Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2020

[Shepherd]

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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)

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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.

[joamuk]

Same again today on SemRush.

I work in payday (UK) and have experienced similar huge drops where I have had keywords outside of top 10-20. By huge I mean 50 places.

However, from what I can see, a lots of those spots are not taken up by US, Australian and even South African website. No Use Google — you gotta be a UK citizen to apply.

Did someone forget to tick the relevant country checkbox at Google again?

[George_G]

For anyone it might concern, since 17 Dec 2019 google has been penalizing sites algorithmically. It has happened in mid January too and apparently now. You can loose pretty much all of your traffic in a few days. I have been looking in quite a few of those.

Some had bad issues like poor links, pbns, 301 redirects, build on expired domains etc. Some however, were totally whitehat, with no obvious technical seo issues, good content and naural links.

If you are following Jhon Mu on twitter, you have probably seen some of those and people asking if it is a bug. Jhon answered it is how the algo sees their sites now and it is not a bug.

So, yea, after penguin, i think this is the biggest wave of algo penalties I have seen. And google said not long ago they will not penalize, but rather ignore bad links.

Anybody else was looking into this?

[BushyTop]

Seen massive changes here. My observations are pretty brief. Links win.

[jediviper]

There is no pattern here...
One kw went up to 6th pos on the 28/1 (after the known core Update), then remained at results between 15-20 and since the 9/2 it jumped down to 64...
No logic behind so sudden and huge drops.

[ichthyous]

I've noticed massive drops in specific kw as well... From top ten down 50-98 places. Overall traffic seems to have shifted but no huge losses. If it's any consolation when terms suddenly drop off a cliff like that it tends to be temporary and they return to where they were. I wouldn't panic over a one or two day shake-up. If it lasts for days then it's a sign that you might be stuck with those results. My site still has barely recovered from the shake-up in early January. This is just the new normal, Google is unreliable now.

[RedBar]

Both UK and US SERPs moving around with noticeably the larger brands and real suppliers doing better.

The US SERPs are cleaner than the UK where too many US companies and social type fluff is dominating, for instance an important keyword phrase I rank in the USA on the first page, I am on the second page in the UK behind US companies I am ahead of in the US!

Overall though, holding my breath and crossing all fingers, the SERPs look better for MY widgets than they have done for many years ... Watch this all fall apart in the next few days!

[samwest]

Past 24 hours seeing higher traffic quality again. Higher traffic too. No apparent SERP moves. Interestingly, when I ran a annual report for sales going back 10 years, I see an upswing has been happening since 2016. Gee, I wonder why? Hoping the trend continues in 2020.

Looks like the bottom was hit in late 2015. It's a slow rise, but at this point, I'll take any positive move. New patterns appear to be emerging as AI evolves.

[ichthyous]

I've seen in SEMrush that my main competitors have all fallen dramatically, and that scares the pants off of me since they are very large companies who have ranked highly for years. One newcomer is steadily advancing for months now and with this current update is rising quickly day by day to reach the top. A similar thing happened to my site in Sept/Oct and I just kept rising until I pushed out my major competitors. This update is hitting my #4-#10 ranking terms hard...they're dropping in average position and so my traffic is dropping. #1-#3 has also been affected but not that much. Has anyone else seen this?

[mhansen]

Not seeing much in terms of ranking changes, but the serps in our world are now dominated by ads, Google widgets, etc. Our #1 organic position is so far lost on the page, it's no wonder nobody will find it.

Ad (Right side ads also)
Ad
Ad
Ad

"Featured Snippet" now contains 4 images (none of which link to the domain, but G images) on top of the snippet of text, along with clickable elements that allow the user to scroll through the featured snippet to narrow their answer.

