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]

[System]

Let's stay on topic.

This isn't the thread to talk about Facebook Leveraging User Data [webmasterworld.com]
We are specifically talking about current Google updates & changes in this thread.

[edited by: goodroi at 1:05 pm (utc) on Apr 17, 2019]

[StoneSolid]

@southernguy
thanks for the bing tip (for personal use) :P

but I actually gave that example to show google in total contradiction to all of their quality guidelines - regardless of the niche, how is that even possible?

[universenet]

In my case google no accepting submit sitemaps all urls... like ignore some sitemaps...really is some problem with resources..

[NickMNS]

@universnet

google no accepting submit sitemaps all urls... like ignore some sitemaps

There is nothing wrong with Google. They have never said that they automatically index all the page of a website. Typically they will index a subset of the website that a sufficiently large to get a good understanding of the content and quality. For most small websites, up to a few hundred pages, this will typically result in the entire website being indexed. For large sites, that is with pages in the millions, those site may never be fully indexed. I have a site with pages that number in the tens of millions, the site is six years old. Not all of my pages are indexed. But, progressively overtime more and more of it is indexed.

The only way I know how to increase the pages indexed is to increase the number of links going to the site and ideally those links should point to different pages. I assume (I don't know for a fact) that Google likely indexes based on discovery from those links, and continues on to within some depth or breadths. So more links == more indexed pages.

It is equally important to point out that number of pages indexed does not correlate to ranking. You can have (as I do) millions of indexed pages, and the bulk of those pages never see any traffic.

[RedBar]

I have a site with pages that number in the tens of millions,

I'm not being disrespectful when I ask this however are these tens of millions of pages similar to many other sites with tens of millions of pages or are they unique pages?

I find it difficult to believe that there can be that many sites with tens of millions of pages that are different from other sites with tens of milliions of pages.

Are these (generic) sites simply regurgitating what has already been done and Google has to sift its way through them all to try and find "new" stuff thereby filling their drives plus slowing down their indexing and listings?

I willingly accept some sites are far superior to others when presenting all this information.

[NickMNS]

are these tens of millions of pages similar to many other sites with tens of millions of pages or are they unique pages?

This depends on how one defines similar. By some measure the pages could be considered nearly identical but each pages is distinctly different. In my specific case (without actually being specific), the pages display statistics about a certain type of entity. There is one page per entity and there are tens of millions of these entities. Think of it a sort of baseball card, you have a player (the entity) and statistics about that player. User's will may look for information about one player or several.

This pattern is quite common on the internet, the pages about companies, actors (IMDB), sports teams, athletes, business leaders, collectibles, etc...

I have two sites that fit this pattern in completely unrelated niches.

Are these (generic) sites simply regurgitating what has already been done

I can't speak for all sites, but there are certainly many sites that do simply regurgitate. I have created valuable content that isn't readily available on other websites, or isn't presented in the same fashion. But my biggest challenge remains, that is to differentiate myself from those "regurge" sites. To your point, I face this challenge mostly in the eyes of Google. I'm fairly confident that the user can see the difference, but Google sees 10 sites that spew the same garbage vs one that doesn't. Google tends to play it safe and side with ten. Specially in the age of fake news.

[universenet]

RedBar I understand that google no indexing all pages...problem is with submiting siremap...it says done...but is not in list...or second probkem that is no calculating good number of urls in sitemap...of course I do not expect indexing all oages...I have close to 20 million pages

[RedBar]

@NickMNS - I know it's off-topic but how do you generate so many pages?

[NickMNS]

I wrote my own CMS in Python

[Milchan]

I wrote my own CMS in Python

How is the content generated - is is user generated or scraped from other sources? Im not suggesting anything bad by this - there are legit uses for scraping of content to create new content , im just interested

[samwest]

Just wondering if anyone is experiencing a huge drop in conversions since the 12th or is it just me? Zero the past three days..which is a first ever.

[universenet]

samwest + I have few websites and 2 of them have traffic bigger... but they have been no important to me because maybe 70 visits a day and now 160 visits a day... other website had few visits a day and now arround 20 visits a day
What is reason for grow visits to that sites? Nothing... even 1 of them has bounce rate almost 90%.. if they have better links? I am almost sure that NO...
Google all time talking about rules for net... multiscreen... bounce rate... return visits... links... but in real google doing all like random search

Exacty this is what I said before .. google "taking visits from medium websites and give to anonymous websites... why they doing this? So we can just think about why...is problem migrating to new webmaster toolls still? maybe... is some other problem..maybe.. is just what google want to do? Maybe

[doodoofan]

Just wondering if anyone is experiencing a huge drop in conversions since the 12th or is it just me? Zero the past three days..which is a first ever.

I've been experiencing a huge drop in conversions for the past few weeks.

[samsseo]

I've seen a drop in traffic, particularly around 1pm today (GMT+2) but conversions remain steady. No obvious spikes in the algo trackers...

[sem4u]

How are your rankings looking, samseo? A lot of people are about to go on an Easter break from tomorrow, so traffic is bound to drop for many sites.

[whoa182]

Traffic is a little all over the place today so I wouldn't be surprised to see SEMRush spike later.

