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]

No recovery here. In fact Google besides losing my home page in the serps, they have removed every one of my images but are still prominently displaying all the sites that have SCRAPED my images. This looks like a manual penalty for some unknown reason.

[jmorgan]

Great traffic yesterday, continuing today. Not sure what it's related to. SEMrush sensor not suggesting much changing.

[RareBit]

@samwest - I was thinking your issues looked like a penalty of some sort, what your describing is not normal

[BushyTop]

@samwest surely you would have a message though in webmaster tools. homepage removal sounds really fishy though. You appearing for branded searches? Or do you think its something more granular and thats why you are assuming its a manual penalty?

[samwest]

@ BushyTop - Just checked and no issues detected for manual actions, or so they say. Sunday Monday and part of Tuesday were incredible, I had thought everything reverted to 2007. Three conversions within an hour, but strangely I had pretty much evaporated from the SERPs already...it was all direct traffic. (as documented on the 9th, above...)

I used to have many images in the top image search for my keyphrase, in fact the result usually featured at least two of my images. Those are all gone across the board, even for much less competitive and specific searches, hence the manual penalty assumption.

In the past 20 years, I did enjoy a very good page one double position, usually #1 and #2 (although traffic seems extremely filtered). One was for my home page and one for a cornerstone content sub page both of which are evergreen. Now only the sub page remains. I seem to recall this happening long ago during another major update and when your root page (index.html, or index.php) disappears it's a major penalty...but nothing to allude to this in WMT.

When I see two pages on a result, I think there may be a keyword focus issue. When one disappears, I tend to think that as confirmation. I hate to bring up the dreaded "keyword cannibalization" topic, but that is what this appears to resemble. But 20 years of stability? Guess that's called "moving the cheese"...again.

I'm in the middle of a family crisis, so this is not any time to be wasting time chasing Google's shenanigans. I guess the chips will just fall where they may. I'll look into the cross linking mechanics of the two competing pages or just demote the sub page by removing any internal links to the home page or making it's content less palatable. Sounds like shooting myself in the foot. Any ideas are welcome.

Recently adding the affected sites URL to my WebmasterWorld profile was probably a bad idea. It may just be my hallucination, but it tanked withing a week or two of doing that. If Googler's reads this forum, and I'm sure they do, that's like asking for a manual review.

[TeresaD]

@samwest +

I am rising in the serps but no conversions so not sure what is going on, I have genuine traffic back, maybe they are window shopping?

I think you should just leave the site as it is, I have competing pages for categories and products but see it as a good thing, my meta is strong enough to put me on page one twice but I am products, not sure if that is your niche.

Best of luck with your family crisis I hope it all resolves with a happy ending.

[Milchan]

So after Sep 26th my sales dropped like a stone to next to nothing and traffic fell about 25% (on already drastically reduced levels over this last year or so). As I have posted before I suspected at least part of the update was Geo based as my USA traffic and serp positions all but disappeared completely and before it was often around 40/50% and gives me probably 30 to 50% of sales. All that went away over night so was clearly a problem.

So first thing I did was spend Saturday 28th moving my server to a US location as before it was located outside of the US and did a request to google to reindex the homepage. I also tidied up some schema errors and changed how my schema is created a bit to improve it as it was being reported for the products that some had errors (google seems to move change the requirements on what they accept with schema so worth checking this regularly) and sent for validation.

So obviously cant know what if any of the above had an effect or if it was just google changing something again but since Oct 3rd Im seem improvements both in traffic levels (regained that 25%) but also conversions overall. The number of conversions similar to pre update levels but most importantly the products that are converting are the better higher ticket ones I used to reply on , were as right after the update the few conversions I had were nearly all for the same low profit product. 40% of my sales have come from the US again and are distributed with other locations around world in similar percentages like they were pre update. The GSC numbers are finally moving upwards again instead of following the downward trend that I have seen so often this year.

Nothing conclusive of course but it is possible that my moving the server to the US has helped as before that and post update all my traffic was very localised and Id lost nearly all from US, Europe, Asia etc. Thought is was worth posting in case it can help anyone else.

