Google September 2019 Core Update

[MayankParmar]

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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)

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

[twitter.com...]

[samwest]

So some unknown holiday overseas has tanked US traffic for the past two weeks? Holiday schmoliday. Smh

[edited by: samwest at 11:46 am (utc) on Oct 4, 2019]

[Solipsism]

@seomotionz of course, it was just a joke :)

[seomotionz]

@samwest Globalisation big time! Our traffic also gets effected during Christmas and New Year.

[cabsco]

@jmorgan Nigeria Independence day (a national holiday) was October 1st, and India also had holiday this week. Most of my traffic (~60%) comes from these regions, so I think we all have to wait till next week to know our true traffic status quo.

[NickMNS]

But Barry has many sources so I wrote it here.

Not in the particular post you linked to. The only other sources listed were the from SERP tools. But from SERoundTables perspective that is fine, WW is a great source. The issue is here at WW, we can't use Barry's post as support to claim of an update (or other) when his post is using what we wrote here.

[seomotionz]

@NickMNS Okay, next time I will keep that in mind.

[paranoid android]

There's a bank holiday next year in the UK. I believe that's why everybody's traffic has plummeted.

/end sarcasm.

[samwest]

I am currently getting more "update your google listing" telephone spam calls per day than visitors on my site. I kid you not.

[TeresaD]

I have something very strange, exactly 2 pages for every hit for a widget that does not sell until April/May so should not be searched by the public at this time of year.

I can also confirm that no one has passed away since June :) funerals are 3 days after so my widget needs to be next day delivery, waiting for Amazon in the UK will not work for that widget.

[StupidIntelligent]

MayankParmar - Is your discover traffic back after its sudden death?

[HereWeGo123]

Ever since yesterday’s early evenings volatility, here’s what I began I noticing in the SERPs - when I manually check KWs for reviews for various brands or companies, I see Yelp ranking organically for physical locations that are thousands of miles away from my current location. Before, I would see it once in a while very moderately, and only mostly if the company or service I’m googling has a physical location nearby. Right now I’m able to replicate such results amongst many KWs. Never seen such persistency before. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[MiteshWali]

It took some time, but now the SEO community is noticing the impact of the Google September 2019 core update. Yesterday morning most weren't seeing any significant impact but later on, on that day, people began noticing the search results shaking up.

Note, this began rolling out on Tuesday afternoon and it should take a few days to fully roll out, so from the 24th through maybe tomorrow, on Google's birthday, the 27th? Happy birthday Google!

Here are some newer comments from both WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World after around 10 am ET yesterday.
<snip>

[edited by: not2easy at 5:20 am (utc) on Oct 5, 2019]
[edit reason] Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[samwest]

After 20/years, this update finally removed my home page from the serps . Stick a fork in me.

[seomotionz]

@samwest all of your pages were removed or just the homepage?

[MayankParmar]

@StupidIntelligent Still not back.

[browndog]

I've decided that I'll shut the shop in 10 months once my subscriptions finish. It's not worth it anymore, it's a good site, but G killed it. I've given too much to this. Let them have their generic McDonalds results. Not a sympathy post, just accepting that it's over.

[StupidIntelligent]

@browndog - How about selling it?

[samwest]

How about selling it?

Whereas Mark Cuban managed to sell broadcast for com for billions...you'd be a fool to buy a website these days. Then again, I was offered a chance to buy into one of the first bottled water endeavors and laughed at the idea of people buying bottled water.

[TeresaD]

In the first 5 months of the year my sales were up 211% on last year, I thought I had finally cracked it!

No sales in days, no wages in weeks, maybe Google does not like the javascript but I am not spending any more time or money on the site

[samwest]

It looks like this major update has finally settled out. Anyone seeing any further movement?

[samwest]

Correction... Its still moving. Now interesting finds results are the 1, 2, 3 and four main organic results. Your niche may vary. Welcome to everflux.

[KaseyM]

Rankings are all over the place.

Went from having one of the worst days of the year to one of the best in a matter of days. Truly baffling.

[BushyTop]

@smawest yeah its definitely still moving here too.

[RareBit]

Apart from URLs suddenly showing capital letters then not, I have seen very little movement throughout the update in my niche (UK manufacturing & Interior)

[Travis304]

Google's engineers continue to do... whatever, apparently, with their algos and SERPs. I believe their wizardry is still "rolling out", because I've watched one of my site's bounce between top 4 spots for some keyphrases I've worked for in less than 10 minutes. Just now, actually. Lot of volatility over the weekend, too. Ping-ponging up and down, up and down. I also noticed some very ugly features and changes to SERPs (temporarily), like small, jarringly pixelated favicons appearing next to each result. Keep it up Google, webmasters are ditching you en masse.

[RedBar]

My localised widgets SERPs seem to have settled however my global widgets are still bouncing like crazy ... My exact match domain trademarked widget site which disappeared completely last year has been as high as top of the second page this weekend, other good sites in this sector have also reappeared, and disappeared again, meanwhile the almost useless top ranking sites have hardly budged, they obviously have some very good friends high-up at G!

If G were to say it's fully rolled-out I wouldn't believe them whatsoever.

[seomotionz]

How come the gaming sites which have no whatsoever SEO done are ranking better now? A friend of mine owns one he told me so I checked. Some of the sites in that niche has considerably gained many high places due to this update who weren't ranking at all.

[Milchan]

Keep it up Google, webmasters are ditching you en masse.

Whilst it might be the case that webmasters are ditching google and using things like duckduckgo and bing unfortunately your average user has no idea about how search is getting messed up and manipulated by google and just automatically uses google through habit or even lack of knowing there are even other ways - they just type in their phone/browser and whatever the search is set to gets used and it is set to google in the majority of cases.

