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]

[Cyril TechWebsites]

"Cleared"

[gatormark]

Over the past couple days I’ve been doing some testing. To increase my pagespeed and eventually affect SEO, I removed ALL “above the fold” ads on mobile devices. I assumed I would take a financial hit by doing this (what else is new). However, my CTR and RPM went up slightly. That is very, very unusual. My numbers ended up being almost exactly the same as the previous few days. There seems to be some serious throttling going on to keep my earnings at a certain number because every day income is removed and my numbers end up around the same low amount.

[sofie77]

Today I saw a lot of search queries without the organic serps. Google gave a answer or a number but there are NO serps anymore. You have to click a button at the bottom to load the ogranic results. Is this new?

[RedBar]

@sofie77

For what was the search term, generally?

[renatovieira]

Did someone have a huge traffic spike on the 25th and today there is absolutely no traffic?

This latest update looks more like a prank ...

It's unbelievable!

[ichthyous]

Did someone have a huge traffic spike on the 25th and today there is absolutely no traffic?

Traffic has been trending steadily downward since April 17th for me, and it really took a downward turn on May 4th. But you are right, this week and especially today is unusually low. I haven't had one new email, call, or inquiry since last week.

[whoa182]

@Sofie

I've noticed some search results only have 1 page of of results, sometimes not even 10 either, and the rest of the web is omitted.

Keyword phrase is: "product a vs product b"

You have to select at the bottom of Google to show all results.

[koan]

The man in Washington considers anything he doesn't like biased and fake news, it's just another cringy tantrum.

[immrrobot]

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

So, Page Experience the new buzz here. For me Page experience and revenue never go hand to hand. There is always a substitution of one over another. I guess most of us don't fall in the green zone of page speed. So, what's the plan guys moving forward. Removing bunch of display ads or making a site as vanilla as possible that gets no conversion for the sake of G?

[Athedian]

G can post as many of that kind of topic as they want, but it doesn't detract from the fact that they are still focusing on revenue. So all that "user experience" bs they wrote? I'd take it with a grain of salt.

Not saying great content and great user experience aren't important, of course they are. In fact, that's the only reason why people revisit a website over and over for updated information about the topics that they are interested in. However, would it make the site "RANK" better in Google? (And this is the main point here) Doubtful. As long as their algo is a mess and as long as they focus only on $$$, I'd bet we'd still be seeing a bunch of great sites with great content and experience to be horribly ranked.

[hopepro]

I'm seeing older pages on my site got visitors, especially those that were out of trends. For example, products that are no longer popular and traffic came to this random pages.

Also, New contents are being indexed can only be found with exact matched. Even though my site is the only one can answer the question at that moment.

I would say this May update is totally corrupted

[BushyTop]

I'm seeing some pretty significant changes again this morning. Automotive, UK.

[samwest]

Expect a high level of clamping and very poor performance from SERPs in coming weeks as Gorg grabs it all while they still can. We can only hope the clamp is on them soon. Someone is finally on to their greedy gaming of the serps.

[RedBar]

I am in total and utter confusion as to what is happening with Google and Pinterest!

For the first time in a week or so I decided to check the ranking for my industry's #1 product, the one I hold the EMD, the worldwide registered and trademark. The widget site which 3 years ago G demoted from the top 100 that everyone else plagiarised ... oh you remember:-)

A couple of months or so ago I decided to meld the EMD site into one of my global sites, reduced it to only three pages and sat back and watched what has happened. Over the past couple of months this widget page has climbed to being #11, a nice poisition being top of the second page.

Therefore I decided to actually look at the two Pinterest pages at #5 & 6 and I was in ABSOLUTE SHOCK .!.!.!

#5 was ME with a May 2020 date

#6 was ME with an April 2020 date

How, just how is this possible? I have not touched Pinterest in probably 3-4 years.

I have three ranking pages in the top 11, how and why?

Can anyone explain this to me and the entire webmaster community, white and black hat?

[samwest]

I'd like to see that specific search red....pm me. Pinterest has decimated my niche too.

[gatormark]

@NickMNS

I too got a positive jump, but not from Adsense. Exponential just jumped 500% for me. It’s back to pre-covid numbers. Adsense is up a little, maybe 10%...not sure how long that will last.

[SteveWrz]

This week is exceptionally bad for me. It looks like another 15% decline. Despite working daily on my site for two years straight, I am officially getting less traffic than when I had completely neglected my site for a year and a half.

I just want any kind of explanation because this is, frankly, #*$!.

[gatormark]

... additionally, I am seeing a slight uptick on my page rankings. I have been working on the speed of my mobile pages and made some minor text adjustments. That seems to be working out good, for the first time.

However, the keywords that completely dropped out of SERP, I cannot seem to get back into the rankings. I may have to wait for another algorithm update for all of those keywords.

At this point, I’ll take any positive results no matter how small.

[ichthyous]

This week is exceptionally bad for me. It looks like another 15% decline.

