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?

[ichthyous]

@Cyril TechWebsites I compared the last six months of 2020 YOY with 2019. I have a 14% drop in impressions overall, which starts exactly on May 4th. I have a 30% drop in clicks during the same period...the decline in clicks is seen over the entire 6 months of 2020 but got worse after May 4th.

[samwest]

@ichy - yes, I am also seeing a lot of variation between impressions and clicks. This is seemingly due 99.9% to changes that Google is making as my site has not changed at all. I try my best to keep it relatively stable. Here is a screen shot of my performance graph > [imgur.com...]

This illustrates the issue you describe perfectly.
I was experiencing a very nice recovery until the May 2020 update that wiped out traffic and shot clicks down. I typically don't post unless things are really abnormal and fishy looking...and this is pretty bad.

[mosxu]

@athedian

If you run ads and spend a lot you need to check your ads on multiple ips ideally no vpns. Now if you select the search word action insights and you see 100% but the ips you searched from don’t show your ads for that particular keyword?

[KaseyM]

My GA adjusted up by about 40,000 visitors for yesterday. Could be GA bugs? Idk. Going to bed.

[Athedian]

@mosxu - I checked the ads through different IPs before, the ads are all showing for those particular keywords. Of course, it could just be regional-based geographically speaking. But, if that's indeed the case, in the sense that because it's geographically based through the geo-targeting that I did, then it still doesn't explain why a mobile app platform site is competing with the keywords that I bid for.

So with that in mind, it's either that company has an incompetent marketing specialist at work or Google is doing something shady in the background to drive up the cost per click.

@KaseyM - I'm seeing the same thing. Similar to GSC, where I'm still seeing a massive increase of impressions and clicks. Seems like the Google Update is still being rolled out.

[immrrobot]

ranking has never been stable after the May update. Just when you think one keyword has bumped the other one goes down the hill. Get a grip G

[MayankParmar]

Analytics is delayed.

[mosxu]

@athedian

“Google is doing something shady in the background to drive up the cost per click”

Can you contact the mobile app platform marketing department and ask? Are they really advertising ?

[glakes]

it's either that company has an incompetent marketing specialist at work or Google is doing something shady in the background to drive up the cost per click.

Advertisers are paying to compete against others with irrelevant and even free ads. How much this may impact the CPC would likely vary widely from industry to industry. However, I believe most advertisers will feel this impact in an ever eroding ROI. Keep in mind, those of us seeing irrelevant ads for our keywords would suggest our ads are also being displayed to an irrelevant/poorly targeted audience as well - thus costing us money and further devaluing Google's entire advertising platform.

For me, conversions dropped 75% on 7/28/2020 and recovered to only about 50% of the daily average seen 7/27/2020 and before. This is a substantial drop in conversions coming from Google, and other data (time on page/bounce rate) suggests the traffic being sent from 7/28/2020 to current is very low quality. Organic traffic quantity and paid traffic quantity/spend remains similar to that of 7/27/2020. This suggests Google lowered the quality bar even further. At this rate, it won't be long before all traffic from Google performs as well as pop-under traffic did back in the day...

[renatovieira]

Apparently things are back to normal. 5th - 6th August, there was some big test or update.

[BushyTop]

@renatovieira does that mean you're back to normal now? seeing converting traffic, yes? Is your traffic solely US?

[renatovieira]

@BushyTop

Yes, the average I have daily in the morning is back to normal. AdSense looks like that too. My biggest sources of traffic are US and UK.

Yesterday, nobody else found me via Google. The SERP's were stable and visible. I don't know what has happened in the past two days.

[ichthyous]

ranking has never been stable after the May update. Just when you think one keyword has bumped the other one goes down the hill. Get a grip G

Google has a grip, a very firm one...around your throat

[widgetized]

Just noticed a negative spike on 4th August in GSC, affecting all the parameters at the same time (clicks, average position, average ctr, ...). Anyone noticed this?

[MayankParmar]

Google Console is also delayed :/

[MayankParmar]

Discover remains dead for me. Probably got hit again :(

[Dooku]

For those running wordpress for their websites in this thread as I read here a few pages back:

Ditch wordpress as soon as you can:
- Bloatware of the worst kind.
- WP's success is it's own worst problem, attracts constant hack attempts on wp websites and it's plugins.
- Very popular with the worst kinds of bots.
- Very popular for scrappers because of wp structure that almost NO ONE changes.
- Resource hog of the worst kind.
- Wasted efforts on keeping plugins updated....or you get hacked....again.
- It is NOT seo friendly, unlike some of you seem to think.

