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!

[SEO programmer]

@EditorialGuy

I have worked on this site now for over 2 years, and over those 2 years have never experienced a drop in traffic. I understand your point though about seasonality. It's just weird when that has never been the case.

I honestly think it's just a ripple effect of the recent Google bugs. Once the dust settles I think more light will shine on what's happening.

[universenet]

Ranking top 3 for over thousand plus keywords for very competitive commercial terms, yet traffic is no where. It seems as if people have stopped searching Google. It doesn't make any sense.”

Ha ha ha that is what you see! All down to personalisation not local or seasonal

Yes.. this is exactly what I said to him that can be personalized search and need just search from some other nologed computer with no same cookies
and even important no same IP address
If you are in same wifi (same IP) everyone getting similar results in google

Did you know?
If you using Skype for call and have skype account in your computer so Microsoft even checking NUMBER of hard disc on your computer
(looking crazy but believe me this is tested and checked and proved)
They used that way for recognize people who using free landing call to other countries that will no using resources too much
They are owner of skype and of windows... all is easy check

[ichthyous]

Ranking top 3 for over thousand plus keywords for very competitive commercial terms, yet traffic is no where. It seems as if people have stopped searching Google. It doesn't make any sense.

If you are ranking top three for over a thousand terms then you should be a millionaire already and ready to retire. You're very lucky to maintain that positioning, my site has been around for many years and Google has slowly dropped me out of the top three for a full third of my terms since last September, and still dropping. Once you fall out of top three expect little to no traffic.

[seomotionz]

Traffic is very down today. Is something going on? OT is really low and ads are also not responding much as they should do.

[Mark_A]

B2B Niche - Monday was very quiet, UK G Organic, but it was a bank holiday so no one was at work.

Tuesday was also slow, I expect there is a holiday element, people taking leave around the bank holiday.

Not enough data to show for Wednesday.

[samwest]

“Ranking top 3 for over thousand plus keywords for very competitive commercial terms, yet traffic is no where. It seems as if people have stopped searching Google. It doesn't make any sense.”

Ha ha ha that is what you see! All down to personalisation not local or seasonal.

Even the smoke screen called "incognito" shows my rank on page 1. I've always wondered why they would even offer this "tool" which would only would only serve to reveal the cloak and dagger nature of the SERP's. They want us in the dark...and it's still so pitch black out there that it's "spooky".

I will say, compared to a few years ago, the "images" block above the fold is MUCH better...with proper attribution to the proper source site. With this alone, I would expect MUCH better traffic, but the inverse is true. While things may suddenly appear broken, from Google's point of view it's all working perfectly fine as evident by Q1 results... [webmasterworld.com...]

[RedBar]

If you are ranking top three for over a thousand terms then you should be a millionaire already and ready to retire.

And just how do you correlate that?

I've been in the same position since the mid 90s way before Google came along, yet Google's image theft, personalisation and deliberate SERPs manipulation, especially of its US results, now has them delivering the most fubard search ever seen.

Have you ever tried a non-English language Google.tld product search and seen how many US results are delivered even when the actual search is not about a US product.

How many non .com/net/org results do you find in its SERPs even though there are far, far superior results that could be shown?

Google is a farce, period!

[NickMNS]

Ranking top 3 for over thousand plus keywords for very competitive commercial terms, yet traffic is no where. It seems as if people have stopped searching Google. It doesn't make any sense.

For this to make sense one needs to come to terms with the fact that:
There is no reliable way to track rankings
The paid services have no means of determining actual ranks because the relationship between Keyword and SERP is not one to one it is one to many and the many is determined by undisclosed and non-measurable factors such as personalization.

The best of the worst ranking measure is GSC where Google provides you with reliable (because it is Google providing Google data) but heavily biased statistics. GSC shows you a conditional result. Example, GSC shows for the keyword "Widget" that you rank on average #1. What this really means is that when you received an impression for "widget" your rank was on average #1. What isn't provided is the number of times the keyword appeared in search and you did not receive an impression.

Practically what this means is that the rank figures provided in GSC are of little value, the real number to watch is number of impressions.

Let me frame this differently. When an update occurs one often sees significant shift in the number of impression from one day to the next. As powerful as Google is, they are not able to directly change the keywords that are being searched. What this show is that Google has directed more or less traffic towards your site as a result of the update, your true rank has changed. I call this your "absolute rank". Say the number of impressions as increase 10x, in other words your "absolute rank" has increased, but your "conditional" rank, the rank reported in GSC, may have actually dropped, say from 3 to 5, but overall the amount of traffic certainly increased. You would also see a drop in CTR. But a 1% drop in CTR from for 4% to 3% would have little impact as compared to the 10x in impressions.

Now if someone reports that their number of impressions increased and their rank increased and as a result they are getting less traffic, then I would agree that that make no sense.

[ichthyous]

Practically what this means is that the rank figures provided in GSC are of little value, the real number to watch is number of impressions.

