Crazy swings in search traffic, started Feb 2019, now slowly changing

[elos42]

Hi, you can see a graph from my webmaster search console below.

You can see the weird search traffic behavior.

[drive.google.com ]

I had all but given up on getting much traffic from web search (for obvious reasons), until about Jan 8 this year, when suddenly, the long declining trend started reversing.

I did carry out a redesign of the web and all that, but that was about 2 days before that. I doubt if that's it.

I am still trying to figure out why Google s***d me the way it did starting in Feb 2019 all the way up to Jan 8, and why the trend started reversing, almost on its own.

Are there any 'penalties' that last for exactly one year? Or did Google implement a major change in its algo on the new year's?

PS: It's a news site, and does get traffic from non-search sources.

[Robert Charlton]

elos42, your graph essentially corresponds in time period to the largest series of reporting bugs I can ever remember seeing on Google, which resulted in a series of threads.

That said, though, the reported bugs were about pages dropping out of the reported index, whereas your graph is showing upswings. I don't know whether there's a connection, and whether the threads will help you work out what was actually happening.

This thread noted below is more or less the beginning of the bugs... Some were reporting errors, but I'm not sure about all of them. I tried to keep the threads linked to subsequent and related thread(s) as new bugs were identified by Google...

Reports of Google Dropping Pages Out of Index... possibly a bug?
April 5, 2019
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4941198.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Note that the threads were probably slightly behind the changes, as it took a while for posters here to notice that changes were continuing. Vital in all this reporting, I should add, are Barry Schwartz's seroundtable articles, which I reference in our threads.

I should note also that all this was preceded by changes and limitations in the Google Fetch (to index) Tool, as Google was trying to prevent use of the tool by spammers and those who wanted to maintain fresh listings. You mentioned that you're a news site, so you might have used the Fetch tools as a submission tool, and/or many other news sites might have done so. Conceivably, if competitors lost traffic for a while because Google wasn't indexing them, you might have gained.

Big reductions in crawl-to-index limits on Google Fetch tool
March, 2018
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4893740.htm [webmasterworld.com]

This may or may not apply to you... and again, you'll have to piece the competitive picture together. Please keep us posted on how you think this might have related to what you saw, as artifacts from the Fetch Tool update and the reporting errors are otherwise hard to track.

There have also been big changes made in the news algorithm, I understand, with originality and freshness counting for more than previously... so if you're using off the web sources (ie, effectively adding original content), this might account for the upswing you're beginning to see. And nine months or so is not an unreasonable amount of time for it to have taken this long. I encourage you to continue what you've been doing, as your graph does seem to have started another upward movement, as you note.

Hoping this helps.

[tangor]

Or did Google implement a major change in its algo on the new year's?

Too early to tell.

[sk7411]

They rolled out January Core update on Jan 14th , Usually when such update happens the indicative signs are felt earlier than the actual roll out . I believe it's the jan core update in your case.

[elos42]

I meant to say the site theme and some other stuff were changed 'two months' before Jan 8, and not two days :( .

As for using off-the-web sources, yes, whatever we put can never be found on any other website. However, because it's news, within minutes, the same news starts getting reported on elsewhere, but of course, in different wording.

[RedBar]

This weekend I happen to have been testing several different devices with different OS and one thing is for certain, the SERPs were different for nearly every device whilst doing this research.

The biggest difference I saw was actually for one of my own pages which on Friday was at #3 and yesterday at #83 meanwhile I saw other pages go from nowhere to top 15 all in the space of a few hours.

Even the regular #1 & 2 spots were not static, they were floating around within the top 10.

If you are seeing these kind of fluctuations then, IME, don't do anything, most likely you have done absolutely nothing wrong and if you attempt to "fix it" you'll not know what has, or has not, worked.

Guessing out aloud it would appear that AI = GU (Great Unstability) at the moment ... Of course, this assumes that it's AI which is causing these massive fluctuations, if it isn't AI then they have an even bigger problem to resolve.

[elos42]

Just an update. I have not done any major revision to my website design during this period, but look at the difference on Jan 15 and May 4! Has anyone else seen anything during those two days? [drive.google.com...]