Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2019

[Mark_A]

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System: The following 12 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4940766.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 12:25 pm on May 1, 2019 (utc -5)

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For my main current site, Google Organic accounts for 28% of sessions.

I swear it takes up 80% of the effort though!

[StupidIntelligent]

It can't be that bad on such wide scale. People are just using less of Google for shopping searches, and going direct to brand sites. Google is become less relevant for commercial businesses over time.

[mosxu]

@seomotionz

The zombie traffic we seem to get less and less on the organic (not so for the ads) and as you said sometimes fails to enter the site and organic is zero which means our site stopped showing, but actually it still shows to whoever visited the site before and not to new searchers.

We do not have a problem spending in ads as long as these are displayed according to google terms and conditions and buyers are not personalised away for undisclosed reasons.

[glakes]

glakes what do you think about that google can not send organic traffic?
they do not want or they really can not?
(of course I understand that they want max earn)

Yes, Google can send organic traffic. But I was speaking of converting traffic, where a buyer has an intent on spending money buying a product online. We have found that most buyers go directly to Amazon. But for information searches, Google is still the king. Though with this latest update, Google has buried organic listings making it much more difficult for users to find relevant pages in Google and traffic for us. I have some great info pages on my site, which prior to this update received a lot of Google traffic, but I'm not going to spend money to help people solve problems without getting any return on that investment.

If people will not get best results in search so for normal people searching on google can be more and more expensive...

It is expensive advertising in Google as many people research products on Google then go to Amazon to buy. To put this in perspective, a $20 item may have keywords that cost $1+ per click in Adwords. Then the user goes to Amazon after researching on Google to make their purchase and Amazon takes a 15% commission from the total of every sale (product and shipping fees, if applicable). It's hard for a business to absorb both of the costs of Amazon and Google. And with Google heavily pushing paid ads after this new algo update, it will get worse for users and advertisers as Google displays those ads for even less relevant search queries.

I have not engaged in any targeted SEO efforts for 5+ years. My focus has been on creating great content on an easy to use website to support the sale of great domestically produced products. From my perspective, Google looks very desperate to shakedown advertisers for cash with this latest update. Both users and advertisers will flee Google if this update and the lack of or buried relevant organic listings sticks.

[seomotionz]

@mosxu My ad traffic is fine. Atleast for now. I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow!

[ichthyous]

When I really spend time and dig deeper into what has happened with referrals from Google, it's clear that this is a full-on assault on all organic results. I've had traffic to my landing pages drop 15%-85% from the same period last year, and the drops were not simultaneous...different pages fell off a cliff at different dates from September 2018 to March 2019.

This could be a demotion of my site, but more likely just that Google is now loading the page with so many other links that even top three ranking sites get very little traffic. There is no way to recover from this, it's just the new reality and Google is desperate to keep its revenue growth on par with Wall Street's expectations. They must be under serious pressure from Facebook (stealing ad revenue) and Amazon (stealing product search and ad revenue), and also people are using apps and not performing Google searches.

I am spending less time making changes to my site and I am ignoring Google's constant demands, you won't get any more traffic by following Google's standards anyway. Time and money is better spent on anything else but Google now. In other words, take your eggs out of Google's basket as soon as you can and distribute them to other baskets.

[mosxu]

@glakes

shaking 70% or more of advertisers is not fair practice

we are all under the wrong impression that the ads will be displayed to ready to buy searches provided we bid high enough but no our ads are displayed to “researchers” only for undisclosed reasons

we do not know the terms of this type of personalisation

[Shepherd]

we are all under the wrong impression that the ads will be displayed to ready to buy searches provided we bid high enough

I wouldn't say we are all under that impression. Advertisers and, more importantly, the ad platform have gotten more sophisticated over the years. More sophisticated by multiples in recent months. This has in turn led to more sophisticated SERPs. There are a lot of forces working against the "bid high" advertiser and the SEOer, most of those forces are not google.

[glakes]

@mosxu

Our total traffic from Google has been cut in half. Organic took a huge hit and paid took a substantial hit as well. I'm not too concerned yet since Amazon and social drive a lot of new sales for us while our B2B remains strong. And until Google can tap into my fax machine and control it, those B2B sales are well out of Google's greed driven reach.

Regardless, I will likely respond by stopping my Adwords campaigns. Google's paid traffic was converting horribly before this update, but some of Google's organic traffic did convert so we as a company justified the continued spend. Prior to the last year, we had limited/no campaigns running at all. But if Google is going to send us very little traffic, and even less/no converting traffic, well then Google can go to hell. I don't need them.

