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]

@upstate8987

Looking in Search Console, I'm seeing one of my sites with virtually no change (and even positive change) in average ranking over the past week, but a MAJOR decrease in impressions and, therefore, clicks. This would indicate that I'm ranking the same, but the actual physical position on the page has dropped because of YT thumbnails and ads at the top.

That is not what the stats are showing you. Ranking in Google Search Console is not what you think. Ranking is the rank that your website appeared in the search results given that your website appeared in the search results. Best explained by example. Users search the keyword "Widget" 1000 times, your site appears for that query 100 times. 50 times out of the 100 you rank #1, the other 50 times you rank number 10. Your average rank according to GSC is 5. Now an update happens, you website only appears in search for 10 of the 1000 times 5 times as #1 and 5 times as number 10, thus your average rank according to GSC has not changed. But your impressions have dropped, by 90%.

Your rank is not calculated on the full global search volume, this makes impressions a metric of much greater importance. You will notice that updates always have a significant impact on impressions, but rarely have significant ranking. Conversely given no change in ranking but a positive change in ranking typically results in only marginal increase in traffic.

What the stats are telling you, is not that your rank has changed, it is that you are no longer appearing in search at all.

[gatormark]

Lost about 20% of my traffic from the last update...so far.

[gwarftron]

Ok, so I have a bunch of pages that are indexed but not submitted in the sitemap issue. In GSC when I looked at the sitemaps the pages are not there. But checking my original sitemaps over via Rankmath I can see that all the pages are there. So some issue with the pages not being included in my GSC sitemaps.
I saw someone mentioned this in a previous post. What's the thinking around this? Some general Google error? And just wait for it to sort itself out? Or should I do something about it?

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld gwarftron

Or should I do something about it?

Do precisely what about what?

No one has a clue what's happened / happening / or is broken / or not ... the only sensible advice anyone can take at the moment is to sit tight for a few days and watch ... It you take any action it may make things better, it may make things worse, who knows if you could have an effect? That's very doubtful.

I look at it like this, the new algo is taking effect using G's last crawl of sites, most of my cache dates seem to be 14th - 18th April therefore how can I affect what's occurring now when G needs a more recent crawl?

Sure as heck if I were performing a mass update of something I then wouldn't add into its mix halfway through updating a whole load of new / refreshed data, that would not make sense when you consider the volume of data that Google has.

As much as we hate G at times at least give this update time to permeate across all data centres THEN we can start a thorough analysis of what G may have done, or not!

[SweetPotato]

When you have pages that are straight up FAKES that redirect to malware or ads, ranking on page 1 you know the SE is over.
Bing doesn't even index those spam domains, but on Google they dominate.
Years ago you wouldn't dream of a pure spam sneaky redirect on page 1, now just by looking at the domain, title and meta you can tell a virus is a click away.
IMO Google lost all credibility when they handed over the antispam to an AI which can't see what humans do: 1 example, those sites show a totally different content when access directly than when accessed via SERPs (with google as referral). The AI never sees the spam because it crawls the page without a referral.

And that's the tip of the iceberg: I see google docs spam ranking too, millions of google docs that are spam with a link to malware. And now there's PDF spam, with it's latest update google made .PDF files rank as any other page, and now spammers are using it effectively to dominate.

Google is 10 steps behind on anti-spam measures. And let's not even talk about PBN's which can't even be detected by humans let alone an AI.

My advice is, if you are magically doing good, don't touch anything. Even if your design is 5 years old, don't improve anything.
If you are not doing good, that's normal, might be time to look at some other project that doesn't rely on SEO.

[edited by: SweetPotato at 2:17 pm (utc) on May 9, 2020]

[JesterMagic]

I built a large number of new links from highly trusted sites in February and March. The anchor text was clearly pushing the limits and I knew it. Also the number of links added per page...but since the sites have a very high Trust factor you can get away with it up to a point. This is the second or third time I've gone on a link building binge adding hundreds of new links

Doesn't sound all that natural to me or very high quality. Google may have caught on to whatever you are trying to do to game the system.

[sofie77]

This is our main page. The chart is from WMT. Take a look at this:

[imgur.com...]

January 2020 had a correlation to March 2019
May 2020 had a correlation to September 2019

The reason why the fall in May 2020 is deeper than in September 2019 is probably because Corona (included)

Do you think this core updates will be more stable anytime?

[aristotle]

NickMNS -- your reply to upstate8987 provides part of the explanation. But in addition, I believe that the "average position" is an overall average for the site as a whole, and as rankings for different keywords vary from day to day, their weightings in the average will also vary. So the overall average doesn't always tell you what's really happening, since most of the clicks and impressions usually come from a few top keywords.

