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...]

[iamlost]

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[NickMNS]

@iamlost
My first thought was "wah?, did your account get hacked?"

Unfortunately your post appears as the first post of the next page, requiring a step back to get the context.

It makes sense now....

[seowinning]

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[sk7411]

Did the GA bug resolve for you guys ? We are seeing an Elevated reporting in realtime numbers and we are not sure what to believe .

[StupidIntelligent]

Traffic bursts but ZERO conversions. Not even a cent.

[glakes]

@StupidIntelligent

Our conversions are substantially down today as well. Amazon is dead too, so I'm thinking shoppers are taking a breather or shopping for Coronavirus related items.

[RedBar]

Whoa, for a few hours this afternoon I've had global requests for assorted urls that were removed in 2015.

It's stopped now however something happened.

[universenet]

Our conversions are substantially down today as well. Amazon is dead too, so I'm thinking shoppers are taking a breather or shopping for Coronavirus related items.

it is like all world will be un quarantine soon
but they wiil have internet so is not so bad, no totaly isolation

[universenet]

[searchengineland.com ]

Google bans face mask ads globally due to misleading coronavirus claims

[devoo]

Real time Google Analytics is broken for almost a month now. It sometimes shows unreal numbers during the day but overall data seems to be correct.

[seomotionz]

GA remains broken. In the meantime, I am seeing way too much bot activity. Is another update coming this weekend? Or, its just another regular day to day activity by Google?

[mosxu]

Face masks are totally necessary at least not to spread the virus further but:

DeepMind used the latest version of its AlphaFold system (building on the protein folding work that appeared in Nature in January) to release structure predictions of several proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These structure predictions have not yet been experimentally verified, but the hope is that by accelerating their release they may contribute to the scientific community’s understanding of how the virus functions and experimental work in developing future treatments.

[MayankParmar]

Meh, GA is such a big mess.

[deriklogov]

I noticed traffic drop (-10%) across couple sites on March 12 (yesterday), ranking positions still the same, traffic USA, so no explanation.
Anyone else ?

[markseo]

This last 7 days I have seen more than ever changes in quality of traffic day to day. Rankings, as far as I can tell, are pretty much the same (though I concede that its impossible to know what others are seeing due to personalisation of serps) but the conversions jump up and down wildly. This now seems to simply be the norm - not an outlier week once every couple of months but instead just every day. No way to predict what will come next. Maybe its the run-up to another core update ... they have landed mid March in the past.

[devoo]

Here's an interesting experiment. Today I searched for "Фейд Ин" on Google which is "fade in" written in Cyrillic alphabet to see if the term is used that way. Not a single result contains the words I typed in! Google translates the words I used and searches for "fade in" instead. Since I'm not Russian, it thinks searching for "fade in" is better for me! This is ridiculous haha :)

On the other hand, Bing shows me results about the exact phrase I typed in.

Edit: Cyrillic letters can't be displayed on the forum.

[BushyTop]

We're seeing GA issues too. Real-Time is lower for us and the geo-locations is all over the place. Our average rank has gone way down. Pages without links or within competitive verticles seem to have been hit. Conversations seem okay tho

[samwest]

Traffic is gone. It's a ghost town. Rest assured, Google will optimize their profits no matter what. If people start tightening their belts and spending less, expect Google to move in to maximize their profits at our expense, just like they've done for the past decade....but more.

In my niche, I see "interesting finds" (which all point to add filled pages) and lots of pinterest back on top again. I can definitely see how they are pushing their interests to the front.

[StupidIntelligent]

Coronavirus seems to be making its way into the minds of people. I think until this settles down in a few months, life is going to be tough.

I'm also willing to bet, Google might delay or cancel large core updates - so that in case of a mishap, the web ecosystem doesn't go down with it - since most of their staff has now been ordered to stay indoors.

[mosxu]

It means even less buyers searching because of this virus but the machine has two options 1. not sell the buyer traffic or 2. sell it at a higher price to us.

2. Starts with a lot of non converting traffic to make us think competitors have put their bids up.

[glakes]

so that in case of a mishap, the web ecosystem doesn't go down with it

I don't think Google cares about anything other than Google.

