Update Maverick : Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2019

[Malanje]

---

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)

---

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

[MayankParmar]

[imgur.com...]

Traffic from Google Discover remains zero :(

[zeus]

Bing PPC? when I payed for search I only used Bing be cause of there Price. You will not have that many visits, but mostly its quality.

[aristotle]

I do not see any search engine for now who can be good competition to google
I feel like nobody is seriously interested to be serious search giant engine

Haven't rumors been floating around for several years that Apple might develop a search engine. I guess the rumors started after people began seeing applebot in their server logs. Seems like I saw a report somewhere that applebot has become more active recently

[zeus]

aristotle - A good match would be Apple buys DDG, they do like there SE. :) Apple also make improvements on Privacy

[EditorialGuy]

but real problem is that google really does not have real competition

Back in the pre-Google days when search traffic was divided among AltaVista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Excite, and a few other search engines, you had to worry about your rankings in a whole slew of SEs. Now, if you rank well in Google for a number of popular queries, you can get a lot of search traffic in one fell swoop.

[BangkokBaby]

Saw a drop of about 10%.

[Treud]

After being demoted a lot in June (almost 0 with Google), yesterday I had my best organic since June patch. Let’s see if it’s the same today !

[KaseyM]

Had a drop yesterday - not sure if it's just my keywords not being particularly popular or something more sinister. 10-15% drop.

[aristotle]

EditorialGuy wrote:
you can get a lot of search traffic in one fell swoop.

Or you can lose a lot of search traffic in one fell swoop.

......
It's like having all your eggs in one basket.

If you get significant amounts of traffic from several different search engines, then if you lose most of it from one of them, you will still get traffic from the others

[ChokenBako]

Today i have another 20% traffic drop.... what is going on?

[paranoid android]

I just got an email from Google letting me know exactly how to deal with the latest loss in rakings:

"Dear devalued publisher,

If you find that the search results are showing irrelevant, crappier content, its because you are doing something seriously wrong. We cannot tell you what it is you are doing wrong or even if we've applied the same algorithmic penalty to all sites. Just know that you are in the WRONG. You are just wrong, wrong wrong! Go to our helpful Webmaster forums and we'll nitpick your site and create lots of tasks for you to complete that may or may not help.

Please keep keep churning out original, high quality content and keep your fingers and toes crossed!

Best wishes,
Google"

//end sarcasm

[JesterMagic]

At this point Apple is the only one that could take on Google Search since they could default all their devices to their new search engine. Unfortunately Google is paying Apple $12 billion this year to be the default search engine on apple devices so obviously apple is happy with the current arrangement and figure it is easier to take the money than try to make a go of it. Plus Apple will just be another Google IMO.

I think the only way to break the Google strangle hold eventually is for the government to force phone companies to offer default options for a number of different settings and software products which the consumer can select from when they first boot up their new phone (this includes Apple as well). This includes the internet browser, default search engine, Assistants (Google, Siri, etc...), and the app store.

[samwest]

Like clockwork, end of month quota has kicked in. One week before EOM, I was right on track to actually beat last month, but just as I approach last month's conversion total, BAM! Traffic and conversions are gone, yet SERPs appear unchanged. What FELLS like a quota clearly IS a quota.

With SERP's being unchanged (unless it's longtail that I'm not seeing) It's pretty clear the AI can control the volume of traffic as well as the behavior or quality of users in some magical way.

For countless months, I consistently miss the EOM target by only one or two conversions, and always less than the previous month. It's that "slow death roll" most of us have been experiencing since 2010.

With a natural trend, and based on the previous 3 weeks, I should consistently beat the previous month, but it always falls apart at end of month. Now watch someone tell me it has to do with people's pay day date....or the weather.

[mosxu]

@samwest

You are not one of them they say “people like us are getting programmed”

For some reason AI cannot brainwash you in believing their traffic is real.

[equidistant]

@paraniod andriod thanks for the laughs.

@jestermagic

Plus Apple will just be another Google IMO.

I guess Apple will be just another Bing with a bigger 'mobile search' market share. They are sure to take away a big chunk of mobile search traffic from Google, and that will end Google's monopoly when it comes to mobile search.

And provided that they do not support arbitrary frameworks like AMP, Google won't be as successful in pushing their AMP agenda any further. They might even stop pushing it. The only reason they are pushing it right now is because they have total control and everyone has to listen to what they say.

Google is in a position to force their arbitrary standards over everyone else because of zero competition. HTTPS for instance is not required for websites that deal only with content. But webmasters were forced to adopt it because someone at Google thought it was important, for some arbitrary reason. They also own the chrome browser and hence they started showing the 'Not Secure' sign for Non-HTTPS websites to further push HTTPS. Now that's total control of not only your market, but all other related markets as well which makes it super easy to push your will on others.

Imagine there was a search engine as powerful as Google with 30 to 40% of the market share that did not believe in HTTPSing all websites. Would Google then be able to push HTTPS over everyone? Probably not.

[EditorialGuy]

If you get significant amounts of traffic from several different search engines, then if you lose most of it from one of them, you will still get traffic from the others

Or you could spend a lot of time "optimizing" for a bunch of search engines and do poorly in all. It's all a crapshoot, IMO.

