Google September 2019 Core Update

[MayankParmar]

---

System: The following 22 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4962430.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 9:39 am on Sep 24, 2019 (cst -5)

---

Holy #*$!, official core update will be rolling out later today!

[twitter.com...]

[Milchan]

does G actually have a game plan other than a shortsighted one for its own (directors financial gain)

It is exactly that. All you need to do is check out the stock price since Sundar Pichai took over late 2015. It is no coincidence also that he is considered to have an extremely low salary for a CEO of Mega company like google but holds a lot of google shares and receives bonuses dependant on revenue level. He is running the company with a profits above all else attitude as that is how he gets rich himself. I don't believe he is in it to build something to make the world better in any way what so ever - it is all about the money and nothing else and he/they do not care who they are hurting in the process.

[browndog]

Insofar as the #1 rule for G is concerned, never, never, ever, do as they suggest or request ... they do that for only one reason and that is for their own benefit, it never has anything whatsoever to do with being beneficial for you.

I know that now. I have always said that I write for my readers and not for Google, and I stand by that. But I did remove all of those comments because G had notified me the page was very slow (only 3 images on the article, all optimised). I feel like I let my visitors down because those were messages thanking me for the article as well as offering support to other readers. So I trashed them (I thought I could retrieve them at any time), and G still continued to demote me.

I checked a couple of my competitors this morning, and they seem to be in the same boat as me and have taken an absolute battering over the past year. According to SEM Rush, one site has gone from 1.3 million visitors in January to 550k in September, this was a progressive drop over nine months. Another one has dropped from 2.2 million in May to 1.6 million in September. The only site which continues to grow and grow and grow is a sister site to a 'big health site', which ranks number one for almost everything.

[Selen]

But I did remove all of those comments

I had a similar situation when a comment plugin was too slow; I copied comments and left them as clear text (with usernames and dates) and then disabled the plugin on this page. It took me some time but it was worth keeping them.

[samwest]

Again, I've actually improved in rank, dropped in bounce and yet no conversions whatsoever. They turn ON and OFF like a light switch. I will bet my bile duct (again) that by Saturday I still wind up beating last week because they will pop the switch again on Thursday, Friday, Sat, like last week. That or some sado Googler is watching this forum and will just keep it cranked down for fun. I have no idea if they are doing by design or if it's by sheer coincidence. If the latter be the case, then coincidence has now become a reliably stable state.

[seomotionz]

This update has had by far the worst impact on my site in the 17 years I've had it. Like samwest, I can get a little traffic via my Facebook page as well as push notifications, but not much from Google.

@browndog I agree. Yesterday it was bot traffic and today its a tsunami of spammers. I took a nap and when I woke up our community board had hundreds of spam posts. I just spent the last hour removing them.

[jediviper]

So for international Markets, I had no change at my GA traffic.
But in GSC, I have noticed some huge drops from not my main markets.
It seems that some big markets that were bringing a lot of Impressions -like USA, India, Indonesia- had a very big decrease since the 23rd of September.

It's not like it's creating any big problem for us, I am just curious how this is connected to the September update. Actually I haven't seen so low number of Impressions since last April.

[BushyTop]

I'm starting to see more changes. Almost as though this update is picking up speed.

[samwest]

@seom... seeing the same foreign and spam traffic. First check of GART this morning had a visitor from Doha...wtf is Doha? Lots of Russian spam when I totally block Russia using cloudflare. China too.
Is this a Google problem or an overall www network problem?

[TeresaD]

Nothing for hours, no spammers, no bots, no humans, no sales, it is like someone has switched the site off

[seomotionz]

@samwest Atleast you know what country to block. GA is not able to tell what to block because they are all from 'not set'.

@TeresaD It is holiday today in our country. So, I am not worried about the amount of traffic today.

[edited by: seomotionz at 1:23 pm (utc) on Oct 2, 2019]

[Milchan]

yeah, its like someone switched the internet off. Since this last update I have had the worse traffic levels and sales in a decade. Whilst that is annoying/concerning enough for me what makes it even worse is that this is clearly not just happening to me and my niche, it is happening to lots of different people, different niches etc so I imagine the effect on small businesses around the world is immense.

[zeus]

seomotionz

Mostly its Russia and China . If you dont need visits from there block those, I bet it will help.

[samwest]

Who here is using Cloudflare? This common experience should help us diagnose the problem...or not. I guess all we can do is watch the alphabet quarterly profit report and narrow down our answer from that data.

Back in the day before Google was such a behemoth, I would look to the "internet weather report" to see if there were backbone or router issues. I would hope by now these are robust and not being corrupted for some nefarious purpose. Think I'll reactivate my "black hole for bad bots" plugin just to see what happens.

