Google Florida Update 2 March 12, 2019

[BushyTop]

---

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)

---

Seeing some changes this morning. Anyone else. UK.

[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.

[Mark_A]

For me, last week G organic traffic was down, actually from the 13th, this week it seems to have recovered.

We haven't changed the site at all in that period and I don't yet know if the rankings have been scrambled.

eta: only a 60 odd page site, niche B2B, a spender on G Ads.

[whoa182]

My traffic seems to be down to a trickle today after a huge recovery last week. Whatever they did today has reversed some of the gains. I think it's better to not get too excited anymore :/

[ichthyous]

I'm wondering whether freshness of content has been dialed up significantly in importance now. It's hard for archive sites like mine as the dates our pages were published can be older. I have removed the schema and meta tags referring to the original publication date of the page from my site and now just included "Page last updated on" on the front end. I can keep my pages updated all the time, so that's a much fresher date. Has anyone found that this has helped or hurt?

[Shaddows]

We were not hit by any significant penalty in the past, and we got a decent boost with the initial update.

Something changed yesterday, and we are now below the pre-update level.

[broccoli]

My homepage is showing some signs of life today. It’s sometimes popping up on page 2. No traffic increase. Desperately praying for a turnaround at this stage.

[Fatlossplanner]

@broccoli did you make any changes to your site to see positive results? For me I don't see any improvements unfiortunately...

[SnowMan68]

They are definitely tweaking something today. Feels like the core update.

[whoa182]

Probably increasing the 'punitive filter' to make it impossible to rank well unless you have an outstanding link profile and trust. My content is pretty good, better than most of the results/keywords that I am targeting, I just don't have a great link profile. It feels unfair, but I will stop moaning now and save my pennies again before I go broke completely lol.

Not seeing negative effects across all keywords, but a lot of the in-content long tail keywords and synonyms I was ranking for have dropped off. In other cases, my rankings improved today. It's a bit of a mess, to be honest.

I have to get out of the health niche and put my energy elsewhere. Maybe. For my own sanity. = )

[edited by: whoa182 at 7:51 pm (utc) on Mar 21, 2019]

[Fatlossplanner]

@whoa182 I agree with you.. My rankings have disappeared now from rank 1 to page 5 or even 6... It's high time we need to switch to a different traffic source...

[broccoli]

@Fatlossplanner No, nothing at all, I don't like changing things during an update, because it's impossible to tell whether the changes you make are having a positive/negative effect, or whether they're still changing or rolling back or correcting the update. Don't panic! Let the dust settle and wait for the analysis first.

[Nichita]

"Google has stopped supporting the rel=next/prev markup it launched back in 2011. The interesting part is, Google has not supported it for the past few years and didn’t tell anyone!"

"The crazy part about this is that Google has been recommending the use of the rel=next/prev throughout the years. In fact, Google just recommended that we use it in the latest Google webmaster hangout from two days ago!"

What should we say about these Core updates when they aren't able to tell us that the "next / prev" is useless since a few years ago...

(Source: John Mueller from Google / Search Engine Land)


---Mod's note: Separate discussion on this topic here...
Google Retires rel=prev/next
[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:38 am (utc) on Mar 22, 2019]
[edit reason] Linked to new thread on this topic... [/edit]

[broccoli]

Just checked GSC, links have refreshed again, just lost another 4,000 links, mostly to my home page. I think they're tweaking something. I see traffic/ranking changes every time there's a link refresh, I think GSC is an accurate reflection of the link data they're assessing.

Edit: just discovered the source of today's link loss - all from my old forwarded domain, which my hosting company expired for me without contacting me to tell me I needed to renew it!

It doesn't explain the link loss from a couple of weeks ago - and I've been losing thousands of links from GSC since around October time, but at least it didn't get even worse!

Although it's odd that my homepage should rise in the serps after losing a load of links from my old domain isn't it?

[broccoli]

Have they changed their crawling pattern? My internal links count has changed and reordered in GSC. Never seen a change like this before. Apparently my terms and conditions page is my most linked page now instead of my home page... Home page is linked 3 times on each page, terms is linked once in the footer! Again, I haven't touched anything on my site.

[Fatlossplanner]

@broccoli I too see the same and I and constantly dropping...

