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]

[paranoid android]

How about your search clicks? They seem relatively unaffected for me, but Discover has been slashed.

[MayankParmar]

@paranoid android Position for some top keywords dropped, so the search traffic has seen a drop of 50%. But the overall rank hasn't dropped a lot.

As mine is a news site, I am completely dependent on Google News and Discover. Search traffic only contributes to 20% of my site traffic.

I have a decent CTR of 10% on Discover.

[paranoid android]

Interesting. My discover data is really sporadic when I look at it. It peaked mid-May, then crashed, then peaked again at the end of May, then had much smaller peaks and crashes in the first few days of June, before being completely wiped out on the 6th June onwards.

[ronei]

Thats really a big update and keep going for 1 week. Number of website noticed traffic fall after this update. one big sites dailymail also post that they have lost 50% of traffic which is a huge .

Lets see how we can improve our ranking and traffic after this update.

[Selen]

If a site is good*, people will find it anyhow, will link to it, will share it, will return, etc...

Two big problems:

1. Even if some people will link to it, the links will be in 90% "nofollow."
2. In the meantime, dishonest competitors who abuse Google terms and buy links will get hundreds of dofollow links.

By math and common sense, it is impossible that an honest webmaster creating great content and just "waiting" for links will ever match the link chasers.

[southernguy]

2. In the meantime, dishonest competitors who abuse Google terms and buy links will get hundreds of dofollow links.

@Selen and currently there are a lot of those and for the most part the ones who are ranking at least in my niche/

[MayankParmar]

It also depends on the niche. Pretty easy to build links on technology niche.

[whoa182]

How natural is it for a website to have 95.5% of their links being "dofollow"?

I know a site that has just that. I can't see how that can be natural...

They've been doing amazingly well with very rapid growth in the health space. The editor has access to several high DA sites (not his) and posts on them every day. Frequently linking to this new website he is a part of, from all these domains with no issues. Links in articles, links in the footer, links everywhere.

They have a board full of Ph.D.'s.. but their growth was anything but "natural". It was simply about connections. Knowing the right people and acquiring very easy links because of that. Their website is hardly special and unique.

I was looking again last night at sites where I could possibly guest post or reach out to, to maybe collaborate. But it's like a graveyard out there.. so many health sites completely destroyed in the last year from looking at SEMRush.

I'm starting to doubt that the regular user who finds your article on Google is going to have a website. And going to link to you. Most webmasters who find your site are there for one reason, to get ideas or copy your content, but won't link to you.

[Selen]

A hint for Google if they are reading on how to detect some notorious spammers. They have been playing Google search for at least a couple of years now and they are on top positions after each core update.

- They create pages on strong domains (all those HuffPost / Quora / Forbes and other pages made by "contributors" = SEOs). The content on these pages is typically pretty good, including photos, videos, but it is still 100% paid undisclosed content.

- [here is the important part] - They don't link directly to their money sites; they either user free / temporary domains like .site, .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq, .info, and either use a redirection or a landing page where visitor clicks and is taken to their money pages. That way, they protect their destination domains from being penalized.

For Google AI it should be simple to detect though: when content contains links to all those temporary domains, it strongly suggest the content is paid / manipulated. Only the spammer who created the content knows about the existence of these temporary domains, so it cannot be confused with genuine content.

I would go even further - when content has links redirecting domainA to domainB, including short URL services like bit.ly, it can be safely considered as non-genuine / sponsored / manipulated. I have yet to find a top-ranking page that disapproves this claim.

[HereWeGo123]

After the June core update, I am still noticing the same sites ranking that I believe should not be ranking. Fly-by-night sites. Sites that have tons of high DA links through expired/301 domains to themselves. The content is really poor (but nicely optimized/structured for SEO purposes). All black-hat. I'm sure Google is aware of these flaws, that's why I think they will be releasing another major update relatively soon (amongst other reasons too).

[Treud]

After one week for sure we’ve been hit by a penalty now have to figure out which one ....

[Histerius]

@Selen Reuters, for example, uses short links when they think a source should be linked and that are not links at all, you have to copy paste them if you want visit them.

[Selen]

If you think about "genuine users" - when they link to your website because they find your content useful / interesting, they just copy-paste the destination URL. Only SEOs / spammers would use redirecting domains or URL shorteners (I never click on those as they can lead to malware sites).

[Treud]

My guess is a thin content algo hit.
I just noticed that since 1 month google had indexed the double of our pages (need to see which ones and how).
As we have a e-commerce site looks like it’s all the products attributes pages that help nothing for google but give info to customer.
No idea how they went on index has they are not clickable in the product (sizes, weight...)
It’s a page with no text nothing. And it return 404 on the google index.
I just started 1 week before the update a Noindex of 1000 pages like that but it takes some time to roll out.
Let’s see at next update if it’s this.

But when a site of 2000 pages returns 1000 404 on index sure it’s not good ...

[NickMNS]

@Flipflop and @paranoid android
Your issues with pagination may be explained by this (from March):
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google Retires rel=prev/next

[aristotle]

They have a board full of Ph.D.'s..

That reminds me that a few months ago I came across an article about some webmasters creating fake Board of Directors pages to try to increaser their site's authority.
It's not hard to do -- just copy some photos of people's faces from the web and create some fake credentials. May not be hard to trick google's algorithm either.

