Nov 19th & 20th Update?
-
Did anyone see any big changes around Nov 19th & 20th? Mozcast had some high temps around there.
If you saw any big changes in organic search, any ideas WTH that was all about?
Any guesses?
One site I work with took about a 15% hit and has since sort of skidded sideways.
-
Evidence of something around 11/18-19 is pretty strong at this point. Glenn's article that Peter N. posted is worth checking out. I've heard rumors of a mobile connection, but that's been hard to pin down - there does seem to be a "quality" aspect, but that's such a hard word to pin down. No confirmation from Google, but MozCast and similar data definitely saw spikes, and there was solid chatter.
EGOL is right, though - that time period before Black Friday is a hairy one, search-wise, and there are so many variables to disentangle. I think something algorithmic happened, but that doesn't mean that any particular problem or drop was due to a Google change, and it's going to be really tough to piece together any particular story, I'm afraid.
-
There have been a few reports about people experiencing some drops, nothing being released from Google as per usual but at least other people are seeing an affect
-
I'm still trying to understand a total crash in Google organic search traffic that started on 25 November and hit rock bottom on 27 November. It has not recovered. At first I thought it was because I accidentally had "deter indexing" ticked in my Wordpress settings after a new site version was pushed live, but it's now been three days since I corrected that and there's no sign of even a small recovery.
I resubmitted my sitemap and forced re-index using GWT and my site is definitely indexed. But Google traffic had dropped from over 200 a day to around 10 a day.
I have a lot of links to TripAdvisor on my site (travel blog), so I don't know if that's the issue? Or if it's something in the new premium theme?
I read something about affiliate links using affiliate keyword anchors being punished by this update but I don't use affiliate links as such, just direct links to the relevant TA listing which are converted on click by a JS script provided by TA. They are all do-follow, which might be an issue (but has never been in the past). And they are all anchored by the actual hotel name or photo of the hotel. And not all my posts have them either, but the whole site has suffered just as I was getting some traction in SERPs.
There is no manual penalty notice in GWT.
Site is http://www.asiantraveltips.com if you would be kind enough to offer any advice or opinions about what's happened.
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for the message. For this particular site, I'm looking at a very noticeable dip in position tracking that is then partially obscured by the following week's Thanksgiving holiday. This week, the week after the holiday week, is down about 15% traffic wise compared to 2 weeks prior. As a point of reference, last year this site was flat for the same period. So, don't really think it's just seasonality.
I might think it was just this site, but it just happened to coincide with that increase in mozcast temps and other stories of flux.
Has anybody benefited or suffered with the same kind of timing?
-
According Glenn Gabe there was something: http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/november-19-google-algorithm-update/ http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/unconfirmed-google-algorithm-updates-2015/
Google says: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html
"Don't have anything more specific to announce, sorry!" -
Traffic on many non-retail sites in the United States started to dip on the 19th and 20th in advance of Thanksgiving Week. Many schools take a break that week and lots of adults plan trips for the holiday. Traffic on my informational sites went down then, but has been nothing less than volcanic this week. I was wondering if something happened yesterday to give me a traffic blast that continues today. Up over 20% on a site that is already busy.
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
-
Internal Links & Possible Duplicate Content
Hello, I have a website which from February 6 is keep losing positions. I have not received any manual actions in the Search Console. However I have read the following article a few weeks ago and it look a lot with my case: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cut-down-on-similar-content-pages-25223.html I noticed that google has remove from indexing 44 out of the 182 pages of my website. The pages that have been removed can be considered as similar like the website that is mentioned in the article above. The problem is that there are about 100 pages that are similar to these. It is about pages that describe the cabins of various cruise ships, that contain one picture and one sentence of max 10 words. So, in terms of humans this is not duplicate content but what about the engine, having in mind that sometimes that little sentence can be the same? And let’s say that I remove all these pages and present the cabin details in one page, instead of 15 for example, dynamically and that reduces that size of the website from 180 pages to 50 or so, how will this affect the SEO concerning the internal links issue? Thank you for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Homepage not ranking for targeted keywords (established site with somewhat ok UR&DR)
Hello everyone, i have a question regarding my homepage issue. My homepage is not showing up in google search result for all the keywords except brand name. I have checked the following things to make sure my homepage is working properly. 1.The page is indexed. 2.No canonical issues 3.No robots.txt issues. 4.Ahrefs UR45 DR55 while my competitors ranking in 2nd and 3rd page have lower UR and DR Have tens of thousands of backlinks but i think most of them are legit I suspect the problem might be the hoempage has more than 70 Anchor text (Internal links) working as directory, and many of them contain the keywords we are targeting. Will that be the reason my homepage is not ranking at all? Since the google might consider it as keyword stuffing and penalize my homepage for that. What are your thoughts on this? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sufanfeiyan0 -
Still seeing a terrible rank drop after last algo update?!
I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image) As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect.. Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section! Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?! S0sD7d8.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
How can I 100% safe get some of my keywords ranking on second & third page?
Hi, I want to know how can I rank some of my keywords which are in the second and third page on google on page one 100% save, so it will pass all penguin, pandas etc as quick as possible? Kind Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rodica70 -
Pleasing the Google Gods & Not DeIndexing my site.
Hey Mozzers, So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too. Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website? Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled? Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"? What is every bodies experience with all of this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Dust.js Client-side JavaScript Templates & SEO
I work for a commerce company and our IT team is pushing to switch our JSP server-side templates over to client-side templates using a JavaScript library called Dust.js Dust.js is a JavaScript client-side templating solution that takes the presentation layer away from the data layer. The problem with front-end solutions like this is they are not SEO friendly because all the content is being served up with JavaScript. Dust.js has the ability to render your client-side content server-side if it detects Google bot or a browser with JavaScript turned off but I’m not sold on this as being “safe”. Read about Linkedin switching over to Dust.js http://engineering.linkedin.com/frontend/leaving-jsps-dust-moving-linkedin-dustjs-client-side-templates http://engineering.linkedin.com/frontend/client-side-templating-throwdown-mustache-handlebars-dustjs-and-more Explanation of this: “Dust.js server side support: if you have a client that can't execute JavaScript, such as a search engine crawler, a page must be rendered server side. Once written, the same dust.js template can be rendered not only in the browser, but also on the server using node.js or Rhino.” Basically what would be happening on the backend of our site, is we would be detecting the user-agent of all traffic and once we found a search bot, serve up our web pages server-side instead client-side to the bots so they can index our site. Server-side and client-side will be identical content and there will be NO black hat cloaking going on. The content will be identical. But, this technique is Cloaking right? From Wikipedia: “Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable.” Matt Cutts on Cloaking http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 Like I said our content will be the same but if you read the very last sentence from Wikipdia it’s the “present but not searchable” that gets me. If our content is the same, are we cloaking? Should we be developing our site like this for ease of development and performance? Do you think client-side templates with server-side solutions are safe from getting us kicked out of search engines? Thank you in advance for ANY help with this!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bodybuilding.com0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0 -
Penguin Update or URL Error - Rankings Tank
I just redid my site from Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart to Drupal. The site is much cleaner now. I transferred all the content. Now my site dropped from being in the top ten on almost every key word we were targeting to 35+. I "aliased" the urls so that they were the same as the Godaddy site. However when I look at our search results I notice that our URLs have extra wording at the end like this: ?categoryid=1 or some other number. Could this be the reason that our rankings tanked? Previously on the godaddy site the results didnt show this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chronicle0