On the morning of Friday, November 15th, we woke up to a substantial one-day temperature spike on MozCast. Digging in, there were no signs of a glitch, and it seemed to hit across multiple IPs. The 30-day history looks like this:
Webmaster chatter seemed normal and Google has not confirmed an update, but soon other major flux-tracking tools showed one-day spikes. Here's the data from SERPmetrics:
Both SERPmetrics and SERPs.com (that graph is a bit less clear, due to an unusually low-flux day earlier in the month) show the spike on November 15th, but one-day shifts are common due to measurement differences in the three tools.
Did big sites win big?
The first thing I dig into when we see a temperature spike is a set of secondary metrics that look at large-scale trends across the data set. That morning showed a solid jump in the "Big 10," which simply represents the percentage of total search results in the set occupied by the top 10 domains (for that day):
The one day jump from 15.39% to 15.89% represents a 3.2% relative increase – it may not seem like a huge amount, but it's historically unusual. Wikipedia, Amazon, and eBay all had one-day gains in the 3-5% range.
Unfortunately, it's easy to jump to conclusions but much harder to interpret this kind of change. Some algorithm updates might benefit large brands, but it's just as often the case that an update penalizes low-quality sites, and the big brands simply end up filling the gaps. For example, if the #10 result on a SERP falls out, and the #11 pops up one position to fill that spot, the new #10 is more likely to be a big site with a large Google footprint than a small site.
Our larger data set (not currently public) set shows a similar trend. All I can say with certainty is: (1) this was a historically unusually one-day change, and (2) the "Big 10" metric is at now at a historical high (going back to April 2012). I have no reliable clues about the causality and what specifically changed to cause this increase.
What did Wikipedia win?
Since digging into high-temperature keywords didn't reveal any clear patterns, I thought it might be interesting to see where a big winner (like Wikipedia) picked up top 10 listings. In most of the cases I saw, the big domains didn't gain prime real estate, but simply picked up a top 10 result because another site fell out. For example, here are the top 10 on November 14th for "famous footwear store hours" (domains only):
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- MyStore411.com
- Wiki.Answers.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- FamousFootwear.com
- MyStore411.com
- Wiki.Answers.com
- OutletLocation.com
- Indeed.com
- Wikipedia.org
- Yelp.com
Was there a glitch?
Something else happened on November 14th that was a bit odd. I informally polled my Twitter followers about that day and got the following bit of information from Galen Ward:
Coincidentally, I had just been in the Moz Google Webmaster Tools account that morning and happened upon this (I didn't put two and two together until Galen's tweet):
I didn't think much of it at the time (temporary glitches happen), but it seems that multiple webmasters and SEOs got the same error on the same day. Is it possible that a bug on Google's end could cause large-scale ranking fluctuations? It depends a lot on the scope and nature of the bug. Last April, a Google bug caused a number of domains to be misclassified as parked, and the impact was large enough to cause noticeable ranking changes.
If this was simply an unexpected side effect of a bug, though, we'd expect a reversal. The temperature the next day or soon after would spike again, and the secondary metrics, like the Big 10 increase, would settle back to their former values. In this case, we've seen no such reversal.
Is Andy Kaufman alive?
When it comes to daily ranking changes, separating the signal from the noise is incredibly difficult. The morning of November 15th, we captured a change that illustrates just how dynamic Google has become (and is something I've wanted to capture in the wild for a while).
Around November 13th, TMZ broke a story that a woman claiming to be Andy Kaufman's daughter said that her father was still alive. Multiple news sources picked up on this story on November 14th. Early that morning, we captured the first page of results for "kaufman", which were as follows:
- IMDB (Charlie Kaufman)
- Wikipedia (Kaufman, TX)
- Wikipedia (Andy Kaufman)
- RobertKaufman.com
- KaufmanCo.com
- KaufmanCounty.net
- KaufmanTX.org
- Kauffman.org
- Fandango.com (Kaufman Astoria Cinemas)
Google was viewing a search for "kaufman" as informational and generic, returning results for Andy Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman, cities named Kaufman, etc. A disambiguation box on the SERP even makes it clear that Google has trouble interpreting the query.
