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...]

[mhansen]

Today in Google SERPs, I saw something for the first time and to be honest it's rather alarming. The result page for a product search, showed a "Top 16 Reviewed" products of the type I searched for. The layout on desktop was:

Shopping Carousel (side scroll)
Ad
Ad
Top 16 Reviewed [Product Type & roughly 600 pixels tall with a horizontal scroller)
First Organic
People Also Asked with 5 questions
Organic 2
Organic 3
Map
Local Listing that serves what the product makes
Local Listing that serves what the product makes
Local Listing that serves what the product makes
A few more organic

I've never seen the "Top 16 Reviewed" widget like this and do quite a bit of product searching, but it's clear G is using schema data to show this and keep the viewers within the garden walls of G properties. All of the Bold and top links led to another Google Shopping page, not the actual website with the reviews or products. Each product contained a thumbnail image (linked to Google shopping) as well as 3 text links. The top text link... you guessed it, goes to Google shopping results. The 2nd link went to a dead-end (server not found) ecom site and the third to a product review site.

I used a private browser window... and the results were the same whether the product type was singular or pluralized.

Is this new, or has it been around for awhile?

[MayankParmar]

@seomotionz I removed links and nofollow links in all articles tagged with a category.

[steffanlv]

@MayankParmar It can take months. Beside what actions did you have taken?

No, it's supposed to not take months. Numerous times i've been in similar situation. Reaching out to John Mueller or another Google hack/rep on social works sometimes as does contacting your Google 'rep' assuming you have a decent spend with Google monthly. Of course, this is ignoring the 'tried and tested' indexing methods/services that are about.

[RedBar]

Just why does Google love regurgitated, plagiarised, extremely poorly written WordPress pages published by complete and utter amateurs?

Its UK SERPs is getting beyond more than a joke and, btw, I would love to know how in supposedly localised SERPs I am seeing Qatari sites that do not even rank in their own country?

[seowinning]

Alphabet is winning in stock market while you are complaining about results. Google profits is doing good, quality isn't a factor. Complaining here in the forum won't change what google is doing. Again, if it's good for stock market, they will keep going. GG google.

[universenet]

Is interesting how fast now people recognize new idea of searching, no important quality, no important update panda randa danda dundo i other anymals, things are important, money is important, even one dad did teach son and said "My son, money is not all in the world because still exist diamonds, gold, rubin's, sapphires, properties" So ok, lets go take it

[samwest]

Google profits are incredible thanks to their ability to direct traffic exactly where they want it. While It may look like chaos, they are in complete control. Totally throttled again today.

[universenet]

samwest, they do not have anything for losing, no real competition yet

[samwest]

Pulu see bagumba [youtu.be...]

[ichthyous]

It has been an incredibly slow start to the year. Google screwed my traffic real good in early January and it's never really been the same since then. The traffic only shows a 9% drop overall, or 19% compared to last year this time. But somehow they've managed to make the actual business vanish completely. To me this feels like we are already in a recession, and I'm convinced that in June or July it will be announced that we are in one. The virus is going to make it much worse. I don't think that this is all just due to Google's tricks. I sell high priced items that are definitely sensitive to economic downturn though. If people aren't feeling confident the sales just stop.

[seomotionz]

No, it's supposed to not take months.

@steffanlv I didn't say that it should or it will take months. I said it can take months. Besides removing selective links and making some of the links no-follow, takes time. Even if you did contact someone.

[Athedian]

Thanks a lot, Google. You've effectively sent a crap load of irrelevant traffic to my site for the sole purpose of making your revenue quota to satisfy the new CEO and shareholders. Conversions tanked and irrelevant clicks on the ads increased significantly. What a shady company.

[seomotionz]

@samwest Today it is loss of traffic. I don't what happened but after noon many sites showed very steep fall, specially in tech news & eCommerce. And I am not blaming this on Google because this has happened due to sudden disappearance in direct traffic.

[samwest]

@seomotionz - sometimes we see traffic loss simply due to network or server data center issues. Those I don't blame those on Google of course, but what I'm seeing this month appears to be related to traffic shaping and user behavior along with a subtle longer term throttle pattern. This is proven by both GA and more honestly by Matomo data. The more work we do, the less results we see...sometimes even a negative effect. The effort of diminishing returns continues...yet the static non-authoritative, ad filled content farms remain rock solid in their positions.

[seomotionz]

@samwest I bet Amazon's sales are only increasing.

[glakes]

I bet Amazon's sales are only increasing.

