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]

[samwest]

Pinterest is like Amazon, has it's own search, so what's the point of having it in Google SERPs, it's mostly just irrelevant fluff. It's just pushing out millions of struggling businesses. Way to go Gorg.

[Skape7]

@webweeb that's good to know. It's strange since Pinterest is kind of a competitor for Google. I noticed Google has made some tweaks to image search to kind of mirror pinterest in some ways. Makes me wonder if they are planning on buying Pinterest down the road.

I have one site that is a very visual niche in which I have a decent presence on Pinterest and I kind of benefit from getting multiple positions in the SERPs sometimes with my website and pinterest.

[Webweeb]

The pinterest thing and ranking thin content in general changes the game completely.

However, before starting up my own spam bots and posting images with links all over the place, I will wait for Google to fix whatever bug they admitted.

I suspect Google right now is being flooded with spam reports, since if content is thin, it is almost impossible to tell spam from quality content, as there is almost no onpage to work off of.

Thats also how I suspect keyword stuffing is ranking again... Google thinks its a pinterest-like page and the keywords are tags, so as long as thee is an image somewhere in the body of the page, they rank it.

Overall, this pushes webmasters to spam 3rd party websites to regain traffic instead of creating value for users... Not necessarily what Google intended. So I do expect this to get changed.

[worker]

Is the overwhelming number of Google Books listings also a confirmed/admitted bug?

[Webweeb]

@worker
no, google books are not a confirmed bug. just more proof that this core update is the worst in the history of Google to date.

But honestly, between the pinterest spam, the thin content, the ABSOLUTELY useless google books, barely related news articles... If these serps are actually what makes users happy, then Its time for me to find a new job.

Clearly I have lost touch with reality.

But since Google fired their head of search after this shipstorm started, I do have a glimmer of hope left.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing a sudden dip in traffic on the 10th and 11th?

[MayankParmar]

Has anyone noticed a drop in referral from Google APIs in Analytics but their Discover traffic is unchanged in Console? It looks like Analytics has suddenly stopped allocating Discover traffic to Google APIs.com

[widgetized]

@ichthyous

Sort of. I'm seeing a lot of spam emails coming in and converting traffic disappeared completely after 9 June. The usual.

I also notice I'm losing a lot of Valid Pages from the Coverage section on GSC. Can't understand the reason, honestly, Valid Pages always went up in the past.

[glakes]

Anyone else seeing a sudden dip in traffic on the 10th and 11th?

Yes and a substantial drop (-20%). Spam dominates Google's SERPS at the moment...

[RedBar]

Is the overwhelming number of Google Books listings also a confirmed/admitted bug?

This has been occurring for about a year now, maybe longer. Whenever I see books listed, which is nearly in every result and can be quite often on the first page for which there are loads of possible results, I have yet to see ONE book with relevance to my query.

They NEVER, ever have anything to do with my queries.

[Webweeb]

Just saw a page ranking top 3 that was only keywords listed... one per line.

At the bottom there was a box for a mailing list subscription.

no images and nothing else.... just keyword stuffing and one call to action.

My guess is that bot farms are automatically googling, clicking the result and subscribing to the 'newsletter', leading google to think they were a successful conversion and ranking absolute trash.

At this point I'm almost certain the black hats are faking user data to brake whole SERPs, manipulating google to rank things differently by manipulating user intent using bots. Google has long since admitted that they track 'conversions'.... I'm not sure who to be mad at... the black hats trying to rank without merit or Google that can still easily be tricked after all these years.

But the weirdest thing was that there was not even a link on the page... only keyword stuffing... so noone seemed to benefit from the traffic. Granted, I had adblock on, as you do when you click trash like that.... but it seemed extremely weird. They also used CSS to move most the page content above the page and essentially make it invisible... did not investigate the soruce code, but clearly something extremely shady was going on there.

[edited by: Webweeb at 1:38 pm (utc) on Jun 12, 2020]

[SweetPotato]

IMO, DOCS, PDF and YouTube do not belong in web search at all, they do not "enhance" the search but obstruct it.

If i want a video i search it on YouTube like a normal human being.
i don't expect YouTube videos on search YET they are not only there but often on 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th spots. WHY? Because Google owns YouTube.

All pages should compete with equal chance. This isn't a fair game at all.

We have to fight against: spammers, scrappers, random snippets all over, paid results on top and bottom spots, Pinterest, Quora, Amazon, YouTube videos, random PDF's, random google docs.

