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]

[ichthyous]

Making business with G nowadays is like you are sentenced to death, but no one will tell you why. They will just kill you.

The constant and serious attacks on traffic really started in Sept of 2018. January 2020 was bad, and May even worse. My impressions in Google Images are down by almost 2/3 in the last 16 months, on top of the already lower trending site traffic. At this point I am not worrying so much about analyzing how I can remake my site to rank better in Google, but rather how I can get away from Google entirely as this is the new normal. Even if you recover you'll just get hit again and spend another six months waiting for a reprieve from the algorithm.

Google has made a business decision to sacrifice their organic SERPS completely in the name of higher quarterly profit. It's just that simple...they own the platform and they are going to do whatever they can to squeeze profit out of it, even if it destroys the quality of their own search.

[ichthyous]

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.

Do keep in mind that every social media platform has a DMCA takedown page. If you are the creator of the image you can submit a DMCA takedown for all the images being stolen. Your competitors' Pinterest posts will disappear from Google. I personally submit my images to Pinterest so others will share them. This creates a lot of links, albeit low level ones that I think don't count for much. When people steal my images and post them on Pinterest without a link to my site or a credit I make them take it down.

[ChokenBako]

I have the same problem with a scraper. Google lists the website above mine and everything of that website ist bad and not in compliance with Google guidelines....just ridiculous =(

[Webweeb]

@ichthyous
Ye I'm not going to DMCA everyone. My images are still ranking #1 in the niche, while my site ranks page 5+ now with all the spam.

Everyone steals my images. There is not enough time in the day to find it all and take it down. Also they do it autoamtically, so no chance at all. They all have watermarks too so at least its very obvious if a Google employee looks at it XD

The problem is noone will ever look, because Google is run by machines without common sense now.

[mosxu]

@glakes

Your dream may come true:

[theverge.com...]

I mean common EU has all information and still pretend nothing is wrong. As for Trump probably already too late

[ichthyous]

I've been doing some research and it seems the great majority of my traffic loss is from direct traffic. According to GA, my Google organic traffic is down 3% from this time last year, but direct traffic is down 53%.

I then checked GSC and see that my image search traffic has been declining steadily for a year, but took a serious downtown after May 4th. Image impressions are now only 1/3 of what they were 16 months ago. I cannot find Google Images listed separately under organic search in GA anymore...is Google Image traffic is listed under "direct/none" now?

[riccarbi]

For five years now, I've been posting thousands of original photos on my websites (I've shoot all of them, personally. So, I know that they are all original. Furthermore, I've always included my websites' name in titles, captions with crystal clear copyright bylines, and so on). From the beginning, Google started ranking webites that were scraping my pictures above mine in their image SERPs. Initially, I thought that was due to my websites being "the new kids in town". But I've realized very soon that this is Google's usual policy. They have never gave a damn about "original content" for images. I deem this intentional. It has been always quite easy to tell the original source of an image, even before AI. I can write in a few minutes a dozen lines in C++ that can tell it without any doubt for any kind of websites. Do no evil? Who still believe those BS out there? "For a few dollars more" would better suit Google's "philosophy", these days.

[MayankParmar]

I noticed that my direct and referral traffic had suddenly started appearing as 'organic' in Analytics.

The referral traffic is usually from news.google.com or googleapis.com and something happened with Analytics and it started allocating traffic from these two referrals to organic. It's fixed now, but previous stats have remained unchanged.

[RedBar]

@riccarbi

How long have you had your site, 5 years?

Weren't you aware of the great Google image theft of 10 years ago? Copying and scraping was very common all through the noughties however Google took it to a completely new level by "scraping / stealing" every image on The Net, in a materr of 2-3 months I went from 100K PVs per day to 10K and over the year down to 5K, yep a 95% loss in PVs, my AdSense earnings obviously collapsed.

All the images were mine and original, a total disrespect by Google and the day I fell out with Mountain View, period. I have not trusted a thing it has said, done or recommended since and I know a lot of other businesses that took the same attitude when I explained to them what had happened. This was not just to a few selected businesses, it was to an entire global widget industry which I explained during seminars at major international widget trade fairs.

Google completely shot themselves in the foot insofar as my industry was concerned.

[glakes]

@mosxu

I think it's already been established the FTC has no desire to actually do the work to go after big tech in any meaningful way. That's why a group of states are performing their own antitrust investigation into Google. With the investigative infrastructure in place, states could easily pursue Amazon as well. Both California and Washington appear to be doing just that by launching their own investigations into Amazon for using third party seller/product data to build their own portfolio of private label products. See [mashable.com...] for more information.