People also asked (4 Q&A)
Popular products (4 products listed horizontally)
1st Organic
2nd organic
Interesting stories (4 across)
3rd org
4th org
Research [product] (4 sites linked)
5th org
6th
7th organic
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad

[glakes]

@mhansen

This update definitely looks like a cash grab by Google. Paid clicks doubled with this update though conversions remain poor, making an already poor ROI even worse. I'll keep my ads running for a bit longer, but I've had it and want out. With the money saved by not spending with Google, I can triple my Amazon ad budget and actually get more sales.

Google should keep a close eye on how many advertisers stop their campaigns or drastically cut their bids. Google simply doesn't have the traffic quality to justify forcing paid clicks to product pages. Google's SERPS, IMO, have become such a hot mess that I'm sure others are getting turned off with the ad spam and all the distractions. This might explain why I'm seeing more conversions from Bing and Yahoo. Real buyers are likely going elsewhere so they don't have to sift through Google's mess.

[edited by: glakes at 7:46 pm (utc) on Feb 10, 2020]

[StupidIntelligent]

@mhansen

In a time not so far away...

Page 1:
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad

Page 2:

1st Organic
2nd organic
Interesting stories (4 across)
3rd org
4th org
....

[mhansen]

The loss of organic in SERPS has been growing slowly over the last year or three... but this latest change is just, wow.

[TeresaD]

@glakes I dropped my ad spend to €3 a day, max ppc .012 and suprisingly I am averaging 8-10 conversions a week

[glakes]

@TeresaD

You and I are in similar situations as we saw organic conversions take a hit in November, and we both sell niche types of products. Like you, I have repeatedly dropped my Google ad spend to the point where I am now spending very little. It doesn't seem to matter how high or low I bid, Google just is not delivering conversions. As you eluded to previously, this may be related to Bert and impacting both paid and organic results since the lack of conversions is confined to Google only.

[mosxu]

0.012 is a number AI can’t even compute, the mission is to become 1 trillion company and you guys are not cooperating.

For .012 ads will not even be displayed to a new buyer, it will probably let it convert in organics

[BushyTop]

Seeing massive changes again today.

[TeresaD]

@mosxu I saw it more as a brand awareness spend as most of my competitors on shopping are high street names in the UK .

What I am seeing from it is many more hits to my about us, shipping and review page then a contact by email, phone or live chat so it is not what I originally planned but an affordable way of driving new and future sales.

The last 7 days 168 clicks and 13 conversions
Last 30 days 753 clicks and 45 conversions

[mosxu]

@TeresaD

High street stores are part of localisation strategy and they get the traffic first if a prediction for a local sale is made.

[TeresaD]

@mosxu they are in a different country with a different currency so that makes things a bit more complicated because (in my view) that should not be classed as a local sale

[GuillermoValls]

Translate it: [twitter.com...]

@mhansen The best message on this topic is yours (Msg#:4983197). Thanks for sharing it with us
Google has increased ads and widget visibility getting to reduce the visibility of organic results

More Ads: [google.com...]
Featured images: [google.com...]
Q&A: [google.com...]
Featured Fragment: [google.com...]

[NeapTide]

Reading these threads silently for past couple of months. I am seeing noticable drops in traffic since November. Seeing my website pushing down the serps slowly.
What i am suspecting is pile of dead backlinks pointing to my website. There are over 7000 all coming from dead websites or parked domain names.

Previously I ignored them thinking Google will handle it but i am suspecting after all their AI is not that smart. Now I have gathered majority of them, shoved them inside Disavow links file and uploaded using their disavow links tools.

I will see if it would help in near future or not. Some really jealous competitors might be behind this malicious practice of hurting my website with bad quality links from dead sites.

By the way those dead backlinks were only increasing in number all this time. The domain names are really #*$!ty and stupid some ends with extensions like com, info, xyz, ir, cn and so on.

Saw similar complains from other people as well in Google search community.

[seomotionz]

Its not SERP of search results rather than it is SERP of Ads. Pages are starting with atleast 6 ads on top and ending with another 3-4 ads (according to your query) at the bottom.

I don't know what is exactly Google is trying to do but if this stays like this. Then small businesses are ought to be destroyed.

