Dunno about "that idiot," but I have been saying lately that our Google traffic has mostly been steady or edging upward slightly. No drama, just the usual ebb and flow with the seasons. For our site, the last really big change was a few years ago.

Then again, I don't have an e-commerce site, and this forum does seem to have been taken over by e-commerce types these days. People who deal in widgets may well experience different "updates" than people who deal in information, but they shouldn't get their tights in a twist just because everyone doesn't have the same experience they do.

Well I've never had any serious problems with mods censoring my posts. Over the years I've received a few reprimands from them, but nothing ever came of it.

So say what you want to say and don't worry about what someone else might think.

Other than the big Google updates in March and May of this year, I don't think I've been hit by any other updates (not that those ones weren't bad enough). Summer was slow as expected, but now that summer is over, traffic has been rebounding, again as expected. And personally, I've found the people on here to be extremely helpful, and I've learned a lot. I'm very thankful for this site.

I don't know what had been done by GOOGLE. But, including my competitors, our index are decreasing to a very low level. Do everybody meet such situation?

The only overt censorship I ever see here are:
- Personal attacks
- Editorialising (especially Google-bashing)
- Calling out companies / sites / pages / tools
- Using site or keyword specifics

Of those, I have no desire to stop the "censorship" - apart from possibly the keyword thing (though the argument for timelessness and universality is strong).

Of much more concern is the "othering" that happens here. People have tribes, and just ignore (at best) members of other tribes, leading to self-imposed bubbles.

Some people, including some mods and admins, seem more concerned with shutting down discussion through bullying / belittling tactics, than allowing people to challenge orthodox assumptions. Why not just state "I disagree with that, for this reason" and allow other professional webmasters to read both sides? Let reputation, credibility and clarity of thought do it's thing.

Of course, if you want the freedom to say things that others disagree with, you must accept that others will disagree with you. Expect your opinions to be challenged robustly.

Embrace it; you might even learn something!

Moderator note: It's off topic comments that result in posts being removed as they cause topics to rapidly drift. Start new threads if you want a new topic. Let's not spend any time bashing Google as it earns our sites no money, and it's very tiresome. Side note: I'm no google fanboy. It's a search engine that gives an opportunity to list our sites and businesses and make some $.

Back on topic.

I think we need to be a little patient as i'm still seeing shifts going on, in both directions. It needs to fully settle.

Amazon are making great strides in our niche, in areas normally dominated by specialists.

Also, notice Google is showing "By Google" on the Shopping results. Is this new, ready for the proposed implementation of compliance with anti-trust ruling? Or have I just noticed it because I'm looking?

This update is still ongoing? I found the rankings in the first 10 results are still disturbing.

@Shaddows Very interesting! Do you mind me asking what types of keyword terms they have improved for?

Yes, I have noticed this as well it looks to be almost definitely new and more than likely as (you have rightfully suggested) a result of the EU competition fine, they have also moved the display box from above the results to the right hand side, basically giving themselves what was the SMEs most cost effective AdWords option (up until February of last years) to advertise on. Now that begs the question as to how this new format is less competitive...?

[edited by: NicJamCo at 10:24 am (utc) on Sep 28, 2017]

Seeing a significant increase in google traffic this week. Very similar to the increase experienced the second week of October 2016. Both stand out as they come at a time of the year when our traffic tends to decline. All traffic from other sources is on a steady, normal seasonal decline.

@Shepherd You could well be right! In fact excluding 2015 there has been major Penguin updates or refreshes (which this could well be) in October 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016.

I see on google search “people also ask” with so many asking question, so google take the answer from all websites with quotes for free and people just not come to the website because read the answer on the google search engine and come to the next question. For my opinion in this case google use all website for free. Website not earn nothing and lose traffic. 1,2,3 year maxim little webmaster disappear and only giant company remain. Really sad move, this is really killing internet.

Ok, I just wanted to reach out to you. One of googles ips were blocked in my firewall it is not traditional ip and my server company could not find it and I suspect this has caused my traffic loss so I just thought I would say check this has not happened to you as they may have created different ips in this update. Fetch from google was actually working ok as well as it used different ip address.

Is anyone noticing something big today? My traffic is almost zero. It looks like Google has turned off the tap.

Tourism, USA

My traffic does seem to be down a bit this morning, at least compared to yesterday, but still better than the same day last week. US traffic only starts rolling in around this time, so it's too early in the day to really say if anything has happened. So far, I wouldn't call today a disaster, but something seems to be off.

Education/Information, USA

It just keeps getting worse folks...I am now convinced that no amount of tweaks or nudging your content for better traffic and conversions will EVER work. As a last ditch test and using all I have learned of SEO in the past 17 years, I am now releasing FREE versions of my content to see if these so called "visitors" are really human and if G really picks up "compelling content with takeaway value". Results to follow.

Loads of above the fold page one results and yet site sits at or near zero traffic. Been zero for over an hour now. No seasonal upswing in sight. WTF happened THIS time?