STOP THE MADNESS!

@Google Have you forgotten how to make a search engine? It's like you have amnesia, burned down all knowledge and starting from 0. No common sense either. What is going on here? Any human left in charge?

[Skape7]

So 2 of my sites seemed to have recovered yesterday after 2 days of a significant dip. Seems like they were testing the SERPs during that period? I didn't change anything on these sites.

[mhansen]

Big shift to bigger brands in my market segment (informational, lead-gen) today. Not only the featured snippet, but also anther listing in the top 3 organics of a semi-related page from same domain. Of course, this is well down the page after all the other crap they put in between the ads and walled Google garden.

[Countryside tech]

Seeing significant drops in ranking on regular search results through several niches. Didn't happen for the past 18 months... There is something going on.

[RedBar]

Honestly, just what are some of you searching for?

Sure I see Pinterest pages and the Google books thing however I haven't seen the garbage some of you are claiming to get in months. I may not like G's listing preferences however in my widget sector I have to say that things are, generally, looking cleaner.

Why one valid page ranks above another valid page, well, that's real in-depth investigation time:-)

But, then again, I generally only use G for testing purposes, not for my searches.

[samwest]

If these serps are actually what makes users happy, then Its time for me to find a new job.

I believe these serps only make GOOGLE happy.
Just imagine, if you make 40billion+ per quarter, that breaks down to roughly $450 Million per day. PER DAY! It's an obscene amount of money for any one company to be extracting from a market. Can you guess where all that money comes from? Yep, YOUR pocket, by way of technological subterfuge...or as in this update, "alleged" ineptness disguised as the same. Their defense is "oops, we made a boo boo"...yet pocket all the gains.

Welcome to all the new faces here! By your appearance we can see the problem is indeed widespread.

[mhansen]

@Samwest and Others

I believe these serps only make GOOGLE happy.

I tend to stay away from using Google Adsense on any of my busier sites and focus strictly on self-monetization through lead gen, etc. It's worked out well for +15 years.

Outside of the Big-Brands that Google already has a backend relationship with, I see many sites moving to the top that are littered with Adsense ads. The sites are simply full of ads and when viewed in mobile they have an auto ad floating on top/bottom of the screen, and when you scroll through, you are presented a new ad on every ajax/screen load, which seems to occur about every 400-500 pixels. Literally, some screens are nothing but Google adsense ads.

Has anyone ever seen any correlational between top ranking sites and Google adsense? IE: Do you feel they are promoted higher in SERPs, over other, self monetized sites?

I DID add adsense to one high converting site last year, and after earning very good $$ for 3-4 months (+$5k/mo), that was at the expense of our primary leads, I noticed a sudden drop in Google traffic. After pulling the ads, the traffic came back rather quickly and I've never used them again.

[Webweeb]

@RedBar
Thats the problem about these kinds of forums. We cant reveal our niches. Noone wants unnecessary competition.
I agree that the results for very obvious terms with obvious intent are ok.

However, in my main niche right now actual bot level spam is ranking. Mostly parasite spam. The most obvious kind too with bitly links, links to deindexed sites, keyword stuffing ect. Even literally deleted pages are ranking regularly, because the parasite site hosts are faster at removing the spam than Google.

I suspect my niche is not the only one affected by this 'bug'. I also suspect different niches are affected to different degrees. Mine just happens to be one of the worst with actual reeal SPAM being 80% of the first 4 pages.

And then you have the admitted bug with pinerest ranking under 3000 different CCTLDs and some SERPS being exclusively pinterest... the suspected bug with google books and useless PDFs ranking all over sudden...

And then you have COVID and Google clearly having biases concerning that and wanting to weed out information that does not agree with the WHO... so they had to push a quick and probably untested update for that too. Untested, because India was in lockdown and you do not want to pay US salaries to test SERPS....

...and all that leads me to suspect that this Google May the 4th Core update was not tested enough. Also they clearly released it on May the 4th not because it was ready, but because its funny. Very professional.

TLDR; its a mess

[ichthyous]

YouTube videos on search YET they are not only there but often on 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th spots. WHY?

