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.

[KaseyM]

Seeing big shifts in rankings and Google struggling to crawl through some of the updated articles I've submitted.

Maybe Google has pressed the destroy buttons shortly before heading off for a long weekend.

[steffanlv]

Past few days have seen rankings increases for sites hit hard by the June update. Still substantially down but it's nice to show clients a little bit of a rebound has happened.

[Milchan]

I have seen an increase since July 1st also but most significantly the traffic seems to be actual relevant visitors as I am getting some conversions. Hope it continues but I am of course skeptical.

[sunjun]

@BushyTop
As time goes,I found news and jobs much more in search results.But I seldom got this links,I am Trembling,Trembling

[seomotionz]

@Milchan you are right traffic is real. But still the traffic is low now compared to lase week.

[Mark_A]

Last week G organic sessions were ok, so far this week they are well down.
Hard to detect a trend though. Except this week so far is a but meh!

[mosxu]

is the earnings report coming up?

[alvanorichie]

We are doomed now, pray for recovery :(

[MayankParmar]

4th of July might be the reason for the traffic drop for many.

[samwest]

I love how holidays, the season and weather are regularly blamed for these across-the-board drops....and always drops, not rises. I've been at this since 1996 and it wasn't until 2010 that we really started seeing this continued decline with every update being punitive.
The web as we knew it is long dead. Now it's just a platform for Gorg to make well over a hundred billion per year using YOUR content. SMH.

[Dimitri]

I love how holidays, the season and weather are regularly blamed for these across-the-board drops....

This is self-motivation for a brighter tomorrow :)

[whoa182]

I think the only time I've ever noticed a drop is December 25th and 26th. Every other holiday hasn't made an obvious difference to traffic.. at least in the health/diet niche.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar Holidays of our country are also responsible.

[anefarious1]

agree with samwest

[MayankParmar]

[imgur.com...]

Position improved in the last three days.

[EditorialGuy]

I love how holidays, the season and weather are regularly blamed for these across-the-board drops....and always drops, not rises. I've been at this since 1996 and it wasn't until 2010 that we really started seeing this continued decline with every update being punitive.

I've been a Web publisher since 1995, and I worked for online services (MSN, Delphi) before that. In my experience, holidays and holiday periods used to have quite a bit of impact, for a couple of reasons:

1) A lot of heavy Internet users were in offices and on university campuses. When the Christmas holidays rolled around, I'd always see a traffic drop until the students returned to their dorms and campus computer labs.

2) The Web audience was concentrated in a handful of countries, so a national holiday in--say--the United States or the UK would have more impact than it does in the global-Internet era.

Still, holidays and even local events can have a big impact.Our travel site receives an upsurge of traffic every time [weather/tidal event in a certain European city] occurs, and when [disaster in another European city] happened a while back, a lot of additional traffic came our way even though we made no attempt to provide news coverage..

[topaz]

Seeing a modest improvement from June updates as well. Long way to go for full recovery.
And Googlebot is barely crawling my 275k page site.... which is abnormal for the site.

[samwest]

@EG - yes, historically holidays (and weather) always had an impact...they would typically INCREASE traffic, not regularly DECREASE traffic like they have done consistently since 2010. To avoid a ToS ding, I won't go into specifics, but in my vertical, bad weather, holidays have always been and should continue to be a natural and logical mark for increased user activity. How did that situation mysteriously become inverted? All niches are different, so as you say, YMMV.

[EditorialGuy]

historically holidays (and weather) always had an impact...they would typically INCREASE traffic, not regularly DECREASE traffic like they have done consistently since 2010.

That hasn't been my experience over the last quarter-century. Obviously, topic and audience are going to play a big role in what effect (if any) holidays have on traffic.

[jmorgan]

I love how holidays, the season and weather are regularly blamed for these across-the-board drops

Uhh, if that's how it's always been for certain publishers every year, and their traffic consistently falls during the summer and on public holidays (and rises again when it's not), why do you expect them to deny this fact and blame it on the internet dying instead?

I personally find this time of the year frustrating but what can I do? I can't force people to get on their computers and use my website while they're out there enjoying the sun.

[mosxu]

Guess what, zombies are being “programmed”

[Milchan]

I can't force people to get on their computers and use my website while they're out there enjoying the sun.

That might have made sense 10 years ago but the majority of people use the internet on their phones. Go out to any park or public space full of people enjoying the sun and see how many of them are not glued to their phones.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar how are your conversions? Our position also improved this week. But traffic not so much.

[ichthyous]

Uhh, if that's how it's always been for certain publishers every year, and their traffic consistently falls during the summer and on public holidays (and rises again when it's not), why do you expect them to deny this fact and blame it on the internet dying instead?

My traffic falls every year as soon as school in out and then increases as soon as school is back in. Never fails. However the current level of low traffic is low even by summer standards and is not recovering at all, despite the fact that my SEMrush rank keeps increasing now for over a month. Where's the beef?

[ichthyous]

I'm getting mighty sick of getting my site hit by relativity dot com from Chicago. I blocked their IP and removed them from my analytics using a filter. But still getting a ton of hits now from "unknown.unkown" in Chicago...i imagine it's the same company, as normally I don't have that much traffic from Chicago. Does anyone else see this, and how to remove unknown network domain from your analytics?

[whoa182]

@ichthynous

Yes, especially over the last few days. Labeled as direct traffic from Chicago and they visit multiple pages on my site throughout the day.

[StupidIntelligent]

Google may have implemented an anti-semrush algo. During the last core update; semrush sensor was quiet.

[aristotle]

Google may have implemented an anti-semrush algo. During the last core update; semrush sensor was quiet.

I've never used Semrush, but from what I read here, they apparently use bots to continually check large numbers of google search results rankings. Google has been at war with this kind of activity for many years. I imagine that these types of sites have to constantly change their UAs and IPs

[whoa182]

It really does feel that when you get hit with these core updates, there is no natural growth. As if you've been put in the naughty corner and you are just filtered out.

Not growth in June, just flat (again): [imgur.com...]

[Dimitri]

I've never used Semrush, but from what I read here, they apparently use bots to continually check large numbers of google search results rankings. Google has been at war with this kind of activity for many years. I imagine that these types of sites have to constantly change their UAs and IPs

Also, since Google personalizes search results, these bots might received SERP customized to their profile :)