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]

[seomotionz]

Today about 30% traffic is down. The sites which were hit by bots are having real traffic but its slow.

Jobs+Abbreviation+Customer Care (Got only impact in Abbreviations segment, that was in ranking)

@manishvats21 Many sites like yours were hit yesterday. Today their traffic is also down but they are improving. How about yours? I haven't heard of anybody got hit and lost about 70% traffic. The maximum limit I have heard is around 50%.

[engine]

Here's some other news which may affect your traffic. Google Adding More Top Stories in Search With Multiple Carousels [webmasterworld.com]

[RedBar]

The only common factors I am seeing are all on older, well-established, branded sites with many formerly well-ranked pages simply disappearing meanwhile with some other pages still in their regular positions!

I have one 21 year old region-specific UK site easily heading towards its worst-ever December, it's looking at least 50% of the last few Decembers and possibly even worse if this continues. Fortunately it is not actually affecting the business whatsoever but, nevertheless, it is extremely disconcerting as to what it is G has, or has not, done.

If this were only happening on my UK sites I would probably have suggested that it may possibly be General Election related however since my global sites are experiencing equally unusual SERPs results, I have to discount that.

For at least the last 20 years from mid-December onwards I have experienced dramatic and fluctutaing traffic since the vast majority of my widget industry does close down for 2-3 weeks however I've never experienced it as pronounced as this.

Is this it until 6th January 2020, another 25 days?

[SteveWrz]

The only common factors I am seeing are all on older, well-established, branded sites with many formerly well-ranked pages simply disappearing meanwhile with some other pages still in their regular positions!

This is exactly what I've seen as well. I feel like I'm being punished for strictly following Google's own guidelines and being as white-hat as possible. Content is king? BS. I should have just been out there buying links all along.

[glakes]

It is very clear for me that google is giving very specific quota traffic each day. 1 keyword has 100 visitors, another 3 keywords starting to rank and gain 3 X 33 = 90+ visitors. The first keyword drop down its position right away. Since we're connected to brand and advertisers directly, in some extent, we're the only one who has the information about the promotional campaign, but when searching for those keywords, other sites with non-relevant contents come up first. Is this BERT that google so proud of?

I can confirm this is happening on our ecommerce website as well. We have info pages that take off this time of year and as a result Google is heavily throttling traffic to our product pages. This crude form of throttling traffic on the fly, which appears to be placing a sitewide cap on traffic, is why some may be seeing bursts of sales/conversions followed by a period of zombies. Since this is not limited to page level, others experiencing this should be able to easily notice how traffic to one page falls as another page on the site spikes. With us, unfortunately our product pages are not spiking at all which makes it impossible to convert a Google visitor into a sale when little traffic reaches our product pages.

I believe a much less noticeable form of this traffic throttling method may have been going on for years, and Google just cranked it up big time.

[Paperchaser]

Still skiing downhill after almost 50% traffic lost since Nov 7th i see a little light at the end of the tunnel since yesterday but not getting my hope up to much though =/
Let's see how things will be after holidays.

[ichthyous]

Semrush shows a nice jump for me. I've now passed all my competitors and and ranking at the top. Traffic has increased a bit according to GA. But total silence and no inquiries. It could be that people are preparing for holidays and have finished shopping, but typically that doesn't happen by beginning of December. It's been quiet for ten days.

[darkness957]

It is true that there is an ongoing algorithm update. I see more traffic to my website than in the previous few days. Hopefully everything will work out for the better.

[BushyTop]

Loads of Bot activity last night. We had some many fake enquiries beating our captcha, its crazy.

[seomotionz]

@BushyTop Not only just bots but a whole bunch of spammers and irrelevant traffic too.

[Martin Ice Web]

Only for the christmas shopping stats this year, compared to last year. ( our sales )

2018:
google 15%
amazon 65%
ebay 20%

2019 so far:
google 5%
amazon 83%
ebay 12%

google is loosing much ground while amazon is growing. Some stats say that >70% of transactional queries are started on amazon right now.
This makes it easier for us to disregard google and cut off all ad budget.

And this is not surprising me. With google search i allways have the feeling that they dontīt want my best but theirs. Disregarding keywords or adding/substiution auf synonyms is paternalism.

Personally I donīt know why the donīt learn from it. Itīs like serial TV with all their commercials. They are loosing ground to streaming portals but they do it the old way.

[griffinx]

It is very clear for me that google is giving very specific quota traffic each day. 1 keyword has 100 visitors, another 3 keywords starting to rank and gain 3 X 33 = 90+ visitors. The first keyword drop down its position right away. Since we're connected to brand and advertisers directly, in some extent, we're the only one who has the information about the promotional campaign, but when searching for those keywords, other sites with non-relevant contents come up first. Is this BERT that google so proud of?

