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?

[Fabinho]

Guys, I wanted to try to answer by quoting, but I haven't debated in forums for many years, I lost the memory of how to work here (after all, I'm over 40 years old ... lol), besides I apologize for my average English, but I love it your language and I always strive for training.

Hello @renatovieira,
very good to find another Brazilian here. I think that publishers here in Brazil are suffering collectively, largely because of the pandemic and its impacts on the economy. What happens with our portal is very peculiar. To my knowledge, we are the only portal / site in our niche and the same level of access so shaken in this same proportion of our news site here in our country.

Hello @RedBar
thank you very much for the welcome, I hope to add to your forum.

We are customers of a Brazilian hosting company that uses the services of the OVH data center. I came to know that our dedicated server is in France by self-research. Our ip is linked to CloudFlare which is used as a CDN.

Yes, we are in a ".com.br" domain. However, at the beginning of the year we launched a version of our portal for Portugal (".pt") and this new site has already been approved on Google News and has also been having difficulty indexing. Perhaps because it is on the same dedicated server hosted in the French data center? Was this a suspicion?

Thanks guys for your receptivity!

[ichthyous]

@Fabinho Bem-vindo no foro...May 4th hit many, many sites hard. I watched all of my competitors go down with me at the same time. Completely new sites are in those top ten spots now across many keywords and terms. That's on top of the January update, which was also bad for me.

Google has been getting worse and worse since 2018...they are determined to make everyone pay them now, and are willing to destroy the quality of their organic results to do that. In reality, Google has declared war on us...and they have all the ammunition. Having said that, a 90% drop is extreme...I'm down about 15% in traffic and clicks from last summer and I think that's one of the biggest one-time drops I have ever seen.

I would look very hard at your niche, what happened to your competitors? Did they also go down 90%? Is there anything you should be doing on your pages to bring up the quality? To me it is very clear that links alone will no longer carry a site to the top...long form content seems to be in favor in my niche, and ecommerce pages vanished completely for many short-tail terms. But even if you have an incredible link profile it counts for less now.

[Athedian]

@Fabinho - Can manually type in

 [quote] [/quote] 

in the Quick Reply or you can use the Post Reply and the quote button is in there.

Traffic is still increasing for my site but conversion died off this morning. So... either it's definitely something I changed in my headlines or Google's having an adjustment to the "glitch" that they had a few days ago.

[mosxu]

I don’t think that using a software to check serps is of any value basically it uses data centre IPs that have no human personalisation. Buyers may see something else.

[rustybrick]

Are things calm now?

[Webweeb]

Yes all is calm... deleted .gov and .edu PDFs are ranking page 1, google sites spam works, even t shirt sites spam is ranking too. All is clam in the best way possible. Scrapers masking as news websites ranking all over the place too. #newnormal

Imagine googling for a service... finding a t shirt website with a t shirt that says ">>> Link >>>"... then having to click on a link to a deindexed site in the description...
service? clearly that user wants a t shirt.

Barry, tell Google to whatever itself for me, will you.

[rustybrick]

Webweeb - they know...

[MayankParmar]

AMP users, has Google started indexing your AMP pages this week? My two /amp/ articles got indexed on Google in the last 24 hours. I have confirmed this bug is also hitting non-WordPress sites.

[renatovieira]

Barry, daily fluctuations continue for me... This comes from last saturday ...

[arjunsinhchandravat]

This is a google way of saying give your money to us. Even I have seen drop in the traffic for some of my clients, but the strange thing is rankings are intact for some of them, in-fact moved up, but still no traffic. What kind of Google bug is this?

[ichthyous]

My traffic is relatively normal, ranking is slowly returning but not yet recovered fully. I have lost five top three terms and eleven top ten terms that did not come back. One thing that is clear...as soon as this "glitch" happened I had three conversions in a row. Since the "recovery" not one. My business hangs on the very brief periods when Google has a shake up and seems to drop whatever filters it has in place to ensure that converting traffic never makes it to my site. This may seem a bit far fetched, but it's not. I have seen this over and over and over now since 2018. Every Google update brings a sudden burst of new conversions, then as it settles down again...no customers.

[shadowlight]

My traffic is up over all but conversions are down one day and up the next. Its a total rollercoaster. Nothing about anything to do with google is 'natural' anymore, everything is highly manipulated to benefit them above everything else. Everything.....traffic, serps, analytics, ads, adsense....the lot.

There was a point in time I basically implemented most things they suggested. The more I look into how they operate, not just in search but in everything they do, the more I realise just how ruthless, greedy and untrustworthy they really are. Anything they suggest these days I look at from the point of view of 'Whats in it for them?'.

I removed amp totally from my site a while ago, removed adsense a couple of years ago and now I am thinking I really should removed analytics too. My mobile is due an upgrade, I've had android devices for years, not this time, Ill be getting an Iphone.

[mosxu]

@arjunsinhchandravat

It is not a bug it is called personalisation for the few:

[KaseyM]

SEMRush rankings have us up (and our searches do well) but traffic is way way down.

[ichthyous]

I removed amp totally from my site a while ago, removed adsense a couple of years ago and now I am thinking I really should removed analytics too. My mobile is due an upgrade, I've had android devices for years, not this time, Ill be getting an Iphone.

I removed analytics completely and don't miss it...all it did was slow down my pages load time and give google more information to use against me. No traffic, no data for the Goog Monster! I am also thinking about switching to iPhone, but for different reasons. The great majority of my customers use it. Of my mobile traffic a full 65% is iPhone.