After the story about Andy Kaufman broke, the SERP changed dramatically:
- CNN
- IMDB (Charlie Kaufman)
- CNN
- Wikipedia (Kaufman, TX)
- Fox News
- KaufmanCounty.net
- RobertKaufman.com
- KaufmanCo.com
- US Today
- NY Daily News
Where there were no news-related organic results before, news articles now accounted for half of the top ten, including the #1 and #3 spots. You may have heard the term "QDF" (Query Deserve Freshness) in the SEO world. What's interesting here is that QDF is not something that's just on or off for any particular query. A query that was relatively static transformed overnight because of new information. In other words, Google decided in real-time that this informational query was now a news query, simply based on new data and content.
Is this the cause of the overall flux? No – it's very unlikely that a single event could move the needle. Even an event like 9/11, that had a huge impact on many people, is only going to be relevant to a small percentage of queries. Events like these simply go to show how dynamic any given query can be on any given day. In a case like this, the query isn't even historically high flux – it transformed overnight, and that transformation had nothing to do with algorithm updates.
So, what happened?
If it seems like I'm stalling, then, well – hey, is that Elvis?! One of the difficulties of retroactively explaining rankings fluctuations is that we typically can only look at the results themselves. This essentially means that we're measuring positions, position changes, and characteristics of the domains and URLs. This makes it easy to measure something like domain diversity but very difficult to profile something like a Penguin update, where the changes are due to characteristics of the individual sites and their link profiles.
We're also creeping into the holiday season – we've already seen a pattern of above average flux in the weekend before Thanksgiving. As we get into Black Friday, commercial SERPs naturally fluctuate, and it's hard to separate what Google is doing from changes due to competition and seasonality.
Whatever happened on November 14-15, it doesn't appear to have rolled back. The one-day spike is similar to a more traditional algorithm update, but that's about the best we have for now. If anyone has seen additional clues or has any follow-up on the DNS errors in Google Webmaster Tools, please leave a comment.
Well now, this would be the first algo update from Hummingbird. I also agree Dr.Pete that it was less of the Big sites climbing and more of smaller player falling. Yet what was the reason? I ran metrics across 30 sites that have no mobile presence and surprisingly saw a whopping 37% decrease in traffic overnight! Then ran 30 sites that have a strong Mobile presence and saw a 29% increase in traffic! Is hummingbird tightening the vise for Mobile device online Christmas shoppers? Or was it just coincidence?
I think you are right. In the last few days I've seen sites even with full spam (but with mobile versions) ranking higher that sites with no mobile versions.
Mobile has become so important that you MUST consider as the way to go with every site (or better yest, instead of separate sites, responsive ones).
Quite a coincidence happening days before black Friday and Cyber Monday yet by Dr. Pete not commenting on this analysis it leaves me a bit doubtful!?
This is a very interesting analysis and makes a lot of sense. A lot of time mobile traffic slips past the radar.
Thanks Mark, I agree that up until today there has been limited benefits towards the responsiveness of a Website besides the user experience. Although I am a strong believer that one of Hummingbirds main characteristics is to support the World of Mobile. Evidently the days of non-responsive websites are soon approaching!
Hey guys,
I noticed a shift in rankings for multiple US based websites, however, did not receive any DNS error messages from Google WMT. I did see that the number of pages crawled for the majority of these site was below the avg. for the 14th and the 15th. Also, have continued to witness fluctuations in rankings throughout last week. My Moz ranking report updates on Wednesday and with the ups and down reported by tools like MozCast and algoroo.com I'm excited to see it. With the specific verticals and situations I'm focused on analyzing Mobile and QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) should have a minimal impact. All sites are mobile friendly and their related search queries are relatively stagnate. Only impact I've witnessed is one of our site saw a small decrease like 2.13% in organic traffic and small decrease in impression reported by webmaster tools.
Interesting... some of the people who got the GWT error reported unusually high crawl volume from Google on 11/14 (the opposite of what you saw, and you didn't get the GWT error). Just speculating, but I wonder if there's a connection between these crawl changes and what happened the next day.
