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]

@samwest

“avoid tactical surprise and asymmetrical threats. Making the system less "stable" and predictable eliminates the reward that gaming used to provide”

Regina should have said keep moving the cheese instead but the only difference here is that small businesses are customers not enemies.

[renatovieira]

SERPs OK. However, my traffic is absolutely zero. Something similar to the April 16 update.

Huge drop in impressions today. Does anyone else feel this?

[RedBar]

Does anyone else feel this?

Actually no, traffic up across all sites even the hitherto poorly performing UK ones.

[MayankParmar]

2 months and manual penalty appear still not reviewed. Is this normal?

[RedBar]

@MayankParmar

I missed your post about this, you actually had a confirmed manual penalty, for what?

[RedBar]

Has anyone else's Statcounter completely crashed, won't load, etc?

[ichthyous]

Huge drop in impressions today. Does anyone else feel this?

No...impressions are going up, but CTR has dropped since April 19th and so has average position. For a short while during the previous week impressions and CTR were rising in unison, now they are diverging more and more and traffic is going down again

[seomotionz]

@ichthyous Impressions are more or less the same. But CTR is definitely down.

@RedBar SC did show some problems last week. This week its working fine.

@MayankParmar It depends. In many cases, I have seen these problems to take even 6 months.

[RedBar]

This week its working fine.

Have you tried today?

There seems to be a new home page and whatever script is trying to work simply overloads and fails. It won't even let me enter my user name.

[seomotionz]

@RedBar No man! I am not seeing anything like it, sorry.

[not2easy]

I saw this and went to SC and had no problem to log in - but once logged in, nothing worked at all. I'd guess they are doing some changes/updates.

[sk7411]

@MayankParmar : 2 months is a lot of time tbh. There was one case where one of my friend submitted review and it was going over 3 weeks , i asked him to resubmit the request to which he was skeptical about at first , i also asked him to mention that he had already waited ~1 month in the request. To both our surprise the penalty was revoked within 3-4 days after that . I believe sometimes the request queue up for them and submitting a new one might just be a better option while many might also suggest you not to do so otherwise.

But i believe post covid scenarios might be different with limited resources for them .

[RedBar]

Statcounter home page back to normal and can now log in, whatever script was trying to work stopped my radio channel!

[ichthyous]

I realize now that the very low level of business since the beginning of January was not due to a recession starting or to coronavirus brewing in China...it's 100% due to Google turning off the switch in early January. It's been silent since the first week of January when Google made whatever changes it made. Last week Google lifted the veil for a short while and all the business came rushing back like the old days...even now during a massive amount of economic uncertainty. So that goes to show you, there is still plenty of business out there, but you will not see any of it from Google anymore unless you pay them. It's been almost four months, so this is a permanent change on Google's part. "Pay to play or go away" is Google's motto.

[jmorgan]

@MayankParmar A manual penalty suggests that you may have been doing something dodgy, which I'm not suggesting you did. But then again, did you? I wouldn't think they'd be handing out manual penalties like candy for no reason.

Or it could have been a case being of desperate and overreacting to a drop in rankings which resulted in making things worse (I know I've personally done that in the past).

My personal advice to anyone who's seen their ranking drop is to not worry about doing anything to manipulate your rankings, but to focus on improving the quality of your content/website instead (maybe just imagine that Google didn't exist). I know I'm probably going to get a lot of heat for saying this, but it's worked for me so far.

Whenever you make a decision for your website, ask yourself, "Am I doing this to improve the quality of my website, or am I doing this to improve my Google rankings using some SEO 'trick' that someone like Patel or Backlinko recommended?" You know, maybe use one of those "TOP 7 TRICKS TO RANK #1 IN GOOGLE IN 2020!"

I've stated this before, and there's always a few people who argue that they MUST build a website purely for Google/SEO but, like I said, my philosophy seems to be working so far and I'm going to stick with it.

