Nov 19th & 20th Update?

[94501]

Did anyone see any big changes around Nov 19th & 20th? Mozcast had some high temps around there.

If you saw any big changes in organic search, any ideas WTH that was all about?

Any guesses?

One site I work with took about a 15% hit and has since sort of skidded sideways.

[EGOL]

Traffic on many non-retail sites in the United States started to dip on the 19th and 20th in advance of Thanksgiving Week.  Many schools take a break that week and lots of adults plan trips for the holiday.   Traffic on my informational sites went down then, but has been nothing less than volcanic this week.  I was wondering if something happened yesterday to give me a traffic blast that continues today.  Up over 20% on a site that is already busy.

[Mobilio]

According Glenn Gabe there was something: http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/november-19-google-algorithm-update/ http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/unconfirmed-google-algorithm-updates-2015/

Google says: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html
"Don't have anything more specific to announce, sorry!"

[94501]

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the message. For this particular site, I'm looking at a very noticeable dip in position tracking that is then partially obscured by the following week's Thanksgiving holiday. This week, the week after the holiday week, is down about 15% traffic wise compared to 2 weeks prior. As a point of reference, last year this site was flat for the same period. So, don't really think it's just seasonality.

I might think it was just this site, but it just happened to coincide with that increase in mozcast temps and other stories of flux.

Has anybody benefited or suffered with the same kind of timing?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I'm still trying to understand a total crash in Google organic search traffic that started on 25 November and hit rock bottom on 27 November. It has not recovered. At first I thought it was because I accidentally had "deter indexing" ticked in my Wordpress settings after a new site version was pushed live, but it's now been three days since I corrected that and there's no sign of even a small recovery.

I resubmitted my sitemap and forced re-index using GWT and my site is definitely indexed. But Google traffic had dropped from over 200 a day to around 10 a day.

I have a lot of links to TripAdvisor on my site (travel blog), so I don't know if that's the issue? Or if it's something in the new premium theme?

I read something about affiliate links using affiliate keyword anchors being punished by this update but I don't use affiliate links as such, just direct links to the relevant TA listing which are converted on click by a JS script provided by TA. They are all do-follow, which might be an issue (but has never been in the past). And they are all anchored by the actual hotel name or photo of the hotel. And not all my posts have them either, but the whole site has suffered just as I was getting some traction in SERPs.

There is no manual penalty notice in GWT.

Site is http://www.asiantraveltips.com if you would be kind enough to offer any advice or opinions about what's happened.

[O2C]

There have been a few reports about people experiencing some drops, nothing being released from Google as per usual but at least other people are seeing an affect

http://searchengineland.com/evidence-of-an-unconfirmed-google-update-happening-on-november-19th-237452

[Dr-Pete]

Evidence of something around 11/18-19 is pretty strong at this point. Glenn's article that Peter N. posted is worth checking out. I've heard rumors of a mobile connection, but that's been hard to pin down - there does seem to be a "quality" aspect, but that's such a hard word to pin down. No confirmation from Google, but MozCast and similar data definitely saw spikes, and there was solid chatter.

EGOL is right, though - that time period before Black Friday is a hairy one, search-wise, and there are so many variables to disentangle. I think something algorithmic happened, but that doesn't mean that any particular problem or drop was due to a Google change, and it's going to be really tough to piece together any particular story, I'm afraid.