Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2020

[michaeldhayes]

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System: The following 6 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4986200.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 6:28 am on Apr 1, 2020 (PDT -8)

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Not aimed at anyone in particular, but I've noticed this thread is littered with people complaining about not getting traffic.

It makes the whole thread rather painful to read through.

SEO is about competing. It's not about complaining. If you can't compete, find a niche where you can. Screaming into the ether and lobbying for some sort of cosmic justice for small businesses is not going to get your anywhere, in life or with google.

We don't negotiate with google for a fairer playing field. They are the playing field. So find an area where you can win, and exploit it.

In more pertinent and less rant-y news: I'm seeing +20%, +20%, and +10% week over week. Tech and industrial. Still think it's COVID related, but with all the volatility indexes going crazy, I'm starting to lean toward update. However that's what I thought last week also, so who knows.

[mosxu]

I see no ads and no organics, only locals at the top of search but all locals are closed due to lockdown.

AI has nothing to sell or user experience is not that important?

[shadowlight]

SEO is about competing. It's not about complaining.

Thats just it though. Google are making it almost impossible to compete organically and that is one big reason why people are complaining.

PPC ads on google does not provide a good ROI either.

I have an authority site that appears in top results for competitive terms, yet traffic and conversions have nose dived.

Top results dont even provide a decent amount of traffic & conversions anymore.

There is so much behind the scenes manipulation of traffic going on its unbelievable.

I've seen some of you mention this in the past, but this is the first time I've seen it, myself: Four ads at the top of a mobile search result. That's more or less the whole screen. Have to scroll down to see ANY organic results, but then you immediately run into one of their "interesting finds" boxes, and more ads at the bottom.

Four ads at the top has been the norm for a while in my niche.

A lot of competitive search terms in my niche have 4 ads at the top, followed by the first organic then 'top stories' then 'people also ask' then a big wikipedia info box with pictures then 'videos' then 'people also search for'.......its ridiculous.

A few times today when ive checked the serps 'top stories' have actually appeared below the ads and before the first organic result. Its the first time ive seen this.

The whole worlds in turmoil at the moment with covid 19, businesses are closed, struggling and going into administration, people are losing their jobs and livlihoods. There will be a hell of a lot of busineeses no longer paying for google ads but i would bet money on the fact that googles income from ads isnt massively affected because they are just pushing ads and funnelling traffic towards ads even more aggressively than normal.

[glakes]

And every time we vote for a change there is no change really

It's very similar to Google's algo updates - a stacked deck cut at the right spot then dished out. Not much changes except for Amazon having 3 listings at the top, Google gives them two organic listings followed by Walmart. Next algo update occurs and it reverts.

Just today I logged onto Amazon and noticed they are padding the maximum estimated delivery date on all seller fulfilled items in the marketplace by 10 days. This was obviously done to deceive consumers and compel them to purchase and wait for products fulfilled by Amazon when merchant fulfilled items are being delivered much quicker.

Even in a time of national crisis, Amazon like Google is free to deceive consumers and screw domestic small businesses for their own gain.

[Martin Ice Web]

Complete disaster, seachring for apples, google returns pears.

[glakes]

Some quick Google stats for the last couple of days:

4/6/2020 Conversion Rates
Organic:.59%
PPC: 3.03%

4/7/2020 Conversion Rates (so far)
Organic: 2.33%
PPC: 7.14%

What I think is happening is shoppers are seeking us and our products outside of Amazon. As mentioned previously, Amazon is padding the maximum delivery date by ten days on seller fulfilled orders. Amazon is obviously doing this to make it appear merchant fulfilled orders are experiencing the same delivery problems as Amazon. Total lies it is. Our shipments are not only arriving on time, but often a day sooner.

Even though my little small business doesn't have robots in the warehouse and get all the tax abatements/incentives as Amazon, we do a really good job. Maybe local, state and the Federal Government should take away Amazon's tax abatements/incentives and give them to small businesses instead. I'll take the discounts they get on utilities too.

Considering Amazon is lying to consumers, on a huge scale, why doesn't Google deindex them or at least severely demote them in the SERPS? I'll tell you why. Google's quality raters target small businesses for destruction when huge companies like Amazon can lie to consumers, steer product reviews to Chinese made products fulfilled by Amazon, etc. Google's policies don't apply to big multi-national companies at all.