How powerful having all this data can be for both Amazon and Google. What's rather interesting to see is how well Amazon's private label products rank in Google. Like Google, Amazon slowly tightens the screws to make it difficult for anyone to connect the dots. What's typical is Amazon suspends a seller's product listing and demands supplier invoices to reinstate the product listing in their marketplace. With these invoices, Amazon has all the manufacturer/supplier information they need to swoop right in. And they do.

Both Amazon and Google have monetized people in such a way that has them competing against themselves and are prime examples of predatory capitalism.

[samwest]

@riccarbi... Gog likely considers your generation of “thousands of original pictures” as spam. They did the same to me. Makes sense because the only one of my images that ranks are the single images stolen by scrapers. Like red bar...the loss of image listing destroyed my traffic...because there is nothing in it for Google....and that happened exactly as red said...ten years ago.

[aristotle]

This has been said here many times before, but may be worth another reminder:

TWO INDICATIONS THAT YOUR SITE MAY HAVE BEEN PENALIZED BY GOOGLE'S ALGORITHM:

1. A RAPID DECLINE IN TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE SEARCH

2. SCRAPED COPIES RANK ABOVE YOUR ORIGINALS

[southernguy]

SCRAPED COPIES RANK ABOVE YOUR ORIGINALS

Maybe this explains Pinterest outranking everything for many queries.

[glakes]

TWO INDICATIONS THAT YOUR SITE MAY HAVE BEEN PENALIZED BY GOOGLE'S ALGORITHM:

2. SCRAPED COPIES RANK ABOVE YOUR ORIGINALS

Which is an indication Google does not or is slow to identify and penalize scraped content.

I never really bought this lame excuse by Google. Say someone kicks in the front door to your home, or you leave the front door unlocked, and they rob it. Does that mean anyone else if free to enter and take what they want without penalty? Bottom line is Google wants no responsibility for what they index/rank and could care less about those harmed as the result of Google allowing thieves to profit over the original creators. If we are responsible for the content on our websites, why isn't Google?

[ichthyous]

Weren't you aware of the great Google image theft of 10 years ago?

@Redbar...that was in fact 2010, I remember it well. Lost 90%+ of my image traffic overnight and it never came back. It was due to a design change which basically made it much harder for the viewer to visit the source site.

As I have said many many times, you can in fact pull down content that is ranking above your own through strategic DMCA complaints. Go to google and file the complaint...the page will be removed allowing your own image to rank higher. I file numerous DMCA complaints and I also bring in a good income from infringement actions.

I am not seeing scraped images of mine ranking higher than my own pages...what I am seeing is a 60+% loss in impressions for my images over the last 16 months or so. My own images are no longer ranking well, and that appears to be the majority of my traffic loss.

Does anyone know where Google Images traffic is being shown now under GA? it used to show up under images.google.com under organic...but it's not there anymore. Is it included under direct traffic now?

[ChokenBako]

I see only one direction in the moment - downwards. Every day 1-2% less visitors compared to previous week. =(

[Sally Stitts]

You know, as I read through this thread, I was seeking a positive comment.
I think I found one.
More and more webmasters are abandoning their long-held misconceptions about Google, and facing reality.
I find this, although painful, to be a positive happenstance. It took me forever (years and years) to admit defeat by this platform,
when it had been obvious for years, to an intelligent, independent and unbiased observer.

TRUE AWARENESS of the situation, and the ADMISSION thereof, is key to meeting the future. "What, are you stupid?"
I think I was.

I used to juggle ads like crazy, to "punish" my oppressor. Great effect, that had, as you might imagine.
My new tack is total surrender. Don't ask me why. Full, deep immersion in auto-ads ... everything.
It is my way of totally giving up trying. Just let her ride, and test my masochistic tendencies.
Release the stress. Just let it go. Stop trying to control anything, because you are not dealing with a rational entity.

Just let her ride, and be done with it. Because they are done with you.
Contemplate new ideas. Seek gratification elsewhere. It is the only way. See? Positive. New Horizons. Better deals.
.

[jediviper]

The loss of traffic is not always a penalty from Google . Not to be confused with the manual penalty, which it's verified by a message in the Google Search Console.

A drop because of the May Core Update just means that other websites perform better than you. It's not the same with a penalty and it shouldn't be mentioned like this.

[Portland79]

Here's another crazy thing.

Staring June 9th-10th I suddenly got about 3 times more Adsense Impressions on my sites but less revenue.
Clicks up due to all the extra ads.
Impression RPM way way down due to excessive ads and low paying ads.

Why did Google suddenly decide my sites were worth spamming?

I used to have it turned down to some sort of percentage for auto ads but they removed that option sometime last month and went full throttle.

They put the same ads over and over 8+ to a page.
Some are even covering my text!

