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

---

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]

[Cralamarre]

Yep, everything is back to normal today with GA. But yesterday's report still looks like I was about to lose my house, just in time for Christmas. By the end of the day yesterday, Analytics was showing almost no traffic at all. And yet as soon as the new day rolled around, the traffic magically returned.

[samwest]

I always run Matomo side by side with GA. My site gets so little traffic these days that the dedicated server has plenty of horsepower going to waste.

Another SERP shift has occurred overnite in my niches. A consecutive listing of 1 and 2 is now at 1 and 4. They seem to be A/B (C,D,E,F...) testing layouts on the fly.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar My guess is that they are not going to report unless it is something like all hell break loose.

Anyway, traffic is good today. Some Keywords are recovering.

[gatormark]

It seems like Google is perpetually updating its algorithm this month. At the beginning of December, one of my websites had a significant number of keywords that jumped to the number one spot for a couple weeks. Now, they have come back down to the #2 and #3 spots. It seems like there's a lot of SERP volatility this month.

[renatovieira]

And here we are again!

Extreme low traffic today.

Has anyone else noticed anything today?

Tourism, USA

[Tech4]

Beginning from yesterday I see -20% in traffic. So now I have traffic as I normally had on weekends before. That is literally disappointing.

[CarlosX1302]

Since yesterday I see -30% less traffic

[RedBar]

I live in one of the least populated areas of the UK, an hour ago I popped into the town and it was chocker with traffic and shoppers just like it normally is 2-3 days before Xmas.

Yesterday one of my daughters went to our county city and it too was heaving ... Xmas seems to have come early here, parties started last weekend and I know the hotal site I run is fully-booked through to New Year with restaurant bookings.

I'm not going to be political however last week's election result seems to have released a massive pent-up demand ... maybe?

[Tech4]

Wait... In Google Analytics I see about -30% traffic and even about -35% publisher impressions for AdSense.
BUT!
1. In Google Search Console I have only -5% impressions and clicks but not -30% (however for December, 16 only a partial data point is available yet)
2. and in my AdSense report I see the exact same number of ad impressions as I have last Monday (and actually every Monday since November, 9 when I really faced -30% to my website traffic).

I remember that yesterday (about 18 hours from this moment) I notices AdSense hanged. It showed me a half of income and in the morning I saw the income increase. That's it. Just trying to understand what's going...

[ZjacksonTech]

Saw a 26% decrease overnight as well on our electrical focused sites (electrical engineers, not consumer electronics)...and just like Tech4, search console is not reflecting the same drop....

[ZjacksonTech]

Just an update (and sorry to double post) I'm noticing over on twitter that people are noticing inaccurate data populating in GA.
[twitter.com...]

[samwest]

I also saw an anomaly of -25.7% yesterday. Odd that we all are seeing very similar same day drops. Where do you think all that traffic went?

[ZjacksonTech]

@samwest I think its actually a Google Analytics bug. Check to see if the traffic drop is reflected in GSC (same 26%ish drop should be viewable via impressions / clicks report)

[browndog]

Mine real time traffic didn't recover, I've never seen a drop like that, it went from 30+ live visitors to 10 and that is where it has remained. I thought things were getting better for my site.

[System]

New thread at: Google Analytics Bug Inaccurately Shows Big SEO Losses [webmasterworld.com]

Let's keep this thread on topic with comments focused on Updates & SERP changes.
If you want to comment about the Google Analytics bug please head to the other thread :)

[edited by: goodroi at 10:53 pm (utc) on Dec 17, 2019]

[jmorgan]

Mine real time traffic didn't recover, I've never seen a drop like that, it went from 30+ live visitors to 10 and that is where it has remained. I thought things were getting better for my site.

Well, if it's related to the GA bug, I wouldn't worry about it. Just write off the last day (when the bug was active).

[Steven29]

Here is what I see:

Can it be that your not being "throttled", but bots are coming and using up your "clicks budget"? If you rank well for a term, hundreds of bots will come and bounce and the attacker website will then replace your article. (Your article sucks it had a 100% bounce rate!) and this new article has no bounces! It doesn't matter if you show them a Captcha page, block them entirely or anything else... Google is recording the data and they will take it into your ranking factor.

Could it also be that during Peak Hours, bots are slamming your website making it respond inconsistently and therefore Google thinks your server can't handle the traffic at this time?

This is part of what I see and i've made a post here with more details: [webmasterworld.com...]

The easiest way to see what i'm talking about is by searching any random 3 characters in Google for the past 1 hour. It's all websites installing malware!

Now replace those 3 random letters with some of your keywords, what do you see? Most of these "infected machines" have over 30,000 links indexed in google and i've seen as high as 500,000 pages. (Seem to abusing Google's each sub domain is a different domain algorithm).

Congratulations! You've made the 5 Billionth Search! Click here to download|verify|install etc.

"Step 1: Click "Continue"
Step 2: Click "Add To Chrome"
Step 3: Enjoy!"

The funny thing is, you can refresh the pages each time and it goes to a different link, yet no abuse reports get answered and nothing happens.

[edited by: Steven29 at 2:01 am (utc) on Dec 18, 2019]

[Athedian]

@christianz Thanks for the clarification.