Edit: One thing I notice on the organic side is a disproportionate amount of traffic from Google.ca. While my company is based in the USA and ships to Canada, the high percentage of Canadian traffic -vs- USA traffic is bizarre. It's almost as if Google updated/screwed up geographic personalization.

[ichthyous]

One thing I notice on the organic side is a disproportionate amount of traffic from Google.ca. While my company is based in the USA and ships to Canada, the high percentage of Canadian traffic -vs- USA traffic is bizarre. It's almost as if Google updated/screwed up geographic personalization.

@glakes I had the exact same 'phenomenon' for about 4-5 months at the end of 2018 and begin of 2019. I am USA based but traffic from UK/Canada/Australia were all through the roof and I was selling a lot to those countries while my USA traffic was getting whacked. All of that additional international traffic disappeared, country by country. My international traffic is now at par or below what used to be considered normal for the last ten years. Don't count on that extra traffic lasting.

[glakes]

Don't count on that extra traffic lasting.

If it wasn't for the Canada traffic, Google would not be sending much of anything. It's not "extra" traffic for me!

[samwest]

In my niche, I keep seeing "<snip>.".. take the #1 spot. Every few months they drop out, change the domain name, rinse and repeat. By the looks of their dominating page, the trick to getting a temporary #1 spot is to use no less than TEN on-page Google ads.
This site does not make it on desktop, but is dominating the mobile results which a WAY different.

Looks like desktop is a dead venture for business nowadays, as even my #1 positions can't manage more than a trickle or zombies.
Heading back to the J.O.B. sector in a few weeks, which is better than just plain old broke.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:17 am (utc) on May 3, 2019]
[edit reason] Naming competition not allowed, per forum Charter [/edit]

[NickMNS]

@Glakes

Edit: One thing I notice on the organic side is a disproportionate amount of traffic from Google.ca. While my company is based in the USA and ships to Canada, the high percentage of Canadian traffic -vs- USA traffic is bizarre. It's almost as if Google updated/screwed up geographic personalization.

I have been experiencing a similar pattern. My secondary site targets, US and Canadian audience. The content is nearly all specific to events happening in US/Canada, but I have a few summary pages where the data is more general. These general pages have been getting all the traffic and it continues to grow, I was up 125% in April vs. March. The only problem is that traffic is coming mostly from Europe, mostly the UK. Canadian traffic is disproportionately higher than US traffic as well. It basically appears to be coming from anywhere but the US.

I don't understand why. I don't know how to change this. Most of all I'm very reluctant to try and change this because, Euro traffic is better than no traffic, which is what I was getting before.

[universenet]

and why google say that they still doing backlinks report?
And that they need some time still for this?
They "fighting" with data? (fighting mean in good way )

I am still thinking that all that mixing of irelevant results are because google still need finnish migrating data
Or maybe I am not right?

[seomotionz]

Now I am seeing in serountable that Google Search Console has lost data.

[not2easy]

Now I am seeing in serountable that Google Search Console has lost data.

You can see that here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Shaddows]

The only problem is that traffic is coming mostly from Europe, mostly the UK.

Yeah, our niche (but not all niches- we've researched) is properly broken atm. We're in a highly competitive market- there are dozens of high-quality UK sites to display in SERPs. But no, it's all your Yank sites showing. Amazon's .com is frequently outranking their .co.uk. Why?

I am not remotely surprised there is a corresponding increase in unwanted (or unwarranted) UK traffic to US sites.

[broccoli]

I don't know what happened in this latest update over the weekend of the 27th as I wasn't affected by it - but trying to get a simple answer to a coding query is almost impossible at the moment. Info boxes with wrong information, no exact phrase match, just vague pages with related words and combinations of words. In the searches I've been doing, Google seems adamant that string means the same thing as array.

[afnaaz]

Hi guys,

Need one Help, I made a mistake by doing keywords stuffing in my website Contents in past and I fixed it by December first week; but still my page is not seeing any improvements, after that. I am sure I checked all other on page checklist of things to be done and all others are well and good. That website has lots of high quality links to it and I am sure it was demoted only because of Panda

Do you guys have any idea on following things

(i) How often does Google do "Data refresh"?
(ii) when was the last time "Data refresh" happened?

pls advise

Thanks
Adnaazy

[universenet]

afnaaz They doing that when example migrating to new webmaster tools
Now is happenning this kind of refresh (with mistakes)

But if you ask when google refresh data of your website.... depends what kind of website you have... if your website is important news website so this is every minute... in other way no... so copy of pages from your website can be few months old even or more on google servers

[afnaaz]

@universenet
>> Thanks for ur response, My query is general enquiry, not related to the recent Google search console bug.
and
>>Mine is not a news website. I am selling Software products.
Just want to know, nowadays how often Google does "Data Refresh" (Google Panda).

