Yep, dropped again :(

Another pretty massive drop here. Maybe it's World Cup related or holidays?

Traffic is really low today for me as well. It's generally been trending upwards despite the minor setbacks during google updates, but today isn't looking great so far for both of my sites.

Checking my Search Console today: I can see I have had a drop in Clicks / Impressions / CTR / Position on 9 June, and after that everything is pretty much stable. Can anyone confirm something happened around 9 June?

Despite of that, since 14 June sales are slowly coming back.

Hours of zombies had to stop adwords campaigns

It's Eid, people.

MayankParmar - you mean Eid Al Fitr?

@Cyril TechWebsites Yep.

MayankParmar: On one hand, I believe that it's not update, that the traffic decline is happening because of Eid Al Fitr + World Cup + start of the vacation season all over the world. On other hand I have some doubts on that: I believe that there are some part of Muslims traffic for my websites (India, UAE, Philippines, Muslims in Germany, France etc), but could it cause so big drop? The other thing is that I also noticed drop from US (around 5%) - and there are a lack of Muslims living there... As always, Google rolled out the update on days with a lot of events and it will be hard to tell exactly if I actually lost some traffic... the next week will show the real situation.

My traffic is down a bit today, but it's been down roughly 5% all week. I'm not convinced it's an update. I think it's just summer, plus other things going on.

The fact that Semrush is showing there's a new update is bothering me :(

Hours of zombies had to stop adwords campaigns

I saw a couple Adwords users complaining about low impressions for the last couple of days. One said his campaign has been running for three years and had 1/2 the impressions. This would suggest either his ads were displaced by a layout change in the SERPS and/or poor targeting by Google. Regardless, the SERP trackers are off the hook today - there is definitely an update going on. My traffic volume and pageviews are largely back to normal, though conversions remain on the light side for this time of day.

I saw a noticeable drop in traffic all week, with Friday afternoon and evening (US Eastern) being the worst by far. What I have not seen is any real drop in rankings on the keywords I track. I guess I could be losing it on the long tail.

The fact that Semrush is showing there's a new update is bothering me :(

I can count on one hand the number of times in the past two years that my traffic has been drastically affected by an update, no mater what Semrush says.

I've also given up on trying to please Google. I know at this point that I could not possibly improve my content any further, and my visitors all seem happy. So Google can do whatever it wants. I don't care anymore.

AdSense revenue has actually been up this week even with the traffic drop. Page views go down, but page RPM goes up. Works for me.

[edited by: Cralamarre at 2:30 pm (utc) on Jun 16, 2018]

I've seen a big drop this week as well (8%) and we are now down 22% compared to last year, for visits and ad impressions. For a lot of our keywords that stupid youtube widget now shows up front and center usually position 3 and taking up several listing locations. Whatever happened March 5th, 2018 this year started a slide we cannot seem to get out of...

Exactly same, AdSense is up and traffic is down.

Exactly same, AdSense is up and traffic is down.

May be better quality traffic.

What could go wrong if I use apps like Lumen to convert articles into videos. Technically duplication, but it's okay, right?

@MayankParmar I don't "convert" my articles into videos, I make videos based on the articles. In other words, the text articles tell people how to do something, and the videos show them how to do it. I'm not sure how you would just convert an article into a video.

Keep in mind that it's not enough to just publish a video on YouTube. The video needs to be good enough for people to want to watch it, and Like it, and Subscribe to your channel. Otherwise, your video will die a quick death and you'll gain nothing.

What on earth is going on?

What on earth is going on?

Messi misses a penalty, this is the end of Times.

Zombies only,

I am sick I wished I would have become a doctor or something doing something useful

What on earth is going on?

Wish I knew. What started off looking like normal traffic numbers, though low conversions, has fallen off the cliff again. I will say this appears to be impacting Amazon sales as well. That could possibly be a good thing if all the Amazon crowding in the SERPS ends with this update. Who knows, maybe this is Google's response to Amazon dropping shopping ads.

I have Adwords running and yesterday's impressions/clicks were very low. Today I see a spike in CPC, but on very low impressions. Who knows, this might be zombie 2.0, 3.0 or whatever version they are on to deplete budgets as quickly as possible. I will leave it running, as I normally do during major updates, just to get some data to review.