The above was just some things off the top of my head.

If you have the resources, have your new website done in core PHP, and if the developer starts touting php frameworks like Laravel or CodeIgniter, then dump him. Might as well use wordpress again, same bloatware.
I have my sites done in core PHP and the developer needs to know how to do security and everything else without using bloatware like Laravel. This way it's much easier to upgrade your website.

Also having a "cms" back-end programmed is not that difficult, besides all the options you need that are specific for your website like order and customer management you only need some easy page content management options so you can add new content from that back-end system like the way you do in wordpress.

Such a site is waaaaaaaaaaaaaayy faster than wordpress on a simple small digitalocean droplet. You can design the site structure from the ground up for better crawling by serps. And yes, it WILL perform better in the serps.

[samwest]

@Dooko - first let me say that I started out using dreamweaver and html. That eventually died off as it plummeted in the SERPS after the MayDay 2010 update. I switched to WordPress, but use plenty of security features one of which is cloudflare's firewall to block entire countries, like China, Russia and a few other bad actors, which are the the source of 90% of my bot traffic. There are many other bot killing techniques for WP. Dumping an existing site with thousands of pages and posts is simply not possible and obviously impractical. You would totally tank your remaining site traffic, and be quite expensive, so that's REALLY bad advice. Better advice is to start a new site and use core PHP. Also, please note the repetition in your "cons" list.

Amazingly all day Friday and the first half of Saturday reverted to fantastic traffic and conversions. Then, it all came crashing down again Saturday afternoon and now continuing into Sunday. Am sorry to say, fiddling with your site or it's platform / framework is NOT going to change your fortunes. Google does whatever Google wants to do, they can juggle you up or down. Consider your site in the organic SERPs as a number on a roulette wheel, or a lottery ball, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down...it's by design and there appears to be nothing that we can do to circumvent their black box AI process. The only thing that might temporarily work is massive black-hat or managing to do something crazy stupid that goes viral...because these days it seems, stupid sells.

[ichthyous]

@samwest Not for me...Saturday and so far Sunday are slow. My impressions reported in GSC have zoomed upward for one week straight...but clicks haven't increased at all and in fact are at recent lows.

I am also seeing something new...my UK and Australia traffic are alternating. First Australia disappeared completely, UK normal. Now UK disappeared completely and Australia surged. UK is about 7-10% of my traffic daily for 17+ years and Australia is about 4%. It is impossible for traffic from either country stop completely without either Google massively throttling my traffic or some sort of global outage of the internet backbone. I'll place my bets on the former.

@Dooku I agree with you on WP being bloated, slow, and often poorly coded. You have to really eval every plugin and do not install them at all if possible. I've had them drop my site entirely with CPU load spikes etc. The worst are the themes! They call far too many css and js files and are a nightmare to speed up. Building one from scratch on WP is a better path than out of the box. I have been fortunate that I have never had a hack, but I was very paranoid about that from the beginning and hardened the site. Cloudflare can handle much of the attempts to scan and enter, but not all. I have a perpetual problem with Chinese brute force atempts...they somehow know my server's real IP. You can change IP addresses and take other measures if needed.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:29 pm (utc) on Aug 9, 2020]

[seomotionz]

@Dooku I agree with you on the attack part. But if you think that changing CMS or spending thousands of dollars on web developers to develop you own CMS, is going to get you ranked well in Google. Well then, I will say that its not going to happen.

If you are so concerned of being attacked then just ramp up your security. And usually from what I have seen those people gets attacked the most who have unnecessary plugins and/or outdated plugins installed. So, keep your plugins to the minimum.

And @samwest said it correct. Blocking countries like China and Russia is a good solution. I know that an attack can happen from anywhere. Still even though you are not being attacked, traffic from those countries can easily eat up your bandwidth but you won't be able to make a single dollar because they are not English speaking.

[ichthyous]

Blocking countries like China and Russia is a good solution. I know that an attack can happen from anywhere. Still even though you are not being attacked, traffic from those countries can easily eat up your bandwidth but you won't be able to make a single dollar because they are not English speaking.

