Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2020

[ichthyous]

The following 2 messages were cut out of the June 2020 thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4997607.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 5:45 pm on Jul 1, 2020 (PDT -8)

Either that, or my website, is getting a lot of fake bot traffic.

Don't underestimate how much bot traffic and scraping is going on. I spent June creating firewall rules in cloudflare to keep them off my server and yes my traffic reported in GA did drop because of it. Cloudflare doesn't even catch a lot of it. I blocked scans of my server for all kinds of files and URL combinations that don't exist. I don't need the endless bots sucking up my resources. And I still had a brute force attack from China two days ago that CF did not prevent.

I'm wondering if the lower bounce rate and longer time spent on the page from real traffic will benefit me in any way... Doubt it!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:57 am (utc) on Jul 2, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

[RedBar]

Blimey, all good traffic today, if it continues like this for all of July I'll be pleasantly surprised.

I say that since they are our traditional holiday months however I haven't a clue what anyone's doing about them as yet!

[BushyTop]

@RedBar that's strange because we are seeing the opposite today and we are also based in the UK

[RedBar]

@BushyTop - Bear in mind that my global B2B and directory sites get less than 10% of their traffic from the UK, the UK sites are re-building traffic from the lockdown.

[samwest]

July is starting stale here. All depends on your niche tho... just picked up a new client who does very well...but they are in the essential meat business. July 4 - grill - meat...for them, business SHOULD be booming. So many factors separate us.

[jmorgan]

Google seems to derive some kind of sick pleasure from teasing me with improved rankings, then rolling it back. *Sigh* Not much I can do besides continue to improve my site.

[ichthyous]

Google seems to derive some kind of sick pleasure from teasing me with improved rankings, then rolling it back.

Not just you...I've had a moderate increase in traffic since the weekend, a big increase in clicks in GSC, and a slow but steady recovery of top 3 ranking of terms. Today however traffic has dropped again. Google seems to throttle traffic hour to hour now, so you never know how the day will end.

[MayankParmar]

Great thread exposing Pinterest and Google [twitter.com...]

[worker]

Unbelievable. I just ran a few of the search phrases I use to test what is happening with Google.

Page one of the results:
2 results redirect to other sites (one to a p0rn site and the other to a site that attempted a Malicious Domain Attack)

Page two of the results:
7 out of 10 results redirected to P0RN sites and/or Malicious Domain Attack sites (70% of 2nd-page results were bad and/or harmful)

Google has a severe problem on their hands if they are delivering false search results that redirect to other sites, especially when some of those other sites attempt malicious attacks on the searcher's browser.

I'm stunned to see that 9 out of 20 organic results in the first two pages are 100% fake/wrong and/or literally harmful. Those 9 fake results push good results down. Something within Google's Search System is horribly broken.

[browndog]

I was contacted by a 'holistic' company yesterday, they have a '10 best' article and it ranks no. 2. They asked me to link to it, and said I may not have even heard of them all (I've been doing this for 20 years, and of course I know them all). Their article consisted of a photo and a line of text. Two of the photos were incorrect. Meanwhile, I have the same article, with accurate photos and 100 or so words of text under each one, and rank nowhere.
Another massive bugbear is sites which have a huge Adsense ad at the top and I can't make it go away. So the content is minute. I don't know if it's a glitch with my computer or not.

[RedBar]

Global widget B2Bs going well however the hotel / pub is on fire with tomorrow's re-opening, it's not mid-day and already surpassed pre-lockdown average with accommodation and restaurant bookings looking good.

[TalkativeEditorial]

There are also a bunch of 404s still showing up at the top of the SERPS for some very basic queries.
Question - when you guys notice these things, is it on desktop or mobile? and if you spot it on one, do you go test to see if it's the same on the other?

[RedBar]

Personally I gave up worrying about "what is happening" years ago since no matter what you say / do / think / feel, there's absolutely nothing you can actually do about their dire results in some widget sectors.

It's up to us to educate users to try different search engines etc, anyway, don't most users rely on FB / T for their accurate / genuine / non-fake information? :-))

[glakes]

It's up to us to educate users to try different search engines

Agreed.

Google has a tendency to direct users to our info pages whereas Bing is much better at sending visitors to our store. When a customer is attempting to purchase an industrial type product, they have a far greater chance of selecting the correct item from our store since there is a selection. Bing handles this pretty well. Google, on the other hand, appears to want to force us to spend money on ads to accomplish the same. This is one of the problems with buyer intent queries on Google.

In the end, it's Google's users that pay a price for Google giving them half relevant information as it pertains to their query. Because of this, orders originating from Google organic are far more likely to result in returns and a restocking fee applied. Had the customer used Bing or Yahoo, they would have easily found the store page where they could select the correct item(s). The heavy hand of Google holds our store and product pages hostage and requires an advertising ransom to be seen...

