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?

[renatovieira]

Bad bad day...

Did they turn off the internet? It's not possible...

[ichthyous]

@ChokenBako @Webweeb After 17 years of watching the same domain, I know what is a normal pattern and what isn't on my site. Traffic is totally abnormal, and it is definitely throttling or whatever other manipulation from Google. How about traffic dropping through the floor many days when it should be at a peak? Much lower USA traffic than usual...and traffic from Australia vanishing one day, UK the next. Sudden spikes in traffic with a much higher bounce rate, followed by unusually low traffic. It could be that Google is simply showing different results to different users, but if that were totally random so would the traffic be.

[Steven29]

I agree that Google has had some type of throttle on it for the past two years or so...

In my experience, this throttle has different levels and will not allow you to surpass the amount of money for that throttle in the given month. If you have awesome days from viral content or any other marketing, you will have bad days to offset your earnings to keep you in your throttle zone.

It's almost like they are not calculating ads by clicks, cpm or anything anymore... but rather how authoritative your website is and giving a share of the Adsense revenue to your site.

If you keep hitting your maximum throttle for a few months in a row.. you can be upgraded to the next throttle space when the next update occurs and will have higher earnings every month, no matter what you really do. You can post 10 new articles a day all month, or post nothing.. but you will stay in your throttle zone. When the next update occurs you may loose, keep or gain more throttle authority.

But it does appear in the last few months, this throttle has been updated slightly to give a minimum throttle to all websites in a niche. It doesn't matter how spammy you are and it appears people are abusing this update.

These domains do not rank normally, receive no traffic and have bounce rates as high as 90%... but will be shown above your website if you are in your "throttle zone" and already set to earn what your set throttle amount of money is.

Is this being done to allow others a fair chance to compete in niches? I would think so, if the domains taking the place weren't complete spun garbage that can't even be read correctly and is a complete mystery how they even get approved for an Adsense account.

The minute a few go away, a few more come to replace the one's that got penalized and the process repeats again. Why wouldn't they? The websites can be created in hours, they are that bad.

[ichthyous]

@Steven29 I just want t clarify...don't run adsense on my site, nor do I pay for adwords.

[Webweeb]

In my experience at about 300 concurrent visitors average the 'patterns' are gone. You can expect pretty regular patterns hour to hour, day to day.

Thats a lot of visitors. we are talking 50k+ a day. Unique visitors. However, even then depending on your conversion rates, you may still see 'patterns' in your conversions.

Even at 100 to 200 you can still get some patterns. Below 100 lots of patterns. Below 50 extreme patterns.

As for trottlig: Google sandbox was 100% real. I got out of it multiple times. Usually took 3-7 months.
I see some apparent throttling on YouTube... had to make the whole channel private for a time, now the channel struggles hard to regain rankings. It seems to happen extremely slowly now. But that probably just the algo testing it as a recommendation against other videos slowly.

As for google giving you a traffic 'allowance' it makes now economic sense for them to not show the best content that makes users happy to as many people as possible. I dont think they are so far ahead of the 'competition' that they can afford to run a social welfare scheme and rank people to keep them out of poverty.

I admit I would expect the liberal people at Google to want to run a welfare scheme, but the people making the actual decisions are pure capitalists at heart and only support leftie politics, because leftie politicians are usually cheaper to buy. - less law and order focus ect. Also leftie politics make for a better company image if you are a monopoly that in truth is hurting everyone.

[MayankParmar]

Index > Coverage > Valid

A gradual decline in the valid indexed pages. Anyone with the same problem?

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar

Not quite the same, but an increase in Alternate page with proper canonical tag
With those alternates largely being a bunch of rogue URLs with additional strings like translate etc

[TalkativeEditorial]

But man oh man, this Discover confusion is a pain. Old, irrelevant articles are still randomly surfacing, obviously, that will decimate the CTR.
I actually had to check to make double sure there is no indexing issue or issues with redirecting to AMP and I can't spot any.

[RedBar]

With August coming to a close metrics across all sites look very good for me and I'll post their perfomances tomorrow however my major concern is the UK hotel / pub site and the end of the Govt's "Eat Out" promotion.

