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]

[Ahtesham08]

Yes, the US traffic is cut down by 30% to 40% for all my websites, and even on my Youtube Channel, this can't be a Google thing. I am not an American, but this appears like an even or seasonal stuff. Are people out on holidays or something?

[ichthyous]

Yes, the US traffic is cut down by 30% to 40% for all my websites, and even on my Youtube Channel, this can't be a Google thing

Youtube us owned by Google. I have noticed another decline today, potentially big but it's too early to tell. A 30-40% drop in one day is never normal, even for a major holiday. It's only my USA traffic that is dropping. My UK, CA, AU, and traffic from other countries hasn't changed and is increasing in some cases. Also, the traffic is all classified as "direct"...if I look at Google organic search traffic it is steady.

@Athedian How is your Bing traffic holding up?

[Ahtesham08]

The reason I mentioned Youtube there is because my channel's views are not based on rankings, my 99% views comes from YT's recommendation algorithm. Still, I see downfall there. Plus I am seeing across all my websites that are completely unrelated. The only thing that is common, is that all my content is based on entertainment niche, even the Youtube channel, that usually garners close 100k pageviews daily.

[JesterMagic]

Our niche has been relatively clear of the Pin Interest crap but this has changed over the past week as I have notice their pages rising in the SERPs.

Not sure why Google hasn't fixed this issue. Pin Interest pages are completely useless.

[ichthyous]

@Ahtesham08 It could be partly that the entire nation outside of the Northeast is having big increases in COVID cases and they are edging toward lockdowns again. My traffic numbers and my GSC clicks are at the lows from March and April. But I doubt it's only that, since most of my traffic comes from the Northeast USA and it saw a spike on Monday and fell off a cliff on Wed/Thu/Fri. My traffic is down 30% from yesterday this time and that was already lower than the day before. So that is absolutely not normal. Another telling sign is how my number of visitors can be almost exactly the same for 3-4 days in a row...that's not possible in the real world, only when Google decides to cap your traffic.

Meanwhile, my ranking has not changed at all...that's why I got rid of SEMrush, visibility/ranking has no relation to the actual traffic volume anymore so why continue to pay so much.

[ichthyous]

Not sure why Google hasn't fixed this issue. Pin Interest pages are completely useless.

Not completely useless if the pins are your own, or pins linking to your website, or to partner sites selling your product. GSC link count updated and added thousands of links to my site...all from Pinterest. But yes, I would agree that something is wrong to have so many Pinterest feeds in the SERPS in general...and also the top ten results are crowded with thin articles all taking about the same thing, but not one site actually selling that thing anymore.

[Ahtesham08]

They are not just useless, they have run an algorithm that steals headlines from all the top pages on the SERP, they change it minimally, and then insert a pic and the link of that URL inside their post, and they would block that URL internally, so people can't go to those sites. They are doing this with pretty much every niche. And then next step is to have different domains in different countries .nz .in .ar, and they would do this thing with all their different domains, and completely take over the 1,2, 3, and 4 spots. (Sorry, I am not a native English speaker)

[Ahtesham08]

@ichthyous + - The traffic pattern you told.... is "EXACTLY" what I am seeing on all my websites. Monday it JUMPED, and from there, it just kept on falling down. Even today is looking really pathetic. You are a senior member, can you share your experience, what's the end-game here? I have seen my websites fall like this in past, but they eventually go back to where they were and even grow with time. Why Google plays this cat and mouse game?

[ichthyous]

@Ahtesham08 I just checked my Pinterest feed, and Pinterest posts using my images...none of the links were blocked. They had a link to the page on my site where the image is found. Sometimes people download the image and upload it to their own account and the post does not include a link...that pisses me off, but my images all have a watermark so people still know where it's coming from. I don't understand what you mean "block the link internally"?

[ichthyous]

@Ahtesham08 Google search traffic today to my site is down enormously, yet my visibility/ranking/positions have not changed, and in fact are slowly improving. Some of this is definitely due to COVID in the USA, but not most of it. Google is throttling traffic...sending only a certain amount every day and no more. My traffic drops from around 10am-6pm EST every day now, and picks up again in the evening...contrary to 17 years of traffic patterns on my site. My UK, Canada, Australia, European, Latin American, and Asia traffic are all normal...Middle East is actually higher. In my case only USA 'direct' traffic has dropped through the floor. This is why Google hides its search traffic under 'Direct', so that you cannot clearly blame Google for the drop in traffic. In my case Google Images traffic dropped 40% from the beginning of May and has not recovered at all. That is a good part of the 'direct' traffic I believe. The end game is to kill off our organic traffic to force all of us to purchase advertising from Google. This year has been truly awful with Google...the January update and especially the May update. It's the new normal...expect for your site not to be found for a good part of the year now.