As for your earlier post about your own website several days ago, millions of sites were hit by the original panda rollout in 2011, yet the vast majority of owners didn't understand why. There was a thread about that rollout on the google forum that eventually had more than 80,000 posts from owners who questioned why their site had been hit. The point is that just because you think that your site shouldn't be penalized by panda, doesn't prove that it isn't.

[MayankParmar]

Google Discover traffic declined for anyone here?

[RedBar]

As a matter of interest which generalised widget sectors are seeling massive amounts of spam with redirects etc?

[NickMNS]

your reply to upstate8987 provides part of the explanation. But in addition, I believe that the "average position" is an overall average for the site as a whole,

Yes but more specifically, it is the aggregate of the position for each impressions regardless of query or page. As such it is by definition the "average for the site as a whole". But it remains within the constraints that I explained above, that is it only counts position for a given impression, no impression no position.

I have a new website that I just launched that has essentially no traffic, so very little data in GSC, using the sparse data, I am able to download it and easily reproduce the calculations used by GSC. In other words calculate the weighted average of the position and arrive and the same figures. I am fully confident in what I am saying here.

It is also very much worth pointing out that the "queries" report is also further biased by the fact that not all "queries" or "keywords" are reported, in fact only a fraction of them are shown. So here again, the report is very misleading.

The point is that just because you think that your site shouldn't be penalized by panda, doesn't prove that it isn't.

I don't know what post your are referring to specifically, but let me just say that I doubt seriously that this my case. The last major update I did for my site was back in 2018, since then I have not made any substantive change, I have seen my traffic drop by nearly 75%, to then increase to 125% and as of the latest update I'm down to about 50 or 60% of my 2018 pre-update traffic. Had there been a Panda like penalty, it should have simply stuck, and that clearly it hasn't. Believe me when I say, a Panda penalty would be a good thing, because then I could know what to change, improve and adjust, whereas right now I just simply dumbfounded. The best strategy moving forward appears to be continue to do nothing.

[leadman1]

I'm facing a serious traffic drop because of the poor impressions of the Discover section. It is not working well right now. Also, I observed some indexing problems. For example, my recent article indexed by Google search but not indexed by Google News app. On the other hand, my other article indexed by Google News section but it's not can be seen on Search. This update contains many inconsistencies.

Sorry for my poor English.

[capulkit]

I don’t know but as of now I feel Bing is more accurate than Google.

[MayankParmar]

@leadman1 Hi. I've also observed this strange behaviour with Discover and Google News.

[engine]

Getting back to the clutter, i'm not sure that is a position lost in the stats, but lost in the real SERPs. There's more obfuscation going on than on the face of it.

[jmorgan]

Don't know how accurate SEMRush's sensor is (I think it's reasonably accurate), but if you only see relative stability from here, it would logically mean there aren't any major adjustments/rollbacks.

[samwest]

Very evident of Googles manipulation today as all the on site traffic ATM is from a single city out west. Clamp is still on as they continue to bleed every drop from this stone.

[MayankParmar]

[searchengineland.com...]

An absolute monster :)

[LuckyLiz]

I have not made any substantive change,

Have you considered that might the reason you're losing traffic? Are other sites in your niche updating more often?

[cwalker216]

@SweetPotato "When you have pages that are straight up FAKES that redirect to malware or ads, ranking on page 1 you know the SE is over."

I've seen specific search queries on G where the ENTIRE 1st page has this. Literally, every single link you click on redirects to a totally different site, which either has malware or something else sinister.

This has been going on since Medic update, and it's for keywords with several 100 searches per month.

[StoneSolid]

@SweetPotato

When you have pages that are straight up FAKES that redirect to malware or ads, ranking on page 1 you know the SE is over.
Bing doesn't even index those spam domains, but on Google they dominate.

Indeed, I couldn't agree more.

Such sites are puzzling me for some years now.. even more so since it really seems easy to detect and get rid of them with few lines of parser code.

[NickMNS]

@LuckyLiz

Have you considered that might the reason you're losing traffic?

Yes I certainly have. But the time line goes as follows March 2018 I made major update on of my site, at the same time there was a Google update that wiped out 50% of my traffic, from that point forward I saw a progressive erosion of my traffic. The March 2018 site update was objectively a major improvement. There was no doubt in my mind that the March 2018 drop was due to the state of the previous design, and waiting for the changes to be recognized by Google would take some time. So I waited, and traffic eroded further In the mean time I had other work that was actually bringing money, so I simply neglected the site. By December 2019 my traffic was down to close to 10% of my peak traffic. I started working on other projects.

