Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2020

[Shepherd]

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System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4982115.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 12:19 pm on Mar 1, 2020 (utc -5)

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If you're in ecommerce this twitter thread is a good read, albeit a bit scary.

[twitter.com...]

[universenet]

Google appears to be having a massive meltdown right now... Hangouts, analytics, gmail, even search, all showing 500 and 502 errors.

Maybe they have some upgrade in software ?

[UpOnOne]

I am also seeing a ton of incorrect dates in the SERPS for forum and blog posts. SERP may indicate Dec 16, 2019, but the post is from 2008.

[samwest]

Yep, lots of Google services down today, see: [google.com...]
Seems working at home has brought Gorg to it's knees.

[sk7411]

Seeing a -20% decrease in Traffic past 4-5 hours, Probably they never stop making updates. :(

[mosxu]

AI is a bit confused with regards to quota distribution, the hours orders occur makes little sense.
It is not natural people don’t behave like that.

[RedBar]

Seeing a -20% decrease in Traffic past 4-5 hours, Probably they never stop making updates.

That's nothing, I now have several 20+ year old sites at -95% for several days now and I expect it to continue.

*DING* - Yes, they never stop making updates, neither do I:-)

[glakes]

AI is a bit confused with regards to quota distribution, the hours orders occur makes little sense.

Yesterday I saw a 30% drop in organic traffic and a whopping 80% increase in Google fAds paid clicks. The drop in organic traffic appears to have been the start of another update. Shuffling going on today and numerous SERP trackers are picking up on this volatility. I might have to disable ads to prevent Google's money grab attempt since they are not delivering conversions.

Crisis or no crisis, the blood suckers in the Plex will drain as many small businesses out of existence as they can. Google is still heavily promoting Chinese made/seller products shipped by Amazon even though Amazon has posted delivery times of 30 days.

[samwest]

Traffic is up, but in strange ON/OFF regional clusters within the US.

[ichthyous]

Keep in mind that FB is reporting a big drop in paid ads as businesses shut down campaigns. Why pay when nobody is buying anything? Only Amazon is thriving now. I'm sure Google is also getting hammered on the ad revenue as smaller sized businesses decide that advertising in this climate is a total waste. Hence, Google will accelerate pushing organic serps down while pushing ads even harder. I'm seeing a slow gradual daily decline in visibility, and my site is about 50% off normal traffic levels, although GSC shows a very slow uptick in clicks.

I'm even dropping SEMrush service... Why pay so much just to track an inevitable decline and fight to stay at top for nobody to buy anything? I'm not beating this dead horse anymore. As I've said numerous times on here, I would gladly pay Google for ads if they had proven to be effective in delivering sales in the past. They never were, it was money down the drain. I haven't tried recently, and I won't. Right now in my line of business nobody is shopping for anything, it's far worse than the 2008 recession and no end in sight for now. Paying for ads now would be futile.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:29 pm (utc) on Mar 27, 2020]

[mosxu]

“ whopping 80% increase in Google fAds paid clicks “

AI will have to compute like this: show x website ads only to users who click on ads but ignore organic listings of course excluding already visitors to x website ...

[Cralamarre]

Seeing a nice 15% bump in traffic today compared to the same day last week. Yesterday's traffic was up 10%. Overall, traffic is still down 20% from pre-pandemic days but it is not the disaster I was expecting. At least not yet.

[glakes]

I'm even dropping SEMrush service... Why pay so much just to track an inevitable decline and fight to stay at top for nobody to buy anything?

I feel about the same way in regards to everything with Google including paid tools, ads and organic SEO. Well before the coronavirus, Google kicked small businesses between the legs to favor big corps. Amazon dominates Google's organic SERPS, even at a time when the estimated delivery date on many in-stock Amazon fulfilled products is up to a month later.

As far as paying for services to track keyword positions, I feel it's kinda useless when a #1 organic listing is often well beneath the fold and producing very little traffic. In my industry, Amazon is at the top and often crowded with the top 1, 2 and 3 organic positions.

[BoredMeteor]

Yeah, I've grown tired of monitoring keywords and watching stats, myself, when it doesn't seem to amount to much these days. I've also found myself falling into a loop of doing everything for the sake of Google, and that just...sucks, and you don't get much for it.

In my last-ditch effort to regain sanity, I'm just going back to basics. There was a time long ago when I didn't pay so much attention to search engines, anyway. We'll see how it works out.

That said, I've actually seen a slight (slight) improvement over the past week...but I think the real fun is only just beginning...

[RedBar]

Methinks the world has given up most interests except maybe for films and box sets!

[samwest]

After a record day this year...conversions shut right off on Saturday. Algo has to be sure you dont get too successful. Clamped again.

Every year for 20 years, between week 12 and 15 sees a dramatic traffic and conversion drop, FNFAR. This year should be the exception...but it wont.