Many are reporting that their rankings have gained positions but their traffic has remained the same. I am seeing some sites whose traffic has dropped around 30% since Sunday but they haven't gained or lost their positions.

[GuillermoValls]

@seomotionz Totally agree with you.

[NickMNS]

@GuillermoValls

More Ads: [google.com...]
Featured images: [google.com...]
Q&A: [google.com...]
Featured Fragment: [google.com...]

This is a great example how the same search for different users in different locations produce totally different results. I see exactly 2 ads on the first link, no ads anywhere else. But! I'm not in Spain, and not in area with a large Spanish speaking community.

[w_hebb]

We saw, in our sector, food and drink, according to SEMRush very high volatility over the last 48 hours almost a 10 on SEMRush's scale. Converting traffic seems to have been throttled over the last few days, number of conversions is within 5% of each other for the last five days. Too statistically consistent to be natural. As many others have remarked, traffic is there, but suddenly not traffic that converts. Beats me. Organics are converting at the same low rate as PPC.

Kind regards,
Bill

[NickMNS]

Too statistically consistent to be natural.

LOL, randomness never looks natural.

I think my post above speaks volumes, in two respects. First off, if you need to question anything, it is the accuracy of SEMRush, Too many people put far too much trust in a service that from all accounts cannot be providing accurate measures of anything. How does SEMRush account for the fact that two people in two different locations see entirely different results. The bottom line is, it doesn't and as such the results are statistically meaningless.

My post above and my previous post, a few pages earlier in this thread (the one about the weather), demonstrate that Google is detecting high traffic and high revenue potential queries and adapting the search results to them, This is not only being done on the basis of location but it appears to be happening in real-time based on other factors such as current events or search volume. This fact alone would explain low conversion rate. Google can detect through some proxy metric when a search query will generate buying interest, it then ramps up ad serving on that query, thus diverting buyers away from the organic results. Meanwhile, for queries with little buying intent, no or few ads appear and the users continue to come to the your website. But these user have no intent to buy. While this will most directly impact organic results, it should also negative impact ads. If under "normal" conditions Google shows one or two ads those ads probably perform well, but if you are 1 of 4 ads squeezed between shopping and "also asked" and "tweets" and "knowledge", the CTR and likely the conversion rate on those ads should be negatively impacted.

@seomotionz

Its not SERP of search results rather than it is SERP of Ads.

It should not be SERP but SEAP => Search Engine Ads Page

[glakes]

The biggest benefactor to Google's mess, in my industry, appears to be Amazon. My sales on Amazon are trending higher. And this is the problem Google has. The more Google tries to monetize product queries, by restricting choice, the more they drive their users to other search engines/marketplaces that provide options. Fewer buyers produces fewer conversions that will compel more advertisers to leave or at a minimum greatly reduce their bids/spending to reflect Google's abysmal traffic quality.

Of course the above assumes some of the changes going on now will stick. But the major turmoil may just be a ploy to scare advertisers into raising their spending to offset losses in conversions. Once enough money is made, one big rollback can occur.

Regardless of the reasons for the SERP mess, the real problem for consumers and businesses is that a handful of companies control the bulk of advertising and ecommerce.

[seomotionz]

@glakes Google is just trying to corner the market. And its effecting user behavior as well.

I know many people who just uses DDG or Bing to search, browse and buy. And this group is increasing in size everyday.

[universenet]

I know many people who just uses DDG or Bing to search, browse and buy. And this group is increasing in size everyday

DDG is more and more similar to google

favicon

recent news

and who can type duckduckgo..?
why they are not ddg or similar?

In start they have wrong name

[RedBar]

favicon

recent news

and who can type duckduckgo..?
why they are not ddg or similar?

They've had favicons for years, way before Google last month.

Don't people search for news?

Try [duck.com...] if you want it quicker.

One great DDG feature is their mobile browser, everyone's phone I have installed it on love it, especially the crap cleaning feature.