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?

[RedBar]

WooHoo Pinterest, go for it G! Just done a three keyword specialist product search and in the top 30 results were:

co.uk
com
gr
ca
dk
at

20% of the results Pinterest and dare I mention Houzz and Alibaba listings?

All of this for a specialist product emanating from Norway.

[ichthyous]

Yesterday was very good traffic and conversions for most of the day. If an update came through, it still appears to process like the old "Google Dance" with several dead days followed by great traffic and conversions.

I fid the opposite for the last few years...I get a sudden massive influx of inquiries for about 12-18 hours, then I can expect 2-3 days of death until it recovers a bit. That's my confirm of a Google update. Since January the number of inquiries (conversions) has been so low that any sudden surge becomes very obvious. Like you said, during that time my ranking doesn't change much. And in fact my ranking / visibility has remained rock stable, but traffic is very low and no conversions.

[Treud]

My ranking is totally not stable, was kind of OK for 3 months, since 15 of July started to see quite big changes and fall. And since the 27th it's like crazy.
Stable now for 3 days, of course, the lowest rank possible! As usual


For Bing, all good.

[samwest]

Yesterday was clearly an anomaly...today its dead again.

[NeapTide]

Day by day i am totally losing trust in Google now. They are 100 percent stealing your site content and won't even let users visit your site by showing content of your site in snippets and *people also search/ask for* box

Due to these boxes my site results have got pushed down to page 2 resulting in drastic decrease in traffic.

It seems like its better to do a real life business instead of relying on these crooks who steal all your data and use that for their own profits.

[RedBar]

It seems like its better to do a real life business

Here's the stupid question of the day!

What type / kind of business are you running now?

[mosxu]

“Real Life Business” nice but that was possible before Covid

[RedBar]

Yesterday experienced very high traffic across all sites, more than double average ... checked their logs and all seem to be genuine, very unusua for a Monday.

[Treud]

@RedBar I had the same last week. it was new high traffic keywords. But they have been taken away since then !
Looks like Google is trolling me !

[RedBar]

@Treud

GT - Google Trolling :-)))

Mine were all completely normal global visits and paths through the sites with obvious time lapses between each page when multiple pages were viewed. Single page visits are also common for me when people are researching one specific widget product.

Bots are usually pretty obvious however MS Azure and Google's {roxy make me wonder at times however I tend not to see them very much.

[ichthyous]

I am still seeing clamped traffic from the US...my traffic from the UK is high, and Australia has returned after vanishing for two days.

The continued concern is a very clamped amount of traffic from USA...some days almost normal, some days awful...never very good anymore. My top USA markets are 1) NYC metro, 2) DC Metro, 3) Entire state of California. This summer...almost nothing from NY or DC, but normal inquiries from CA. This is probably due to the fact that major cities are still shut down and empty. My sales to CA are more suburban and spread across the state. That's all that I can surmise. Is anyone seeing 'normal' (aka pre-pandemic) traffic patterns from USA anymore?

[Treud]

My USA traffic is strangely the same for 3 days. And it’s not normal. I usually see a wave in weekdays with lowest point Thursday. But it’s always lower than the Sunday. And here it’s the same !

I also receive visitors by waves

[universenet]

Internet World is changing

1.google
2.youtube
3.Tmall
4.baidu
5.facebook

Baidu search engine is high now
3. and 4. places are chinese companies

[bookmarc]

There seems to be huge fluctuation today. I lost 50% but it recovered after an hour or two. but yesterday my site was down 19%

even chrome extension is ranking higher than my site. and the extension was built for my site and links to my site. and of course, google books and Pinterest also rank. this search term volume is over 20k.

[RedBar]

My Tuesday has finished and it was even higher than Monday, all good stuff looking at my logs and I did examine them carefully since I expected to find something.

High traffic in July and August is not something I have ever experienced like this in 27 years.

As a matter of interest for those who have expressed it to me about the UK hotel / pub site, in the first four days of August it has had more page views than April and May combined!

Eat Out to Help Out has driven a lot of traffic without a doubt.

Who's going to ask first what this means?:-)

[Athedian]

Traffic spiked for me yesterday but very low conversions.

Either it's the new keywords I added to my pages or there's another update again.

Also just checked the auction insight of Google Ads, it's currently showing irrelevant "competitors" competing against our ads. Looks like Google algo for the ads is also being messed up badly. And no, there's nothing wrong with the keywords that I bid for.

[samwest]

Tuesday..clobbered again...throttled/ staccato 2 at a time drip traffic all day, no conversions. Very dramatic ON/OFF traffic happening again. WTAF?

[mosxu]

@Athedian

“auction insight of Google Ads, it's currently showing irrelevant "competitors" competing against our ads”

Poor competitors I wonder what they are seeing in auction insights ?

[Athedian]

@mosxu - I was also seeing Google itself in auction insight for three months straight in the beginning of this year then it disappeared.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Facing with the same situation: after 2 months of geat affiliate sales, my Amazon website dropped sales for 2 weeks already, conversions are just dead (traffic changed, but not so drastically as sales did). I'm a newbie in Amazon, but now I understood what folks from here are saying when it goes about "zombie" traffic. It's a strange "hand-made" pattern, like Google has it's own "ON/OFF" button to stop your revenue.

[freyahenry]

We realize Google has a past filled with moving back a portion of the signs after the rollout of Broad Core Updates. In any case, these progressions are not reported and it's just through the sensors that we become more acquainted with about the SERP variances.

