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]

[ichthyous]

Really seeing a hard clamp the last three weeks, and getting worse. Identical conversion totals week to week.

It's amazing how these days the amount of visitors is almost exactly the same from day to day. I've recovered 6 top three ranking KW this week alone, yet no increase at all. In my case the loss is 100% USA traffic...my international traffic hasn't changed.

I do think that the recession and the pandemic have something to do with it, but it's mostly Google throttling. I removed GA completely from my site...it was partly to blame for my lower pagespeed scores and frankly I don't trust Google to have my site data anymore. I found an alternative that almost matched GA in reporting and will use that.

[edited by: ichthyous at 5:01 pm (utc) on Jul 19, 2020]

[RedBar]

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

Or do something that they know nothing about and cannot be replicated in volume simply by using data.

In other words make something tangible but not for the mass market that many others can / will copy easily and destroy its exclusivity and profitability ... or be the vendor who sells G their coffee / tea in all their offices:-)

Apologies to those who do!

[ichthyous]

Or do something that they know nothing about and cannot be replicated in volume simply by using data. In other words make something tangible but not for the mass market that many others can / will copy easily and destroy its exclusivity and profitability

I do just that, I produce tangible goods that are unique...albeit in a luxury market with fierce competition. Google has decimated my business this year because they've taken away the leads to new buyers. No other source of promotion works remotely as well for my business as organic search and they are all quite overhyped and overpriced...I've tried and mostly a huge waste of time and money other than email marketing.

[ratraceescapeartist]

@ichthyous care to share what alternative to GA you are using?

For my future sites, I don't want that crap from google on any of my sites because I know those SOB's will be spying on me.

[Athedian]

@Athedian How is your Bing traffic holding up?

@ichthyous - doing quite well actually! CPA is at its lowest ever and I'm not really focusing too much on it and let it run organically. I just optimize a few headlines and away it goes. ROI is off the chart compared to Google Ads.

But getting hit on page ranking day by day slowly. We're getting a new site structure up and it's been in development for months now. Should be at least 20x faster and 50x more mobile friendly than before. Plus we're creating our own stats system, forget about Analytics, what a broken system it is.

Facebook works well for us too, but we run campaigns at most 1/4 of the year.

@glakes - seems that social media does work quite nicely especially during this pandemic and a lot of people are buying online. The trick is knowing how to optimize the ads so that it's not a blackhole like Google Ads where all your money is being sucked into the abyss, which to veterans it's relatively easy but not much so for newcomers.

[Dooku]

Who is using Matomo to track their analytics? I am thinking of installing the on premise version on my own Ubuntu server. As it is I am already paying a hefty monthly amount for 5 digital ocean droplets for collecting data using log file parsers, excel sheets and vba scripts......and also statcounter. So I am wondering if I can improve on this by at least getting most of the info I need while simplifying my setup.

So, is anyone using Matomo installed on their own server? Does it work well, any hickups, things to watch out for etc....etc...?

[KaseyM]

Sorry rant incoming.

Opening up Google News to the masses was an awful idea. Seen so many scraping sites rank well at the top of queries for republishing the same article but slightly tweaks.

Then you've got instances like this. A brand new site with the default AMP template, default names, scraped content and not even enough effort to change the default WordPress logo.

[imgur.com...]

Took me a year to get my site compliant enough on Google News and now any idiot with a WordPress site can rank.

Nuts.

/rant.

[StupidIntelligent]

Kasey. Stop ranting and do what works. If it's scrapped content, so be it. If Google doesn't care, why should you. One day, when it does follow its own rules, you can invest your energies accordingly.

[BushyTop]

@stupidintelligent Apologies to jump in here, but personally, I hate that type of thinking. When you start straying down the thinking of adopting practices you know are shady, it's a slippery slope. I could never do it. The day it went pop, I would never forgive myself.

Every circumstance is different though, I get that. This might be a last throw of the dart to try and generate some income. But for me, I'd be putting jobs on the line here. Not something I'd ever want to do.

[KaseyM]

@BushyTop 100% - telling me to do spammy practices to get ahead is not good advice although I respect your opinion StupidIntelligent.

In this particular instance, I'm speaking from a users point of view too. Jumbled mess of words without any credibility behind the site - waste of my time and didn't answer my question.

[seomotionz]

@BushyTop @KasaeyM I know its not right. And many will disagree too with you guys. Me myself don't agree completely with it.

But what @StupidIntelligent meant I think that we have to act accordingly here. May be not scrapped but something that will work. Even if that means that we are in the black area and not in grey. Our backs are already against the wall. There is nothing much we can actually do that can impact our work effectively.

[Dooku]

@Bushytop and KaseyM,

"adopting practices you know are shady" What exactly is "shady"?
If you read the infamous G webmaster guidelines PDF, than anything you do to improve rankings, even writing optimized copy, and don't get me started on link building, is NOT allowed.

The terms blackhat and whitehat are nothing more than justifications for not so noble actions from the seo service companies to market their product as "being in accordance to google guidelines". Which off course is total BS.

I have already been incorrectly quoted here about this subject, and nobody here, including me, is advising to scrape and spam the internet.
However, if you already do any seo work, and call it white hat if you will, than there are far more options than the "usual" seo tactics. You just have to be creative.

[MayankParmar]

Google News has gone pure bs after they redesigned the desktop UI and changed the approval/algo. Scrappers rank somehow, original content gets pushed to an unknown page. Also, Google News display old content even when new articles are available.

