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.

[seomotionz]

Absolutely an update is happening now. Something big.

My two websites have no traffic at all. Something I never saw.

Search Console without penalty.

@renatovieira I am not so sure. Traffic is low than usual. But I am seeing any steep drop!

And SEMrush sensors are also showing nothing.

[RareBit]

No update here - my SERPs have been stable so far this week

[TaylorJones]

Traffic is slightly down but Top 3 rankings are all over the place at the moment.

On a side note, has anyone noticed Google not pulling in update title tags? All of my pages were crawled on November 2nd but are still showing information from mid-October. Any help appreciated

[PlinyTheElder]

I don't claim that this update touched every keyword. I'm experiencing "Google Dance" in a particular niche. However, in my niche, there definitely has been a huge Google algorithm update. In particular, the update affected the category pages.

[seomotionz]

Today traffic is very low. Its even worse then the previous week which was a holiday week.

[samwest]

My traffic seems to disappear the moment I start watching it...must be due to Heisenbergs Uncertainly Principle. ;)

What used to be certain traffic for page one results is now very far from certain.

Major changes daily in my niche. Seems they are beginning to employ the same annoying search function you find in YouTube. Try to page back once and the whole search result changes.

[samwest]

I'm experiencing "Google Dance" in a particular niche.

I can confirm that. This morning lost the home page and images again. This is the same thing that has been happening each week since September. Site at zero all day so far. There is no stability to the SERPs and if we were to rely on only Google for our livelihood, we'd perish.

[topaz]

No change in serp keywords, but zero traffic from amp, top stories or discover. Devastating for a news site.

[Subhodip]

Google announced “BERT roll out in October last week and it was a massive update. With “BERT”, Google aims to improve the interpretation of complex long-tail search queries and display more relevant search results. It will help Google to comprehend better about what people are looking for. This BERT update impacts 10% of search queries. If you see any rank drop, be sure to evaluate the content and match it with the search intent.

[samwest]

From what I see in my niche, Google's interpretation of search intent is to find and present the site with the most spun content and on-page ads. My niche is being decimated by content farmers. Whatever "BERT" does appears to be creating SERP chaos.

[RedBar]

I don't know about a "dance", it's more like a witches' cauldron that's been turned up high and all the scum in the bottom has floated to the top and is bubbling up and down and swirling around, the image SERPs is even worse, meanwhile some sites are securely stuck to #1 in the SERPs no matter how bad or irrelevant they are.

[PlinyTheElder]

I don't think that any recent changes in ranking what I have been witnessing are related to BERT since I see the entire TOP100 SERP jump up and down.

@Subhodip, I don't agree with you completely, since the content itself is not what BERT regards. A particular site (whether it be a famous brand or a private blog) may appear in the 2nd and 99th place within just 1 second. Next time, you'll see it in the 5th place. After, in the 23d place. And all these things are happening to all the sites in the SERP simultaneously!

[samwest]

Anyone seeing alot of query strings and keywords shown in GART as a long string like ? Cmuzdb65hsdffh734gr9f31h3lefg27frg1g2edhffh2fhhfhf2888shs ?
Seriously, seeing a lot of that today.

[seomotionz]

@Subhodip Its not BERT. Its something else.

[heisje]

Seems Google is "spreading the wealth" and spreading traffic. My observation : Old domains with updated content but long graced with no traffic are now doing better, while newer previously luckier domains are losing traffic. For some this may be good news.

Still, especially regarding technical subjects, serps seem dominated by stale and indeed long obsolete content, despite some dated early this century! Authority supreme, innovation irrelevant. That's definitely not the way of doing things.

.

[BushyTop]

Literally no conversions for me in the past 24 hours.... :(

[SweetPotato]

I'm seeing serps filled with malware and sneaky redirects from .cf .tk .ml .gq .ga domains.
Google can't tell apart anymore a legitimate site and a spam site.
This is serious. The anti-spam team lost the battle.

[RedBar]

Google can't tell apart anymore a legitimate site and a spam site.

The question has to be, how come DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc seemingly do not have this problem?

And how come G cannot recognise a brand new scraper site v the original, regularly updated one from 20 years ago?

[KaseyM]

So many spam sites getting into Google News nowadays?

