Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2019

[EditorialGuy]

The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4944194.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 11:00 am on Jun 1, 2019 - (PDT -8)

Also, with the ad model a majority of people know that you are trying to get something out of them - a purchase, a signup etc - so there is a lesser level of trust there but if they find you through organic whilst they are in the research stage and you provide good info and value, then there is trust built and you get more sales.

On the other hand, people who are actively shopping for a product or service may regard ads as useful information. That was the concept behind Yellow Pages directories and magazines like Computer Shopper.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:07 pm (utc) on Jun 1, 2019]
[edit reason] Cleanup after thread split to new thread [/edit]

[riccarbi]

My rankings and organic traffic are nosediving, and I really don't know why. I moved my websites to a new VPS in April and, since that moment, Google's traffic started dropping; this is the first period in years that my monthly traffic is lower than the previous year's. I have to point out that the new VPS is much faster than the old one (as I verified with almost all testing tools, and as GA correctly reports), hardware and software platform are now much better than before; furthermore, I didn't change provider and server location; yet, the IP has changed. It seems that the problem is limited to Google, Bing traffic for my main website <snip> increased by 50% after the move; only Google's dropped by about 30% in just a few weeks.
I really don't understand what's happening with Google. Faster site = worse ranking? This makes no sense. Algo change? A penalization for changing the IP address? Just a coincidence?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:39 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2019]
[edit reason] removed url to poster's site, per Forum Charter [/edit]

[BangkokBaby]

@Riccarbi, many others are in your boat (me included). I have had big jumps up and big jumps down since September 2018.

I don't think anybody can really guess on what is happening but one thing for sure is that a % of these changes are mistakes/errors.

Some sites that dropped in 2018 updates saw big jumps in 2019.

Others have gone up, down, up down this year which doesn't seem to make much sense as most SEO change take months to come into effect.

Before 2019 Google search was pretty straight forward, you make positive changes you see positive results.

Nowadays ranking can change by 25%+- every other week. There's not much you can do in a two week period to see changes so big.

Many here have done nothing and are going up and down every other week.

In April and May Google dropped the ball themselves with indexing issues, these issues they need to address and make public, but anything internally algorithmic wise they will keep their mouth shut.

I'm guessing it is possible that they made some errors to their algorithm which perhaps cannot be undone and in order to fix past errors we are seeing this.

Part of it is the new mobile layout which will impact impressions and organic listings are now lower.

For now I'm just waiting it out, not really making any major changes to my site until things settle down which I hope is pretty soon.

I don't believe the Google is making us all turn into ads, because Google doesn't think short-term, and anyone can see if they did this in 5-10 years they will become the next AOL/ask Jeeves. The people working there are too smart to fall for that mistake.

I just wish Google would come out and give us some kind of guidance on what is happening and what we can except as many people on this forum and 100k+ other admins feed their families from their sites, so it would be great to keep us all in the loop so we know what is going on.

It's not like they aren't reading these threads because for sure someone at Google is.

[Dimitri]

Before 2019 Google search was pretty straight forward, you make positive changes you see positive results.

hum...

[ichthyous]

My rankings and organic traffic are nosediving, and I really don't know why

Because it's your turn now, that's all. I wouldn't kill myself looking for a reason your site has plunged. Mine did the same thing last September 27th and my traffic never recovered. In March it dropped again and has stayed at the new lower level since then. Lately, mysteriously, my ranking has started to crawl upward daily according to SEMrush. Usually that's cause for cheer, but my traffic has not increased at all. I'm still 20% lower overall from this time last year, and up to 60% on my most important landing pages.

I hadn't done anything or made any big changes when my traffic fell off a cliff either. I also upgraded to a faster VPS account last year but my IP address did not change. You might see large swings in your ranking moving forward, but the traffic will remain mysteriously stable at the new low level.

[Andem]

Seeing surprising increases on several sites that I recently discovered were using a certain type of exploit that can only be described as blackhat and illegal (in the US).

Funnily enough, I did get into contact with somebody at Google and they confirmed my research and thanked me very much for my efforts.

Very strange because these sites are still ranking like they're Wikipedia in several verticals.

[whoa182]

Is anyone seeing any issues with google analytics? I've had zero traffic for the past hour and both of my plugins lost their authentication. I put in the tracking code into the header of the sites, but nothing. Test traffic on GA doesn't work and I just tried a VPN, which also isn't showing up on real-time reports.

[Andem]

@whoa182: Analytics seems not to be updating at the moment.

[lostshootingstar]

Google is having widespread issues across many products right now.

Also, is this a first?! Google telling us there will be a core update tomorrow?

[twitter.com...]