Google is constantly playing with this. Since the March update my impressions dropped off quite a bit in correlation with my drop in ranking out of the top three for quite a few search terms. The CTR is rising considerably though, so the number of clicks hasn't dropped as drastically as impressions. My image search CTR has doubled to 0.2% from the miserably low 0.1%. Both desktop and mobile web searches also have higher CTR now as well.

I noticed wild swings in the number of impressions and CTR in 2018 too, well before all these updates started in September. It appears that Google is playing with improved CTR while spreading the impressions across more sites? Whatever they're doing, it's designed to beef up their bottom line I'm sure.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar Everything boils down to personal experience I guess. My site has been online since 2002 so I've done the tango with Google for a long time. In my case the products are a high price point and **somewhat** unique...the margins are very high, but the overall number of sales is not.

If you are still selling widgets for .29 cents on Google I would think that Amazon would have destroyed that business long ago, let alone the fact that nobody uses Google product search anymore. The most important thing is to have exclusive products and to build a brand. Even with that, it's a tough slog these days online as it's all tilting toward large corporations. I took the fat profits I've earned over the better years and invested it...hence, my comment about being a millionaire. I never at any point had anything like 1,000 top three terms at any one time. Right now I have 60 (down from 90).

Everything is temporary, it's all sand under our feet. You have to see the future speeding at you like a freight train and prepare for eventualities. For those just starting out, online sales will never be as viable as it was for us. If they can make a go of social media though, the two combined are definitely still viable. Problem is social media is even more of a rigged game than Google is.

[StupidIntelligent]

Traffic is there, just pathetic conversions. This has been a problem for quite a number of years.

[StupidIntelligent]

Anyone who says zombie traffic doesn't exist hasn't got real traffic. This is true for sites that get a large number of users generally. Either people have stopped searching or Google is shaping buyer traffic to push towards ads.

[RedBar]

In my case the products are a high price point and **somewhat** unique...the margins are very high, but the overall number of sales is not.

'Tis similar to me however I produce specialised construction products and only supply by the full container load. From '95 through to 05/08 sales were ever-increasing and margins good. Like many others the crash in '08 affected many businesses however we survived it extremely well but the last few years have been horrendous with so many companies seemingly willing to supply at or near to zero profit levels.

Whereas all search engines used to be a good driver of new business enquiries, these days they hardly deliver any whatsoever, in actual fact we have gone back to national and international trade exhibitions as the main source of new customers.

One of the major problems that The Internet has created is "cheap and nasty" suppliers. Companies promsing the earth at ridiculously low prices and then when received are the garbage to be expected. This has obviously had an effect on the buyers/specifiers/architects trust levels hence these days we have more factory visits by the trade than ever before.

I can also tell you that the vast majority of my widget trade are experiencing similar and even more surprisingly the retail side of the trade has had the same happen. Literally only a few years ago a retailer would be quoted "Internet prices" by a potential buyer, these days, I am told by many, it no longer happens!

People have realised that you do get what you pay for and cheap can be very regrettable indeed.

Obviously I am not referring to branded box products.

[mosxu]

@stupidintelligent

Buyer traffic is not pushed towards my ads maybe to some favourite advertisers

[universenet]

from Google Webmasters
@googlewmc

"Today we are announcing support for FAQ and How-to structured data on Google Search and Google Assistant, including new reports in Search Console to monitor how your site is performing. [webmasters.googleblog.com...] …"

Google working all time on new structure data
If something seems like going out of control this can be because somthing gone out of control in new structure

[NickMNS]

The article linked by Universenet is very interesting, but the elephant in the room is:

"how do we get paid?"

Great business plan, the publisher create the content, markups the content and then Google takes it for free, serves it's ads on it, collects data, and pockets all the cash and what do we get?

It gets worse!
Its a catch 22. If you don't add the markup and give your content away for free, then someone else will and the what little revenue you had will continue to decay, as your website is not evolving with the market.

[jmorgan]

Does anyone here actually like/use Pinterest? I'm guessing I'm in the minority here seeing as this site is ranking so highly for anything and everything, but I'm personally kind of tired with clicking on a search result, going to Pinterest and then having them DEMAND that I log in before I can do anything.

What exactly is so great about this website?

[mosxu]

That is “catch 0” not “catch 22”

No point having a website

[ichthyous]

@jmorgan I used to use it when it referred lots of traffic to my site... Ten times more than any other social media site. But they switched their model to paid/boosted posts just like facebook so now if you pin something nobody sees it or repins it.

The feed is annoyingly full of promoted posts now, just like Instagram. I still do get traffic from there, and some of my pinterest post images rank higher in Google image search than the same image on my website. Google started dropping pinterest backlinks reported in GSC a while ago though. That's when I stopped bothering to post there. Now it seems more like one big recipe, makeup and fashion tips site.