I can only hope Amazon customers receiving our shipments up to two weeks sooner then Amazon's estimate will question the integrity of Amazon and choose to use a search engine to find products next time...

[mosxu]

“What I think is happening is shoppers are seeking us and our products outside of Amazon”

It sounds like personalisation at work, previously buyers were seeing amazon ads / rankings and only if they did not convert at Amazon and searched again ads from glakes or maybe some rankings showed.

The good news is if amazon goes bust you are next in line preferred by Al but 7.14% conversion rate is a crime. AI’s formula will probably not work if it would allow all buyers to see your site.

[StupidIntelligent]

Observing changes starting a few hours ago. Am I alone or others seeing the same?

[RedBar]

Not seeing anything worth mentioning at the moment but one never knows!

I saw a very interesting Alexa ranking (bear with me) for the USA's largest widget importer / wholesaler in my industry, it has / had a $1+ Billion turnover therefore a major player.

Since the start of the lockdown its global Alexa ranking has dropped from top 34,000 to 112,000.

What do I take from this?

Yep, my widget industry has had the stuffing knocked out of it BUT, at the same time, other sites / widget sectors are still doing ok or have improved / gained traffic etc.

[jmorgan]

Would most webmasters agree, in this day and age, that bots/scrapers actually take up significantly more server resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) than actual humans?

It seems almost ludicrous that I have to host my website on a powerful server just so that there is enough computing power left over from all the spammy bots/scrapers to serve my actual human users. But, unfortunately, that seems to be the way of the web going forward.

I mean, think about it. The bots (and there's an infinite amount of them) don't give a damn about sending multi-threaded requests one after the other, while actual humans actually go to a page, read your article/content for a while, before going on to the next page (and that's if they actually don't bounce).

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Would most webmasters agree, in this day and age, that bots/scrapers actually take up significantly more server resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) than actual humans?

=> [webmasterworld.com...]

You can stop all these bots by blocking requests from Datacenter IP Ranges => [webmasterworld.com...]

[RareBit]

We are seeing good organic traffic now (30% up on April 2019), but organic revenue is about 50% down.

But, we are picking all that back up + more via PPC as we are really pushing that we are still open and have products ready to ship. I am seeing a lot of businesses still running campaigns but not open for business and I think that is changing consumer behavior although that still doesn't explain the drop in organic revenue.

[glakes]

@mosxu

The good news is if amazon goes bust you are next in line

+1 for making me laugh!

7.14% conversion rate is a crime.

Google did jail me for the remainder of the day with no additional conversions. I wasn't surprised to see this, and my "sentence" will likely be days of conversion rates of .5% or less.

[KaseyM]

Seeing indexing delay today. Anyone else?

[aristotle]

I am seeing a lot of businesses still running campaigns but not open for business

Can you clarify? Why would a lot of businesses that aren't open still be running ad campaigns? Please explain.

[ichthyous]

Would most webmasters agree, in this day and age, that bots/scrapers actually take up significantly more server resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) than actual humans?

Absolutely...I banned all bots from certain ranges in China recently, and thinking about Russia and Ukraine now. Sucking up my resources and stealing my images

[ichthyous]

So in general are you all seeing a recovery in traffic since the beginning of the COVID pandemic? I am seeing a very slow stair-step pattern upward, but traffic is still down about 25%. Traffic is still way off from January for me. Note: my traffic drops like a stone in the weeks where school lets out for the summer, so some of this may be a drop in youth/student searching

[EditorialGuy]

So in general are you all seeing a recovery in traffic since the beginning of the COVID pandemic?

I'm not. Then again, I publish a travel-planning site, and not a whole lot of people are planning vacations right now.

[glakes]

Why would a lot of businesses that aren't open still be running ad campaigns?

I think what happened is some of these businesses just closed without pausing their ad campaigns. With payments set to auto-reload from the credit card on file, their ad campaigns just continue to run. Some will be in for a shock when they return to work. Amazon is doing something similar - advertising non-essential Prime products that won't ship for two weeks or longer. But Amazon is swimming in money, so it won't hurt them like the small businesses.

[mosxu]

“Why would a lot of businesses that aren't open still be running ad campaigns?”