Keeping it simple, I believe that the timing of a published core update and our mutual experiences is proof enough that this is a result of that update...but keeping an open mind, who knows for sure.

[edited by: samwest at 1:39 pm (utc) on Oct 2, 2019]

[TeresaD]

@seomotionz +

yesterday was family allowance in my country so today is usually very busy when shoppers search for birthday presents or other occasion widgets.

[seomotionz]

@TeresaD ohh! Then it is odd. Although on the bright side you are not hit by any spammer!
@samwest Not using CF.

[BushyTop]

@Samwest I use cloudflare and railgun, Whats the issue that you are having?

[samwest]

@BushyTop - no issue, but just wondering if other systems are at play here. A quick review of bandwidth shows everything is running fine on my VPS. Bandwidth, Memory and CPU loading all low, which simply means no traffic...which is obviously apparent. Regardless, I popped BHFBB back on just to be sure...since I seem to be getting a lot of bot signups from Russian domains, even though I put up a challenge to all Russian traffic....the little traffic I am getting is 100% zombie in it's behavior.

[Selen]

Several competitors have created "review" websites where they feature a dozen of their own sister sites from the same business niche. These sites have an order form that is processed by the same (their own) company. To make it look "legit," they added a couple of real competitors to the "review list" (with lower "ratings" of course).

They wrote 100% fake reviews of their own services and attributed a scale from 1-10. Top 10 sites have "rating" between 9.1 and 10 (and they own all of them). The "ratings" are 100% fake and bogus.

Google happily shows domains and fake ratings in the answer box on a very competitive term (eg. best {service}). It's been going on for years, but now their dishonest efforts pay even more.

[samwest]

@Selen - blackhat still pays and Google is still none the wiser. Why should they be when many of these sites (one in my particular niche) display up to TEN Google ads per page.

[Milchan]

@selen - my niche is dominated now by one competitor that does exactly what you are describing and I know for a fact that google has been made aware of this, aswell as all the fake false google reviews they made and yet chose to not take any action.
They have lots of doorway page sites (which is specifically mentioned against something google will ban you for in their guidelines), they have blog review/tips sites that do nothing but favor their own products and even talk down and scare monger to the point of slander other companies, They even have one site that purports to be an official site for something when it is not in any way shape or form an official site, so it is deliberately misleading people and then on that same site states they do not offer any products or services but these are the top 5 recommendations they have - all of which lead to YMYL sites that they own.
Google absolutely does not care about the guidelines it publishes , and blackhat techniques are what work if you have the resources to do it well. Google could easiliy spot what is going on with an algorthim on these sites but choose to ignore it.

[NickMNS]

Has there been any official word regarding whether this update is fully rolled out?

I got hit hard 1 week prior to official start date, and then nothing, no change. Finally yesterday and today I have been seeing an uptick in traffic, recovering some of the loss. But nothing conclusive.

[futziyamka]

The best, thanks)

[TeresaD]

Is this a page speed problem? I just ran my site through page speed insights which is different than it used to be and the results are not good a score of 20, it used to be 89 (what is garbage collection and main thread work, are they new pc terms?)

Minimize main-thread work 17.5 s
Category
Time Spent
Script Evaluation
10,406 ms
Other
1,777 ms
Style & Layout
1,664 ms
Rendering
1,291 ms
Garbage Collection
1,148 ms
Script Parsing & Compilation
939 ms
Parse HTML & CSS
270 ms

Reduce JavaScript execution time 11.1 s

Avoid an excessive DOM size 1,301 elements (1301 is less than 1500 according to my maths )

Browser engineers recommend pages contain fewer than ~1,500 DOM elements. The sweet spot is a tree depth < 32 elements and fewer than 60 children/parent element. A large DOM can increase memory usage, cause longer style calculations, and produce costly layout reflows. Learn more.

Total DOM Elements
1,301
Maximum DOM Depth
<div class="grid-category__image-spacer-inner">
32
Maximum Child Elements
<body lang="en" class="bgd-attachment-fixed WIDGET-customer-loggedOut WIDGET-lang-en dragdrop-dropTarget dragdrop-boundary" id="WIDGET_body" data-pin-hover="true">
51

All of them are CMS related and out of my control, I have changed the cms to widget to follow the rules but my cms are very progressive and up to date, I do have a load speed issue because I use my country hosting so the site is built from embed code but given our very dodgy wifi my site loading in 3 or 4 seconds is fast compared to some sites.

Can you see what your scores are to see if we can find some common ground on what is going on.

[billycorgan]

Has anyone recovered on this update that got big hit on March 2019 core update?
I recovered just nearly 10% then nothing...

[docluv]

@TerseaD These are all common web perofrmance terms and pretty much any professional web developer should understand these concepts.