[mosxu]

@Athedian

Auction insights can’t be genuine if you select a keyword and tells you that you had 100% top page exposure and if you check your ads from IPs who never visited your site before and hardly see any of your ads?

[RedBar]

@samwest

You asked a couple of days agp whether I used AdSense to which I replied for not more than two years since it was taking me two months to get to the minimum. If you recall a few years back I was on USD 10+K per month.

Anyway, for the last couple of days whilst researching my widget products I've been keeping my eyes open for AdSense / AnyThing in my industry and the simple answer is no one is carrying any ads whatsoevr. Certainly none of the ranking sites for my widget products, hardly any of the widget portals are even used nowadays and online trade magazines are only carrying specialist trade ads.

The retal trade does use AdWords etc but obviously they are not seen on the top ranking sites other than a SERPs page.

[glakes]

Also just checked the auction insight of Google Ads, it's currently showing irrelevant "competitors" competing against our ads. Looks like Google algo for the ads is also being messed up badly.

Adding irrelevant competitors to both paid and organic search results is not new. I believe it's an attempt by Google to force legitimate businesses to pay and pay more to rise above the irrelevant distractions and/or scraped pages. While this may compel businesses to invest more in paid ads in the short-term, it's driving consumers of goods elsewhere while also ruining Google's image in the eyes of paying advertisers.

We may be seeing this tactic play out in Google's shopping ads. While many advertisers left shopping ads because of COVID, Google is allowing free listings to be displayed. This ads more competition for the paying advertisers that remain. I see it as a form of shill bidding. Imagine being at a real auction and bidding $50 on an end table, and a bid of $0 from someone else accepted by the auctioneer. If you want that end table, you must now bid $50.01 despite the prior bid being $0. I don't see how any of this would be beneficial to those bidding or even legal...

[mosxu]

@glakes

“Imagine being at a real auction and bidding $50 on an end table, and a bid of $0 from someone else accepted by the auctioneer. If you want that end table, you must now bid $50.01 despite the prior bid being $0. I don't see how any of this would be beneficial to those bidding or even legal...”

No one knows what is computed in that auction. I mean we would be probably feeling sick to find out one day!

[samwest]

@redbar - I rarely see ads on brick and mortar or tangible product sites as they tend to draw buyers away from their products...which is wise. I DO however see up to 10 or more ads on blogs that talk about other peoples products. These "infulencers" and typically not "authorities" and are only looking to cash in the few pennies that Adsense now pays. Shows just how desperate some publishers can be. While our sites server a similar market, mine is what I'd call "hard informational", paid content and I limit my adsense ads to bottom of the page only. It's probably while I suffer in rank and see these on/off periods and Google pushes for more $$$. The ad filled bloggers can spout keyword loaded aggregations as they editorialize about other sites...so that must be the quality user experience Google prefers (or is it the ads?). Good to hear you are doing well...you should be.

Sunday and Monday were OK, but the clamp is back on...trickle traffic continues. I am amazed how they can keep a constant flow of 2 visitors and that's it all day. I can't breathe.
The only peaks I see are when I turn on FB ads, and it seems even those quickly decay in effectiveness, yet the money is still taken. I gave up on Adsense as that platform is dead to me.

[RedBar]

@samwest

Most of the blogger-style sites have all but disappeared from my sector, the only ones I rarely see are usually very old ones not updated in several years and ALL, fairly sure all, of the keyword domain name MFA sites have gone altogether.

Do you know what? I think I've just realised why my trademark registered, keyword domain was hit even though it was a 40 year old exclusive product originally brought to the global market by ourseleves ... doh!

[ichthyous]

I DO however see up to 10 or more ads on blogs that talk about other peoples products.

I don't run adsense and never have. Since the May 4th update the SERPS in my niche have been completely taken over by blog posts and articles, many from newbie sites with very little domain rank or inbound links. Any business or commerce related site is now relegated 10-12 places down from May across the board for short tail searches. I don't see one of my competitors from before the May update ranking well either...we're all gone. These blog posts / articles are all very similar and all discuss the same thing...who needs 10-12 of them in a row? My guess is they are all running adsense, but I haven't made a study of it. Google has chosen to show the user what it what it makes the most money from, not allowing the user to choose from a diversity of results.

[samwest]

@redbar - I have seen just the opposite. The bloggers and pinterest are at the top now, with new ones appearing. Oddly enough, my domain keywords are about all I rank on these days. Seems we are seeing almost the opposite in serp changes. As far as trying to improve traffic, they harder you try, the less you get. It's a exercise in diminishing returns. Just letting your site sit idle for 6 months seems to be the path to success in my vertical. I have posted new articles that get hits for the first few hours, then disappear for months before reappearing in SERRPs. The mythical sandbox seems to be alive and well.

One last strange observation. Today I have been unable to get more than 2 consecutive visitors. Just on a hunch, I performed a server reboot. Now I'm seeing triple the consecutive traffic. It's like the server has a "remora" attached to it, sucking off traffic and a reboot effectively removes it ...for a few hours at least. I have been doing this for several years now and it seems every time I reboot, the traffic flows again. At first I thought it was a memory leak, but available memory is high before the reboot. Weird. Maybe a rogue plugin. I've mentioned this before in this forum. Anyone else running WP notice this? Perhaps it's just my hallucination.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous & samwest

Are you both running WP?