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.

[SweetPotato]

When I search some exact phrase in quotes present on the site I get 5+ pages of spam domains as results. These pages are either pure spam, offline or redirect to malware. Most don't even contain the query. Is this how a negative seo campaign looks like in 2019?
VERY STRANGE.

[Essex_boy]

Seriously starting to believe that Google is pushing us towards paid ads - No really ? This has been going on slowly for years

[JesterMagic]

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

It's a weird search for sure

"But also old portable systems"

I guess I can excuse the fact that the it may lead to websites that are a little spammy (if the searcher is looking for illegal ROMS for example) but that doesn't excuse listing sites that then redirects users.to pure spam sites that are potentially unsafe. I know these hacker type sites show one version of the site to Googlebot and for others perform the redirect. There are ways around this for Google though...

[equidistant]

When I search some exact phrase in quotes present on the site I get 5+ pages of spam domains as results. These pages are either pure spam, offline or redirect to malware. Most don't even contain the query. Is this how a negative seo campaign looks like in 2019?

Okay, here's what I gather from this. You took a phrase from a page (let's say Page-A.html) from your website and then did an exact match search hoping that your page (Page-A.html) would rank on top. But instead, you found various spammy domains that copied your article rank above you?

I have found this exact case with many articles. The original article ranks way below. The top rankers are websites with copied content. I usually find medium.com or quora.com ranking above, even though the original article was simply copied and pasted into these platforms by some random user.

[southernguy]

@equidistant I actually did this experiment with a domain that got hammered with the July update the domain lost most of its keywords it had been ranking for about 500 keywords many of those page one, it was sent to page 4 and 5. Since I do not plan on renewing the domain I took all the content and posted it on medium leaving the original content up there (for now) now that content (on medium) is outranking the original site on page one for several keywords.

[SweetPotato]

This is worrisome. Look, I don't even mind if a copycat site ranks above me any more. But 50 sites that redirect to malware looks extremely fishy.

Google doesn't seem to be able to distinguish these domains that 301 up to 10 times before you land on a fake virus alert ad.

I invite those curious to search small quoted text from their own sites and see if this happens to you too. If it's just me maybe I'm being targeted. But if not, Google was broken by spammers.

Regardless this shouldn't happen at all.

More and more I get convinced that Bing's strategy of not indexing every domain ever is good for the algorithm. Because it keeps the trash out of the equation.

[aristotle]

If scraped copies rank above the original article for quoted snippets of text, it usually means that the site with the original article is under a penalty.

[SweetPotato]

They only show the scraped text on the serp meta description. When you click you get redirected to malware.
Yesterday i used the "send feedback" function to explain this to google.
There were 5 pages of search results.
Today the same search query returns only my site.
Google deindexed 50~ domains.
I was blown away. I have never seen google act so severely so fast.
These were pure spam, malware redirect sites, not your every day scrapper.
Like the search example i posted above.

I now did the same with the link above, let's see if they clean it as well.
Fingers crossed.

[Milchan]

Seriously starting to believe that Google is pushing us towards paid ads - No really ? This has been going on slowly for years

starting to believe? It is undeniable fact.

It is no coincidence that alphabets revenue increased by 20% in Q2 2019 - they are focused on forcing people to use paid ads by controlling search to the point businesses lose revenue.

[aristotle]

SweetPotato - It certainly is surprising that google would act so quickly to remove those pages.

What you saw could be part of a big malicious operation, in which robots are sent out across the web looking for pages with certain keywords in their titles. The pages they find are then scraped and re-published, and the re-directs added. It could all be done automatically, so that 1000s of new pages are created everyday.

Very likely google already knows about this type of operation, and removes these pages as fast as they can find them. But since the pages are created automatically, it could be hard for google to keep up, especially if the culprits have a huge number of (continually changing) domains available to them.

Today the same search query returns only my site.

If your page is the only result, it probably means that there aren't any more scraped copies on the web.

[aristotle]

Followup to my last post -- Obviously I don't know any of this for sure, so was just speculating anyway. If such malicious operations do exist, the details probably vary from what I said also.

As for a motive for these types of operation, if they exist, one possibility would be to infect peoples' computers with botnet trojans. Even large existing botnets need to be continually replenished to replace losses as people remove malware

[whoa182]

The last few messages led me to test something out and I'd really appreciate some opinions on the result.