I have 6 sites that scrape every article I put out and rank above me.

Unbelievable.

[glakes]

The question has to be, how come DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc seemingly do not have this problem?

Because Google displays what they think people want instead of providing what they ask for.

Google's search results are so heavily manipulated with layers of algo instructions, along with a touch of a low IQ RankBrain, that the results often look amateurish. It's a shame that with all the money Google makes they can't produce the better search results their competitors provide on a much, much lower budget.

[seomotionz]

The question has to be, how come DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc seemingly do not have this problem?

And how come G cannot recognise a brand new scraper site v the original, regularly updated one from 20 years ago?

@RedBar @SweetPotato The reason is that Google is too busy making money for its shareholders.

[Selen]

Via the US IP I see on the main page of google.com this link: "New! Get Nest Wifi now on the Google Store." Is this a commercial version of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button?

[topaz]

the flux from earlier this week which i think is unrelated to bert seems to be over for me..
[imgur.com...]

[samwest]

Google is too busy making money for its shareholders

They can start paying dividends any time now.

[RedBar]

They can start paying dividends any time now.

Just making sure, this is rhetorical? :-)

[RedBar]

Because Google displays what they think people want instead of providing what they ask for.

Damn, damn, damn ... I keep forgetting that!

[Paperchaser]

Entertainment industry here, i see lot of movement on my end, lot of sites losing their ranking heavily and couple hours later everything gets back to where they were. This weekend should be very interesting imo ;)

[sk7411]

I hate to say this but something seems not right for a Friday trend . 8th November may be ? BERT was good for us and things coincide with Bills prediction about the possible roll back .

Entertainment Niche.

[edited by: sk7411 at 9:16 am (utc) on Nov 8, 2019]

[StupidIntelligent]

@sk7411 - you mean you're not getting any traffic at all?

[sk7411]

@sk7411 - you mean you're not getting any traffic at all?

Traffic is there but to the pre BERT level.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:35 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2019]

[glakes]

<snip>

I don't see a rollback but rather a rollover where Google is steamrolling small businesses. Despite stable traffic, we received not one conversion from Google yesterday. We have good organic ranks in Google and Adwords, yet we could not squeak out one lousy conversion from Google. Conversions from Bing and Yahoo were fine along with direct (type in traffic).

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:23 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2019]
[edit reason] See mods note. [/edit]

[topaz]

@glakes... how you are tracking ? A fair bit of my Google traffic appears as direct in analytics.

[samwest]

Still looking like a rollback and re-sort going on. And yes Redbar' as a stock holder, that was tongue-in-cheek. I would rather see them pay a dividend than buying up and destroying more ideas and companies.

[NickMNS]

Well the "Bill Lambert" prediction appears to be materializing. That is "my" Bill Lambert prediction.

I'll make a prediction, on November 8th, there will another large spike in referral spam.

I'm seeing a massive spike of fake referrer spam traffic hitting my home page, a good portion of which is showing in GA as coming from Google (organic). I need to check my logs to confirm this, but unfortunately I don't have time at the moment. Also, this is ongoing right now so for the numbers to be really impressive I need let it play out.

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Mods note: A problem here is not only is the traffic fake, but so is "Bill Lambert". Thanks to Nick for recognizing this.

Barry at SER has made some pretty strong statements to the effect that, whoever Bill is, he's not a Googler. I don't follow him, but I assume that he's someone who is savvy enough about Google's updating patterns that he's right more often than not, maybe better than the broken clock that's right at least twice a day. Maybe he's got something to do with the fake traffic.

Since he's not a Googler, at WebmasterWorld we're going to treat him as someone who's spreading a story that's not completely true, for whatever reason... and we don't want our platform used for spreading rumors. Moderators here are volunteers, often pressed for time... Right now I don't have time even to look up Barry's statement about him.

I'm sure there are more graceful ways of handling this, but, for the moment, we're simply going to request that we avoid being part of the "Bill Lambert" rumor.

For those posts where "he" is mentioned, we will edit out all Bill Lambert references as best we can, without obscuring the traffic data that everybody here is trying to share. Some posts might get lost entirely, so best not to give this hoax more legs than it deserves.

