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]

[BangkokBaby]

@HereWeGo123,

Yes doing the 301 redirect can help a lot right now, there's no denying that. I have not done it because I believe it's only a matter of time before Google puts an end to that kind of stuff. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.

I would not advise it for any site other than a "churn and burn" because you're going to get caught sooner or later.


Unrelated somewhat but is anyone else's GA not reporting fine. For me since 7am GMT my overview is not showing the correct numbers, however in real-time it's logging everything correctly.

[southernguy]

@HereWeGo123 This has been going on since August and that is mostly what is ranking right now in my niches, very frustrating. I began doing churn and burn sites with this method in Dec after seeing no recovery for my authority sites.

I can imagine that aged domain sellers are loving it, how long this lasts who knows, I guess we are going on 8 months now with pretty much the same scenario of whats ranking. These sites usually last for a couple of months, and then slowly begin to move down in the rankings. I see a lot of guys with big pockets who have dozens of these domains and when one drops there are others waiting in line (all they need to do is add the redirects and they are ready to go).

Many of these domains had something to do with medical or health and usually have strong backlink profiles from medical institutions, universities etc. When I begin to see a domain reach page two or bottom of page one, I can check the traffic and it will have a sharp spike upward within just a couple of weeks and begins to rank at the top.

TBH if I had the kind of money these guys did I would also be doing it at a larger scale, I have been doing it to get by financially until hopefully, something changes. Problem is that with long tail keywords no longer ranking like they were it pretty much limits the search field.

[HereWeGo123]

Yeah, completely agree that this is not a good tactic long term. I wouldn't advise anyone doing that, nor have we ever done that or plan on doing it. I've seen quite a bit of sites surge on top over the years only to find them plummet within several months or so. Probably the folks behind this know it too, but they're just riding the wave while they can.

[aristotle]

Many of these domains had something to do with medical or health and usually have strong backlink profiles from medical institutions, universities etc.

Makes you kinda wonder why "Many of these domains" would be for sale. Such strong backlinks from such great authorities. If those backlinks are so great, why is whatever site was there previously now shut down?

[southernguy]

@aristotle Many of the ones I have seen ranking in my niche are medical, some are old domains that had independent cancer research or other disease studies, some have been from drug rehab facilities that have been shut down, others from independent medical studies. A lot of them are domains going back to 1998 most of them have names that don't even come close to the niche they represent but they do rank well.

[MayankParmar]

Google isn't stable here as well, ups and downs. The deindexing bug reshuffled position for many of my keywords resulting in another dip.

Updating hundreds of old posts with a decent amount of additional words every week could trigger Google spam systems?

[aristotle]

Many of the ones I have seen ranking in my niche are medical, some are old domains that had independent cancer research or other disease studies, some have been from drug rehab facilities that have been shut down, others from independent medical studies. A lot of them are domains going back to 1998 most of them have names that don't even come close to the niche they represent but they do rank well.

Well I can understand why you might want to buy these types of domains, but I still wonder about some things:
-- Are these domains really for sale, and if so, why, and at what kind of prices?
So to summarize, if they "rank well", and have great backlinks, why would they be for sale, if they are?

[southernguy]

Most of them are on domain auction sites and they can run a hundred into the thousands. Most of them seem to be expired and are no longer needed (I am assuming) I have personally picked up a few for cheap and some have ranked well and are still ranking (5 months now) how long this will last who knows. I much prefer doing things the right way but most of what I consider my good authority sites tanked in August, a couple of them have gradually seen a small increase in traffic but are not ranking as they did.

[aristotle]

southernguy - I must have misunderstood you. I thought you intended to buy some old domains (dormant or expired) and re-direct them to your main sites because they still have good backlinks which would give a boost to your main sites.

btw -- I heard of cases where someone bought an old domain at what appeared to be a cheap price, but later discovered that google had previously applied a penalty to it that was still in effect. So it didn't work out too well.

[aristotle]

P.S. #2 Hasn't google stated in the past that if a new owner takes over a domain and changes its content, then the algorithm automatically completely discounts all of the old backlinks that it already had.

[southernguy]

@aristotle I'm kinda veering off topic here but no I have not been using them to redirect to other domains, just picked them up due to their current link profile. Googles current update seems to favor them right now. Picking up an expired domain is always a risk but for the most part the backlinks seem to remain for a while. Not always which is probably why some sites rank really well and then die off after a few months while others remain stable.

As far as Google discounting the backlinks after a domain changes hands and content I have not seen any evidence of that at least in my situation. Maybe after further algorithm changes, it may happen, but I think we can agree that a lot of the recent updates don't make a lot of sense right now.

[SnowMan68]

Ever since the indexing bug, I've been having issues getting old pages to update in the index. They are all showing from April 3rd or before. When I refetch (URL Inspection Tool), it shows an error 404 on Google. Anyone else noticing something similar?

I am able to get new pages to index just fine.

[edgeman]

@SnowMan68: Yes, I'm seeing something somewhat similar (not the 404 errors). I came here specifically to see if anyone else is seeing what you've described as it relates to seeing updated content, because I certainly am (over the last week or so). I've requested numerous pages be recrawled (because the content was updated substantially), at which point I eventually see within 24-48 hours an indication in the SERPs that the page was updated in the last couple of days. However, the cache for the page shows something from a few weeks ago with no change in rank. When I requested these fetches before the last week or so, I'd usually see the new version in the SERPs within 15-30 minutes (and fluctuations in rank).

[JunaidSEO]

I think its a huge update from Google and it has been confirm that it was started from 26 March A.K.A. Broad Core Update. It seems like Google Search Ranking Algorithm Changes is the major update of the year in the Search Industry.

