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]

[Dimitri]

So who rank higher than us?

Ads, Youtube, Images, News, Answer Box, Related Searches... :)

By the way, as I mentioned earlier this month, I did have a nice increase of human traffic, with the core update. The first few days it was like 20-25% , now it more like a little less than 20%, which is "big". (Informational and message board site on everyday life themes).

[sofie77]

@I am seeing big changes in the SERPs now. I see what feels like an update is underway OR at least some kind of tweaks.

Yes, same here. I am pretty sure when US is woke up more people will write about this.

Got hit in August 2018 (- 70%)
Recoverd half in March 2019 (+35%)
Got hit again in June 2019 (-20%)
and today another hit (-10% / -20%)

It looks like a correction of the June 2019 core update or anything with EAT. I am in the medical sector. Some hospital, goverment and pharmacy pages rank me out for keywords they dont have on the site. It seems its all about trust and synomys / related words.

[MayankParmar]

not seeing any improvements :(

[browndog]

I've never seen traffic this low...it's completely collapsed. I hoped my host had crashed...and was disappointed to find my site is still up.

[Martin Ice Web]

I guess what J Mueller said about there is nothing you can do seems to be the truth.
After scanning a lots of sites that are ranking very well in my niche I could say that 90% of them have desastrous SEO quality.
From loading times up to 7 seconds, JS errors, loading 5 css files a.s.o. up to mobile pages with low accessibility.
All have one in common: they are the manufacturers
This can not be beaten by any SEO factors.

From what JM said that this update was about getting the quality of the whole site was sure not the truth. Didn`t he say something like : does the site look outdated? is the site maintained? ....

Content seems to be downgraded in my niche. What rules are manufacturers whatever the sites quality is like.

[Dimitri]

Do you mean that the site of the manufacturer of a product is coming first, before sites talking about this product?

[mosxu]

@Dimitri

What do you mean you’ve had a nice increase in human traffic?

How do you know it is human?

[Dimitri]

What do you mean you’ve had a nice increase in human traffic?

I always mention "humans" to show that I am making the difference between real humans (or close to humans :)) and bots.

How do you know it is human?

I achieve very complex and picky filtering,so I am pretty confident to be able to tell if a request is from a human or a bot ... my script is certainly not 100% perfect, but I sincerely believe it's it 90% reliable.
I can also match this with visitors engagements on the site, since its mostly a message board, I can see also the increase of posts.

[mosxu]

@Dimtri

What is the percentage between humans and bots on your website being a message board one expects less bots...

[StupidIntelligent]

Updates are happening every two weeks now regularly. Next update would be mid July, so hang on there and don't buy that rope just yet.

[Dimitri]

What is the percentage between humans and bots on your website

Roughly 80% of bots , 20% of humans. In bots, I include GoogleBot, BingBot, etc... the "legitimate" bots, but also all the scrappers which I am blocking.

being a message board one expects less bots...

I don't know. With new messages posted all the time, "legitimate" bots are often coming, and by having lot of "content" ... scrappers like it too, or at least "try".

(illegitimate bots = scrappers + spam bots)

[ichthyous]

Does anyone here actually have more organic desktop users than mobile?

My arts related site is still 54% desktop. Desktop users convert far better than mobile, they have more serious intent in general.

[BangkokBaby]

Yes an update is rolling out, I'm down -15% in today's update.

In Jan/Feb/March/April and most of May My site traffic was shooting up with most of the updates.

Then I lost 65%~ in the June 3rd update, and today another 15%.

After June 3rd I made a bunch of on-site changes to my site in terms of reducing errors like 301, 404, missing meta and doubled my site health score on Ahfrefs. I also disavowed spam links.

[NickMNS]

@BangkokBaby I'm seeing the same here, I was down about 15% yesterday and it's looking worse for today.

[whoa182]

No positive change here, traffic still down about 80% since June.

After the March core update, I was also benefitting from each subsequent smaller update. Now, there is nothing. No growth, just a flat line. I have about 170 articles on my site, about 80 people from Google each day... this awful and makes me want to give up.

I assume that there is no chance of recovery before another core update.

[jediviper]

All your traffic info comes from GA or from SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs?

[SweetPotato]

@woah182 Don't give up man things will get better!

[Dimitri]

Don't give up

+1 this is the right state of mind.

[RedBar]

Don't give up man things will get better!

Only if all the sheeple give up on their Google addiction.

Facts are facts, Google has absolutely no intention, nor incentive, to assist anyone unless they are prepared to give them advertising Dollars ... forget that and you're already in trouble.

[zeus]

My site is a ecommerce site with sale of health Products (Natural) with blog about Healthy topics. That what google hate so much in the last year. down 80%. Now I will focus more on offline promotion, like I see many others do over the last 2-3 years. Still rank perfect on duckduckgo

[clicklib]

Today I got an e-mail from Glenn Allsop, quite a well known SEO guy I guess, with a link to a huge blogpost about the June update.
Have any of you read it? What do you make of it?
[gaps.com...]

[steffanlv]

It's probably best I chime in with what I am seeing. I have several high profile, large websites that clients pay me to optimize for and manage. On most of the eCom sites I manage the overall traffic from Organic is substantially down since the June update rolled out. Down for one eCom site on average as much as 55%.