[lina]

I have had a location-based travel-ish content site for the last 6 or 7 years. From the outset, my traffic steadily increased and it seemed like it came up as the top search result when you searched for almost anything related to my niche. Then, around June last year, traffic slowed down and kept dropping. I was down 40% or so YoY and the first weeks of March were the lowest yet, probably 50% of the traffic I had last year.

I never knew if an update was the cause of my fall or if it was something else, because I don't know a lot about this stuff. My content is high quality, but I have a lot of new competitors spinning it and all of a sudden the spinners were outranking me, even though they have fewer banklinks. I assumed they were doing shady SEO stuff. While all of this happened I also finally switched to https and Cloudflare in case I was being penalized by speed issues and I removed AdSense because it was slowing my site down so much (I still have my own advertisers via Doubleclick). I really do think that my content is the best in my niche and although I hadn't heard about E-A-T until today (would this even affect a location-based travel site?) I do have author bios and they are legit. I never understood why I was all of a sudden being outranked by such obviously spammy sites, but I hadn't been updating as often and they were posting a lot, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Then, March 12, boom, I was almost back to where I was last year. Traffic climbed until March 18, then started dropping again and I've lost most of my gains. I'm not sure what's going on.

[Selen]

My thoughts about this update so far (I do many informational searches on Google every day).

It feels like a lot of pretty, but not very genuine sites have been rewarded. Visually, they are appealing, content is well presented (not very original), but I don't feel connected to them; most of them are not genuine. For example, I studied a site that appeared on top results out of nowhere. Nice Wordpress template, many pictures. But it's clear, the site was designed for specific keywords in mind (suggested by main categories and keywords used). All blog posts were added in 2018, within a month (no consistency, suggesting the articles were purchased and published in bulk). Then I check a Disclosure -- I got it, the site "may recommend" or "endorse" specific products or services (the plus is it was disclosed in public).

I once visited a popular tourist destination. In main town, there were dozens of restaurants. A few ones in the best locations couldn't be overlooked as they seemed very shiny, pretty, in new buildings, parking space, splendid lights at night. I visited a couple of them; inside they were very nice too, air-conditioners, fashionable design, lights, and dressed-up waitresses. Food was pretty good. The problem - nobody or few people inside. Not because of the prices (they were, surprisingly, not too expensive). But there was no connection and authenticity. People (including me) would prefer to visit a "shabby" and old building, but one that you could feel they love doing what they are doing, and they do it well.

Same with websites - visitors don't mind a spelling mistake or some other irrelevant issues as long as there is substance and connection to the site. To me, this March 2019 update, in too many instances, kills the connection and promotes a shiny, but inauthentic package. On one hand, I'm not surprised that a Google "rater" who visits these newly-rewarded sites would feel they are of top quality, but when you dig deeper, the truth starts to reveal.

Regarding author bios - they have been heavily gamed. Shady "SEOs" create fake social media profiles and "guest articles," then they use the same fake name and credentials on their own bios (interconnecting / citing each other). AI thinks that the author is "legitimate" because the same (fake) name / credential is consistently listed and "confirmed" on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, guest guest articles, and on his "About Me" page.

[seo2019]

Need to establish the priorities to concentrate on.

For me it’s either content or back links. If my sites continue to decline in rankings. I’ll have to make changes.

This may include deleting content to make it shorter and or disavowing links.

[southernguy]

@seo2019 I tried both on one of my sites back in December so far has made no difference, others I have done nothing and they have gradually come back. Nothing close to where they were but even with good rankings its a wash, with all the ads, videos, suggestions etc. Organic results on Google page 2 are now the new page 1.

[HereWeGo123]

Hey everyone – Was hoping to get some advice from someone's experience. We've identified patterns between our good content vs our poor quality, outdated content. For good content, we stayed strong after this update. However, for old, thin, outdated content, we took a hit. A good chunk of our traffic was relying on our old and thin content before this update. As a result, we felt a traffic decline after this update. With that said, we are nuking old dead weight and thin content pages that, but also will need to do major updates and/or rewrites to at least 1000 pages. With our manpower and resources, it can take at least a year, yet we feel those pages are cancerous in their current state. Is it easier to just start a brand new site with best practices? Any thoughts anyone? Thanks!

[seo2019]

That’s strange, it’s the opposite for my site. Thin pages with out of date content that have not been touched in over 12 months are now doing very well.

Where as the long quality content that was updated regularly has took a nose dive.

Perhaps it’s better to hold off doing anything until we know what we are dealing with.