'm writing an article that mentions Elbonian fritters, I'll link to a recipe or an article about Elbonian fritters (since it isn't something that I'm inclined to cover in depth myself).

FWIW, I got an unsolicited "dofollow" link from the Washington Post recently that was based on the same principle. So it isn't just cranky old-timers like me who still use links as citations.

[Milchan]

Nowadays, good PBNs are hard to be recognized even by experienced webmasters

Yes , this is exactly the case of my competitors. The PBNs seemingly have good content (relatively speaking as opposed to auto generated spun sites on PBN farms) and are actually manually run but they are still that - PBNs created purely for the purpose of increasing SERP results for their money sites. I simply do not have the resources to do the same and also feel that it is wrong so wouldn't feel comfortable doing it anyway - I guess that is why they will win and I will lose though: more resources and less integrity is what is required to win nowadays.

[bonanza22]

Hey everyone,

this update is pretty tricky, in my opinion we have to wait one or two weeks and everything should stabilize. Then we will decide what to do next.

[StoneSolid]

Some of us do. My policy is to use links the way they were intended to be used, as citations: e.g., if I'm writing an article that mentions Elbonian fritters, I'll link to a recipe or an article about Elbonian fritters (since it isn't something that I'm inclined to cover in depth myself).

Despite the fact you're an exception, I do hope you agree and understand what I'm saying?
99.9% of webmasters will surely avoid placing a backlink anywhere, simply because they prefer that surfer clicks on their adsense or whatever it is that they are selling or advertising.

FWIW, I got an unsolicited "dofollow" link from the Washington Post recently that was based on the same principle. So it isn't just cranky old-timers like me who still use links as citations.

News sites kind of HAVE TO link to a lot of stuff, because they aren't making content, they are just "reviewing it".
Speaking of news sites, you're probably aware that almost every news portal allows "paid article" kind of thing. Each of those contain a link.
If that isn't plain buying links, I don't know what is.

(I'm not saying that YOU did it. I'm just once again saying you're an exception in how things work most of the time)

[mirrornl]

Please, stay on topic "Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019"

[StoneSolid]

Please, stay on topic "Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019"

Sorry for digression. However, it is hard to discuss something 100% invisible and mysterious :)

[Fatlossplanner]

Still no signs of improvements... It getting worse...

[seo2019]

@fatlossplanner same here. Are all your pages affected in the same way?

[Purd]

Tl:dr Key Takeaways (my opinion):
This update is mainly about searcher intent.
Outdated content is probably pulling your site down across the board.
Confession: I’m not an Seo
I’m the founder/owner of a site/application that was born in 2001, savvy enough to realise at the time that ANY content with a sprinkling of good keywords could, and most likely would, rank high enough to bring meaningful traffic.
It happened. At our peak – around 2011, the site was pulling in 1m+ visits a month, producing around 1000 new, paying, subscribers each month. (It’s a UK site aimed at UK users.)
I got bored/burned out and left the biz for a few years.
Re-entered late in 2015 because business was in deep trouble – not so much because of declining site visitor numbers at this point, but because of venture capital backed companies offering free services that we were charging for. (I’m not bitter, they had the foresight to make a lot of money, and anyway now they need to make a profit are also charging customers.)
Also mobile started happening in a big way.
At that point we had over 3000 pages of indexed content built up over the years – much of it written by professionally qualified experts. Almost entirely neglected since the day it was published.
Reviewing the situation in 2015/2016, I became aware that some of the content was hopelessly outdated but wasn’t overly concerned because we were still getting plenty of traffic. (In fact, when I looked at some of the searches G was sending us traffic for, I was surprised at how bad the page was in terms of answering the query. (Or how bad G was at finding good pages for those queries.)
Suffice to say that SEO didn’t make onto my urgent to do list, strategy was to concentrate on adding value to services, conversion rates and the mobile version of our app.
Fast forward to Aug 18
First sign of real trouble on visitor numbers was Medic early August 18 – around 40% traffic loss. Our site is in the health (but not medical) field. We made our credentials more visible on our About Us page and generally did things with more awareness that showing expertise/authority/trust is important. We had an uplift at end of October 18 that probably regained 80% of traffic lost to medic. (Our business naturally declines towards the end of the year and we had taken steps to get biz from elsewhere after medic, so it’s difficult to be precise about these numbers.)
To March 19
The content issue has finally caught up. We are too small a team, now, with too small a budget to bring all these pages up to scratch now that G has got better at interpreting what people really want.
It’s not that the content is bad. More that it was written with ‘keywords’ (as many as possible) in mind that were not really a perfect fit. The word ‘shoehorn’ springs to mind.
It’s also true that much of the content has not been updated in many years.
That is my understanding of what this core update is about.
It’ll take me many months, (optimistically) to get my older content sorted, and I’m fully prepared to work the hours and do what it takes.
My question to this community is: do you think it’s going to be worth it?
PS: I’m aware that this post is an indulgent distraction from my G pain and actually getting on with it 😊

[aristotle]

I don't know why I keep reading this thread. Everybody says different (inconsistent) things. People reach general conclusions based on what they see happen on one site. Sometimes the same person says their site's traffic went up, then later says it went down. Nobody wants to talk about the elephants in the room (Panda and E.A.T.).

