Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2020

[samwest]

---

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)

---

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?

[glakes]

@mosxu

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

One thing is for certain. When Google mixes in free ads with paid ads, it is no longer an auction where bidders can expect to get more if they pay more. In my state auctions are regulated, and I'd bet the most profitable auctioneer in most states is Google and they remain unregulated. That's why they can get away adding with free ads that dilute the value of those bidding and IMO introduced a corrupt shill bidding process.

Yesterday I saw a spike in the unpaid shopping display ads. Paid spend remained constant and conversions were non-existent. I think it's time to clamp down on the wallet and dump Google in its entirety. Both paid and organic SERPS are nothing more than a money funnel for Google. Consumers are getting smarter, and that's why I believe Amazon has propelled itself well beyond Google for product searches. Bottom line - webmasters, advertisers and consumers can't trust Google.

Today seems like another Google dud day - not worth investing money in paid ads or time/money into SEO.

[ichthyous]

@redbar Yes Wordpress...it can certainly use an update and some improvement. My competitors were mostly not on Wordpress...they also fell right along with me. Google just decided that longer form pages were what should rank for those types of terms now, not businesses that typically have less word count on their landing pages and product pages. I can assure you that I have a lot more inbound links than a lot of the crappy blog posts ranking now. This is a decision on Google's part, or a result of a major tweak to the algo favoring longer form content and underweighting links.

I've wanted to lengthen the content on my pages for a while now, but my WP theme doesn't allow you to lay out the archive pages and really add lots of text. It's not easy to be both a catalogue of products and an informational page at the same time. When I say informational, I mean in a broad sense, not information about the products.

[samwest]

All day...steady 2 consecutive visits and no more. Zero conversions. Clearly throttled. Dud day is right...for us...but today alone they'll bank about 500 million...give or take 50M. That's obscene.

[renatovieira]

Today things are very, very and very bad. My traffic just disappeared. F***!

It's unbelievable... Here we go again on the Google roller coaster.

[samwest]

@rena - but did your positions change at all? I bet they are the same. I'm watching this throttled traffic in total amazement.

[renatovieira]

@sam - SERP's are ok. Main keywords are stable. That's why I don't understand what is happening today.

[Koray Tugberk Gubur]

On 1 August, all of my 8 projects have lost rankings. On 5 August, all of them have better rankings according to the beginning.
What was the purpose of this change?
Do you know?

[ichthyous]

Yesterday was better, today started strong and at 8am fell off a cliff for the rest of the day. This is while I've gained six top three ranking terms and 11 top ten tanking terms in the last week or so. There is not such a strong correlation between traffic and ranking/visibility anymore, especially since Google controls the traffic hour by hour.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - That's exactly what happened to me yesterday and today.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Traffic always drops through the floor during prime business hours...usually for me at around 10am and recovers in the evening, correct? The exact opposite of my traffic for the last 17 years, so my international traffic is higher now as a proportion of my traffic than it's ever been.

[Kash1111]

I wonder how many of you guys are placed in a YMYL Categorie.

[Treud]

@Kash1111 I have a E-commerce mainly so I bet I'm under the YMYL. Anyway each core update that's the same. I'm smashed down and after I comeback slowly until next update.
Conversions are usually stable because the converting keywords are still there and I think also customer find us through forums. But the short Keyword with High traffic I didn't had the opportunity to really test and taste them! only 1 week :)

[Athedian]

@mosxu - Not quite sure what you mean...but I've only briefly checked on the auction insight and saw random competitors showing up that had never appeared in the past. I mean, if they were relevant competitors offering similar services to what we're offering, then yeah, that's fine. But man, I got a competitor that was pushing for mobile app platform which has nothing to do with what we're offering.

@glakes - Well said. And it's pretty evident from the last few days that cost per click was insanely high compared to what I've seen in the last few months. I had optimized the ads to the point where there's nothing more to optimize and lowered the cpa to the lowest possible while getting really high conversion rate. Then the last few days hit and I was burning budget like drinking water with very little conversions. Google definitely has been throwing these fake competitors so that they can milk more $$$ from paid advertisers. Disgusting tactic.

@ichthyous - I'm also using WP right now but moving away from it soon. Got a web dev to develop a whole new site after realizing previous team screwed up the WP site with useless plugins that lowered page speed significantly while crashing the site left and right. We've fixed most of the problems already but there are still a crap load of things that we can improve upon on the site. Of course, properly maintained, WP is still a very nice platform to use.

But with the Core Web Vitals, our WP site is definitely at its last breath.

[topaz]

You guys that reference throttled traffic with no change in keyword positions...are you sure it's not just your Discover traffic disappearing and reappearing ?

[ichthyous]

You guys that reference throttled traffic with no change in keyword positions...are you sure it's not just your Discover traffic disappearing and reappearing

I have no Discover traffic, zero. I don't operate a blog it's a commercial site with products, not articles etc.

[ChokenBako]

I just had a quick view in my GSC. Increased Impressions but Position and CTR falling. Overall it remains stable at a low level.

[MayankParmar]

Discover traffic returned on Monday after a week of absence and it disappeared on Tuesday.

[southernguy]

Throttled traffic is real! On Monday and Tuesday 2 of my sites were on fire with both traffic and conversions, once again I had not seen this kind of activity in months, it happens frequently, on Wednesday traffic died off completely (dead). Google has definitely found a way to manipulate traffic patterns in favor of personal gain.