Blocking China, Russia, Ukraine will stop a lot of it...unless they are using IP spoofing to seem like the attack is coming from another country, which is very common. Still...my most determined attacks are all coming from China. I don't have any business with China or Russia but I don't believe in blocking any valid traffic so I use cloudflare firewall rules which stops most of the scraping attempts. CP Hulk on cpanel blocks brute force...set it to three attempts and blacklisted. If you truly don't care about anyone in China or Russia seeing your site then block the country...it can place a big load on your server to do that though.

[KaseyM]

@Dooku

Couldn't disagree more. What you're suggesting, particularly if you're migrating away, will cost you tens of thousands of pounds to go in bespoke PHP or if you are a programmer hundreds of hours.

WordPress is what you make of it.

There's plenty of tools to stop your server getting attacked with a plugin route or CloudFlare being painless integrations for the most part.

The rest of your complaints can be solved by coding your own themes/plugins to avoid bloat (which is inevitable when you use themes/plugins that are trying to be a jack of all trades).

Do agree with scrapers - will let you know when I solve that one!

[samwest]

"Blackhole for bad bots" is a fun way to mitigate some of the WP snoops. Them come in, but they never get out. I've been able to hold my position in the top 5 for over a decade (after switching from html for a decade) using WP combined with Cloudflare CDN and with a decent A/B GTMetrix rank. I could improve that by scaling images better. Lotsa work. I'm working on a fresh site using WP and minimal plugins. It works great for brochure sites...but takes skill for anything more complex, like woocommerce carts. I have a hosting client who just wanted me to set it up for her...in two days it was a disaster. Gotta know what you are doing.

[MayankParmar]

Whatever update they rolled out in August is nasty. Killed off my Discover, News traffic :(

[samwest]

Today was not a good day. Huge drop in traffic for a Sunday...no conversions. Hope you all did better than I.

[Athedian]

@mosxu - I did, actually, they didn't want to tell me anything lol. Go figure. Well, I guess they'd probably thought I was doing some form of "espionage" on them.

@glakes - Indeed. In the end, it's the Big G that's winning and taking all the money. Whether if it's sustainable for them in the long run is hard to say, but I know Google CEO only cares about now: now how do we get more money from these advertisers? Now how should we change the algo so that we can drive up the cost and make more revenue?

@Dooku - Exactly the same reasons why I had started a new site design and about to dump WP. Not that WP is extremely bad, it's just all those additional "features" and "plugins" are not necessary for my company. The previous team also built the entire WP site on top of a single SEO plugin, which also slowed down the site to a point where Google handed out speed penalties. And when I tried to remove that one SEO plugin, the entire site broke.

Oh and speaking of broken plugins on WP, that SEO plugin the previous team used? It had a problem with one of the Google Updates in the past years ago and all the blog article images became "attachments" where Google ranked those as separate pages, thus, lowering SERP ranking because those "pages" were useless one-image blank content pages.

...and they never really used that plugin to the fullest anyway. They installed it for the heck of it and left it there. God, there are so many things I can complain about our WP site right now. Can't wait until the new site is done with its own CMS.

@samwest - GSC showing massive traffic and impression spikes over the weekend for me but died off finally on Monday morning. I guess the Update is almost done rolling out. Conversion still sucked though...

[MayankParmar]

Scrapper copied my article from RSS feed and they're in Top Stories, Google never fails to surprise me with its broken quality control!

[renatovieira]

@samwest - The same here! Not counting Saturday and Sunday, which were very low traffic. Really the update on the 6th and 7th took me out of the game...

[samwest]

Whatever traffic is left after this alleged update is all zombie. My only viable traffic right now is return customers / members. Yet SERPS look relatively unchanged. Pinterest still at 1 and 2 positions. Currently zero visitors on site.

[RedBar]

For my widget industry August is usually holiday month therefore much lower B2B traffic but even over the weekend it was not significantly lower than average.

Are US schools back? My trade directory is seeing visitors to specific pages that usually only happen when speciialised course work is set.

The UK hotel / pub site is still way above pre-lockdown traffic levels especially looking at accommodation and the "Eat Out to Help Out" Government promotion.