Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2020

[samwest]

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System: The following 11 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5001046.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 3:44 pm on Aug 1, 2020 (utc -5)

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August 1st. Big SERP changes and not a single conversion in the past 48 hours. The number 1 result for several of my test queries is now....drum roll please...a single PINTEREST pin....with no followers. Is this Googles idea of a "quality user expetience" and is EAT out the window or is everything just broken? Again...

With no on site changes...bounce was dropping every day for the last few weeks...now over the last two days bounce is way up so traffic behavior has suddenly changed for the worse....which indicates a large algo change.

Anyone else seeing this?

[MayankParmar]

It's common for Discover to drop if you get hit by core update. The next core update might help you.

[browndog]

@browndog - Yeah it's getting worse right now. If I recall correctly, a long time ago it was around 15 results, almost no ads. Then it became 13 results or something like that with two ads, then three ads, then four ads, then four ads at top and two at bottom, and now it's like four ads at top, three ads at bottom, Youtube galore, one to two decent links to relevant content, and the rest is either random blogs or sites from another country in a language that I can't read nor searched for. :(

That warning scheme for Australia is just another way for Google to force their way through regulations and other watchdog groups out there. Unbelievable.

To be fair, I don't mind seeing ads if it's in context. Such as 'wardrobes, Widgetown' or 'homeloans, Somewheretown', you're probably searching for a service or product. What is annoying me is non-commercial posts which are flooded with Youtube, and worse, when I enter 'topic and mysite' and it still won't return my site as no. 1 (or even 2), when my intention is clear, I want to see an article from a specific site.

The warning has completely turned me off Chrome, I find it completely unethical. I could have put up with it if it was once-only and you could dismiss, but every time I open Chrome or Youtube the pop up appears. Google have such a strong stance regarding user experience, pop-ups (and I support them on that), but they are often the worst offenders. It's a case of 'do as I say, not as I do'.

[RedBar]

It's common for Discover to drop if you get hit by core update.

Fact or forum board speculative talk?

[Martin Ice Web]

Nearly no traffic from google today. (germany)
But another +20% sales on amazon.


What is the mission? Become the worst searchengine ever?

[MayankParmar]

Core update impact on Discover is a fact. Officially confirmed by Google: [twitter.com...]

[Webweeb]

@Martin Ice Web
You not getting traffic does not make Google a bad search engine. The question is who gets the traffic instead?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Hrm, so I rolled back to the AMP for WP plugin before there was a decline....and initial signs seem to show that there is some recovery. I know correlation does not always = causation...but it is interesting.

[RedBar]

Core update impact on Discover is a fact.

Obviously phrased as "may" not "will".

This is no different to any update, up/down, swings and roundabouts, Google dance, they all have the same effect of winners and losers, some are obvious, some are not. If the reason as to why were obvious then even more spam would rule.

[ichthyous]

Despite a small drop in ranking I've seen somewhat higher traffic this entire week...however only one conversion. I did discover a major issue on my site via GSC Coverage tab 'excluded' pages report...at some point canonical links were added to some category pages and up to thirty paginated pages per category were not being indexed. I went through and submitted them all to Google for re-indexing. I really wonder what effect this may have had on my ranking as it looks like that has been in place for quite a long time...I'm about to find out!

[NickMNS]

@itchyous

at some point canonical links were added to some category pages and up to thirty paginated pages per category were not being indexed.

Are you referring to the link rel=next and rel=prev tags, if you are those were deprecated a while ago, in which case re-submitting may not work. But it is definitely worth trying regardless.

I couldn't find the exact post that says it is deprecated, but this old post has a warning saying it is not supported:
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS No, I am referring to adding an actual fixed canonical URL to the category so that every page in the category points to the first page as the canonical. For example: xyzsite/widgets/page/2/, xyzsite/widgets/page/3/, xyzsite/widgets/page/4/ etc all have the same canonical url "xyzsite/widgets/". I must have added it myself to some categories through a Wordpress plugin that handles SEO...but I don't remember doing it and I can't understand why only some categories have it. I have read recently that this is a major mistake and causes drops in ranking as the content on those paginated pages will not get followed.

[NickMNS]

I hope it helps. Definitely let us know how turns out. It will probably take quite a while before seeing the impact though.

[renatovieira]

High traffic now since morning. Has anyone else noticed any changes?

[Fabinho]

@TalkativeEditorial Yes, apparently everything normal.

In both the Serach Console and the Publisher Center, there is no abnormal error notification.

I asked for Google News support and they returned saying that we are indexed normally, but it definitely isn't!

I got a direct help attention with a Google AMP technician mediated by our Adsense account manager, and on his side also the feedback that there is nothing serious about our AMP.

I see some rare cases here in the country of publishers affected in Discover in the September 2019 update, but in the May update only our news site. Not to mention that not even in the international community have I seen reports of sites so extensively affected Discover / News / Serp at the same time. I think our site was handpicked in this Google lottery :(

[MayankParmar]

@Fabinho What about your organic traffic? Still normal after May update?

[ichthyous]

High traffic now since morning. Has anyone else noticed any changes?

I'm seeing an almost 40% decline in USA traffic today vs yesterday, so traffic is down for me. This tends to be the pattern until about 6pm...then all of the sudden you see the USA traffic pick up and end the day at a normal level. During business hours USA traffic vanishes...maybe that's why conversion rates are NIL these days?

[EditorialGuy]

I am now pretty sure that the decline is SERP quality is to do with Google trying to understand 'user intent'. They are trying to go from being a tool to find relevant results to a word or phrase to a prediction AI....I must admit that this CAN lead to better results IF it works. However, it does not seem to work properly at this time, especially for terms that can have multiple and especially many intents.

