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.

[RedBar]

Here's the post many do not like!

This UK lunchtime my global B2B has just exceeded September's numbers with 5 full days to go. I'm half surprised in that September's numbers are usually down a bit because one of our major trade fairs is in September but obviously that is not happening this year.

Genuine trade enquiries and confirmed orders are still good, in fact some orders have been quite unusual and very unexpected. Sales of low-cost products are very slow, more unusual, higher-priced is definitely noticeable.

All other sites are on par with August except for the expected drop at the hotel / pub but that could still surpass pre-Covid numbers.

[TalkativeEditorial]

The weirdness continues. Up 40 places on a fairly competitive keyword....buuut.. the page that's suddenly ranking is an old one which I've not worked on or intended to use as the target page.

Up 22 and 27 places for a different, slightly less competitive, KW - but also an old page not intended as the target page.

Edit: Up another 39 places for another old page. What is going on.

Google needs to CTRL ALT DEL itself.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial That's how I noticed my problem first. They started ranking my unrelated (a few months old) articles for the keyword on the first page and the main article which was ranking disappeared.

Make sure that you run the target URL in inspection tool for canonicalization problem.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Kinda feels like it doesn't matter what we do at this point, because despite several people raising the issue (or several issues), apparently, everything is fine.

[worker]

Ran a few tests today and the search results on page 1 of Google included:
1) sites redirecting to #*$! sites
2) sites redirecting to softcore #*$! sites
3) sites redirecting to sites that attempted 'Malicious Site: Malicious Domain Request' (Blocked by Norton, fortunately)
4) Pinterest site with one related link and images <= in no way a valid search result for the search phrase
5) a site with a single broken image and zero text on it
6) 3 valid results

70% of the search results on a search phrase test resulted in redirects and malicious attacks and just bad results

The cherry on top is the 'Featured Result' at the top of the page, first under the ads, with a border around it and lots of text in the box, was one of the sites redirecting to a Malicious Attack.

Whatever safety system Google used to have in place to protect users appears to be gone. AND these searches were done in an incognito Chrome browser session, so even if the Google Search system removed safety protections, presumably the Chrome browser would have had something in place. ONLY because I have Norton web safety installed and activated was I protected from the first organic result on page one of a search (and other results on the same page).

I have no idea what is going on at Google, but whatever it is, it appears at the moment that their search system is horribly broken in virtually every way measurable: search result quality, search result safety, etc.

[KaseyM]

Seen Google nuke quite a few of the spam sites I've been moaning about for weeks today.

[MayankParmar]

Quite a few SEOs are discussing a potential Google core update.

[NickMNS]

I'm seeing an uptick in traffic, in the order of 20 to 30%. Starting yesterday at about 1pm EDT. With the volatility of the past couple of weeks it was unclear if this was just more volatility, but the increase appears to have remained consistent over the past 24 hours or so. Time will tell.

[ichthyous]

I saw an uptick on Monday and Tuesday, but it dropped off as the week progressed. Gained back some of the top 3 and top 10 ranking terms, but it has not helped traffic. The shifting in terms is almost daily now. It is very slow...no calls, very few emails. Traffic still off in the USA. I suspect the election and poor economy has caused people to place spending on hold.

[mosxu]

“Self Destruct”

I mean it is shocking AI is not even intelligent it is a #*$! disgrace, cheese moving engine

[MayankParmar]

Almost one thousand articles got deindexed: [imgur.com...]

(I've shared more details in a separate thread that is waiting for approval).

[Jori]

I have some pages deinxed too. That's beginning to be usual at Google.
Simply put a request in GSC asking G to reindex it...

But deinxed pages, even if they are on the serps again causes damages to the rest of the website. Because it's different if you have a website with 100 good pages or just 50...

[MayankParmar]

@Jori In my case, I see the duplicate canonical error (unrelated canonical is picked up by Google) and request indexing button is not helping (the page is recrawled but the error remains).