I can confirm this is happening on our ecommerce website as well. We have info pages that take off this time of year and as a result Google is heavily throttling traffic to our product pages. This crude form of throttling traffic on the fly, which appears to be placing a sitewide cap on traffic, is why some may be seeing bursts of sales/conversions followed by a period of zombies. Since this is not limited to page level, others experiencing this should be able to easily notice how traffic to one page falls as another page on the site spikes. With us, unfortunately our product pages are not spiking at all which makes it impossible to convert a Google visitor into a sale when little traffic reaches our product pages.

I believe a much less noticeable form of this traffic throttling method may have been going on for years, and Google just cranked it up big time.

I agree with both of you above. I run a site getting millions of organic visitors each month. We got hit in November 2019. Since, then none of the pages get over 3 or 2 visitors at any time and the pages keep rotating. The traffic pattern for organic has become completely inorganic on GA with active visitors on pages stuck to 4-3-2, etc., throughout the day. Normally we see high traffic in weekdays during the day. But, now see see the same amount of traffic on all days - day and night also. Hence, organic traffic is pretty constant throughout - which means the traffic is being throttled.

Our account was switched to Mobile First Indexing in November 2019. I dont know if there was a glitch in that which lead to the website being stuck somewhere.

[mosxu]

Where is the cheese?

We used to live with zombies hoping they would convert if we make our sites better but even these are gone now.

Never thought to live the day when singularity will eliminate even the zombies

[seomotionz]

@mosxu You are correct. Atleast the zombies didn't eat up our bandwidth. Now we are hit by a tsunami of spammers who are easy to handle but they are eating away our bandwidth.

[samwest]

Huge serp change overnite. The crap content farms and Pinterest have floated to the top again. Nothing but SERP Roulette.
Had another 3 hour "hot" window yesterday followed by a dead, non converting rest of the day filled with Zombie one-and-done visits.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Miss the good old days. In which whether you are getting traffic or not. Now zombies, bots a whole lot mess to deal with. It good to hear though that you got 3 hours.

[samwest]

@seom - the disheartening part is knowing that it could be hot like that all day, and it used to be before throttling started. What causes the throttling? Looking at yesterday's data it looked like they shifted the serps and ad format in such a way as to kill off traffic for the rest of the day. User behavior and targeting also seems to be somehow in play. The same dead pattern continues today. SERP layout changes by the second these days. I know many don't buy it, but the result and data of this movement looks like a quota enforcement system.

[seomotionz]

@samwest I know the feeling. Its like Google has given us all a fixed quota of traffic. If we don't get the traffic when we are expecting to get then Google just throws away traffic some other time. And they don't care whether its real or zombie or just bots.

[StupidIntelligent]

Whenever there is a burst of queries; Google's algo starts repositioning the SERPs to favor ads and other media that belongs to them.

When the short-term trend is over, the old results fall back. This is why when you check your ranking, you're fine, but still not getting any traffic.

Traffic shaping has existed since 2008. In the current, new design, "more space" between the snippets has exacerbated the problem.

[griffinx]

@hopepro eloquently put.

I have been watching our GA continuously for last couple weeks and attest to what you say. None of our page get more than 3-4 active visitors at any point in time. Pages that normally used to have 30-20 active visitors at any point in time stuck to the above 3-4 active visitors.

Earlier a hot page used to get around 35-40 active visitors during peak time which is around 11:30 AM for us and used to gradually drop throughout the day in terms of traffic and go through the cycles. With highest traffic on weekdays.

Now, those pages are stuck to 3-4 active visitors all day - every day.

I also see keywords being rotated. For example in some pages, we would get 2 active visitors continuously for like 15 minutes. Then silence for another 30 minutes. Then BAM! back to 2 active visitors.

We thought the problem was internal and did the following:
1. Improve load speed and page score on mobile/web
2. Disavowed spammy links
3. Reworked content on a lot of pages.

But, no results. Its really maddening to watch GA.

I'm seeing a ridiculous way that google limits the traffic

For example, keyword A, keyword B, keyword C

keyword A is receiving about 5 hits per minute in GA

Keyword B started to gain traffic and it reaches about 3-4 hits per minute in GA

All of the sudden, keyword A started to fall off and no stats on real time traffic

Then again, keyword C started to rank in the same amount of traffic, A and B are gone

These 3 keywords can be in different niches or on the same niches

If we're talking in a bigger picture - real time stats show 270, going up to 290, break 300, up to 350 active users, once it reaches this limit it falls down to 260-250 right away at that very moment

- I've assigned one person to monitor GA traffic the whole day except night time a week after algo changed
- Started this test 3 weeks ago, results are all the same, never break 350 active user on site of which before NOV 7 it was 600-800 active users in peak hours
- No server problem, no site down, no other technical issues

Other findings:
- Never seen before sites going up 1st position
- Facebook and Twitter rank 1-5 on some keywords and with double and even triple ranking
- Spammy site, thin content, bridge page, etc.. on top
- new keywords enter my site with longer tails
- Youtube listed in normal search in some kws, most I've seen is the whole first page
- New contents published rank on desktop first, one hour later, mobile

Been through so many algo changes, this is the most frustrated and the most unreasonable + unnecessary one.

