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?

[Webweeb]

@glakes:
No way to contact Google, unless you have connections. I guess tweet at Jon Mueller or Mr. Gary Illyes if you want to broadcast your niche to every SEO out there. - Noone is that stupid. I have enough spam outranking me already.

I messaged Gary Illyes on insta over the 95% spam and 20% deleted pages ranking in my niche. Message never got read.

Spam reports don't get read, only 'used to improve spam detection tools' aka machine learning.

Humans cost money. So Google doesn't want them. Funny with how liberal they are and 'care' so much about people. Its all words, not actions. Only employing machines, ignoring human problems and paying no taxes while supporting politics that wants to tax people more. Funny that.

I guess you can talk to Adsense reps, but they probably dont even work for Google. They probably outsource that stuff to random 'Michaels'' from India.

I'm sure you could somehow social engineer yourself into being able to contact some people at Google by stalking them on social media ect, but I am not that desperate yet.

[renatovieira]

Today is apparently going to be a long day. Traffic is gone again...

[MayankParmar]

Whatever happened to the core update...

[samwest]

The Week From Hell continues.
WTH did they do?
SERP's appear unchanged.

That's my August SERP Haiku.
This month is ending just like last month.
Some light in between, but now back to all zombies.

[Willi pazuti]

Google effect is so rich so poor, this week for me was extreme poverty

[samwest]

Largest separation between impressions and clicks all year. Big indicator that something more enticing is being placed above. Other than the Interesting Finds block, that is just a repeat of their top three ad filled results, I can't see any obvious changes. AI clearly hard at work to maximize profits.

[Webweeb]

@samwest
Same. Yes, it seems CTR is extremely important this update.

The problem with that is that telling people what they want to hear is that its not always honest. I suspect a contributing factor to why my niche is almost exclusively spam now is that they can make claims actual websites cannot, if they want to keep their integrity and not be taken to court.

So overemphasizing CTR is extremely dangerous. "Make $10.000/d working from home" sounds much better than "get an opportunity to make some money from home, but dont expect too much"... honesty goes out the window, CTR goes up..

But since Google is almost forcing me to, I will have to experiment with dishonest Title tags and meta descriptions going forward. It is really the only reasonable thing that can explain the spam ranking at this time aside from a bug. And I guess if thats the game I have to play, thats the game I have to play.

[mosxu]

I only get zombies to my ads had to stop the campaigns:

[mosxu]

Another thing I noticed is that most of the customers we get from google are nuts: I am not joking it looks like AI has a psychological profile on everybody and plays with it.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

In a few days there is a Labor Day in US. I'm 99% for sure that core update will be rolled out during these holidays.

[jmorgan]

In a few days there is a Labor Day in US. I'm 99% for sure that core update will be rolled out during these holidays.

Wouldn't surprise me. They have a tendency to roll out updates during holidays.

[samwest]

Now seeing my IP graphics stolen and appearing on top ranked (on Google) Pinterest pages...pointing to the scrapers site no less. So...they are again promoting the criminals and fake / hyperbolic titles. No surprise as Google appears to side that way. Stay neutral or hang it up. We will leave in droves and never trust them again. Beyond disgusted with this obvious and sudden manipulation escalation....or maybe its another glitch. Smdh.

GA numbers are way off...haven't changed in days. Based on my Matomo data, GA should be showing much lower than they are reporting.

[RedBar]

In a few days there is a Labor Day in US. I'm 99% for sure that core update will be rolled out during these holidays.

That's very doubtful going by past experience, I'm stickiig with 21st - 23rd September.

[RedBar]

@samwest

GA numbers are way off

Why do you continue to bother with their garbage?

I dumped all Google-related stuff 10 years ago, never missed any of it:-)

Heh, I have about 15 unused GMail addresses and they're all still valid!

[MayankParmar]

It totally sucks to lose years of hard work due to Google's incompetence. And getting over failure is definitely not easy.

[ChokenBako]

On my end total rollercoaster today. Visits skyrock then suddenly drop, rise again, drop. Seems that the algo doesn´t allow to get the visits beoyond a certain value....

No matter how many new content I add the visits remain the same.
This is so frustrating....

[renatovieira]

@ChokenBako - Wow... Exactly what happens to me! And in my case, there are definite periods for traffic ups and downs.

