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]

[NickMNS]

According to one old theory, if a large site has a lot of low-value pages, they can drag down the site as a whole,

This may hold true for a blog or news site, where a having many crappy articles hurts the quality overall.

But, this doesn't apply in my situation as my site has millions of pages because each page shows information about a specific entity, so each page is essentially the same as any other in terms of quality but not content. For example, a site about baseball players where each player get its own page. Some pages will be less popular than others, thus get less traffic while others will get more, but the popularity of a page is a function of the popularity of the player. Culling unpopular player would reduce the quality of the overall website.

google originally developed the panda penalty to use against "content farms"

Again not my case, as my content is evergreen, it hasn't changed in years. The last time I updated it, I got whacked with by an update, it took 2 years to recover from. Now a few shorts month after recovering, I get hit again.

I have done nothing on this site for years, and I have watched it bounce around with each update. This says to me that the outcome of the updates has more to do with randomness than anything else.

[SteveWrz]

Everyone check your Analytics. I just checked mine and nearly all the losses I saw this morning are gone. Like the numbers from earlier hours have been changed to reflect higher visitor counts.

Can anyone else confirm? Is this all just a glitch?

[Shai]

Can confirm a rollback. Most of the increases we saw this morning have gone back or settled at Lower position. Might we a tweak the re-release soon.

[bwnbwn]

Not a roll back moved up a page been on 3 for quite some time just all the different dns hasn't caught up. Gonna stick

[Cralamarre]

Traffic has been continuing to rise for the past 7 hours and is now higher than my pre-pandemic numbers. Have not seen an improvement like this in years. There's no way this can last. Good things don't happen anymore.

[whoa182]

I know things are still moving right now but with this update I'm starting to losing ranking for pages that are well-researched and have a high conversion rate (20%). And sad part is that I am once again losing to pages that are spam. They are literally just 20 Amazon affiliate links. No original content. A few words that exist on the pages (probably less than 300) is content that's copied and pasted directly from Amazon's page and they add a star rating. Not an exaggeration either.

Two pages at the top of the SERPs only contain pages with affiliate links with no original content. Holding position #1 and #2. They are AI generated lists, apparently. Their ENTIRE website is just auto-generated content of affiliate links. How on earth has Google not done anything about this? They've been floating around at the top for over a year now.

My page is 2000 words long, average time on page is 7 minutes and it has a 20% conversion rate.

Health niche.

First I get hit by Amazon and see a 70% drop in earnings. Now I get hit by Google after having a good few months since January.

Hopefully this will sort itself out over the coming days. But wth?

[sofie77]

This update is the worst update (for us) I ever saw in my years of seo.

Like I said before,

we lost in May 2018,
we lost in August 2018 (Med),
we recoverd half in March 2019 (core update),
we lost the recovery from March in September 2019 (core update)
in January 2020 we recovered to the same positions as march 2019 (core update)

May 2020: we lost everything again. At this moment we got hit harder then 2018.

This is the badest und most painfull update for our sites I ever saw and this during corona where earnings are -60% already.

When this sticks, an I am pretty sure it will, then this is the end for us. We will not do more improvments or adding more content. I have enough of this roller coaster and sickmacker.
I hate those sleepless nights :(

Imho google play with the weight of backlinks, ads, usergenerated content vs. editorial content, nonprofit -> related to YMYL search requests.

[edited by: sofie77 at 6:17 am (utc) on May 6, 2020]

[jediviper]

Not talking about penalties or other issues, but the GAME IS ON!

Huge volatility currently according to Semrush for:
- Germany, UK, Australia: 9.4
- USA: 7.7

[jmorgan]

Traffic down just slightly on last week for me. Hard to say if it's the update or just natural fluctuation.

[browndog]

SEM rush is reporting an improvement in keywords, I always have live traffic in the background and usually sit on between 15-20 visitors (used to sit on 100 all the time), and for about half an hour my traffic started going up and up reaching a peak of approximately 110 (it wasn't just one article, but across the board, so not a social media share), before going back down to normal if not worse crappy numbers. I wish they'd kept that dial turned up.

