Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2019

[glakes]

This post and the following 3 posts were moved from Nov 2019 thread [webmasterworld.com...]
by not2easy at 5:42 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2019

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Solid quantity of traffic coming from Google, but it's all rubbish. I'd likely have a better conversion rate with the same quantity of traffic using pop-unders on unrelated sites.

Bing/Yahoo are converting well and Amazon is solid as always. Just another day of Google proving their irrelevance in my ecommerce industry...


[edited by: not2easy at 5:42 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2019]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:44 pm (utc) on Dec 2, 2019]
[edit reason] split cleanup [/edit]

[Sissi]

Probably the mistake is to believe that SEO is a science.
Just discovered that for 2 major competitive keywords, on of my page was ranking number 3 page 1.No https, not even indexed with webmaster tool.

[Robert Charlton]

Probably the mistake is to believe that SEO is a science.

I myself think of it as a craft or an art, with some important technical aspects.. but have never considered it a science. .

Just discovered that for 2 major competitive keywords, on of my page was ranking number 3 page 1.No https, not even indexed with webmaster tool.

This may suggest that you're thinking of SEO as a checklist, and that if one checks all the right boxes for technical factors, one deserves to rank high. There are many, many nuances and factors, and even comparing "2 major competitive keywords", you can't possible reduce the factors to the two you have listed.

IMO, this kind of simplistic approach causes a lot of superficial SEO, and huge amounts of frustration...

https is simply not that major a ranking factor, though it's important for a great many reasons, some of which are still coming.... I'm unsure what you mean by 'not even indexed with webmaster tool", but some of those tools are training wheels, possiblly useful training wheels when they work, but certainly not make-or-break aspects of site setup that determine ranking.

[dethfire]

Advanced SEO absolutely benefits from knowing some Information Architecture, Retrieval Systems and Data science.

[Robert Charlton]

Advanced SEO absolutely benefits from knowing some Information Architecture

dethfire, I fully agree. The discipline of "Architecture" itself, though, combines both arts and sciences. Information Architecture, granted, is probably more technical than aesthetic... with User Experience, say, probably going more toward the arts.


Mod's note...
Putting mod's hat on, though, discussing the arts/science divide further would be off topic in the Updates and SERP Changes thread, which is about updates and serp changes and sharing observations about those.

[heisje]

Advanced SEO absolutely benefits from knowing some Information Architecture, Retrieval Systems and Data science.

There is no such thing as "Advanced SEO". There is only "Effective SEO", evaluated by how much income it generates at the current time. It comes in a variety of flavours depending on each specific case.

(Ooops - crossed with mod's (post!)

.

[aristotle]

Solid quantity of traffic coming from Google, but it's all rubbish.

Traffic patterns and visitor behavior may be a bit abnormal this weekend, especially for shopping sites.

I'm getting blasted with emails with headlines like "Black Friday Sale Extended", and "Get An Early Start On Cyber Monday". I'm not doing any shopping myself, but can imagine that there's a lot of abnormal activity.

[seomotionz]

@heisje agreed. Whether you do effective SEO or not!

@aristotle Some of our sites had a blast this weekend. Since last week (prior to Black Friday) SERP's were a mess, I am wondering what is going to happen this week.

[samwest]

Well, my product is no longer selling, but Adsense is suddenly booming ever since activating auto ads.

[jmorgan]

Probably the mistake is to believe that SEO is a science.

IMO, and I've stated this before, people are probably spending too much time on "SEO" and relying on Google to rank them. IMO, again, I think it's probably best just to focus on building a quality website for your users and the rest will take care of itself.

If you're asking yourself "What will Google think of this?", then you're on the wrong track when you should be thinking "Will this benefit or detract from the user experience?" I myself have been (and probably will be from time to time) guilty of this mistake.

[seomotionz]

Well, my product is no longer selling, but Adsense is suddenly booming ever since activating auto ads.

@samwest You don't necessarily need to turn them on. eCPM is high since Friday and its good as it never was.

[samwest]

@seom... funny how traffic picked up but behavior seems fully tuned for ad conversion, not product conversion. Must be another amazing coinkidink...or a brilliant AI effect.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Soon we will be crying that our eCPM's has gotten very low.

[samwest]

@seo ... naturally.

Anyone else notice the current trend of Google preferring long winded aggregations of sites as faux reviews? Not only that, the trend of placing a number in the title, like "101 best widgets"? (Even RankMath is recommending that). In spots you'd expect more authoritative info, you get Pinterest.

This just screams of over optimization and a lack of creativity on the so called "authors" part. The end of these "articles" is usually mindless syndication of "see what this actor looks like now" click traps.

