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]

[themistral]

We are still showing good visibility on semrush - up on last week, but our organic traffic is already down on last Friday which in turn was halved from the Friday before.
Monday, Tuesday and Thursday were all there or thereabouts in comparison to the traffic the week before.

We've made no changes to our website other than add new blog posts.

Can't work out what's going on. Anyone else in the UK seeing this behaviour?

[renatovieira]

@themistral

I had a high traffic spike on Tuesday. Since then I've been falling after falling traffic.

I thought it was just another test, but analyzing my graphics, something big start to run.

[vphoner]

My rankings went down big on Tuesday December 3rd. Hope this is not permanent. Traffic very low now too as a result. Hard to be a mom and pop site these days. Was there a big algorithm change in December?

[renatovieira]

@vphoner

I'm a little more relieved to know it wasn't just me.

My numbers are amazing, I say that negatively. :-(

One of my sites is 6 years old, and I've never seen anything like it like these last 3 days.

[markseo]

Seeing a big drop off, back to pre-november 11th levels.

Aren't we due a quarterly core update around now?

[themistral]

@renatovieira @vphoner

i thought last weekend might have been to do with Black Friday weekend here in the UK even though we are not an ecom site.
Felt a little relieved when traffic went up to expected levels on Mon/Tues. But yes, it now seems like something is going on.

I know there was a local search update recently, but we are still ranking well in local pack and haven't seen traffic drop off from this channel.

[vphoner]

@renatovieira, I hope this is temporary. Its strange, because I saw a big drop in late September around 9/25, then about a month later on 10/30 and through November, much stronger traffic, , and now this. Its all over the place. But over the last couple of years, its been downhill for those of us with smaller sites.

[SteveWrz]

Is anyone else seeing just random spikes and valleys throughout the day? For years my daily Analytics chart would be a smooth climb throughout the day, now there are huge spikes in traffic one hour, followed by a big drop the next, and then somewhat back to normal afterwards. It's been happening since the November update.

[samwest]

Is anyone else seeing just random spikes and valleys throughout the day? For years my daily Analytics chart would be a smooth climb throughout the day, now there are huge spikes in traffic one hour, followed by a big drop the next, and then somewhat back to normal afterwards. It's been happening since the November update.

Yes, this is pretty much a daily occurrence that just keeps getting worse.
I won't bore you with details, but patterns indicate a definite throttle and quota.
Not a natural pattern at all as one would expect based on a typical TOD traffic.
And yet site ranks #1 to #3 across a wide range of searches.

Baring any AI throttling or quota filtering, it must mean nobody is using Google today, but maybe tomorrow...pffft
Meanwhile the junior executives at Google laugh and dine on lobster daily.

[edited by: samwest at 6:57 pm (utc) on Dec 6, 2019]

[renatovieira]

Does anyone remember the zombies?

Leaving the joke aside, this week not even zombies visited my sites! God damn !

This update is really being devastating for my sites.

[renatovieira]

@SteveWrz

Also here! Some hours heavy traffic. At other times practically zero traffic. Very strange...

[samwest]

@ rena ...Same here...three sales in 30 min then nothing else all day. Ridiculous.

Oh and ubiquitous zombies still prevail.

[seomotionz]

Everytime I see the analytics, its either I get a headache or my heart starts pounding so hard & so fast that its about to explode.

Zero traffic for hours and then boom! hundreds within just couple of minutes.

Anyway, some of the sites which usually gets US traffic mainly. All of sudden getting huge amounts of European traffic specifically which countries doesn't have English as their official language such as Germany. The traffic is not bad, getting a few sales. But the thing that concerns me is US traffic has disappeared totally.

[gatormark]

@renatovieira

My second largest site had a high traffic spike the beginning of this month as well. For me, it turned out that my Google rankings jumped. Many of my keywords jump from 3 or 4 to #1. Just that difference increased traffic and revenue 450%. My main site saw a little uptick, but not anything to write home about.

[seomotionz]

Just that difference increased traffic and revenue 450%

@gatormark Enjoy it while it lasts. eCPM rates are through the roof, indeed.