Then at the end of December I saw a pop in traffic, in January a further pop, by February I was reaching late 2018 traffic levels. By the end of the month I was back to peak traffic and at the end of March I had traffic spike that surpassed even my most viral day. Unfortunately that spike didn't last. But my traffic continued to be strong for another few weeks. Then last week with the update, my traffic was halved. But I remain well above my average traffic level of 2019. Traffic in 2020 to date has already surpassed all of 2019.

From this I conclude that the "do nothing" strategy has worked pretty well for me. Was it optimal? There really is no way to know. I'm also very aware that the strategy cannot continue indefinitely. It has also made me realize that we think we can guess what things will make positive changes in ranking and ultimately doing nothing seems to work as well if not better than guessing.

So the question moving forward is when to make changes? And ultimately, it ends up being a business question. Do I try to improve a site that has struggled or do I focus on a new project? How much more traffic/revenue can I expect to get? Will it be worth the investment in time and resources? The impossibility to answer these questions ex ante, is the crux of this business.

[samwest]

Have you considered that might the reason you're losing traffic? Are other sites in your niche updating more often?

None of the sites near me change. This is evergreen content. The only time I see these drastic drops is when Gorg doesnt hit their revenue targets...which is nearly always with this insatiable monster.

Today is incredibley horrible. I usually see a bump up on Mothers Day...but since last week traffic is being wiped out...right after their Q2 "revenue increasing goal" statement. :(

[ichthyous]

I compared the last six days to the previous period, which was rising. A sudden downward tick of about 22%, so that is definitely the latest update talking. What I am seeing is a fairly big drop in impressions in GSC since the 4th. However, it appears to be recovering slightly in terms of ranking...too early to say for sure....

[MayankParmar]

Weird Google SERP bug. Some old articles are appearing as if they were published a few hours ago. Old articles with incorrect time and it appears to be a Google bug. The sites haven't tweaked their publishing time to manipulate the rankings.

[gatormark]

@ichthyous, that's what I'm seeing too. 22-24% decrease.

[BoredMeteor]

Traffic is still decimated, with no positive changes. Worse, in some cases. However, despite what Semrush might report, I'm still seeing pretty deep movements in the serps, with other websites continuing to drop for certain keywords. Pinterest domains (.com, .se, .ru, .com.mx, .ch, etc) appear in clusters on first and second pages. Just looks spammy, like filters are still off.

I've also found another similarly sized competitor that's been hit hard. So that's three of us, now. After the dust settles, I'm going to take a hard look at what we all have in common, though I don't believe it's niche-related and can't find anything that stands out between us and websites that haven't been hit.

Speaking of which, I'm seeing people everywhere theorizing about why some websites got hit and not others. They always turn to the usual beats: bad backlinks, low or thin quality content, haven't updated in a long time, not enough EAT, etc. Blah blah blah. Blah.

I honestly think that's just a rationalization by those who haven't been hit for why they won't get hit in the future. "Oh, they lost, so they clearly did X and deserved it! But not me!" Yeah. You have to remember this is Google we're talking about, and in their Alice-In-Wonderland digital dystopia, you can do every single thing they ask, but sooner or later...

I have an older website in a different niche that I haven't touched in over 5 years. I just kind of forgot about it. No Wordpress updates, plugin updates, no SEO, no SSL, no author or about pages, nothing. Nothing has changed on it. I haven't even logged into it. It is a time capsule. I checked today, and while it has little traffic due to being a very small site, it still ranks for almost every keyword I ever targeted, and has even been granted multiple featured snippets. I was shocked.

A contrary example: My larger competitor that got hit is a pretty huge website. Giant social following (hundreds of thousands), full staff of writers, updated daily with long-form content, registered LLC with full physical contact details and author bios, experts in the field who have appeared on national radio programs, over a decade of work and...poof, it's off Google.

My current site is a smaller (though more unique, as it's my voice and style) version of theirs, so if THEY don't recover, I'm doubly screwed. Because they did everything I was ultimately aiming for, and everything Google asked. And they have been punished severely.

[gatormark]

I’ve come to the conclusion that we should not try to figure out Google. SEO changes are futile. Just try to make your website the best for its audience and let the chips fall where they may.

[seomotionz]

I’ve come to the conclusion that we should not try to figure out Google. SEO changes are futile. Just try to make your website the best for its audience and let the chips fall where they may.

@gatormark Then why pages with absolute and actual malwares ranking in the first pages? Forget about our rankings and all. Atleast Google should think about the safety of its users! But NO!

These pages should be stripped down from the SERP's anyway.

[jediviper]

The GSC impressions are 60% down for different countries during the whole previous week, but the traffic is affected only by a decrease of 10%.
On the other hand, I am noticing that now many of the top 3 Google results are from the Google Play store!

So it looks that for some niches, Google is pushing it's own properties up the rankings !