Yesterday's conversion was horrible. Organic traffic was just bad all around as well. Ahref's tool showing massive drop in ranking for me for the last three days but GSC is showing avg. pos. remains the same.

What kind of an update is Google doing anyway?

[Pokwerpok]

Has anyone tried removing GA (and using some other tool like Matomo or Statcount etc instead), and has this had any effect on your rankings?

With GA you give Google ton of info regarding your site... GA is free, it benefits Google. And with the algo updates, what if they're using your data against you.. Interested hearing thoughts on this!

[artemi0]

In my case definitively not GA bug, got same traffic drop in Adsense and in user generated content in my website. Down 40% in all those.

I think a huge update is going on.

For those who suggest our websites might have got penalised, in my google search console there is nothing saying that.

[browndog]

In my case definitively not GA bug, got same traffic drop in Adsense and in user generated content in my website. Down 40% in all those.

I think a huge update is going on.

For those who suggest our websites might have got penalised, in my google search console there is nothing saying that.

Seems to be the way for me too, but I will give it a couple of days to see what is going on, read feedback here etc. But it's not looking good at my end. But right now analytics is telling me I'm 55% down on the same day last week.

[hopepro]

Just to share, Since Nov 7, my site have been dropping hard and it's getting recovery for a week now.

What I shared before was, the traffic got stuck on so called "google quota" between 200-300 during the fall

What happen right now is, it seems to me that traffic is stuck on 300+ up to 380 active user on site which has been a good sign but it's another google quota level.

during sometimes of the day, traffic drop to 250 active user and I believe that it might not hit traffic quota. All of the sudden, traffic jumped to 370 active users for certain minutes.

All this, this algo seems to have its patterns like playing games, when you reach one level, you have to beat the boss, the boss is beat, then you move on to the next. So maybe google is giving scores on certain extent, when you reach up to that score, then, it will reward you with extra traffic that ensure that you'll get that certain amount etc...

I did several changes to the site and content, and that might help beating the first boss

[whoa182]

In my case it 100% has to be a Google Analytics bug. I was watching all the [human] traffic coming to my site (about 30 visitors in 1 hour from Google) and when the hour updated it showed 2 visitors. Anyway, the data is still missing and has not been corrected from last night.

[StupidIntelligent]

@RedBar - You seem to be a multi-millionaire with a manufacturing business, and other investments (as you have posted), but spend an awful lot of time with us small timers. Not that this is something bad, but surely, there must be smarter and more-connected people that can guide you through business growth, than an SEO forum.

[samwest]

My traffic drop was not GA related...my side by side Matomo data shows the same anomaly...as well as many others. Totally dead this week...but that fits with same period last year. Funny how that is repeatable so nearly by the day and year after year. You'd think traffic would be MUCH more random and naturally distributed. Looks more like an artificial pattern of throttling than that of natural behavior.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Its the thing with Google. Some weeks you get and there are some weeks you don't get. The traffic rise which I saw yesterday has gone today. Significant International traffic loss occurred today.

[arunpalsingh]

Beginning 8 Nov 2019, I have lost about 50% of traffic till date. It happened last year August too but then recovered early this year.
Health niche.

[samwest]

More SERP shuffling this morning and zero traffic for over an hour. Dredging new holiday lows. Think we can call this "The Grinch" update.

[NickMNS]

You'd think traffic would be MUCH more random and naturally distributed.

I'm sorry, but this type of statements really irk me.
First randomness is dichotomous, it is either random or it is not random. Then, what is a "natural" distribution, what are it properties of a natural distribution? I think the essence of what you are trying to say is that, by simply looking you can tell that it is not random. To which I say it is extremely difficult to determine if process is random just by looking at it. I strongly urge you to read this article on Gambler's Fallacy [en.wikipedia.org...] which explains why.

The other point I take from your statement "Much more random" is that you expect to wider swings in traffic. More variability. I find this to be an odd statement in the context of this thread. On occasion when one does see periods of increased variability, and almost every time this occurs, one reads post like "Google must be testing", or "something must be wrong with the algo" or "Google has lost control".

The way I see it is that you website get's a "global" rank, that is a weighted average based on the volume of search per search term summed across all the search terms. This is purely theoretical for us the webmasters as there is no reliable way to accurately measure it, and it is obviously changing continuously. But despite this change it remains relatively stable over time. Except in the case of algo-updates at which time there may be a sudden a significant change.

What this means in term of traffic is, while your rank remains stable and largely predictable (ie: not random) there is a baseline of traffic. Then, in addition to this stable traffic there is a component on random traffic, new users searching for the first time, old users that stop searching, the occurrence of first time search terms, etc... This variability is also, somewhat predictable, in that it remains within certain bounds. Say you have a baseline of 800 traffic, and variable ranges from 0 to 200. Your traffic will then range between 800 and 1000 on any given day, but the exact traffic figure for any given day will be random within that range. The degree of variability is a function of the specific website, and the niche, and it will likely change with algo-updates. You can call this throttling if you would like.

So it would be perfectly normal, if not expected, to see similar traffic patterns year over year for a specific website.

[heisje]

With GA you give Google ton of info regarding your site... GA is free, it benefits Google. And with the algo updates, what if they're using your data against you.. Interested hearing thoughts on this!

Disable GA - don't give Google ton of info regarding your site.
.