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]

[samwest]

They sure don't. Again, this week total conversions the exact same as the past dozen or more weeks.

[mosxu]

“40%+ of sellers live in China”

Yes Chinese manufacturers selling direct to US consumers. No wonder buyers do not waste their time researching prices with google.

Google has no chance unless they control people minds and brainwash them where to buy from.

[griffinx]

But, wouldn't Google be concerned about customer concentration? And, how they are enabling Amazon?

Ideally, you would want a large base of small customers who are diversified - so that you can dictate the terms. But, by wiping out smaller sellers and websites - in the long-term they stand to lose.

[seomotionz]

Our this week's conversions resembles to Novembers. Last week was much better. As I said earlier traffic is down so sales are too.

Anyway, I am seeing a steady rise in 'not set' Country traffic in GA. They have a higher bounce rate. But not fully bouncing traffic like the zombies.

[glakes]

in the long-term they stand to lose.

Google's Amazon crowded SERPS is what ultimately drove me to sell on Amazon five years ago. I could not outrank Amazon, so I joined them. I know others that said to hell with Google and did the same thing. But that domain crowding also helped to train shoppers to just go to Amazon and search there. In that sense, we're already seeing the results of the long-term. Google has already lost a lot of product search traffic since I joined Amazon, and Google loses more every year.

it would have been to Google's benefit to have a diverse set of search results. But Google is focused on quarterly earnings, and they feel if product queries are crowded with Amazon pages then some businesses will join Adwords or spend more. But the ROI in Adwords for products has gone down the tubes quickly. Shopping Actions will be Google's answer, where they take a 12% commission from each sale. I plan on trying that out in 2020 just for the heck of it. Knowing Google, they will be spamming the heck out of those commission based ads in no time.

[mosxu]

“ they will be spamming the heck out of those commission based ads in no time“

Yes profiled spenders will be sent first to their favourite accounts and only if these do not convert the rest of us will be trialled but this will at least not make us pay for garbage. No conversions. No commission!

[samwest]

Here we go again, #1 listings everywhere but not a live soul on the site. The only thing that manages to appear is foreign and all zombie.

[hopepro]

@samwest I've been monitoring some of the keywords such as "payday loan" in my region. Before this, I saw spammy sites rank 2-8th. What spammy sites did was putting English to translate and spin contents. Now spammy sites are gone. I think this just happened today. However, I'm still seeing may other keywords that spammer injected the contents into .gov .ac .org are still ranking high. Don't know what the heck is google doing right now.

[RedBar]

Don't know what the heck is google doing right now.

And, in all honesty, do you think G does?

Nah! Totally and utterly lost the plot, they have:-)

[RedBar]

#1 listings everywhere

This is utterly incredulous isn't it?

How is this possible yet not to generate one single enquiry from anywhere in the world?

People don't fall on my pages by accident, they are deliberately seeking my widgets however these days new enquiries are not being seen from potential new customers.

For sure existing customers and potential new ones we already know about are looking and researching through our sites BUT 90+% of all new unknown business customer enquiries are not Net generated.

For my global industry this now seems to be the "new" standard ... Precisely the same as it was up until the mid to late 90s!

Dare I say it, everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same?

[hopepro]

@all this is the first time seeing traffic throttling from my side. Has anybody experienced things like this whenever there’s an algo changed? thanks

[seomotionz]

Dare I say it, everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same?

@RedBar New is old. And old in new. Its goes with G too. Either they have a complete idea & they are proceeding as per their grand plan (which I doubt) or they have no clue.

[griffinx]

@hopepro this is the first time I am witnessing it. I continue to believe its a glitch wherein some websites are stuck inadvertently.

I am today seeing us stuck in the 4-5 bracket. With some pages getting 6 active visitors.

Before the drop happened for us - I saw the following:

1. We got switched to Mobile First Indexing. Same day/week of fall. I got a popup in Search Console. - NY Times also reported a drop in traffic in the same week and they were trying to figure out if it was because of BERT or Mobile First Indexing.

We have made a tremendous cleanup effort for SEO over the last month - working extra hours. Though, I am not seeing any more fall from November levels - traffic still isn't back to old levels either.

[griffinx]

@hopepro - checkout this article [seroundtable.com...]

BERT + MFI could have been an issue?

[Athedian]

Suddenly dropped 100,000+ in rank today with Ahref. Might be due to the update from 12/11-12/15?