Someone mentioned recently how it seems that the only real change in traffic these days is from update to update. This appears to be the case for my website also... There is no natural growth as I was used to seeing for years before, it is either straight up or straight down from one update to the next.

I don't really speak about what is going on, because my knowledge about how these algo's work is very limited, but it feels like there is some contention between algorithms and/or the current state is too rigid. Things aren't moving, or if they do, it tends to be mainly for the big sites who have the quality backlinks and trust.

I have benefited from the March update but also dropped a little after a tweak, but traffic growth has remained flat since then, despite adding more lots more carefully targeted articles for low comp keywords. Sometimes it feels like I gain one and lose one, and everything just averages out the same.

People say that some of these updates are mainly about relevancy, but I just don't see it. I see a lot of irrelevant articles or ones that barely focus on the query, they just very briefly mention it and rank higher than specific articles about the query. And I'm not saying this because I lost out on the last core update... I didn't, but Google's results have been just all over the place and terrible since last August.

Is this just the process of machine learning and things will improve over the next few months and years?

[westcoast]

Our traffic has also taken a hit since the 12th. Approx a 5% drop across the site daily. This after our traffic had finally stabilized over the past 6 months or so for the first time in years. Hoping this is temporary.

[Milchan]

Hoping this is temporary.

with google the only thing that is temporary now is stability

[NickMNS]

I am also seeing drop in traffic, about 5% or so over the last few days. Today is looking like the drop may be widening but it is still too early to tell.

I am also noticing that the drop appears to be specific to the US. The content on my sites are specific to the US. My main site (.com) typically gets over 75% of its traffic from the US that seems to have dropped to around 70%. The content of my second site targets the US and Canada but use a niche specific gTLD. On this site I have been getting a considerable amount of traffic from the UK but most was still coming from the US. On April 7 I saw a large increase in traffic, most of which was UK Traffic. On 15th the traffic started to declined, leaving me with very little US traffic (~15%).

@Milchan to answer your question, content is generated by aggregating data from a variety of sources both public and private.

[mosxu]

Long live the “personalisation” no conversions .

This is nothing short than the Chinese social scoring.

[Milchan]

I get the feeling something changed again half way through today. Seems quite common updates are done on Thursdays or Friday also. Ive no concrete evidence but my morning was ok and then seems like someone flipped a switch and there seems to be more people reporting bad traffic / no conversions again today, so its just a hunch

[universenet]

yes...I can say same.. google still is not stable...traffic all time going up ..down

[BangkokBaby]

@Westcoast and @NickMSN, I too am seeing a drop from the 12th of April, which keep getting lower by about 2-4% per day, it seems to be slowing now, but a little too early to tell.

[BangkokBaby]

Updates showing on the SEM Sensor and I see a change in my traffic. I hope this is them fixing the indexing issue.

[LuckyLiz]

I am also seeing drop in traffic, about 5% or so over the last few days

This is Easter week and I believe Passover starts this weekend, too. A lot of schools in the US are off for spring break around this time. Some are off the week before the holiday, others, the week after and families often go on vacation. So, for some sites, at least, the drop may be a seasonal one.

[EditorialGuy]

The Mueller Report may be another distraction. (I know that I've been spending a lot of time reading the news!)

[HereWeGo123]

@EditorialGuy

The Mueller Report may be another distraction. (I know that I've been spending a lot of time reading the news!)

Completely agree. At least in our niches (U.S. Review website), we've almost always noticed a correlation between traffic drops and the highly-anticipated U.S. based developing/breaking news stories such as the Mueller case. Also, it's spring break for most of the folks with Easter weekend. A more clear picture of where everyone's traffic is to be evaluated beginning next week, assuming no other major news stories break out.

[universenet]

EditorialGuy + Somtimes I think that maybe full Moon have impact too on google search .... ..becuase google working in that way... unexpected.

[Selen]

Interesting article about Google "featured snippets" and the fact that they bring less and less click value to webmasters: [searchengineland.com...]

[HereWeGo123]

Here's one observation I have, which I'm pretty sure others have seen at least once in their online careers – So after the March 12 Core Update, there was one site in particular that surged atop the search results out of the blue, even outranking us for numerous Keyword terms.

Being in the internet business myself, I can see that they're a fly-by-night type of website, yet they “cross all the T's and dot all the I's” when it comes to “mimicking E-A-T”, their content is pretty straight forward and what Google would call, “a good user experience”. They even go as far as having some experts author and/or “medically review” their content (allegedly).

However, and most significantly, looking at their backlink profile, they have many High DA links pointing to their relevant category pages from very reputable sites. But then, looking more closely, those allegedly high quality backlinks from those reputable sites are all pointing to dead domains, which this website appeared to buy out and redirect to their desired pages on the new domain. It's one of the oldest backlink tricks in the book – scan some reputable site and find dead outbound links, buy whichever domains and redirect them to wherever you want. That's what this site apparently did. So essentially, there are no true genuine backlinks, but all 301 redirects.

Their count in backlinks only surged literally within recent months. Clearly, this is a manipulation of backlinks. They are just riding the wave, but I suspect Google will eventually either penalize and/or discount those links and that website may lose its prominent rankings.