Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2019

[engine]

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System: The following 8 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4966830.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 4:01 pm on Nov 1, 2019 (PDT -8)

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Not what i'd seen, it wasn't even that.
I'd class myself as an experienced searcher, and, sometimes, when I look at Google's serps it's trying to pre-empt my intent. More often than not, it's presenting either highly-optimised sites, or, in this case, it was all wrong. Something's broke.

It works that way these days.

I don't ever use "best" as that is spammed out.

[jmorgan]

Traffic starting to drop significantly, most likely due to Thanksgiving.

[samwest]

@EG - you are missing the relevance of this simultaneous group observed event. This simply clarifies the theory that throttling is INDEED happening all the time....except for these short events or bumps that reveal natural unfettered converting traffic...of course YMMV. lol

@jmorgan...

Traffic starting to drop significantly, most likely due to Thanksgiving.

For my niche that has historically been a RISE in traffic on Thanksgiving...but not seeing that as of yet...

[jmorgan]

@samwest I guess if you're in the retail sector (which I'm not), you might have to wait till it gets closer to Black Friday.

[aristotle]

Traffic starting to drop significantly, most likely due to Thanksgiving.

In addition to the usual effects of Thanksgiving, news sites are reporting that a ferocious 'bomb cyclone' is taking aim at huge portion of the western US. It could produce hurricane force winds, extensive flooding, widespread power outages, etc.

[glakes]

The question remains...why?

With the holidays here, my guess is Google is leveraging chaos in organics to boost Adwords spending. Businesses have built up a lot of inventory to meet the holiday demand, and with organics pulled out from underneath them many will be compelled to spend big on ads just to prop up sales/ move inventory. The items I sell are mostly industrial and not stocking stuffers, so the chaos has a reverse effect on us. We reduced Adwords spending by about 40%.

I see the chaos in organics as Google attempting their last hurrah for holiday shopping. Shoppers have largely abandoned Google, and I think 2020 will be the year it becomes more widely known just how poor Google is at sending shoppers to websites. Especially if the chaos in organics continues, imagine how ugly the holiday season sales numbers will look for those small businesses that invested heavily in Google - whether it be SEO or paid ads. Neither are delivering. The winners this holiday season will likely be the same as they were in the past - Amazon, WalMart, etc. which are all eroding Google's relevance in commerce.

Most of us have seen the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya's comments in the story at [cnbc.com...] and I think he sums it up pretty well. Just like Google is attempting to devour the profits in the travel industry, their efforts will continue expanding into other industries by leveraging their search product.

“The longer it takes for Google to find a second act, the more you’re f----d,” he said about those companies, adding that investor patience will wane. “If you are in the business of being a parasite on top of Google, your medium-term and long-term prospects are terrible; you’re an impaired company, you don’t know it,” he added. The only way to win, he argued, is to offer unique value; many companies have done the opposite, becoming more like their competitors and relying on Google to drive volume. That’s a recipe for disaster.

[seomotionz]

Something is terribly wrong today. Today we didn't get the happy two hour traffic. Although it was more or less obvious.

But still no zombies or bots or nothing. Its an absolute silence.

[hopepro]

From my side, I can see different search results with multiple searches on the same keywords within seconds. It swings up and down like crazy

[mosxu]

In my industry when a certain enhanced advertiser is on I can see where all buyers go to and the rest of us get dumped or not showing at all.

Nothing special about the site or advertiser prices but if no other competitors with high conversion rates show than that advertiser will pay the highest bid and get the conversion too.

At the moment when I search for a product I only find what I am looking for on max 1-2 websites although there are probably at least 10 websites offering that product.

This practice is harming the consumer for sure.

[rustybrick]

Reminder, Thanksgiving pretty much starts today. People in the US start to take off Wednesday through the weekend.

[seomotionz]

@rustybrick Anything else that we should be aware of? Because what it looks like a whole lot more is going on today.

[samwest]

There IS a whole lot more going on...or more appropriately...off.

I was reviewing my GSC click/impression data over the past year, and this time last year my clicks greatly outweighed my impressions. In the past several months, without any major on-site changes, my clicks are now much less than impressions.