[EditorialGuy]

I guess Apple will be just another Bing with a bigger 'mobile search' market share. They are sure to take away a big chunk of mobile search traffic from Google, and that will end Google's monopoly when it comes to mobile search.

Sure, just like Microsoft is destroying Google by including its search engine and browser with Windows, and Apple Maps are sucking market share away from Google Maps.

Except that neither of those events have happened, which is probably just as well. People can complain all they want about Google Search, but having a strong independent search engine sure beats having Microsoft and Apple become a duopoly that controls hardware, software, and the Web.

[NickMNS]

beats having Microsoft and Apple become a duopoly that controls hardware, software, and the Web.

The issue is that inverse is happening, companies that in the past were purely on the software side like Google, Amazon and Facebook are now offering hardware. These companies are all competing to secure access to the leading edge hardware, such as that needed for 5G integration. As evidenced by this weeks announcement by Apple that they are buying Intel's smartphone modem business. [webmasterworld.com...]

This would suggest that it is rather unlikely that Apple would be focusing on buying up DDG or some other search engine.

[Milchan]

At this point Apple is the only one that could take on Google Search since they could default all their devices to their new search engine.

I actually think Amazon is the one that could take them on , they have the infrastructure and clearly know how to inovate. Not saying they will or if that would be any better, but just that they probably could.

Like clockwork, end of month quota has kicked in. One week before EOM, I was right on track to actually beat last month, but just as I approach last month's conversion total, BAM! Traffic and conversions are gone, yet SERPs appear unchanged. What FELLS like a quota clearly IS a quota.

Yes , exactly the same for me. Was going ok this month compared to the last few and now it just seems like someone has just turned the traffic off.Serp positions look the same, but next to zero conversions now.

Now watch someone tell me it has to do with people's pay day date....or the weather.

Lol exactly, anyone that still believes it is things like that and not google controlling things is in denial imho

[zeus]

I have now on a health ecommerce site added a Googlebot Noindex to all articles on the site and removed those with google console.
Lets see what happens.

[NickMNS]

Lets see what happens.

Why wait I'll tell you now. Your pages will be removed from the index and you will get no traffic.

What exactly is:

a Googlebot Noindex

If you have added a meta tag with name=robots and content="noindex", then you are sending a message to all of the major search engines.
If you have blocked googlebot from crawling with robots.txt then you will be causing yourself issues, as Googlebot will no longer crawl but you pages will remain in the index.
If you have done something else, like add a noindex to the robots.txt or some other permutation, then it will likely be ignored and change nothing.

Good luck.

One question. What are you hoping to achieve?

[glakes]

Since Maverick it has been very ugly across the board. Few sales on our website and in marketplaces like Amazon. Is there any info/analysis on what Maverick may have targeted?

When I look at Google's search results, we still dominate. In our small little industry we are innovators and even our newest products with no competition are not moving. Since school is right around the corner, I know consumers are busy with end of summer vacations, spending on back to school items, etc. which makes it difficult to ascertain an algorithmic induced shift in buyer behavior. But rest assured, something substantial changed. I have not seen so few sales in many years. It's so bad that this will be the first Saturday in years that we won't have staff go in to ship orders. It's that ugly...

[mosxu]

@glakes

Same here never seen so much crap traffic in my life

[SweetPotato]

Can someone take a look at this? Very simple search:

[google.com...]

ALL domains are spam with snkeay redirects.
What is happening here?

[zeus]

Nickmns - <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> has been used and I removed the pages on Google console.
My goal is to get out of the pro medic update

[skaterpunk]

Can someone take a look at this? Very simple search:

Simple search? Too me, that's a very odd search phrase that I would never think of using or expect quality results for.

[Milchan]

I agree that is a very strange search especially to use in quotes for an exact match search. The results though do seem like even more garbage than you would expect even from that with teh first one seemingly even in french for a clearly english language search - I didnt click on any as I dont trust what most of them might be hosting!

[NickMNS]

@zeus unless I'm mistaken:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

name="googlebot" is not recognized. This should do nothing.
it must read name="robots" but then it is no specific to googlebot but to all well behaved bots (bing, ddg, etc...)

I don't follow your logic

My goal is to get out of the pro medic update

The medic update wiped out most of your traffic, so now your are going to noindex your pages, which will wipe out the remaining traffic. I assume at some point in the future your going switch this off and hope that Google's algo forgot that it didn't like your content. I do not know, but this seems like an act of desperation and self-destruction more than anything.

[Koray Tugberk Gubur]

my web site has increased traffic with lots of keywords but I still exactly dunno why, maybe crawl budget maybe healthy internal links.

[Martin Ice Web]

The reason why we see better positions but noch gains in traffic, is imo that we are as webmasters search in different ways as users do.
In my niche (ecom) i See very offen that poeple add buy or Shop to the query. This produces very different Serps in my niche.

So if the Last Update changed the way user queries are interpreted, then traffic declines and positions are unchanged.
E.g when google automatically added bis or shop to transactional queries and removed this behaviour with the Update.