I have a hand full (less than 5) mostly black hat websites (sites that I practiced grey/black hat tactics) that were used primarily for affiliate sales revenue starting back around 2010. Around the fall of 2014 to the beginning of 2015 most of the SEO value of these sites disappeared, mostly due to Panda and Penguin updates. Since this June update rolled out every one of these 5 sites has jumped back into the top 10 for targeted competitive keyword phrases (that they used to rank for). These are sites would be considered web 2.0s; most are Wordpress websites that have pretty good quality content that was posted regularly and were well optimized on page SEO.

These websites were setup to appear to be authoritative. I sent a LOT of spammy back links to these sites but most did have some very good, high quality back links that I then built back links to (typically Tier 1 through Tier 4). For most of these sites the new/fresh content ended in 2014 when Google updates killed the value the sites had and all sales stopped. I checked the historical back link data for these sites and they did lose a big majority of the links they had. AHrefs shows very low UR/DR scores for these sites. The overall value markers from AHrefs, Moz, etc show that these websites have very very low quality yet they are ranking now back close to where they ranked years ago, outperforming competitors with much much higher DA, UR, DR, etc scores for tough keyword phrases .

Just an FYI. If anyone wants more info feel free to ask.

[aristotle]

After scanning a lots of sites that are ranking very well in my niche I could say that 90% of them have desastrous SEO quality.

For a long time google has been on an Anti-SEO campaign. One result is that sites with good SEO can be outranked by sites with "desastrous SEO quality"

[TeresaD]

I have followed this thread from the start, I have a very small ecommerce site selling {decorative metal items} my target market is small and I compete with high street names, I was very happy with my conversions until the 21st May when they fell off a cliff.

My business is seasonal I am usually very busy until the end of May then June slows down but not this much (https://imgur.com/UHsMwgR)

[Milchan]

@ steffanlv "Just an FYI. If anyone wants more info feel free to ask."

I was wondering if you could give your opinion on what would be good tactics (or if you think there are any) to try to improve rankings / traffic now then taking into account what has happened to your sites and what you SEO tactics, site configurations, content types etc that you have. By this I don't mean what black hat tactics, but what white hat tactics you think would be the best to focus on, things to check / do etc. I think plenty of people would be interested to hear that if you have any insights.

[steffanlv]

@Milchan, sure. This is something I have obviously been researching ever since the June Update finished rolling out. As many have posted here, I believe there are discernible markers for E-A-T. I think one of the issues a couple of eCom sites I manage have is online reputation. Although these sites use ShopperApproved and have had a relationship with TrustPilot I believe the aggregate scores/reviews are hurting these eCom sites. It's one of the only markers I have identified that could be an issue. I use CORA a lot and these eCom sites are pretty much in line with competitors yet our eCom sites have tanked in rankings since the update rolled out. Pretty bad, where before things have always been pretty good. Each eCom site has a long history and the ShopperApproved reviews are better than 4 stars and are added throughout the website. Rich snippet usage sitewide.

We believe many of our competitors are more E-A-T than our eCom websites even though software like CORA says we are fairly similar. We plan on altering product pages to accommodate what we think we know about E-A-T. List of actionable items includes:

- More use of social signals
- Getting review platform scores up
- Getting more referrals from authority websites (i.e. Wikipedia)
- Adding testimonial-like content throughout the websites
- Adding Author widgets to pages (including appropriate rich snippet coding)
- Adding surveys, polls with scoring, user participation numbers and results to product and other pages
- Adding How-To and Q&A content to product pages
- Reviewing and optimizing META related content
- Employ better use of LSI related supporting content per product page
- Review and edit product page content focusing on TF-IDF from data obtain from TermLabs.io
- Add interactivity indicators throughout the websites like "number of times page has been viewed/shared"
- Add a short referral area on each product page with a couple of outbound links to highly authoritative websites
- Add "Customers also found these pages useful" content
- More extensive use of rich snippet content/coding

The list is growing. These are items we have discussed within the past week or so. I'm sure I forgot a few items that we recently discussed. Would really like people's feedback on items that can be added to this list or perhaps subtracted!

[BangkokBaby]

@Steffanlv, it's interesting you said that about your black hat sites. My #1 competitor is doing black hat which is obvious when you run SEMRush/Ahrefs on their site. Paid links which appear on the home page or exact anchor matches.

They got hit in 2018 and early 2019 badly, after the JUNE update they shot up about 90% and are now out ranking everyone in my niche.

[jmorgan]

Ironic that semrush noticed a more significant change from a non-official update than one that was officially announced.

For the record, I gained rankings in some keywords, and lost in others. Will need to do a deeper analysis to figure out if I'm overall ahead or behind on average.

[henryrandall82]

Hi There,

I am running multiple ecommerce site for herbal and ED medicines and targeting Google.co.uk, and from one month, I am getting regular keyword fluctuation, some time it's show at 2nd or 3rd page and same day or next day it's not showing in Google at any pages. And it's going regular and also traffic is going worst day by day.

From 25-June-2019, I have seen 50% organic indexed keywords lost for my all herbal and ED medicines websites.

Please let me know is there any Google update going for this, and how we can retain ranking there. I have checked sites and as per Google, it's 100% well optimized for meta tags, content and link building aswell.

[paranoid android]

Is this possibly a 'trap' by Google? Temporarily appear as if low-quality black hat sites will rank higher, wait for certain publishers to turn to the dark side, then switch a flip and down-rank all the low-quality black hat sites again and reward the ones with high authority/good quality content?