[samwest]

I have noticed that the "Interesting Finds" block site that was last week confined to that 4x4 block have now been expanded to the first organic results...pushing all the previous organics down 4 spot to the bottom or to page two oblivion. Anyone else seeing that?

In my niche, those Interesting Finds sites are semi related, thin ads filled pages...and as I've pointed out, on those search results that now have less Paid AD spots (because less people are buying those specific ads) this is a way for Google to populate the top of the serps with more embedded ads on spammy pages. It's all about the bucks, forget user experience. smh

[RedBar]

Yay ... No sooner did I come back in, now I've been bounced out again, it's an uneffin'believable farce with obviously couldn't care less kiddies who've been let out of the "farm" to create as much havoc as possible.

[Donukaps]

No movement here on my end. Same with my competitors in my niche. Didn't see any changes.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Donukaps

Where are you based / country / target market(s) / local / international?

General widget niche, no need to be specific?

Some sectors, especially what I have seen such as localised, have not been touched much however many global sites have seen a lot of turbulence .. and then again, some haven't noticed a darned thing!

[seomotionz]

News niche fluctuations are cooling down.

@MayankParmar is your traffic back yet?

[MayankParmar]

Googleapis.com (Discover) traffic: [imgur.com...]

A part of it did come back.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar. Good to hear that.

One of our main sites gets plenty of Indian traffic and today to expect traffic is foolish.

[Martin Ice Web]

Something happend yesterday around 2pm. Since traffic dropped like a stone and sales stopped again.

[londrum]

google must be playing around with an old index to some extent, because i deleted my entire site last june and have watched the number of indexed pages steadily drop from 300,000 to 2,000, but a couple of days ago it suddenly jumped back up again to 15,000 again.
and the site has been completely inaccessible since june.

[RedBar]

google must be playing around with an old index to some extent,

That's a possibility since I deleted AdSense off all my sites in April, in August it was showing zero PVs for ads however in September it started showing PVs again and has done every day since then and primarily to the USA.

The way my widget SERPs are still bouncing around is ridiculous.

[TeresaD]

September Statistics

Users 5.5K Decrease 17.58%

Revenue €xxx Decrease 41.81%

Ecommerce conversion rate 0.86% Decrease 28.11%

Sessions 6.1K Decrease 19.63%

[cattie]

My Google analytics have been all weird since the weekend.

[Travis304]

I have reason to believe Google isn't done "screwing around". I'm getting massive amounts of direct traffic (not from SERPs) to my site today. No campaigns, ads, emails, etc. My SERPs are bouncing wildly again, too -- only this time, my top keys jumped back up to the top 5 spots from bottom of page 1 / top of page 2. That'll probably last a day or so, before they jump back down. Rinse, repeat. And even if SERPs are messed up, I'm sure I'll see a bunch of inexplicable traffic like I have been (with no conversion). This latest core update also appears to have played heavily on reevaluating backlinks and link profiles of sites, too. I've seen my sites' Ahrefs ranks steadily climb because of all the new, high-DR links I've won over the last 3 to 6 months, then they'll suddenly tank a million spots in an hour. Then climb, then tank, then climb... Over and over.

Let's not even get into the discussion of link-farm, blackhat sites with PBNs and thin content hitting the top spots, while actual authorities on a widget / niche get relegated to page two. Never mind comparing content side-by-side and the latter is, by all measures, better than the former. Google is incompetent (and money-hungry).

[seomotionz]

Checked in SEMrush. Its stormy SERP changes in the news nice today.

[Martin Ice Web]

@TeresaD, simmilar to us. I even could sell 10 bucks for 2 bucks and no one will buy it.

But if you look at it: google did it right form their point of view. Feel free to invest in google shopping ads
i bet last quater will be again 25% increase for google shares.....

[TeresaD]

Martin Ice Web + I switched off google shopping ads, they tanked too

[browndog]

Never mind comparing content side-by-side and the latter is, by all measures, better than the former. Google is incompetent (and money-hungry).

That is the thing that infuriates me, we are told to create compelling content, and add unique content or data other sites don't have. You do that, you create a great article about unicorns, with tonnes of unique content, you include everything, colours, personality, potential health problems, and images to back up. They show a crappy 200-word post from an insurance or food company which offers literally nothing. If Google really were practising what they preach and prioritising unique and truly useful content, which goes beyond what other sites are producing, the search results would be much, much different. It is all spin.

[samwest]

@Travis - I am seeing the exact same thing early this week. Direct traffic from 'who knows where'. My mobile and desktop position and images have slipped or been completely removed and yet I suddenly get direct desktop traffic from the Gods. I'm not complaining, but it sure is mysterious. Looks like the filters will kick back in today since I've already hit conversion quota for the week with this excellent quality & converting direct traffic. But this morning, nothing but a trickle of mobile tire kickers again.

That whole article about core updates and quality is bunk. I now see the Interesting Finds block contains the same sites as the first four organics which is utterly ridiculous serp spamming...and it's being done by Google themselves. Something is still very broken.

[jmorgan]

My Google analytics have been all weird since the weekend.

@cattie Could be due to daylight savings in Australia.

Actually, a few other countries are due for this at some stage in the next few weeks which may result in some analytics confusion.

[MayankParmar]

Discover/News traffic returned back to normal today.

I am not seeing any movements now. All is good after three months of darkness. And yes, recovery is definitely possible.

[BushyTop]

@MayankParmar - full recovery

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar you are lucky to see full recovery. Most of the site owners to whom I have talked 99% of them said partial or a certain amount of recovery after this update.