Ventured to the ommitted search results in my niche amazon ranks page after page.. showing how much weight/bias the algos really give amazon. Worth looking at because I think those results give you a good insight of who really dominates.

Google isn't improving its search engine by these algorithm updates. I only see the CRAP sites on the first page. They published articles with only keywords a few days ago to capture the position and I couldn't overtake them anymore and even lost the existing position to 100 words article sites.

The dominance has to be snatched from Google before it's too late.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 2:49 pm (utc) on Sep 28, 2017]

@samwest, Sorry if you've stated this previously, but is your site e-commerce or information-based? US or UK? Also, are you saying you're actually getting no traffic at all today?

My site is information-based, and most of the content on it is free. In fact, there isn't a single site on the first page of the SERPs for my main keyword that doesn't offer most of its content for free. The #1 site on Google is actually a YouTube channel, which just goes to show how much Google loves videos these days.

@cra - my site is US based, informational up front but paid for detailed PDF's. This has been my model since 1997 and it's worked very well.
Due to an apparent decay of this model, I am now releasing free versions of my pdf's spread out as articles. I rank on page one for the phrase "free-kw1-kw2" but zip on traffic. It has decent KW trend volume too. I am seeing traffic patterns fall into basically three buckets, ranked by frequency of occurrence :
1. Drip traffic - long runs of one or two visits at a time, can occur any time of day. Just like a dripping faucet.
2. ON / OFF traffic - normal flow of 2 or more visits at a time followed by long zero runs.
3. "normal" traffic - very rare these days, but occasionally the site flow looks normal. This is usually accompanied by regular conversions.

They seem to switch patterns on am hourly basis. What really confounds me is that in the past, every day was a "naturally" normal day. No odd ON/OFF or drip patterns. I could set my watch by the regularity of conversions.

This falls in with recent "Google Insights" that prove just how tightly we are watched. Today I got an insight that said:
Anomaly Detected: drop in Pageviews for Page xxxxxxxx. For this Page, we forecast Pageviews of 47.3-125 for Sep 26, 2017, and your actual Pageviews of 46 is lower than this range. Seriously? They actually wasted the computing power to derive this "useful data"? The scary part is: Now that they HAVE it, how are they USING it?

In the past, traffic just flowed naturally with no scrutiny or shaping....not the case anymore. Time to return to PIWIK.
That probably will not help as they will still manage to monitor the site with bots. I have pages that don't have GA code on them and yet I still get "intelligence" reports on those too. creepy indeed.

@samwest if you use googlefonts or anything google they probably can still see your data.

@samwest, That's very strange because your site actually sounds very similar to mine, even down to the PDF sales (I thought I was the only one who still sold PDFs). My site is also US based. However, I'm not seeing any real problems with traffic. Things started out a bit slower than I was expecting this morning, but now that the US traffic has kicked in, everything seems to have caught up again. I tend to panic every time I see a slight dip in traffic, but really, today is turning out to be pretty normal.

@samwest, Also, I think those anomaly reports in Google Analytics are there to help you spot potential problems. I don't think it's Google's way of saying "We're watching you" or that they're in some way using the information against you. At least, that's my take on it.

My traffic has definitely recovered today from the slow start. No sign of any updates.

@samwest

Zero traffic for one hour with keywords at the top? It sounds your site has been temporarily de indexed to any new searcher and the zombies failed to enter to compensate.

I would look for clues around that time. Server logs, anything really

mos - this has been ongoing, so it's not a temporary issue...just comes and goes.

Hi folks,

In some part of this topic some people mentions some changes in positions that can be conencted to google local. Search Engine Land reports an updating in Google Local Finder..
[searchengineland.com...] So.. some part of the changes detected in google positions can be connected to this updated

cheers

My website is not related to business or e commerce. I have lost 50% of traffic and always respect users and all perfect guidelines. Some website with poorly content growth at the speed of light and I was penalized doing my content and good quality work as always.

@skynet84 Hello having read through the abundance of online conversations regarding this as well as looking at current spikes and fluctuations and previous algorithm updates, refreshes and changes: [moz.com...] it seems to me that there is a multitude of algorithms being either updated, refreshed and or changed all at the same time, which would make sense as to why we are seeing such a mixed bag of results from one day to the next. Also what is interesting to note is the timing of the previous big algorithm updates, many of them took place during a holiday season, usually based on US breaks and on the odd occasion over a UK break, and (as long as Google is playing ball and your website is in order) once the algorithms have finished what they are doing everything should hopefully fall back in to place (subject to what your competitors have done to improve their rankings) and or improve. But certainly don't quote me on this!

There is such a thing as over-optimizing.

The following 4 messages were cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: google/4870588.htm [webmasterworld.com]
11:42 am on Sep 29, 2017 (PDT -8)

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Mod's note: Split off part of this thread to a new topic that deserves a discussion of its own....

Longform articles and information overload
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4870588.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:03 pm (utc) on Sep 29, 2017]