Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2020

[seomotionz]

The following 11 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4974557.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:10 am on Jan 2, 2020 - (PDT -8)

20 years of data show that updates have created MUCH more than a "twitch" in traffic.

Its not a twitch if it costs you a significant amount of money.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:20 pm (utc) on Jan 2, 2020]
[edit reason] cleanup after split to new thread [/edit]

[glakes]

@Manana

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I released my new book on December 29, 2020. Sales and conversions were excellent for the first 2 weeks but Google update of January 14, 2020 completely wiped out the conversions for my new book. I made zero sales to the new organic visitors since then.

It would appear we are in the same boat. Mobile searches I performed on Google for books of interest to me resulted in a block of Audible (Amazon owned) at the top followed by a paid Amazon text ad that leads to an Amazon category page with sponsored ads appearing at the top of them. One has to do some serious scrolling on Google to get away from Amazon or Amazon owned properties. Then I'm hit with a block of "people also searched for," "interesting finds," "people also ask" and to finish it off "related searches." Amazon also has an organic listing in this mess as well.

I get it, Amazon is known for books. But that's why people go directly to Amazon. I go to a search engine to find choices, which Google is miserably failing at. I don't know how your book can be found on Google with the way book queries look. Google's SERPS look more like they have a partnership with Amazon then actual search results.

By any chance are you also selling your book on Amazon?

As far as a SERP update today...

I don't see any indication of a SERP update. Traffic mirrors the garbage Google has been sending in both quantity (ok) and quality (terrible/non-converting).

[Manana]

@glakes, thank you for the welcome. The discussions on these messageboards shed light on some of the mysteries I was observing myself.

My books aren't on Amazon. My visitors find my blog articles mainly through google search and I promote my books within my articles.

Google skimming profitable traffic is only one of the problems I identified by reading the messages on this board. Another mystery was about fixed organic traffic.

Every once in a while I publish an article that gains organic traffic but the newfound traffic to the fresh article takes away from the traffic to my previous articles, leaving my total traffic the same. The only time I experienced a surge in traffic was after June 2019 update which wiped out my sales in the process and gone anyway after the September 2019 update but the sales never came back.

[nmbrsk]

This update has absolutely ruined us.

We’re a sports news website, with plenty of original content/reporting. We have been on Google News for near enough 2 years and haven’t really been touched by any of the updates except this one, which has decimated our traffic.

We no longer show in the Top Stories carousel for all the keywords we usually rank for. Google has also removed the ‘Latest From ...com’ widget on our brand name search. Google News isn’t showing our articles, even though when searching with ‘site:’, our articles are listed there.

We’ve fallen from nearly page 1 to page 5/6 for a highly competitive keyword we’ve been doing well with as well.

80% of our traffic is from Google News and rich results, so we’ve essentially seen an 80% decrease in impressions and clicks, overnight.

No drastic changes have been made to the site, except small improvements such as linking better to other categories on the site.

I haven’t got a clue how to optimise for this update, so I did a bit of digging and noticed a lot of spam websites linking to us in GSC. We’ve now added these to our disavow list, to see if there’s any benefit in the coming weeks.

We’ve seen huge growth since the launch of our site in 2017, but this update has put us back a good year or two, with the dreaded feeling that Google now ‘dislikes’ our site and any future updates will reflect this.

The worst month I’ve ever had, since starting out in online websites in 2008.

[samwest]

Month end, looks like Gorg is not hitting it's income numbers, so is extracting it by directing to ads...again. Seems the only time we do any good is in that brief moment between updates when things settle out, then when the AI sees it's not optimized for enough profit, it shakes the whole system up again.

Again shut down in the middle of the day to absolutely zero traffic. I always have to go check to see if the power cord is still plugged in. (of course I am joking, the site is housed in a data center). Since I already hit the monthly quota and beat last month by the thinnest of margins, I can be assured of only a trickle till Feb 1st...if lucky. Historically this time of year is peak, but the algo nowadays seems hell bent on pounding down any gains.

[glakes]

@Manana

Another mystery was about fixed organic traffic.

Every once in a while I publish an article that gains organic traffic but the newfound traffic to the fresh article takes away from the traffic to my previous articles, leaving my total traffic the same

Yet another similarity in the problems we share, and +1 for mentioning it. Unfortunately for me, I have a some pages that get a ton of traffic when it gets cold outside. I discussed this issue in the December [webmasterworld.com...] SEO thread. Buyer traffic for our product pages disappeared as these cold weather pages started taking off. Could this be the reason why the problem in Google persists? Will this problem continue until spring, when those high traffic cold weather pages naturally lose traffic?

I did modify these cold weather pages, with some heavy graphics, so we'll see if that helps to cut the mobile traffic out from the knees. I hated to modify the pages, but great content does not pay the bills - product sales do.

[mosxu]

Working hard to reduce spend, deluded AI wants to sell same thing at double the price

[ichthyous]

Yes, whatever updated last night also boosted me considerably as well. Could it be tackling the 1200 'slow page load' errors for mobile and getting rid of them in ten days? Perhaps but I doubt it. I also discovered that I lost about 100 quality links over the course of January and I think that's the real culprit.

[TeresaD]

Jan 22nd to Jan 29th 2020 v 2019

users +40.04%
conversions -71.17%

same products, same religious widget season, that hurts. I think it is a speed update which there is nothing I can fix until 4g stops behaving so erratically which is down to the mobile providers.

[samwest]

Wow, another super weird coinkidink...
I rebooted my server while at zero visitors. Immediately after coming back up I get a quick dozen "visitors"...they hung around for about 5 minutes then bam...right back to zero again. It's as if there is a hard clamp on the site that is broken on reboot and then quickly re-established...at least that's how it looks. I regularly get conversions within minutes of rebooting. Anyone else ever notice that?

