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]

[universenet]

glakes
we are in same proffesional.. mechanical engineers..
what to do for make websites loading less of 2 s?
Maybe implenment some turbo injection in server?

Many peopple using third party scripts and contents and maybe pictures loading too from third party websites and if you loading it in your website need more time for load
This is way how maybe google will make out many websites what using third part connections
but of course we can not say that speed of websites on mobile is not important... is very important.. speed and data
and after all so "good" hosting and so "good" clouds resources for better loading websites... (dedcated servers and all other) honestly are not cheap

[glakes]

@universenet

Since Google is using the mobile first index, caching on mobile devices is important. This is where I really dropped the ball by not having caching enabled for mobile devices. Many CMS cache plugins do not offer mobile caching or offer it as a premium/paid feature. I would look into that if using a CMS since it appears to have a major impact. I had Memcached enabled from the start, which stores frequently used queries to the DB, but that was not enough. Our images are optimized, but we are not lazy loading them (yet). With DB driven websites, it's hard to achieve good speeds on shared hosting. As you noted, a dedicated server is not cheap nor is cloud hosting. Unfortunately the page load, FID, etc. speeds Google wants now will likely have lower thresholds a year or two from now which will lead to more expenses.

[universenet]

glakes
Do you use magento?

[glakes]

I use Wordpress and Woocommerce. I see there is an extension for Magneto called Full Page Cache that supposedly supports mobile devices, but it's not cheap. Are you using any cache extensions now?

[TeresaD]

but how do you get around your countries broadband is really really bad, I am lucky if my 3g connects even though my contract says 4g it is something I have never seen or used, nothing will load in 2 seconds on mobile including GSC!

[frostitomik]

If you use WordPress, it's actually super easy to get website loading speed around 1s. All you need is a managed WP hosting with CDN. It will cost you more than a shared hosting (around 20-30 USD a month) but it's totally worth it.

[glakes]

@frostitomik

I have the WP/Woocommerce managed hosting but not the CDN. This will be the next step if I can't reign in the speed.

@TeresaD

A CDN may help if they have servers located throughout your country if serving your national market. I would hope Google would be understanding of broadband limitations in regions when searches are performed on country specific Google domains.

[TeresaD]

My cart is on a CDN but that still needs to be loaded through our wifi network, it is so annoying because my hosts run speed tests (USA cart with Irish affiliate host) and get really fast speeds of 1-3 seconds then look at my screen casts of load speed which can be anything from 4-16 seconds which we accept because that is what we are used to but they find bonkers.

My only hope is that my site is one of the fastest 3 legged donkeys in the race and the crawler does take the country into consideration

[seowinning]

Page speed insights may be broken? [developers.google.com...]

returning 8 seconds for FID, randomly 8.nnn or 8,nnn in robots.txt and 4 seconds for posts. Google search console is reporting lots of sites as slow because this broken FID. what If this FID is a rank factor..

[universenet]

I use Wordpress and Woocommerce. I see there is an extension for Magneto called Full Page Cache that supposedly supports mobile devices, but it's not cheap. Are you using any cache extensions now?

glakes
I am using my own code for my websites.. combination php...html...mysql..css..javascripts...

but if you want use magento so it is heavy for resources and many CMS need always some cache management but not always succsefull...
Making site load faster can be with big problems depends of scripts (CMS) what you using...

[christianz]

We are getting completely off-topic, but I will add that low FID score can be entirely and exclusively because of Google AdSense. Especially any type of mobile auto ads.

AdSense on its own drops the pagespeed score on mobile 25 - 60 points in general.

How do I know this? I have a site with doesn't have any javascript at all (other than AdSense) and which loads in less than a second (AMP level of optimisation). And gets 100/100 for desktop (as it should), yet terrible FID and much reduced score for mobile (where it should be 100/100 also, because it is impossible to make a faster site).

[SweetPotato]

Google speed insights is bs! Specially on mobile! If you use Google AdSense alone will cause solid 1500ms of load crippling mobile score to the %40~ slow red evil.
The same guys penalizing your site are causing the slowness.

[Samsam1978]

"The same guys penalizing your site are causing the slowness." true. What can you do? Hoping they will see sense when all the ad revenue is dropping.

[Samsam1978]

I hope for a Google rollback to Sept soon.

[frostitomik]

What you can do is to use affiliates instead of ads where it's possible.

[christianz]

"I hope for a Google rollback to Sept soon."

I don't. This update seems like a rollback of September update when they clearly got something very wrong, penalizing older sites and promoting newer copies / scrapes / spam.

[whoa182]

To be honest, ever since they released BERT, the SERPs have been getting progressively better again with each major update. The spam sites that were ranking well now are gone and the results are quite relevant again.

[samwest]

No such improvements here. The crap has risen again. Low quality / high ad density spin and aggregation sites have once again popped to the top in my vertical. This is a dramatic change in SERPS for me and the biggest position change (2 to 3 position drop) in several years. Another money grab over quality update it appears. The remaining traffic barely converts and weekly totals quota'd...as usual.

