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]

[Dooku]

"We are humans. We should know better than to make it a "survival of fittest" free-for-all"

Makes you wonder what kind of people work at companies like Google, Facebook......
And why companies like that only can exist and operate in the usa?

[glakes]

why companies like that only can exist and operate in the usa?

Easily bought/corrupt politicians, weak/outdated laws, politicized federal agencies, a gullible consumer population, etc. I think it's a combination of many factors. Chief among them are the antitrust laws in the USA, which severely limit the ability of government, businesses and individuals to seek justice in the courts. Antitrust laws were created in the days of the horse and buggy, which have remained largely unchanged since, and are ill suited to protect consumers/competition 100+ years later. Then there's the cozy relationship between big government and big data. The Constitution prohibits government from monitoring every citizen's move, but private businesses are free to do it so long as they get a user's permission by agreeing to some TOS, AUP, etc. buried in a large disclosure/disclaimer document. With big data collecting all this information, big government can easily tap that data when the need arises as a workaround to the Constitutional limits of government.

[samwest]

Great post glakes - that says it all.
Google, seed funded by DARPA...what could go wrong?

See: [qz.com...]
and: [wired.com...]

The SERPs are currently producing some of the best Zombies I've seen in quite some time.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Something strange is going on with the Discover algorithms for sure.

On one of the sites we manage, we haven't lost much in terms of position for our KWs, but Discover appearance has fallen off a cliff since 10 June - even for topics we'd gotten traction on quite regularly before. And not as someone mentioned with the referral of it changing, as in, dead as a doornail in Search Console's metrics.

Anyone else seeing similar?

[samwest]

Yes TE - The entire month has been a search volume disaster, while positions "appear" to remain unchanged. Appears to be more heavy "traffic shaping".
Down, down, down...

[christianz]

The fact that we always drift offtopic and gravitate towards criticizing Google tells a lot about what it feels like to be webmaster in 2020.

Newspapers and TV were replaced by Internet and Internet is being replaced by corporatenet.

Sorry about pedaling offtopic, I just can't help myself.

[Mark_A]

I understand the concern expressed over the last couple of pages, our organic traffic from G is well down over 3 years ago. But still our ad performance is good and we get volumes of relevant niche industrial search queries from G, sending us valuable daily visitors. I also use Bing ads but the volume of relevant queries is a tiny fraction of G. The fact is, a large volume of technical B2B searchers still use G.

I can recall when (perhaps in the 90s) once you hit the sweet spot you would get thousands of targeted organic visitors from G for free, those days are no more. It is a new landscape. Now I compare the ROI for G ads to email marketing or ads in technical journals, as I expect do G, and at the moment advertising in G is still good value in our niche. Paying for "professional" SEO, which we did 2 years ago, didn't improve things at all, hence our reliance on G ads.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Forgive me if it is not allowed, but just seen <article> on AMP pages takin a dip in the SERPS recently. It kinda chimes with the 9/10/11 June date where everyone started noticing things behaving oddly. Is there anyone who doesn't use AMP who can corroborate some trends ?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:34 am (utc) on Jun 18, 2020]
[edit reason] snipped "article" link, per forum charter and New Users [/edit]

[ichthyous]

Has anyone been finding a higher number of "Crawled - currently not indexed" pages in GSC under coverage? I am finding new content that is not in the index, and hasn't been crawled since last year! It's not a huge number of pages, but never seen this before

[southernguy]

I guess that is where this statement @glakes mentions makes perfect sense "a gullible consumer population, etc" Basically Google censoring or omitting things out of search says that people are not smart enough to spot fake products, fake news and more important "think for themselves".

[Webweeb]

So in my niche, spam keeps appearing in the SERPS. I actually posted a list of parasite spam sites the spammers use, but mods deleted it. 2000 spam reports and Google has not changed anything yet. Deleted spam posts keep ranking page 1, because websites are faster at cleaning up spam than Google is.

Has anyone any idea how long it can take for Google to fix bugs like this? Or will it just get fixed accidentally one day by another update?

Fells bad... Google has essentially just handed a multi million dollar industry to black hat spammers.

Im actually contemplating going to my local Google Headquarters and making a scene about it, since there is no way to get even a "We got it, escalated it to the engineers" from them.

[JesterMagic]

why companies like that only can exist and operate in the usa?

It's not just the USA, these are global companies now. I would think most countries laws lag behind when it comes to the internet.

The reason why most of these large internet companies are based in the USA is that the USA consumers embraced the internet much quicker than other countries and the country itself is the largest market in terms of dollars (soon to be eclipsed by China). So they had the best chance to succeed.

