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]

These criminals keep destroying my website. I just can find words to tell what I'm thinking on that guys from G. It's a real Corporate of Evil. I even don't hope that something will roll-back. So much work was done, I alwasy tried to produce the best content I could, paying a huge money to my authors and till now everything was not so bad. But right now the thing is that my pages were pulled down with content that is less informative, shorter, less deeper. I'm creating content on IT tutorials on advanced topics (like Active Directory, PowerShell etc.), and right now I'm seeing that my long-form detailed content is not needed by Google anymore. I just don't know what to do (and the fact that my Adsense RPM went from 1.8 to 0.6 since Corona is another reason why now I think that I'm near the edge).

[christianz]

Corona induced RPM loss will come back. No need to worry about that too much. The mistreatment of quality websites, reliance on flawed "AI" and pushing of ads and in-house websites is something to worry about.

It will get only worse, unless there emerges anti-Google which is true competition for Google with 30+% search market share and based in strictly non-US, non-Western locale (China for example) and therefore not part of the California tech cartel.

Unfortunately, I don't see it happening soon.

[RedBar]

For those, and their competitors, who have lost badly in this update, how many of you are solely digital businesses?

Do you ever partake in realworld business activities such as trade fairs or event sponsorship etc?

[ichthyous]

I've noticed a 64% decline in 'direct' traffic, and a 24% increase in organic search traffic reported by Google Analytics in the last week since the update started on May 4th. Is anyone else seeing this? My ranking as a whole seems to be recovering slowly, and traffic is ticking upward again but only in small increments.

[edited by: ichthyous at 2:11 pm (utc) on May 11, 2020]

[gatormark]

@RedBar - I’m 100% online.

[ichthyous]

Do you ever partake in realworld business activities such as trade fairs or event sponsorship etc?

No, and now with COVID I'm thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't trapped in such a contract. I've heard that people's money has not been refunded in full, they just switched to online presentation. Real world business will never be the same...in person meetings will never recover. Business travel will never return to what it was, and people will not flock to shows and fairs again until they've all been vaccinated. COVID has accelerated this trend faster than anything in recent memory.

[ichthyous]

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

I absolutely believe that updating your site on regular basis helps. My site is a big catalog basically, it's not article based so most of the content pages are too thin. I can update around the edges but the majority of pages are just product pages and it is very hard to make major informational changes to those. Interestingly, my competitors that have pushed me out of the top three lately all had thin content pages, but they have hundreds of thousands of products. Size definitely is a determining factor with this type of site.

[RedBar]

COVID has accelerated this trend faster than anything in recent memory.

Short memory! SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

All fairs recovered after that and most probably will do again. Have you ever bothered about travelling to a country with, say, malaria? It's never bothered me before and it won't do now.

The reason I ask if their websites have a realworld presence, I wonder, is G validating if these are realworld businesses or simply automated programmes that disappear at the whiff of any problem? Would that be a crazy thing to do? I have no idea but with all the scams going on maybe they're coming from a different direction?

Just a thought.

[SteveWrz]

It would be one thing if this was the new bottom and I can work on improving my content and regaining positions. But since the November update, my main site has continued to fall with every passing month.

After 13 years of running this business, I have a few months to figure things out before I hang it up for good.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@SteveWrz Strange things, but the same situation for me. Updating content to the newest one not helps anymore since 2019 November update. I DO know that it's the best content from the authors with deep advanced knowledge, but it won't work for me since mentioned update.

[RedBar]

Which generalised widget sectors are seeing the malware results in their SERPs?

If you don't tell us we can't help.

My sector is plagued with Pinterest but nothing untowards.

[sofie77]

Google loose alot of money on adwords. Do you think google made a list of websites, where the owners propably will invest in adwords when they got hit or is this not allowed? (to evil?)

Fact is, most website owners / firms will not recognize this update. They doesn´t read forums ore SEO Blogs. They dont know about an udpate or have ever heard of one. I know many of such companies.

For them, it is not linked to a loss of positions. Rather, they connect it to corona. So they will probably invest in adwords...

[edited by: sofie77 at 4:41 pm (utc) on May 11, 2020]

[ichthyous]

@RedBar - Business travel for in person meetings etc will never return to previous levels. Not even after a vaccine is discovered...that's because companies have realized how non-essential much of that travel was. They are doing just fine with teleconferencing. Many people are moving out of major urban areas and many more people will be working remotely...I don't think that genie will be put back in the bottle.

As for trade fairs, once a vaccine is discovered that foot traffic might recover. Malaria is treatable, so not comparable to coronavirus.

[TeeKay]

@ichthyous You're making a lot of sense to me pal.

Personal example; but I won't be going 'into' the supermarket anymore. Now I just order it and get it delivered. I could have done that years ago, but I was just stuck in my mindset. The supermarket was always a pain in the neck.

Businesses will be considering whether or not they still even need all of the 10 sales reps that they currently have, A) due to reduced sales revenue (depending on sector of course), and B) as you (@ichthyous) said; having adapted to using various non 'in-person' methods of selling a service/product. Methods that cost the company pennies compared to flying sale reps around the globe and putting them up in hotels.

There are and always will be some industries that require a physical 'in-person' demo of a product, but for a vast majority, in terms of 'sales communications', Coronavirus has simply accelerated what was going to become the norm by 2030, making it the norm in 2020 instead.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Do I assume you are resident in the USA?

[Robert Charlton]

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.

Nick, all good considerations, definitely worth evaluating.

