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]

[BoredMeteor]

Just throwing out some info because I'm bored:

Finally got around to checking the damage to some of my competition. Biggest competitor (or who I consider "biggest" among the group of publishers I follow, meaning not owned by huge corporations) saw a 97% drop in keyword visibility. Another site similar to my own also saw a 97% drop. A much smaller site, if what I'm seeing is correct, lost 100%, everything completely gone aside from their homepage. I lost about 88%.

I went ahead and checked a much larger branded site with a full staff (think verified on Facebook with over a million follows), and they lost 25%.

Truth is, I've yet to see anyone who's really gained. Most I've checked have, at best, remained the same. Everyone else lost pretty big.

[RedBar]

@Dooku

This is a good example of how clueless you and MANY others are regarding the digital footprint you have accumulated for years and handed over for free to Google

Well, thank you for that pointless post.

If you've EVER read anything I have posted you would know that for the last 10 years I have not used any Google products, I only use their search engine for testing puposes on a separate machine and even after that clear browser cache, history, cookies everything and only use Chrome to do that testing as well.

Plus, and you may not believe this however it is true, I advised ALL company staff and friends who would listen in the mid 90s way before Google not to post anything anywhere if they didn't want to leave a digital footprint.

Many thought I was a little crazy then, they don't now.

[RedBar]

If you use youtube, you are tracked there, if you are using an android phone, you are being tracked, if you are using gmail, you are being tracked, if you are using google maps, you are being tracked

Youtube - Never use
Android - Why buy anything with in-built obsolescence
Gmail - Never use
Map - Pointless for me
Google Earth - Never use
Any Google analytics - Never use
Google fonts - Never use
Whatever else Google - Never use

Yep, Google pi$$ed me off many years ago!

[sofie77]

In a specific health niche where are alot of youtube videos google display now ONLY 3 organic results.

First > 3 Ads
Second > Youtube
Third > Youtube
Four > Youtube
Five > Youtube
Six > Youtube
Seven > Google Q&A Questions
Eight + > organic results

Other Queries are full with pinterest in a row > Postion 1 - Postion 6. Does google plan to buy pinterest in the near future or why so many results?

Like I said already, this looks like a penalty.
The shareholders are the only thing that is important and most developers and employees from google are shareholders, they want loose money, so they stay calm and quiet, even if the results are worse...lets squeeze the lemon.

I saw it in this thread and I cant forget -> dont build your house on rented land.

[RedBar]

Unfortunately sofie77 Google has totally screwed-up with its Pinterest love affair, we'll see IF it winds that back somewhat.

Insofar as YouTube is concerned more than 3 billion searches a month are made with it and it is supposedly the second largest search engine.

That's why I use DDG, Ecosia etc, I'm not searching for videos ... Not that they are all garbage however mostly pointless insofar as I am concerned.

[Kash1111]

@paranoid android

Page speed in GSC is not working, I am trying to validate the improvements we have made with our sites, seems like you can't.

[Dooku]

@Redbar

If I have offended you in any way or my post may have come over too harsh, then I DO apologize!

The post was not meant for you personally but your comment was a very good example of "why people wonder how google is tracking them", so I used it to explain that.

I DO know your not a big fan of Google. But the post is meant to explain the tracking environment we live in. You would be surprised at how many people just do not have any clue at all, and many that do know about it are just ignorant in the fact by claiming "I don't have anything to hide anyway".

[christianz]

I am still waiting for that day when search results in YouTube com will also return independent websites for queries where it makes sense.

If web search can be spammed with Google's videos, why not spam Google's videos with web results? Just for fairness lol

Also I am still waiting for that "Web" tab for google desktop search results. If you can have separate tabs for news, images etc, why not have it for web results?

These are all rhetorical questions, of course. I know the answers.

