Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2020

[Shepherd]

---

System: The following 6 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4978307.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 6:54 pm on Feb 1, 2020 (utc -5)

---

FWIW, seeing the featured snippet holder (wikipedia in this case) gone completely from the SERPs this morning, no longer listed on page 2 or anywhere.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

So why don't you all do something about it?

If everyone switched off their ads for one day, a week or a month, what would that cost them?

Yes, it's simply as every time and like in any aspect of our lifes. Minority rules majority. But even if all websmasters will unite and start making their moves together, big G will have to listen to us. It's seems like Webmasters Association is something we all need nowadays, an official organization that will be representing our rights, like in every niche. I'm pretty sure if each of us will donate 5...50 USD to this organization, it will become able to make so "stinky" situations to Google with the help of lawyers, public official discussion, etc.

[Rndm]

Honestly the idea of a webmaster seems like a very outdated concept. I have worked for a few agencies and through them a LOT of companies. You will not find anything like a webmaster at at these companies in the way that it is described here. I would think that there are very very few sites that are ran by a single webmaster.I have always been confused by the use of the term on this site. I may be way off course so feedback is appreciated.

I am not against the association idea btw, but perhaps cast a wider net than webmaster to get a larger audience. Perhaps it is an SEO body of some sort. If you go the publisher route it would probably attract more content marketers than I think is wanted. Just some rambling thoughts.

[RedBar]

It's seems like Webmasters Association is something we all need nowadays,

I've been hearing that for at least 15 possibly 20 years ... too late now.

[goodroi]

Mods Note: Please be careful to stay on-topic. This thread is for discussing Google Updates & SERP changes. It is not for discussing Google business operations. If you want to talk about something else, please start a new thread :)

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Goodroi

Sorry, Goodroi!)) We've been involved in our fantasies on how we can change the world!)) Let's discuss further drops and unfair updates here!))

[glakes]

Google organic conversion rate:

2/20/2020: .38%
2/21/2020: 0%

Another couple quality days of conversions from the worlds supposedly best search engine. LOL

[nmbrsk]

@RNDM,

I completely agree with you on the term of ‘webmasters’. I’m in my early 20s and making online websites and being solely in charge of them has been something I’ve done done I was 11. To me, it was always a hobby, which can turn into a profession if done correctly.

I’m in my first professional 9-5 job right now and I’m in charge as a marketing/web admin sort of role. It’s a very small company so I’m in charge of the website on my own, but a job like this is very much the exception rather than the rule.

Prior to this role, I found myself looking for a job for 9 months after graduating (in marketing), because being a ‘webmaster’ was still all I really really felt qualified in. But you don’t get job roles like that at 99% of companies. That’s why I’m struggling to move on from my current role. Quitting my role and becoming a full time ‘webmaster’ is something I was considering doing after the success of my main website in last 18 months. But after the latest Google update, it’s probably a pipe dream now.

I was at the stage of probably making my website a limited company, considering the tax relief, but there’s no chance of that happening following the update in mid January, unless my site miraculously recovers.

[seomotionz]

@seomotionz I removed low-quality links, nofollowed some after analyzing site with Ahrefs, and applied for reconsideration.

@MayankParmar That is not going to solve it. As I said earlier. Remove all the unnecessary links and make all the outgoing links no-follow through out the site. It will resolve the manual action penalty fast. If you don't do that then it can take months. My own site got this penalty once but I deal with this almost everyday. Its the fastest way to deal with it.

[jmorgan]

Are there any actual solid case studies where the removal of low-quality links has resulted in a benefit to rankings? Seems like a waste of time to me, IMO. Time better spent on improving the quality of your website.

And how would you determine which links are "low-quality"? Based on your own discretion?

"Oh yeah, that one seems bad. Remove. That one is ok. This one definitely bad. Remove."

How would you know if your judgment is actually consistent with Google's (assuming Google actually penalizes websites for low-quality links)? And how do you know you're not actually hurting your website by removing links which may actually be legit?

[seomotionz]

@jmorgan We don't disavow low quality links. Its unwise thing to do. Google ignores low quality links any way.

Disavow tool is a very powerful tool and it has to be handled with extreme care. The tool should be used to only those links which comes from completely irrelevant and/or s**t sources.

[jmorgan]

Yeah, actually, I think I might have confused disavowing links to removing links from your website to low-quality sites. Sorry.

[devoo]

Hey everyone I've been reading the discussions here for months now and decided to join and add my two cents.

I'm running a web app and my site was hit by the Jan 13 update as well. I lost about 40% of the traffic and I'm trying to understand what was the reason behind this huge drop.

At first I thought it could be about speed because in the Search Console my site was flagged as "slow" on mobile. In fact my website is very very fast when it doesn't have Adsense on it :) So I didn't have much option other than remove some of the ads to improve the speed. I removed auto ads for good, removed some 3rd party javascript and set the ad balance to a lower level. As a result, Search Console is now showing it has "moderate" speed on mobile.

