What happened on September 17 on Google?
-
According to mozcast:
and to my own stats, Google had a pretty strong algorithm update on September 17. Personally I have experienced a drop of about 10% of traffic coming from Google on most of my main e-commerce site virtualsheetmusic.com.
Anyone know more about that update? Any ideas about what changed?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts!
Best,
Fab.
-
Thank you jStrong, I have just posted something on that thread too. I am glad to know I am not alone! I hope we can figure out what happened and possibly tackle the problem.
Thanks!
-
Had something similar happen to a client of ours. On Sept 17 they lost about 85-90% of their organic traffic among all search engines. I mentioned this in a post I added yesterday.
http://moz.com/community/q/loss-of-85-90-of-organic-traffic-within-the-last-2-weeks
Still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but am also curious to see if anyone else ran into similar issues.
-
Thank you guys for your replies and information.
Peter: I understand what you mean and I do understand why it is not possible for MozCast to know which verticals are affected by a particular Google update. What you wrote makes perfectly sense.
Highland: you may be right about the Google Hummingbird, but I see that update was released about 1 month ago whereas I begun having a drop in traffic since September 17th (13 days ago). But we can't exclude it either since looks like my long tail keywords have been mostly affected (see below)...
It is worth noting the following events around the date the drop begun:
1. On September 15 our hosting provider had a major power outage which put our site offline for about 5 hours. I don't think Google cares too much for this since 5 hours it is not a huge down time and never happened for at least the past 3 years, but this happened just 2 days before the drop begun.
2. On September 17 (the day the traffic drop begun), we updated our website page rendering engine to improve our page speed of about 20% (this should be a good thing right?)
Also, I have analyzed the traffic coming to our website from Google and looks like that the most affected section has been our product pages which makes me think that long tail keywords have been mostly affected.
Any more clues?
Thank you again, I really appreciate your insights and thoughts on all this. And, please, if anyone has experienced a similar drop in traffic since September 17, please post it here!
-
It's a bit tricky. MozCast (and other trackers like it, to the best of my knowledge) basically look at how rankings change over time. For MozCast, we track two fixed sets (1K and 10K) of keywords every 24 hours, and then measure how the URLs in the top 10 shift. This is tricky for many reasons:
(1) There are a ton of ways to measure this "flux", all of them valid in different ways.
(2) Baseline flux is very high. I estimate that as many as 80% of queries change daily, to some degree. Google is much more dynamic and real-time than most SEOs think.
(3) "Baseline" flux varies wildly across keywords, based on factors like QDF. I wrote a post about just how extreme this can be (http://moz.com/blog/a-week-in-the-life-of-3-keywords).
Ultimately, we try to gauge to an average, and then look for extreme variations, but the noise-to-signal is extremely high. The reality is that SERPs are change all of the time, not just based on the algorithm, but on changes to sites. Google also makes more than 500 changes per year, so even "algorithm update" is a tough term to define. We're looking for the big ones.
It's important to note, too, that all of the current flux tools are focused solely on organic results and movement of those results (as are most SEOs). We're not looking at how verticals come and go, Knowledge Graph entities, etc. We're actually working on some tools to track these entities more closely. "Hummingbird" is, IMO, going to power these entities and expand them, possibly for months to come.
-
It's possible all these shifts are due to Google Hummingbird, which one person at Google called "the largest rewrite since 2001." This is the month-long rollout they've been talking about.
Still, Hummingbird is more about usability than SEO signals. The biggest shift is in "conversational search" (i.e. "How often has Rand Fishkin shaved his beard off?"). Google is now focused on returning more relevant results to those kinds fo searches. That would explain why temps never spiked. It doesn't seems to have affected generic search terms as much, if at all.
-
Thank you guys for your replies and insights. It is my understanding that MozCast draws its graph based on the number of sites affected by a Google update... is that correct? If so, I deduce that people (or the algorithm) beyond MozCast knows which sites and/or how many sites have been affected by a particular update. If that's the case, and I don't see any different scenario, I assume that we can potentially understand if those affected sites have something in common (are mostly e-commerce websites? News? etc...). That would help us to understand the nature of any update, most of all the major ones since we would have more data to crunch.
Am I wrong with my brainstorming here? I am eager to know your thoughts an this.
Thank you again.
