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.

[filbiz]

@Pokwerpok, I guess it has to do with something else. But there is no info regarding algo update today. Hope this is just a glitch.

[ChokenBako]

@Browndog:

Yep something is going on, got hit yesterday. -16% down comapred to last week....

[dollarsound]

Yes, here too. Main 2 sites, different niches, different geos, have been slightly loosing traffic for the last 2 weeks. But yesterday one was 25% down vs same day last week and the other 15%. Today it seems it's going to be worst.

[dollarsound]

It started at 5:00 am PST

[seo2019]

We where doing well when the BERT algorithm rolled out, however we can hit by something yesterday.
Lost 50% of our traffic overnight.

[samwest]

I concur...the week started out ok' but the bottom fell out yesterday. Seeing a lot of churn in the SERPs. Really looks like a rollback to a few weeks ago for my niche. It's a mess.

All images lost (again), as well as the home page...yet a sub page is still at #1.

Lots of foreign traffic and odd queries to deep pages. Zero conversions.

This new "fake traffic" is no different than the long standing Zombie observation. Maybe some are just now experiencing it for the first time. My sincerest sympathies.

[edited by: samwest at 11:10 am (utc) on Nov 9, 2019]

[SnowMan68]

We saw an increase of 24% with G organic yesterday vs. the average of the last 8 Fridays. We'll see if it holds through the weekend and into next week.

[samwest]

Just looking at my adsense numbers for yesterday...up 203% and a record day....but no conversions on my product. That may indicate a filter effect designed to churn ads is being rolled out or tested. Not surprising and fully expected from the worlds best ad engine.

[SteveWrz]

Add me to the Rollback list. 12 year old site, built into a massive authority using only white-hat techniques and staying on top of everything. I had a massive upswing in September, a slight increase with BERT, and now massive devastation Thursday evening/Friday morning. Looks like a 30% decrease.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

The same thing as for many of you: 13 years big old IT blog (with updated content, regular posts, totally white, never had any serious problems with updates) was hit hard and the decrease goes on. Another one of my websites is not so big and trusted, but it also catch a 60% decrease after Thursday and till now. Fingers crossed it's something temporary...

[EditorialGuy]

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

We always see a decline in November and early December (that's been true for 20+ years), but the last couple of days have shown a slight improvement, both in real numbers and year-over-year comparisons. That may not have anything to do with Google's algorithms, though (external factors can easily come into play), and in any case, the change hasn't been significant.

[JesterMagic]

Seeing a slight rollback in our niche which means a slight boost. With Bert we lost some traffic. and 2 weeks ago we went down 10% but seem to have gain that back in the last few days.

[dollarsound]

One of my sites that has suffered from that drop is 9 years old, I never did any seo to it more than technical on site seo. Domain authority is 50+ and content is original, all articles 2500 words up. The 30% drop is still here today in all geos and hourly constant.

[SnowMan68]

It looks like our increase in google traffic is coming from long tail. I don't really see much movement with the short tail for us.

[aristotle]

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.

Possibly google detected an upsurge in click fraud?

[browndog]

I'm down 10% from the previous week, and there is no sign of improvement. After adding up the outgoings for my site yesterday, I realised I'm now making absolutely no money from it, but working a full 4 days a week, as well as mornings and evenings on the days I work out of the home. Which makes me a fool.

[samwest]

I cant figure why image search is so screwed up. I have over a thousand original and compelling images and yet Google only indexes two. Now those two are gone and the only remaining images of mine being indexed are those that were scraped and posted on really poor quality, spammy foreign sites.

When I see this, it's either a rollback or a re-sort of the image index. Google dance used to act like this...but now it's a weekly polka. Same bubble sort behavior on my home page for certain keyphrases.

It really is a mess.

[RedBar]

I don't know what's happening on one of my sites tonight (UK time), supposedly loads of single visits from Google yet all with different IPs, locations, devices, screen sizes, operating systems etc.

They've each been visiting a valid but a different url for a milli-second.

[Malanje]

Google is encouraging visitors to click on the ads as if they were search results. When will advertisers realize this? I can't believe that kind of clicks bring customers.

[SweetPotato]

The only folks doing good are black hat dudes and huge sites. Google is lost.

[seomotionz]

@SweetPotato Its true, the regular folks are getting crushed. I thought after the holidays, this week traffic will be better. But instead of getting better, it got worse. I am seeing useless sites ranking high in the SERP's. I am staring to think that there no human at the Google HQ who looks into the searches!

[browndog]

Down by 22% from this time last week. I need to find a way to get out of my subscriptions and shut down the site. It breaks my heart, I love it, but it's no longer viable.

[sk7411]

<snip>
The rollback/tweak or whatever you want to call it has happened. This is getting meaningless day by day to discuss every updates and tweaks . Period!

[edited by: goodroi at 4:30 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2019]
[edit reason] let's stay on topic :) [/edit]

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Aristotel

Possibly google detected an upsurge in click fraud?

The thing is he checked the things and didn't detected any spurges or something else. Everything was going as everyday. And then "boom" and your traffic is sh...t according to Google. And the funniest situation is that Adsense blocked ads displaying for the website that has 87% of traffic from Google... It looks like Google told him: "Yeah, I know that my traffic is pure sh...t!".....

[sk7411]

Well SEJ has a post regarding November google update , so it’s broadly felt i suppose .

[engine]

Domain crowding is rife. I saw two pages for one term and then gave up.

[MayankParmar]

I am not seeing any changes in my niche.

[JorgeV]

Hello-

The same way Google pushed the use of HTTPS, I am certain that in the upcoming years, Google will also push IPv6.