I've stopped wasting time on social media. I had decent followings on my Facebook business page but nobody sees the posts unless you boost them now. I had many followers and backlinks on Google+ and we all know what happened there... Pinterest also converted to promoted posts and Instagram is very hard to build a decent following on your own... Its all about paying influencers to talk about you. Instagram for me is fine if the traffic is free, but I won't pay influencers to get a following that doesn't convert. YouTube seems to be the last frontier, but requires a lot of work and YouTube influencers are complaining about dropping ad revenue and their videos not getting seen. I have no direct experience on that.

[southernguy]

The structured data benefits no one but Google, it keeps users there longer, for us SEO's it offers no value, stop using Google folks. I'm telling you Bing and DDG work pretty darn good.

@jmorgan

I agree, why show Pinterest in search, but Pinterest is not the only one, currently in certain niches I see a lot of web 2.0 and parasites popping up like medium, blogspot etc.

As far as using Pinterest I have found the user interface to be somewhat buggy but as far as monetization it works well for certain niches, I have a beauty niche that makes a pretty good income from Pinterest alone. I still don't think it justifies showing up in search.

[samwest]

Are we still talking about the SERP's here or is this the social media / dead site topic? I'm still waiting to see if someone can post a few links to any articles related to this recent Google bug/fix/fubar/snafu mess or if we are to believe this is simply seasonal flux.

[NickMNS]

Catch22 is an expression that comes from a book of the same name (and also a movie was made). It describes a situation where no matter the action you take the outcome is equivalently negative.

Here is better explanation: [en.wikipedia.org...]

[samwest]

@NickMNS, I think for most of us, since the 2010 MayDay update, the better phrase is "diminishing returns".

[ichthyous]

@samwest What you are referring to is simply the latest of several updates going back to September 2018. My site fell off a cliff then and then it only got worse after the March 12th update. Nobody here has posted any really verifiable recovery strategy that entire time as far as I can tell...just a lot of disparate (and desperate) hunches. The huge drops don't seem to follow any clear pattern, although it might suggest that Google is devaluing some types of links and valuing others more highly. I've tried making all kinds of changes recommended here and hasn't helped much.
My site loads faster than ever and works well on mobile... Still 30% of my traffic vanished in the last 6 months. Google's screwed up reporting in GSC and mysterious days of lost data are just a side show. Do you expect your traffic to bounce back when that gets resolved? I wouldn't count on it, but I would be happy if I were wrong on that.

[mosxu]

@Nick

Ha ha ha,
Yes we need to get used to negative growth because of “catch 22” instead of having a transparent set of rules so that we all can trade fairly.

[universenet]

John Mueller at google

SEO contests are pretty useless.

SEO contests never reflect real life-performance, they generate a ton of spam that negatively affects the whole ecosystem, they're a big waste of time & effort. The smart approach to SEO contests is to ignore them.

So... SEO not important more?

[JesterMagic]

Wow that link from universenet about Google Structured Data shows you what Google is concentrating on. Structured Data use to be about the search engines better understanding pages so they could better organize the organic results. Now it is all about rich snippets which they are now calling "rich results". All the photos seems to show these rich results pretty much answering the questions completely. No need to visit the website providing the information. Not sure why Google (and other search engines) can get away with this. If your niche has a lot of questions that can be answered by a rich result your in trouble.

All that is missing now below these rich results is a related ad. I am sure in the next year or so we will see those.

[ichthyous]

Considering the number of crawl anomalies reported in GSC for pages that actually exist, I am beginning to wonder if part of the problem with sites that have lost traffic is having too many redirects. I have a huge number of 301 redirects in place from when I redesigned my site in 2015. My htaccess file is 1.5mb in size and I can't drop them as Google still looks for those old urls every day. It seems that perhaps Google may not want to devote the crawl budget to redirects and this could be hurting some sites with a lot of redirects in place...just a theory on my part.

Question 1: How many of you who have seen big drops in traffic recently have a significant number of 301 redirects in place on your sites?
Question 2: How to stop using them when Google still comes looking for them years later?

[NickMNS]

I can't drop them as Google still looks for those old urls every day.

Google only continues to look for these pages because there is still something to find. If the pages is gone, then its gone, return a 404 and forget about it. Google may still comeback in the future, because Google never forgets, but the frequency will diminish overtime. It is perfectly fine to return a 404. Having a massive htaccess file is not a good idea, it likely slows things down for the entire site and it makes it a nightmare to maintain.

[skaterpunk]

I am beginning to wonder if part of the problem with sites that have lost traffic is having too many redirects.

I'm as frustrated as anyone with the traffic and revenue rollercoaster. But how much of the blame can each of us admit too? I made a mess for the first few years of operating my site with lack of experience, and polluted the internet with defunct links, too many redirects, and indexing stuff that shouldn't have been indexed.

Google seems to be making their share of mishaps, but trying to keep the web organized when it's bombarded daily with bad web management, black hat SEO, and fake websites, seems like an impossible task.

I don't believe we can scrub the internet like a personal computer, but that's what seems to be needed.