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]

Google love for medium.com is unfounded.
I can write any nonsense there and rank 1st.
There isn't even moderation, anything goes.
Literally!

@SweetPotato Don't jinx it man ! Medium sends traffic to many of my sites. Yeah sure, they are not much targeted and didn't convert so well but sure they can generate ad revenue via adsense.

Wow, what a day of Zombies.

@samwest I am seeing this type of bot & zombie activity since Friday.

[RareBit]

@samwest - the only time I see that (traffic but 0 time on site) is if someone is trying to take my sites down with a DDOS or similar. They hit the page but no assets are loaded

[samwest]

@RB probably not the case because hits are several minutes apart and have no effect on the server loading. Plus, they are all from Google...not direct traffic.

One day I have splashes of live buyers...the next day or two it shuts down or is all Zombie. No consistency as in the days of natural unfettered traffic flow.

[seomotionz]

@samwest If you are relying on Google for traffic then it is the new way. Some days will be good (or not so good) and some days will be very very bad.

[RareBit]

Ah ok, makes sense. I get 2k+ hit per per second when we are under attack..and all direct as you mention

[MarvinG]

Gained good and converting traffic after the september update. All gone since this november update. Traffic dropped 20% :(

[glakes]

Just removed all our Adwords bid adjustments to the plus side. Though we had planned on using Adwords for branding until 1/1/2020, we are accelerating our timeline to depart that marketplace. Google's traffic is pure rubbish, whether organic or paid. I can't see wasting any money even for branding as I believe traffic coming from Google is so poorly matched to our products that even for branding it does not make sense.

[SnowMan68]

@glakes

We recently reduced our Adwords budget by about 50%. It was a joke, our branded searches cost us upwards of $12-$15 per click because our competitors bid it up trying to have exposure for our own keywords. I'd rather lose the business, than lose money or break even on those conversions, while Google continues to profit at our expense.

We've been doing this for about a month and the best part is we've lost very few sales, but saved thousands on just the brand searches alone.

[glakes]

We've been doing this for about a month and the best part is we've lost very few sales, but saved thousands on just the brand searches alone.

Our conversion history suggests entirely shutting down Adwords would not have much of a direct impact on our bottom line either. However, I plan to take the money being wasted in Adwords and reallocate that to other marketing channels that are producing results. I'll have some internal resistance to this, but I can't ignore the poor results from Google anymore. Even for branding, Google is just not worth it.

If you sell products and not services, you may want to take a look at Google's shopping actions where they take a fixed 12% commission from each sale. That may bring some predictability to conversion costs since the PPC model is dead IMO. I've yet to jump into shopping actions, but my guess is that Google will heavily manipulate that in such a way that converting traffic is driven to what makes Google the most money and not necessarily what is best for the consumer. In other words, follow Amazon's lead.

We're just not seeing many conversions from Google at all. Lots of organic traffic, mixed in with Adwords traffic, but high bounce rates and literally no conversions. Does not matter if it is Adwords or organic. I know some have indicated there may have been an update this weekend, but I can't tell. The only way for me to tell is a sniff test - how bad does the rubbish put out today by Google smell? Rotten just like yesterday, the week before, the month before, etc.

[StupidIntelligent]

Anyone else getting fake googlebot visits from countries like France and Ireland?

[BushyTop]

@stupidintelligent Yup! Crazy how we all seem to see the same thing. France....all day.

[StupidIntelligent]

This should explain this phenomenon. Go to the bottom of the article: [imperva.com...]

[mosxu]

@SnowMan68

Is your brand including a search term or is all unique? Also is your brand registered?

[SEOMike]

I had some weird activity on my site from 11/7 through 11/13. Analytics reports a lot of direct traffic to very old blog pages, all with 0% bounce rates and 0:00 session times and all of it out of Chicago. I don't get a ton of traffic to my own site so seeing a spike in traffic of a few hundred visits a day got my attention. I thought maybe I had been hacked or was being attacked by an AWS (I see AWS traffic out of Chicago a lot). I checked my server logs to find the IPs associated with the visits so I could squash a potential hack. I did a 1:1 comparison of times and URLs reported in analytics against my server logs and saw that all of the weird activity reported originated from IPs owned by Google. Geolocaiton tools put all of the traffic out of Cali (probably because of Google's ownership of the IPs) but also lists the IPs as "Google Proxy". The useragent from the Google IPs was Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3694.0 Safari/537.36 Chrome-Lighthouse

I use GTM to bring in GA. I've checked client sites with similar implementations of GA and don't see similar activity. Just my site. The activity seems to be picking up again today.

I haven't seen Googlebot leak into Analytics in many, many years. Anyone else seeing anything like this? I wonder what they're up to...

[StupidIntelligent]

@BushyTop - are you the individual who gets over a million visits per month in the automotive sector?

[samwest]

Crazy stupid drip pattern returned this morning after a nice start to the day...but now a single visit spaced at exactly 10 mins apart for the past 2 hours. Bang ON, Bang Off. It's traffic insanity. No change in SERP's - just radical ON / OFF patterns.