Sorry to interfere with Nick's post and the ongoing Bull Lambert narrative, but at the moment that's the easiest approach we have.

Thanks.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:22 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2019]
[edit reason] Needed to include mod's note.... [/edit]

[RedBar]

My UK sites with 90% UK traffic are performing normally, my global sites are seeing an increase in traffic but not from the USA, all areas and especially the Middle East, China and India have shown more good search queries especially from Baidu.

[samwest]

Also see a lot of referral spam today and complete Zombie page to page interaction...or lack thereof. These are both foreign visits and likely very, very poorly targeted high bounce visits. Yesterday had a small window early in the day of very good quality converting traffic. Amazing how it turns on and off. <snip>

Update: also seeing a lot of probing for long non existing pages again. Clearly not human visits.

[edited by: goodroi at 4:26 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2019]
[edit reason] let's stay on topic [/edit]

[RareBit]

I got a spike on the 5th - but nothing today

[NickMNS]

Bill looks to be spot on again.

Spot on? The traffic is fake, as in not actually coming from Google and not actually hitting your server. He predicted an algo roll-back. What I'm seeing is pure spam. Really traffic appears unaffected.

[imgur.com...]

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I'm seeing strange things happening. Friend of mine using Adsense for 7 years, there was no problems. But week ago he received notification from Adsense team that diplaying ads was limited and that they can't verify the quality of the traffic. After 1 week his account was unblocked and everything is just great now.

After that, from yesterday I'm facing with the same thing with Media.Net, which managers are saying that I'm started sending a low quality traffic. My RPM suddenly dropped 3x times. Meanwhile, I'm seeing changes in traffic pattern last 2 days. I already faced with the same thing during last one big update for my website this year. So, if I understand the situation correctly, and also noticing many folks complaining about low quality search results and non converting traffic, maybe <snip> this is some sort of referral spam under name "Google" these days? :)

[edited by: goodroi at 4:28 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2019]
[edit reason] let's stay on topic :) [/edit]

[samwest]

From my reference point it is a rollback...and just when things were improving...but par for the course as it never seems to improve for long.

[SweetPotato]

The question has to be, how come DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc seemingly do not have this problem?

Bing doesn't index every domain that resolves. They are picky and rightfully so.
DDG is Bing. And I can prove it.

One domain of mine was banned from Bing. So I emailed them and they lift it.
Same day I start getting Bing traffic I get DDG traffic.
My referral traffic for both are exactly the same day by day ever since. Which means my site is on the same position in both sites, for all queries, always.

[glakes]

@glakes... how you are tracking ? A fair bit of my Google traffic appears as direct in analytics.

We analyze from raw logs though have GA installed. Still no conversions from Google at all - not even one...

[browndog]

Has anybody taken a significant hit in the past day? My site seems to have lost a lot of traffic.

[seomotionz]

Has anybody taken a significant hit in the past day? My site seems to have lost a lot of traffic.

@browndog Getting hit is pretty usual these days. Can you be more specific? Was it this week or month?

[Pokwerpok]

@browndog, same here! Never been hit by an algo update or anything before. I have a totally white hat, quality site. Checked, there's no manual penalty, lost of links or anything that would explain this. But yesterday, many keywords got hit and traffic sunk 50% overnight. It doesn't seem like a BERT rollback - with BERT came a boots in impressions, but KW rankings stayed about the same, but now, it hit KW rankings.

[browndog]

I was hoping it was Thanksgiving, but that's not until later in the month. I hope it's a glitch for both of us. Traffic has been awful. I'm 100% white hat too.

[StupidIntelligent]

This Bull Lambert character might be part of the spamming network that DDOSes Google or something. Tons of referral spam in the past 24 hours. He can predict such traffic with accuracy; which leads me to this idea.

[StupidIntelligent]

My latest hit of referral spam came from France. Anyone else with the same data?

[filbiz]

I also lost a lot of traffic since last night. I also saw a drop in keyword ranking on my pages. I'm not sure if this has something to do with my site not yet secured (https) but I've been through years without my site migrating to https and my ranking is good. @pokwerpok and @browndog are your sites already https?

[Pokwerpok]

@filbiz, yes, been using https all the time.