Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2020

[RedBar]

---

System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5004404.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 6:16 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (utc -5)

---

I know some of you are not going to like this however here are my metrics for August 2020:

Global B2B Site 1 PVs v July +27.7%, v August 2019 +332%

Global B2B Site 2 PVs v July 22.9%, v August 2019 +299%

UK Hotel / pub PVs v July 60.3%, v August 2019 +40.25%

All other sites have shown excellent traffic increases, several with their busiest month ever for instance:

UK Specialist widget site v August 2019 +212.2%

The B2B sites ought to continue to show growth as I add more specialist widgets, the interesting thing will be my melding of 90% of Site 2 into Site 1 as from today, 1st September.

Realistically I cannot see the hotel / pub site doing more simply because we're not adding any more information plus the live music scene is still not happening other than selected outdoor acoustic sessions and with the end of the Government's Eat Out to Help Out promotion we expect the food service to drop considerably.

All-in-all, for an August, a quite unexpected traffic month plus all the respective businesses are reporting good enquiries and real sales which is the real test insofar as I am concerned.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Big movement here too. Places gained for previously unranked KWs and some regained after whatever happened on 17/18 Sep. No movement on Discover resurfacing, though.

[RedBar]

If G's history is anything to go by then today should be the day for an update ... maybe they're just teasing us? :-)

[janvitos]

Well this is good news (I hope).

For the first time in almost a month, an article from my website's most popular category (animals) got picked up by Google Discover (France).

The traffic influx is not yet "great" like before, but this is how it usually starts out anyways. After a few hours, the traffic usually picks up and lasts for 1-3 days.

I certainly hope this means Google has fixed some issues regarding their previous glitch and that Discover traffic will come back for all of us.

[ichthyous]

Third day that USA traffic is way off...it was down 30% Monday and 16% Tuesday from the previous four Mondays/Tuesdays. Today (Wed) down 30% compared with previous four Wednesdays. All other traffic is normal, except for UK, which is much higher than normal...up 44% Monday, 52% Tuesday, and 102% so far today as compared to previous four weeks. Anyone else seeing a drop in USA traffic this week?

[TalkativeEditorial]

I certainly hope this means Google has fixed some issues regarding their previous glitch and that Discover traffic will come back for all of us.

I do hope you are right.

[ichthyous]

@southernguy Bing brings in 3% of the searches on my site...DDG less than 1%. Both of them combined would have to increase 1000%+ in order to really start compensating for the loss in Google organic search.

[southernguy]

@ichthyous in my situation I am getting about 9% combined which brings in a couple of conversions per day versus 80% Google traffic which as of late has not converted at all.

[SteveWrz]

Barry is chomping at the bit for an update. Im anxious too, but no noticeable movement on all of my sites.

[Dooku]

@MayankParmar,
Just checked that poptimesuk website from the twitter thread you referred to.
They have NO contact info at all, other than some email form. There is NO company info in the privacy policy page.......nothing nowhere on the website. Also checked their page source code, no direct evidence, but from what I can see is that they have automated their content scraping and posting on their website to a very high degree. That website is practically running on auto-pilot scraping content probably from a fixed list of websites, a little css changes and posting automatically on poptimesuk.
The ultimate insult to the actual websites creating the content......

[westcoast]

Very large site, spanning education & entertainment & reference... 300k pages indexed.

Getting unusual swings in traffic this morning... big surges of traffic as long tail queries killed in the pinterest-apocalypse-update come to life, followed by huge suppression where traffic plummets in minutes as they all drop back to zero. Back to average for the last month right now, but certainly something afoot...

This is odd too, but bing is sending us more traffic today than usual. Can't think of an explanation for that.

[MayankParmar]

@Dooku that site is infected with malware ads - please be careful when visiting it again and I'd recommend you to run a Defender/security scan. Yes, this is the quality of search results in 2020.

[BoredMeteor]

Haven't noticed anything over here, either in traffic or rankings.

Statcounter's been pretty laggy, though. Didn't update for about an hour earlier. Thought maybe that was then end of things, lol.

