Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2020

[RedBar]

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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)

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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.

[glakes]

Uncle Jeff is the only one smiling right now.

I'm seeing converting traffic swing heavily towards Amazon, which is to be expected when Google so heavily crowds their SERPS with Amazon pages (3+ per buyer intent query).

[mosxu]

@glakes

Yes, and if the buyer intent is high we most likely will be displayed under a map.

Our ads are not showing either for undisclosed reasons.

[Webweeb]

Google is funny. Exact same video with small changes: Gets falsely deleted and striked on my 200 sub channel. Stays up forever on my 40k sub channel. Happens all the time too. Bigger channels get videos removed for bogus reasons far less often.

Anyways, no movement. Still waiting for a non-trash core update. Seems to me that only core updates can significantly change rankings for a niche. Still deleted .edu and .gov PDFs ranking. Clearly noone is looking at the rankings, since deleted pages are usually a bad user experience.

[jediviper]

@learnseo81

My findings about EAT are different, but ok maybe it differs for some niches.
In my opinion, the May Update is strongly related to the EAT and many people don't pay the proper attention to it.
On the other hand, if some of your competitors are ranking higher and it's not because of EAT, what else could be the reason of their success? This is what you should discover.

[MayankParmar]

My nightmare is true.

Many new articles are no longer getting indexed and old articles are also disappearing because Google has selected completely unrelated article as the canonical. Traffic has tanked and it's only getting worse. No site-level technical issue :(

[seomotionz]

@MayankParmar I am not getting it. Why Google is indexing the tags of the pages and excluding the original pages? The weird part is that those tags are the exact ones (more or less) of the original page.

[learnseo81]

@jediviper

The only issue we could find on our website was a huge amount of boilerplate content and duplicate content across the website. We believe that we are going over the threshold of boilerplate content. We truly think that was problematic. Here is the situation.

1. We had around 1200 words of content per page. Out of those 1200 words, nearly 800 words were boilerplate, like terms and conditions, shipping policy, returns, etc... We believe that contributed to the massive drop we saw.

2. All our competitors have the EXACT SAME text/description on all the pages and they are only swapping the title and product name in content and they are ranking very fine. The only difference is, they have only 300 words of text on each page and I checked their history of rankings via SEMRush and they have never had any issues or massive drops like me.

3. I feel like I'm surfing the grey area of algo where so much boilerplate content is being flagged and that is causing the drops. That boilerplate is going over the limits and thus we are being qualified as an inferior quality website. Google also says to reduce the amount of boilerplate content, so we have removed all the boilerplate from the website.

One of my friends (who is very good at SEO, at least I think so) said that boilerplate content actually hurts the relevancy of a page and sends confusing signals to the algo. If a page has 1200 words and 800 words seem non-relevant, then surely that might not be good. Such pages can't stand on their own and thus may be flagged by the algo. He said that having 100% unique content on each page won't hurt anyway so we are slowly trying to improve.

We are updating all the pages with 100% unique content, videos, images, faq and we even gained hugely in January but the truth is, the complete overhaul is not done yet and maybe we need to work much much harder to improve/rewrite each page on the website.

We dropped again in May 2020 and nearly 70% pages still had the boilerplate at that time. Maybe google increased some kind of threshold so we are in the grey area of also. Sometimes, we come out of it and sometimes we are flagged.

In someone has more advice about the boilerplate content to share, that would be so helpful. Please advise on how much duplicate is OK... how much similar or boilerplate is OK. I think that 60-70% same text on each page doesn't send quality signals to algo.

Comments, please.

[JesterMagic]

@MayankParmar I am not sure how Google can pick the wrong canonical for an article page if you are doing things correctly. This is not something Google should be picking. You should be specifying the canonical url within your source of the article page for "every" version of the page.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@learnseo81 could you share your site? you can send a message if you don't want to do so publicly. I'll be happy to take a look.

[MayankParmar]

@seomotionz Not tags or category pages. If I have an article on hardware news, they're picking up two months old software news as canonical. Both are proper articles, but completely unrelated. Both pages are not linked in any way.

@JesterMagic I do have the canonical defined properly. For both AMP and non-AMP pages.

Error is "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical" and it started yesterday. As they're slowly deindexing old articles by selecting unrelated canonical, traffic is tanking.

[southernguy]

While its plain to see what's ranking now, the rankings have not improved at least in terms of quality.

I have been looking closely at a couple of niches I compete in. If I were to start over again and replicate what my competition is doing I would be doing the following:

1. Buy a good quality expired domain with a good backlink profile, preferably one that has been used in the medical field or has something to do with science or medicine, seems that the domain name is irrelevant.

2. Scrape and rewrite content related to my niche, it just has to be readable but not comprehensible. Content should consist of short 3-4 sentence paragraphs. Articles should be long and should be based on what's currently ranking, in other words, if an article is ranking positions 3, 4, or 5 and contains 1500 words I need to have at least 2000 to 3000 words and it should rank higher.

3. Each article should have at least 10 fake comments at the bottom.

4. Site should have a few fake persona profiles.

5. Add a long about us page.

6. The title should include (2020)

This is what I am seeing a lot of right now and have been since May.

While these sites are short-lived and usually rank for a few months once they start losing position they are quickly replaced with similar sites, so a lot of churn and burn needs to be done.