[hopepro]

Traffic slow today (SAT) since Friday. I'm seeing more never-seen-before long tailed keywords entering site. Is this Neural? is this BERT? or just regular core update

[StupidIntelligent]

Nothing has really changed on my end.

[glakes]

Another deep crawl going on right now.

Once again, Google is not crawling our product pages. We have no robots.txt at all or noindex on our product pages. There's no technical reason for Google to not crawl our product pages. But Google will crawl our info pages that have YouTube videos embedded on them multiple times. Does this mean we need to embed a video on every product page just to get Google to crawl our product pages?

I'm one that believes how Google crawls a site is a good indication of how a site and each page will perform in the SERPS. The lack of Google crawling our product pages is about the clearest evidence I have that Google has no intention on sending us any shopper traffic. And crawling pages with embedded YouTube videos multiple times illustrates Google's preference for their own services.

[samwest]

Suddenly seeing a LOT of crawling to very old non-existent .htm pages that existed before switching to WordPress CMS over a decade ago. Must be following Wayback Machine links. Redirecting as needed.

[koalapandaeu]

I wrote before about my problems since the september-october updates on a new site. In late november my goog traffic started to pick up again (didn't really do anything, was busy with my social media plans). This continued steadily into Black Friday and then up to the 5th of december, when *something* changed again and traffic has been dead since then.

[BoredMeteor]

This whole year has just been one big relentless Google squeeze.

I was also seeing some minor improvement after getting hit at the end of September. Yesterday things flat lined, and today is the same (if not worse). Every little move they make just keeps chipping away...

[samwest]

Traffic is still ON/OFF and never relates to what you would expect for time of day or week. One hour per day (if you're lucky) you can love it, the next 23 you don't. For many years, with the same SERP positions, we would see TOD and TOW dips and surges that were reliable and made perfect sense. Nowadays it's totally random, which indicates the AI throttle and the man behind the curtain. [youtu.be...]

[renatovieira]

After a tense week, things apparently begin to return to normal levels.

Anyway, I think early celebrate.

[seowinning]

Small updates is ok, but looks like google is releasing huge updates every week...

[aristotle]

looks like google is releasing huge updates every week...

That doesn't make sense.

After 20 years of development and testing, the algorithm should be functioning so well by now that only an occasional minor adjustment is needed.

[gatormark]

After 20 years of development and testing, the algorithm should be functioning so well by now that only an occasional minor adjustment is needed.

@aristotle

I don’t think Google “thinks” that way.

[heisje]

Image search is truly a joke at this time - relevance 35% at best for early results, soon thereafter dropping off to 10%. Only a monopoly can sustain such bad performance - any normal business would be long finished by now.

.

[Athedian]

Traffic died for me on the weekend from 12/7-12/8, conversion was almost non-existent.

Bounce rate shot up by 10% last week from 12/2-12/6 then dropped down again to its usual level. Active users dropped 6% in the last two days.

Didn't do much page updates other than reformatting the blogs because they were done horribly in the past. The new layout should have provided much better UX... guess not.

Also I've noticed a lot of SERP are showing up really old results from years back when I was trying to find some info on certain topics. I guess Google doesn't like newly updated content anymore?

[glakes]

After 20 years of development and testing, the algorithm should be functioning so well by now that only an occasional minor adjustment is needed.

If it were about "quality" one would expect only minor tweaks would be needed as you noted. But it's not about quality and instead all about the money. None of Google's "quality" updates in the last five years have produced better conversions for me. Each "quality" update has resulted in fewer page views and conversions while miraculously maintaining the same or better quantity of traffic. It's nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The organic and paid traffic Google sends is junk. Nothing but pure crap from the worlds alleged best search engine that continuously rolls out "quality" updates to improve search. I've seen no improvements, only things getting worse. So on that note, I'll say Google is good at one thing - lying. The question is, how many webmasters/businesses still believe the BS that Google puts out to the public to digest?

[gatormark]

December is going well in the USA and is not slowing down yet. For me, it is on pace to be the best month since November of 2017. This change is primarily due to Google’s recent algorithm updates affecting my second largest website in a positive way. Finally an update that didn’t hurt me!