As they claim to provide, I'm looking for a direct line to the best authority and takeaway, but Google seems to prefer two or more tiers of ad filled thin pages before you get to your real search intent. At least that's been my recent finding...in my niches.

Cyber Monday and traffic is back to ON / OFF patterns and no conversions.

[MayankParmar]

More on Google's November update for local searches

[twitter.com...]

[RedBar]

In early November, we began making use of neural matching as part of the process of generating local search results.

It's obviously working extremely well with US companies riding high in the UK SERPs!

Not a clue.

[samwest]

Same morning g window as last week. Then poof..conversions shut down the rest of the day.

[SnowMan68]

Busiest Black Friday and Cyber Monday in our company history. Google organic is up significantly and converting at record levels. Will be curious to see what numbers are posted for eCommerce this year.

[sk7411]

I wonder why the chatter is so limited but we are seeing a significant volatility today or from the past couple of days.

[StupidIntelligent]

@SnowMan68 - Congrats for earning so much money.

[JesterMagic]

@sk7411 - November was extremely volatile for a lot of us. Some may just see this as a continuation of what you are seeing and have nothing new to add.

[mosxu]

@SnowMan68

Have you been drinking?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Seeing further drop. Last two weeks since the update past in a hard work for me, I updated the content that were hit. But nothing changed. It seems like this update is more links related and until the database won't be updated with the next update nothing will change and you can try anything, it won't work.

It's the most strangest update I've seen last years. And it's absolutely unlogical for me taking into the consideration the results of SERP...

[glakes]

I wonder why the chatter is so limited but we are seeing a significant volatility today or from the past couple of days.

Despite a rise in traffic, conversions remain constant at near 0 from Google. With traffic that behaves like a hit bot, there's not much to jump for joy over.

Our conversions from Google were down 34% in November, which is our busiest month. But it's not as ugly as it seems. Being down 34% on already poor conversions originating from Google does not impact us that much. And despite Google turning the screws tighter in 2019, my company has set an all time yearly sales record.

I'm not sure how Google thinks it will keep businesses engaged and believing in the Google Kool Aid, but it's obviously working for them and not us. Moving forward I will build on our recent 40% reduction in Adwords spending with further reductions until we permanently depart that marketplace. In 2020 I suspect Google will be less of a factor in our business and not the main topic of our marketing meetings.

[SnowMan68]

@stupidintelligent

Thanks. We have been grinding super hard on content creation. Video is hard to track as far as conversions are concerned, but I think it has played a big part in our recent success.

I'm really wondering how our traffic will look after the Black Friday/Cyber Monday boost goes away. It feels like something rolled out Wednesday last week.

[seomotionz]

Whoa! Suddenly SEMrush is showing spikes. I wondered today why suddenly the traffic dropped after noon.

And loads of bots came to our sites.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Guys who are facing with strange Analytics glitch right now? In live mode in second it shows 120 users online, and after that in one second it shows 80. After a moment it rises again. But no activity in the right pane. What kind of trick is that?

P.S. I have a reason to believe that these guys prepared another portion of headache for webmasters. Cross your fingers.

[aristotle]

Just did a little experiment to compare numbers of ads on google vs. bing.

Using incognito, I searched for "christmas gifts" (without quotes) on both search engines. Here are the results:

Google: 4 ads at top above organic results
Plus 3 ads at bottom below organic results

Bing: 5 ads at top above organic results (bigger than google's ads)
Plus 4 ads at bottom below organic results (bigger than google's ads)
Plus 8 more ads on right edge of screen

Plus both pages have big image clusters linking to each company's own shopping results.

--> So both google and bing are probably making a lot of money from ads. But bing may have to show more ads to keep up.

[glakes]

Whoa! Suddenly SEMrush is showing spikes.

Could it be others, like little ole me, have reduced their Adwords spending so much that Google has to tighten the organic screw even more to make shareholders happy? Or could it be that most shoppers aren't even going to Google to see any ads at all? My Amazon sales would indicate the later is true.

--> So both google and bing are probably making a lot of money from ads. But bing may have to show more ads to keep up.

Google intentionally limits ads to drive up bids. When Google dumped the sidebar ads on desktop years back, it killed our ROI. From an advertisers perspective, more ads is better. With a greater selection of listings (ads and organic), users are more inclined to click on something more relevant -vs- what we see in Google now with limited ads and at times just 5 organic listings.

[jrpfhc]

I have a 5 year old website. I've never used any link building strategy for it. In mid November it had about 32,000 unique visitors from organic search a day. It's whittled down to 26,000 now. I can live with that. What I have a harder time with is that it's been about a 3-5% drop every week. When will it end? I'd just rather know where It's going to land.