[Webweeb]

False positives are one thing, but ranking scams, fraudulent content, scams, fakes and other spam. Is something else.

Somehow Google thinks sites like YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, even their own Google Sties, other Parasite Spam sites can moderate all the spam away. This is simply not true. Spammers will always be able to create spam a lot faster than any platform can remove it.

I see spammers uploading the same video 20 times a day, and blasting each one with 100k views and it ranks within 2 days. And they can do this til kingdom come.

[MayankParmar]

Anyone seeing a sudden spike in "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical" when inspecting the new URLs in Console? Started for me yesterday and it's blocking some articles from getting indexed for hours :(

[KaseyM]

Another drop today.

[bwnbwn]

Something BAD wrong with Google
I do an exact search the sites not there. I mean REALLY. not my site it's a exact search to login a webmail account.
website name email login is my search
I have gone same search a 10000 times
Something BAD wrong going on.
Did Bing there it is.

[Athedian]

Google Search Console hasn't updated for 18 hours here. Ahref showing big ranking drops for my competitors yet the SERP shows absolutely no change. For one of the popular keywords among competitors, a spam site ranked #1. Scrappers stole my content and they ranked #1; reported them multiple times but Google just doesn't care.

Great job, Google. Great job.

[MayankParmar]

Anyone with these issues?

- Some articles are not getting indexed because Google is picking completely unrelated URL as canoncial.
- Old articles disappeared from mobile but they still appear on desktop.
- Completely unrelated results for queries for me and my competitors.

[MayankParmar]

This is very worrying... my old articles also disappeared from desktop after Google suddenly picked wrong canonical for it. What should I do? Any idea? I made zero changes to the site. Traffic is also tanking.

[Athedian]

@MayankParmar - Not seeing much change here. But I am seeing Analytics breaking right now. Showing 100 real-time active users on one of the pages on my website yet it's showing 30+ on the actual numbers.

Maybe try reindexing the article through GSC?

[MayankParmar]

@Athedian I have tried. After submitting index request, "last crawl" time refreshes but problem remains. They're slowly removing pages by marking them duplicate even though the pages are fine. Started suddenly.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar not seeing this personally anywhere, but there are a few mentions of this on Twitter.

Edit: Tested to see how long a new article takes to index and it appears to be indexing as normal/expected. For now...

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar HRM. Although, just checked the 'news' tab for the same query and it appears the results there are completely broken for queries as you mentioned. Both on desktop and mobile.

[ViktorN]

sorry for the delay, I was away.

@MayankParmar - why not updating to the recent version of AMP4WP ? I feel having 1 year old version is not a good idea.

@TalkativeEditorial this is how our Discover looks. Good to know I'm not alone. Seeing poor competitors and scrapping sites with poor content taking the stage. Really wonder what's going on with Google.

[jmorgan]

I get confused whether people are talking about Google SERPs, News, or Discover.

Anyway, despite the recent high volatility rating I'm seeing no change on my end for Google SERPs.

[MayankParmar]

Extremely high volatility in all regions today (where it has been updated). I believe that something is broken (indexing, canonical, unrelated results) and that's causing high spike across trackers.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I believe that something is broken

Agree. Suspect something broke between 15 - 18 September and they were hoping to fix it before too many people noticed. There was an indexing issue around 12 Sep which they claimed was fixed, but seems something has been thrown badly out of whack. Google Trends was also not updated since 18 Sep until today. And GSC is delayed - no data not even partial for yesterday available.

[Athedian]

I'm seeing big drop in page ranking through GSC right now even though I didn't do any changes to the site for the last few days. The ranking is all over the place every single day (ie. one day you'd see a nice rank increase, next day you see a big decrease, then the day after you see it leveling out only to be followed by another increase and then yet another decrease). Two days ago saw a decrease in ranking and yesterday dropped even further. And all this started happening on Sept 11th.

[mosxu]

It is getting scary:

Locals are completely hammered by COVID-19 so are the high street stores and the click is not booming anymore. Moving the cheese does not seem to work either.

Uncle Jeff is the only one smiling right now.

[RareBit]

Seeing a reversal from the 15th here too