[renatovieira]

Something happened yesterday. Almost zero traffic today.

[KaseyM]

Traffic off a cliff yet tools still saying rankings are the same.

[renatovieira]

@KaseyM - Same here..

[ichthyous]

I don't know why this is such a revelation to many people...this has been going on since the January update. I canceled my SEMrush account for this reason...it's basically useless at this point. Your ranking and visibility stay stable using those tools but they are only tracking your place in organic results...all the other content on the page means that the organic results now often start at the bottom of page one or page two now. Ranking well doesn't mean much if Google has totally buried organic results on the page.

This definitely impacts some niches more than others. If your website is about a very specific topic that many people aren't pumping out endless articles, youtube videos, blog posts etc about then you have a shot at being found higher up on the page...but that is not many sites.

With regards to throttling of traffic...of course it's real! Anyone who has closely watched their own analytics for many years can tell you that. Completely unnatural traffic patterns are the norm now. Google is particularly whacking USA traffic during business hours...so expect to see your traffic suddenly vanish in the morning and return in the eve after all the prime traffic has gone elsewhere. I am getting more traffic overnight now, and then at the same time each morning BAM! falls off dramatically. It's not every day, but most days now. Greedy Google is directing traffic to sites that it makes money from...period.

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:39 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2020]

[RedBar]

Discover traffic returned on Monday after a week of absence and it disappeared on Tuesday.

Right, I am going to seem a total newb and possibly idiot ... what the heck is Discover and where is it?

The only time I see it mentioned is here at WebmasterWorld, it certainly is not evident on any of my machines and doing searches for it doesn't halp either.

Is it possible that Discover on / off traffic is precisely because newbs like me and Joe Public haven't a clue what and where it is?

If it's yet another "option" buried deeply somewhere then lack of traffic is plainly obvious, people want simplicity not further complications.

[StupidIntelligent]

@RedBar - These news stories appear in Chrome on smartphones; when you initially open the browser.

[StupidIntelligent]

And can deliver thousands of clicks, and return traffic for news websites every day. Unrelated to Organic blue links. Established informational websites are now tightly dependent on this type of traffic for ad revenue.

[RedBar]

These news stories appear in Chrome on smartphones; when you initially open the browser.

Hmmm ... USA only?

Solely on the APP?

[RedBar]

Ok, found it at long last!

Discover is available to mobile users on the Google App, Android devices, and Google.com on all mobile browsers (when logged into a Google Account).

That explains why I've never seen it.

[samwest]

With regards to throttling of traffic...of course it's real! Anyone who has closely watched their own analytics for many years can tell you that. Completely unnatural traffic patterns are the norm now. Google is particularly whacking USA traffic during business hours...so expect to see your traffic suddenly vanish in the morning and return in the eve after all the prime traffic has gone elsewhere. I am getting more traffic overnight now, and then at the same time each morning BAM! falls off dramatically. It's not every day, but most days now.

This is precisely what I see. Last night, after a limited 2 visit-at-a-time day, I got a short window of "natural flow" and a couple of conversions. SERPs didn't change at all, just apparent throttling. I too am seeing more conversions late at night. However, the target is always moving. In the distant past, I would have traffic and conversion all day, on the half hour, sometimes on top of each other. It was so regular and consistent on a daily basis that you could set your watch by conversions. Those days are long gone as Google now EAT's your lunch...that's all that acronym means.

No reason that page one results should not produce consistent traffic. To get there, we already must have enough E-A-T, so that's moot. There is much more at play here...but we'll never know whats in the black box.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I took a deeper look on my analytics (my website facing with traffic decline since November 8 2019 and since then every further update keeps destroying it) and found that according to Search Console I didn't faced with a huge ranking drops (and in a lot of cases my positions staying stable or even higher). But the quantity of clicks dropped drastically, majority of articles are even having the same or higher impressions, but no clicks... What if the problem is already mentioned here? If all those stable impressions are just happening in featured boxes and answer boxes? That's the only way I can explain this. Clicks are stolen from impressions within the Google ecosystem. They are leaving us behind the game and the future in that case is that there wouldn't be any "small" webmasters like now, only huge websites with big teams that will be able to cover this through other traffic sources (social, direct, newsletters, own searches) and wouldn't be relying on Google as the main source of traffic.

[ichthyous]

There are four things going on that are causing traffic to drop from what I can see:

1) January 2020 update - Page is loaded with many more Google properties, organic SERPS pushed down far on the page or to page 2. This happened on a rolling basis over months from what I could tell, and may have started well before the Jan 2020 update.

2) May 2020 update - A massive algo update that now ranks informational articles and blog posts in the top 10-12 spots for short-tail searches. Ecommerce sites or any site selling products drops 10-20 places across the board. This happened to me and all of my competitors, not one of which is ranking for those terms anymore.

3) May 2020 update - A massive 60% drop in image search impressions and clicks starting on May 4th and lasting about three weeks before hitting bottom. This is probably related to #2. Images that ranked well vanish completely from image search.

4) 2020 - Traffic throttling increases during peak business hours and becomes much worse. Not sure when this started, but it has gotten much worse this year

My site is a 17 year old portfolio/catalog type site (not informational/articles, but no shopping cart checkout on the pages) established site with a fairly good link profile and authority

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:05 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2020]