Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2020

[RedBar]

The following message was cut out of the April, 2020 thread at:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4990589.htm [webmasterworld.com]
by robert_charlton - 1:39 am on May 1, 2020 (PDT -8)



A quick review of a few of my sites' this past month:

1. Global trade directory site about -10% but with increasing PVs as the month has gone on.

2. Global B2B widget site, -20% v Jan / Feb however +15% v March and over the past 4 weeks a nice, steady increase with this week probably being the highest of the year.

3. Global B2B widget site that was hardly affected at the start of lockdowns and has shown a steady PVs increase to the extent that April has been it's highest-ever month at +17% v 2020 average and +8% v March. Good quality enquiries continue.

4. UK B2C widget site has seen a dramatic recovery. Overall PVs are still -20% for the month however since Easter PVs have been completely normal. I need to investigate the actual business performance of this site for more details.

5. UK hotel / pub site, understandably still on its back at -90%, all rankings fine, awaiting lockdown to be eased however I do know future accommodation enquiries are consistent.

6. UK urganic meat and bakery site. This has maintained its +400% increase in PVs and its actual business has now gone national rather than just regional. I'm really surprised with this business since its products are NOT low cost!

Several other sites mostly down in varying amounts however they're all brochure / informational sites so that's not a surprise.

Anyone else with interesting stats?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:47 am (utc) on May 1, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

[samwest]

@ RB - Traffic is way up. Daily visits have doubled and conversions are at a level not seen since 2014. However, my site is very related to the current world events AND much of that new traffic is coming from social media, not Gorg. The converting traffic is mostly from Facebook where I started running ads that actually have ROI. Adwords is stale and boring. Everyone is hanging out on social media platforms these days. Yes Google, the cheese has moved...but AI will soon adapt and try to rob the new paradigm. I used to think of Google as a partner, now they are the competitor...and it was by their own choice.

Traffic from Google is still very sporadic...ON/OFF so they haven't changed their 'traffic shaping' ways in light of a global pandemic and the suffering of their long time content benefactors. The only thing I CAN control is Facebook, so that's where the focus is today.

[RedBar]

The UK retail sector that uses your consumables is up about 30-31% IRC, I assume the USA is similar?

I'm getting some countries wanting to place orders so long as we can give them despatch dates however in India we're still in complete lockdown and, for whatever reason, they don't seem to comprehend that.

[RedBar]

I'm getting a huge amount of garbage email spam today compared to the last few weeks.

Did some re-set their mailing lists to start again today 1st May?

[mosxu]

Zombies at work here

[StupidIntelligent]

Strangely quiet here.

[RedBar]

Strangely quiet here.

Considering yesterday was 1st May celebrations and holidays in many countries my sites were much busier than I expected however so far today they're making up for it, very quiet at the moment.

[ichthyous]

A 47% drop in clicks to my site on April 30th compared to the previous Thursday according to GSC. I hope that is a temporary blip or I'll be in big trouble. Traffic was recovering nicely until this week!

[joshd2]

My site has experienced a massive traffic drop (70%). I'm wondering if anyone has experienced (or has experience with) anything similar? Here are the symptoms:

- On Tuesday April 28th at approx 6:00pm EST my rankings for all search terms (including image and video searches) simultaneously dropped off a cliff.

- There is no manual penalty in Webmaster Tools

- Domain name search does bring up a page from my site as the top result but not the homepage.

- Homepage can still be found in search but Rich Snippets have been removed from it

- New text descriptions are taking days to show up under the link title in the SERPS (it use to take hours).

- The "coverage" section in Webmaster Tools has not been updated since April 27th.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Since there is no manual action this must be an algorithmic issue? Its almost like the way Google views my domain got screwed up and so it just dumped all my rankings.

[martinibuster]

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I saw someone talking about adding branded links and thinking it might be that, then others chiming in to say it might be a Google dance, implying that something is changing.

[browndog]

Is anybody else seeing brands absolutely killing it in the SERPS? I just searched for a medical condition, out of ten results, three were from branded food companies (this condition is cosmetic only, and no food can aid or treat it), and three insurance companies. Wiki is there and only two medical pages returned in the top ten.

[joshd2]

Webmaster Tools finally updated the "Coverage" data for my site.