[samwest]

I'm also willing to bet, Google might delay or cancel large core updates - so that in case of a mishap, the web ecosystem doesn't go down with it - since most of their staff has now been ordered to stay indoors.

With little direct supervision, the AI may decide to go all out and take it all. After all, it's coronavirus proof.

[deriklogov]

Today doesnt look better than yesterday, same -15 % down compare to last week. Something definitely going on with traffic

[mhansen]

With little direct supervision, the AI may decide to go all out and take it all.

I'm sure the AI has some functionality to measure CTR on Google SERP's, based on who is getting the money from the click. If it's an ad, great! +2
If it's a click that leads the visitor to another one of those Google widget landing pages, great! +1
Youtube +1
Carousel +1
etc...

If it leads off a Google owned property, this is not met with good results, -1, and the AI goes right back to learning how to widgetize that specific area of the organic results, to incentivize more Google +1 widget property clicks.

In my market, we have more exposure than ever before. More #1 organic results, more featured snippets, more of just about everything, except visitors. I know SEMR data is not a perfect metric to measure by, however, we are 65% up in KW's, and more than 180% up in "estimated traffic", year over year. Our "Top 3" exposure is up by more than 75% YOY.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that these subtle changes Google makes every week in the widgets within search results, are scavenging as much organic traffic as they can find ways to do.

Such is the life of a web guy right now... and although we get plenty of traffic from outside sources, it's hard to swallow these constant and obvious manipulations without losing a bit of respect for Google.

[Cralamarre]

This coronavirus is certainly making it difficult to analyze traffic problems. My site's traffic was down nearly 10 percent yesterday and even more today. But since my site is education-based and most of my traffic comes from schools, all of the school closings due to the coronavirus (especially in the US) would explain the traffic drop. Of course, it could be a Google update, but the school closings are the more likely culprit.

Problem is, most schools are being closed for the remainder of March and won't re-open until April. So... yay.

[NickMNS]

@Cralamarre, I agree it is definitely difficult to infer anything given the Covid19 uncertainty.

But, I am seeing a similar pattern, down 10% yesterday, down more today and @Deriklogov was reporting similar. Could this be the start of the Google's annual March update?

[deriklogov]

I dont think its update related for 2 reasons:

1) I do track my keywords and see nothing happening
2) Bings traffic same 10% down yesterday and %15-20 today

I dont think both engines will run update at the same day.

[Cralamarre]

@NickMNS, I hope not. My site has not been affected by a Google update in 3 years. It could just be that the coronavirus panic is affecting web traffic in general.

Plus from what I've read on SERoundtable, the update trackers have been mostly quiet this week. Again, it seems more likely that the coronavirus panic is causing the traffic drops.

Even Disneyland is now closed. The world is becoming a ghost town.

[HereWeGo123]

Hi - is anyone still noticing any glitches/delayed reporting in Analytics today?

[swright]

I think the virus is having a bigger and bigger impact. You can't expect the traffic for most websites to not be affected. Events are being cancelled, schools are being closed, businesses experience drops in sales and are thinking of putting people on indefinite leave, you have some big cities under quarantine, you have travel restrictions, etc. All this is highly disruptive to people's lives. If there are lots of people who are concerned about getting infected, buying food with the buying panic in some cities, being put on indefinite leave at their jobs, attending to kids who are not in school, you should expect these people to change their behavior online as well as offline. In such instances, people put more focus on following the news and thinking how they are going to pay for their mortgage, rent, food and medicine given the economic disruption that becomes more perceptible with each day and is starting to affect people's jobs. All non-essential purchases are scaled back as is the online browsing associated with them. We can expect some businesses to do better than others, but for most the trend is expected to be downwards.

Now I don't know how much changes in Google SERP's play into the changes we are seeing as this is tough to tease out given the current situation, but I'll offer my observations:

- My rankings are steady, even increasing, based on trackers, with the usual fluctuations, yet I'm seeing similar 10-15% drops as other people who reported the same in this thread. This trend started towards the end of February and accelerated after the beginning of March - around the time the situation in Europe and the US started to worsen.
- This trend is observable not only for Google but also for traffic from Bing and Yahoo.

The above leads me to believe that whatever the fluctuations due to what Google is doing on their end, the virus is playing a huge part in these traffic drops. It is affecting offline life big time, why wouldn't we expect the same online?