[frankleeceo]

I noticed definite changes starting on May 4th, 7 PM PST. Perhaps it's the Force update.

[ChokenBako]

Itīs getting rough.... -40% Traffic compared with last week. Tech related website. =(

[Dantes100]

Over 40% down so far for a relationship advice site.

[NeapTide]

The worst update so far.
In my niche when searched for something Google is showing Facebook pages on top, then youtube videos that got nothing to do with what you are looking for.
My niche is Android apps and games download and you can't download them from facebook or youtube. WTF.

[Ecopac]

Unfortunately, my site got hit hard yesterday, I just noticed 11,000 links pointing to my homepage from a spam website, is it likely that this has hurt me? They've been there since the middle of March it seems, hasn't been picked up by our SEO guy. If we do a disavow, will we have to wait until the next core update to possibly see any benefits?

[christianz]

11k spam links is not much these days. I have probably 5-10 times that amount and they have been there, proudly displayed in top spots in Search Console for years.

Google can't be bothered to fix this, despite numerous threads in support forum.

I did disavow them but couple of months later revoked my disavow file, since I didn't see any impact.

There is no lasting solution to this, only Google can fix it. They are probably ignored for pagerank, but I don't understand why they show that crap in Search Console.

[RedBar]

On Tuesday for my two global widget sites traffic continued and they both ended up more than 200% with my global widget directory site at normal. So far this morning, Wednesday, traffic is completely normal across all sites.

UK sites are still pretty pointless, even the UK widget site is down again and as for the hotel, bleh!

The organic meat / bakery site has nose-dived with traffic in the last few days and gone back to its previous average now there is no panic buying.

An interesting few days ahead methinks!

[Ecopac]

What's a widget site if you don't mind me asking? I see the term quite a lot in these types of forums

[whoa182]

I don't have tons of traffic but this is the wild ride I've been on from Google since August 2018. They love me, they hate, they love me, they hate me...

[imgur.com...]

The drops and gains are mostly caused during Core updates.

[whoa182]

I'm getting outranked even though I have very informative articles, referenced, and well-researched.

The sites that are popping up and above me now?

<snip>

<snip>

These are not the keywords that they are ranking above me. But they are ranking #1 in Google for many profitable keywords and all they have on their pages is affiliate links. ZERO original content. Scraped from Amazon.

AI machine learning.

I've tried showing Google this for a year now and nothing...

Look at SEMRush: <snip>

It's insane! How is this fair? The whole websites' are just lists of affiliate links. LOOK at their backlinks: Worldbank, Guardian... HOW?

The entire site is JUST affiliate products.

[edited by: engine at 11:33 am (utc) on May 6, 2020]
[edit reason] please see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[RedBar]

What's a widget site if you don't mind me asking?

A widget site is a generic term used for a website product / content / whatever it is designed to do, non-specific however relevant to the poster or conversation..

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[NeapTide]

Pile of junk links in Search Console. Top linking site is dead but links still growing. More spam or dead links from sites ending with .xyz. I am suspecting these links are causing issue for me. And these were intentionally made to push my sites down in search results.

[whoa182]

I've always wondered are these spammy links generated by people / competitor or some other way? I get thousands of them in SC and I've no idea why they keep showing up.

P.S Sorry to mods who had to clean up my last post (oops). I was a bit angry and forgot that we couldn't link to the sites (even if spammy.)

[StoneSolid]

I know it is still too early to say much, but judging by my first analysis, I could even name this update the "ANCHOR" update

From what I'm seeing on my network of sites and some competitors:

- main keywords remained pretty much as they are
- drastic dropping of NON-targeted keywords and broader variations (or whatever you want to call them)

Better said with a basic example:

A site, example title BRAND | RED WIDGETS - with multiple BRAND links and RED WIDGETS links has probably not moved in ranking for RED WIDGETS and closest variations.
However, it probably lost broader keyword rankings and those that aren't backed with substantial and targeted backlinks with anchor texts that follow.
Based on my example, such keywords would be: WIDGET FIXING or WIDGET ADDITIONAL INFO.... that kind of stuff.