[ichthyous]

Another big drop in USA traffic on Monday, and possibly continuing today as well. If this keeps up I'll have no American customers left. In typical Google fashion, I had no new customer inquiries for four days, then six in twelve hours on Sunday night. This is the new normal...silence punctuated by very infrequent bursts of viable traffic. My ranking is holding steady, but traffic has kept dropping since May.

[BushyTop]

@Dooku Shady to me is a blatant conflict with Google's terms of service. Scraped content is exactly that. I do agree with you though on your definition of white and black hat SEO. I'd go as far as to say that it barely exists. They're a very few instances of SEOs adopting white hat SEO. As soon as you start thinking about improving rankings, you're trying to game the system. Gaming to me personally is the very definition of Black hat. However, it is all a sliding scale and there are different degrees of shady behavior. I'm sure that everyone link builds in one way or another. Whether it's creating linkable content or going out an paying for it, if you're creating content with the sole purpose of generating links, is that black hat? IMO it is because it's done with the sole intent of gaming the system. Clearly though, its less BH than going out and buying links. Hence my thoughts on the sliding scale.

@seomotionz that's why I said every circumstance is different. My point is that giving advice like that should come with the disclaimer. IMO you would have to be desperate, on the verge of going under, to start serving scraped content.

[edited by: BushyTop at 1:50 pm (utc) on Jul 21, 2020]

[RedBar]

Monday's traffic across all sites was strong for me, in fact that strong I had a quick in-depth to check if anything untowards had happened however everything was as normal as could be expected.

The site that is surprising me is the UK pub / hotel, even though there is no live music the overall PVs are looking pre-lockdown which is a big surprise for all of us since we were expecting maybe a 33% reduction.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous

Exactly what happens to me. Yesterday and today my traffic is absolutely dead.

Saturday and Sunday was huge traffic. Does not make sense!

[BushyTop]

@ichthyous whatever happened in that update last June was as big as any update I have ever encountered in 10 years experience.

We too got sunk. But I am fighting on. I'm lucky atm that our industry seems to be booming post covid and that we have some great longtail driving conversions. I cannot make any of the high traffic generic stuff ranks though, for love nor money...

[ichthyous]

@RedBar Not seeing any decline in UK, CA, AU, NZ, EU or any other traffic here...only USA is way down. So the net effect is that most of my customer inquires are coming from outside the USA now, where it becomes a much harder sell due to shipping expenses of heavy large objects. customs duties, and the high dollar. Is your USA traffic increasing?

[ichthyous]

Saturday and Sunday was huge traffic. Does not make sense!

@Renato I didn't have a big traffic boost, just a big burst in new customer inquiries...it's always the same now, you get barraged for about twelve hours before traffic drops through the floor. Clearly a totally natural phenomenon

@BushyTop For me this started on May 4th. Web traffic has been a steady line down ever since, and image traffic even worse. Is all of your decline USA traffic, or also international?

[BushyTop]

@ichthyous I'm UK based. I should mention that I mean June 19 too.

[ichthyous]

@BushyTop Oddly enough my UK traffic has not been affected at all. These days I field more inquiries from UK, Ireland, Australian customers than Americans. I am not in an industry that has fared particularly well during COVID, but the recession is even more of a driver. However it is interesting that during very short periods now I suddenly get bombarded with new customer inquiries for a short period of time. It happens perhaps 2-3X a month now. So the customers are out there, but Google is no longer referring them.

[EditorialGuy]

Our editorial travel-planning site continues to see a healthy day-by-day climb in traffic and revenue, now that Europe has begun opening up to tourism. U.S. traffic has actually declined in the last month, though, presumably because Americans are still personae non gratae in the EU.

We're doing well in Google (rankings seem to be creeping up for some queries), but the release of pent-up traveler demand is the real driver of our traffic and revenue growth. I don't blame Google for our big drop in traffic earlier this year, and I don't credit Google for the current upsurge.

[whoa182]

Is anything going on today? I was just checking my ranking and pretty much all my content has totally disappeared from Google? Even keywords for interviews with people that have practically no competition are nowhere (images show up though in image search). Not even "allintitle". My website when doing site:domain.com shows up.

No manual action.

I've never seen anything like this before...

The only changes I made to my site was with Async JavaScript and Gzip a few days ago. Surely that can't be the issue?

I'm guessing this is technical, but I don't know if it's with me or Google!

That being said... I'm noticed that several competitors have also disappeared.

Edit:

I've just done a quick search and several big competitors have also disappeared for keywords they were ranking for. Can't find their articles at all either.

Does anyone know if there is something going on with Google?

[mh19]

It's the same for me. Even typing my website name brings up nothing. Loads (but not all) of my URLs are just gone.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

USA traffic is varying for me, my biggest site has actually increased traffic whereas 2nd and 3rd have reduced however all three are well ahead of last month. I've been considering meldling first and second together since the original reason for keeping them separate has more or less gone.

My biggest decision is which design template I use!

[StupidIntelligent]

Should we call it Trump update?

[rustybrick]

There was a bug [twitter.com...]

[JamesSC]

Oh, dear. Sorry.

[Athedian]

Page ranking fell off the cliff on Monday.

Bug or not, Google can advertise how "neutral" they are as much as they want on Twitter, I'm not buying it.