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]

[chrisv1963]

Domain crowding seems to be back with this last update. One of my searches returned 10 Pinterest results on page 1 and 8 on page 2.

In theory they are all results from "different" websites, but basically all the same scraped crap: pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.com.au, pinterest.nz, pinterest.ie, pinterest.ru, pinterest.ch, pinterest.ca, pinterest.pt, ...

All other "normal" websites with the original non-scraped content are pushed down to the end of page 2 and page 3. Google should be smarter than this.

[seomotionz]

@chrisv1963 You are right. Crowding is a major factor as I saw today and also a ton of bot activity.

[sem4u]

Domain crowding does seem to be an increasing issue, but I am only seeing this from the same domain. Also, one site had a huge crawl on the 16th - the biggest I can remember for a long time.

[BushyTop]

I'm with @SamWest the results haven't improved for me. I keep saying the same thing really. The big dawgs are winning in our verticle. No room for product specialists anymore.

[sk7411]

Raise your hand if you feel it's been long time now we are due yet another google core algorithm update , no seriously i mean 1 week isn't a lot to ask for!^/s

[KaseyM]

Weird bug with Analytics today

[i.imgur.com ]

[TeresaD]

another update that brings back converting traffic would be lovely

[worker]

Still seeing 2 to 3 year old articles referencing a search for Widget Sites instead of actual Widget Sites. Also, seeing fake search results that redirect to #*$! sites. Found 3 on page 2 of Google search results. I have seen these for days and have used the feedback option to report them everyday for about 4 days now. There were only 2 before this morning and a 3rd one just showed up. Apparently their system for crawling through the search results links is not seeing the redirect to the #*$! sites or they refuse to do isolated fixes and instead just feed this type information into their daily search updates (and these #*$! redirects haven't made the cut yet). Cannot figure out the benefit of this last core update. Lots of old articles, links to forums that no longer exist, links that are false and redirect to #*$! sites.

[jmorgan]

@KaseyM Could be a bug, or could be an annoying bot sending fake traffic that somehow gets picked up by GA.

[RedBar]

The big dawgs are winning in our verticle. No room for product specialists anymore.

That's an interesting statement / claim.

In which kind of widget sector are you for this to be happening?

I know I've said this before however in my global widget sector the vast majority of the biggest companies have given up completely with The Net. There are so many of us in so many different countries competing for so many different products in so many different markets ... that it's almost become pointless for many to even consider trying to compete in the SERPs ... PLUS how many searchers are actually going online to source these widgets nowadays?

I can tell you from MY widget sector, very, very few, even Joe Public's not doing it anywhere near like they did 10-15 years ago ... yet my widget sector is still doing extremely well with both trade and public global sales.

Being on page 1 of Google now is superfluous, there is so much GG (Google Garbage) before anyone sees a "result", that it's almost pointless being there.

If anyone believes / feels that being #1 these days is a / the solution, think again however YMMV :-)

[Robert Charlton]

RedBar, I'm guessing over the years from your posts that you've (mainly?) been concerned by image optimization.

Do the sites in your sector use much descriptive text as well, or (if I'm guessing correctly) are they mainly images? Does the text going beyond captions for the images?

[Kendo]

This may be of interest... or not.

Each week I get a report from our SEO guy, have 2 of them but one is more expansive and his reports are more detailed. Each week he reports what he has done during the week and expects to get paid. I usually give it a quick once over, but this week I checked each of the sites that he has been posting to to see if they are included in our backlinks list from Google.

Surprise, surprise... only 5 sites have been included as backlinks for us. Our backlinks count recently dropped by 1500 and I don't know if those are the ones we are missing or what because I don't want to go there atm. But what they hey?

[Martin Ice Web]

Since 4 days we get now thousands of one site hits from all over the world. All are mobil.
Same time conversion dropped and amazon is 1+2 for every query even if they don´t sell the item.

One competitor has 3 domains that have all the same content and all a ranking very well.

[RedBar]

@Robert Charlton

Do the sites in your sector use much descriptive text as well

I've always been concerned about our image quality and optimisation since it can show the difference between our products and others since, whilst being manufactured into widgets, they are actually natural products ... think along the lines of natural wood varieties from many different countries.

I have a lot of product text including to start with a generic description, actual technical specification, original raw product location, the products it can be manufactured into etc, realistically everything anyone needs to know.

To be honest I sometimes wonder whether I have too much information for G to absorb since these days it seems to prefer simple descriptions and / or hieroglyphics with intense product pages being overlooked. Obviously trade specifers, architects and those who actually need to know this information for legal purposes are always using my sites rather than having to resort to hard books of which there are several.

However, don't for one moment think that everyone else in my industry does this, they do not. Many do only post one image and somehow, remarkably, can rank #1 even though it may be a poor image, poorly named and with no alt or text value. Some other specialist sites do similar to me for their country however mine are the only global sites with widgets from all six continents.

