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
-
New Google Update - weird ranking
Hi I wanted to get your thoughts on this keyword ranking. This page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/albatross-heavy-duty-office-chairs-24-stone is now ranking for heavy duty office chair 30 stone We don't mention 30 in the content anywhere, apart from the USPs at the top of the page - could this be it?! I don't know how to change this, or I guess Google is still figuring things out and maybe this will drop off? Love to get some thoughts on this! Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
My Website No Longer Appears in Mobile Google Search but Does in Desktop...Why Is This?
For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW0 -
Implications of removing all google products from site
Is there any data on the implications of removing everything google from a site; analytics, adsense, webmaster tools, sitemaps, etc. Obviously they still have their search data and they say they dont use these other sources of data for ranking information but has anyone actually tried this or is there any existing data on this?
Algorithm Updates | | jessefriedman0 -
How do you get photo galleries indexed on Google News?
I work for a news site and some of our photo galleries get indexed by Google News while others never do. I'm trying to determine why some are more successful than others even though they all follow the same guidelines regarding keyword-rich headlines & copy, h1s, etc. When comparing what's been indexed in the past with current galleries, there doesn't appear to be an obvious pattern. Can anyone share some insight into this?
Algorithm Updates | | BostonWright0 -
How To Rank High In Google Places?
Hello SEOmoz, This question has been hounding me for a long time and I've never seen a single reliable information from the web that answers it. Anyway here's my question; Supposing that there are three Google places for three different websites having the same categories and almost same keywords and same district/city/IP how does Google rank one high from the other? Or simply put if you own one of those websites and you would want to rank higher over your competitors in Google places Search results how does one do it? A number of theories were brought up by some of my colleagues: 1. The age of the listing 2. The number of links pointing to the listing (supposing that one can build links to ones listing) 3. The name/url of the listing, tags, description, etc. 4. The address of the listing. 5. Authority of the domain (linked website) You see some listings have either no description, and only one category and yet they rank number one for a specific term/keyword whereas others have complete categories, descriptions etc. If you could please give me a definite answer I will surely appreciate it. Thank you very much and more power!
Algorithm Updates | | LeeAnn300 -
Big fall between September 27th and 28th
Hello I do not know if it is a panda but my traffic was divided by two between September 27th and 28th... The concerned site is Dismoicomment.fr have you an explanation? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | elitepronostic0 -
Domain Authority and Google keywords
Hi there, We have a domain authority of 33, one of our competitors has an authority of 10, yet they appear to list higher on many keyword searches in google. Is there a reason for this? Our site is 5 months old, and their site is over 3 yrs old. Thanks for your feedback 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | PHDAustralia680 -
Google Directory vs DMOZ
What is the difference between the Google Directory and the DMOZ if any?
Algorithm Updates | | BrandonC-2698870