Also , it raises some concerns about how google is sculpting traffic in this way because (if my theory and observations are correct - but this is purely conjecture at this point) it would suggest that if your server is located in say Australia , yet you have a .com domain and target an international market, you will perform poorly in the non Australian SERPs. Some could argue there is logic in that BUT if your server is US based you perform better across ALL regions.

[RedBar]

BUT if your server is US based you perform better across ALL regions

I do not know the answer however a year ago I moved a .com from a UK server to a US server, after about 8 months I moved it back to the UK since it had no effect whatsoever. This specific site used to reign supreme across all G.tlds but 30 months ago G decided to send the index page into obscurity even though it is the de facto trademarked widget industry site that has been in existence for years.

Sometimes this site re-appears at #1 in Google.co.in, it is an Indian product exported globally, however most of its traffic is my widget trade requiring necessary information. All other search engines list it as #1.

it raises some concerns about how google is sculpting traffic

I feel you're being kind calling it sculpting, I prefer deliberate manipulation in favour of US companies. So many SEOs outside of the USA are seeing this and it will come back to haunt G and bite them extremely hard if they don't rectify their ways.

At one time I considered my loss of US traffic was the "localisation" of their US SERPs however if this were to be true just WHY would widget US importing companies rank so well in "foreign" Google.tlds ... Quite simply localisation cannot be true, outside of the US, since these US companies ought not to be appearing IF localisation were a critical factor.

One thing I will say in G's favour is that whilst searching for my keyword1keyword2keyword3 term it's a mess however when I search for kw1kw2kw3 +my county area or city, the results are absolutely spot on, all good local suppliers and not a US one in sight and no, I am not ranked but my sister's business which is the area's pre-eminent retail supplier, is.

So, they can get it right but how many of Joe Public use 4 keywords in a search?

[Milchan]

I had previously ran my server in the US and moved it a few years ago and saw no detrimental effects when I did. It was just that I saw that after Sep Update all of a sudden all my US traffic disappeared and I dropped in US serps but was top in more local searches still(with same competitors that appear above in US , below me in local - they all had servers that were US based). By moving my server to US , I have recovered some positions in the US serps, not complete recovery but at least I am getting US conversions again. Prior to the update , this wasnt an issue which is what led me to the above theory.

And yes, I was holding back by calling it "sculpting" - I am actually even wondering if there is some kind of manipulation with the longer term aim of trying to get more people locating servers/internet businesses in the US in conjunction with trying to force people to buy ads but in such a way that the Ad purchasing is a US based purchase in order to try to avoid the imminent stronger taxes coming from Europe and probably other countries. Just a random thought that I would have thought would have sounded like a conspiracy theory a couple of years ago but it says a lot that these kind of thoughts come to mind easily nowadays in relation to googles activities.

[buyusardp]

I was also hit by this update, but now recovering slowly.

[samwest]

Does anyone remember the penalty that occurs when Google removes your home page yet sub pages remain? All my images have also been removed. The remaining images that appears are all stolen versions on scraper sites....which is infuriating.

[JorgeV]

Hello @samwest :

- Does Googlebot still visite your site? at the same rate?
- In the GSC, does it work if you do a "fetch as googlebot", on your home page?

I had a similar misadventure several years ago, when using Cloudflare. My host, was blocking some of the requests, because they were all from IPs from CF, and the anti-ddos system of my host thought it was an attack, and was mitigating it. As a result, Googlebot was, randomly, not able to access my pages.

[samwest]

This is a real head scratcher. My GSC performance graph is showing a considerable uptick in impressions and a simultaneous decrease in clicks which just means I'm lower on the page and poorly targeted for search. Makes sense when my home page has been omitted.
[imgur.com...]

[TeresaD]

I have found my problem, nearly 2k pages have dropped out of the index. When I live test the URL it is mobile friendly and can be indexed so no problems or reason for them to have dropped out.

[TeresaD]

It will not let me edit, in site:search I have 30 pages of indexed products. No sales in 4 days....I give up trying to figure it out it is frying my brain!