The break points correspond exactly to core updates over the past year, so yes, something is indeed "up" but it's not clicks to our sites. Adding more 'diversions' to the area above the fold is the likely culprit.

The end result is that when a user searches for a term that would potentially include your content in the results, the likely hood of your site being actually seen and clicked on is greatly reduced. Bad for you, good for Gorg. It's pretty clear in the GSC data.

The data explains why in the past 4 months I have had page one position one results, yet barely any traffic.

Looks like yet another rough start to the day, regardless, a Happy Thankgiving to all here.

[mosxu]

@samwest

You are correct also the shopping, the rich snippets, local results are designed not to drive clicks anymore. Sooner or later the Buy Now button will be placed for products direct in google shopping.

But you cannot not lough if this is AI solution to compete with Amazon.

Happy Thankgiving To You Too!

[steffanlv]

MozCast shows disruption today. People posting about volatility and potential false signals related to penalties by Google. Anyone experiencing similar?

[NickMNS]

Mozcast at 81 is hardly a disruption, and that number is based on yesterday's traffic.

[steffanlv]

Mozcast at 81 is hardly a disruption, and that number is based on yesterday's traffic.

It is when compared to previous days. Not sure why you are trying to argue fact. Also, it's irrelevant whether the traffic is yesterday's or not. Just about every tracking (i.e. SEMRush's, AccuRanker, etc) is delayed to a point.

[hopepro]

Found one interesting point from GSC. Before Nov 10th, google crawl my site 70K-100K pages per day, after that it dropped to 10K per day and I guess this is the technical reason to see the drop in ranking. My guess is that

- Google crawl lesser page on any site, that site won't gain ranking and traffic
- Google might crawl other sites more often and thus we're seeing low quality or never-seen-before sites rank on top of the search

Anyone own any quality site and experience the same?

[samwest]

What a bunch of garbage traffic today. Must all be bored kids riding home to grandma's for the holiday. High traffic' low quality. Zero conversions.

[NickMNS]

Also, it's irrelevant whether the traffic is yesterday's or not

No it is very relevant.

You ask the question:

Anyone experiencing similar?

If the metric is lagging the event, then there is no need to ask that question for people's reaction to the event, as the comments would already have been posted as the event occurred. The lack of unsolicited, and thus unbiased posts, suggests that there was nothing of significance.

Just to be clear the posts in this forum tend to be a leading indicator of algo updates. One generally begins to see chatter of an update, then a significant number of posts of big changes, then the day after metrics such as Mozcast et al. may* confirm that something likely occurred, and finally Google then confirms that indeed an update was rolled out a few days prior. This is why people like Barry Schwartz (SERoundtable) like to monitor and reported on activity in these forums, as it is one of the few remaining means of detecting algo updates in real-time.

So basically, you can answer your own question by reading yesterday's posts.

* I write "may" because it has become somewhat evident as a result of the past few updates that these tools are not really effective at detecting updates. [I was going to write predicting, but one can't really say one is predicting anything when one is reporting the day after {more relevance}]

[glakes]

- Google crawl lesser page on any site, that site won't gain ranking and traffic

It's page specific. If Google quits crawling a page as frequently as they have in the past, that page likely won't be getting much traffic. At least that is my observation.

The theory with low rates of crawling is that Google does not give the page much visibility in the SERPS and therefore does not need to waste computing power on crawling it very often. Pages that rank well tend to be crawled frequently and closely monitored for any changes since they are highly visible in the SERPS.

[seomotionz]

Today I am seeing a lot of ads in Google Maps. This is a new.

[menntarra 34]

Huge changes started yesterday: one website went -80% daily, had daily 25000 unique visitors :/

Other 3 smaller websites went up:
300 unique->2000unique
2900 unique->8000 unique
2500 unique->4000 unique

None of them are in the same niche.

[samwest]

Turkey Day Test: Yesterday I attempted to boost traffic by sending out a Happy Thanksgiving message to my 50k paid user base. Not surprisingly, some invisible let’s call it “governer” dynamically slowed traffic from GOSE as if to throttle my trend to match the predicted volume (using a 20 year baseline of the specific day). None of the G traffic converted.

