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]

[Athedian]

Also been tracking and seeing traffic down since beginning of Dec and got worse in GA starting Dec 12th.

Although I heard GA's real time report also counts the bots as well, so it doesn't really reflect actual users coming in? Anyone able to verify that?

[SweetPotato]

Are you guys sure you don't have at least some % of an algorithm penalty?
I read this thread daily and the patterns you describe sound like penalized sites.
Healthy sites are more or less stable from what I see.
Could it be?

[Cralamarre]

It does appear to be a GA reporting issue because even my direct traffic is showing a massive drop over the past several hours, beginning around 2 pm EST.

[petterijokelainen]

Around 4 hours ago our hourly (week-to-week) organic traffic dropped by 30% suddenly. Direct traffic seems unaffected. Afraid this might not be a GA reporting issue.

[NickMNS]

This is a GA issue. If you use AdSense you can see the difference in the AdSense pageviews vs GA page views.

[swright]

If your real time traffic is steady and your Adsense impressions (if you have Adsense) are in line with business as usual and disagree with GA data, then this points to a glitch in GA.

[Cralamarre]

@NickMNS So you're experiencing the same thing? I did notice that my AdSense page views are roughly the same as last week, and earnings seem unaffected even though GA is showing a huge drop in traffic.

[Cralamarre]

Ok, this is obviously a GA issue. My hourly report shows almost no traffic during the past hour, while real-time stats are normal.

[seomotionz]

Maybe it was an analytics issue. But I don't agree that yesterday's fluctuations was entirely due to it.

[hopepro]

After the long fall, AVG Position in Search Console, started to climb.

Before NOV 7 - AVG POS = 7.7 - 8.0
After NOV 7 - AVG POS = 8.9 - 9.9
This week DEC 14 - DEC 17 AVG POS = 8.7-8.8

I can see traffic uplift of about 20% per day and increasing. Not sure this is over yet

[OldFaces]

Just +1 re: a Google Analytics issue which began around 3am PST on 12/16/19.

[whoa182]

Something is going on with Analytics... definitely not reporting correctly. I've been watching it for the past hour and I'd say there's been around 30 organic visitors but it's showing 2 for the last data point (hour).

Real-time (organic) traffic is fine.

[browndog]

Am I the only one whose real time took a nosedive? Happened around 10am (6 hours ago), and went from 30+ down to 10 and has hovered around that number since.

[swright]

@browndog, is your hourly data in line with yesterday/same day last week?

[browndog]

It was tracking along just fine, similar to yesterday and then it fell off a cliff. Just comparing one hour from yesterday, this is what it looks like yesterday obviously being the higher number.

317 - 27
389 - 23
378 - 22
364 - 18

[MayankParmar]

I almost died when I opened Analytics.

[poptima]

Google wants to kill us upset, it has all its developers working on this. It seems he doesn't want blog competition. For my part, I fell in GA hour by hour, but the normal real traffic, since Nov. 8 of course

[StupidIntelligent]

GA updates are usually down, when there is a data push going on.

[seomotionz]

I almost died when I opened Analytics.

@MayankParmar I thought I suddenly woke up in hell this morning.

[mosxu]

So they achieved quantum supremacy but have some glitches, reporting issues in GA?

Let me think why...

[elguiri]

Just a thought. Maybe we should pay a little for an independent analytics service, instead of installing spyware on our sites. (If you don't think it's spyware, ask yourself why you're getting such an advanced piece of software, with massive server cost, for free. Just remember that when something is free, it's usually because you're the product).

[pavf6]

I see the GA Glitch is now recovering.

[OldFaces]

"Just remember that when something is free, it's usually because you're the product)."
Love that.

GA Glitch now recovering eh? Stats from yesterday 12/16/ haven't updated yet to reflect actual traffic. I'm surprised the usual SEO folks aren't talking more about this. It's either one heck of a GA glitch or a huge algo shift.

[SweetPotato]

-22% Yesterday says GA.
Not really possible unless site was off-line (it wasn't).
Or I got hit again.
Do you see glitch for yesterday stats too? Not only real time.

[OldFaces]

For most Potato they report real-time looks correct whereas hour over hour is significantly less than same day previous week. Many people report 12/16 as being very bad, some report back-to-usual traffic as of 8 or so hours ago. For me, same issue still exists through 3am PST on 12/17

[seomotionz]

I see the GA Glitch is now recovering.

Its not even close to recovering. Now I am seeing wrong data in real-time stats too.

[JesterMagic]

Ugh had a heart attack this morning when I saw yesterday's stats in GA. Was wondering if it was a GA issue with all the message notification emails I got from this forum. I also run a simple internal stats program so I could confirm traffic patterns were normal.

Looks like starting around noon EST traffic took a nose dive in GA and by 11pm was almost 0 resulting in -30% for the day compared to the same day last week. Today so far in GA it looks like traffic is being tracked fine.

[christianz]

This is Google Analytics glitch 100%, no doubt whatsoever. It fell to almost zero visitors / hour for high traffic site over the night. All while real time and AdSense show correct stats. Now GA seems to be recovered and reporting correctly. Expecting Google to come out publicly and confirm this.

[MayankParmar]

It's frustrating how they maintain zero transparency. Google should at least acknowledge it on Twitter or their status page (https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)

[christianz]

@Athedian No, GA real-time does not count known bots (Googlebot etc). Only "indie" bots that Google can't easily and quickly identify as bots.