[cwalker216]

@worker 'I'm stunned to see that 9 out of 20 organic results in the first two pages are 100% fake/wrong and/or literally harmful. Those 9 fake results push good results down. Something within Google's Search System is horribly broken.'

This has quite LITERALLY been happening for close to 2 years at this point. It got so bad that I actually made a Youtube video showing the exact search phrases where these results were showing up, AND even got the attention of Danny Sullivan (Public liaison for search over at Google).

He personally thanked me for creating the video, and said he would send it over to his team.

That was just under 2 years ago, and clearly it's still not fixed.

P.S. I've seen searches where literally eVeRy sInGle rEsULt does exactly what you describe.

[RedBar]

I know I've said this before, and people have sent me their search phrases showing such things, however no matter how bad Google is I never experience this, I may not like the rankings but I never see all the garbage some of you do.

Just why is it that some widget sectors are so badly affected like this?

[worker]

@RedBar "I know I've said this before, and people have sent me their search phrases showing such things, however no matter how bad Google is I never experience this, I may not like the rankings but I never see all the garbage some of you do."

I will say that what I described was due to me testing every result on the first two pages. The results look good on Google, but it is only when I click through that I see the redirects to p0rn sites and malicious sites.

The results links and text look like they are on target for the search phrase.

When you say that you don't see what has been described, is it because the results pages look good, so you are assuming the links lead to appropriately valid pages? Or have you clicked through each link on the first few pages to see if the links are in fact as valid as they appear? (This could be niche/widget category specific, so I'm just curious.)

[RedBar]

is it because the results pages look good, so you are assuming the links lead to appropriately valid pages?

Mine are valid since I know all the global companies in my widget industry, plus before lockdown many of the webmasters used to meet-up regularly at the various international fairs at which we exhibit to discuss all sorts of techie stuff. We used to suffer from MFA bloggers quite a lot however absolutely nowhere as badly these days.

The most annoying thing for me is EBay and Pinterest even though the Pinterest page is usually mine, just how one reasonable image can outrank my specialist page astounds me. Ok, if they want to rank it on the image SERPs ... but the "All" page?

[SweetPotato]

I also see these pages, they show 1 thing to Google bot or if accessed without referral usually a plain HTML scrapped page. But when clicked from serps they show a forum lookalike with a mock-up discussion and a link to malware. There's also MediaFire download page lookalike on Weebly and similar free blogs. It's insane. There are millions for every query even exact matches quoted queries.

[edited by: SweetPotato at 6:36 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2020]

[RedBar]

Yet these pages are never to be seen in Bing / DDG / Yahoo / Ecosia / Yandex?

[SweetPotato]

Well Bing does not immediately index every random domain registered, you have to earn it. DDG and Yahoo results rely heavily on Bing's.

[Abaros]

About P0RN in SERPs.

Maybe it's a malicious extension.

I don't know if it's because of the forum rules, but they should allow these links so they can be checked.

[worker]

Google used to give a warning to people who were about to visit a site that would attempt any Malicious Attack. Google seems so broken now, in not knowing where the results they list actually link to, that they are no longer able to warn people using Google that they are being led directly to a malicious site. I'm holding out some small level of hope that some of the people at Google want to fix flaws like this that completely destroy consumer's faith in Google as the go-to search engine. Aside from fixing things to protect people using Google, they should want to do it to protect their brand. There is absolutely nothing that makes sense about what is and has been happening within Google search results for the last 6 months.

[renatovieira]

Another day with poor traffic. G sends me the user, but he doesn't breathe or move. The whole day was like that.

Has anyone else noticed poor movement today?

[ichthyous]

Big jump in clicks showing in GSC for from the 28th-1st, then right back down to the old lower level on the 2nd. Ridiculous!

[Dooku]

It's 4th of July national holiday in the USA and this years it's on saturday, so it's observed on July 3rd.......people taking at least a long weekend off. Expect lower traffic.

[RedBar]

Wow ... The hotel / bar website I run had it's highest PVs day since July 2017 on Friday, in fact it almost had as many PVs in one day as the entire locked-down month of April.

I went in at 10.30 am to see what was happening and all was completely normal, guys happily drinking their ales:-)

Not looking forward to later on though!

[RedBar]

For those who do not know I suppose I should have said 99% of the UK out of lockdown with bars and restaurants open from today.

For those with salons, wtf is going on, I have two salon clients and they are at their wits ends both mentally and financially.

[samwest]

G sends me the user, but he doesn't breathe or move.

That's called Zombie Traffic.

Google is a mess. Was fishing yesterday and needed to know a bag limit for a particular body of water. Gorg gave me the #1 "knowledge graph" result...dated from 1991. If I had followed that 30 year old information I'd be fined and incarcerated. Great job idiots.

[RedBar]

Does anyone else have visits from the major Chinese search engines every couple of weeks or so seeminly only hitting the index.html page to check it's still there and every month or so a good crawl to pick-up new and updated pages?

I do a lot of business in Asia therefore it's good for me.