Just a quick note as a general response to the "when to make changes" question.... It is wise not to make changes in quick response to Google 'ranking' changes. Google can use such responses as indications of attempting to manipulate the algorithm. See this old discussion here.

Google's Rank Modifying Patent for Spam Detection
Aug 18, 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4486158.htm [webmasterworld.com]

This is not what I think you are talking about, but I nevertheless mention it here because it may have to do with a rise you or others sometimes see after doing nothing.

I'm virtually certain I have seen examples of Google using the patent... generally in response to sites which change frequently with patterns that appear to be SEO-related (eg, testing the ranking effects of purchased links... or frequent "fiddling" with pages). Again, not what I think you are talking about. Definitely don't let this discourage long term improvement.

[dhananjay]

Gonna leave this here (for fun :D)

[seroundtable.com...]

[Musicarl]

Update from the entertainment sector. Since coronavirus, there have been a lot more searches for strings like "widgets that start with K." In this update, Google inserted a carousel on the top of results pages for these searches, so organic results are pushed way down. It seems that if they notice a term getting some attention, they will do what they can to keep that traffic in their ecosystem.

[immrrobot]

If this is how the update is going to stand, then it will be hard to get enough traffic unless we are ranking in the rich snippet or top 2. They are filling everything with clutter. pinterest pages, facebook pages, non-relevant pages, youtube videos, and what not. So is this how G is trying to meet user query? If it is then it's a hilarious update

[jmorgan]

Well, according to search console my average rankings are actually UP since the update, while my impressions/clicks are down. Is it just a quirk in SC where your rankings drop but due to the way your pages show in search results, it actually gives the impression that they are up (on average)?

Or are my impressions/clicks/traffic down purely for other reasons? It's all rather confusing.

[jediviper]

Another aspect of the catastrophe that this new Update has caused is how it affected our kws into NOT ranking.
For the total number of tracked kws, our standard percentage of NOT ranking kws was around 4%.
After the new update this went up to 20%.... It's a total mess. So it's not just pushing kws from the 1st page to the 2nd or 3rd page. Is making them disappear what really creates an unsolved problem.

[TeeKay]

I agree, Google's SERPS appear to be in even more of a scrambled mess since this core update.

Some of my pages have risen and some have dropped, that happens with any Google algorithm update 'core' or 'non-core'. However, the thing that I simply do not understand, is that for many search queries the page of my site Google serves is completely off-topic in terms of the query being searched e.g. you do a search for the 'benefits' content and you get the 'side effects' content. You search the 'side effects' content and you get the 'benefits' content. How on earth is that meant to be serving the searcher with the most useful information. It just confuses the searcher, sends them around in circles. Outright bizarre.

Along with this, as usual Google ranks tons of gibberish webpages, as it's algorithm cannot seem to grasp an understanding of 'quality' content. It's been like that for years now, they just can't seem to get-to-grips with sifting out spammy machine-generated (spun) gibberish content. The spammers know this, so they just continue to flood the SERPS with all that junk endlessly, year after year after year.

Oh and Amazon of course gets its annual bump up the SERPS, in-keeping with it's historically evident 'carte blanche' monopolistic treatment from Google.

[whoa182]

@jmorgan

The reason for average ranking going up but clicks and impressions going down is usually due to lots of keywords not ranking at all. It brings average keyword position up when lots of other keywords that ranked less well disappear.

[gatormark]

Looks like an early 1/3 CPC and 25% rpm decrease this morning, for me. Let’s see if it evens out.

[NickMNS]

@jmorgan and whoa182

Is it just a quirk in SC

The reason for average ranking going up but clicks and impressions going down

I provided a detailed explanation as to why this occurs at the top of page 6 of this thread.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Facing with live report Analytics glitch (or I'm a super lucky and my traffic increased by 200%, but I doubt). Who sees the same?

[NickMNS]

@Cyril I'm not seeing it now but it has been a common occurrence over the past few month. I saw it last, as recently as yesterday, but it only affects the real-time report and doesn't impact any other reports.

[jmorgan]

Yes, not appearing in search for certain keywords anymore, yet ranking higher for others does sound like a plausible explanation for an increase in average ranking.

Certainly, a quick glance at some comparison of keywords between this week and last in GSC shows this to be the case for me.

Quite interesting. Perhaps with an update, the algo, rather than ranking you a few notches lower, just decides that your website is completely not even relevant for a bunch of keywords anymore.

[NickMNS]

Perhaps with an update, the algo, rather than ranking you a few notches lower, just decides that your website is completely not even relevant for a bunch of keywords anymore.

No this is simply an artifact of how the numbers are reported in GSC. If your "global rank" (independent of impressions) is say #3 then the probability of getting an impressions is high, as you will appear on page 1 for any query for that keyword. Thus, this will in theory provide you with an impression. If your "global rank" after an update drops to #22, you are now on page 3 and the probability of getting an impression drops.

But the import thing to remember in all this is the relationship between keyword and SERP is not 1 to 1. Each SERP can be different and show different websites at different ranks based on factors like personalization, geo-location etc. So this global rank changes for each query. Out of the x number of queries you may rank #22 for most, but for some, for example for users that already have been to your website, your website will still rank #3 or better. These #3 searches are fewer, but since GSC is biased to only show you results for which impressions occurred, your "position" will appear to remain stable and possibly even increase.

This doesn't really give you any insight into the nature of the update.

Note this isn't opinion, it is math and it is verifiable.

[jmorgan]

@NickMNS So would you say impressions (and not average rank) are a better indication of whether your site has profited from an update?