[samwest]

Every few days, Google removes a few more pages from the "coverage" report. Why the continued, slow punitive page removal actions? On the bright side, traffic volume is a little higher and more natural the past few days, yet conversion is still poor. GART is still very slow to update the actual page visits...it can show 20 people, yet Matomo, which is truly real time, shows 2.

[insideout]

What is going on again... traffic is getting worse .. after a small recovery on Tuesday, traffic is going down hill ***** this is definitely not a Glitch .. Google is preparing for something HUMONGOUS

[renatovieira]

@insideout - I said this yesterday. It's not a glitch or bug!

[insideout]

@renatovieira you'r right... anyone experiencing worse results

[ichthyous]

We don't know what it really is, but I do find it very odd that my ranking dropped 58% but my traffic has been the same these last three days. I really feel like Google sees a speeding freight train heading its way and is flailing around trying to find ways to increase revenue at all cost. The freight train has an Amazon logo on the front, and the train behind that one says Facebook.

[rustybrick]

You have to ignore data from Monday through Tuesday or so. All the tracking tools are way off from Monday probably through Wednesday.

[browndog]

My live traffic doubled during the glitch, but once it was reversed, traffic dropped to below normal.

I see a lot of UK sites at the top of the SERPS (I'm in Australia). These are general terms such as 'widgetitis', not Australia specific, but in the past, it wasn't that usual to see a UK domain listed.

[renatovieira]

My main terms and keywords are stable. Meanwhile the traffic is gone.

Algoroo shows that things got hot yesterday. Apparently it remains today...

[algoroo.com...]

[browndog]

Okay, this is really weird. I just searched for 'what is a unicorn' (for example), and every result was a dictionary, with no actual articles on what a unicorn is. I've never seen anything like that before.

1. merriam
2. urband dictionary
3. dictionary
4. wiktionary
etc. etc. Every single result is a dictionary.

[McPheeSees]

I got another call from my G guy Vikrum today and although I said get back to me in a month, he called me back in a few days. I have a fair size budget, one that I never reach but he asked me to increase it a whole $20 (nothing for me) and when I wouldn't do that he begged me to make it $15 more and so on. After I didn't want to do his suggestions, he started getting very upset even though I told him I was a happy customer. Imagine, a happy customer spends all kinds of money but they get really upset when you don't do exactly what they want you to. There was no justification for why I should do the stuff he wanted, only try it, and therein lies the problem. I saw no benefit for doing any of it. The less they know about my business, the better.

[Webweeb]

I think I can finally vocalize what annoys me the most about these current rankings...

...before may I was able to tell what made stuff rank... it was either extreme quality, something went viral, something had youtube videos with insane views pointing at it, something had the best images ect. Even for spam I could tell why it was ranking, even if it was manipulated. I could tell someone did something extraordinary to make it rank. Even if it was a spammer with his 20.000 youtube bots ranking videos... at least I could respect the effort before I reported his video.

...now it simply makes no sense, there is no patterns and worst of all... NOTHING TO WORK TOWARDS. It seems random, certainly quality is no factor, since t shirts, google sites and deleted PDFs are ranking, user experience cant be important, since that is absolutely terrible for anyone that sees these results full of keyword stuffed parasite spam with bitly links... good images and video are not a factor, since 0 effort trash is ranking on pins and youtube... There is 0 reason to work on quality content right now. 0 reason to improve my website, since there is no ROI.

So all I do now is create the same 0 effort content, such as pins and youtube videos that is still ranking and is not 100% obvious spam, adding very little or nothing to the user experience. THERE IS NO GOAL, NOTHING TO ASPIRE TO. only hoping that the game will be a meritocracy again.

[browndog]

So all I do now is create the same 0 effort content, such as pins and youtube videos that is still ranking and is not 100% obvious spam, adding very little or nothing to the user experience. THERE IS NO GOAL, NOTHING TO ASPIRE TO. only hoping that the game will be a meritocracy again.

Same, same. I make a few Pinterest pins, update images and content, but have stopped adding articles to my site. I've been working non-stop since 2012 to recover, and my rankings continue to decline and the serps are full of thin content (my goal has always to create detailed articles which cover areas other sites don't, which is what we're told to do). I've just given up now. I'd rather enjoy the garden or read a book.

[samwest]

The serps are full of thin content indeed... but AD FILLED thin content... hence their topping the serps.

Traffic again falling off the cliff today. Anything that does make it through is non converting zombies.

Anyone think this serp traffic mess will ever get better? Think again. The troll wants your every dime.

[Athedian]

@browndog - Hmm... I think it's a geo location thing. I searched the same query on my side and it's showing me urban dictionary and sites that discuss about unicorns. The dictionary sites were all pushed down to the bottom.

But everything's so random now, I don't even know what to do anymore as well.

[ichthyous]

THERE IS NO GOAL, NOTHING TO ASPIRE TO. only hoping that the game will be a meritocracy again.

A question for some of you. Can you not just pay Google and run ads to regain converting traffic? Or are you only running adsense in your articles and the entire goal is adsense revenue? I will always continue to create new content (products) because it's my line of business, irregardless of what Google does. I will need to find ways to get that content seen to sell it but I will not stop making new creative content, I'll just stop focusing on Google. It is very difficult and may take a couple of years, but what choice do any of us have? IF I could pay Google and get sales that made it worthwhile I would just do that. The problem is that Google ads don't work for my business...I've tried numerous times and they do not result in sales for items at my price point.