Update Maverick : Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2019

[Malanje]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4947706.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 1:17 pm on Jul 1, 2019 (utc -5)

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Many advocate that to combat reliance on visits through Google Search you need to build a brand. Obviously it is not enough.

[steffanlv]

Seeing big swings in rankings in sites located in Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Possibly more European countries as well.

[Milchan]

I was holding off to say anything as I have some traffic that I know will skew things a bit today conversion wise as I have a load of leads that have been manually sourced that are converting on my site today which was expected BUT I am also seeing a bit of an increase in traffic plus a few organic conversions . Im not getting too carried away though yet as it is not significant enough for me to believe there has been a big positive change for me.

Looking at GA noticed that certain european traffic increased for me - Im usually close to 50% USA, then a good amount of South America followed by a mis of Canada, Aus, Europe and some Japan/ Korea. Today Ive had a 500% spike in traffic from France with a signifcant spike from Holland and Germany also. Now my numbers are not so large that 500% is crazy amounts (i.e. if I had 1 from france yesterday and 5 today that could just be a groups of friends visiting) but in this case it is significant, spread throughout the day and indicates "something" has happened but Ive no idea what.Overall my european traffic is higher than my US traffic today when normally it is around probably 20%.

[jmorgan]

..

[MayankParmar]

0.7 / 10 Low range.

It's all quiet :)

[BushyTop]

Thank god June is finally over. Lets hope a new month brings about some new releases that yield better results for all of us.

[jediviper]

No difference yet spotted around my traffic coming from different EU countries.

[BushyTop]

Oh Jesus... my traffic appears to be much higher too... this is cruel!

[Milchan]

Oh Jesus... my traffic appears to be much higher too... this is cruel!

I know yeah - in the past I would welcome a day with better traffic now I just treat it with suspicion!

[MayankParmar]

Cloudflare is down yet again.

[jmorgan]

Not that I've ever used Cloudflare, but I'd advise against. That's one extra layer of potential failure that's out of your control. I would be livid if my website was inaccessible because a service I paid for had issues.

I already have enough issues from time to time with my hosting provider. No need for another source of headaches.

[NickMNS]

@jmorgan

Not that I've ever used Cloudflare, but I'd advise against. That's one extra layer of potential failure that's out of your control

I totally get were you are coming from and I would typically feel the same way. Since I have been with Cloudflare this is the first time that their service has been down.

They offer a service call "Always on" that serves your cached pages to user in the event that your server/hosting provider goes down. This has minimized the impact of any down town time that I have had. So the way I see it I'm still better off using the service.

[Milchan]

I think any provider can have some downtime the odd time, even AWS, google, Azure etc have been know to have the odd issue but all of these big companies (including cloudflare) tend to react damn quick and get things sorted most of the time.
The one thing I find annoying about cloudflare though is that it does seem to trigger a few false positives and block some users from accessing sites in my experience but I have to admit ive not seen that happen for a while now (used to happen quite a bit for me and some others I know a year or so ago). There is definitely a market for having a cdn/security provider like them that takes away much of the complexities of setting those things up yourself.

[browndog]

My traffic is up too.

[Milchan]

I was right to not get carried away as today was back down again - seems it was a one off jump for the day but at least I got a load of good conversion out of it and I can probably eat this week.

[BushyTop]

Dont want to be that guy, but if i was a betting man, I'd guess theres another big update pending. Seeing an uptick in G Bot activity again, binary traffic patterns and manual SERPs checks that are different on every search. Fridays always a good bet.

[Eryridave]

Interesting to know @bushytop, just hoping for a recovery from the June one as it severely hit our highly ranking niche tourism sites. Lost no 1 kws that we held for a while, dropping only a few places, but if we're not no 1, we're nothing. However, our similar (not same) sites under development still picking up keywords and traffic...

Like most, I'm baffled with this one as we saw quality posts lose out on the no 1 spot while some posts earmarked for improvement didn't.

Seriously starting to believe that Google is pushing us towards paid ads, something that wouldn't work for our niche, but might work for some of the sites that took the top spot in our place. Makes business sense to provide sites with some free organic traffic by ranking you no 1 and then taking that away, along with the traffic and income with the site them looking at paid ads to make up the shortfall.

But, who knows. I've been calling Google all kinds of names for the last month!

[whoa182]

Big spike for one of my sites in googlebot activity. I wonder if there is another big update coming...

The last spikes I had were on the 30th of May and 19th June. Updates happened around that time.

[imgur.com...]

[BushyTop]

@whoa182 territory?

[zeus]

As we all know site with health related topics or Products are hit again, but only if it natural related, not medicine. Now we also know you can make as many changes on your site it will not bring much, if you have not done anything REAl blackhat. Links is the only thing that can bring a site up the serps. See big companies.

A thing what im speculating on as Google is a monopoly company on the stock exchange. Can it be that if you dont use anything from google on your site, can be a problem, not that I would then implement any, but just a question. google payment, analytics, spam protection, ads,.....Google is not there for us, but for there own benefits.

[BushyTop]

Somethings going on..... and I'm very scared.

[Milchan]

Im done with being scared of what update will do anymore. Im of the mind that now the only thing that is certain is uncertainty

[System]

Mods Note: Please be careful to stay on topic. If you want to ask a question not focused on the monthly Google update/changes please start a new thread.

We split off the discussion about searching with the info: operator to its own thread [webmasterworld.com].

[edited by: goodroi at 3:40 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2019]

[MayankParmar]

[semrush.com...]
the calm before the storm

[gregmaks]

the calm before the storm

You bet..

Something is brewing..

Another Magic Potion..

[samsseo]

Also seeing traffic is down every hour since 2pm BST starting at around -8% and now -17%. Hold on to your hats guys...

[Selen]

It appears that when your content or ideas stray from the established "thought" or "order" then your website is no longer welcome in Google.

[equidistant]

@selen Seems to be the case. Hopefully things change.

[aristotle]

It appears that when your content or ideas stray from the established "thought" or "order" then your website is no longer welcome in Google.

If a site puts forward a minority view on an issue, then it will always be at a dis-advantage against sites that support the majority or conventional view, simply because more people (the majority) will be searching for articles that re-inforce their already-formed opinions. This isn't google's fault.

The minority always has an uphill battle against the majority.

[Selen]

Majority != (not always) The Truth