[universenet]

afnaaz bigger updates of google algorythm is few times a year... but even inside one day (or inside few days) they doing micro updates too ..
They do experiments all time .. when will be next update nobody know this ...

Same is if someone ask you when you will fix your car (and car is working gogd)
Of course nobody know when you will fix your car including you not know too...(why fix if working good)
when need fix is when car is broken
Same for google... when group of websites and data going out of convergency (or divergncy) ... or when going out of what google expect so google will do new update
(or when is discovered chance for better income)

[broccoli]

Did anyone notice this post Barry made a couple of weeks ago about a Google hack where webmasters have been removing their navigation to increase the ranking of their home page, or in the words of the person asking John Mueller, quote "to get around medic"?

[seroundtable.com...]

It struck me as really interesting as ever since last March I lost a big chunk of traffic to a website that has NO navigation. There are links to about 20 subpages on the homepage, and no links between the subpages to each other, just back to the home page. There's a small link to a sitemap, which is hosted on a different domain!

Is this just a form of extreme pagerank sculpting, to force all the link juice towards the home page? Or does it bypass some sort of penalty or bug in the way Google passes pagerank around a site?

[StoneSolid]

Speaking of mr Barry and seroundtable....
He reports about Google like <Mod edit: someone trying to preserve relationships with them/>, avoiding anything important.

Since he got the voice and contacts from Google top shots, why doesn't he ask:

- whats up with more and more and more ads above the fold, and ads in general?
- whats up with multiple google properties way above first organic result?
- why don't they make a NEWS PORTAL or something if they want to compete as a info websites do, with their own content for a change?
- whats up with multiple amazon listings on every query that involves an item that can potentially be bought?
- whats up with all the spam getting indexed and shown for (very) original queries?
- whats up with images search and displaying copyrighted images that are illegally republished on other sites, without displaying the original at all?
- whats up with long tail search in general and big brand sites in serps with unrelated "halfway there" results?
- whats up with google books results fillers literally everywhere?

These questions are just off the top of my head, list goes on and on.

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Mod's note: I've removed poster's unnecessarily political comments from his "simile" above, while trying preserve the rest of his intent. While off-topic for the thread, the comments have affected so much of the discussion here that I'm keeping as much of that intent (as I'm interpreting it) as I can... and also apologizing to Barry Schwartz of SER for the unwarranted rudeness.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:59 am (utc) on May 8, 2019]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[JesterMagic]

Good questions StoneSolid. I like Search Engine Roundtable but Barry tends to just report the news and only really gets comments from Google in regards to bugs or possible algo updates.

I don't think Barry wants to burn bridges and ask the tougher questions. If he did Google would just ignore him.

Google is a monopoly and just needs the appearance of listening and responding to criticism. How the internet works is very difficult for the people in government (and average joe citizen) to understand that any legislation moves at a snails pace.

Things are recently starting to catch up to these large internet companies though. Facebook with their privacy issues and Google with some of their employees organizing protests. It's interesting reading how Google treats their employees. If management can treat their employees like that and down play it in the media, I don't have much hope for any integrity when it comes to them and the search results.

[EditorialGuy]

Getting back to "Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2019," I haven't seen any great change in our Google traffic or overall traffic lately. It's mostly business as usual in our informational travel niche--not just for us, but also for the search results that I watch. As always, YMMV.

[StoneSolid]

@JesterMagic
I agree, it is a very complex issue all together and google definitely has a monopoly.

However, nothing is impossible.

I'm from EU, and I can get in direct touch with my country representatives in European parliament if needed.
I believe USA webmasters can get in touch with their congressmen as well.

@EditorialGuy says "lets get back to google updates and serp changes" - in what way exactly? I'm a member here for 2 months or so and I haven't learned or found out anything new.
I hope I don't get misunderstood here - I'm not saying people here are bad or something, but there is simply nothing to learn or find out.

We're all simply riding the wave as google goes from bad to worse (see list of my questions above)...
..and we're watching our profits go down while google rapidly goes up in each quarterly report.

[Milchan]

I don't know what happened in this latest update over the weekend of the 27th as I wasn't affected by it - but trying to get a simple answer to a coding query is almost impossible at the moment.

Ive been finding that for some time now in regards techy / coding searches- I usually end up using bing instead as it gives more relevant results.

Ever since google has been really trying to interpret user intent of searches the results have been getting less and less relevant - i.e. they have so far failed at it.

[samwest]

Seeing no movement in SERP, but user behavior is changing DRASTICALLY.
Rank brain appears to have early onset dementia...or advanced, I forget.

[Milchan]

for me thing super slow conversions wise again today . Im tired of trying to look into why though. why bother