Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2020

[gatormark]

The following 13 messages were cut out of the May, 2020 thread at:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4994037.htm [webmasterworld.com]
by robert_charlton - 4:31 pm on Jun 1, 2020 (PDT -8)



I just don't know anymore. There is no rhyme to these rankings. I tested the speed of one of the top pages that replaced mine and it has a page speed of 3 for mobile and 23 for desktop. THREE FOR MOBILE! How the heck is that possible and they're in position #2? Google disregards all their recommendations. I am at a complete loss these days. Up is down, Right is wrong.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:44 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

[mosxu]

Competition is not a game that has ever been played with making a profit in mind. Even before Chinese manufacturers selling direct to consumer via Amazon warehouses always new competitors were coming selling without making any profit and kept distorting the market.

That must have impacted AI spenders because the buyers are less and less and profit making (genuine buyer traffic) is only possible for 2-3 ads accounts

[lcfc80]

No idea why I can't quote Bushy at the bottom of page 13 but this reply is to their post

At first it looked that way but now I've seen exactly the same drops as I did from May after showing signs of recovery. My guess at the moment is that they tried to tweak the May update and re-ran it but it still has many of its flaws

[glakes]

Let’s stop running a business and all go on universal income. No point employing people and invest. Waste of time.

@mosxu

We run our businesses and Google attempts to run us until we have nothing left to give.

this is 100% not a rollback. Seen more data on it now.

@BushyTop

If this were a rollback, it would have to be a rollback to November Bert. Conversions have totally disappeared on slightly lower (about 5%) traffic. I haven't seen such poor traffic since November when the Sesame Street gang was introduced to Google's algo...

[Dooku]

It is NEVER EVER a rollback with G algo updates. I wish the online communities and websites like SemRush would drop that term, it's just NOT correct. G will only adjust or tweak a major core update as is clearly to be seen, but they will NEVER do a rollback.

[glakes]

I wish the online communities and websites like SemRush would drop that term

I would agree that the term rollback is used too loosely. Webmasters may perceive a return to traffic, conversions, etc. from a previous point in time as a rollback. But it's more complicated then that. Places like SEMRush and SEO blogs tend to use terminology that is being discussed in webmaster forums which only reinforces the wrong perception. Google does rollbacks, or policy changes, but those are limited to SERP features such as what they did with Favicons.

The SERP monitors have settled down. What we are seeing now is likely what we will have until the next Google update or tweak. For me, it looks like Google is trying to starve us and prop up their buddy Jeff Bezos of Amazon with more traffic/sales.

[RedBar]

but they will NEVER do a rollback.

I don't know how many times you, me and several others have to say that BUT I seem to recollect in the distant past, maybe 15 years ago, there was a rollback or very quick adjustment to one update ... I don't need to remember G algo update names etc :-)

Or is old age winning now?

[ichthyous]

I recovered top three placement for some terms with this "rollback", tweak, or whatever you want to call it. Interestingly though, traffic is lower yesterday and today.

[ichthyous]

As an aside...wondering if any Wordpress users have any insight into whether oEmbeds provide valuable backlinks to your site? I had embeds turned off for my site, but I see a ton of requests hitting the server for urls ending in "/embed". My guess is it might be bots trying to scrape the site for embed urls. But if someone embeds an image or post of yours on their site it includes a link to that post and the home page as well. Perhaps a valuable source of backlinks?

[RedBar]

There's been an "adjustment" since whereby I was seeing 1 x ebay and 2 x Pinterest I'm now seeing 2 x ebay and 1 x Pinterest otherwise much the the same for me.

[webdev29]

Today, the conversion rate and visits are getting worse and worse. I see Pinterest appearing on many commercial queries (we never saw that in FR) and big players like ebay come out of nowhere to crush all the small businesses. If COVID won't kill your business, Google will obviously. Since May it's become a big mess.

[ichthyous]

and big players like ebay come out of nowhere to crush all the small businesses. If COVID won't kill your business, Google will obviously.

Yes, same with my niche...since the may update the first page for any search related to ecomm are only very large players, sprinkled with Pinterest feeds. There is no presence of small to mid sized businesses.

One thing I am seeing and maybe others as well. My traffic has oriented sharply to my home page and away from my landing pages, which used to be the majority of my traffic. This could be because larger players have the ability to rank landing pages very highly compared to smaller sites. I have seen this inversion of traffic from home page / landing pages numerous times over the years with Google, but I have never seen it this strongly, nor such a big loss in impressions and traffic for most (but not all) landing pages.