[RedBar]

No apology required however it was a good example of how we need to be specific in our posts so that people do not take offence plus ensuring there are no misunderstandings when making posts which I am constantly having to clarify with posters asking questions ... I've lost traffic is a perfect example:-(

I used to be a huge fan of Google, I worked with Altavista in the mid 90s and then for Google pre-money oriented days and for several years felt thy were doing a good job until the great image theft, that did it for me.

I agree that the vast majority of people do not have a clue, all our staff is educated on computer security issues plus very regular cleaning and malware scans and it's amazing that once they get used to it how automatic it becomes for them across all devices. My other half used to be the worst until I introduced her to the DDG browser on her iphone, now life is rosy:-)

Amyway, back on topic:-)

[rustybrick]

With this May 2020 core update, those impacted, are you seeing a decline in indexed pages in Google Search Console?

[gatormark]

I read an interesting article yesterday (I can no longer find it), which made me look at the new search results differently. For my niche, I finally see what Google is doing. They have deemphasized the traditional keyword method of searching in favor of predicting what people want. For example, if a person searched for "macabre short stories," Google says, "Oh, you want a definition of macabre short stories and NOT examples to read." While I don't like this new approach, I have made some adjustments to my pages to accommodate the way Google is now looking at my specific arts and literature niche. Of course, they will probably roll back something that will make this a waste of time. Still, I don't have anything to lose since my previously high-ranking keywords are now lost in the forest.

[jmorgan]

I have made some adjustments to my pages to accommodate the way Google is now looking at my specific arts and literature niche.

Hmmm, how about making adjustments according to what your users want?

I understand the thinking though. I've been guilty of it myself at times.

[ichthyous]

With this May 2020 core update, those impacted, are you seeing a decline in indexed pages in Google Search Console

No, not at all. I'm seeing a 20% decline in impressions and a 9% drop in clicks from May 4th - 7th. Then it has stayed at the new lower level ever since. A bit more examination shows the drop in impressions hit my highest-traffic landing pages the hardest...not my home page. The drop was larger for desktop than mobile, but both dropped. The drop was across the board for most countries, except for the UK.

This can illustrate a couple of things...that Google is strategically decimating each website's most important and lucrative terms

and/or

That it's getting harder and harder to rank a site with many landing pages. The traffic to each landing page is drying up and going to google's own properties or to other single topic sites. Having a site with a lot of content silos isn't working well these days unless you are one of the few sites Google has anointed to run away with huge rank increases despite having landing pages with very thin content. I have seen one site climb for six months non-stop and take over all the top three spots, and it is nothing but an index of images with hashtags and no text. It's all about the backlinks with this site I think.

[gatormark]

@jmorgan

Hmmm, how about making adjustments according to what your users want?

My users are already getting what they want. My loyal community is what keeps the website going and profitable. However, most of the income I got from passers-by via search has dried up and I would like to get that income and traffic back. In my community, I have 2 types of users; loyal and active members and people who use the community resources occasionally. Occasional users add a lot of money. The fact of the matter is that I know my visitors better than Google's algorithm.

[ichthyous]

Hmmm, how about making adjustments according to what your users want?

Some of us can only do so much with the type of business we have. My site is simple, a big catalog basically. Do people really want more from me than to be able to browse quickly, fast loading, find things easily, and find answers to their questions with minimal hassle? My customers don't want a treatise on the product...nobody reads half of the info that is on my site already. Yet adding a lot more text would probably help my ranking with Google because I would be able to stuff that text with so many more terms.

My point is...what my users want is not at always what Google would reward me for. I could strip my site down even more and my users would prefer it, but I would lose my traffic.

[gatormark]

@ichthyous

what my users want is not at always what Google would reward me for.

Exactly! Well said.