A couple of years ago I did this with 4 sites and the short-term return was good while it lasted, unfortunately, I just can't compete with the Indian agencies that can turn this type of stuff out like popcorn.

[BoredMeteor]

How can EAT matter when Google ranks 404s and spam pages without bylines? How does a thin Pinterest page display expertise? I don't get it.

I got hit in May. One of my competitors, a registered LLC with tons of contact info on their about page, a dozen well-known contributors and experts in their niche, also got obliterated. Another website with zero author info is coasting along just fine.

I just can't take EAT seriously right now. Maybe if they ever fix things.

Someone somewhere mentioned that Google is preferring to rank linking pages rather than source pages, and that's exactly what I've been seeing for some time now. Everything's screwy, like they've got their signals backwards.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Some big movements here (up for some KWs we've been pursuing and we lost around 12-18 September somewhere). But still no sign of Discover returning.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Hey @MayankParmar - what happens when you "view screenshot" for your AMP pages in GSC?

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial It is broken - a blank screenshot.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@TalkativeEditorial It is broken - a blank screenshot.

Saw it mentioned by a few people on Twitter [twitter.com ]. Some even say it's been happening for a while.

Don't think they read or care about messages really, but maybe also add your message about the problem.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing top 3 ranking terms dropping? I've lost 10 again...they drop and slowly return, then drop again. Thus far I'm down 18 in total, and even more top 10 terms. My USA traffic returning to normal levels but not many new inquiries. No sign of a real update anywhere...but losing that many top terms before an update doesn't bode well...

[MayankParmar]

Almost a 50% drop in traffic [imgur.com...] because Google has decided to select incorrect canonical

Scrappers scrapping my articles are getting indexed normally.

[glakes]

I suspect Google is rebuilding their entire index. Days of constant flux, great pages dropping off the map, trouble with Google's tools/analytics, etc. all point to a complete rebuild. While frustrating, I believe that once the dust settles many of the problems people are reporting will disappear. If the problems are not resolved, I hope everyone has good ranks in Bing because Google's users will run away from Google in droves...

[GoogSay]

Bing and DDG are getting better, but Google is still my preferred search and most peoples. We are creatures of habit. Will be interesting to see what Apple do with search though...

[BoredMeteor]

I switched to Bing back in May and don't miss Google at all.

My site's always performed very well in every other search engine. Used to perform great on Google, too, until they went nuts. I'd like to think some day things might get back to normal.

[Athedian]

@MayankParmar - crap, once GSC starts doing that, it'll be hard for it to fix the indexing issue. GSC has been extremely broken regarding re-indexing of pages for the last year or so (I still have over 50 pages that I've fixed since May of last year and they're STILL not being indexed despite manual requests sent).

Also, Google services are all broken for me with 502 error this morning (Gmail, Google Sheet, Google Ads, Google Analytics...) and just so happens to coincide with the update that's going on right now (GSC showing page ranking to be extremely volatile since Sept 11th for me).

Perhaps big G is doing something major right now? Has someone over there accidentally changed one wrong thing and a lot of integrated systems and API's are all broken?

[Dooku]

Just read in the morning online newspaper in the EU that G has major outages across the world.
Supposedly they have fixed it just now......off course they did.
I even suspect this was going on for longer on off the past few days?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Are you seeing any errors in Publisher Centre @MayankParmar? Seems the problem with "You haven't added any sections yet." is back.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial I always have the error - never disappeared for me. The suggestion/error can be ignored safely unless we want to configure our site for the News app. When we add the sections there, those sections will appear when you view site publisher page on Google News.

[JesterMagic]

@MayankParmar you should start a separate topic about your issue as I am interested in following along and trying to figure it out but all the posts about it are spread through out this general topic.

Notice today that a few of my more steady keywords have fluctuate a bit with some moving up and others moving down. When these keywords move usually the Google update is more than a minor tweak.

[Webweeb]

So this is what page 1 for one of the most competitive searches in my niche looks like:
[ibb.co...]

Estimating about 50k users are looking for this or very similar searches. every day. Has been like this since may. Its only getting worse.

- 3 spam PDFs (deleted)
-- 2 spam .gov pdfs
-- 1 spam org pdf on very authoritive site... still spam.
- 1 spam pin
- 2 spam company profiles
- useless people also ask
- spam youtube videos

The only actual site ranking on page 1 is a competitor pretending to be a news site, but essentially doing what I am doing. Just using a site that claims to be news when its not.

Pages 2-8 look just like that.

[southernguy]

Complaints on other forums this morning, many complaining about sites slowly getting deindexed, others mentioning issues with AMP on some devices but not on others as well as old outdated pages. I can confirm an old domain of mine showing up in search this morning that has been deleted for over 2 years.

Maybe this is all being done on purpose since they are approaching the U.S elections, I would hate to think that Google is willing to cut off their nose to spite the face.

[Dooku]

Maybe G finally did themselves in? With all the cr@p they introduced and their "open source" projects to "improve" user experience it looks like the algo and their "AI" is beyond manageable now? Maybe the infrastructure is finally crumbling down around them?

[glakes]

Maybe G finally did themselves in?

Or Google's AI finally became self-aware and determined the only possible way to terminate its evil creators was to self-destruct.