This promotion has had a tremndous response but we are expecting that specific traffic will mostly disappear however the accommodation side is practically sold out for September.

My B2Bs have had an incredible month considering August is usually dead with some great international enquiries and orders secured.

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar A gradual decline, yes.

And today traffic is not just throttling but also absent in many cases. Around 40% fall in traffic for many sites. Usually in similar cases witnessed in the last months a huge amount of bot activity were noticed. But today its like they are also sitting this one out.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial diagnosing any problem with Discover is impossible. You can do nothing but wait.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar yeah man, it's soooooo painful though, wow. And this after we had a decent run of things working consistently.
Discover giveth and Discover taketh away.

[Steven29]

@ichthyous That shouldn't matter.

Thnk about it. It's basically the same users, every day, for the past decade that are on the internet. The only thing that may be new are devices, in which Google is great at "auto synching" everything to carry the user profile to the new device.

They know how much that "user" is worth to them (how many ads they have clicked, how often they click, at what times and more.

The throttle for websites without Adsense can still be applied using a basic algorithm like this. They know the value of searches they have sent you.

The internet has ALWAYS been consistant. Who remembers, only just a few years ago, having consistant sales. 1 sale for every 20 cart views? If the cart views went to 60 without a sale, you would have 3 sales almost in a row and your conversion ratio would always be consistant? It was always that way for me.

[ichthyous]

Index > Coverage > Valid
A gradual decline in the valid indexed pages. Anyone with the same problem?

No, I am not seeing a decline in valid pages...but I have seen a big increase in Google crawling garbage urls...for example urls with query strings that aren't even used on my site, and haven't been in five years. It's reporting these under "Crawled, not indexed" or "Alternate pages with canonical tag". This weekend I came up with 301 redirects to knock a lot of the garbage, but then Google reports a higher number of redirects. I think Google is wasting the crawl budget on garbage, and my valid pages are not getting indexed.

Not quite the same, but an increase in Alternate page with proper canonical tag
With those alternates largely being a bunch of rogue URLs with additional strings like translate etc

@Talkative Yes! exactly what I am seeing. I added a 301 to strip ALL the garbage query strings except for the two actually used on my site.

[MayankParmar]

I have URLs like the below in excluded (alternate page):

utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&utm_referrer=https://yandex.ua/news
amp/?fbclid=IwAR3Bfx3cV1j29GDdSlc0cWb6txzWc-7HvAruP14Qq-4pjKkhSuY-MQWl9Sk
/feed/

thousands of URLs!

I don't understand how and why they're crawling such URLs. Odd :/

[StupidIntelligent]

What from I can gather from my limited knowledge, anything physical (at least in US) is mostly now ordered through Amazon. The majority middle class and up (I would even put lower middle class living in populous metros) wouldn't even bother visiting websites. They just speak "order xyz Alexa" and bam, it's on the way.

In America, online shopping is Amazon.

Google is like the Bing of online shopping. Whatever single percentage traffic they got for physical products is pushed to Amazon any how.

Online ecommerce stores working in the US should focus their energies on Amazon sales, and stop giving themselves headaches on why Google hasn't made the dinner tonight.

[Athedian]

I'm seeing MASSIVE traffic flooding to my site yesterday and the day before. Another update seems to be rolling out again.

It's either that, or Google's messing with Ads and somehow tied the two supposedly separate algos together and making a bunch of people clicking on the ads.... which is what I've been seeing and tracking for the last three days now.

[ichthyous]

Online ecommerce stores working in the US should focus their energies on Amazon sales, and stop giving themselves headaches on why Google hasn't made the dinner tonight.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I'm in a niche where Amazon does not excel. The majority of sales are still through independent sites, so Google is the Prime mover (a pun!) in my business, not Amazon. Amazon has been trying to make inroads into my niche for years, but has not been successful. On the one hand I would love an alternative to Google, but I fear Amazon would be even worse. These are monopolies, and so they will keep raising the fees they take on their captive audience.

