Google Algorithm Updates - 2019 Ongoing Discussion

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I think this non updated needs a name.

Maybe the twat tracker update or something.
 
Possible Update: 7/30/19

Ignoring the giant, unrealistic spike everyone but SERPWoo has for the update that didn't happen:

SERPWoo:
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Algoroo:
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Mozcast:
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SEMRush:
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SERPmetrics:
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This one seems legit. I saw a visible spike in organic traffic yesterday that settled back down to where I was before. But something is definitely up. Looks to still be rolling out.
 
Confirmed Update: 8/27/19

Look at my organic traffic to this one site:

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Hopefully that spike isn't just a spike like you see before, but a sustained boost. What are you guys seeing?

The Usual Weathermen:

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And for fun, look at this guy and how much data he must be gathering to be such a prophet:

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I am seeing a few jumps on individual pages that I've been working on, onpage and offpage. Nothing major site wide, but a few pages hit record highs.
 
Business as usual.. unfortunately. Site has been flat since the drop in June.
 
That bump I saw on the 8/27/19 update seems to be sticking:

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The only problem is that, while my traffic is up a significant amount, my affiliate link clicks are down. I'm not surprised, seems like a continuance of the Medic-style concern with "Your Money, Your Life" SERPs. I didn't check but I'm sure I'm losing traffic to the typical "Best ___" and "___ Reviews" style posts to old giants with more time and trust metrics flowing.
 
See some action from this update on one of my sites - decimated :(
 
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I wanted to wait a couple days at least before commenting on how my main site did with this update. This is the same one I've struggled with since August 2018. I got that nice bump on 8/27, and now I'm getting an almost equivalent bump again! Time will tell if it holds on or not, but so far so good. This post in this thread summarizes quickly the work I did leading up to this. Makes it sound simple but it was months of work.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Makes it sound simple but it was months of work.
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But there's no way to know for sure if it was the work that you did that caused the traffic increase, right? Anyways congrats on the boost, you deserve it.

My small site is down 10% in traffic, nothing critical. My friend's site got decimated, despite them having the best content in the niche.
 
Poplanu said:
But there's no way to know for sure if it was the work that you did that caused the traffic increase, right?
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Yes, but I can tell you that, despite all the things I did to improve the site, the main two things that I can almost guarantee were the solution was pruning low quality content and fixing like 800 empty pages in the index. I agonized over every piece of information I could find and determined it was a Panda issue, treated it like a Panda issue, and am now being released from that prison.

What I'm saying is, with enough study, looking at the effects of the problem, looking at the timing, seeing the most glaring mistakes, you can get a very informed opinion on the category of problem and then apply the medicine and do so with a high level of confidence.

But I also did the typical "shotgun spray, nuclear option, find any possible problem, tiny or huge, and fix it" method too, because there's no point in leaving it up to chance since so much of this is time based with filters refreshing maybe once every 6 months.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I can almost guarantee were the solution was pruning low quality content
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I have been having great success with content pruning. For some reason, the agency I'm at did a bunch of "3 part series" along time ago. Combing those together has been super helpful. Also cutting dated pages which get next no or low traffic has been giving me some SERP love.
 
My technical site got nailed and I'm down 15-20% starting on 9/25.

The site is for a profession and might be on the edge of YMYL. It isn't health, law, or finance related, but it can be considered a professional site where you should be qualified to provide info. I didn't get hit by Medic so I assume it doesn't fall into YMYL for Google's purposes.

I saw another link mention that this had to do with time on site, but I'm not sure because my other site has similar statistics and didn't get hit so who knows. I'm not changing my strategy or overhauling content based on this update. I'm just trying to make the best site for the visitors.
 
Google BERT Update - Impacts 10% of Queries, Bigger Than RankBrain, Rolling Out Now

I started a thread just for this update at the link above, since it's such a big "game changer." I didn't see a lot of talk about it through out the week and it's supposedly almost done rolling out, so who knows how much the impact has to propagate or will be tweaked in the weeks to come.
 
mikey3times said:
I'm not changing my strategy or overhauling content based on this update. I'm just trying to make the best site for the visitors.
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I believe I got hit by the same update as you and your strategy is what I am doing also... No drastic changes and hopefully I come back. I don't really see how you can make changes based on updates when major updates seem to roll out every 4 weeks now anyway.
 
Unconfirmed Update: 11/8/19

We talked about this some in other threads but I figured we should toss it in here for posteriority's sake. People started reporting fairly severe drops (~30%) starting around the 8th and continue to talk about it today (the 11th).

If you read through all the moaning there's actually enough people sharing information about their niches that we can pick out a pattern. Entertainment, Food, Recipes, Travel, and again Health getting slaughtered. Some people in those niches are winning because someone has to when others drop, but it's largely those niches. Some are saying it's specific pages dropping, others say it's sitewide.

All of the "weather reports" are showing the normal calm weather we associate with times when there's no updates.

This leads me to believe its got to do with either really long-tails that aren't being monitored and/or new SERP features appearing on queries that didn't have them previously. I've seen in my own searches some now "sub-menu" style searches. I searched a video game and there were new tabs like "News, Videos, Guides, Walkthroughs" etc. That could be impacting things for some people.
 
Ryuzaki said:
new SERP features appearing on queries that didn't have them previously.
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The thing with Snippets is, yes there was Google updating it's display to show favicons and such, but if a new block of snippets gets added within the Top 10, it will move URLs out of the Top 10. Trackers would have detected them or at the very least pixel movement or new code at some level. I really do suspect that the situation is hitting domains/URLs that are hitting the long-tail, since BERT - IF it was launched, literally only impacts long-tail terms. All the examples within the Google blog post about BERT were long-tail.

So if this was BERT, it makes sense it's an attack on long-tail terms, and therefore the reason so many rank trackers aren't reporting anything substantial - unless someone does a filter segment for short-tail versus long-tail... SOMEONE... ANYONE....
 
Ryuzaki said:
I searched a video game and there were new tabs like "News, Videos, Guides, Walkthroughs" etc. That could be impacting things for some people.
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Interesting - can you share an example query?
 
My drops have nothing to do with snippets, long tail or new stuff.

Just plain old shuffle of new sites.
 
Darth said:
Interesting - can you share an example query?
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It's being split tested but I finally got one to pop up, even with my typo:

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It's far worse than I described. They're using whatever related sub-searches they can to populate these extra searches. If you click them, they don't take you to a new SERP. They use Javascript or AJAX I'd guess to refresh the page contents right there without refreshing the actual browser page.

It might actually be based around whatever featured snippets they have to show, now that I play with it and think about it.

You'd think if people wanted "achievements lists" and "songs" they'd have typed that in the query, though... I doubt this survives the split tests.
 
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