It is curious isn't it? Yea, no GWT errors. However, did just notice that one site (a .org) has an usually high number of pages crawled on 11/22. Could these changes be taking place different times? Possible for different industry/ verticals?
I also have GWT with the same issue.
Even in November 2013, Google suspended many Adwords account due to lack of all these possibilities of genuine accounts.
I am tracking my 25+ websites and found some simple issues.
Now SEO changed and needed following on high priority
- mobi version for a web is also helpful
- Ethical process for link- building
- Less GWT errors in crawling status
- Welcome Guest posting, but its really co-incidence , its going through Paid process in place of free or sharing process.
In my such experience, In year 2005-06 link exchange was also popular and working well, but Paid link building is worst thing in SEO.
I hope google will update soon and give a better option than Paid/ Guest Posting process.
It shouldn't be . . . ~ !
- Super-cool method of Info-graphics helps to give non-bounce traffic to the website.
- Press Release always wins - because its a part of real online marketing.
- Resource Link building - Very helpful.
Dr. Pette, I always appreciate Moz team , to deliver a challenging experience online.
Regards
Denish verma
SEO Manager (DnA WebSolution)
Hello there,
Well I think I am bit late in commenting on this but let me share my point of view. Well the fluctuation which we noticed on 14th is nothing unusual. The reason being a similar phenomenon occurred at the start of this if any one of you remember. If I am correct it happened around 18-21st January 2013 with no official confirmation, typical Google. Well the only difference is I have not seen much hue and cry this time but during January it was something else most of the spammy sites were washed way.
The fluctuation was so intense that it even engulfed some of the clean sites as well. So the moral of the story is every time Google is planning for something new and big you have a big fluctuation. I am not claiming something big is there in the store right now but if I go by my calculation I fear the coming summers are going to be really tough so be prepared. Lately Google has been experimenting with too many things on SERP and my gut feeling says starting new year we are going to have a all new SERP as per my findings.
For the beginners in this industry it's their best phase to track Google behavior and learn maximum out of it. Just before I end, here is a hint of what should be our strategy. Focus on Social media but be aware getting fake likes shares and follow is soon going to land you in no man's land lolzzzzzzzz. May god save every one from Google's next aasualt.
Hi
On the 15th our home page core keyword rank position jumped 5 places. Now normally after an algo change that position tends to drop back about the same amount of positions. However for the first time this year this has not transpired, the rank position has a stabilised on the new position.
For us this is intersting as we hold first rank, first page in the UK for the keyword phrase. It would however not budge in the US, yet we outranked the competitor in first position in the UK and they hold the US one.
I have tried many things this year to develop and increase the US ranking but it simply would not budge. Our DA, PA, Moz trust, link volume, C Block range etc. are all much bigger than the company ranking in the US. SO why would it not budge?
Along comes this algo change and it does it for me. For me that is very annoying as it sends a signal that for us to hold our highest rank position in the US market we need to either opt for Adwords spend, or hope and wonder when the algo changes in our favour. I'm glad it has but the control factor for us is limited more and more.
I've also observed an unusual increase in impressions on my website on 14th & 15th November, here is a screenshot of last 2 months graph:
https://img191.imageshack.us/img191/2301/2sa0.png
With the disclaimer that I have nothing other than casual observation to back this up, what I'm seeing since Nov 14 and especially since Nov 23 for "black friday" term SERPs is that sites that also appear in Google News seem to be getting a ranking bump in the main organic results, Google seems to have made the SERPs more heavily weighted to blog type sites and away from purely commercial sites, and overall domain authority seems to have become more heavily weighted in the algo as compared to individual page authority or age.
My 2cw...
there is my answer I have asked for on Twitter - thx Dr. Peter J. Meyers.
I do some things that SEOs usually do when they start working (coffee, socials, youtube ...) x) than I start reading till lunch x)))
Same Message i getting still, And if I am not Wrong the last Google Update was on 14 August 2013. On morning of 15th August which was independence day in India, Many People started posting on Forums that their PR are changed, Many website are soaked in sandbox. But I Haven't heard any thing in last few days. But yes that DNS problem is what all are facing.
