@reseller

on organic side it well may be that website is left in a grey area but the elephant in the room is adwards where algos should not apply and zombies are in even a higher number

to me it looks like both organic and adwards results are displayed to drive conversions to certain websites and not much to do with flying birds

@vlexo based in the UK.

Its more than possible that the mobile first algo is hurting us, we have huge issues with page speed, but our site passes the mobile development and works on a responsive framework, but its slow - we're working on that though :)

But.... sites that have built huge amounts of EMAT and are equally as slow rank well - no drops. And, it recently came to light that one of competitors had changed their agency, who has since cleaned their profile... the results? in the past week they have begun to slide down the table. (from 2nd to 4th/5th)

My thoughts are machine learning still has steps to take.

@mosxu
@BushieTop

Do you see much difference when you look at the countries of origin of your organic traffic on 24th January 2017 vs 25th January 2017 (today)?

EMAT

EMAT = exact match anchor text.

It took a while to figure this out, as I'm thinking BushieTop may be the only person on the internet who commonly uses the term. ;)

So far yes, I'm getting more traffic from US, AUS and INDIA.. sorry about the abbreviation, just easier to write, given I've been repeating myself for months.....

Looks like Google Search Console is suddenly showing a considerably larger number of backlinks for several of my sites. I'm seeing quite a few that I didn't previously know about.

There's also a message which might (or not) be related:

Jan-22: Search Console performed an infrastructure update that may cause a change in your data

@reseller

Finally we have proof:

A relevant article from Search Engine Roundtable of 24th January 2017:

The first line of the article reads:

"Over the past 24-hours, the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has seen an uptick in chatter"

So you create chatter,
Barry at SER reports it...
Then you use Barry's report as proof that the your chatter is substantiated.

Is that how it works?

So you create chatter,
Barry at SER reports it...
Then you use Barry's report as proof that the your chatter is substantiated.

+1. The posts Barry quoted are old (January 11 and 12), with one person saying everything is back to normal. Barry might want to exclude posts of those with sites in zombie patterns from being used to gauge whether or not an update has occurred. Temporary relief from zombies may feel like an update, but as those of us with sites in those patterns understand the return to garbage Google traffic normally returns rather quickly and lasts for a substantial period of time. I personally don't see any change in traffic quantity from Google (good) or traffic quality (utter garbage). Poor Barry, I think he stuck his neck out and reported fake news.

Just wish to mention that Google Algorithm Updates usually only affect a limited percentage of queries, mostly around 1% to around 3% of queries (though there are few updates which have affected around 7% or around 11% of queries). Not all webmasters would notice the effect of a given Google Algorithm Update.

As examples, here you can view the % of queries affected by some Panda and Penguin updates [searchengineland.com...]

@mosxu

@reseller

on organic side it well may be that website is left in a grey area but the elephant in the room is adwards where algos should not apply and zombies are in even a higher number

I focused in my said post on organic traffic. I would try to explain more of my assumptions:

There are websites which have been hit by one or more of Google Algorithm Updates, and those websites haven't been able to recover and wouldn't recover at all in future. As I mentioned those websites are in a grey zone regarding Google search algorithm.
Accordingly I assume that Google search algorithm isn't able to correctly match queries with pages of the said affected websites.

On purpose I'm leaving Adwards out of current discussion :)

Not sure what is happening, but I'm getting some traffic but zero repeat visitors today and zero sales. And I'm running adwords too. Nothing is converting today. Sunday and Monday I did well. Adwords are useless today.

@reseller

If Google search algorithm isn't able to correctly match queries with pages of the said affected websites then that traffic will bounce and it does not - zombies always pretend to be on the right page.

@mboydnv

How old is your website in question?

Do you see difference(s) when you look at the countries of origin of your organic traffic on 24th January 2017 (yesterday) vs 25th January 2017 (today)?

@mosxu
We dont know that... zombies are no different from normal users looking at the stats... except they dont convert and dont click ads they dont socially interact and have a very slightly higher bounce rate.

that's all we know. everything else is speculation.

Usually I see zombies:
- during 1-2 days (all at once) once every few months
- stats: -50-80% Conversions, -50% social likes, -50% adsense earnings, +5% bounce rate, time on page: +5%

It's basically what you would expect if your site was dead slow or the design was broken, but none of that is the case.

@mosxu

What you call Zombies might be just disappointed and annoyed searchers who have been misguided to the wrong (irrelevant) websites by Google search algorithm. Don't expect from those annoyed disappointed searchers to buy anything or click on irrelevant Adsense when they land on pages of irrelevant websites.