If that's the case, I'd imagine that Google is taking the long view. Pursuing perfection and pursuing progress are two different things.

[Fabinho]

Hello @MayankParmar

So, it was precisely our organic traffic that was shaken after the update in early May, since most of it came from Google, mainly via Discover that delivered a lot to the AMP pages and this traffic source was zeroed. But if that weren't enough, we were also affected in Google News and in the conventional search that started to hide us in the results for secondary pages, where before we were at the top of the first page.

All of this happened after a month of April with record accesses. As the saying would say, "the nail that stands out is hammered" lol.

Today we have 10% of that traffic from before and we live on traffic coming from social networks, which is also very volatile. It is sad after 20 years of struggle to have to fire employees and renegotiate with partners to try to survive the crisis of the pandemic, the economy (which is for everyone) and the crisis of the algorithm (this only for our website and not for our competitors, to their joy!)

[frenchyy]

@ChokenBako I've seen a previous post about a possible impact of 301 redirections.
I've have been impacted by June 18 update.
A lot of KW in position 1 to 3 dropped to 5/6. Few days after : new drop from 5/6 to position 8/9
It seems to be stable now.
I have removed AMP few weeks before (mid may). I was wondering if the large number of 301 could be the cause ...

[browndog]

Is there an update rolling out? My traffic just tripled.

[browndog]

Filter re-applied, went from 186 live visits to 5. That was quicker than usual.

[ichthyous]

I've seen a previous post about a possible impact of 301 redirections.

I've wondered about this for a long time... I do thing having a high number of redirects is potentially a negative these days but nobody has any evidence. You can't remove the redirects because Google continues to follow them for decades and a high number of 404 errors is probably worse...

[glakes]

@Webweeb

The deeper problem really is the US global hegemony which allowed this monopoly to develop.

I definitely don't dispute your statement, and I don't see much changing in this politically paralyzed environment. Politicians are so busy fighting among each other, their responsibilities to serve the people/country have been sorely neglected - including their roles in providing oversight of the various government agencies.

Yesterday I saw some strange traffic/conversion patterns. Three orders from Google within a brief period of time that were all local. Then nothing from Google at all. Today has largely been dead. Traffic remains elevated since the update on the 15th, but far less conversions. All the shipping problems with USPS has me thinking about scaling back on Amazon and temporarily blacklisting USPS shipping options for some zip codes on my website. With that being said, I'm sure some consumers facing delays in delivery are more likely to hold off on discretionary online purchases since they may face a long wait for delivery.

[Athedian]

@ichthyous - personally, like you, I'd go for 301 instead of a bunch of 404.

My theory, however basic, is that 404 = people shaking in disgust and left upon seeing it within the first 3 seconds = high bounce rate = Google algo thinks your site/page is bad (plus the fact that bots can't crawl the pages properly anymore).

301 is a permanent redirect, which, as long as it's within the same domain, shouldn't have that much of a negative impact. However, if it's multiple 301 from multiple domains, then Google algo may think you're doing something shady and starts handing out penalties.

I've done some research on 301's earlier because our previous team had done SUCH A BAD JOB at headlines and website maintenance that I discovered we got over 300+ 404's and ?tags= urls', which I'm STILL fixing right now. Pisses me off every time when I think about it. Anyway, seems like 301 should be able to carry the score values of the links from old URL to the new one, as long as it's relevant.

Now could the scores/rankings be deducted? Could be, but it's better than a 404 page which has a page ranking of 0 (no index, not the snippet ranking of 0).

[Webweeb]

In my niche pages .edu and .gov PDFs that got deleted are easily ranking. They don't serve 404, but instead an empty page that tells the user that the file got deleted.

So in some cases, Google does not care about a huge bounce rate, since these keep ranking sometimes for weeks.

Its just nice to know that an error page on an .edu that is not at all related to topic outranks my site I actually put effort in.

[samwest]

The latest update has definitely moved previously unknown, low EAT, massively ad rich webspam straight to the #1 position in my niche. Two sites with over 25 google ads each now occupy position 1 and 2. Then pinterest in pos 3 and 4. I think the goal of the latest update is obvious.

[Webweeb]

Also the goddam pinterest bug where pinterest ranks under 400 diferent CCTLDs, admitted bug... STILL NOT FIXED! After almost 4 goodam months!

They know their app is buggy and they are simply not fixing it. I hope that simply means they have given up on the post-may version and will be discontinuing it. Therefore not bothering to fix it.

I mean if you plan on sticking with the current core, then you would fix obvious things like that. Especially if you publicly admitted that it is a bug.

[ichthyous]

I'm not even bothering to check anymore...my ranking of top 3 KW settled 14% below where it was after the glitch. Traffic is on and off, and new customers are totally non-existent for one week now. Here are my top referring cities today:

Dhaka, Bangladesh
Mumbai, India
Greenfield, Indiana, USA
New Delhi, India
Warsaw, Poland
Southampton, The United Kingdom
Kaski, Nepal

This is ludicrous! Not one visit from my local metro, one of the biggest in the world. This is straight up manipulation and traffic throttling by Google. Refer only traffic that will never convert to sales to starve the business into submission, that's Googles plan!

[MayankParmar]

I'm done analyzing the site for technical issues and I couldn't find any problems with AMP or anything that explains Discover drop in tier one countries.

Google turned off traffic to my site under the blanket of August 11 'glitch'. It wasn't a glitch!

[glakes]

Strange stuff. Today I had a lot of converting traffic from Google. Is Google trying to play catch up?