My firm manages quite a few sites that range in size. Around the 14th we saw a change in ranking for quite a few of them. It seems the sites with more content and more recently added content have received better rankings.
Thanks for the article. I look forward to a future article on a more indepth analysis of what may have changed.
A lot of things will change during the holiday season so I am sure this is just a prelude.
Something definitely updated that day since I noticed a move up the rankings for most of the sites I provide SEO for. Didn't get any DNS issues though. It's still early for Hummingbird and I'm hoping this is the start of ironing out the bugs (of which there are many).
Good post!
Thanks for this article. I noticed the DNS error for my site also, and started troubleshooting on my end checking thru webmaster tools, checking dns, etc. Nothing seemed to be affected, and google could infact access my site, so I thought nothing of it. I have a large website with over 1million uniques/mo, and recently I am seeing major traffic fluctuations as of November 26th around 8pm est my traffic dropped by nearly 70%. Google rankings seem to be unchanged, and a 70% decrease seems to be awfull high for Thanksgiving traffic loss. The loss in traffic has continued on to the 27th, and into today the 28th. I'm hoping that wherever the problem is, that it gets resolved very soon.
Our site performance didn't have a dramatic change around Nov. 14, but it certainly did by Nov. 23/24 (although the no. of visits seems back to normal now). But our SERPs have been messed up a bit ever since. In particular, a page for a specific KW that used to be on the 1st page is suddenly missing (at least not in top 100). Instead our homepage and another page are showing up on page 2. And yet when I do a search for the KW while restricting results to only pages of my domain, that missing page is showing up as #1. I just don't get it.
Thanks for the info and analysis btw - great post as ever.
I didn't observed anything but after reading post i realized that since a week or twice, my site is floating form this position to that. May be it because of update.
Based on what I am seeing from Google announcements - it would seem the high score day coincides with Google rolling out (and having problems with) youtube comments powered by Google+. Based on what I am reading spam comments exploded on initial rollout and they had to make some changes very quickly afterward.
Just found this bit from the Youtube blogspot page - on the Nov 6th announcement / rollout of the comments:
"Updated November 12: We know there
are issues with spam and abuse in the new comments and we're working hard to fix
them. We’ve already made a number of changes in the last 24 hours to reduce
spammy comments and bad links, and we have more fixes coming
soon.
We know how important comments are
to you, and we’re making these improvements quickly so you can continue those
conversations with your fans. Stay tuned for updates."
I have to believe somehow this is not coincidence.
From what I can see something happened around then, we lost some rankings over and showed recovery on the 18th November. I'd also agree with Rob Woods - I'm finding it harder to rank against higher domain authority websites with higher page authority pages.
It is funny how these companies prepare for the big thing but it does not really happen. Black Friday and other events that require people to spend are already given. Anybody in this business could have saved for that date for their customers. Preparation can always be done.
I have observed recently websites that were on pg. 1 for their targeted search phrases have vanished, once their google + local listing started appearing in the 7 pack. Would such a significant impact such as that be related to hummingbird. Or does someone have another plausible explanation?
This is more likely tied to what happened with local at the end of October (and some on going changes). Google seems to be separating local results out and adjusting how blending works. Their intent isn't completely clear, but my gut reaction is that it's not directly related to Hummingbird.
It seems like it was page rank update...:)
Hello,
I have a website with big traffic around 20,000 people visit my website on daily basis.
Google is crawling my website regulary as well. But i want that Google must crawl my website only during night period because at that time traffic will be low on my website ..
Because i think there are lakhs of pages of my website and if google crawl regulary then my site's speed decreases.
Please tell can i schedule or restrict google to crawl website only during particular time period ???
Great article, very interesting. I cant see any change in my traffic around 14th Nov but ranking dropped from 1/2 down to currently 5/6 :(
Very interesting.........Peter
Between November 10 and November 14 there was a significant drop in pages-per-visit on our large news-style site. This fall was from around 2.4 pages per visit to around 1.95 pages per visit. Visits themselves have remained at exactly the same level. The effect has persisted up till now.
No significant changes to the site were made around that time.