Article A is canonicalized to Article X and it has been deindexed. Later, Article A gets canonicalized to Article J. Moreover, Article X gets canonicalized to Article P and Article X also disappears from index. A chain of canonicalization that leads to deindexation. So far, I have been unable to find the root cause - gone through canonicalization manually in source code, header, etc - all is normal.

New articles have completely stopped getting indexed.

[ViktorN]

@MayankParmar why didn't you update the AMP4WP to the latest version? maybe this has to do something with the canonical.
I'm also using a year old version, thinking to update.

[glakes]

@MayankParmar

Seems like you are suffering from a similar bug that was reported last year. See [seroundtable.com...]

Since one of the world's richest multi-national businesses can't afford a support department, it may be best to take your concerns to twitter. Otherwise, once it becomes more widely spread and known, then Google may act on their own. But if it costs Google money, they will be on it like stink on poo...

[samwest]

Suddenly getting jacked again. Clamped to drip Zombie traffic...unlike the past, there is no longer a "good day" of the week. Its like a roulette wheel...and oddly enough the house always wins.

[BoredMeteor]

This is getting pathetic. Outranked by websites that haven't even updated for four years, but contain, what, one sentence of copied content from one of my articles? No EAT, spun articles, stolen images. Meanwhile, decent websites with hours and hours of work and stress poured into them get spit on.

Then you've got SEO gurus sounding the alarm of a new update every day for the past few weeks...if Google holds off until after November, then we'll know what's really up.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Sorry you have to deal with this @MayankParmar.
This and the Discover issues, too. With lots of people messaging and asking but no acknowledgement.

[RedBar]

Extremely quiet across all sites for me so far today, my SERPs look normal ... methinks this is going to be a long Autumn and Winter!

[renatovieira]

Stupidly low traffic for a Saturday, which is the best day of the week. The G really limited the number of users and PV's per day. Every day I add on average 7 or 8 URL's with new and unique content. Still, nothing else ranks.

No warning in the SC and the SERP's are stable. Everything OK, even semrush has gone up daily.

I really don't know what's going on.

[topaz]

[twitter.com...]

interesting post on the discover and indexing issues.

[glakes]

@topaz

A Twitterstorm is what it will take for Google to acknowledge the problem exists, provide some sort of guidance on what they are doing to correct the problem and when they expect it to be fixed.

I also wonder if this problem is not already more widespread then we know. It's entirely possible the volatility SERP trackers are picking up on are largely being influenced by this bug.

All I can say is these big mega companies provide pure crap for support. Amazon, Google, etc. are all bot driven and my cat is smarter then their AI. Look at Google's search liaison. No posts from him for two weeks then a burst of truly non-critical tweets that ignore current problems. I hope any settlement the DOJ/FTC has with the anticipated antitrust lawsuit includes provisions that big tech create, maintain and support their services by departments largely comprised of a staff that resides in this country.

[samwest]

I can provide thousands of examples of Google suppression and search biasing right now. Its disgusting and most of what we are experiencing is collateral damage of a bigger war they appear to be waging.

I'm suddenly down over 70% PV's and yet SERPs haven't moved. What's even more glaring as that you can't even push new content on SM even using paid ads. Its a coordinated effort. They've admitted as much.

We are all under the thumb of the bigh tech apparatchik.

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing stability here...I've had another drop of top 3 ranking terms today. I've lost about 25% of top 3 terms in total over the last couple of months...those now sit at position 4-10. They bounce back but the overall trend is down. I am wondering if Google's perpetual reporting of most of my pages as being slow has something to do with it? The new CWV reporting is ridiculous...my pages get 'A' across the board at webpagetest.org, but Google finds endless problems which have no easy resolution and would require a redesign of my site basically.

USA traffic is off 60% and UK traffic off 33% at 11am. Overall traffic down 18% compared to last four Saturdays. Judging from previous patterns the USA traffic could recover most of that by end of day, but I doubt it.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:17 pm (utc) on Sep 26, 2020]

[TalkativeEditorial]

It's almost certainly much, much more widespread than we think since GSC data is behind with nothing new since 22 September (when some of the sensors started to pick up the tremors).