Seeing same thing they have not left the ads on by mistake most of them have closed non essential campaigns but kept some hoping lockdown measures will be lifted soon.

There are no drops in click prices which is very strange by the way ad formula works, further more the system recommends higher CPCs and minimum first page bid also higher.

[RedBar]

I am definitely seeing shuffling around and promotions of hitherto less-well-ranked sites in my widget sector.

Well, they were less-well-ranked for a specific reason, they were mostly lacking in quality information and images, the usual generic fluff was there but nothing else however at the moment it would appear that thin fluff is de rigueur!

Way to go G!

[Malanje]

As the search on Google is, almost every business on the internet is at risk. If Google has an interest in a particular industry, it can easily liquidate the competition.
Not to mention the theft of content from the sites. Newspapers are suffering from this problem, with Google replicating the news on its properties and diverting visitors from newspaper websites.

Let's imagine that Google creates a worldwide network of restaurants. What do you think would happen to local research on where to eat?

We live by Google's rules now. I'm not looking at the tree, I'm looking at the forest.

[glakes]

Let's imagine that Google creates a worldwide network of restaurants. What do you think would happen to local research on where to eat?

I could just imagine it. Walk into one of Google's restaurants and they would be full of politicians and regulators likely getting their meals for free. Just outside the restaurant doors would be prior webmasters panhandling...

[samwest]

I could just imagine it. Walk into one of Google's restaurants and they would be full of politicians and regulators likely getting their meals for free.

Don't need to imagine it...Google's gourmet free lunch has been a reality for quite some time. [youtu.be...]
I get your analogy though.

[seowinning]

That AI is worse than google from 2012.

[southernguy]

I had not been paying much attention to these threads for a while I have been working on a few new projects that after three months have turned the corner and are starting to bring me in some revenue, the sad thing is sites are built to comply with Googles new so-called AI. I built the sites with the following considerations:

Scraped, then Spun content articles are at least 60% unique
Published on expired domains
Keyword stuffed
A Flesch reading of 80-90

So far a couple of sites are ranking well, conversions are nowhere as good as they should be or as they were with other sites that have well-researched quality content.

I built the sites based on whats ranking now on Google and nothing more. Now, these sites are still not ranking on Bing and DDG and probably won't.

The hard part for me is staying on top of this, I'm sure with all the extreme fluctuations they won't maintain their rankings so I need to make sure I keep on getting a couple of new sites up every month.

I personally don't use Google for search anymore mainly due to its poor quality but from what I see is that focusing on the end-user is pointless ( at this time) because it will not rank, churn and burn content SADLY is what seems to rule their algorithm now.

Just my observations.

[koan]

People complain about Google search quality and I kind of agree it's not always great, I hate seeing results from pages without the keywords I specify (although you can require it with a simple click on a link, it's an extra step), results from sites that require registration irritates me (Facebook, Pinterest), I did try Bing and the results seemed similar, the ads however were just horrible, all casino ads (completely unrelated to my search), looking 99% like normal results except for a very subtle label, so back to Google for me.

[samwest]

No complaints about search quality, although, when compared to Bing and Dogpile the censorship is glaringly obvious...my biggest personal 'complaint' is wild variation in user quality and traffic clamping. My record days are always followed by throttled days. The effect of AI is clear.

[glakes]

I'm on the other side of the fence when it comes to Google's search quality. When I type in a query for a product, I expect the results to give me some choices. As it is now, there is so much Amazon crowding in the SERPS that it's almost like I used a different query like site:amazon.com "product"

The most useful feature of a search engine is to find information or things that I wouldn't otherwise find. Google fails miserably when it comes to products and the results for informational queries on Google generally are from big names I already know. Google's SERPS = BLAH IMO

Bing does a far better job at generating results that offer choice and alternatives outside the big names whether it be for products or information. Choice is the main reason why I use Bing and avoid Google's walled garden.

[paybacksa]

"We don't negotiate with google for a fairer playing field. They are the playing field."


Bravo.

[RedBar]

Bravo.

Why?

To quote the Cambridge Dictionary:

used to express approval when a performer or other person has done something well.

Do you feel that Google has done well or were you simply agreeing with the inference that we have a closed system / playing field that is owned and totally controlled by Google and you recognise this?

I see absolutely no lauable reason to applaud that.