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]

My stats seem to indicate that the update is still rolling out? Anyone else see this?

Rolling out? How about Rolling over.
The only traffic I am getting is return customers.
Regardless of the #1 AND #2 position on page one, and on all the suggested search results pages...I am getting no traffic whatsoever. Naturally no conversions either.
Looks like many are in the same boat, again. This is the WORST batch of Zombie traffic ever. "Visitors" hit one page then site for 10 minutes or more, never traversing the site.
Wonder what "Bill Lambert" is saying.

[edited by: samwest at 6:03 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2019]

[TeresaD]

It is so disheartening after all of the years, man/woman hours, time and effort that have gone into our sites for it all to be taken away. I have accepted there is not a lot more I can do except wait for my local widget seasons.

[glakes]

This is the WORST batch of Zombie traffic ever. "Visitors" hit one page then site for 10 minutes or more, never traversing the site.

We're getting a lot of one page wonders from Google now as well. One landed on a page and sat there for 54:07 then left. Most just bounce in < 1 minute. Traffic from Google has been poorly targeted/matched with our website for some time, but I agree it is even worse at this moment. Traffic volume is up, but it's just wasting our bandwidth...

[samwest]

The only way I can nudge a little traffic is by using my facebook page. Nothing appears to be coming from Google. Either the entire world has abandoned them (unlikely) or they figured out an even more effective way to circumvent our sites.

[browndog]

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.

Right now, should be one of the busiest times of the day for traffic, but it's dead.

The biggest impact is they've demoted my no. 1 article, which brought in a significant amount of traffic. I used to sit at no. 1 or 2, but it's now at 5 or 6. I received notification a few months ago that it was loading slowly, with 300+ comments, I was worried that was impacting on speed, so I deleted all of the comments and turned off commenting, since then it's continued to slide. I now regret removing the comments because they were actually helpful.

[southernguy]

Yup, it's pretty much this way with most of my sites. I am not or have never expected for all my pages to all rank number one. It's obvious every site has strengths and weaknesses, but to completely demote entire sites, keywords etc is just wrong.

I have had a bunch of traffic today to some of my better ranking sites but still no conversions.

@browndog right now it's not about making changes I thought the same thing a year ago but in my case making changes to some of my sites made things worse.

From what I see this has affected thousands of webmasters and small businesses everywhere.

I guess that's why when John Muller began saying if your site doesn't rank any longer "there is nothing you can do" I guess he knew all along this was Google's end game.

I guess in a way they set webmasters up for the boiling frog fable and brought us webmasters to a slow boil so we wouldn't jump out of the pot.

[RedBar]

I received notification a few months ago

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.

Period!

[Selen]

"there is nothing you can do"

"never, ever, do as they suggest or request"

Catch-22

[RedBar]

I guess he knew all along this was Google's end game.

That's an interesting statement ... does G actually have a game plan other than a shortsighted one for its own (directors financial gain) benefit and to satisfy the betting market (read Stockmarket)?

I can't find the quote right now but it was in the last couple of weeks where Google stated "We're an ad platform, not a search engine" ... Please correct me if I am wrong about that.

Surely this should clarify everyone's mind as to its intentions / destination?

It has absolutely ZERO interest in promoting a better world, it is only interested in the maximum profitable Dollars. I do not have a problem with that however when its SERPs are so obviously distorted, skewed and biased, it has come to the point whereby governmental intervention is necessary to halt its blatantly obvious manipulation.

Could G honestly prove there is NO contrivance when US companies dominate its G.com English language SERPs globally let alone its results in non-English language SERPs.

Its a farce, a total and utter farce and it (G) is being allowed to get away with it with impunity.

[RedBar]

Catch-22

Nope, never, ever do it!

[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.