Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2019

[dollarsound]

The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4937425.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 11:52 pm on Apr 1, 2019 (PDT -8)



Today traffic is 35% up. This site wasn't affected by these previous updates in march, in august had an increase in organic traffic also, and since then has been fluctuating

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:58 am (utc) on Apr 2, 2019]
[edit reason] Cleanup after thread split to new month [/edit]

[jmorgan]

Had a nice boost on the recent Match update but no change today/yesterday.

[Milchan]

today seems to be a bit of a recovery again for me. Current rough pattern seems to be google update -> 5 to 7 days of low sales -> recovery for 5 to 7 days -> update is tweaked or adjusted -> 5 to 7 days of low sales -> recovery

[Mennovanos]

Still very volatile. Trailer niche.

We lost 33% organic traffic with the "medic" update last year.
Recovered with the mar 12 update to numbers above pre-medic numbers:
Gained 70% organic on March 15, up to 115% increase march 27. Lost some traffic on 28 march till march 31 (back to the original 70% increase).
Now since the 1st of april we have been climbing again, to numbers higher than ever. So this update is good for us (So far).

We focussed on :
User experience by improving page layout, esp for mobile.
EAT (we had no real "about us" page before for example).
And we improved quality by combining multiple low quality pages into 1 quality page.

[seomotionz]

Is it me or something really weird is going on with the SERP's today. Yeah, I know now-a-days its pretty normal. But today is off the charts. More than one updates, maybe?! Can't figure out anything, no angle makes sense.

[glakes]

Google has been hammering our website for the past four days. Google is crawling the same pages over and over again. What purpose does this serve, other than wasting our bandwidth? Maybe Google's AI had another stroke, don't really know. We are an ecommerce website and our product information does not change by the hour. Some product pages have not changed in years.

Conversions from Google are terrible, though we are rocking on Amazon and on pace to log our highest sales period ever.

[hurwith2]

Wacky first few days of April.

[Milchan]

Im thinking there was another update or tweak again today . Things have just dropped off a cliff again and it is about 7 days since that last happened.

[sofie77]

Yes, there is something going on again. This morning I noticed a big drop for many websites. The reason is, that this pages are not anymore in the index. When I make a site: command for specific pages they are gone. Some of you noticed the same?

I made NO robots.txt or noindex error.

Edit: I moved to WMT and made a crawler test for this pages (some startpages gone also) -> no error -> crawling is possible. I made a index request and a few mins late the pages are back and the positions also.

I cant do this for all pages, but It looks like, google has lost many pages. Check this!

[Spiekerooger]

Seeing big movements today in Germany. Even affecting domains that had been stable throughout all updates for all the last months (and even years).

[sofie77]

Me Too Spiekerooger but see my post above yours. I am also from germany and the reason could be, that the pages are not anymore in the index. It looks like there is some error in the google serps. see for example:

site:www.webmasterworld.com

normaly the startpage should come up on the first position. This is happening for subpages also.

[vinod_ts]

Yeah, we are observing the same on our website as well. A huge drop in traffic.

[flatfile]

normaly the startpage should come up on the first position. This is happening for subpages also.

Interesting...I'm noticing the same thing on stackoverflow, dailymail, pinterest and Time.

[Jim Westergren]

Yes, I see the same across many big domains. URL of home page suddenly dropped from google index. No changes to meta or robots.txt done. Search Console -> URL Inspection -> Live Test gives a good looking screenshot. No message of manual action.
A big bug in Google right now?
Anyone else that can see this?

[edited by: Jim_Westergren at 7:49 am (utc) on Apr 5, 2019]

[Spiekerooger]

Yep, that's what I'm seeing as well. And it's not on all datacenters by google. You see at least two different sets of serps w/ gone pages or not every other minute.

But I do also see cases where the same subpage ranking for one key as always but not for the other where it ranked always. So even a page is still in the index (and not totally gone as some homepages), there are big fluctuations.

[sofie77]

Interesting...I'm noticing the same thing on stackoverflow, dailymail, pinterest and Time.

yes but when you search for the name of the brand for example "stackoverflow" the page comes up.
BUT
When a subpage is gone from the "site: command" this subpage is not ranking anymore and this is what happening at the moment for my pages. For a few (cant do that for all) I made a index request via WMT. Few mins later the page pops up again in the serps at the same postion. Then few mins later the page is gone again...(datacenter replication?!)

Yep, that's what I'm seeing as well. And it's not on all datacenters by google. You see at least two different sets of serps w/ gone pages or not every other minute.

Yes, indeed.

So even a page is still in the index (and not totally gone as some homepages), there are big fluctuations.

yes

[Martin Ice Web]

Big losses in traffic and conversions from google again. ( germany )
Our niche is full with domain crowding. Sometimes 6 pages in row!
We are outranked by silly pages with no EAT or even actual HTML Code.
This are sites that i wouldn´t trust a dime.

Traffic to our site is allmost to very rare items that we normaly don´t get any traffic for. Traffic seems to be 100% mismatched.
It seems that google ignores all google guidelines for webmasters.

[sofie77]

@Martin Ice Web

check if the pages are indexed. For all positions we have lost, the site: command gives no result anymore and I hope, when google has fixed this, the rankings will come back.

[Martin Ice Web]

@sofie77+

what the heck, you are right: 50% dropped of the index

[sofie77]

what the heck, you are right: 50% dropped of the index

ok fine, fingers crossed this is only a temporary issue.

Our niche is full with domain crowding. Sometimes 6 pages in row!

I can see this for our domains too. The reason is, that pages with many rows has lost (de-indexed) their main page for that keyword. Therefore google desperately list some other subpages from the same category.

[Jim Westergren]

The missing URLs of home pages that I saw are now back in Google with their original rank position kept intact. It was a glitch in Google.

[Spiekerooger]

@Jim:

I see them coming and going, that is: different data centers with totally different data sets as stated above.

[vinod_ts]

Looks like the indexes are misbehaving still. I see that the indexes are intact in one machine where as in an another machine, it isn't there.

[Erwitt]

My site has lost around 60% of traffic within the last two days (Spain).

I have run the site:command and the URLs are ranking, both the home and subpages. But in Googe Search Console>URL Inspection I get these statuses:

Coverage: Crawled - currently not indexed
Referring page: None detected

Pretty weird... I have request indexing, hope the drop of SERPs is because this error and my site recovers soon!

[sofie77]

@Erwitt

and sometimes its opposite -> site: gives no result but the Search Console (WMT) says "page is indexed". This comes from the datacenter replication.

When WMT and the site: command are fine, the rankings are normal.
This must be a glitch and not a algorithm change?

[Erwitt]

@sofie77

Yes, I hope it's a glitch!

And thanks for warning about it!

[pritz]

I can't find my website's homepage using the site: command. It just gets disappear. The last cache date is 27th March 2019. What to do now?

[DecDub]

I see the same drop, I'm based in Ireland but the website is in the US. This happened a number of times over the last few months but then the recovery kicked in. I'm sure it will return to normal within the next week.

[HereWeGo123]

Just going to throw it out there - late last night (U.S. evening of 4/4/19), I googled an extremely sensitive (and ultra-competitive) health issue related query. And you know what I saw ranking atop? Ezine Articles. And keep in mind, this was for an extremely serious health related condition. Let’s all let that sink in.

[seomotionz]

Everybody is seeing something. As I noticed in this thread. So, I am sure now that I am not the only one.

But anybody seeing any patterns?!