I used to be able to copy and paste blocks of text into google and my page would come up as the 1st result.

So I've been going through a few of my articles and copying blocks of text from the beginning, middle, and the end of the page and then pasting into Google to see the results. For a lot of the articles, it's only when I copy the first paragraph of the text on the page that it will make my page show up in the SERP.

I tried the same thing with a hobby website that is doing very well (not mine) and when I do the same thing, almost all of the text is indexed or searchable on Google without using quotations.

This never used to happen before... And no, the results are not showing identical/duplicate text. This is even happening on interviews which I conducted which are completely unique.

I can't see how the page is rendered by Googlebot in the new Search Console... But I looked at the cached page on Google and it seems to be fine.

Edit: After trying more articles it seems that it's quite inconsistent. Some articles are searchable without quotes by doing the same thing from different parts of the articles. Bing and other search engines almost always show me as the top result when doing the same thing though.

[ichthyous]

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.

I agree with this, but Amazon and Apple both would quickly move to monetize search just like Google. Amazon is already competing with Google head to head in display advertising. The only hope is for the government to establish a non-profit corporation akin to PBS that would establish and run its own search engine without any paid ads or profit motive. Even taking the government out of the picture, any non-profit could do this but not sure how competitive it would be as the amount of resources required are massive. Search is a utility, and it should be treated like one.

[ichthyous]

Has anyone noticed a massive drop in click through rates starting approximately last March and really getting much worse in June and July? Clicks to my home page dropped by almost half in the last two weeks although the impressions were the same. The CTR went from 1.8 to 1.1%. The click through rates for almost all of my pages are dropping like a stone, even though the number of impressions is relatively steady and so is the position according to GSC. This is spreading like a cancer slowly across all keywords. The only explanation is that Google is loading the pages with more and more crap and it's slowly being rolled out over time.

[pupidu]

Big drop AFTER maverick on a variety of my sites. Have different hosting IPs, too, Tuesday and after I see big drop in traffic quality and positions. Sites are 7 years old and older. Some 14 years old. Thursday and Friday - no money for a bread.

State of constant fear, unrest and panic - that is what google want to do with everyday updates.

[whoa182]

I just published my first article since June on my health site because I wanted to see what happens with new content.

I figured the focus keyword was low-medium competitiveness.

Published it a few minutes ago and it ranks either #1 or #2 on Bing, Yahoo, and DDG.

Submitted it to Google and it's nowhere to be seen.

[Sally Stitts]

@whoa182

Published it a few minutes ago and it ranks either #1 or #2 on Bing, Yahoo, and DDG.
Submitted it to Google and it's nowhere to be seen.

I have a few pages with built-in ranking history, with an index page pointing to them.
Google is ALWAYS slow to index new pages, and they ALWAYS rank lower.
I did this to prove to myself that Google is "losing their touch".

A typical page gets indexed very quickly on Bing, Yahoo and DDG, and ranks #1 or #2 on these 3 engines,
for a specially chosen search phrase, SURE to bring the page to the top.
It takes FAR longer for Google to index the page, and it ranks FAR LOWER than on Bing, Yahoo and DDG.

I agree 100% with your statement.
It is truly a new ball game. "Organic wonderfulness" and "original content" doesn't matter any more, at Google.
Just stolen content, loaded with AdSense. GOOGLE LOVES STOLEN CONTENT, because it is stolen for 1 reason - to run AdSense.
This s**t is getting old, REALLY FAST. And, it is accelerating. Something's got to give.
.

[edited by: Sally_Stitts at 12:16 am (utc) on Jul 29, 2019]

[Steven29]

Im having the same trouble with zombie traffic and lots of spam websites popping up out of no where the past year... and then these few websites popping up out of no where with expensive domains and facebook reaches of 200,000+ and in violation of lots of facebook rules but unkillable it seems.

@sweetpotato do you have a reddit subforum in your niche?

[samwest]

I wonder when Google will finally get wise to the old ad loaded "69 exciting ways to use a widget" aggregation style "articles" that only annoy users in an attempt to gain google ad pennies through over optimization and content scraping? Ah! perhaps it's the ad churning that makes them rank above the fold on page one...and two, and three....unfortunately many big name sites have resorted to this lazy practice yet are rewarded by G....in my vertical, mostly former about dot com spinoff / content farms with silly disposable names like; thespruce, lemonslice, etc .