[enricofairme]

CCN (one of the largest cryptocurrency news sites) is closing down following the June update:

[ccn.com...]

[Halaspike]

CCN is really out to challenge Google with that huge article and I'm very sure affected well established websites will do same if Google doesn't fix this trash they called an update.

[NickMNS]

I think that article from CCN speaks volumes. On the one hand, I can certainly relate and sympathize with the frustration felt. Its tough to take a hit. I've been there, I'll likely be there again at some point in the future. But when one looks at their traffic graph the hit was not that bad. I think anyone with a some experience in this crazy business should know that rapid traffic growth has a high likely hood of "correction". In my view expanding your staff/business aggressively during such a period of growth can be best characterized as a gamble. You lost the bet, it hurts but get over it. But to come out after a few days and start insinuating conspiracy theories about left leaning political bias in my view lacks professionalism and the journalistic rigor that CCN claims to have.

While we do understand that Google needs to update their search algorithm from time to time, we cannot comprehend why they are allowed to enforce such drastic changes that have such dramatic consequences for so many news sites over the course of a very limited time – 24 hours, without any explanation or warnings to media organizations like ours. While they did announce the update, they did not disclose any information of what the core update would do.

It's funny how on several occasions according to the traffic graph posted they have seen equally positive jumps, yet they didn't complain then, "Oh Google you should have warned us that you would doubled our traffic overnight!"

OUR DEMANDS FOR GOOGLE
Give a three month’s notice to all webmasters, let alone news organizations, of any major Google Core Update and elaborate what it might affect

Three month prior to this update their traffic was exactly were it is after the update. So really what is the complaint about?

[lostshootingstar]

I think the CCN article is a little heavy handed and a bit of a knee jerk reaction, but I understand their frustration. I've had to look quality employees in the eyes and tell them they no longer have a job because Google decided we are "not worthy" pretty much overnight.

[NickMNS]

I agree:

a bit of a knee jerk reaction,

But they only lost three month worth of growth, most of that growth occurred in May. That spurt of growth was an outlier. How much "quality" staff could you possibly hire in one to three month. That doesn't even cover your typical probation period. Come on! someone is laying it on real thick.

[enricofairme]

I agree with you all regarding the knee jerk reaction of the announcement. Makes me assume there was larger, fundamental flaws with how the business was being run.

[MayankParmar]

"Our daily revenue is down by more than 90%".

That could be the actual reason.

[Milchan]

the " left leaning political bias" bit was the bit I thought was the biggest mistake in that article. Im guessing that the plan with that might be to try to make that part of the issue as much as possible and in conjunction with the petition to the whitehouse they have created, whos' main resident has mentioned similar feelings about google before, they hope to get some traction or action on it, or at least some publicity.

That part aside though , the overall concerns of the article are valid. Google is in a position wereby they can control what gets seen by large majorities of people in many many countries and that includes, news,entertainment, medical/health advice,eccommerce and basically any kind of info. They do it without having to answer to anyone about , explain how or why they do it and make billions of dollars whilst doing so. It is crazy it has been alowed to get as far as this already.

[southernguy]

I knew they were making money but I didn't think they were making billions, this is incredible. You would think press agencies would have complained about this a long time ago. [miamiherald.com...]

[Dimitri]

well established websites

if a site is "well established", then it no longer relies on Google to get traffic.

[MayankParmar]

But every publication even estabilished ones are dependent on Google for a chunk of traffic. Nobody wants to lose a chunk of traffic coming from Google.

[Milchan]

if a site is "well established", then it no longer relies on Google to get traffic.

That is a very simplistic view of things in this age of rapid change.

I have a very well established website in my niche , the first in the region of its kind, was number one for years and the majority of the traffic has always come through google. So I can confidently say that it is well established , yet I can say without a doubt that it is google organic traffic that defines if I make money or not. (and yes ive heard all the stuff about diversify, dont rely on google etc but ive tried many different ways and google is the only one that works. In the past brick and mortar sales were also good but the internet put a stop to that years ago)

[NickMNS]

RE Miami herald opinion piece.

Most notably, AMP (accelerated mobile pages) and the addition of a “Breaking News” category on YouTube have made it possible for people to indulge in all the news content they want without ever going to a publisher’s website.

While it is technically correct that with AMP the user does not go to a the publisher's website. That is, the page is displayed from a CDN instead of a specific web-server. The page's content and most importantly the ads and ad revenue are still going to the publisher. So I have trouble seeing how the use of AMP is directly impact their earnings. I can't speak about YouTube.

But one thing that stands out about this article. When I go to the website, it flashes the story and then the page goes blank. No Google, no conspiracy, simply a web-page that is so bloated and convoluted with useless code and tracking mechanisms that it doesn't display on a page. I had to turn off JS to get the story to display. If your content and ads don't appear to the user then there is no mystery as to why your revenues are dropping. I'm not trying to defend Google, because there are a lot of practices that they engage in that are in defensible. But as publisher one cannot blame Google when the basic functionality of your website does not work.

[Selen]

Could this June 4 Update be related to Youtube policy update that deletes hateful and "borderline" videos - the timing is spot on: [finance.yahoo.com...]