Just wait until some more China based companies start branching out globally....

[TalkativeEditorial]

@ichthyous

Crawled not indexed has remained stable on my older sites, however, started working with a client on two new projects recently pretty much every page of theirs is stuck in that loop.

[Srividhya]

On Monday May 4, 2020 Google pushed another broad core update, which are only released three to four-fold per annum. They are huge global updates and may have a big impact for sites across categories and countries. Although the update might have taken about fortnight to completely roll out, you would have begun to ascertain impact within a couple of days.
Search results have been impacted three days after Google announced the May 4 2020 update. Google warned it may take a couple weeks to settle. This is why that might not be good.
Most updates settle decently fast enrouting with minor changes. This update is unique.
It’s becoming increasingly evident that this update is big.
A partial list of what areas are affected:
Local search businesses
Health related sites
Rolling out worldwide
Multiple languages simultaneously.,
For Example: travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society saw the biggest impact in rankings.
Other industries were also affected… but these are the least affected, such as “news.”

[sk7411]

On Monday May 4, 2020 Google pushed another broad core update, which are only released three to four-fold per annum

You are late to the party mate . It’s june 18th already and we are waiting for the next core update LOL.

[BushyTop]

Anyone seeing changes again today?

[ChokenBako]

@ Bushy: yep another 20% drop compared to last week

[TalkativeEditorial]

I just cannot get my head around the dip in traffic despite not dropping much in the SERPS.

[DecDub]

Took a 50% dip in traffic last week with sites ranking above mine that I've never seen before. No dip this week but no increase either. Surely Google will address this mess. They must be aware that the last update created a world of sh** instead of user enhancement

[JorgeV]

Hello,

They must be aware that the last update created a world of sh** instead of user enhancement

I read the same for each update :)

Those sites, you never saw before, which are now outranking you, are certainly thinking the opposite.

[BushyTop]

@ChokenBako are you talking SERPs changes or just traffic drops?

[samwest]

Makes you wonder what kind of people work at companies like Google, Facebook......

Makes me wonder what kind of people run those companies and direct these non stop punitive actions on legitimate sites. The webspam team seems to operate like they did in the 1950's, using DDT to control mosquitoes...except it also killed off all the beneficial critters.

Traffic seems to have normalized, looks more natural, slight rebound in volume and yet, not a single conversion.
Zombiefest continues.

[whoa182]

I've passed a couple sites on to Google that are clearly spam. As I've said numerous times on here before, they are nothing but the same generic message at the bottom of the page with 10 affiliate links to amazon. 10s of thousands of these pages and they're ranking #1 probably earning 100s of thousands.

They're still at the top showing massive growth. There is no "quality" on these pages. It's simply a list of products ranking for competitive "best product" terms.

Apparently it was "very useful feedback" I gave them... But nothing happened.

[EditorialGuy]

We didn't see much, if any, impact from the May core update. (Information site, travel, destination-focused). Rankings for the queries that I monitor are pretty much the same from day to day to day, week to week, and month to month. The top results are usually of decent quality--even in cases where we're outranked. :-)

For a few queries, we've moved up noticeably, for for the most part it's "same old, same old."

Note:

1) I haven't done comparisons for obscure long-tail queries that generate very little traffic..

2) While our rankings appear to be stable, our top-producing queries, in terms of traffic generated, have changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on travel. (We're getting less traffic on topics of real-time utility, for example, although that's starting to pick up a bit now with the loosening of intra-European border restrictions.) This just goes to show that searcher behavior is just as important as search-engine rankings.

[MayankParmar]

Just got outranked by a site which scraped my content and rephrased it

[ChokenBako]

@Bushy: Traffic only.
@Mayank: Same for me scraped website before mine

[RedBar]

Definitely some shuffling of the SERPs in the past couple of days with more traffic from the USA

[edited by: RedBar at 10:47 am (utc) on Jun 19, 2020]

[KaseyM]

Seem to have been hit this week - sure a bit of it is the USA getting back to work but still. Seems like algo punishing us.

[MayankParmar]

@KaseyM My discover traffic dropped this week too. From 5 digits to 3 digits a day :(

[Dooku]

@ChokenBako, @MayankParmar and OTHERS who see scraped content websites ranking higher with YOUR content, have ANYONE of you done a really good investigation on those websites regarding their link profile and other digital footprints in regards to HOW they rank and preferably compare them against at least 5 other similar scraping websites that rank above you.

They can NOT hide everything they do, I usually find out what crap they are engaged in and for example a lot of them use some form of PBN.........those Google REALLY does not like and will delist quickly and then their rankings will drop fast.