[whoa182]

Even more hilarious is when sites like Healthline write a "101 ways to stop widgets" type post and post a paragraph about '1 of one those ways' and you specifically write an article on it but they still rank number one with no effort.

I do worry that the vast majority of people will be totally accepting of these changes and new people growing up won't know any different and won't see an issue with it.

HL saw 40 million extra organic visitors from Feb to June (the real number is probably at least 4 times that.) And the distribution of their keywords is the complete opposite of what normally happens. This is insane... IMHO no website should see such massive gains in just months like that. This is not fair competition, this is just Google curating the search how they see fit. Tweaking until they see what they want people to see. [semrush.com...]

[Milchan]

so I was hoping it was a blip but seems like something might have changed permanently because since Thursday things have been terrible, Lower traffic and next to no conversions, yet rankings seem about the same. Not looking good.

[equidistant]

@equidistant I actually did this experiment with a domain that got hammered with the July update the domain lost most of its keywords it had been ranking for about 500 keywords many of those page one, it was sent to page 4 and 5. Since I do not plan on renewing the domain I took all the content and posted it on medium leaving the original content up there (for now) now that content (on medium) is outranking the original site on page one for several keywords.

I am not surprised. Goes to show how utterly clueless Google really is when it comes to identifying and crediting original content.

[equidistant]

Even more hilarious is when sites like Healthline write a "101 ways to stop widgets" type post and post a paragraph about '1 of one those ways' and you specifically write an article on it but they still rank number one with no effort.

Simply ranking web pages based on domain authority is a flawed approach and needs to change.

[skaterpunk]

I share peoples frustrations with trying to earn a living from their websites, and let's be honest, the frustration isn't primarily about the readers not getting "my amazing information" because of buried search results. The frustration lies with not getting paid enough for the work, and not wanting to get another job.

Where my feelings vary is that I don't put sole blame on google. There's a lot of competition on the web, and of course someone else is more business savvy, more conniving, has more money, more resources, and will always outperform the people that don't have these assets. These practices were around way before the web.

The web is not a savior for the masses to have a shot in life. It's just another venue for the lottery winners in life…and the people who play the game better…to succeed.

[Selen]

Spammers add a couple of links to "legitimate" sources (eg. BBC, NASA, .edu, .gov) among their spam site. Google AI gives a boost to their spam link only because it was mentioned together with some "trustworthy" links. It should not be like that, it's easy to manipulate.

[MayankParmar]

It's almost August. Anyone recovered from the June update yet?

[ChokenBako]

Nope... not even a bit. Was hit in June, was hit again in Mid-July and it looks like I got hit again at end of july. The problem is that there are many E-A-T sites within my niche and until the June Update it was no problem, because my articles were more relevant, especially long-tail. But now even if I type special long-tail-phrases to google the search results show me unspecific results...
Maybe Google wants us all to invest into Google Ads to be visible in the Oragnic search results again...

[southernguy]

Nope, the one site that I had that was doing really well got nailed in July (Bodybuilding/supplements) got nailed hard and has been losing keywords day by day. Its probably one of the best sites I have ever done in regards to SEO, good content, etc. It was one I started after I lost many sites last August.

In most of my niches, I see a constant churn and burn pattern -> expired domain -> (usually from the medical niche) with good high authority backlinks. -> Rewritten or spun generic content on health and fitness followed by dozens of affiliate money pages. These seem to last the course of 4-8 months or until an update hits then these are replaced by more of the same.

I believe I mentioned here earlier in this thread that a couple of my sites that were hit in August have been gaining traffic again yet I have done nothing to them, the problem is in spite of them beginning to rank again and I see an increase in traffic they are not converting which they had in the past.

[skaterpunk]

…were hit in August have been gaining traffic again…, the problem is in spite of them beginning to rank again and I see an increase in traffic they are not converting which they had in the past.

I echo this statement.

My traffic numbers have recovered from the massive drop around August 2018, but Adsense revenue and affiliate link conversions haven't come back, so there's that lingering problem.

[westcoast]

My traffic is crazy today. +200 users one minute, -200 20 minutes later. etc. Trending significantly lower for this time of day.

Wasn't affected at all last couple of weeks.