So what happened after the speed improvement? Nothing :) It's been two weeks now and it seems that speed doesn't have a noticeable effect on the rankings. Maybe it has in the long term but in my opinion it doesn't explain the Jan 13 update.

After deciding that it wasn't about speed, I've analyzed my competitors and I think I found the obvious reason. I have a big competitor who were dominating the niche for many years. They have a huge backlink profile and according to Moz they have a page authority of 55 while I have 38. We were competing for the top spots last year and in the last 4 months of 2019 I managed to get in front of them because my website has better user engagement rates although they have more authority.

Turns out that they've improved their UI in the last months and combined their two big domains into one with 301 redirect, increasing their page authority to a even higher level. As a result Google put them one spot in front of me almost in every search term. If you are wondering, yes one spot drop can mean 40% drop in the traffic if we are talking about the top positions!

Conclusion: In my opinion, Jan 13 update was mostly about recalculation of the backlinks and page authority or what google calls it. Google didn't penalize those who lost rankings for a specific reason. Maybe their competitors improved their backlink profiles.

Lastly, this one is a bit speculation but I think at the beginning of every year Google updates the results based on page authority. Then as the months go by, their AI comes into play and changes the rankings based on user experience. So I think those sites having a better user experience will recover in the coming months although it can be a slow process.

So if anyone was wondering why they lost their traffic on January update, that's my two cents.

[universenet]

Conclusion: In my opinion, Jan 13 update was mostly about recalculation of the backlinks and page authority or what google calls it. Google didn't penalize those who lost rankings for a specific reason. Maybe their competitors improved their backlink profiles.

January update was about advertising
If your website selling something you will go down, and this is all story, all time is about pay for advertising, all other are just stories for little children

[seowinning]

Those google updates is about two things, domain crowding and internal linking.

[RedBar]

Those google updates is about two things, domain crowding and internal linking.

And precisely why do you say that?

[devoo]

@universenet

In my niche, I don't sell anything or advertise on Google neither my competitors do. Yet some went down and some went up so I think it shouldn't be about advertising.

I know a lot of people here think that Google pushed down their sites on purpose to force them use PPC. I don't believe in that. With every update some sites go down but some sites go up too. You only hear about people who lost their traffic on the forums because people who benefited from the update don't usually take their time to talk about it.

Google is a huge company which gets its power from its reputation. They wouldn't risk their reputation to squeeze a few more dollars from small retailers. When you go down you could increase your PPC spend but the other guy who went up to your place could also reduce their PPC spend since they would have more organic traffic now. Sounds like a zero sum game for Google.

[universenet]

Google is a huge company which gets its power from its reputation. They wouldn't risk their reputation to squeeze a few more dollars from small retailers. When you go down you could increase your PPC spend but the other guy who went up to your place could also reduce their PPC spend since they would have more organic traffic now. Sounds like a zero sum game for Google.

and you are insider here but for free
You did think and think about it months and month and now you made post
It is not small money, it is few hundrets billion dollars, but with time you will understand this too
Your post is like made from 15 years ago, you live in 2005, world is changed much after that year

[devoo]

@universenet

Maybe it's because I'm not selling anything but it's 2020 and I'm making a decent living thanks to Google. I never bothered with obtaining backlinks, never spent a dime on advertising and Google took my site from zero to the top in two years. What I did was focus on user experience and try to improve it as Google suggested and it worked.

For now I tend to believe Google didn't totally turn into an evil monster yet :)

[StupidIntelligent]

@devoo - This is exactly how most websites prosper. The discussions here are mostly, why Google keeps tightening the screws every few years. The only meaningful conclusion is that the web changes, and sometimes other properties need to be replaced with the older ones.

In other words: You're a hero today, but that can end with the knob twisting of a single update.

[renatovieira]

Has anyone noticed a small drop since yesterday?

Usually Saturday is my best day of the week. Today a considerable drop.

[glakes]

Has anyone noticed a small drop since yesterday?

My traffic remains normal for a Saturday and conversions are poor, which is normal from Google. SERP trackers aren't reporting any volatility since Thursday.

The weather is the nicest its been in a while where I'm at. It's sunny and 50°F. With the nice weather in my region, I would expect people to do their running around while the brief nice weather pattern lasts.

[StupidAI]

All my keywords disappear again today.
There must a Google update going on today.

[jmorgan]

@renatovieira Mine went up a little. But my traffic typically drops during public holidays, and last week it was President's Day weekend so it was always due to rebound a little this weekend.

[fearlessrick]

Google must be either broken up by the Justice Department's anti-trust division or beaten to death by competition. There is no way the world can function with a monstrosity like this in the heart of it. You can deny my perception all you like, but the evidence of a completely unregulated company running roughshod over the internet is overwhelming.