[Webweeb]

@ChokenBako
Please stop it. I have many smaller sites and they all behave like that. Its random distribution. There simply is not ging to be exactly 5 visitors every minute... if there were, then you would know that they are bots. The human mind is made to recognize patterns... even if there aren't any. I have a website that primarily ranks in DDG and that one behaves like that too.

Can we please get over reading tea leaves and focus on real issues here? This is why Google is not taking Webmasters seriously.

[ChokenBako]

@webweeb

I would totally agree with you. But the described Szenario is new for my websites. That never happened before the 4th May Update.

And maybe with small websites for you thats real but with big websites over 30.000 unique visitors a day you see patterns which will reoccur.

[MayankParmar]

This is so annoying.

Sites talking about my content are appearing in the Discover feed and I'm not! I just got a Google News notification from a site that has referred to my article in their second para! Insanely stupid algorithm. Bizzare company.

[NeapTide]

I have been saying it since 2015 that Google throttles the traffic but people didn't agree with me. Instead they would tell me to make more backlinks and add more content. That worked too but for short period of time but Google always throttled traffic to my websites

Now everybody is complaining about traffic throttling and i am smiling here like satan on misery of people. Well i shouldn't.

[glakes]

This is why Google is not taking Webmasters seriously.

If webmasters want to be taken seriously, they must either remove (noindex) their websites from Google or stop paying for Ads in droves just to catch Google's attention. This is unlikely to occur since there are many competing pages and advertisers for any given set of keywords. Therefore, webmasters will continue to be treated as a monetized commodity that produces content which can then be surrounded with Ads and sold to the highest bidder.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@ChokenBako

Absolutely the same pattern here. I can't move the website from point since May 4 update. When updating old content the URL recovering the traffic... but exactly at the same time algo tooks traffic from other page in the same quantity. It's so obvious that the search is using quotas. If the website is filtered, you won't jump higher. Only after recovering from algo penalty (I mean not manual actions here).

[TalkativeEditorial]

Anyone who appears on Discover seeing a severe delay in what is appearing over the last few days (since around Friday). I know Discover does show evergreen content, but it's usually pretty good at picking up what is and is not still relevant. For the last few days, all our stuff that has been showing up there is out of date now. Anyone else?

The sensors and rankings seem completely stable and eerily quiet, so wondering if there is a technical glitch our side.

[Cralamarre]

My hourly GA report is showing a major traffic drop over the past couple of hours. Hoping it's a glitch.

Edit: Actually, I think it's my web host that is experiencing problems.

[samwest]

Please stop it. I have many smaller sites and they all behave like that. Its random distribution.

Random distribution, that's a good one.
I have 20 years of data to the contrary.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial It's not just you. They have suddenly started surfacing old articles (3-5 days old) - it could be their new feature or something but this is not good for the CTR. For example, I have 6% CTR for one article and the same article appears again in Discover after two days but CTR is 2-3%.
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Cloudflare and Namecheap are currently down in some regions.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar that's kind of a relief (but it sucks for our CTR). What I've been doing is as soon as I notice something old has surfaced, I go and update with a link to something more relevant.

I've seen loads of old stuff in my own personal feed before, but that has almost always been evergreen stuff that was still relevant. They're just randomly picking articles from us that's already dated - some from eight days ago.

[Webweeb]

Google seems to actually use spam reports to filter out spam pretty quickly. Like within days.

The problem is that their core algo is programmed to rank spam in my niche. So what I am seeing is that as I report 1 kind of spam it disappears and new spam appears instead. ;D

simply amazing.

But I feel like god, since I get to decide what spam gets to rank. Except pinterest that one stays probably because my spam reports get submitted with the wrong cctld, since it automatically redirects... I wonder if it will disappear too if I report with the correct CCTLD.

I will run the experiment. If I can make pinterest go away, then I am truly godlike.

Also .edu and .gov PDFs are somehow immune to spam reports. But they are most definitively doing something and pretty quickly. Even youtube videos get ranked less often after my reports.

However, I would not expect results unless what you are reporting is actual spam. I dont think they will let something affect the SERPS that they have not at least automatically verified against spam patterns. Or maybe even a human.... probably not. Google dont need no Humans, Google is a strong and independent Spam Engine.

[edited by: Webweeb at 5:18 pm (utc) on Aug 30, 2020]

[Cralamarre]

I guess my web host was not the only one hit by a service disruption this morning. CNN is reporting a major internet outage.