[SnowMan68]

The 404 error is on Google search.

[ibb.co ]

Interesting that you have the same issue because that leads me to believe it's widespread. Something is definitely not right and it all links back to the indexing bug.

[universenet]

SnowMan68 google still migrating data ... maybe will finnish about new year if not before

[SnowMan68]

@universenet

Where are you getting your information? Is there a public source on this?

[BangkokBaby]

@Snowman68, when you view the cache and it shows a 404 error, it's nothing to worry about, Google have commented on this before. I've had that with a few of my pages in the past and their rankings did not change. It will go back to normal within 24-48 hours.

[Martin Ice Web]

Last week i read an article about google gives misinformations to its users. Essentially the author wrote about google makes it very hard for users to get helpfull information of widgets someone wnats to buy.
I tested it the way the author did and probably 80% of users.
So I used the Keywords "test" and "Kaffevollautomat" ( german ).
And yes, 7 out of 10 entries are MFAPP Sites ( made for amazon partner program (ADS) )
Real established sties are no where to be found wthin the first 30 entries.
All the sites have the goal to route users to amazon and make money by clicking the amazon ad.
They have a lot of noisy blah blah on its pages but a real test is nowhere to be found.
Some widgets that are first on one test site could be easily be found at 10 on another test site.
Testing with other "test" + "keyword" combination shows allwas the same picture.

IMO google has to remove all sites with Amazon partner program from serps.

[SnowMan68]

@bangkokbaby

The 404 isn't my biggest concern, it's the fact they don't update the page in the index.

The 404 error has been showing for over 7 business days. There is definitely an issue.

[ichthyous]

I suddenly had numerous indexing issues and 404 errors showing up in GSC last week but they resolved themselves after about three days. I did add a bunch of 301 redirects, which is ridiculous to have to do for pages that haven't existed in years.

Has anyone seen a drop in ranking for sites which employ many redirects? My site has not recovered from the March 12th update even though I have lots of new inbound links and the pages load fast and have been updated. I have tens of thousands of redirects in htaccess which I needed after my last site redesign in 2015. I can't drop them because Google still looks for the old pages endlessly. I wonder if sites with too many redirects are taking a hit lately?

[universenet]

SnowMan68 @universenet
Where are you getting your information? Is there a public source on this?

from google...

[edgeman]

@SnowMan68: In the instance where I refetch a page, I can expect that if I look at the cache from within the search results for that page shortly thereafter, YES, I'll get a 404 error that eventually resolves itself (under normal circumstances, that happens fairly quickly - within an hour or so).

Furthermore, under those same normal circumstances, I would eventually see a cached result that reflects the new page that I refetched as expected. But lately, I'm getting a substantially older result as I indicated previously despite the SERP indicating the page was recently updated.

So, I agree, this has got to be widespread. I live in search results and they just feel off (for lack of a better word) since the index glitch - with the end result being that I'm experiencing difficulty forcing an update to the cache for pre-existing pages (something we do daily) whereas I didn't before.

[SnowMan68]

@edgeman

Thanks for the reply. Appreciate the thorough response. Sounds like the same or similar to what I’m seeing.

Anyone else seeing this? Really surprised no one else has chimed in. I thought fetching pages after making changes was fairly common in the SEO world.

[Milchan]

not sure if anyone else has noticed any changes today but my conversions have stopped completely today. Nothing, nada, zero.

[elias756]

Same here, conversions and traffic have been slowly reducing since the march 2019 update, crappy websites that no-one would trust outranking established big websites with far better content, website UX, speed, technical SEO and EAT. Oh man I hope google will fix this mess soon.

[BangkokBaby]

Sometimes I'll get high numbers of traffic and zero conversions, but usually later in the week I'll get more conversions for a day than usual and it balances out. For conversions on my site I sometimes need to look over a 60-90 day average. Viewing it by a per day basis is too much variance, even more so if your site isn't getting thousands of hits per day.

The time of the month also impacts conversions (people waiting for pay-day), and other things like seasonality.

Another factor to look for is conversion % based on total traffic rather than how many you got 4 weeks ago to today, as traffic many increase/decrease which will impact the total number of conversions, but usually will keep the % the same.

[Milchan]

yeah, im aware things fluctuate naturally and they always have but the way things fluctuate is not natural anymore - it is "controlled" at the whim of google. Im the same in that I get sudden spikes that are higher than I might of expected some days also but to go to NOTHING in a day then the same again today yet traffic seems the same is just strange. Hoping it is another update or tweak and things will come back round. I gave up trying to analyse %, versus visitors, conversions etc a while ago because nothing makes sense anymore and you just end up pulling your hair out. Ill just get on with the things Im doing and hope it gets better again and not panic unless there are no change in the next days.

[Robert Charlton]

Follwing up on the index glitch, this is the latest status I've been able to find. Includes discussion of Barry's update from yesterday, which I partially quote below....

April 2019 Google indexing & reporting bugs continue... It's not you!
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4943488.htm [webmasterworld.com]

It is now 16 days and counting since the Google Search Console Coverage report has been updated. Two-weeks later than the normal two-day delay and there is no end in sight...// Google is aware of the issue, they intentionally paused the reports because of the indexing issues that were supposedly fixed. But that was fixed 12 days ago and the reporting is still not working in Google Search Console....

[NickMNS]

Im the same in that I get sudden spikes that are higher than I might of expected some days also but to go to NOTHING in a day then the same again today yet traffic seems the same is just strange.

Yes, strange one might even say random.