That also explains why so much new sites and spammy sites surfaced above established sites with such lesser keywords:
Example again....
BRAND | RED WIDGETS site lost ranking for WIDGET FIXING keyword while a spammy single purpose WIDGET-FIXING-4YOU .com went up solely because of backlinks and anchors for that exact search term are covered much better than for established site.

However, as always, it is a bit ridiculous since an established site probably got WIDGET FIXING covered much better than spammy new site, even though it isn't the established site's primary subject or purpose.



EDIT: coz I kind of feel the need to give one more opinion, if my analysis is correct:

I would roughly say that this update is a "good thing" in a way of thinking - expertise in each field looked at separately, without chance that a general "strong" site is automatically "strong" for any even slightly related search term.

However, execution of such plan is done poorly by google, because it proves that they are 99% reliant on backlinks and nothing else, hence easily manipulated.
Content is clearly the most minor piece of the seo puzzle, and it is now more apparent than ever.




My two cents.

Hope my analysis makes sense.
I'm a bit sleepy as I type this.

[seomotionz]

Some sites with completely blank link profile and so-so content are getting ranked in highly competitive niches.

[Cralamarre]

Still seeing a good 20% increase in traffic hour-by-hour compared to last week. First time I've benefitted from a Google update in years.

[sofie77]

I think this core update is more keyword based.

On previous core updates we lost positions for all rankings and get them back with the next core update.

With this update only medical keywords are affected. No medical keys keep their position, but we are a medical page, so 90% of our keys are medical related. Interessting is also, that when you write the longtails that you have lost without a space, the rankings are normal. Example:

diseases forum > affected, because diseases is medical
diseasesforum > not affected, still at the same position

depression symptoms > affected
depressionssymtpoms > not affected

What I also dont understand is:

We run a big medical forum with over 2 Mio Posts and thousands of active users. In our niche is only 1 other forum without many posts and very less active users. This forum has no ads, Its very oudated and has only a few backlinks.

In all matters we are way better then this page. Speed, Content, very nice backlinks (from newspapers, universitys, books, pdfs, doctors, studies etc.) age, frequency, structure, amp etc. Since 2018 we have lost the first position for this niche with the key "diseases forum".

Before May 2018 > Position 1
May 2018 > Position 5
March 2019 > Position 2
September 2019 > Position 9
January 2020 > Position 2
May 2020 > Position 17 (second page)

On the first position is still this outdated forum. Between Position 2-16 is NO forum. Only websites with the medical key but without the suffix forum. When people search for a forum, they dont want info pages about the diseases, they want a user generated page with experience of the members.

I am pretty sure if we could remove our decent ads (not above the fold), we are back at the position 1 but we cant do, because we have to pay our bills. I think, ads and medical keys are evil for google. I think also, that google changed again the impact of links, because like I said, our linkprofile is awesome. In any other niche, (not medical) this page would be always rank well...but the medical niche is the hardest...

When it keeps this way, we think about to remove the ads, because the income is almost dead anyways...

[SteveWrz]

YMYL Site - Down 24%
Travel Site - Up 22%
Niche Site - Up 33%

My travel site is less than a year old, niche site is 5 months old, both saw considerable increases.

My YMYL site is 13 years old and I spend 95% of my time and resources growing that site. It also accounts for most of my income.

This looks like another update that makes absolutely zero sense to me.

[Portland79]

Anyone else notice referrals from this site?

<snip>

After researching, it is a company that hires basically random half English speaking people from India to "rate" sites for Google.
These guys suddenly become the "expert authority" for deciding if a site belongs in a SERP.

I don't think the rankings are "AI" at all.
I think these guys are rating down all good sites and ranking up sites they are partnered or affiliated with.

They changed the face of the SERPs through "click work" bought by Google to "aide the AI".

Main statement on their site

<snip>

Any thoughts?

[edited by: goodroi at 6:36 pm (utc) on May 6, 2020]
[edit reason] Please no specific urls [/edit]

[ChokenBako]

This Google Update is not really funny. I just recognized a website which scraped my content (more tha 3000 pages) and now ranks above me. Serious? What is wrong with you Google!

Beside that, does anybody has experienced that before? Should I use the DMCA or should I wait?