[worker]

Seeing a dramatic drop in search engine position for large numbers of search terms. The sites that are in between me and the first position are a combination of about 50% accurate results and 50% news articles / blog posts (up to 4 years old). I'm referring to search terms like X sites, or X site, or Free X site, where X is whatever type of site you are searching (obviously). My guess is they have increased the use of their AI system and it does not (yet) distinguish the difference in a search term for X site as meaning the searcher wants to reach sites matching X. Instead, it is floundering around giving a combination of X sites and sites with content about X sites. If I'm correct, then as people click on the actual X sites results rather than articles about X sites, their AI system will realize that for those types of searches, it should present the actual sites and not random article content. Just a theory.

[jmorgan]

Yes, it does seem like some of the recent rankings boosts that I got for some keywords have been rolled back. Probably not to a full extent, or maybe it's just me.

[worker]

I saw major search position drops from the 14th until yesterday with the news articles I referenced above showing up mixed in among search results. Yesterday, my numbers improved by about 30%-40% so I looked again and the news articles that pushed me lower on many search terms were not there. Today, my numbers are bad again and the news articles are back in the search results. If someone is searching for X sites, it is common sense that they want to see sites about X, they do not want to read articles about sites about X. The inclusion of these news articles in the search results for such a straight forward search is evidence that the current results are missing the mark on what a searcher is looking for. Since Google isn't stupid, I have to assume that in somewhat short order, they will realize the search results are filled with results that do not match the intention of the search term/search phrase.

[worker]

Wow. Just did another search and on the third page of results in the 5th and 6th positions, there were 2 separate independant links to a forum that has been shut down for a lengthy period of time. The snippets of text from the forum had Oct. 2005 and Aug. 2006 in them. Google just served me 15-year-old data from a non-existent forum halfway down the 3rd page of results for a very basic three-word search phrase. I'm floored. After digging more, I found that the forum in question had ceased operation in the middle of 2019. This means Google kept 15-year-old forum posts in its database and despite the forum no longer begin active, it has begun serving that data again. This clearly shows that the current set of results is severely flawed.

[hopepro]

This is my first time seeing Google index Bit.ly Link. very strange

[HereWeGo123]

@SweetPotato

Google speed insights is bs! Specially on mobile! If you use Google AdSense alone will cause solid 1500ms of load crippling mobile score to the %40~ slow red evil. The same guys penalizing your site are causing the slowness.

We run Adsense on our website. I ran a quick experiment and tested a URL without Adsense and got a near perfect score on all areas.

Then that identical page with Adsense units will be somewhere around a 60-65 score.

As google always said - the Adsense and search teams don’t talk to each other. Everything is compartmentalized.

[christianz]

"As google always said - the Adsense and search teams don’t talk to each other. Everything is compartmentalized."

They are pretending to be neutral. Which is really funny.

[Kendo]

what to do for make websites loading less of 2 s?

My guys Suggested that page speed may be the fault to a drop this week because they noticed some high results. But they were only for one day, perhaps a bad hair day for our server and DOS attacks or Google routers which I do recall were slow in Analytics the other day.

But otherwise page speed was quite good... between 1.5 and 1.8 secs for all pages. But that was on a PC. Stats from mobile was about 4 seconds.

Why would the mobile phone be slower and why are mobile phones be used for the benchmark when traffic is still overwhelmingly PC?

While on that job I moved any remaining large images to a remote server and compressed the rest. Then enabled caching for the whole site. Page speed had no noticeable improvement from what it was already.

[seomotionz]

As google always said - the Adsense and search teams don’t talk to each other. Everything is compartmentalized.

Do you really believe that? I mean we are not talking about just any service here! Its Adsense!

It pays back money to the users. Just think if you were Google then what you will do?!

[cellist]

First post here...

After losing traffic slowly but steadily since late summer, my niche site I started in 2008 got a nice bump from this latest core update. This is encouraging as I've been updating and redesigning the site, including rewriting old articles, adding new articles and videos, and tweaking basically everything. According to moz, I picked up around 70 key words. I couldn't understand why I was getting less traffic after each update but I guess I'm back in favor with the gods again.

Reading all of the posts on this thread reminds me of how very badly we need out from under this google monopoly of search. We need at least three search engines that are used equally.

[HereWeGo123]

@seomontionz

Do you really believe that? I mean we are not talking about just any service here! Its Adsense!

That's exactly what I mean. Since they are “allegedly” separate, AdSense has no idea direct knowledge on what kind of adverse effects their ads can have on sites that the Search Team addresses as “low quality”. Over the years, I've had AdSense reps reach out to me and say, “do this, do that, place more ads here.’ Fortunately, we didn't listen to them because then people got negatively affected based on google's algos.

[swagatika]

Hi, I am working for a project on data quality and that's US based. After this 2020 google core update, most of the keyword ranks have dropped. So I want to know about what the new strategy we should follow. Please reply......