[EditorialGuy]

I just did a comparison of September 24 - October 12, 2019 with the equivalent period last year, and the numbers of users and sessions on our main travel-planning site are nearly identical. Pageviews are down a bit, probably because (1) mobile is now a larger percentage of our traffic, and (2) I've consolidated a number of our top-performing multi-page articles into single pages in recent months to accommodate mobile users who prefer scrolling to clicking.

Obviously, there have been some changes in the site's content over the past year (some pages added, others gone),. but for the most part, it's an "evergreen" site with the same top-performing pages this year as last.

[Milchan]

yesterday terrible for conversions, today even worse . Nothing

[BushyTop]

@samwest we have the exact same pattern. clicks and impressions have always been tightly bound. Now there are huge discrepancies.

[zeus]

samwest - I think google filters you be cause they think the other content is the original.

[ichthyous]

@JorgeV thanks for the info, I suspected a while back that something similar was going on with cloudflare on my site because the number of inaccessible pages seemed too high. How did you resolve this? Did you have to disable your host's brute force attack rules on the server?

[ichthyous]

@samwest I am seeing a constant state of flux in GSC. From the March update forward clicks and impressions went totally out of whack, and recently this September seem to be more aligned again. Since the end of September I've been getting more inquiries, but still nowhere near what it was before the March and especially early June updates. We are just the guinea pigs Google uses to test which algo updates drive more and more profit into their own hands. Whether our businesses survive or not is completely inconsequential to Google.

[EditorialGuy]

We are just the guinea pigs Google uses to test which algo updates drive more and more profit into their own hands. Whether our businesses survive or not is completely inconsequential to Google.

Google's target audience consists of searchers, not businesses that rely on organic search traffic. Even if Google did care about businesses surviving on free organic traffic, why would it want to favor John or Jane's business over Bob or Bobbi's? Search results aren't a zero-sum game: For every site that loses in a Google update, there's another that gains.

[samwest]

I think google filters you be cause they think the other content is the original.

Well, then Google is wrong. I mean if they can't determine the post date and simply use that then they are not as sophisticated as we think. On a brighter note, it seems that my images are starting to reappear. Like I said in the separate posts about this, after all these years, core updates still look like an old fashioned bubble sort. [en.wikipedia.org...]

[JesterMagic]

For every site that loses in a Google update, there's another that gains.

Not always true. If Google adds more widgets or feature snippet data to the search results then every one looses except Google (who are not part of the results but displays info from the result pages). Google's main goal is to keep users on Google until they either click on an advertisement or click on another Google property.

[JesterMagic]

Notice the last few days Google bot has been visiting my site about 4 times the normal amount. It's also thanksgiving weekend in Canada so that will affect things a bit for some off us.

[BushyTop]

@jestermagic I was literally just coming on to report the same. Huge bot activity too

[Milchan]

Not always true. If Google adds more widgets or feature snippet data to the search results then every one looses except Google (who are not part of the results but displays info from the result pages). Google's main goal is to keep users on Google until they either click on an advertisement or click on another Google property.

Was going to reply with something similiar. There are plenty of reported stats that show that google is increasing the number of clicks that go to google property sites or non click searches (via the answer boxes etc). They clearly have a tactic of trying to force businesses to pay for advertising by driving down their traffic levels and conversions. With that in mind also, it would make sense to have the organic part of the serps serving less relevant sites which will drive users to search again or click on the ads

[EditorialGuy]

Not always true. If Google adds more widgets or feature snippet data to the search results then every one looses except Google (who are not part of the results but displays info from the result pages

"Answer boxes," rich snippets, etc. may be a mixed blessing for sites that provide quick answers from the public domain (the capital of North Dakota, the current price of gold, the director of Titanic), the temperature in Timbuktu), but for sites that offer more depth--and that attract users who want more depth--they can be a great source of traffic

[skaterpunk]

I mean if they can't determine the post date and simply use that then they are not as sophisticated as we think.