[sk7411]

Seeing some good shuffling happening around since Thursday continuing through today . Google , what are you trying to achieve by pushing fresh spam sites up .

[RedBar]

My two global .coms plus my global trade widget directory are still seeing good numbers, even on a Saturday, and checking the SERPs many of site 2's "upgrades / improvements" last Oct / Nov are now kicking-in and driving new B2B enquiries from several countries.

Asian / Far East visitor numbers are definitely up, this next week could be interesting.

[MayankParmar]

The outbound link penalty got revoked today after 2 months! However, the message is still there in the console.

During this penalty, the traffic rank or CTR remained unchanged. I still believe it was a mistake or it could the result of the way I placed links when I started the site. I fixed nofollowed a few links and they revoked the penalty :)

[RedBar]

The outbound link penalty got revoked today

I'm intrigued, what did you do originally to cause this?

[nomis5]

Some sectors, not many, are doing well out of this Coronavirus.

My sector, gardening is seeing huge, massive increases in page views.

RPM is down but recently it is slowly recovering with no loss in page views.

Overall, this is up, this is down, but revenue is up and that's what matters to me.

Fear of the threat to the public's food supply will never go away now - not for many years.

[BoredMeteor]

Seriously though, why did stockphoto sites get such a boost from the last update? I'm seeing them everywhere. They're just pages with photos on them.

Quality content, indeed!

Edit: Oh, god. Now I'm seeing that infinite scroll "more results" button on desktop. Is that new? I'm not sure I've seen that on desktop before.

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar 20+ articles had 'Download from the [Store name]' anchor and these articles were published in March 2016. I explained that I don't sell links and they revoked the penalty :)

[ichthyous]

Seriously though, why did stockphoto sites get such a boost from the last update? I'm seeing them everywhere. They're just pages with photos on them.

No all stock photo sites, just the one that allows you to download the photos for free. I have watched that skyrocket for three months now and it is taking all the top three terms from everyone else. The reason probably being that the sites using the free images link back to the site. Their pages are nothing but links to images with very little text, you are correct.

My own site has a similar structure and it has always been a challenge to get it to rank as the images are the content...it's simply not viable to load the pages with nonsense text.

[StupidIntelligent]

Google has virtually stopped reflecting updates to individual pages for days on end. This is usually a precursor to an impending update. Let's see.

[widgetized]

April was a surprisingly good month for conversions, at least since January 2020. Worth mentioning I notice an increase of clicks and impressions started in late March in my GSC.

Unfortunately, since a couple of days, conversions dropped to 0 (traffic is apparently the same, even if I noticed some weird peaks), and started to get a lot of spammy emails from all my websites, just like before this period.

Oh well, the good old switch ON / OFF in action again.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

For my websites traffic started to recover last week (far away from pre-pandemia numbers, but at least it stopped the drop). But Adsense numbers are still absolutely dead (RPM 0.86 instead of 1.6-1.8)...

[RedBar]

For my websites traffic started to recover last week

The same for me and continuing into this week.

[ichthyous]

Unfortunately, since a couple of days, conversions dropped to 0 (traffic is apparently the same, even if I noticed some weird peaks), and started to get a lot of spammy emails from all my websites, just like before this period.

That's right...Google definitely lifted the veil from the 13th-18th...I was getting new inquiries (conversions) at a very high rate. Then it stopped cold by the 19th and my traffic and clicks has been dropping ever since. It's very frustrating to know that there are plenty of viable customers out there but they aren't going to find any of your content because it's pay to play now.

[hopepro]

Is there anyone still seeing low quality sites rank on top?

[RedBar]

Is there anyone still seeing low quality sites rank on top?

Of course, can / will Google ever be able to do anything about this, they seem to be addicted to it!

Will Google ever be able to stop US sites from copying the original, usually non-US site, and then ranking them above the original and then, usually, demoting the original drastically?

At times Google is awesome (yes I did write that) yet at other times it is the biggest load of garbage ever delivered.