It's been a gradual decline since the update...losing a bit more traffic every day. Today I found the most credible analysis that I've read: [mariehaynes.com ]. She seems to think that links have been devalued in this update. Not penalized, but devalued as part of the total algo. I suspect from the 4-6 month cycles of higher and lower placement since 2018 that Google has experimented before with reducing the value of links in the algo. In my case I am not seeing a huge drop, but a very slow gradual daily loss. I'm back to where I was last year this time...but I had improved ranking for months from end of August to early January...all of that has increase has vanished (so far).

[gatormark]

One thing I do not understand is the decrease in the number of page views Google allows or counts. Yesterday, Adsense gave one of my sites 54,000 page views. Google Analytics gave the same site 49,228 page views. But my SmarterStats show 150,000 page views. I don't understand this discrepancy. Something is wrong because every day they give me about the same amount of page views even though my on server stats show 3 times the page views.

[seomotionz]

@ichthyous If G is devaluing links. Then what is considered as votes to rank pages?

[immrrobot]

@seomotionz A bunch load of pinterest links is what G uses to vote

[Shepherd]

Update and SERP change:

Just saw this info box atop the results after a search for a phone number:

It looks like there aren't any great matches for your search
Tip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."
Need help? Check out other tips for searching on Google.
You can also try these searches:
nonqaba rwaxa
hawug hawug
supercalifragi alidocious

Maybe some sort of time warp back to 1998 occurred during my search...

[RedBar]

Anyone else unable to log-in to Statcounter today (Saturday)?

[ichthyous]

@seomotionz You can read the article I linked to, it's informative. Basically what she is saying is that links are being counted less heavily in the mix than they were before, and perhaps they are also getting better at separating links out by what is self-serving (placed by the site owner) and what are more authentic links.

[christianz]

@seomotionz If Google are reducing weight of links and increasing weight of their fuzzy AI filters, they are simply delusional and probably think that "singularity is near" and soon some kind of divine hive mind will emerge in their data centers and start ranking sites by value all by itself.

The reality is that their AI algorithms are quite dumb and rank garbage in front of established sites and in many cases completely miss the point of what particular page is about.

In parallel with this AI delusion, they are also pushing self interest by aggressively promoting their own websites and paid ads.

I don't even understand why they try so hard. In today's "economy" big corporations don't even need to make any profit, as long as they are monopolies. Whether they make 100 billion per yer or lose 100 per year, the stock market doesn't care, as long as they are in dominant market position / revenue share.

[Dooku]

@Redbar,
Yes, Statcounter is down almost all day long now. Tried from 3 geographical locations from different computers and DNS......
Aodhán Cullen and his team are probably battling platform problems and/or ddos attacks again.
I hope they get it sorted because its happening more often lately, else I will switch to Clicky.

@Ichtyous, That is a nice article indeed, long read but informative, although can not entirely agree to their conclusion.
A search engine just can NOT function without links. If you want to read some very technical papers about that there are enough online to be found.
G however can change value given to some links and get better at distinguishing between type of links.
But that is clearly to relay that value to anything where G can grab more profit. I am already seeing the same in my log files since May 5th.

[ichthyous]

@Dooku Google cannot function without links no, but it can experiment with the relative value of those links. I've seen rankings for some of my landing pages that ranked well for a decade and that have a ton of good quality links vanish, and instead links to articles have taken over the first two pages. It seems that the number of links is not nearly as important, and that Google thinks that everyone must be searching for endless "how to" articles. For example if you search for "black and white photography" it's now an endless list of articles about the best bw photographers on instagram, bw photography tutorials, but you don't actually see websites about bw photography anymore. Those appear page two or at top of page three now. If you search for "black and white photos" it's another matter, it's all e-commerce sites on the first page. Google has rigidly decided our intent depending on whether we use the word 'photography' or the word 'photos'. While I agree that Google is trying to funnel as much traffic to its own properties as possible, these changes don't seem to reflect that. Another possibility is that my site has just had a subtle penalty applied for the sudden growth of links in the last two months. I've never once had a manual penalty, but it strikes me as odd how many landing pages have dropped to page two or three from the top five ranking before

[BoredMeteor]

Seriously: Has anyone who's ever had their site nuked by Google ever fully recovered? Is that a thing that happens?

This whole mess wouldn't be quite so terrible if I didn't see so much spam remaining in the serps, if not getting boosted. Meanwhile, I'm booted back to page 18, 60, 100, nothing. For one keyword, they took away a top spot I had for images (up in the featured snippet) and replaced it with an image from a spam blog...that was taken from my website, of course. Keywords are still falling in places, too, same for my competitors. The bleeding won't stop.

Not to mention that new posts aren't even getting indexed for several days, now. Used to be almost instant.

It's all so tiring.

[StupidIntelligent]

BoredMeteor - Are you a big site, several thousand organic visitors per day; or a relatively new? I'm asking because this could be the start of a major shift that might last years, and may impact old players.