[TeresaD]

@samwest can you try rebooting on a regular basis when you are at zero? it might be time consuming but sales are sales!

[samwest]

@TeresaD...as you can tell...this rollercoaster traffic will drive ya nuts. Another goose egg day.

[BoredMeteor]

I feel like I'm trapped in some kind of algorithmic rip current when it comes to Google right now. You think you're making progress, and then BOOM, nope, not so fast. I don't know what they're up to today especially, but traffic, which I was just starting to recover after mid-January, just shriveled up completely. Maybe they're still playing with their update, I don't know.

Meh. Just venting. One thing that bothers me, though, is when I look at the Search Console and see that, while my rankings have stayed relatively the same over the past 16 months, clicks and impressions have steadily fallen. You can see the lines diverge. One straight across, the other two steadily falling. I blame all their goofy "featured" boxes, pushing everything farther and farther down. Haven't helped me one bit.

I've still got a lot of work to do recovering some damaged keywords, but I just don't see how any of this is sustainable. Used to be fun working on my sites, but between Google and rampant plagiarism (especially on YouTube, which I absolutely hate) and the stress of keeping things afloat...

[watesh]

Lost 45% of my traffic this January. I have never been hit by a core algorithm but this one seems to be going for the knock out punch.

[MayankParmar]

Is Analytics delayed for anyone?

[RareBit]

no delay here - but I am seeing quite a bit of flux in my verticals this morning

[KaseyM]

@MayankParmar yesterday was down by quite a lot for me. Today's live analytics looks like it's only covering mobile traffic.

[samwest]

Traffic decimated. Looks like the month ends with another Goggle money grab.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar Delayed? Can't say that. But GA is taking way too much time to load. And many times its just showing errors. This has just started today.

[fearlessrick]

@ nmbrsk, sorry for your losses. Google just does what they do, without letting anybody in on it. That said, part of my site is vey sports oriented, and I have been crushed this January. There is one page in particular which used to get a ton of traffic and revenue, but G changed the algo and now it shows up on page 5 or 6 in the SERPS when it used to be #1.

On the term "throttling" mentioned by some here. I can definitely detect that effect via my revenue. I could completely revamp my site, double the number of pages, by G would make sure my revenue only increases by ~20%. It's simply not eve close to being fair.

Amazon... They're playing a dangerous game as the Feds are steeping up their anti-trust investigations. There's been some news on it.

Overall, G is just out of control. I had my best day of the month on the 26th, my worst on the 29th. January is the worst month I've had in a year. If Google died tomorrow, I would not miss it for one minute.

[glakes]

Lost 45% of my traffic this January.

Looks like the month ends with another Goggle money grab.

January is the worst month I've had in a year.

I can't argue with any of the quoted statements. Our total (organic and paid) conversions from Google are down 40% this month. To put this into perspective, the cost per conversion for January is below.

2017: $1.90
2018: $3.20
2019: $5.33

There's not enough margin in our products to justify continuing to pay Google to advertise and changes were made to stop the bleeding.

Amazon... They're playing a dangerous game as the Feds are steeping up their anti-trust investigations.

I'm doubtful anything will come from these investigations. A couple months before the Congressional investigation kicked off, five Amazon execs made donations to the Congressman who is leading the investigation. Consumers also love Amazon, so the political will to push regulators to take action isn't there. In fact, regulators may face backlash from the public should they take action against Amazon - that's how much consumers love them. I expect Amazon to continue dominating Google's SERPS since Google uses Amazon as a placeholder to force competing businesses to pay for ads if they want to be seen on buyer intent queries.

Is Analytics delayed for anyone?

Delayed or missing data - yes. GA is reporting about half of our actual traffic. Also logging into GA took a long time as other members have pointed out. The excessive lag with GA does not appear to be impacting page load speed on our site.

[renatovieira]

January 28th and 29th very very high traffic. Today he is completely dead.

Someone else?

[seomotionz]

@glakes Indeed big fish like amazon can easily get out of it. And even if some thing did happen. Its not like that Google is going replace amazon with some other site.

[jediviper]

Semrush Sensor shows high activity for today in AUSTRALIA.

Industries mostly affected:
- Arts & Entertainment
- Computers & Electronics
- Games
- Internet & Telecom
- Online Communities
- News
- Sports

Other countries show nothing major.

[RareBit]

my Jan YoY stats are well weird:

Organic traffic is up 47%
Orders are up 19%
Revenue is down 38%

we do offer free samples which accounts for the transactions but the last time I saw this is when the UK was suppose to be leaving the EU in October - so basically I am blaming Brexit for poor January sales!

[mosxu]

@samwest

Is converting traffic coming back after each server reboot?

Or it was one off?

[SweetPotato]

GA says missing permissions (which is bs) and i'm not the only one.

[glakes]

GA says missing permissions

Same for me.

GA has been buggy all morning. Traffic stats are well below normal and what server stats report.

[engine]

I just noticed Facebook videos appearing in Google SERPs. Was that a while back and i've missed it, or is this a new way to get video into google SERPs.

[StupidIntelligent]

Bot traffic is up; which means that an update is on the way.

[samwest]

@mos - I've actually been doing that for over 5 years with varying degrees of success. It's weird for sure, maybe related to memory allocation, but doubtful. It does happen very often though, when I'm having a bad run, I reboot and within 1 to 30 minutes, bam, a conversion appears...sometime after days of nothing. Could be a coincidence, but a very persistent one. Hey, at this point I'll throw salt over my shoulder or rub a lucky rabbits foot...whatever it takes. ;)