Also noticing that the entire source of the decline is USA traffic, while non-USA traffic is holding steady or increasing.

[Webweeb]

So I think I figured out one part of the puzzle why the Google serps have become worse.
So today I googled...
"mexican sterotypes"
"part of world population white"

And I did not get the answers I was looking for. There are some fairly obvious political algos going on there. Not saying I agree or disagree. I just did not get what I was looking for. It essentially treated my search as "why mexican stereotypes are bad" when that was 100% clearly not what I was searching for.

All I was looking for was a list of sterotypes and a percentage. I got nothing useful.

I think Google has shifted away from giving people what they are looking for and gone for giving them what they want them to see.

I think this same kind of algo is also causing black hat spam to rank in my niche. Because while it is not political at all, there are terms involved that can be used in a political context. So the political algos may cause it to bugg out.

Its quite frightening. Because it means instead of creating the content users want, we need to create the content that Google wants them to see...
...welcome to the Brave New World.

[webdev29]

Indeed, in a completely different vein, I noticed the same problem. The attention of the user linked to the keyword is not as relevant as it was before May updates. A simple example: If your traffic does not have a significant drop but suddenly your conversion rate drops massively after GG update, it simply means that the user's request is not treated as it should be. This is something that I have encountered since the first updates in May and it continues to get worse and worse...

[mosxu]

@glakes

“We run our businesses and Google attempts to run us until we have nothing left to give”

It is summing all up it is us who should have been protesting on the streets cause we have nothing left to give.

[gatormark]

I am searching from the USA and I have been getting more and more pages with non-english results since the update. I’ve never seen this before and it is strange, especially since I’m using the English language in my queries.

Has anyone noticed this?

[webdev29]

it's interesting, out of curiosity I tested some random queries and on SERP (FR) I'm starting to get results in foreign language (EN-US) . Relatively quite far in the results, towards page 6-8 for the moment.

In any case, for the moment all the information tends to make you think that the last Updates concern the comprehension of the text (BERT) and the attention related to the keyword (context included), all on a PageRank background.

Big mess ! hope they will tweak the whole thing before killing too many small businesses, their ""little"" game began to cost a lot to society (we already have enough to deal with this pandemic.)

[MayankParmar]

Lol scrapper is in Top Stories and I'm not. Great job Google!

[engine]

Interesting : I found a site at position 1 in the SERPs and it had malware. It wasn't flagged by Google.

[renatovieira]

Update is happening now?

Traffic was gone. Morning USA.

Has anyone noticed anything abnormal today?

Niche: Live streaming cameras

[glakes]

It is summing all up it is us who should have been protesting on the streets cause we have nothing left to give.

@mosxu

Though I haven't been in the streets, I have been protesting by reaching out to regulators and the politicians that oversee their departments. Though it may be an exercise in futility, I keep a list of those that failed to respond/address my concerns. Besides losing my vote, I'll invest in seeing those who ignored my concerns are removed from office.

The dysfunction in D.C. is at an all time high as well as their incompetence. It's not limited to politicians, but just about every Federal department including those responsible for protecting consumers and ensuring competitive markets. Thankfully some state attorney general's are ramping up efforts to protect consumers/competition under their jurisdiction. I see Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is seeking public comments on search engines (see [ohioattorneygeneral.gov...] ) and their anti-competitive practices as his office pursues justice for those consumers and businesses harmed within his jurisdiction.

It's terrible that states must take it upon themselves to protect consumers/competition when our tax dollars pay for Federal agencies to do that. But as we've witnessed over the years, Federal agencies have been negligent in carrying out their duties which has allowed this cancer to grow. And I see the Amazon cancer is growing yet again with their acquisition of the self driving startup Zoox. Before long we will all be working for Amazon or Google unless the last line of defense (state attorney generals) saves the day.

What I am witnessing in this latest Google update is a doubling down of low quality/non-converting traffic. Total traffic is definitely lower as well. With all the reports of Google's garbage SERPS, I would expect more tweaks moving forward.

Update is happening now?

@renatovieira

I'm not seeing an update, just a continuation of the erosion of Google's traffic and its quality. SERP tools that I've checked are all reporting a state of calm.

[RedBar]

So today I googled...
"mexican sterotypes"
"part of world population white"

I am confused!