[RareBit]

is anyone seeing movement on the results today? non of the trackers are picking anything up but I have had a few positions drop to 2nd place this morning

[Subhodip]

On 13th of January 2020, Google announces the roll-out of its first broad core algorithm update of 2020. It seems a lot bigger than the September core update. Still, it’s rolling out. Check out your latest SEO and reports. Some websites get vast improvements and some are suffering massive rank drop. I will suggest you update your content based on user intent. Thanks.

[seomotionz]

is anyone seeing movement on the results today? non of the trackers are picking anything up but I have had a few positions drop to 2nd place this morning

@RareBit Yup, changes are happening. And also the bug of GA is back.

[RedBar]

I will suggest you update your content based on user intent.

Generic posts about suggestions are pointless since it is most unlikely that one has a clue to Google's intent let alone suggesting a user's intent.

Algo updates are algo updates and it's extremely rare for them to be reversed / wound back or anything else. For many years now the Google scraper is there for one purpose and one purpose only, to use our content for free to generate as much money for G and its shareholders as possible.

If you feel it has any other purpose than this, please inform.

[jrpfhc]

We have made up everything that we lost in the November update.

[RareBit]

@seomotionz - cheers for confirming. I guess it could be one of the many smaller tweaks G do, as I am only seeing it on 1 site and across a few KWs

[seomotionz]

@Rarebit More like some ripple effects.

[BushyTop]

For those that are mentioning the same thing, I'm also seeing more changes than usual today. UK based, automotive

[mhansen]

Re: Changes today (01/21/20)

What I'm seeing in our widget sector are wide changes in the suggestion phrases as you type your query. One of the higher volume suggested terms we tend to try and get in front of, is missing completely. Others that we often see there are not there at all. On queries I expect to see 6-8 suggestions, there is only 1 or none at all.

[TeresaD]

@RedBar+ I use Google taxomomy for specs and save the body of the product page for descriptive text, its neatens the page up and is consistent across the site for the crawler

[chrisv1963]

Algo updates are algo updates and it's extremely rare for them to be reversed / wound back or anything else. For many years now the Google scraper is there for one purpose and one purpose only, to use our content for free to generate as much money for G and its shareholders as possible.

If you feel it has any other purpose than this, please inform.

Scraping and hotlinking. Stealing our content and our bandwidth to generate money for G and its shareholders. Good search results are no longer important. This pretty much makes it a fake search engine.

[RedBar]

Whoa! I'm seeing a massive increase in spam email today and nearly all from Poland ... what's happened?

Anyone else?

[ichthyous]

is anyone seeing movement on the results today?

Yes this update is still working its magic...a huge drop in average position here and it looks like already 20%+ drop in traffic, and it still hasn't finished. There were no changes to my site. From mid Oct - Mod Nov I saw a big improvement, and it stayed that way for until Jan 13th when this new update wiped it all out. Now I'm worse off than before.

The only thing that changed was that on the 12th almost all of my pages were switched to slow loading "FID issue: longer than 300ms (mobile)". My pages are still categorized as 'moderate' for desktop. However the drop in traffic has not affected just mobile traffic, it's desktop too.

If I test using Lighthouse my pages score very well for mobile...only using Google's page speed insights tool on a page by page basis do they score so low as to be considered slow. Overall, only 4% of my pages have an FID slower than 300ms though, and the page says "All pages served from this origin have a Moderate speed compared to other pages in the Chrome User Experience Report over the last 30 days". So it makes no sense whatsoever that they are shown as having an average FID of 558ms in Search Console error.

It takes up to a month of user data for Google to re-eval the pages, so that's one month of low traffic already. My guess is, even if the "FID" issue clears up my rankings won't improve...that will have to wait for some mysterious future update that suddenly reverses this one, which is exactly what happened to me last September / October after half a year of waiting. Google just wants to rotate the index periodically now, nobody will be immune anymore except perhaps the largest players.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:32 pm (utc) on Jan 21, 2020]

[BushyTop]

I'm not buying this FID being the root cause. We test fast for that on all of google's endorsed tools and we've been hit!

We do have some accessibility issues and best practise issues though. We only test moderate for that, but i'm hoping to have these fixed in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, that turns a switch!

[seomotionz]

@RedBar Apparently its in the app, widget and mobile related niches. Some are saying that kw's are changing their positions very rapidly. Although I don't know anything about spam emails.

[ichthyous]

@ BushyTop I think you are right. Upon further examination with Page Speed Insights only 4% of my pages are classified as having an FID greater than 300ms, but almost all of them show the FID warning in search console. My pages can definitely be sped up on mobile, so I'm working that. Some of the slow load times are from Google's own external calls and css for fonts, analytics, and Captcha.