It's a simple proposition. Google must die. At the very least, their power must be diminished greatly. They are dangerous and once the screws are put to them (as they are now, with investigations ongoing), they will be even more vicious in their attacks against small business and government regulation.

Here's what frosts me, and is evidence of criminal behavior, whether done by AI or humans, because humans program the AI.

The weekends have become my best days in terms of revenue, page views, etc. This morning I get up and check my Adsense stats. They are horrible. Revenue the lowest of the month, and that's a Saturday, with the highest number of pageviews of the month, but, oddly, impressions are suspiciously low. In a minute, I find out why. I have policy violations on 10 of my best pages. These are pages that have had policy violations in the past and which I've corrected, even though they're nothing, but I'm just playing in Google's sandbox, right?

Anyhow, I am in the policy review and notice that the "latest enforcement action" is February 21. That's two days ago and I know these pages were not flagged on my dashboard because I check for policy violations every day, every damn day, and often two or three times.

So, Google puts me in policy prison, with "restricted ad serving" for two days without letting me know. And, BTW, the policy they claim that I'm in violation of is adult content, which it is clearly not, as there are no photos on the page and every mention of questionable words (I've had to eliminate the words "sex", "nude", "provocative" and others from my lexicon) has been scrubbed and eliminated.

When you request a review of your site or various pages, Google throws up a message that says they will inform you when the review is complete. I've done 40 or 50 reviews and have yet to see a message from Google of a completed review. Squat, Nothing.

These people are a criminal enterprise. They don't pay taxes, treat government like some ugly wart, and their customers like slaves to their deity, the almighty Google.

If they're doing things like this to me, and I'm very much small peanuts, what are they doing to other sites, on a systematic basis, over and over and over again, to bolster their bottom line, or to push small operators out of business, or to benefit their allies. There's plenty of suspicious behavior going on at the "plex" and it needs to end.

[edited by: fearlessrick at 2:02 pm (utc) on Feb 23, 2020]

[seowinning]

Google Search just got worse in any aspect, Almost 10 ADs in the first page, bert is the most useless algorithm ever made, even random statistics algorithms can beat it and provide better results. Bert is so bad that even with so much user data that google owns, which is enough to predict user's intention, the algorithms can't provide satisfactory results. The secret of google is that they own more user data than its competitors, no need for broken AI trying to improve results. Since 2019 march, in the day that bert was rolled out, google looks like a roller coaster, I have a real example of crap sites with copy/paste content ranking beyond well and quality content sites from the same niche being hit by these useless updates.

[RedBar]

The USA G SERPs for my specific widgets seems to be holding steady and is not too bad, most of the pages for the big keyword phrase are simply coplies of my stuff, even the non-USA sites, however the UK G SERPs seems to be getting worse, it is utterly shambolic and I've checked it across several widget keyword phrases and it's mostly garbage.

Last night I decided to test the UK G SERPs for my #1 keyword phrase an MOBILE ... Wow, horrific, at the most there were 5 organic results on a page, I've never seen so many ads!

Friday night a friend was quizzing me about mobile phones etc since his had literally just died. He told me what he expected from a phone and that he'd tried searching for a couple of hours on G but was totally confused, had I any suggestions?

A couple of minutes later I gave him a link to a well-known UK discount store, he checked the specifications, decided it was exactly what he wanted and duly collected it Saturday morning ... G involvement zero, expertise knowledge 100%, I see this happening more and more all the time, Google is becoming superfluous when friends, colleagues and recommendations can easily do it better than the Gorg's AI will ever understand.

Data for data's sake is totally useless and G is proving that big time.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a steady uptick in visibility and position on mobile in SEMrush, but no increase in traffic. Desktop visibility fluctuates a lot and traffic from desktop is down ~19% from this time last year. That's because the page is now so loaded with options that nobody is even finding the organic results. I'm ranking well, but my traffic is decreasing and I'm seeing longer and longer periods without any serious calls, emails or sales. It will only get worse and worse until there is no point in even worrying about Google anymore.

What other way does Google have to force top ranking sites to pay them for ads other than to devalue completely the advantage of ranking well organically? You'll see Google's profits skyrocket for a while as desperate businesses turn to paying for ads and run up the CPC, but in the long term this cannibalistic strategy poses a huge problem for Google. Google is intentionally destroying its own results in order to squeeze us like the monopolistic boa constrictor that it truly is.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Which generic sector are you in? Retail / B2C, B2B, Governmental, Education etc?

[fearlessrick]

I'm done with these morons. They hit me up with more policy violations when none exist. There are alternatives to Adsense and the reason I haven't switched is because Google pays better. Well, now that they don't pay better, there's no good reason for sticking with them. They can KMA.

[TeresaD]

Conversions down 60.68% WTF? Usually when you mail adwords they swarm you, I contact them with proof that the app is doubling conversions and no reply.

Customers like my website, surely they should be the ones to decide my traffic and not a crawler?

After 8 years I am financially heading for the do do, what a complete waste of time and learning!