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...]

[seowinning]

Some results is like that
AD
AD
AD
AD
1 - Youtube
2 - Youtube
3 - Youtube
4 - Youtube
5 - Youtube
6 - Books Google
7 - Books Google
8 - Random Site
9 - Books Google
10 - Books Google
AD
AD
AD
AD

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Traffic keeps having a really strange patterns. I really want the situation with C.virus would stop. At least, the economic should back to work again. I have a reason to believe that the US society could give all world the solution on how to KEEP WORKING in the situation related to the virus. US is the most developed society from the bussiness point of view, so I trully hope that folks from America will find a solution on how to work in these circumstances very quickly and share it with the rest of the world.

[glakes]

Zombies...all Zombies.

I really cranked up the Google Ads budget for the weekend. The results:

Google Ads: 1.01% Conversion Rate
Google Organic: .62%
Google Shopping Actions: 0%

My site performs (converts) quite well with other search engines, referral traffic, social, etc. Google is hands down the worst performer in converting traffic. Google's excessive Amazon heavy results, for product queries, leaves little to no room for anything else. Along with all the other distracting garbage Google has in the SERPS, Google simply is not delivering a quality service for advertisers. On the other hand, my Amazon sales over the weekend rocked with pending orders still rolling in this morning.

I'm about ready to dump what's left of the stale Google Kool-Aid down the drain. All the crap Google released since October has done nothing but negatively impacted conversions while at the same time substantially driving up costs. Enough is enough. If AI, Bert, etc. were designed to improve search, webmasters would be the first to see it in improved traffic quality. Instead, Google's traffic quality continues to get worse and worse. It's clear to me the only thing Google wants to improve is their profits.

[RedBar]

Some results is like that
6 - Books Google

Can someone explain to me why Books Google has so much importance when the book itself has absolutely zero to do with the search term?

Do people buy books randomly from Google like this?

Will my butcher soon be offering me washing powder to go with my sausages?

[glakes]

Some results is like that

Can someone explain to me why Books Google has so much importance when the book itself has absolutely zero to do with the search term?

I haven't seen Google Books in any of my queries (yet). Can someone suggest some queries that produce such results?

[universenet]

Can someone explain to me why Books Google has so much importance when the book itself has absolutely zero to do with the search term?

Do people buy books randomly from Google like this?

This is just for make loop that visits will not go to other websites, so all stay to google
Ideal world for google will be world without any other website, they crawling websites slow or not crawling, they exclude pages from google search, they removing crawled pages from search console, all this not because website is good or bad, just because they do not need it anymore, they are busy with ads

[BCNorth]

I am seeing some oddities with rank reporting. For local based sites lots of rankings show WAY down, yet manual searches, checks using other software, and even Google Analytics data all appear perfectly normal.

The way the rank reporting is showing drops, the traffic should be crashing, but it is not. Wondering if API stuff changed or something? I typically look at traffic, not rank reporting results anyways, but still concerning to see them, but they make no sense...

[Shepherd]

I haven't seen Google Books in any of my queries (yet).

One would generally see these results deep in the SERPs, for competitive terms page 10 and beyond, for more obscure terms one might see them on the first page.

This has been something for some time now. My guess is they use these results to try and better understand searcher intent.

[RedBar]

I haven't seen Google Books in any of my queries (yet).

I see it on a regular basis when I know that there are thousands of valid sites for the query.

I actually saw books last week in positions 5-10 of the first page, farcical.

[glakes]

Thanks @Shepherd and @RedBar

I don't see books in my industry, which is mostly industrial types of products. Regardless, it's interesting to hear of SERPS filled with book listings. As @universenet noted, might be another brick in Google's walled garden.

[Shepherd]

SERPS filled with book listings

To be clear, these listings are from books.google.com, scans of books and the scanned pages listed in the SERPs generally always contain the [keyword].

For example (hopefully generic enough) a search for Dower Rights, starting on page 18 of the SERPs shows books listings.
I think google, using these scanned pages and the context in those pages to help determine searcher intent matching with keywords...

[seowinning]

Does anyone believe that there is some kind of bug in PR?

[universenet]

[cnet.com ]

this is one of news what describe how internet is changing and google is changing
No important much PR and similar things , google search sometimes working in random mood
All is changed and will no back only maybe with some other search engine

[Athedian]

Keywords dropped, crap load of irrelevant traffic, no conversions, AHREF tool showing rank increase but that doesn't mean anything if not a single conversion appeared. What a disappointing 2020.

[BushyTop]

Anyone seeing changes to today, I've seen a big drop to my pages without links

[MayankParmar]

India is celebrating Holi. Traffic might drop for some of you.

[seomotionz]

India is celebrating Holi. Traffic might drop for some of you.

I decleared it yesterday morning saying National Holiday.

[BushyTop]

Not for us... won't affect us - and I'm specifically talking about rank only. Not traffic.

[ichthyous]

My visibility is up in both desktop and mobile according to SEMrush, but traffic is lower and there are **ZERO** calls or emails coming in. It's been this way for ten days now, and it's been slowing down for two months. Either coronavirus is having an immediate and shocking impact on all business or Google has very effectively killed of my business completely. Still not sure, but I think it's a combination of the two.

[jmorgan]

Is Holi over? Or they still celebrating it in India?

[sk7411]

We are seeing an uptick in Indian traffic despite of holi . May be due to the two day celebration probably. We can conclude tomorrow what’s actually going on .

[seomotionz]

Is Holi over? Or they still celebrating it in India?

@jmorgan Yup, over.

[jmorgan]

@semomotionz Ok, thanks. My traffic is noticeably lower this week. Not really sure why. Was there an update?

Edit: Nevermind, just realized many colleges have started spring break, not to mention many other government enforced closures due to CV.

[pavf6]

Noticing a major GA issue. Traffic Drops 70% and spikes back to 120%.

Anyone else facing similar issue?

[rbrtrbrt]

@pavf6: Yes, same issue

[MayankParmar]

@pavf6 Yes, same.

- Stats are delayed.
- Abnormal real-time.

[seomotionz]

Apparently GA has some weird bug since yesterday or Monday. Sometimes even though there is real visitor on a site present, still real-time stats is showing nothing. And sometimes the total number of visitors are showing wrong. I have confirmed it with other traffic stat services.

[pavf6]

When you refresh in the Real-Time tab. It shows "Server Not Responding" for a second and then displays the data.

[RareBit]

a good example of the issues on Google search at the moment - I am searching for product information, specifically regarding the advantages of buying a white product...and all the results are for the advantages of a black product. Utterly useless!

edit: If a search engine is unable to distinguish between colours - then I think its time to switch it off and start again!

[glakes]

If a search engine is unable to distinguish between colours - then I think its time to switch it off and start again!

From Google (see [blog.google...] ):

Last year, we introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or as we call it--BERT, for short.

So that’s a lot of technical details, but what does it all mean for you? Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information.

IMO, Bert is incapable of understanding even simple queries. To overcome this obstacle, humankind must be retrained to speak and write binary. In the spirit of that effort, I say this to Google:

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