-
Yeah, Robert's right - with 500+ updates, the task of figuring out which spikes really mean something is very difficult. The pattern of 9/17 on MozCast looks more like a traditional update, with a relatively quiet period around a one-day spike, but I don't have a lot more detail on that particular day.
The update Adam mentioned ("Hummingbird") apparently happened "about a month ago", but seems to be tied to semantic search, Knowledge Graph, etc. Google's statements are pretty vague. It's more likely that is related to the 8/20-21 spike spotted by multiple tools and webmasters than the 9/17 spike.
Sorry I can't give you more information. I've seen very little chatter or reports about 9/17, other than what we saw in the tracking data.
-
Earlier today, Google announced an algorithm change that should affect about 90% of search queries. They said this has rolled out over the past month. When more details come out and some people do some more testing, this may have something to do with it.
-
SER had a post a couple of days ago asking just that. I can't say my traffic suffered a lot (in fact, one site seems to have had a small bump in organic traffic) but given than it only got to 86 (100+ seems to indicate major shifts) I'd say it was likely a localized set that got hit. Probably a Panda shift (just a guess, tho).
-
Fabrizo,
I am intrigued whenever I see this question because it seems we notice only when we feel an effect. We handle multiple sites as an agency and I don't see any real "9/17" change across the board and no change that is noticeable for even a single site (I looked at five that I know are more likely to move).
With the mozcast, that is another area I find intriguing in that I respect those at Moz and their understanding of statistics and scientific method; I also scratch my head from time to time as to whether or not the given movement has any overall effect on "most" sites.
When you read the "About Mozcast," and they point out the numbers of algorithmic changes in a year, it is apparent that most won't have an appreciable effect on a given site. Unfortunately, for most of us change to any site we own or manage can have dire consequences so we have to always be vigilant.
I wish I could give you a better answer, good luck,
Robert
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Well in Google But Not Bing - Why?
Hello Moz Community, I'm ranking well in Google (#2-#6 for various keywords) but on the second page of Bing. Are there certain differences that I should be aware of? Thanks, Cole
Algorithm Updates | | ColeLusby0 -
How long does google take to re-ranking pages in results?
I mean when google dance, the pages in results go up and down frequency every minue, but finally your page will rank in any position in google, what is the time when you get another position in google
Algorithm Updates | | engtamous0 -
Page details in Google Search
I noticed this morning a drop in the SERPs for a couple of my main keywords. And even though this is a little annoying the more pressing matter is that Google is not displaying the meta title I have specified for the majority of my sites pages, despite one being specified and knowing my site has them in place. Could this sudden change to not using my specified title be the cause of the drop, and why would they be being displayed by Google in the first place, when they are there to be used. The title currently being displayed inthe SERPs is not anything that has been specified in the past or from the previous latest crawl etc. Any insight would be appreciated. Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0 -
Is it me or Google?
Hi All, I'm new here so take it easy on me.. OK, basically i have had a SEO company for about 3 years, they did a wonderful job, for the last 12 months or so i have been in top 1-3 positions for pretty much every keyword i wanted... On Jan 17th, that all changed, suddenly google doesnt like something about my site... for the sake of this questions lets focus purely on the keyword "CCTV", i use to be 1st or 2nd, it varied... Since Jan 17th i am all over the place, today alone, i was 9th this morning, then 13th, then 22nd... I am working on a lot of things my SEO company told me to do, with regards my site, obviously this is going to take time... but my big concern is that google doesnt seem to know where to rank me lol, i mean, at least if they settled on a place i.e 22nd, then i have a stable base to work from... Has anyone seen this kind of thing before, and can i expect at somepoint google decides to simply remove me? Any advice welcome. regards James
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
SEOMoz reports now that google only reporting the average only the top position
Today Google announced "Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in." Will this affect SEOMoz reports in any way?
Algorithm Updates | | PerriCline0 -
Anyone have stats on numbers of Google users searching while logged in?
In light of Google's recent "social search update", I am curious to know how many Google users perform searches while logged into their Google account thereby showing "social results".
Algorithm Updates | | Gyi0 -
Google place page Images
Is there any real difference in uploading an images directly to your google places page or linking an image from another site? I have heard that you get better results if you upload a photo to photo bucket then to insider pages then post that link to your google places page. To me it just seems a bit odd to do things this way. I get that it's suppose to give you more back links however I don't think it would necessarily be relevant or useful for the user. Any thoughts??
Algorithm Updates | | christinarule0