Google Page Rank dropped at about the same time from PR6 to PR5. This is a high authority site, with 80% original content https://www.globalpropertyguide.com
Will anyone hazard a guess as to what happened?
This post is informative for me. Thanks for sharing a complete info to google update. Thanks a lot.
Trafficyup
Hi Dr. Peter! Thanks for the update. I actually didn't see any fluctuations here but its always good to be kept up to date! Please keep us posted. I just love reading all of your articles for they are very informative. Keep up the good work :)
Just a quick reply - Dan at Dejan SEO here in Oz reported that after investigation it looked like a false alarm. I checked over a lot of our data as well and tend to agree. It doesn't look algorithmic, it looks like things just went weird for a day over at G.
https://dejanseo.com.au/ fifth-most-turbulent-day-in-google/ if anyone wants a quick peruse of his data at Algoroo.
Hi, I write from italy, sorry for my bed english.
Same dns error for me. I call my dns mantainer, they say that there are no problem.
Not found 1200/681000
TimeOut 36000/681000
We have yellow page site, with more than 20.000.000 page.
We have 600.000 googlebot query every day avarage 400 query every minute.
I check my server log and i find that googlebot query go down:
14/11/2013 UTC TIME:
from 16:00 to 16:30
from 21:40 to 22:09
I have 10 minuts with no query... never happened...
19/11/2013 we have lost 80% of traffic. I don't think that this 2 events are linked. I think no.
No manual action in GWT. No other signal. No other error message.
After 18/11/2013 i lost microformats (see here: i39.tinypic.com/260ve52.png). Nothing else.
If i try site:mysite.it i find only 700.000 page... in the past we have 7.000.000
Yes, Even I felt the same, most of my new websites got hit, Google webmaster not indexing new content at all. Maybe they have big plans for this X-mas and new year. The same is noticed by many friends bloggers.
From 13, 14 Nov to until now my website visitors showing by Analytic are 0. My website ranking and social media popularity is growing day by day and i have visitors on my site but Analytic still showing the visitors result 0. What should be the problem.?
It's hard to speak in generalities, but a visitor count of 0 is much more likely a problem with Google Analytics or a serious technical problem on the site. It's unlikely that an algorithm update would take away all of your traffic. A penalty could do that, but you should still have traffic from other sources. If it's 0 across the board, something else is going on.
This is a very interesting analysis and makes a lot of sense. I see this happen too when smaller sites get dinged it makes the bigger sites look like they were pushed up.
Well there should be something that had happened on that day. Since then my clients ranking have been dropping. Lets say it was an update will the rankings keep dropping each week ? Dr. Peter great post by the way.
is there any big algorithm updates just recently? It is because one of my website's ranking is doing pretty well on 25th, November, but whem checked on 28th, most of the ranking not there.
Great analysis, but you can't leave us hangin' like that - what's going on with Andy Kaufman?
That's right Greg
Thanks for the update, had a quick look into it too, heard a few theory's that maybe it was Google taking down a large link wheel etc. but generally seems to be a bit under the radar.
I'm lucky that my sites have not been affected on that date but it's always good to know whats going on. Thanks agian for keeping us all in the loop.
Seems like it affected more on blogs which contain decent content with G+ authority. As I hold a blog, I notice dramatically changes of traffic flow on my blog since 14 Nov. Traffic has increases more than 60% on my website. I think it was Panda!!
Matt Cutts did hint in his PubCon keynote that there wouldn't be anymore updates for a while, although obviously he did it in that cryptic manner of his. I forget the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of the Webspam team will be focusing on link injection spam for a number of months, so to much of the outside world it may not look like they're doing anything much.
I took that to mean there wouldn't be a noticeable update until we're into 2014. Then again, in the same address he also hinted that Penguin could be tweaked again, so who knows...
One thing we have to be careful about is that Matt defines "update" very narrowly, IMO. I've heard a few people suggest Google is hitting some new link networks hard, which could cause ranking shuffles, but isn't technically an update. Meanwhile, they'll keep doing rolling Panda data refreshes, launch new features, etc., but they may not technically call any of that an "update".