I'm not seeing any YouTube widgets in the SERPS like others have reported, though it could just be the datacenter I'm pulling results from or they just won't show them to me because of personalized/manipulated search results. I did have YouTube videos that were ranking, though I'm not getting any traffic from them now. The videos are informative and relevant, and I would expect them to be in a widget driving some small amount of traffic but I'm seeing nothing.

I'm trying to think of this from Google's perspective. Users on YouTube are likely more click happy, which makes Google more money. If Google is trying to wring more money out of ads, it stands to reason they have a desire to divert search traffic onto YouTube where they can make more money. Not that I like it, but that may be what's happening. If this is why traffic/conversions are taking a nosedive, it will devalue not only organic search results, but text and shopping ads as well.

With results still shifting, I'll just kick back and enjoy the ride...

@glakes

Today I've noticed the Youtube bar rank dropping in the SERPS for some of my keywords. And some of them disappeared entirely. Traffic has picked up this evening as well, but it usually does later in the day, so I'll see what happens on my peak day (usually Monday).

Amazon affiliate conversions seem normal (around 20%), and sales numbers steady, so the quality of traffic is good, despite lower traffic.

[edited by: whoa182 at 10:34 pm (utc) on Jun 16, 2018]

I am stopping all ads for now...

@whoa182

I'm seeing live traffic originating from YouTube. It's not a good sign at all. Did a search on Google for a two word keyphrase, and got the following from nine organic results:

#1 Urban Dictionary
Image Block
#2 Urban Dictionary
#3 YouTube
#4 YouTube
#5 YouTube
#6 YouTube
#7 YouTube
#8 Twitter
#9 Twitter

Results like the above make a YouTube widget look good. LOL

Did another search for gridlock. I got the following results:

#1 Wikipedia
#2 Dictionary
YouTube Widget
#3 Dictionary
#4 Webster Dictionary
#5 Wiktionary
#6 Urban Dictionary
Image Block
#7 IMDB
#8 The Guardian
#9 The Atlantic
#10 NY Times

I'm guessing Google thinks that I as a middle age man need to know what the definition of gridlock is with the excessive dictionary listings.

All I can say is every search query I executed in Google returned FUBAR results. If I were Google I would be utterly embarrassed with what is being served. Which brings me to my next comment:

@mosxu

You may not want to stop all ads. I'm increasing my spend in Bing as I suspect many Google users will become so frustrated that they will be compelled to use another search engine. Whether it's an excessive number of videos or dictionary sites, the results are so narrow in scope (thin) that I wouldn't bother using Google in such a FUBAR state.

Edit:

Amazon has taken a pretty heavy hit so far. I'm seeing Google crowd other big brands while Amazon has lost many crowded results and have been booted beneath the fold. I guess Google was not too happy that Amazon stopped advertising with product ads. Some sellers are complaining about large drops in sales. This should be interesting to see how hard it hits Amazon in the wallet...

I doubt Google will intentionally down rank Amazon. They probably don't want another fine...

Traffic is still down :(

If I were Google I would be utterly embarrassed with what is being served.

I made a search related to the Pathé Foundation building in Paris by architect Renzo Piano for a museum-related article some days ago. Searching "Pathé Foundation Renzo Piano" in Google gave me the following results:

1st - Archdaily (with a content totally scraped from Renzo Piano's Website, text and images; not a single original word in it)

3rd-4th other architectural web magazines with many photos (again from Piano's office) and a very short text (mostly image captions) which is clearly that from Piano's website, just shorter and slightly modified

5th - The Renzo Piano page on which such content was first published and which contains all the original text and pictures

Do you remember when, many years ago, Google was making fun of Altavista because searching for "Ford automobiles" on them gave as 1st result an obscure reseller's website and not Ford Company's own one?

How we could still believe that "creating original and quality content" really makes a difference for ranking in Google, these days?

PS you can do the same search for other contemporay architecture buildings, the fist result is always a website featuring content taken "as it is" from the architect's websites or by cut and pasting from an official press-release; literally line by line, without even doing the small effort to "cosmeticize" it. Hooray!

The thing is, returning brand sites is limiting the risk to get it wrong.

Backlink makes a difference, content doesn't.