[gatormark]

I read an interesting article yesterday (I can no longer find it), which made me look at the new search results differently. For my niche, I finally see what Google is doing. They have deemphasized the traditional keyword method of searching in favor of predicting what people want. For example, if a person searched for "macabre short stories," Google says, "Oh, you want a definition of macabre short stories and NOT examples to read." While I don't like this new approach, I have made some adjustments to my pages to accommodate the way Google is now looking at my specific arts and literature niche. Of course, they will probably roll back something that will make this a waste of time. Still, I don't have anything to lose since my previously high-ranking keywords are now lost in the forest.

As a follow up to my post above. I spent all day writing 144 one-sentence snippets of text to enhance my 144 main page's description of its content. I had Google index one of the pages that I changed base on the new way Google is now looking at my niche, and that page jumped 8 spots in the SERP in one day. I will now have them index the rest of the page and see what happens. I'm hoping the changes don't impact Bing and DDG (I didn't alter the snippets that they use) since these keywords typically rank #1 on those search engines, but I get very little traffic from them compared to Google.

[immrrobot]

i'm seeing a lot of amp pages in one of my niches. And, was always skeptical on installing it as the site's revenue completely depends on adsense. How many of you guys have seen a good increase from ad revenue after installing amp? May be worth a shot as 70% of that site's traffic comes from mobile

[BoredMeteor]

Here's a fun one:

For a keyword I used to get a decent bit of traffic on, Google has booted me to page 5. What replaced my spot on page 1? A link to a Pinterest page containing an image taken from my site, but linking to a scraper Blogspot blog. It's like Inception levels of BS. (Edit: Actually, make that TWO positions on page one from Pinterest pointing to the same stolen content. Wow.)

Regarding AMP: Before I got absolutely destroyed, AMP pages gave me about the same revenue as before. Ads within posts performed best.

[immrrobot]

@bored Which plugin worked well for you to insert adsense ads to amp pages? Doesn't seem to have a lot of flexibility as it is with a web page. I'm thinking of using amp for wp - accelerated mobile pages. The official amp offer too much of vanilla design for me.

[BoredMeteor]

I actually just used a custom function alongside the standard AMP plugin (with a design change, because you're right about it being vanilla). If you want to look into that, you might check here: [isabelcastillo.com...]

I don't know much about other plugins, though, sorry.

[RedBar]

Now the update dust seems to have settled my traffic is running slightly higher than before for my global sites.

The UK retail widget site is steadily gaining visitors, the hotel site is back to flatling after a burst last week when all accommodation was fully-booked from Monday of this week onwards with "key workers / contractors" for weeks / some months ahead.

[gatormark]

I responded to the May update yesterday with some SEO changes and out of the 5 pages I had Google index yesterday and then tested this morning, all of the pages except one increased in ranking. The one that did not was already in spot #2. Positions increased in one day: 8, 1, 1, 5, 0.

[RedBar]

@gatormark

Are you using WordPress?

[gatormark]

@RedBar

Are you using WordPress?

No, this is a fully developed asp.net C# website.

[samwest]

Had it with Googles blatant Pinterest SERP loading. Switching to Dogpile or DDG. Anything is better than Pinterestfest.

[ichthyous]

I spent all day writing 144 one-sentence snippets of text to enhance my 144 main page's description of its content.

@gatormark are you referring to updating the page description on your 144 top pages by adding another sentence that you think is likely to become a snippit? That's simply called, "rewriting the page description" is it not?

[gatormark]

@ichthyous

I did not change the page meta-description. I added a one sentence paragraph to the introductory text of the page. Google immediately started using that new paragraph as it’s snippet in search results. Google, for some reason, never uses my meta-data.

[ichthyous]

I did not change the page meta-description. I added a one sentence paragraph to the introductory text of the page. Google immediately started using that new paragraph as it’s snippet in search results.

I see...do you mean that they appeared as featured snippits at the top of page one, or Google updated the actual page's description with the new sentence? Google disregards my meta desc and title sometimes too...Very annoying. If you shorten the title it tends to help

[JesterMagic]

Notice Google bot is gobbling up a lot of my pages today. Probably 5 times more than normal. They haven't done that in a number of months.