[broccoli]

Thanks @redbar - is this the same site that was hit last year and recently recovered? Which update hit it?

Meanwhile - back to backlinks. Roger Montti posted about what might be a change to how Google assesses backlinks, apparently taking into account surrounding text:

[searchenginejournal.com...]

The purpose is to look for brand mentions. If Google have started using this it might explain some of my problems. The sites Google is promoting in my niche are EMDs, and I believe Google thinks their names are actually brands and is rewarding them for it. Whereas my site actually has a brand but few of my links or surrounding text refer to my brand, they refer to the titles of my pages, since when I first started out I’d created something unique and treated each page in effect as its own brand, but my pages were later copied by others and the terms became generic. So it’s possible I’m getting penalised for lack of branded links despite being one of the few branded websites in my niche...

[StoneSolid]

Nobody wants to talk about the elephants in the room (Panda and E.A.T.).

Both of those are google narratives to make the search algos look more complex than they actually are.
Backlinks are 99% of seo, as simple as that.

[tangor]

<dark satire rooted in reality>

The real chuckle is most seem to forget that the fabulous black box is operated by humans. Sadly, the humans working it (ie. inserting their data choices as "best user intent") are largely young whippersnappers with university education (take that as you will) and that is NOT mainstream, or even friendly to ordinary society or economics in general.

When the bean counters at g see an over correction in their core updates they tell the young coders to back it off and do better ... and so wild swings will ensue, and yet, each time, the whippersnappers will color the changes ... because that's all they have been taught.

AI is only as smart as those tweaking the code, and sadly, these days, we are dealing with a box of rocks.

</dark satire rooted in reality>

Meanwhile, give it six months. These daily/hourly angst sessions will only give you heartburn.

[sql500]

Do you remember the good old days?

There was alltheweb, yahoo, lycos, hotbot, aol search, live search, netscape, bruce clay and so many others.

We always got descent traffic from all of them, and they seemed to include sites fairly quickly.

But today... :(

Niente, Nada, Nothing

[tangor]

@sql500 ... indeed I do! Meanwhile, welcome to the forum, just in case nobody said hello!

The biggest change in search these days is "intent" and the only problem I have with that is "who decides what the intent" really is?

[Lagonda]

Anyone worse than this?

[i.imgur.com...]

[mosxu]

Amazing update of the buyer journey, getting twice more organic traffic but not converting.

These “researchers” got smarter they seem to engage more even getting to the basket but do not have the mental strength to cross the line.

[RedBar]

Is anyone else having to log-in to WebmasterWorld through "My Threads" to view these posts?

Thanks @redbar - is this the same site that was hit last year and recently recovered? Which update hit it?

Nope, no update hit it, Google simply decided to completely remove the index page from their SERPs, it was indexed however did not rank for anything after being #1 for several years especially for keyword1keyword2keyword3 on an EMD for which we hold the registered trademark and introduced to the global widget market nearlry 40 years ago.

A large US company that plagiarised that index page last year now ranks at #1. All other search engines still has my site at #1.

Recovery is a relative term when so many advertisements are above the fold no matter the device.

[aristotle]

Hmm.. Some of the same people who recently came here because their sites have been losing traffic keep trying to give SEO advice to people whose sites aren't losing traffic. If these newcomers know so much, why are their sites losing traffic?

[Fatlossplanner]

Does anyone in this thread see recovery to the rankings?

[sk7411]

Does anyone in this thread see recovery to the rankings?

Not really , it’s getting bad and flatlined day after day .

[Fatlossplanner]

It's getting worse...

[whoa182]

I'm doing okay but many keywords are not stable. From one our to the next they can be up or down 5 or more positions. Google needs to let the search team go on holiday. :)

Still down 20% from August 1st, so not that far off to where I was. But this is with a lot of new articles since the update. Impressions in SC were much higher up until the 19-20th March (which is when I felt they had changed something).

[imgur.com...]