[vphoner]

I also am still seeing traffic still dropping. Ever since 12/4 and its been awful. Lowest day was yesterday. Looks like things are still dropping. Hoping for a recovery. Tough to survive this. I have seen things like this happen in May 2018 and Sept-Oct 2019 and recovered. Hope I can recover here too. Noticed that Bing traffic has also dropped off, and has been the for last month.

[glakes]

I also am still seeing traffic still dropping.

With Google heavily throttling/rationing traffic, I suspect traffic losses will continue. Rationing traffic must be a resource hog considering how many queries Google processes. It may take weeks for this to roll out to various industries along with all the short, medium and long tail queries those industries have. A number of us saw the start of this on November 7-8.

I question Google's motives by doing this. When great pages are throttled, and removed from the SERPS, users are presented with less desirable options. I get that chaos in organics is meant to drive businesses to cough up money for Adwords, but Google is throwing their users under the bus by doing this. Will Google lose users as a result?

Is Google going to miss 4th quarter revenue projections by so much to warrant rationing traffic in such a crude manner? Brin and Page stepping down may be the biggest clue to that answer. But how many advertisers will Google lose in this rationing process? Even though Adwords was not generating enough sales to pay for itself, organics helped to cover our losses. Now with very few and far between sales originating with Google, it's kind of hard to justify giving them anymore money. This whole traffic rationing may end up accelerating a decline in their CPC and advertising revenue, which would then require even more drastic acts of desperation.

[hopepro]

@griffinx - You would have to really take times, sit there and watch how it goes, it actually is like that. That's why I keep saying google tries to limit traffic. It'll be like Okay I'll give you 50K visitors today and no more.

[samwest]

Looks like all around, traffic was stripped today.

[griffinx]

@hopepro. Agreed. I think the throttling has just become very obvious now. In a medium sized website - its very obvious when you have the same number of people throughout the day on a page.

[mosxu]

The maths are simple 5 million ready to buy searchers stop using a search engine every year because of Amazon.

Chrome, analytics, android is doing great job profiling buyers behaviour on the sites they visited in their life and ads are served based these profiles but for some undisclosed reasons my ads never show to ready to buy searchers regardless how much I bid.

Technically we are paying big bananas for whatever their dogs do not convert. That is not competition.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Compared to last Saturday. Today traffic is down around 30-35%. But hey today is not over yet.

[samwest]

@seo... down here too...right when traffic traditionally went up. As griff and others have observed...I to get those 3 to 4 visit 'clamps' where traffic just wont go above that level.

In the past, I have mentioned statistical 'kurtosis' or the now lack thereof...this is a pretty clear indication of the throttle in action. I notice the same effect on my client sites. Maybe they think nobody is watching.

[glakes]

The maths are simple 5 million ready to buy searchers stop using a search engine every year because of Amazon.

I was looking at a 2018 Q2 JumpShot ecommerce report that broke down Amazon's marketshare by category:

Electronics: 89.9%
Home Improvement: 83.8%
Health (Medicines): 92%

Low Marketshare Categories for Amazon:

Beauty: 72%
Furniture: 47%
Women's Clothing: 42%

This report had Amazon pegged at 54% of all first time product searches. When considering Amazon's marketshare, those in the minority that use a search engine for product searches are still finding their way to Amazon where they open their wallet. As a side note, the JumpShot report noted Amazon's growth has stalled while noting WalMart is growing twice as fast as the overall year over year category growth except for women's clothing.

Every ecommerce report is different and JumpShot claims:

Jumpshot delivers digital intelligence from within the Internet's most valuable walled gardens.
Our real-time, anonymized global panel tracks 5B actions a day across 100 million devices to deliver insights into online consumer behavior.

The big takeaway here is that ecommerce marketshare is heavily dominated by very few players. This leaves very little room for independent websites, where we tend to get the leftover scraps. Even paying for Adwords ads, for say an average electronic device, means we can count on missing roughly 9 out of 10 sales to Amazon right off the bat.

Yes, Google has problems but this is a much larger problem for the overall economy and competition. The hands-off approach of politicians and regulators have created this environment. And unfortunately for our national economy, Amazon is clearly holding the winning hand in ecommerce while at the same time operating a marketplace where an estimated 40%+ of sellers live in China.

[seomotionz]

Maybe they think nobody is watching.

@samwest If you are referring to Google here. Then I will say that they just don't care.