If you already knew the answer YOU were seeking then why search for an alternative one?

Both searches could throw up multiple generic results, I certainly wouldn't have a clue for Mexican stereotype other than Hispanic, Indian, Catholic and sombrero and that's not because I am British since my wife IS Apache, Hispanic, Irish, Moor and a few others as well and who were the original settlers in "Mexico" ... honestly, her family tree goes back over 1,000 years.

You'll only get out as good as what you put in.

[renatovieira]

Is anyone really noticing any strange movements today?

It looks like Google sends me users looking for a lemon cake recipe, while my site is live streaming cameras.

Zombies again?

[Webweeb]

@redbar

No, I did not know the answer I was looking for. I wanted to know how many % of the world population are white.
I also wanted to know what mexican sterotypes were, since I was talking to a mexican friend from the US about mexican culture.

The funny thing is that years ago I googled the same thing and remember finding out that something around 12-20% of the world population are white. Now I dont seem to be able to find a number at all. Which means I am stuck with inaccurate and outdated numbers in my head. Probably because telling people that whites are a minority would be a hate crime or something.

It just seems extremely sketchy to me. And seems like the kind of thing Gouvernements should regulate.

Also problematic is that if I had not known that the Information exists and I was able to find it previous, I would have never known that the SERP is bad.

Even more scary to me is that someone at Google actually decided to make an algo to not tell people how many people on earth are white... its not like a huge overarching algo would be able to do this. Or maybe an algo can do this, engineers feel free to correct me. Is it possible for an algo to learn hypersensitive political correctness to the point of recognizing that telling people that whites are a minority on earth might be considered offensive to some?

I cant see how a broad algo would handle this problem. Which means it has to be targeted, which is extremely scary.

[edited by: Webweeb at 12:00 am (utc) on Jun 28, 2020]

[webdev29]

@renatovieira, yes I noticed abnormal movements, over 3 years I never exceeded 20% bounce rate and today I've gone up to more than 35-40% ! these movements started from 10am the 27/06 (4pm FR), after this hour and despite a traffic increase of +20% over the last 24 hours, I had absolutely no conversions...

[renatovieira]

@webdev29

Exactly same here...

[TalkativeEditorial]

@renatovieira

Been noticing weird movements even when I am searching for stuff myself for utterly mundane things about tracing paper.
And so many Google Books results that do not relate to my query at all. So. Many.

Meanwhile, Google Discover is still borked for us and in some of our verticals the results that are top are more than a year old (including pages from our site!) - and this is on time-sensitive topics.

[Dooku]

Regarding the abominable bad quality and low amount of traffic, the following is just speculation off course;
Yesterday I heard on the news that several states in the USA are preparing to go into lockdown again.
Over a hundred million citizens will face this issue....again.

Traffic from the USA is not normal anyway since covid19 for obvious reasons, and now the second lockdown is looming.
It would appear G is scraping the already (before covid19) low volume of "quality" traffic for it's own purpose. But now with this new situation, and changing again maybe, there is not much left for the rest of us at all.

The traffic from the USA is going down since months already, all that is left is non converting bot traffic and probably scrapers and the like. Because traffic from from the rest of the world is remaining quite stable on all my websites and my test websites.

I only read about the situation from news sites and tv news programs about the situation in the USA, so off course forum members living in the USA will know much better what the actual situation is. But it would appear visiting websites and making purchases is NOT one of their top priorities now, nor for the coming months.

I do not mind this set back and except it. It is a minor nuisance compared to what other people go through and in worst case even loose their lives because of the same incompetent people Glakes described a few posts back. But how G handles and abuses this situation it's clear that they have lost their moral compass. I have no sympathy left for even the normal G employees, as a human being they should know better, there is no excuse.

[cptproto]

It is just sad what is happening, my site gets outranked by scam websites which landingpages got around 10k spam backlinks (#*$! related anchor text), google books, pinterest and facebook pages. My page ranked on #1-#3 for almost 2 years and is now sitting on page 2. Gaming Niche. Looks like black hat is the way to go these days, I feel betrayed following Google's suggestions and being a white hat guy to the bone. I usually don't whine about updates, but I feel more and more disgusted in what google has turned into after they started licking the asses of their shareholders.

Please excuse my little rant.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial I have seen Discover improvements this week.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar - At least something good is happening for someone! Happy for you.