[EditorialGuy]

Nice boost this morning. One page is already up 6,900 percent over the same day last week because of a natural event at one of the destinations that we cover, which just goes to show that Google's algorithm changes aren't the only things that affect search traffic.

[Martin Ice Web]

We saw a uptic in traffic starting last week. Conversions down since last monday.
I was astonished about the traffic that we no get and analized it.It turned out that it is just bots from all over the world.
Most comes from Sri lanka and other "free law!" countries. I figured out that the owner of the bots are located in russia. It seems that russians have booked a big slot of IPs in this countries. Maybe because most webmasters refuse .ru IPs in .htacces.

With bert starting ( and i realy don´t know if its online for germany ) our niche is again useless for shopping customers.
Sites that i would never trust, big sites that have to be a registered user, very slow loading ( 30 seconds ) big brands sites are ruling.
And what is realy annoying is that google ranks sites that astonishingly have no repution for selling this items. Like a food market sells guitars.

[Paperchaser]

@browndog Same exact situation here as well, i strongly believe it will get back to previous state hopefully, hang in there little more if you can just incase. =/
[ibb.co...] down by 21%

[bugthinker]

Oh yeah, I felt the change on my well-performing site.

[Tech4]

My two websites have lost exactly 30% of traffic from Google simultaneously despite they are in different languages. Google is definitely testing or already using a new algorithm.

[HereWeGo123]

@Paperchaser – Thanks for sharing that. What niche/market are you in? And Can you please share why you feel everything will bounce back? Thanks!

[jmorgan]

A few pundits are suggesting there was an update around Nov 7. Did anyone notice changes?

[SnowMan68]

@jmorgan

Lol

[aristotle]

Cyril TechWebsites -- I meant to say that google might have detected an upsurge in fraudulent clickbot activity on adsense ads in the same or similar niche as that website.

[jmorgan]

@SnowMan68 I'll take that as a yes.

[Paperchaser]

@HereWeGo123 I'm in the entertainment niche, what i have notice so far are domain including the keyword being research are being ranked on top regardless if you have a more relevant website for that research(example - poster movies).. Ive seen this behaviors (in my niche) often in the past specially when some Algo being roll back, reason I'm being optimistic. Sadly we still talking about the big G so nothing really is for sure, its just my 2cents :)

Apologize if my English ain't perfect, hopefully u still got my point.

[seomotionz]

Is it just me or you guys are also seeing this? The SERP's are flooded with Google Ads. I mean a bit more than the usual flooding.

[Guidesify]

Improved SERP positions but traffic down by 24%.

[samwest]

Decreased SERPS but a increase in totally non responsive traffic to site sales conversions or amazon site links yet big increase in adsense conversions. From my perspective it is like traffic is targeted to ads, not site content. I foolishly allowed Google to trample on my site with auto ads, so I deserve this.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Aristotle

I meant to say that google might have detected an upsurge in fraudulent clickbot activity on adsense ads in the same or similar niche as that website.

You mean that some spam traffic around the niche can stop displaying ads on different websites from that niche? How can that be possible? Can't get it...

[RedBar]

The SERP's are flooded with Google Ads.

By flooded on desktop do you mean lots of ads at the top followed by 3-5 YouTube videos, ads on the RHS, at the bottom similar to the top and squeezed in the middle a maximum of 5 organic listings?

Nah, I've not see that :-)

On mobile the above layout is utterly pointless since as soon as one sees it, it is not worth going any further, meanwhile DDG still provides a very clean experience with, most of the times, better results.

I do still tend to use G for images however something drastic has also happened in those SERPs the past few weeks especially with domain crowding.

[SadPanda]

8 year old website in education space with ahrefs DR of 70. Only white hat SEO. Lost 40% of traffic from Nov 9 to Nov 11 (compared to previous week). Rankings dropped as well. First time we were significantly impacted by any algorithm update. Good times ;-/

[StupidIntelligent]

No change on my end.

[aristotle]

aristotle:
I meant to say that google might have detected an upsurge in fraudulent clickbot activity on adsense ads in the same or similar niche as that website.

Cyril TechWebsites
You mean that some spam traffic around the niche can stop displaying ads on different websites from that niche? How can that be possible? Can't get it...

Well I thought you were looking for an explanation for why the adsense ads were paused, and so I speculated that google might have detected excessive fraudulent clickbot activity for ads pertaining to that niche.

Earlier you mentioned "pure sh...t" traffic, and I can't imagine a worse form of traffic than clickbots. Many clickbots disguise themselves as referral traffic from google search.

But if the ads were paused, there wouldn't be anything for the clickbots to click.

[ubound]

I lost about 17%. My traffic grew steadily this year, better than ever on a six-year-old site. I didn't gain much from Bert but I was gaining the whole time since March. This update put me back to where I was around July traffic-wise, but conversions are almost non-existent. I don't do any optimization at all. I just kind of look up keywords and include them in titles, but I don't worry about keywords beyond that. I don't build links at all.

Also, remember last Sunday there was winter time change, so your data for last Sunday is 25 hours instead of 24. And also today there was a GA issue, so I am not sure whether it tracked during the down period. This won't make a huge difference, but it's something to keep in mind when trying to assess your losses

[samwest]

I'm not going to speculate on why traffic behavior has tanked since last Friday. The serps in my niche and many others are an ad loaded mess. I can search several distinctly different terms yet google throws back the same irrelevant ad loaded sites.

Traffic is not traversing pages again and this is a behavioral issue that turns on and off at random. If this is not related to some kind of sophisticated AI filtering designed to push ad dollars, I'll eat my hat.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Google is throwing so much ads now. That I starting to think that Google has forgotten its a search engine and not a PTC like platform.