The published date can be changed to whatever you want it to be. I'm not an advanced coder, yet in WP the date can be changed in each article, or I can go into cpanel and modify the dates.

Have you checked the code and compared dates?

[RedBar]

The published date can be changed to whatever you want it to be.

Agreed however surely the date ought to be the one G first spiders?

I believe they used to do that many years ago for articles and images however that bit of very important historical recording seems to have gone by the wayside over the years hence the proliferation of scraper information out-ranking the actual original.

[Milchan]

"Answer boxes," rich snippets, etc. may be a mixed blessing for sites that provide quick answers from the public domain (the capital of North Dakota, the current price of gold, the director of Titanic), the temperature in Timbuktu), but for sites that offer more depth--and that attract users who want more depth--they can be a great source of traffic

That is (was?) certainly true also. Whenever Ive had the featured snippet at the top it bring more traffic although I don't think "People also asked" boxes bring much traffic to sites as they post a question and answer it in one go (not the question being searched for and often different enough to not result in people wanting to go deeper). The reason I have a was? in brackets though is that it seems to me that the featured snippets no longer appear , or at least far less frequently than before (I couldnt get one to appear then just trying with various searches in my niche) and that serp space is entirely taken up with more ads now. Another example of google putting revenue before user experience , as they always said the featured snippets were a user experience enhancement (which ads certainly are not)

[samwest]

Results continue to bounce. I'm in, I'm out. Round and round she goes, where it stops nobody knows. Absolutely zero traffic all day. John Mu must have responded to my twitter post and "fixed" the site for good.

[edited by: samwest at 2:09 pm (utc) on Oct 15, 2019]

[topaz]

Just the opposite i'm seeing. Absolutely no movement for the last few days. Not much traffic from AMP/Discover. Slow indexing, stale results in Google News.

[samwest]

Today I'm uninstalling Google Analytics. It's pointless and maddening to watch this circus. Time to just walk away and let the chips fall where they may. There's no point in fighting this monster. Maybe I'll pick up a few ms in site speed.

[BushyTop]

:(

[zeus]

samwest - Then try Matomo its also free and does a good job. I have never used Google tools, but for 10 years Matomo (Piwik)

[RedBar]

Today I'm uninstalling Google Analytics.

Only a decade behind me:-)!)!

[Milchan]

I will be setting up a new server soon and I am going to install my own analytics like nagios or icinga on that and ditch GA also so I know for sure what is the real picture. I will take a look at Matamo on premise also though as it also looks like a good option.

After several days of next to nothing yesterday I had a decent day with conversions to decent pre update levels. Today google has realised the mistake and turned of the internet again and nothing what so ever. Anyone that wants to tell me there is not manipulation / throttling / filters - what ever you want to call it - going on is completely deluded (or works for google)

[skaterpunk]

Today I'm uninstalling Google Analytics…Maybe I'll pick up a few ms in site speed.

You should gain more than a few ms. Analytics is script heavy.

[samwest]

Good news for WordPress operators - Matomo for WordPress! Time to dump GA. Nice! [matomo.org...]

[mohi]

I have read this new update but I cannot understand all. Is there anyone who will make me clear?
Thanks

[BoredMeteor]

Mild improvement since this whole thing started last month. Some keywords rebounded, but not fully. Which is sad, because right now is "in season" for my website. I'd hate to see how things would look otherwise.

One thing I noticed after looking in Search Console is that, just before the update, Discover traffic skyrocketed hard, then afterwards dropped to literally zero. Now it's slowly increasing again.

If Google got rid of featured snippets and all the other junk they've stacked on top of rankings, traffic would triple overnight. I only see them adding to it, until all of page one is just some weird portal for their chosen links, and we're all hidden away in a back room. It even makes Search Console half useless, because while I may have rank 1 for a certain keyword, that doesn't mean I'm anywhere near the top.

[SweetPotato]

What happened here? Where are all the posts between October 17 and 23 ?

[samwest]

What happened here? Where are all the posts between October 17 and 23 ?

There were none. Many have given up the futility of reporting....or they all recovered. lol