I agree. You have to parse what Matt says like a contract lawyer. What he doesn't explicitly say is as important as what he does. Since Panda is now just part of the algo, which updates more than daily, any Panda related changes are no longer an "update". Also, the webspam team might be focusing on link spam but that doesn't mean the search quality side might not be making substantial changes or running tests that have nothing to do with the webspam team.
Yes, Even I felt the same, most of my new websites got hit, Google webmaster not indexing new content at all. Maybe they have big plans for this X-mas and new year. The same is noticed by many friends bloggers.
I feel Google is getting ready for this X-mas and New-year, as this is holiday and shopping session. Google is trying hard to give preference to websites with valuable content and higher Page Authority.
However, one of my new website which is one month Old is still growing with good pace but another website which is 10 days old is lagging behind in SERP.
The point is very obvious and clear that Google don't want to give preference on the special events like X-mas and New Year. As being an Indian, most of the Indian bloggers try to capture event by using EMD's and in the past they were very successful but in November they had very HARD TIME.
I am running multiple websites and facing the problem of 'Google Not Indexing' my webpages even after crawling several times, this is happening on new websites.
However I haven't received any DNS error in GWT. But, my friends did receive such errors. All I feel is Google want to capture the Xmas event and want to earn more through Google Adwords to boost their revenue.
Oh yes, I didn't check the deep report on my sites, there was something wrong on 14th Nov, because I have near about 40% traffic dropped. Not sure about crawl on that day by Googlebot.
By the way thanks Peter for information.
Yes.. November 14 GoogleBot can't access my site.. Organic search traffic reduced upto 20%. Some keywords ranking also drop down..
Thank you for sharing this information Pete. I saw your tweet that day saying unusual spike on the mozcast data and wondering what the cause was so thank you for explaining it so well. Very interesting stuff!!
Very interesting indeed!
I got problems with my news portal. In last 3 days (23th November), my search traffic dropped, from 600+ unique from Google on 40-50 visits...I have 100% natural links, no any spammed link on site. And all was a totally how that need to be. But just i lost all my rankings.
I was also on #2 for full name of prime minister in Bosnia, and Wiki was at #1. But today there is BBC on #1 place.
I don't know whats happen, no manual spam action, no single page that was deindexed, all was there. But no rankings...So there was some update on Google algo. Is there any one else with some changes?
(sorry for bad English)
Must of been Elvis.
Erm, I mean the rolling monthly Panda update.
It could be Panda but this also supports my guess that overall domain authority has been more heavily weighted vs. the individual page. BBC will have massive domain authority and trust.
Haven't seen anything special on November 14th though, but have observed a decent traffic growth of 60% on one of our blogs from November 20th. Not sure it's some update or usual flactuation.
Got one site that looks like it's been hit by ANOTHER Panda update.
Got one site where all the Big Sites are now ranking for one of the top terms and this small site has dropped from position 3 down to position 8.
Otherwise I'm just seeing a lot of link building in the run up to Christmas.
This is all just very interesting. But it sounds like the Moz team is getting better at analyzing and predicting...
When anything like this is reported on Mozcast, I immediately check some of the most competitive keywords (UK) of my clients. Strange thing was, their was nothing to report. Absolutely no change in ranking whatsoever.
I also got a message in Google Webmaster tools on 21-Nov instead of 14-Nov.
it says something like.
Googlebot can't access your siteNovember 21, 2013
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 381 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 3.6%.
Not sure about the reason why Googlebot try to crawl robots.txt and ensure that he didn't crawl any pages listed in that file?
Dr. Pete-
We saw the same DNS error issue on several of our webmaster tools accounts. We also saw a big drop in search query volume and traffic. In our webmaster tools account we also saw a large amount of new "soft 404" and "not found" errors. We set about fixing the server configuration issue that was causing the errors, and roughly 19 hours later our search query volume went back up to normal levels, the DNS errors also went away in our account so not sure if the temporary drop in rankings was from the DNS issues google thought our site was having, or from the soft 404's & not found errors that suddenly showed up.