[nmbrsk]

After being decimated by the December 2019 update (keywords fell from 8.5k to 2k, 300 top 3 keywords to 47), my personal site had a little uptick in May/June, before falling hugely in May/June. I implemented some changes 2-3 weeks ago and seeing signs of a small recovery.

The ranking drop also saw Google not showing me in the Top Stories carousel or having a ‘latest from example.com’ widget on my brand name. As a news site, not featuring in Top Stories for my niche is a HUGE hit. The past couple of weeks it’s started to pick up again, although still no Discovery traffic.

This last year has felt like I’ve been under something of a manual penalty so I’m hoping things start to pick up massively otherwise this project - which I’ve been working on for over 10 years - will need to be shelved. Sad really.

[glakes]

What from I can gather from my limited knowledge, anything physical (at least in US) is mostly now ordered through Amazon.

Amazon does command a leading/large percentage of the ecommerce market though has customers that I would consider bottom of the barrel. Amazon's business model is to build warehouses and the infrastructure needed to move cheap Chinese goods to the American consumer quickly. According to Marketplace Pulse, 58% of the top 100,000 sellers on Amazon live in China while only 36% reside in the USA. See [marketplacepulse.com...] for more info.

The majority middle class and up (I would even put lower middle class living in populous metros) wouldn't even bother visiting websites.

Amazon makes it easy to order products, and Americans across all income brackets too lazy/loyal to look elsewhere often pay more for many items. I've found that eBay is a less expensive marketplace to purchase many items. What I sell is often bought in pairs, and consumers can get a discount on my website, real time/fair freight quotes and no marketplace facilitator tax. On Amazon consumers can only buy my products as single items, get gouged on freight (Amazon does not have real time freight quotes) and many pay a marketplace facilitator tax. Still, I lose some of my margins on single item purchases due to Amazon's 15% commission on each sale -vs- 3% on my website.

There's still a strong demand outside of Amazon, but I've found this demand is largely driven by educated consumers and those consumers that want to make an educated purchasing decision on niche/specialized products. Still, IMO your statement holds true for many products when you note:

Online ecommerce stores working in the US should focus their energies on Amazon sales, and stop giving themselves headaches on why Google hasn't made the dinner tonight.

Even for specialized niche type products, Google will rank a new Amazon page above an established independent ecommerce product page. It's disgusting to think that so much of the information and commerce industries are controlled by just two unregulated multi-national companies.

[Webweeb]

LOL i see googles point about onpage not mattering anymore.

I have been showing page titles on all my pages for almost 10 years, because it is SEO 101 to have the title tag as an h1 on the actual page...
...and honestly it worked well for SEO for some time.

But now I removed it on one of my sites and my bounce rate went down 5%...
...back in the day this would have been suicide SEO wise, but now I can actually do what is good for the user without compromising SEO.

On the other hand spam ranks in my niche, probably because Google ignores onpage spam signals now so I guess its not all good :D

[MayankParmar]

Does anyone remember this? SearchEngineLand: Daily Mail SEO says site lost big after June Google update, asks community for help

Per Ahrefs, their traffic recovered and remained stable. The recovery is after they made ZERO changes to their site to fix quality. Just yet another example of how Google treats publishers differently! :)

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar lol, literally saw a Daily M*** post in my Discover feed as I read this.

Meanwhile, our daily original content still nowhere to be found in Discover....yet no change to rankings.

[MayankParmar]

Yeah. No recovery from August 11 Discover drop yet

[BoredMeteor]

Yeah, I bumped into that Daily Mail story a few months ago when I was first researching the May 4 Apocalypse Update. I think it's possible that DM just regained their rankings after another core update without Google necessarily giving them a hand specifically, but who knows...I think seroundtable had a similar situation a few years back, did nothing, and also eventually recovered.

Well, nothing about Google makes sense to me right now, anyway.

[renatovieira]

@MayankParmar - Same here. Every day things only get worse. This update heavily affected one of my main sites.

[System]

The following 5 messages were cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5008345.htm [webmasterworld.com]
6:16 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (utc -5)