If you run your site through WebPagetest you will get all sorts of details about how your page renders.

Based on what you shared I would say you have way too much JavaScript in play.

My baseline is time to first interaction should be 2 seconds or less on desktop and 3 on mobile. And by mobile I mean an average 3G connection on an average phone, like a Moto 4 or something in that class.

If you are fast under those conditions then you are fast period.

If you CMS is crushing you then you should look to get something you have control over. I recommend static web pages and very little JS. I build pretty good sized applications with 50-100kb of JavaScript and consumer content sites with < 50kb routinely.

[TeresaD]

docluv + we are still mainly on 2g!

[BushyTop]

SEMrush recording high fluctuations again

[mosxu]

If you are in e-commerce is amazon fulfilling the product you sell for a Chinese manufacturer by any chance?

The buyers disappear because they go direct to amazon and traffic should stop as well on e-commerce sites.

[jediviper]

Yeap. the Sensor of Semrush goes up again and mostly categories of Arts, News and Sports seem to affected

[samwest]

Took a major position hit overnite, so yes, this update is still rolling over us all. This should do it for me. It was a great 20 years. Good luck to all.

[BushyTop]

@Samwest I feel for you. I think you might have been my first interaction on here. I can remember thinking with a client many years ago how similar our patterns were and how you must have been equally frustrated. I'm sorry to hear you're struggling now.

We're seeing ups and downs across all of our product. We have been making small improvements (albeit very small and frequent) since the sept launch. Today has sent everything crazy again, where some terms dramatically improve and others dont. No pattern... everything is just mental.

[MayankParmar]

The Google News and Discover traffic which I gained after the September update has gone all of a sudden today. It may be because of heavy news coverage in my niche or it's update related :/

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar where were you getting the traffic from? I mean country/region wise.

[MayankParmar]

@seomotionz India for Google Discover (googleapis.com). Other countries for Google News.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar may have been due to the holiday season. Our traffic (which sites gets India traffic) is also down its usual this time of the year.

[Milchan]

Im wondering now if this update has something to do with geo location of the server at all. Because looking at all the sites that have moved above me now that were previously directly below or way below their servers are all located in the US.This is for english language search yet when I use google in the language local to me I am back up there even though my site is entirely in english not that language. The other possibility is that the update has only rolled out to english language servers so far and not all other languages so I could yet take a further hit.

[sk7411]

Can confirm , the gain that was there in this September update is all gone today , semrush sensor also backs this up .Moreover It’s approximately 7 days later today which hints it might be some kind of post update tweaks .

(Entertainment Niche)

[samwest]

It does appear as if some kind of geo-targeting roulette wheel is controlling my traffic. My pattern is no traffic for 30 min, then a surge all clustered on the east coast, then 30 min of no traffic, then a cluster around Chicago, then 30 min of no traffic then a cluster around Atlanta, rinse and repeat. In the distant past you could set your watch by the traffic volume and conversions.

[seomotionz]

@sk7411 Is it confirmed that the update has been all rolled out?

[sk7411]

@seomotionz While the answer to this question would be mostly an ‘yes’ if you ask this to any google employee , I believe we have a lot of yet to see post tweaks and turbulences ahead which is what usually happens after every update . This is the reason i stay mostly underwhelmed about these core updates , you never know what can these post update tremors do to your traffic .

[nmbrsk]

A landing page that gets around 60-80% of my traffic & revenue from being ranked 1 for a range of keywords has completely dropped in the SERPs. It's been replaced by my homepage instead, with the position floating around 20-35.

SEMrush shows my visibility down by 30%?!

[StupidIntelligent]

Medium wrote an article about Google's evil play: [medium.com...]

[Selen]

Very interesting article (read the comments below it too). I like the idea of profit share for search.

[seomotionz]

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable is saying another update is brewing.

[cabsco]

Noticed some drops this week but its nothing major considering the holidays. Didn't experienced any abnormal drops today. I'd say the traffic I gained in the September core update still hold, although I'm yet to fully recover to where I was before I was hit by the June core update.

[Solipsism]

@seomotionz It's actually because people on Webmaster World are saying there are fluctuations on SERP that Barry written there is a possible update. So if you said on Webmaster World there is an update because Barry wrote it, it's an infinite circle.

[edited by: Solipsism at 9:29 am (utc) on Oct 4, 2019]

[browndog]

So if you said on Webmaster World there is an update because Barry wrote it, it's an infinite circle.

I laughed a little too hard at that.

[rustybrick]

recursion

[seomotionz]

@Solipsism I knew that. But Barry has many sources so I wrote it here.

[jmorgan]

Noticed some drops this week but its nothing major considering the holidays.

Which holidays in particular? I do notice that my traffic is flatter than usual during Indian waking hours.