We observed many sites get effected on Nov 14/15, specific to how Google consumes Schema.org markup. Many companies lost their Rich Snippets, and structured data consumption decreased from that point forward. We believe one of the algorithm "updates" (tweek/adjustment/optimization ... whatever Google wants to call it) was to stop awarding Rich Snippets to those that implemented markup as a block of HTML, versus in-line with template attributes. This makes implementing Schema.org much more difficult by eliminating techniques that automate the process.
We have been ranking our agency website on the first page for query Internet marketing services. This search, at least in the US/North East, used to return blended results including a few local results in the top positions. Our listing in the SERPs displayed the 5 star reviews from Google+ Local page in the SERPS and was also on the right side in the knowledge graph location area with information sourced from our Google+ local page. After the 14th, the reviews snippet is no longer displayed in the SERPs and the local listing sourced knowledge graph placement for our business no longer displays. I wonder if this is related as another comment mentioned changes in rich snippets/markup.
I am not able to figure out yet but is this a reason of sudden fall in traffic of one of my clients named "Budget Fence An Patio", a Santa Ana based client. Please throw some light on this!! Any help is welcome.
In the UK we perhaps saw a small improvement around 21st Nov for keyterms, but only a minor improvement!
In respect to Kaufman and QDF couldn't this be Hummingbird at work! Google trying to understand the nature of your query, so "kaufman" could stop been for places and switch to news if it picks up a sudden influx of new news items that are about "Andy Kaufman"; it's natural for it to presume that a search is more interested in the latter!
My best guess is that this wasn't Hummingbird - Hummingbird seems focused on determining the intent of complex queries (like voice queries) and may pull in additional data like search history for context. This was a head term (just "kaufman") with no context. The change seemed to be completely due to the sites themselves and shifts in Google's index. Google was re-interpreting the query so much as recognizing that the web itself changed.
Didn't get any warnings or errors for me in the said time but rankings are volatile on Google after Hummingbird and Penguin 2.1 updates.
Well, I'm not saying this is true, but maybe Moz got some help from our Brand.com 150 Power List? Haha, just playing! I actually remember reading several reports about this spike all across the Web. You're right that it is certainly hard to tell what's a seasonal fluctuation and what's a truly permanent algorithmic change.
I guess we'll have to wait til after the holidays to see! Is there any way we can find out sooner, though?
Thanks for the update Pete, we didn't see any fluctuations here but its always good to be kept up to date!
Judging from your data it definitely seems something DID happen. I'm sure all will become clear in the next big update. Lets all pray for keyword (not provided) visability!
Very interesting. We received the same error on the 14th, so I talked to our IT team and was told that we were experiencing server issues around that time, but they were resolved and I didn't think twice. I also didn't notice anything unusual in traffic or rankings during that time period. I went back and double checked, and everything seems as it should.
We are located about twenty minutes south of Moz in Seattle, I wonder if the issues are related by geolocation or if people in other parts of the country/world received an error in GWT?
I've heard that some big providers had DNS issues, so it may not have been a bug on Google's end. It was just a strange coincidence, and I wonder if something large scale could cause a short-term shake-up.
Actually, my biggest concern right now is that, results from UK are most likely dominated by websites that have spam links or link farming etc. I don't know why Google still having problem on resolving this issues. And yes, we received the same DNS message from Google Webmaster tools but there's no folloup message yet.
Websites with high OM investments (adwords) seemed to be positively affected regarding organic traffic. Anyone feeling the same?
Nope. Matt Cutts has stated clearly and categorically that AdWords advertising does not affect ranking. You may have to read around what he says sometimes but he has been crystal clear on this issue and I do not believe in any way that he would outright lie about something like this. It's more likely correlation. Big brands who have the money to advertise have also received a bump because they are big brands with authoritative domains. Advertising on AdWords does not affect your organic ranking.
I'm glad that there was no google update on november 14th because if it would have been now SEOs had had to adapt again to the changes.
thanks for posting ... My site have also dramatic visitor drop in Analytics at 14 Nov.
i'm a happy man, i was unable to get one of my clients site in top 3 results of designing industry and at last it has been listed on November 22. i was really shocked as i've stop working and it get higher SERPs after this update or change. it is the first time there is a good news for me after an update or shuffling.thanks to Google :) just kidding
Yes,I guest.