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]

[jmorgan]

Hard to assess the full effects of the update with the recent Indian festivities and the upcoming long weekend in the US.

[brodiec16]

Interesting, I am seeing the opposite trend of @glakes, Traffic down about 20%, but all quality metrics (pages per session, bounce rate, eCommerce CR, even average order value) up. Not quite enough to make up the difference in traffic, resulting in about a 7% loss of rev, but seems like for me, I am getting higher quality traffic but less of it. Tracking SERP rankings I am seeing drops in positions for branded question style keywords "Brand X reviews", "is brand X safe" etc, but increases in product keywords.

[BoredMeteor]

My traffic has not been this low in seven years. It's honestly pretty devastating. I'm going to try to move forward, because in the past low lows have had a tendency to be followed by high highs...but at a certain point, I'm just tired of playing the game.

[RareBit]

I had a quick look over my positions this morning, most saw a drop during the roll out but are now back where they were pre-update - Business as usual! (UK interiors & manufacturing)

[BushyTop]

@rarebit I really hope that is true for us too and that we are slightly behind you. We took a big hit with this one. Would kill for previous positions. Every time something like this happens, it's a frightening look into the future. One day your business can be trotting along nicely, the next it's devastated. Hard to build a business model around that. I know a lot of webmasters will say 'you should be relying solely on organic' and we don't - for the most part. But our business and our margin is calculated with organic in mind. hard to be competitive with those that rank if were not.

[Martin Ice Web]

Wow. google has now completly lost the oriantation. We get a lot of users searching for products that we do not have.
It is like poeple go into a supermarket and ask for clothes.

And since this new update we get surges of traffic from 114.119.x.x

[sk7411]

I did some quick metrics comparison of many sites and i have a strong reason to believe that most of the sites just flipped their positions vice versa with January and September Core algorithm update . So the takeaway is enjoy till it lasts and then wait for the table to turn .. Repeat! And ofcourse keep updating your website with all the goods . It has become like more sort of a lottery!

[RedBar]

@MIW

It is like poeple go into a supermarket and ask for clothes.

As a frequent visitor to Germany for 50 years even I know German supermarkets sell clocthes however I understand your analogy:-)

[Mark_A]

In Britain people now go into a clothes shop and buy food! (Marks & Spencer)

[RareBit]

@BushyTop - How many URLs do you have in SC (indexed, not submitted in sitemap)? and are they all user visited pages?

I used to get massive swings (9/10/11 positions) when updates were happening and one thing that seemed to help was reducing our indexed URLs, we were creating loads or filter generated URLs/URLs with parameters so I got rid of all of them and now I only see a drop of 1 or 2 positions during a roll out

[BushyTop]

@RareBit alot.... around 12k... That's interesting and one thing that we are trying to change with the new site. I use the canonical on these pages, where previously I used to include the query in the Robots. The canonical should be enough I feel, but like I say, with the new site design, i'm removing that section entirely and changing the links to indexable URLs

[samwest]

I can definitely concur with the poor search targeting effect. While the SERPs have juggled slightly in the past few days...traffic is down and bounce is suddenly way up with no site changes. Yesterday had normal conversions for the first half of the day the once again BAM...it shuts right down to all Zombie.

I figured they turned off filters temporarily to celebrate Alphabets 1 trillion market capitalization...but no...even that's not going to be enough. [cnbc.com...]

[edited by: samwest at 3:06 pm (utc) on Jan 17, 2020]

[samwest]

....

[seomotionz]

I did some quick metrics comparison of many sites and i have a strong reason to believe that most of the sites just flipped their positions vice versa with January and September Core algorithm update . So the takeaway is enjoy till it lasts and then wait for the table to turn .. Repeat! And ofcourse keep updating your website with all the goods . It has become like more sort of a lottery!

@sk7411 This isn't the strangest thing I heard today about Google. I heard that keyword's are disappearing from the SERP's and then reappearing. Although their positions remains unchanged.

[glakes]

I heard that keyword's are disappearing from the SERP's and then reappearing.

Unfortunately this is not new in the ecommerce sector. Keywords disappearing and reappearing is one of the methods Google uses to direct ready to buy shoppers to their preferred site - by dropping competing pages out of the SERPS (down or off first page). When Google identifies users with a low intent to purchase, they get sent to competing websites. Unfortunately Google apparently has made my site one big tire and the recipient of many tire kickers. I don't know why Google does this as it really trashes confidence in their ad platform (Adwords) because there is so much blatant manipulation going on.

Yesterday had normal conversions for the first half of the day the once again BAM...it shuts right down to all Zombie.

@samwest

Google has removed almost all ready to buy traffic from being sent to my website. Nearly no conversions from Google despite total traffic being up 80%+ since the update. Not even the smallest window of converting traffic from Google. Traffic from other sources is converting ok, though is better targeted as witnessed with a much lower bounce rate.

[ichthyous]

I've lost a huge amount of ground in my average position starting on the 13th...today I noticed that google switched almost ALL of my pages from moderate speed to slow in one shot on the 12th. The error is "FID issue: longer than 300ms (mobile)". I think that's the main reason. Is anyone else seeing this?

[TeresaD]

"When Google identifies users with a low intent to purchase, they get sent to competing websites"

That would be my site then!

Jan 10th - 17th 2020 v 2019

Users +61.92%
Conversions -60.24%

That makes no sense at all for 1 week in January when I have a specific widget season coming up. Same week in 2019 was +30.44% from 2018

[swright]

Anyone seeing different search results sets shifting like crazy every couple of minutes?

