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]

[givinguponlife]

And i am done :) last update pushed me higher, and now google took all and more back, so wtf are these idiots tweaking, they can't make up their minds

25k users day gone to nothing i a m done

[Venomous1]

Still no impact.

Financial Services in the UK.

[samwest]

Waiting for someone to suggest it might be due to the weather...lmao.

[SweetPotato]

You would think after a while they would get it right, but no.
Every update screw things more and more.
How do this people keep their jobs?
Maybe if there was ANY competition to google they'll be forced to actually make things right.
And i don't talk about my site personally, i have to constantly go to duckduckgo to find stuff google won't even index, for reasons only they know but are a secret.
Soviet Russia had less secrets. We know how that went.

[samwest]

How do this people keep their jobs?

They don't. After 15+ years, I recently had to take an engineering job to make ends meet. From 1996 to 2010, i was easily doing 6 figures annually all by myself. The turnaround actually started shortly after the 2008 administration took office which subsequently emboldened Googles greed. Since then its been a slow ride to under 10k/year...poverty level...so much for free enterprise on the web. If it wasn't for the new administration and easing of policy restrictions, I'd be living in a cardboard box. Thank you DJT...Now finish the job and break up Google.

[jmorgan]

Semrush went up to 4.6 then down to 3.5 which, if accurate, shows that this update wasn't as big a deal as some of their previous ones.

[WhoKnows111]

WTF is going on

One of my websites is getting 89% of traffic from the Philippines the past 3 days

Another is so far showing - 73% loss in search - when searching for main phrases I see Quora above me everywhere

[ichthyous]

Well, after months of being in the doghouse my site is skyrocketing today in SEMrush. It's been trending upward over the last two weeks and now is just zooming. Many terms suddenly back in the top 3 again overnight. Let's see if it stays this way and if the traffic actually recovers. I could use a break after 9 months of Google hell.

[MayankParmar]

Mine is a technology niche site and for all queries (even very specific ones) on Google News, I ranking on the last position. Rank for all stories on normal search has also dropped.

For any query on Google news, the first page has relevant results, second and third page has irrelevant Horse racing tips, Russian sites, American Flat Track stories and I am last. Even horse racing tips story which has nothing to do with query outranked me.

I have dofollow backlinks from all big companies and publications (90+ DA).

[cabsco]

We lose roughly 40% of our traffic since May 4. The decline in our traffic started at around 9:00am - 10:00am (GMT+1) and since then it has stayed that way. We weren't affected by the March update but instead experience a 30% increase in organic traffic. Now its all gone. We don't even know what to do, we are just looking and hoping things will recover. It's beyond comprehension how these changes can impact ones life.

BTW, this is my first time commenting here. To those affected, I wished you all the best.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

After great traffic increase since yesterday, the update did the thing and my traffic decreased -9% for one website and about -20% for another one... Hope that this is not the end... and the things will get better after it will roll out fully... I was so happy in the morning and now I'm sad again... So many work done and such a "great" result... Thanks.

[NickMNS]

@oleotio interesting perspective. I sees things similarly.

But entropy cannot be increased or decreased in one system without impacting related systems. This is best explained by the air conditioner analogy. Entropy inside the house is reduced as the air is cooled, but the heat or (chaos) is exhausted into the environment outside the house. I see this applying to Google. As Google improves it's algos overtime it reduces it's chaos, in that it becomes better at matching queries to results. This in turn increases the chaos to the "external" system, to the webmasters and content creators as there appears to be no logic for ranking. An example of the increased chaos for webmasters is the gradual shift from a one to one relationship for keyword:search result, to a one to many relationship, due to a variety of factors as you describe.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar Is your traffic down only today or it was yesterday down too? And how are you checking that you are in the last position?

[BangkokBaby]

Got hit again with another 20% drop. 41% yesterday and 20% today for a total of 61% traffic drop. As mentioned around 75% of the updates this year pushed my site up (into new highs), not I'm at lows of what I had in 2015.

[BushyTop]

I find it absolutely crazy that there's webmasters on here that see such sudden changes, i really sympathise with you. My update today is that i am still heavily hit, losing around 16% of visibility. Like @Bangkokbaby, this comes after two months are fantastic growth.

[whoa182]

It's funny how pages can climb up the rankings with time (no backlinks), reach number one, and then Google decides months or a year later: "Actually, we'll ignore all these user signals, testing, and demote your article to 2nd page". A few months later, articles climb back to number one. Google responds with another update: "Nope, we don't want people to see that page, we want people to see this..."

Rinse and repeat.

Rather than a fair game/battle for the top spots with good and relevant content, it feels like an effort to make a highly curated 1st page with what Google employees want you to see, not what users want.

I know it doesn't work quite like how I explained, but it feels like it. That's the end of my rant about this recent update. :)

[jmorgan]

I still see no changes personally. My traffic is down a bit, but I attribute it more to the summertime, as well as the current Muslim festivities.

[brianp]

So my initial thoughts on this Google update---

All signs point to the usual culprit, despite what Google may say --> backlinks.