It’s clear that G considers any traffic...as the direct traffic appears to have shut down anything useful from the OSE. Anything from G was all Zombie one-and-done visits.

Maybe it’s just my hallucination, but it appears to be acting like a real time PID controller with analytics as the error signal. Test complete. This result is disturbing and would back my long standing quota theory. Due to a considerable traffic overshoot from the mass email, I expect to see very little if any traffic from GOSE today...even though Thanksgiving has traditionally been a high traffic day in my niche. Happy Turkey Day anyway. Will update as the next few days unfold.

[glakes]

it appears to be acting like a real time PID controller with analytics as the error signal. Test complete. This result is disturbing and would back my long standing quota theory. Due to a considerable traffic overshoot from the mass email, I expect to see very little if any traffic from GOSE today...

Would be interesting to take your throttling test a step further in the future. Before your next email blast, consider disabling analytics and any other embedded code that phones home to Google for a few days. Might that produce different results?

Even with clearing all the Google trackware from ones site, we can't control what data Chrome browsers send back to Google or the data collected from a subscriber list mailing that lands in Gmail accounts. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see how diluting the data Google harvests from our sites manifests itself in the type of users and quantity of traffic they send us from Search (if at all).

[Mark_A]

@samwest I did a few emailers recently, not the volume of yours, I did get peaks of web traffic, so my total traffic was not throttled. (a GA user)

[samwest]

I did get peaks of web traffic,

Yeah, so did I, but upon sorting through the direct traffic and Google traffic, I found Google had dropped off significantly, apparently in response to the overall burst. Cause and effect me thinks. This what I call the "foot of cupid" effect [youtu.be...] . As expected, today Google traffic is almost nonexistent, but I'm still getting direct from the mailing and will continue to do so for several more days.

[mosxu]

Quotas are in place for sure we end up every week with same amount of sales but click prices always go up.

Loosing 5 million ready to buy searchers every year to Amazon means the buyer traffic has to be sold more expensive but I have doubts my competitors have the prices and the sales to put prices up. Now it becomes more interesting when the desire to bid higher goes. Very interesting ...

[glakes]

Loosing 5 million ready to buy searchers every year to Amazon means the buyer traffic has to be sold more expensive but I have doubts my competitors have the prices and the sales to put prices up. Now it becomes more interesting when the desire to bid higher goes.

I believe 2020 will be the year many businesses abandon the PPC model and focus on shopping actions. The predictable and 12% fixed commission for shopping actions will appeal to many product sellers. As it stands now, some of the PPC top bids are ridiculous and unsustainable. A $2 bid for a $1.50 product? These loss leaders were common in the past, but have been evaporating for a while.

As more businesses reduce their PPC budgets, and move towards shopping actions, Google's ad revenue will tumble. With less money being spent on PPC, Adsense publishers will also feel the pinch as well. I wonder how Google will address this and keep publishers engaged? Will Google push/transfer Adsense publishers to a commission based affiliate pay program like Amazon? And with Google taking a 3% lower commission than Amazon's 15%, will Google be able to compete for publishers by offering competitive commissions?

With shopping actions, Google will likely be compelled to display and direct searchers to purchase those products that are more profitable for Google -vs- what is best for the consumer. In a futile effort to compete with Amazon, I would also expect to see more shopping blocks displayed in the SERPS for buyer queries which will push organics even further down the results.

2020 should be an interesting year to see how Google attempts to adapt their most profitable product (ads) to a changed environment. Will Google be able to regain some relevance in ecommerce or are they too far gone? How will Adsense publishers survive as more businesses ditch the PPC model?

[mosxu]

At the end of the day no one knows who/what is visiting your site and a commission based model should be the answer provided the commission is fixed and there is no personalisation and ads are not displayed according to the buyer pocket profile.

Amazon is the powerhouse, unbeatable business model facilitating Chinese manufacturers to sell direct to consumers. The need to research prices will become a complete waste of time.

[casperb]

Where do you get the idea that companies are reducing their ppc budgets? xD

[seomotionz]

Suddenly we are seeing many happy publishers of adsense, eCPM's are great now than ever.