Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2016 - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

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Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2016

Ukonline1

9:53 am on Oct 1, 2016 (gmt 0)

System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4817284.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:06 am on Oct 1, 2016 (PDT -8)

Starting to get a bit concerned now. Saw very good improvement in serps on 1st September, then fell back to previous levels/slightly worse on 15th September. Seen slight improvement in one keyword and that's it. GSC shows big spike in pages crawled over last couple of days.

I'm starting to think this is how things are going to remain for me now; and after 2 1/2 years of seriously hard work! I really did expect this Penguin update to be good for us!

expmrb

6:51 am on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

Monday was nice. Since then the organic traffic is just falling. And today is the minimum. Are you guys seeing this too?

Shaddows

7:42 am on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

We're seeing multiple traffic sets again, similar to the P4 roll out period, since Monday.

Simon_H

10:00 am on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

Multiple others are reporting the same wrong data issues with Google Analytics starting yesterday that we saw (threads about it on Google advertiser community), GSC broke yesterday, hreflang being reported incorrectly in GSC, definite P4 reversals going on (we're seeing this too). I'm guessing Google is having some major infrastructure/datacenter issues and either failing over to out-of-date servers or rolling back.

Martin Ice Web

10:12 am on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

Monday was nice. Since then the organic traffic is just falling. And today is the minimum. Are you guys seeing this too?

We are seeing it too.
I don�t know what they did but a nice side effect is, that amazon sales sky rocked so we just could stop our complet spending to google as sales through google organics and PLAs are down to 5%.
Thanx a lot, more money for us!

germany

BushieTop

10:20 am on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

We're not seeing the same results as Pre-penguin - in fact they are hugely different, however we have seen throttled traffic. I do have the same thoughts that google is gearing up to something....

BushieTop

1:45 pm on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

In the past hour, we've just seen a significant negative change. Traffic minimal and ranking decreasing for all generic terms.

samwest

2:40 pm on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

Bushie...seeing same here. Last weekend did anyone notice a very slow Sat & Sun and a big surge on Monday into Tuesday? I saw the exact same pattern on multiple sites in completely different niches. None of that surge converted.

I'm also running into several seemingly random occurrences of Google results being clicked and nothing but a blank white page comes up. Move to other results on same page and no problems, going back and clicking on that same results in a blank page.

ionguy

3:50 pm on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

@samwest same here same here; slowdown on sat/sun and a surge on mon. since tue all dead again. some troubles with google results since yesterday

SnowMan68

4:14 pm on Oct 27, 2016 (gmt 0)

Saw a slow down on Sat/Sun, boost on Monday and Tuesday, slow down slightly Wednesday and Thursday looks more like Monday and Tuesday. Something is churning again, could it be core algo related?

BushieTop

7:50 am on Oct 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

We're suffering now, we seem to be on a slump. All of the growth that we say 2 weeks ago is falling away. These changes are so frustrating. I'm yearning for some consistency.

aristotle

1:19 pm on Oct 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

There's an option in Google search that tells it to show 100 results per page instead of 10. In the past it would nearly always show 10 pages of 100 results each, for a total of 1000 results. But now it usually only shows 300 or less results and then stops.

Uber_SEO

1:20 pm on Oct 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

My website was pounded when P4 rolled out. I've genuinely no idea why, so I presumed there had been some other filter that had been rolled out in the background. Over the last few days I've started to see rankings revert - looking much more normal, and certainly healthier. Very strange.

Simon_H

2:18 pm on Oct 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

Google appears to be in the middle of a technical meltdown. GA is still losing data, GSC broke completely a couple of days ago as well as bugs with hreflang and manual actions, Adwords partners have lost their specialisation data, and the SERPs seem to be switching in some really old datasets and results from a few weeks ago.

We're seeing a whole load of stuff that doesn't make any sense at all in our data (both paid and organic), but it doesn't seem worth trying to understand it given all the problems Google is having.

mosxu

11:10 am on Oct 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

I am seeing a lot the big adwards spenders breaking into the rankings as well, not a lot of space left there to compete...

SnowMan68

3:16 pm on Oct 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

Surprised there wasn't more comments about this week's update. We saw a 20-25% increase in Google referrals depending on the day. We were hit by the early September quality (phantom) update. Wondering if these two are connected. We had experienced indexing issues after a switch to a new server led to timeouts when gbot would crawl. Lasted for 3 months and was finally fixed about 45 days ago.

jrs79

3:40 pm on Oct 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

Starting on 10/26 I noticed an 18% dip in visits to my site. Homepage is down 50%. Never had any traffic issues in the past.

redgorillas

7:52 pm on Oct 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

We had same issue exactly on 26/10 on 2 our sites. Traffic is still 25-30% lower than before. Also percent of new session increased almost to 95. Some people reported that it's possible Google Analytics bug but i can see some changes in search results on many our keywords.

We can't find any information about that update.

Simon_H

7:57 pm on Oct 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

Guys, there is definitely a problem with Google Analytics that started around 26th October. Make sure you check search analytics in GSC and compare with GA to help see what's really happening.

mosxu

11:24 am on Oct 30, 2016 (gmt 0)

Under no circumstances should Google Analytics be considered any safe considering the ghost traffic and other tricks spammers can employ.

1. if your site has quota the unlimited fake requests sent to your analytics ID can eat into that quota
2. same fake requests form a different country IP could change the geolocation of your site (this may have just happened to Nick)

Libre

1:45 pm on Oct 30, 2016 (gmt 0)

@Simon I hope there is a problem with Google Analytics, if not I have lost most of the traffic from India!

Simon_H

1:58 pm on Oct 30, 2016 (gmt 0)

@Libre Here's one thread about it: [en.advertisercommunity.com ]

mboydnv

10:38 pm on Oct 30, 2016 (gmt 0)

Sales are down 75% over 4 days - Las Vegas, NV. Rankings are good #11 , #12 etc (2nd page)

What is happening?

ionguy

10:19 am on Oct 31, 2016 (gmt 0)

@mboydnv world war 2 against small business
still no changes since last tue; anyone getting the same?

BushieTop

4:20 pm on Oct 31, 2016 (gmt 0)

We're now seeing the old results from the pre penguin... looks like we're a couple of weeks behind you guys.

BushieTop

2:45 pm on Nov 1, 2016 (gmt 0)

Has anyone seen the results revert back to what they were post penguin yet. Looks like we are back to where we were pre penguin?!

System

9:50 pm on Nov 1, 2016 (gmt 0)

redhat

The following 8 messages were cut out to new thread by aakk9999. New thread at: google/4824428.htm [webmasterworld.com]
10:16 am on Nov 3, 2016 (gmt 0)

This 176 message thread spans 6 pages: 176