On the day my rankings dropped off completely all of my pages became listed as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap". Normally only 20% of my pages are listed "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap". Clearly something is going wrong with the way Google is viewing my domain due to some sort of update right?

[samwest]

Past two weeks were the best I've seen in 6 years...but since yesterday my GA and Matomo data concur that a clamp is back in place...which aligns perfectly with Googles stated effort to up their game in Q2, since they badly missed their Q1 target of >20% revenue increase. See: [webmasterworld.com...]

I feel so sorry they only did 13%...because now I know they will be BRUTAL in May...and that is proving true already.

Just a causal look in my vertical shows a sudden loss of long tail as those areas are now being stuffed with ad filled content farm spin. Page one results on long tail search's have now been pushed to page 3.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:13 am (utc) on May 4, 2020]
[edit reason] fixed broken link [/edit]

[Elleder]

@joshd2
Massive traffic drop also happened on my site. This situation started on the 22nd. But the traffic data on the mobile phone is still normal.

[Juniya]

Well I noticed something strange too after looking at my data. Starting from May 1st, or really lets just say May 2nd until now, traffic has reduced for some of my sites but not by much, RPM down and clicks are down, page views up though.

This is probably due to some advertisers stopping their campaigns because of the Covid-19. I expect Google to cover their own asses and redirect as much traffic as they can get away with onto Google adwords clients to keep some of them happy and keep their profits high and not scare the shareholders in wallstreet.

May might be a tough month for most web sites, it all depends on this Covid-19, if it shows promise to die down by end of May, June and July should be months were most of us should see an upswing in consumer spending in all industries. Lets just hope Covid-19 pandemic doesn't get any worse.

[EditorialGuy]

No Google-related changes for our editorial travel-planning site. We had a big drop in late February, when the headlines were all about COVID-19 hitting Europe), and things have been slow since then (as they have been for the travel industry in general).

[mhansen]

Just saw this at SEL - [searchengineland.com ]

Google May 2020 Core Update rolling out today
Here is the second Google core update of the 2020 year.
Barry Schwartz on May 4, 2020 at 2:30 pm

Google announced it is rolling out a new core update, the May 2020 core update, today. This is the second core update of the 2020 year, the first one was the January 2020 core update.

Historically, Google has released a core Google algorithm update every few months or so. It was just a bit over 3-months ago since the January core update.

[RedBar]

May 4, 2020 at 2:30 pm

Precisely as forecast by me last week, they've been doing this the first week of May since at least 2005, never really noticed it before that date.

[samwest]

@RB - yes, it happens every year, coincidentally the start of Q2. Not even a pandemic can upset the machine.

[MayankParmar]

The pandemic update is rolling out!

[NickMNS]

coincidentally the start of Q2

Since when is May the start of Q2?

Things are looking positive on my end let's see how long it holds for.

[HereWeGo123]

@NickMNS - When did you first starting seeing positive movement on your end?

[MayankParmar]

It's pandemic and I don't want Google updates to crush me at this time of financial crisis. I'm scared :(

[NickMNS]

When did you first starting seeing positive movement on your end?

At around 1am, but it's not a big move, ~10%. It is still too early to tell if this is real or just normal variations, but as I said it's positive, which is better than negative.

[HereWeGo123]

@NickMNS - How large is your website roughly?

[NickMNS]

In what respect?

[HereWeGo123]

In what respect?

Number of indexed pages, monthly pageviews

[NickMNS]

My site is large in terms of number of pages is in the tens of millions and a large portion of that is indexed. In terms of page views I prefer not to say, other than it could be higher.

[HereWeGo123]

Looks like it's pretty quiet on here regarding the update. I guess sometimes it can take longer to pick up. I remember during the January broad core update, we began seeing negative effects of it within 3 hours after they confirmed that it began rolling out. During the September Broadcore update, me, personally, I began noticing the massive volatility but with positive movement late into that following evening once they announced it in the morning.

So far, everything seems quiet on our end.

[BoredMeteor]

I finally start making some positive progress and, right on cue, Google comes along like a wrecking ball.

Well, hopefully I don't get hit too hard this update (things were steady all day, but right now I'm seeing some not-so-great shifts). I certainly don't expect any gains.