Sporting goods industry, we track 12 competitors. Out of the 12, two are relatively new, and show shady backlinks in SEMRUSH that are. Two of these 12 that do not engage in shady backlink practices have an Ads keywords in SEMrush of 34.7k and 13.5k with Organic traffic in the 1+ million range to match it. Others have good adwords spend, but those two stand out. Average amount of organic traffic lost by these competitors is 16.55% with one scaling higher to 31%.

Those who gained in SEMrush do not even go with best practices for a quality website these days. No https, slow page speed, etc. Yet they are increasing in organic traffic, with the only thing that really stands out is a massive increase in backlinks. The backlink profile shows the vast majority are from the fake URL shortener sites (wont name them, but those who look into this sort of thing know what I'm referring to) and one of these sites that came from way behind to now outrank what could only be classified as top tier 1 sites has some very weird backlinks showing up that may be exploiting a bug with google's "redirect notification" page.

The only other thing I've noticed is there seems to be a huge increase in individual sites search results pages showing up for very popular terms in the SERPS after this update. Once again there are how many references between Google's webmaster quality guidelines saying to block internal search results, questions answered on twitter where we've been told to block these, and more yet those who did not follow these guidelines are now ranking very high for internal search results for very valuable keyword phrases.

[southernguy]

I got hit back in August, several of my sites got hammered after ranking well for several years. Many here made comments that they were not affected. Some including myself made changes and what I felt to be improvements to my sites and after nine months no recovery.

I have other sites that I did nothing with and with this new update they are coming back up, this means jack sh*t. Higher traffic now does not seem to equal conversions. So for me getting excited about a traffic increase or a boost in KW ranking does not mean more conversions.

If you look at the results they are not very reliable, forget trying to find relevance. I guess it depends on the niche. What I do know is that if you have not been hit now or in the last several months it wasn't your turn. But if things continue the way they are your turn will come soon enough.

I was never one to think that all my pages deserved being in top spots ( as long as I had a few ) I was happy and made a comfortable living but the way things are now it can be days before I see a single conversion.

Who said life was fair, right?

[brianp]

One more thing I'd add. I'm seeing a fair number of results on the first page that say this:

No information is available for this page.
Learn why

When you click on the link, it would appear that it uses some module in Magento to redirect a deleted product URL to the search, which is no indexed. As this doesn't 404, it would seem that Google keeps it in the index despite:

a) There being a noindex on the page

b) There is no content matching the query, other than a notification of 'Your search 'keyword direct from 404 URL' did not match any products.'

I realize there may be links to the URL, etc. but looking at what this page ranks ahead of -- actual pages selling the product that no longer exists on this website -- one has to ask if this is an example of the "quality content" that we hear so much about. The site in question that does this also spends $0.00 on adwords, so it's yet again not in the equation of protecting an advertiser, etc.

[topaz]

Google News results and Top Stories are so bad right now for moderate keywords. Almost completely useless.

[universenet]

google indexing website very slow... if your website page is not on google search maybe reason can be that is even no indexed.. so how page can be there?
Why google is slow in indexing website?
Google is slow in remove errors in indexing too

[Cralamarre]

Google traffic was up 15% yesterday compared to last week. Still going strong today.

[EditorialGuy]

No obvious changes here from the update. It's early days yet, of course.

[HammerDown]

Very strange. I have own three US health sites and work full-time as SEO for a big health site. The big site is seeing crazy fluctuations in Google organic hour-over-hour for the last 60 hours compared to the same days two weeks ago but it's all a wash; traffic report looks like nothing happened.

One site, which I think is the most authoritative was way up in the 3rd and then down 80% yesterday, Makes zero sense whatsoever.

[edited by: HammerDown at 3:06 pm (utc) on Jun 5, 2019]

[MayankParmar]

@seomotionz It started to drop yesterday and has dropped by another 20%, the overall drop is now accounting to 50%.

I am manually checking position on Google News and as well as asked people around me to check. I also checked with brightlocal and the result remained same - last or second last.

[EditorialGuy]

One site, which I think is the most authoritative was way up in the 3rd and then down 80% yesterday, Makes zero sense whatsoever.

I wonder how long it takes for a major algorithm change to roll out, and what instabilities may occur in the meantime? (FWIW, I'd hope that Danny Sullivan or someone else at Google would indicate when the rollout is complete.)

[StupidIntelligent]

Bill Lambert pseudonym who probably works at Google, posts accurately about upcoming updates on Seroundtable. He mentioned yesterday that this was going to be a BIG one.

[cabsco]

My bad! I mean June 4 not May 4 in my previous post. Can an admin help me make the correction? thanks.

[Dimitri]

Bill Lambert pseudonym who probably works at Google, posts accurately about upcoming updates on Seroundtable. He mentioned yesterday that this was going to be a BIG one.

Considering that for once, the update was announced several days ago by Google on Twitter ,and that a "core" update is necessarily a "big" one, Bill didn't invent the wheel ...