Youtube is Google's cash cow, that's why. Plus a lot of people actually do watch the videos, it makes perfect sense to integrate their platforms

[ichthyous]

Traffic is being highly throttled from day to day now, and even by hour. I took a big dip on the 10th, then traffic was low on the 11th in the first half of the day...but when I checked today traffic had zoomed in the second half. This morning traffic unusually low again. Not a single inquiry originating from Google in more than a week now...plus the economy is in shock, protests, COVID. I hope google realizes that this last round of updates from May 4th onward was a failure and reverts it ASAP.

[Dooku]

Currently I am seeing this in in serps and my own data; the higher the competition in the "niche" or industry the higher the number of scraper websites, spammers and burn&churners.

However, the real spike I noticed soon after the october 2019 Bert update......the google AI. I am pretty sure that the spammers/scrapers have noticed and found new easy methods to fool the new Bert infested algorithm without much effort.
Seeing a lot of obviously made for quick ranking stuffed websites with nonsensical content ranking QUICK with NEWLY registered domain even.

Either google knows this and has planned for it like they are estimating when their AI will catch up and those spam websites will be cleaned from the serps, or they have miscalculated completely the results of what would happen and are now seeing this mess and maybe are looking for a solution on how to clean this up?

@Samwest, yes you have to wonder if making as much money per QUARTER as the entire economy of small countries is actually morally sound? At the least it will cause some form of corruption and at worst complete abuse of (economic)power, like google is beginning to display now.

[MayankParmar]

My traffic dropped too and I've no idea if it's because of the update. It's just getting stressful. They need to stop doing these regular updates.

[gatormark]

The number one Google SERP link, in one of my main keywords, literally links to Oprah Magazine and that page has one paragraph of fairly unrelated text and 10 links to completely unrelated content. How does a Billion dollar corporation produce search results like this?

@MayankParmar

Google needs to keep doing updates because the current search results are laughable.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

It's so fun to watch how 6 years of your work is just dying day after day. You had one from the biggest websites in your niche, a lot of thankful comments, a lot of info shared with your readers... but... now Google decided you have a bad website and you will be vanished totally. Maybe it will roll back in a year, but you won't be able to keep your work and pay money to your authors. This year almost killed my bussiness, a few weeks left until traffic will be vanished totally. Making bussiness with G nowadays is like you are sentenced to death, but no one will tell you why. They will just kill you.

[MayankParmar]

[twitter.com...]

THIS. EXACTLY THIS.

After the recent Google updates, they're ranking scrapers in Top Stories and Google News Feed!

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@MayankParmar

Oh, it was so fun to read this Twitter post. Guy asked John Muller WHY THE HELL the scrapers are on the first positions in the SERP and stealing others content, benefitting from that. And the answer is to start DMCA process... Is it the answer for the guy's question?

As I see the situation, the guys from Google is absolutely satisfied on what they have done this year. As I see from their posts. Nothing will change. The answer is "If you don't like something, start DMCA process". They are not going to change something in their algo, as I understand it's really great from their point of view.

[MayankParmar]

Google's priorities must change and they should stop ranking scrappers!

Is pushing down scrappers in SERPs a difficult task for a $1 trillion company? And the scrapper has itself linked to the original source but still, Google choose to rank it above the original content :)

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar Google can't even tell which is the real page. For example a page is about "best restaurants of x" then instead of showing the main page. Google is showing its tags in the SERP's which are basically 'restaurants of X' or 'X restaurants', which usually are far hard to rank.

I am noticing this for a while now. Since Google is moving towards to be like a Q&A site, its giving far more importance in tags rather than the page's actual keyword.

[Webweeb]

@Dooku
Yes, the black hats seem to have found a new method, but seems accidental to me.
Google just suddently started ranking their spammy profile backlins, scrapers, parasite spam and spammy social profiles... so now they are simply flooding the serps with that stuff.

Except now they are doing it for traffic and not links.

I can literally see my rakings go down day by day as the spammers keep doing what works, pushing me down further and further in the SERPS.

I am 100% sure this is a bug / not intended... and people are probably clicking through far more SERP pages now, wich Google can see and is not a good sign...
But will they fix it? When will they fix it? A month? A year? Ever?

Do they even care that spammers steal my images and outrank me using pinterest? I'm 100% sure this happens to many of us right now.
Oh look a spammer is using my image in a pin.... and raking above me. Lovely.
Is it my job to DMCA 100s of people doing that?
Or is it Google thats supposed to rank authorities instead of spammers?

I dont even know anymore. 2020... nothing makes sense anymore.