[Treud]

Seeing some drops as well since the tweak of Twitter. But the total page view seems the same for Sucuri. (Overall position tanked a lot as well). More bots less users?
Let’s wait a few days to see if it’s a big shift in SERP or the Twitter tweak effect.

[RedBar]

or the Twitter tweak effect.

I've been asleep ... what Twitter effect?

[Treud]

[seroundtable.com...]

« « As you probably all know, Twitter has been hacked in a big way yesterday. In short hackers pushing a crypto scam hijacked Twitter accounts for Bitcoin, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Ripple, Binance, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and many more. It seems like Google took action by removing the Twitter boxes from the Google search results » »

[not2easy]

That was discussed here a few days ago: [webmasterworld.com...]

[RedBar]

Yep, thanks, I thought it was something "new" I'd missed ... anyway, IMHO social links have very little effect on ranking if at all, but that's another subject altogether.

[Pokwerpok]

Those of you who've experienced Google throttling traffic, sending only a certain amount of traffic every day: have you tried deleting GA (and GSC?), and using Matomo (or some else) instead? Could that help with traffic if Google wouldn't know the statistics of your website?

Just thinking if this could solve the issue as I'm in the same boat. Also, I used to get varying real time traffic, now it's always max 1 user per page... which is not normal at all.

[southernguy]

In my case I don't use any Google tools period, never have, they already have enough data as it is. But yes traffic throttling is a thing I see it daily on various sites. Been like this for over a year and has gotten progressively worse over the last couple of months.

[ichthyous]

Twitter boxes would have zero effect on my site. Traffic is the lowest I've seen it today, even during the worst of the pandemic. A lazy summer Friday + throttling + COVID, but mostly due to throttling.

Has anyone actually ever seen their traffic increase after removing Google analytics? Or conversely, go down after removing it?

[Robert Charlton]

Mod's note: Re any further Twitter discussion, if anything more needs to be said about Twitter traffic, please create a separate thread in the appropriate forum... This monthly Updates thread is about the Google algo... not about web traffic in general.

- - -

Also, some personal observations (and not to prompt further discussion about covid-19), let me just say that the effects of the pandemic have been such on the US economy that it's unlikely that certain affected sectors will rebound quickly... and some sectors will not rebound at all. In some commerce/ ecommerce niches, demand actually has increased because of the pandemic, though perhaps only temporarilly. So, compariing traffic levels to those of last year, eg, simply does not make sense.

I'm also seeing that the Google algo is demanding more expertise signals for anything explicitly covid-19 related. Some excellent material I've seen, articles superbly researched and written by authorities in their fields (but in fields other than medicine), is often cited by news sites that do rank for medically related terms. Gradually, one article I've been watching has been moving up from the bottom of page one to position five, on a three word search that is tangentially covid-19. related, or in a much longer search that happens to encompass Google-reranked portions of a query. Very difficult, therefore, to use length of query to describe how competitive it is.

[Hanna_Grey]

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.<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 9:53 am (utc) on Jul 18, 2020]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please go read the rules :) [/edit]

[ichthyous]

Cloudflare had an outage on the 17th and was not routing traffic correctly...most likely the source of the big drop many of us saw. We'll see today...

[JesterMagic]

I don't think this was mentioned before, anyways I saw this the other day on my feed from WSJ that talks about Google favoring Youtube videos over the original sources of the video from Twitch, etc...

[wsj.com...]

[glakes]

I don't put all the eggs into one basket and just focused on the Ads anymore as the previous team had done. I now also focused on other sources and as much as it's controversial, Facebook ads performed nicely for us.

Facebook works well for us too, but we run campaigns at most 1/4 of the year. Amazon works well for us since we sell products. To put it into comparison, it costs us nearly 8 times the amount of money in Google Ads to generate the same number of sales -vs- Amazon ads. Running ads on Google is definitely not cost effective and produces at best a neutral ROI. It's not worth the time and lack of profit to invest much in Google Ads these days.