Backlinks increased by 72 though...which is NOT normal, as there's no possible reason for this sudden increase of links. I suspect could be an SEO attack on the site or something else is going on. Went through the backlink lists (still going through them) and found quite a bit of bad links. So the ranking dropped massively and sudden increase in ranking.

Might be associated with the new update? I don't even know anymore. Few weeks ago, got nice ranking boost and traffic to the site, then it started to tank on Nov 8th and continued to drop slowly until today where Grand Canyon showed up.

[griffinx]

@Athedian - Its most probably not a negative SEO attack. My suggestion:

I would deep dive into Analytics to understand the traffic drop rather than AHREF.

Google (probably) has a stable search volume. So, when someone loses - someone wins. From November 2019, it has been ups and downs like a giant wheel for everyone.

Do the SEO basics like improving site speed, content, removing deadlinks, etc.,

Sit tight - let is stabilize and then make major moves like updating disavow.

[Athedian]

@griffinx Thanks a lot for the suggestions.

I'm currently going through thousands of backlinks right now as the previous team didn't do any clean up at all. I did find 98% of all the links we have currently are nasty, nasty links dating back 2012-2014 to pages that have nothing to do with our services.

Analytics is showing people coming in from a handful of blog articles that I finished optimizing with internal links to relevant articles and suggested readings. Although the bounce rate is insanely high for those pages which also increased our overall bounce rate for the entire site.

Appreciate your feedback on the situation. I died a little bit inside when I saw the ranking dropped massively this morning.

[BushyTop]

We've been hit over the weekend.... :(

[samwest]

Once the algo is ported to Sycamore...we are all toast. It may have started already and if so will learn to sort the SERPS instantly based on quantum predicted intention. Now that would indeed be 'spooky'. [livescience.com...]

I find it amazing that anyone thinks all this is just Google fumbling about, overwhelmed with too much data and that they are incapable of knowing what they are doing. They know.

To assume they are doing anything other than super optimizing for their own profit is pretty much dis-proven by the incredible 40 billion per quarter numbers and constant 20% increases...and that's using plain old silicon processors. Enjoy the little that is left...for now.

[jrpfhc]

We had 4 straight weeks of decline, after an incredibly strong October. Everything started to recover about 2 weeks ago. It's still not where it was before the slide, but hopefully that's where the bottom is (this time).

[seomotionz]

@samwest Today we didn't even got the least quota of traffic.

[samwest]

@seomotionz, I am now experiencing in the US what you must be seeing in IN. All traffic stripped. I am only getting return traffic today, anything that does come in, comes from obscure pages, nothing from the #1 serp listings. That's just about impossible. Ridiculous.

[SteveWrz]

Someone tell me Analytics is having tracking issues again today because I am seeing a further 50% decline today and I wont be able to survive that kind of a hit.

[Cralamarre]

@SteveWrz My hourly analytics report has been showing a massive traffic drop for the past few hours, but my real-time analytics seems fine. I'm also hoping it's a reporting issue.

[jrpfhc]

@cralamarre

It has to be a reporting issue. I have Jetpack still. It’s always close to GA. Jetpack is on pace and the hourly GA is way down. Don’t let it get you down. Definitely A reporting issue.

[christianz]

I am seeing the same "glitch". Past 4 hours impossible traffic drop while real-time shows ok numbers. I think this is false alarm - analytics glitch.

However, Google has been evil to me since mid september and stripped about ~30% of traffic and is sending it to worse, less relevant websites (and YouTube of course). Seems to be a theme these days with their unintelligent artificial intelligence taking over and making one bad anti-user decision after another.

Therefore I wouldn't be surprised about further traffic penalties. This web dev business is a losing game #timetostartmakingiphoneunboxingvideosgamingchannelandmakeuptutorialsonyoutubeandinstagram

[Cralamarre]

Glad to hear other people are reporting the analytics issue. Based on past experience, I was assuming it was just a glitch, but of course you never know.

[browndog]

I've been travelling well and my real time traffic dropped significantly about 2 hours ago. I am hoping it's an analytics glitch.

[swright]

I'm also having what seems to be a GA issue. Drop started around 2 pm EST - around 30-50% down. Real time seems normal.

[RedBar]

Devil's Advocate here!

Why do you entrust your data to GA considering G is possibly your biggest commercial and informational "competitor"?

Nowt's for free!