[glakes]

@TeresaD

Sorry to hear you are sharing in this misery. This phenomena has been happening for a long time (years) and is spreading to different niches/industries. My guess is it takes a lot of computing power to generate fine-tuned user intent based SERPS on the fly. This may be why it appears to be slowly spreading to other industries.

The million dollar question is why. Is there anything we as webmasters can do to make us part of Google's favored in-crowd?

[samwest]

Who in the hell posts a paid ad to a Pinterest page? I seriously see this in my vertical. Talk about a distant and desperate monetization model.

[glakes]

Who in the hell posts a paid ad to a Pinterest page?

Possibly someone that wants a better conversion rate then Adwords. :)

[TeresaD]

I think it is possibly consumer behaviour too, I have checked a lot of my products on my mobile since the update, my products are near or at the top of the page, there are also several category related products images in the middle with a link to my site.

I have a shopping campaign set up but lowered the ppc, even so sometimes my products are on the top of the page in the shopping feed too. So they can be found, they are being clicked on and they are adding to cart.

Why are people not spending or converting?
Why are they searching for long tail, getting exactly what they looked for at a reasonable price, adding to cart then leaving?
For one of my widgets I am the only person in my country that sells them, why would a customer click on the Amazon link istead when it is in a different currency and competitive prices?

Since I broke Q4 by being stupid and lost everything now that I have it back I think there is more to it than just updates. The zombies are gone so it is genuine traffic, yes the updates hurt but something has definitely changed with customers window shopping, my biggest time to buy path is 12 days then 28+ days.

My site is 8 years old and has been updated so it is modern and very UX friendly, site speed is more important to Googlebot than my customers as everything is slowish to load because of our rubbish broadband.

What are Google seeing on our sites that we are not? Why are they sending us the traffic they do? What is the profile of the customers they are not sending us? Why did they convert instantly in the past?

If we could nail the consumer and crawler behaviour it would be a start!

So many questions that we know will never be answered so no point in dwelling on them :)

[MayankParmar]

Odd behaviour of Google News: Showing old articles over the new ones.

Also, the Discover traffic is completely down since 13th. Rank is not affected. Anyone in the same situation?

[universenet]

I think that mostly all things will come in place in few days or over weekend...
Still are things disordered...

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Glakes

Google has removed almost all ready to buy traffic from being sent to my website. Nearly no conversions from Google despite total traffic being up 80%+ since the update.

To be honestly - pretty dramatic data from you... Fingers crossed that such destiny won't took my websites...

[glakes]

@TeresaD

I think it is possibly consumer behaviour too

You may be correct. It's tax prep time, and that's not a good way to wake up from the holiday credit card spending hangover. :) This may be part of the reason people are not converting, but for my industry it does not have as big of an impact since many consumers see the products my company manufactures as a need rather than a want.

site speed is more important to Googlebot than my customers as everything is slowish to load because of our rubbish broadband.

I think site speed is overrated to a certain degree when it comes to Google. That's just an opinion, but on ecommerce websites shoppers expect plenty of images and details. So I think to a certain degree Google considers this, even though our pages may not load as fast as others. My store is not fast, but appears to rank well.

What are Google seeing on our sites that we are not?

If we could figure this one out we would be in good shape!

@Cyril TechWebsites

I wouldn't wish what I am seeing on anyone!

[seomotionz]

Unfortunately this is not new in the ecommerce sector

Its not eCommerce product pages. These are normal blog posts.

[ichthyous]

I think site speed is overrated to a certain degree when it comes to Google

I don't know about that. Google started reporting almost all of my pages as being slow on mobile in GSC speed report on the 12th. Previously they were all listed at moderate. The next day (and for four days after) my average position dropped like a stone, including plenty of top three ranking pages. There's no other reason for this since I've made no changes to my site.

[universenet]

Google increasing site speed criterion... medium speed starting to be recognized like a slow speed.. in that way soon we can expect needs for load wesbite in nano second ...and for that we will need nuclear dedicated server

[glakes]

@ichthyous

Valid points about site speed and your personal observations. Unfortunately the timing of your drop in rank coincides with a major algo update which muddies the water. Regardless, I concede that Google does consider speed as a ranking factor and should not be ignored. It's possible that Google has dialed up the importance of site speed when it comes to ranking as both you and @universenet are suggesting.

I too have an issue with site speed. My FID is 307ms when it must be under 300ms. The page noted in GSC with a slow FID is currently getting a lot of traffic from Google. Is this because the content is so compelling that Google chooses to ignore the speed? It may be the case as there is little competition for the page and what competing pages exist are shallow. Our product pages, on the other hand, do have a fair amount of competition. Is this why product sales from Google have completely dried up? It's possible that Google is directing ready to buy shoppers to faster websites and sending the tire kickers to our slower site.

@ichthyous have you taken corrective action to improve site speed? If you have, then please post a follow-up if you see an improvement and I'll chime in if I see any improvements from my side. I took corrective action on my site's FID issue. My page speed in GA was as high as 4.76 seconds in the last seven days with most days being around 3.4 seconds. After corrective action, GA reports the page speed average yesterday at 2.04 seconds and today .83 seconds. Average page load time and FID were largely addressed by using caching, which I was doing before with a basic cache. However my site is now using browser specific caching to force mobile devices to cache whereas before they were not. Shame on me for not doing this before, but I'm in manufacturing and mechanical engineering is more my cup of tea. Maybe it's getting time I stick with manufacturing great products while outsourcing the great and fast website tasks to a competent provider. :)

Thank you to both @ichthyous and @universenet for sharing your opinions. It's entirely possible both of you are correct in stating site speed is now more important.