Imagine yourself searching for apples. By mistake Google search algorithm rank a website selling banana. You in good faith visit the banana website and land on a page expecting to find and purchase apples. You get annoyed and disappointed when you discover that Google search algorithm has misguided you to the wrong website. You would never interact with anything on the banana website. As such I wouldn't call you a Zombie, but a dissatisfied misguided Google searcher :(

@reseller
@WhiteHatTryHard

WhiteHatTryHard is right zombie traffic has a slightly higher bounce rate but no way is mis-matched traffic. If a user was looking for apples and landed on a banana site will not spend more than 10 seconds and bounce where here we are dealing with something more special. To optimize for conversions we use clicktale , lucky orange and we replay all zombies journeys on the site, the reality is that zombies are engaging like a "normal user" sometimes for minutes...

@mosxu

Assuming that Zombie traffic is in fact the organic traffic generated as the result of Google search algorithm mismatching queries of different people. Accordingly I wish to draw attentions to the following assumptions:

1- The different people whom queries have been mismatched might behave differently (as to bounce) when they land on pages of irrelevant websites.

2- As to the affected websites, Google search algorithm might keep mismatching queries for part of the day or for the entire whole day or for days with no specific pattern or specific limits.

3- The affected websites would never recover. They would be kept subject for the mismatching process for ever. Business wise those affected websites might be considered dead. Its therefore I suggested affected websites to be moved to new domains in an attempt to bring them back into business.

@reseller

do me a favour first please, put luckyorange (it is free for 7 days) on the site you have zombies, then playback the users in the period when no conversions happen then watch users in a period when conversions happen, comparing the users there is no mismatched traffic and I am telling you that no one will spend time on the wrong site

zombies try to look very real, even adding products to basket and that is not mismatched traffic that is deceiving

I think we shouldn't expect Google to announce or confirm Algorithm Updates in future.

We've seen some country related changes in traffic this week. Our primary country designation shows little change, but some of the others are down a lot. Has anyone else seen similar changes?

@LuckyLiz

We've seen some country related changes in traffic this week. Our primary country designation shows little change, but some of the others are down a lot. Has anyone else seen similar changes?

Thanks for feedback.

In fact I have posted on this thread two posts (Msg#:483305 and Msg#:4833406) dated 25th January 2017 asking following question:

Do you see difference(s) when you look at the countries of origin of your organic traffic on 24th January 2017 (yesterday) vs 25th January 2017 (today)?

@reseller Sorry I missed those posts. Yes, I do see the difference starting on January 25.

It could be that the aim of Google Algorithm Update of 24th January 2017 is to improve how geo-targeting is handled by Google Search Algorithm.

Our traffic was up nicely on the 24th but has been plummeting ever since. Frankly alarming drops since the 26th...

We also had same problem with traffic going up and down last week. We had best organic traffic results for 24-26 of January and then it's dropped lower then it was before. It's really sad we this traffic also converted much better than ever before.

same here nice up and then sad drop

I have one site (US focused) that saw a drop of around 20-25% on 25-26 January.

The site is:
Content rich.
Solid, natural backlink profile.
Responsive design
Image light.

Where it's weaker - poor engagement stats (bounce rate higher than I'd like combined with a lowish time on site), which I believe spring from poor design.

<< Where it's weaker - poor engagement stats (bounce rate higher than I'd like combined with a lowish time on site), >>

That's my going theory. The parts of our site with lowest time on site / single view per session just got hammered really, really badly during the past dew days.

The problem is, on our site at least there is nothing wrong with these pages! In most cases the reason we have such a low time on site on these pages is that the user's question is answered immediately. They get their answer in a few seconds, and are done. [ Clearly this isn't good for OUR conversions, but that is a different issue. A user finding what they are looking for quickly should not be grounds for search demotion! ]

I would understand if the user is hitting back, and bouncing back to another site from the same google query, but I just don't think that's happening much in the case of many of our penalized pages. It feels to me like Google is using other data to say "hey, that user just spent 15 seconds on that site and never clicked on in further. penalize them!"

Our site is also extremely old (20 years now), and our google traffic gets hit with each and every update. There's something seriously wrong with Google's long-term data in their algorithms. Even though our site has kept up with the SEO landscape we continue to get crushed. I sometimes wonder if we just chose a new domain name and started over if everything would pop back up to where it ought to. Unfortunately we are extremely well established and have thousands of backlinks, so this isn't practical.

I really wish Google would look into how their algorithms unfairly (and I suspect unintentionally) affect old websites.

[edited by: westcoast at 7:34 pm (utc) on Jan 30, 2017]

Our sales tanked on the 25th severely. And are quite anemic today. Tourism, las vegas. Plenty of people coming to Vegas. Our rankings are second page at the top. #11. I've run ads all day yesterday and today, nothing made. sad. 12 years in business.

25% drop on a U.S. informational medium site on January 26, which was boosted initially by 25% in early December & didn't budge at all until last Thursday.