[browndog]

I'm finding that they're not returning exact matches. I've just searched for 'American Widgets', I get:

American widgets
List of widgets
American widgets
List of widgets
American widgets
List of widgets
10 large widgets
List of widgets
Widgets most popular in America

I then search for my article on American widgets and put in the name of my site after widgets, and it's nowhere to be found. The post is 2-3 weeks old now, so should have been indexed. Very strange.

[NickMNS]

I don't know what is up but I'm currently seeing a massive in flux of direct traffic to my site. I'm talking a 5 to 10X of what I would typically expect. There seems to be some correlation with some traffic from Reddit, in that the traffic is all landing on the same page. The traffic according GA does not seem to be coming from the same location and is mostly US based.

[seomotionz]

@SEOMike I saw a huge spike in traffic like this on Friday. They were all direct. If you see at a glance then you wouldn't even notice anything apart from the fact that they had a high bounce rate. When I went through my analytics thoroughly I found that all of these traffic has originated from google.com

Google is loosing their trust from users at a faster rate than I imagined. I mean SERP's are all sh**t, analytics are flooded with these type of void traffic (which a general user or a newbie wouldn't be able to determine), and above all adwords is costing way much more than usual. On a click which we are used to pay about $2-5 or may be $6. They are charging about $15-$20 which is way out of limit.

[arjunsinhchandravat]

After 7-10th November, suddenly there is a drop in rankings from 1 they moved to 2 and from 2-3. I have analyzed the URLs that are ranking on #1, our content is any day better than theirs and has authoritative and move backlinks. My assumption is, this could be due to BERT update. We were ranking for a set of keywords on #1 for the past 6-7 years now. Any suggestions what should I do, I am already working on the content part.

[koalapandaeu]

Hello, I have a new website, selling physical products in Europe. I don't use Adwords or any other form of advertisment, i don't engage in shady SEO operations.
You can see my daily organic google traffic here: [imgur.com...]
This is filtered traffic (without the 0:00 sessions). It was going well until the 25th September update. After that the sites started restoring some positions, but then came the November update. But the number of visitors is only part of the story. The september update changed the nature of my traffic, I suddenly started getting most of my google traffic from the USA/India (places where I can't sell) and next to none from Germany, Netherlands, Poland (my main markets). Interestingly enough my "well performing" English-language pages don't seem to reach any Brits.
And now this is my Bing traffic: [imgur.com...]
It is improving, while not driving many visitors. Other search engines also seem to like my site. I hope more people ditch Google and start using them.

[mosxu]

“On a click which we are used to pay about $2-5 or may be $6. They are charging about $15-$20 which is way out of limit.”

Smart robots moving the cheese first thing a webmaster does when buyer traffic disappears is probably putting bids up.

Now $15-$20 is not out of limit if buyer traffic goes to less and less advertisers

[Adrian100]

I run an affiliate website that reviews real products that I get from manufacturers. The last few weeks have been hell... Google shot my website into oblivion. Rankings are down, zombie traffic and almost no revenue. Just in August, I had one of my best months ever, rankings were going up but now they're decreasing faster and faster every day. Funny thing is the "big guys" (big magazines lol) with fake reviews, just listing the products and linking to Amazon, are ranking on position 1 - 10. Their content is literally nonexistent and they outrank my real reviews with 300-400 words. Btw the same goes for my competitors who also write real reviews. This is not fun anymore.

[seomotionz]

@mosxu We are putting less money in adwords now. The budget is almost 30% less.

After getting hit by a tsunami of bots this week seems to be good. No zombies or bots so far. The traffic is less but human, and a bit converting too. Everything changes and everything goes up & down. But what I am seeing to be constant is that the traffic stoppages. This started prior to the holiday weeks. And now its still there. A certain time of the day traffic stops, not even bots are seen at that time.

[mosxu]

@seomotionz

Yes in the old days the zombies were in large numbers but nowadays they do not compensate that much when traffic stops.

[samwest]

The churn continues...now my home page that was lagging an evergreen content sub page, popping in and out of the SERPS has now leapfrogged the evergreen sub page and is #1 for the term, and ranking for both singular and plural. Images are back...for now. Regardless of the home page being at #1, traffic is back to the zero / slow drip. Yesterday saw dramatic ON and OFF periods...or in other words, the new norm.
Just waiting for the day when they decide to take it all...it's close.

[MarvinG]

@Adrian100

I experience the same. Also write real reviews and in-depth reviews too. Most of them around 1500 words, but now I'm outranked by crappy reviews with almost no real content.

[SteveWrz]

@MarvinG

Yup, all of my articles are 1,500 fully researched and well written articles and I'm being beat out by of the top positions by absolute garbage.

The worst offender is Forbes outranking my site for some keywords with ONLY an image + caption page. Total word count on one of the pages outranking mine is 44. FORTY FOUR. It's literally a caption to a picture and that's it. No information, no links, nothing at all. How on Earth is that more relevant than what I'm writing?!

[goodroi]

@koalapandaeu Is there a scale to those charts or was your best day actually 37 people a day?

[dollarsound]

Talking again about the Nov 7th update...what I dont really understand is why all the sites I have access to, have dropped the very same amount of traffic. All of them already around 40%. Why not some loose 10%, others 20 or some others 50%. All the same percentage. Isn't it weird?