[samwest]

@TE yes...all my traffic data is blank except for today. How many times have they blinded us from useful data? Now what we see is mostly fake, delayed or inaccurate.
My trust in Google has eroded to below zero.

Matomo and GA data should match. In my case...they don't.

[TalkativeEditorial]

It's the complete lack of acknowledgement that gets me. I know they cannot respond to every person with an axe to grind or an issue to raise about being rejected for being AN ACTUAL SPAM SITE. But man I have seen enough people raise issues seemingly related to what poor @MayankParmar is going through with his site and nothing. It's not even customer service, it's just plain lack of courtesy

[samwest]

It's not even customer service, it's just plain lack of courtesy

He's must not be a big enough fish.
That and I've never seen any type of SERP support.
Only the third party Adwords jack.

FB Ads are a similar dead end of support.
They send you a "personal" contact email from a no-reply address, then give you a big CONTACT US button that goes to their bottomless self service help desk / labyrinth.

Making matters worse, a week later you get another 'personalized' email saying you failed to contact that person...when there is no way to contact that person. Meanwhile, they are all laughing at us chasing our tails.

[Steven29]

"It's the complete lack of acknowledgement that gets me. I know they cannot respond to every person with an axe to grind or an issue to raise about being rejected for being AN ACTUAL SPAM SITE."

Like Google not caring, nobody cares until it happens to them. This same type of network spam I reported almost a year ago is what I believe is happening to most of you:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I too was hit with this canonical issue about a year ago now and it ended up being these spam sites doing shady redirects, using canonical tags to each spam site with your text on it to confuse Google and get you stuck in a redirect chain.

After how many spam domains with your content saying it's actually this url, no it's this url, no it's this url until it's affected? Not very many it seems. It seems google has a bug or threshhold on domains using exact text and what to do with them.

The way to fix this is to block the bots from getting your text and getting your links to add into the canonical chain of death.

For some reason, this has been happening in my niche for about 2 years now, but in the last month it has increased 10 fold and spread to way more niches. I'm even seeing it for some local client websites!

Thorugh my research, it appears to be sourced from the UK and China.

I also now see improvements to this operation and there are now completely cloned websites using a CDN and spinning the text or converting it to a different language in the middle.

Doing a search for a minute this morning, here is the type of example of what i'm talking about (i'm sorry mods, but I feel it needs to be shown): [bit.ly...] (note: this website maycontain malware and appears to be one still in development to rewrite the entire blog from the website owner who in most cases will not know)

(script on page):

if(url.indexOf("stfi.re") != -1) { var canonical = ""; var links = document.getElementsByTagName("link"); for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i ++) { if (links[i].getAttribute("rel") === "canonical") { canonical = links[i].getAttribute("href")}}; canonical = canonical.replace("?sfr=1", "");top.location = canonical; console.log(canonical);}

Is this what Google is trying to maniuplate us all into doing? Blocking all bots except them, so only they have All of the Data? There is no reason at all these things should prevail, especially at the same time they are pushing "AI". How can you do AI when you can't even code a non AI script to work properly?

We'll be in some big trouble when the smart cars algorithm is cracked and bots are sending thousands of drivers off a cliff. All the hype and it's obviously Not Ready.

[edited by: Steven29 at 5:46 pm (utc) on Sep 26, 2020]

[janvitos]

Well Google Discover is a mess today. It's showing me only politics articles, which I’m most definitely NOT interested in. And I already told Discover not to show me stories about that subject.

I also noticed the options to hide topics and publishers is gone, so I cannot tell Discover to stop showing me those articles. This makes Discover totally useless.

Something big (and very problematic for most of us) is happening at Google and I suspect it’s probably related to two things: A) The US elections and B) The possible antitrust case against Google that should be presented in the coming days.

What are your Discover observations today?