I first noticed this due to a huge slowdown in GTX Metrix which was more Google Ad calls, so then I checked reports saw much more impressions, checked webpage, SLAMMED full of repetitive ads.

The only conclusion, Google hates me and wants to ruin my users experience. Time to remove all Adsense. ALL.

[samwest]

Stop trying to control anything, because you are not dealing with a rational entity.

You are dealing with a GREEDY entity that wants it all...and THEIR way.

Zombies are back in force. Round and round she goes.
Zero stability. SERPs remain unchanged for main keyphrases...but traffic shaping is steering buyers...through the garden of Google ads.

You just cant make a living online anymore unless you are a viral wonder and can sidestep Gorg.

[RedBar]

@Sally Stitts

An interesting point of view and your success / failure may probably totally depend on your niche and how much Google considers to have "under its control". Sites selling / promoting / advising / reviewing generic products is something that it probably does have a pretty good handle of how to control simply because of the volume of historical data it has.

I used to be a huge fan of Google in its early days, in fact I was head-hunted in the late 90s to help work on the algo, develop and promote it. My first moniker here goes back to 2003 and much of the advice / knowledge I gave in those days related to how to optimise for G results ... in hindsight a lot of blackhatters obviously read my posts as well, we all know what happened there and it's also a reason why I will not give specific advice to "complicated" situations these days.

During the noughties many of us saw a change in G's attitudes towards webmasters and, as I noted in a post above, it culminated for me in 2010 with the great Google image theft.

That was when it really dawned on me that G was no longer my friend / partner / associate / whatever, it no longer considered me / us as anything but an end to its own means, it didn't exist for the good of the people, it existed solely for itself and shareholders, it was obsessed with money and nothing else mattered.

I don't live in a world like that, my family business has been going 180 years this year, we have global contact and suppliers, we have worked on many projects together and intend to do so in the future, the moment someone / anyone decides to be greedy at the expense of all the others would be the last time we did business with them ... We all need to make a reasonable profit to exist comfortably plus invest in the future, not a mere pittance simply to survive which is, unfortunately, what much of Internet sales is these days.

This isn't a rant, if someone had said 20 years ago I would be writing this I would have doubted it, however the reality is that I / my business had to be in control and not be at the behest of the Gorg beast, it was actually a very simple decision to make when faced with the choice of compliance or independence!

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Life is tough, and there is no place for fairness, this has always been like that since life appeared on Earth. Eat or be eaten.

[samwest]

Life is tough, and there is no place for fairness, this has always been like that since life appeared on Earth. Eat or be eaten.

So with that logic, Standard Oil, Microsoft and AT&T shouldn't have been broken up. It's not about "fairness" it's about running a monopoly and antitrust law.

[RedBar]

Eat or be eaten.

Fortunately I have always believed in co-operation as the better way forward in business. Crap / conflicts happen and sometimes we never realise why until it is explained ... however some do prefer your definition.

I sleep well every night:-)

[StupidIntelligent]

@Redbar - 180 years. Wow. Other than winery, textiles, or hoteling (perhaps companies in Japan are an exception), I can't of any sector that can last this long without being a globally-known brand.

[RedBar]

Completely off topic however a very interesting list can be found here:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[Skape7]

Google was definitely doing something on June 9th and 10th. 2 of my sites saw significant dips in traffic on those 2 days, but recovered on the 11th and has increased since to levels consistent with or even slightly higher than before. Not sure if it was a glitch or if they were testing out the SERPs, but they were up to something there.

[riccarbi]

@Redbar - 180 years. Wow. Other than winery, textiles, or hoteling (perhaps companies in Japan are an exception), I can't of any sector that can last this long without being a globally-known brand.

That's not so uncommon in Italy and in many other European countries. The chocolate factory founded by my great-great-grandfather in 1850 is still in the business today (I'm not involved in it, though). Yet, I'm, currently seeing a decline in old businesses' number in Italy, these days. A large number of historic shops in my city that had been in the market for a couple of centuries have quit the business in the last ten years. And monopolistic web giants (such as Google, FB, Tripadvisor, Amazon, and the like) might have some role in such a decline, possibly.

[RedBar]

might have some role in such a decline, possibly.

I doubt it's possibly, it's 99.99% a certainty!

[christianz]

"Life is tough, and there is no place for fairness, this has always been like that since life appeared on Earth. Eat or be eaten."

Absolute nonsense. If that is the case, lets remove law and police (funny enough, some m***ns in the dumpster fire US of A actually are advocating this) and let the strongest criminal eat all the others.

We are humans. We should know better than to make it a "survival of fittest" free-for-all. Entrenched criminal corporations are in monopoly positions and if you are not one of them, you are doomed for servitude no matter how talented, beautiful or mentally determined and strong you are.