My Amazon sales have been rising week over week. This pay period is looking like a 15% increase in sales.

For products in my industry, Google's organic SERPS for short and medium tail keywords are dominated by Amazon. In addition to organic domain crowding, Amazon has product ads and text ads running. Most of what is above the fold is just Amazon, except for a few paid shopping ads mixed in with Amazon's. But even in the shopping ad block, Amazon is always first. LOL

It's not worth wasting time on SEO or money bidding on ads when it's clear Google wants to limit their user's product choices to only those products sold on Amazon. This oligopoly (Amazon and Google) needs to be broken up for small businesses to have a chance...

[Martin Ice Web]

Last year in summer i decided that all changes we made did not result in better performance and will not result in better performance. So I put all I the hints that are around about pushing a website aside and focused on what i realy knew. Especially some statements that Matt Cutts wrote years ago. I decided to put my website upside down. And saw that my site matched the things Matt Cutts said.
It took about 3 month to get things right. In this time i saw some ups but more downs.
Until this January we got a boost come along with more conversions. We saw a drop in the beginning of february for about 10 days but it went back to "normal".

We still see strange days with no conversions all day long ( except of small runs ) but this days are more rare than in the past where good days were rare.
We still notice when there is an update going on but it seems that this updates do not effect us this hard any more.

But over all we see a good user interaction and a steady flow of conversions.

brand searches are still very low to not existing within google but we see a take-away effect.

[seomotionz]

@glakes I am happy for your if your sales is rising.

Anyway, as I said earlier today direct traffic fell today. But now it has came to my attention that organic traffic has also fallen. Not by big margin but the fall is worrying me. Why? Some everlasting pages which gets traffic everyday as they rank in the first pages have gone to the second page. As these page's target not much of a crowd so a small fall also causes major traffic drop. Its like Google is specifically targeting long tail kw's and hitting them out of the SERP's.

[samwest]

I bet Amazon's sales are only increasing.

Very likely yes. This is because Amazon is it's own search engine and deprecates the use of Google entirely.
I have never once searched Google to find something on Amazon, if fact, I completely avoid clicking on any Amazon links in Google because there is a 90% chance it's just an affiliate troll. I've said it a million times...they moved your cheese. Regardless, Google SERPs should still produce for digital goods...and it does, sometimes, when they allow it, but it's nowhere as reliable as years ago. Nowhere. So they will eventually lose that ground to some other "fair play" platform of the future....I hope.

[StupidIntelligent]

Irrelevant traffic tsunamis. People are looking for sanitizers and Google is sending them to pages about trees.

[glakes]

Irrelevant traffic tsunamis.

+1 in agreement. It's amazing how Google's already bad traffic gets worse and worse by the day.

[mosxu]

@glakes

On product titles maybe put “15% Cheaper than Amazon”

Probably will make no difference because the algorithm knows how many clicks a profiled buyer makes towards a purchase and your site probably shows only after that number of clicks!

See how fair personalisation is?

[glakes]

<snip>
@ mosxu

It might take more than a title change to get Google's attention. Maybe if I disabled the shopping cart on my website and replaced the add to cart button with affiliate links to my products on Amazon I would get some love from Google. Sadly, I don't think there is much I can do that would make a difference.

[edited by: goodroi at 2:11 pm (utc) on Mar 6, 2020]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to stay on topic :) [/edit]

[goodroi]

This thread is for discussing Google Updates and SERP changes. Please be careful to stay on-topic :)

[Rndm]

Wrong thread

[cheegum]

Another update rolling out, exactly like the 9 NOV Update. Sensors are silent. Looking at various sites on ahrefs, i am noticing huge drops and gains.

[sk7411]

True, seems like something is moving , seeing gains but not exactly gains , we dropped around last week .

[seomotionz]

Another update rolling out, exactly like the 9 NOV Update. Sensors are silent. Looking at various sites on ahrefs, i am noticing huge drops and gains.

@cheegum Probably another "regular" updates that Google does all the time.

[derflotr]

I am seeing a lot of FAQ schema mark'd up results today previewing only 2 questions rather than the regular 3 - much more frequently than usual.

[glakes]

Another update rolling out, exactly like the 9 NOV Update.

Yippeee! That's the update that almost killed off all the converting traffic. What will this update do, put converting Google traffic even deeper in the grave?

Edit:

The November 9 update is believed to be related to Bert. Remember Bert was trained from Wikipedia, and last time I looked Wikipedia would be a poor source of training anything about shopping online/product purchases. Anyway, might this this be a Bert update some are witnessing?