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SEM & SEO
The tremor within the Google search rating algorithm continues on a big scale
18
Dec
Dec
Are you dizzy yet? Google search results are still very volatile and we’ve been seeing high chatter peaks again in the last 24 to 48 hours and the tracking tools are also running incredibly hot. There is so much going on in the google search for an SEO that for many it is not an option for Christmas.
Just when you thought we had enough, we didn’t. As I mentioned, we’ve had tons of updates over the past year, both confirmed and unconfirmed Updates to the Google search algorithm. It seems like this is going on Volatility from earlier this week and it’s hard to tell if all of this is directly related to running Update product reviews or not.
SEO chatter
The lingering chatter at WebmasterWorld spits like I said. A lot of SEOs talk about the results jumping around all over the place like you’d see on a big update. Here’s some of that chatter:
Feels like something big happened today. I’ve had slight improvements in the past few days and we’ve had a pretty significant drop today. This update appears to be a lot bigger than the latest “core update” that they released. This “Product Reviews” update seems to go way beyond products, as the losses we have suffered today have nothing to do with products at all. Traffic increased 20+% on December 10th but fell 35% on December 15th. Something big definitely happened today. I’ve seen several people report a big drop in the same day. Looks like something new is being introduced. What I learned about these updates is that even if your site or sites benefit from a particular update, it won’t last long. If you happened to receive a huge boost, make sure to use it in every possible way as it will end soon. It could be a day, a week, or a couple of months. Huge decrease this morning … I had higher and more stable traffic for a month until December 3rd. It went back and seems to have stayed at around -15% US traffic since then, mostly focused on traffic to my homepage. Both search and direct traffic have decreased and the US may step down 65-70% in the day today and struggle to recover all day. Again this coincides with large daily fluctuations in the ranking … I can lose 10 top ten terms at once and regain them the next day. All of this has resulted in very few new inquiries and of course no new sales. The only sales I’ve made are from repeat customers. A company I work with also experiences large fluctuations in ranking on a daily basis. This is most noticeable in Search Console when you are only selecting rankings. This seemed to start around April around the time of the product review update. It is not an affiliate site, but it has a lot of in-depth informative content about their products and the situations in which they are used. This looks like the last year for the site. I was hit pretty hard too. I managed to achieve global reach, initially Google classified me mainly in the USA. The problem I had with that is a huge drop in keywords. Now these keywords are coming back very slowly but ranking very badly. For example, if a keyword was ranked 4th, it is now 94. And it is not improving. The new update they started with today will hit me tomorrow so I really hope for some improvements.
If you’re on the wrong end of the stick with the current core update (I’m not buying the product review label) this is going to hurt.
Traffic is down 35% today … both in search and direct access. USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia … at the bottom. I have never seen such a large drop in a single day in my 17 years of doing this, so hopefully this is not a new and permanent terror that Google is unleashing on us. One way or another, Google is making sure that all organic search traffic is disappearing at an ever faster pace. I have been hit by every algorithm update in the past 12 months. Today another 15% less and now a total of 70% less than in a year-on-year comparison
It goes on, but I don’t want to just copy and paste all the chatter there.
Tracking tools
The tracking tools are also really hot right now, practically all of them showing significant volatility in the past few weeks and rising again in the past 48 hours. Here are some screenshots from these tools.
So yes, many signs point to a major update, but what exactly this update is is hard to say, a lot is happening. It can be fundamental update corrections, it can be the update of product reviews, it can be unannounced spam efforts or algorithmic shifts or something else.
Recently confirmed Google updates
So let’s recap the confirmed updates we had recently:
And actually more confirmed and a lot unconfirmed updates.
I hope your stress level is manageable before the coming holidays.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