[riccarbi]

I posted about this GA problem already (post moved to the AdSense forum). But my thought now is "Hey, we have been experiencing a lot of Google services' disruptions for the last two months. Indexing bugs, GA bugs, AdSense problems. What the heck are they doing in Mountain View?" Did all their engineers go mad all of a sudden, or are they preparing something utterly new? And, should we all be scared of what they are building up, considering Google's last moves against webmasters and publishers, or will Google's management eventually remember that they were once committed to the "Don't be Evil" commandment, sooner or later?

[whoa182]

I had a feeling something was about to happen... Googlebot activity was about 5-6x higher the other day. A big spike.

I haven't been around here much lately, but since March my website has been seeing steady growth like the old days. I recovered almost completely and then saw little boosts in traffic with other minor updates. My other website that was more neglected and didn't undergo the same kind of overhaul did not see any improvement... The funny thing is that about 90% of the posts are #1 on bing, duckduckgo, and other search engines.

Good luck everyone!

[edited by: whoa182 at 9:23 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2019]

[Halaspike]

I'm seeing 0 real time users for the first time in my life, either there's a problem with Google analytics or they just rolled out the update and my site has been burned

[Jori]

Let's keep calm. Danny Sullivan said it's unrelated.

I'm having the same issues, and adsense is freezes to. My positions are more or less equal it seems... Let's wait.

[Cralamarre]

Just got back from the gym, checked Analytics and found out my site has not had a single visitor in over 2 hours. If I ever needed an excuse to not go back to the gym, this is it.

[swright]

Same GA problem here. Great way to have a heart attack.

[Milchan]

definitely a problem with analytics - showing no visitors when there are certainly visitors on site (for example I used tawk.to for live chat and that also shows real time visitor stats and I can people are there with that).

Yet another google problem. Never seen anything like this recent period ever.

[aristotle]

The term "core update" suggests to me that google merely adjusts some parameters in the core part of the algorithm, and doesn't add any major new filters.

[Dimitri]

I cross my fingers, I have NEVER been negatively impacted by Google's core updates. But for how long? I know that no one is really "safe", and that anything can happen, including side effects.

[jxlarrea]

Google Cloud is down. Most Google services including Analytics, GCP, Search Console, Youtube, etc. are down.

AdSense reporting has been frozen since the outage began about 4 hours ago. Ads are showing but who knows if we will see any revenue today.

Google Cloud problems in the last 24 hours
[istheservicedown.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:49 pm (utc) on Jun 6, 2019]
[edit reason] Added caption to posted link [/edit]

[aristotle]

Google Cloud is down

Hmm.. I wonder if they're being attacked. Don't a lot of major websites use Google Cloud.

[Milchan]

my analytics is back up , has been for a bit now.

[universenet]

we will see how internet world and google search will looking after 3 June 2019 Core update
[twitter.com ]
I hope no bad surprise again for many

[Milchan]

I hope no bad surprise again for many

I expect nothing but bad things from google now so if I get any improvements it is a nice surprise but then even then I would see them as temporary anyway.

[BangkokBaby]

Thanks Google just what we needed to start June off, another core update!

*hides behind sofa*

[HereWeGo123]

Yeah, Per our observations, Google has definitely been testing something in the evenings and at night (U.S. times). Based on Google's conduct, those tests in the past were always followed by an update. In my opinion, the update will be large enough that Google has to announce it in an isolated way. Plus, I suspect that it will be a further tweaking/refinement of the March 12 update since a broad core update is coming just three months after. Perhaps G got enough feedback from webmasters about some garbage appearing in the SERPs. As I've mentioned here before, after this March 12 update, there have been a number of sites ranking prominently due to them buying those very expired domains that had high DA backlinks from the past, which black HATs thought they can piggy-back off of. Plus, those very sites had high authority links that were pointing to other dead domains that they simply redirected to their current money site. I can't imagine Google ever liking that. Maybe this update will address those very sites.

[HereWeGo123]

Is it too early to start posting observations of this update? If not, I am noticing slightly higher real time stats right now vs what we’ve been seeing for the past couple months for this time of the day.

[SweetPotato]

Just the usual shaving expect 10%-30% less visitors. Spam, scrape, aggregate content sites, sites that haven't updated since 2012, sites that use "keywords" meta tag, sites that spam the meta description and articles with same keywords 57 times will get a boost. That's what i'm seeing.

[Dimitri]

Since exactly midnight UTC , I observes a solid 25% increase of traffic (compared to last week, last month and last year). I have no idea if this is related to the new core update, I think it's a little too early in the day for Google, so it might be other factors, or a use of a temporary database while the new one is being deployed...

[samwest]

Don't you just love how Google's little dotted line predicts that your traffic will go down, then it actually DOES go down?
Whatever happened to natural traffic?
That's a rhetorical question by the way...

[jmorgan]

Nothing changed for me so far.