[EditorialGuy]

Dept. of Small Blessings:

Our travel information site has had a slight uptick in the last couple of days. Now we're down a mere 80.5 percent from the equivalent day last year, compared to our low point of -84.1 percent two days ago!

(And no, the drop has nothing to do with Google, unless Google invented the coronavirus.)

[RedBar]

unless Google invented the coronavirus

I feel sure there'll be a connection somewhere:-)

Obviously your traffic fall is understandable however I'm surprised by that much, obviously not a lot of day-dreaming and escapism is going on?

Meanwhile I'm surprised on our hotel site how many are checking-out the cancelled live music pages!

[EditorialGuy]

Obviously your traffic fall is understandable however I'm surprised by that much, obviously not a lot of day-dreaming and escapism is going on?

Our most popular destination content is for countries that are locked down, with people dying in prodigious numbers. That doesn't help. :-)

[Cralamarre]

Continuing to see a jump in traffic over the past few days to my education-based site. In fact, traffic this weekend has been better than weekends prior to the virus pandemic. Hoping it keeps up.

[anzsub30]

@Cralamarre I have Tech site (programming tutorials) and seeing the same trends. Last weekend traffic was up around 15% and this weekend even further (weekend traffic better than before pandemic days).
However, weekdays traffic remained less than prior to pandemic days (around -20%).

IMO, the traffic is up during weekends as mentally there is less distinction between weekdays and weekends as people started working from home. I see it less or not related to Google SERPs change but people's behavior.

[Cralamarre]

@anzsub30, I agree that the jump in traffic is from people's behavior and not from any updates or SERP changes. I know from having worked from home for 15 years that the distinction between weekdays and weekends disappears as time goes on.

But even my weekday traffic has been showing signs of improvement. For example, traffic last Thursday was down 13% compared to the start of the month (pre-pandemic). But the week before, it was down 24%. So things do seem to be improving, at least in the education niche.

[HereWeGo123]

Saw a HUGE spike in crawling stats in GSC on 3/26 & 3/27. Biggest spike since 1/10/2020 (at least on our end). Is anyone seeing something similar with heir crawl stats?

[sk7411]

Saw a HUGE spike in crawling stats in GSC on 3/26 & 3/27. Biggest spike since 1/10/2020 (at least on our end). Is anyone seeing something similar with heir crawl stats?

Yes indeed and we are already affected since last friday . Massive crawling and ranking fluctuations have some correlations among them although google kind of denies it which is obvious.

[glakes]

Yes indeed and we are already affected since last friday

Agreed. Seeing flux today as well which is being picked up in SERP trackers.

Amazon appears to be cemented at the top of Google's SERPs, often with estimated delivery days of 5-30 days on many products. To Google, small businesses don't exist unless in ads.

[samwest]

SERPs are a total roulette wheel...changing every day...every HOUR in fact. Appears as a struggle to maximize dying ad revenue.

[RedBar]

Definitely a big shuffle in my widget world with interesting results for my #1 Keyword1keyword2keyword3 search.

USA Google:

1. A site with only ONE image on the page, that's it!

2. USA #1 importer / wholesaler, good result.

3. Home Depot, TWO images and very brief description, garbage!

The remainder are the regulars shuffled around, some reasonable pages, most extremely thin.

UK Google

1. USA #1 importer / wholesaler, good result HOWEVER does not supply anywhere outside the USA!

All other USA sites have been removed from the first page at long last and actually only a couple of them in the top 30. They, too, do not supply outside the USA.

Remainder are mostly UK sites of varying quality however #6 is such a blatant WP pagiarisiation of my information that it's an utter farce.

My question has to be just why does a site with one image rank #1 in the USA, it's not even a decent image, this is 20 year old ranking results, period.

[glakes]

Home Depot, TWO images and very brief description, garbage!

Home Depot ads are appearing too and some I checked are out of stock. Same applies for some Amazon products. The out of stock condition spans days, so it's not like they just went out of stock. The same applies for organic product listings too - many big corps ranking at the top, often with domain crowding, yet the items aren't available for purchase. What a poor user experience.

So much for Google, and Bing for that matter, ensuring the product is indeed available. Or is it that these big national and multi-national companies are given a free pass by the search engines? These big corps must be rolling in so much money they don't need to disable out of stock ads. Meanwhile us small businesses must watch every dime.

[devoo]

I'm seeing a gradual increase in traffic since the last Friday but still far from the numbers before January.

[Cralamarre]

Same here. Traffic is up 20% today compared to last Monday, but still down from the beginning of the month.

[samwest]

Traffic jumping late in the day, but all zombies all day, yet yesterday was conversions galore. They really know how to flip the switch on..and mostly OFF.
Adsense proves that traffic today is all aimed at ads, not sales conversions.