The problem we have on Google is they are scaling back our organic traffic and trying to route their users to our paid ads instead. This results in about the same daily number of visitors from Google collectively, but at a much higher cost. Where total paid traffic from Google once was in the 10% of total Google visits range, it has now risen above 20%. Some of this may be attributed to advertisers dropping out of Google, and at this rate I will be gone too. I just can't afford it anymore, and I'm a manufacturer so I have a lot of margins to work with.

As it pertains to consumers using Google to find products, Google's ignorance has led to their demise in this area. Google failed to present their users with choices, which quickly allowed Amazon to rise as the top product search engine. I see the announcement of Google allowing free retail listings in search [webmasterworld.com...] as Google waving a white flag in a sign of surrender. But it's too little and too late for Google. Amazon won this war and Google lost. Much of the traffic we get from Google these days are just consumers doing research who ultimately go back to Amazon and buy our products there. Consumers are doing this despite our products and shipping being more affordable on our website along with the absence of the Marketplace Facilitator tax Amazon has.

IMO, Google hit its peak and COVID-19 marked the beginning of Google's continual downward trend. Unless Google can give its users higher quality SERPS/choices, and paying advertisers value, Google will continue to contract. Additionally, the Google fluff (videos, images, knowledge box, etc.) is working against them as those SERP features dilute value for advertisers and in many cases reduce far better choices for consumers of information and products.

The bottom line: Google is cannibalizing itself and everyone else willing to pay for a seat on their sinking ship...

[ratraceescapeartist]

@glakes

Google has become way too arrogant from being a monopoly.

They are trying to screw too many people at once:

1. webmasters: with reducing their traffic and pushing their serps back in the rankings, meanwhile stealing their snippets and giving them zero clicks
2. users: providing them with garbage and nonrelevant search queries that are full of google's own products or only branded content like pinterest/facebook, in the top spots or content scraping low quality sites
3. advertisers: high adsense costs but low ROI with #*$!ty traffic

I hope this will be their demise soon!

[ichthyous]

@glakes Reports of Google's demise are premature. Reports of many webmasters' demise, however, are imminent. Google will keep making enormous profits and doesn't need us. They use our content and do not have to give back anything because whatever incremental amount of free traffic they send our way is still better than nothing. They may loose ground on adsense as they have big competition from FB and Amazon now, but they'll make it up in other ways. It's always the small business that gets crushed, not the behemoth. Every business has a birth/death cycle and when the playing field changes dramatically many do not make it. The businesses that built their foundation on Google organic search are in that position now...adapt or perish.

[RedBar]

Reports of Google's demise are premature.

Absolutely and that is because the vast majority of sheeple haven't a clue when it comes to using all kinds of devices and they are very unlikely to change their very bad habits unless we / someone shows them how to.

An example ... Last night I was in the pub and a customer asked the owner why they had not updated their website prior to re-opening after the lockdown. The owner looked at me because she knew that new updates had been posted almost daily for two weeks prior to the re-opening.

I asked the person to show me their phone and, of course, it was showing their cache, I refreshed it and they were shocked, they had never seen that done before. I then spent the next half an hour with their $1500 phone setting it up, clearing-out its garbage, installing the DDG browser, showing how to clear cache etc ... unfortunately this was only one of billions of people to educate however it is a start and with a bit of luck they may pass on a little of their new knowledge.

[ichthyous]

People aren't going to change their behavior, because it's all free for them and they are dependent on it. People need search, maps, gmail and all the other freebies. So they may have to scroll a bit further to find what they want...I don't hear anyone complaining. Now if Google becomes embroiled in some scandal, the way FB did with Cambridge Analytica and Russian fake news posts etc. then you will see the tide turning against them in public sentiment. I do see fewer people using FB than before because FB has the reputation of being slimy now...Google doesn't yet.

[samwest]

Really seeing a hard clamp the last three weeks, and getting worse. Identical conversion totals week to week. They keep a steady single file flow of traffic, one or two at a time, as indicated by Matomo, but GART is showing at least double that and for at least double the time on page. Fake reporting seems to be the "thing" these days. Really discouraging. Trying to get ahead is just an exercise in diminishing returns. I trust Gorg less and less each passing day. The "Pinterst bug" has yet to be addressed.

Anyone care to bet that Gorg generates over 50 Billion this quarter?

[StupidIntelligent]

The only way to make money through Google is to buy their stock.

[samwest]

The only way to make money through Google is to buy their stock.

I own a bunch from the IPO and then it split...but they still don't pay a dividend.