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.

[BushyTop]

I'm not sure I agree this was solely a bug. I think there might have been an update attached to it. Something that has caused the bug.

[RedBar]

@MP

I'll definitely create more sites

Rightly or wrongly this past 3-4 years I have been reducing my number of sites, I used to have in excess of 100 personal business sites and several hundred EMD domain names pointing at them however I am now down to one super site and, at the moment, this appears to be doing the biz.

If my site falls over in G it will not be the end of the world, I have tens of thousands of bona fide and approved email addresses to use plus I don't know how many direct mobile numbers for WhatsApp / Telegran / WeChat which are all used intensively nowadays.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is dropping this entire week, and ranking is fluctuating. Today I gained back about six top 3 terms, but traffic is way down. USA traffic is down a whopping 74% at 10am. UK traffic also down. Overall traffic for the last week is down 15% over the previous week, and getting worse it looks like.

Google search console is showing lots of pages under "Crawled, not in Index" now. I had to request indexing one by one. This is a growing problem...Google is indexing a huge mountain of garbage urls it has created out of thin air while dropping real pages from its index.

[Webweeb]

Seeing lots nof new spam ranking in the last few days. They must have changed something. Still 95% spam. Also now there is an arabic result in an extremely competitive serp.

makes 0 sense.

also spammers seem to have managed to upload spam pdfs to who.int... and who would have guessed... Google ranks that stuff straight #1. For a topic that has less than nothing to do with health.

[samwest]

Anyone else see a massive traffic and conversion boost yesterday? Now, it's gone as quickly as it arrived. Incredible.

[RedBar]

Had my highest traffic day yesterday in my new era, not pre-2010 levels by a long way however easily the best since launching html 5 sites some 6 years ago and today's looking good so far too.

[samwest]

@redbar - so what's the common denominator here? My conversions went from days of dead to one on every half hour...especially in the morning, then dwindled back to zero by 3pm...historically speaking, after 3pm used to be the busiest time of the day for me with the best conversions.
Zero SERP motion, once again, all behavioral. Another total anomaly.

I do see that the "People also searched for".. box is now gone...for now, but any benefit was short lived.

[edited by: samwest at 4:43 pm (utc) on Sep 28, 2020]

[ichthyous]

Anyone else see a massive traffic and conversion boost yesterday? Now, it's gone as quickly as it arrived. Incredible.

No, I had lower traffic yesterday and today is a bloodbath...-30% over previous four Mondays. And that's with gaining back Top 3 ranking. Something odd is definitely brewing...

[MayankParmar]

Happy to know that I'm not the only one affected in the canonicalization problem - it's being widely reported now and John has asked for examples: [twitter.com...] - please check your coverage report thoroughly!

@RedBar Right. Concentrating on one site is best, but higher chances of surviving updates and retaining traffic if one site drops for a few months, no?

[RedBar]

@MP

I used to feel that way also however the last few years, after G public comments, I decided to concentrate more on branding as well as adding more info, pics and videos. The melding of my two B2Bs has been nothing short of amazing and I'll provide those stats in a couple of days, however I am trade-product led with my pages having to be authoratative but evergreen too.

I'm pretty sure there's a massive difference with G's evaluation of my site v your constantly evovling one.

@SW

Zero SERP motion

And even being #1 does not drive anywhere near the traffic it used to do.

[westcoast]

I am seeing all sorts of inconsistencies in the "Coverage" section of webmaster tools.

Examples:

LOTS of URLs listed under "Crawled - currently not indexed" when they are in fact indexed, have been for some time, and can be searched on today, and rank decently well !

urls listed under "Alternate page with proper canonical URL" for a URL where its URL, its canonical, and Google's selected canonical are all the same (?!)

Even have a URL under "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" where Google has ignored my canonical and instead invented its own canonical which is the HTTP version of the same URL, instead of the correct https. (?!?!) [zero pages on our site use http]

[MayankParmar]

Are AMP pages getting indexed as a page for anyone?

@westcoast If you see any spike after 22nd/23rd, it's likely to due Google's issues. Should be fine soon!

[KaseyM]

Indexing is very slow for new articles, fetch as google and submit to google just isn't working, amp pages being indexed despite canonical.

Down 30% traffic since sep 22.

🙃🙃

[ichthyous]

It's 7:30pm EST here so day is winding down. USA traffic -44% today, UK +35%, AUS +19%, CA +39%, DE +59%. The drop is USA traffic only, which has been the case with my site for this entire summer. It's ridiculous when you are based in the States and have almost as much traffic from UK by end of day. Google is screwing with my USA traffic in a massive way.

[ViktorN]

Regarding indexing news:

[twitter.com...]

[Athedian]

@ViktorN - No worries. Yeah the new site we're developing right now is totally staying away from WP altogether. Not saying WP is bad, just it's not the right platform for us and definitely caused way more damage and grieve than necessary.

@MayankParmar - Yup, the attachments indexing was a massive problem back then. I didn't even bother updating it because I found out these plugins would just break the site completely because of the poor coding and structure that the previous team had built. So I'm now stuck with a broken site, broken coding structure, bad plugins, outdated versions of everything, and a sitemap that is locked and can't be updated.

[markseo]

Traffic increases in last week but not really on our main converting pages. One thing I've noticed that has been going on for a few weeks in our niche is less frequent use of featured snippets. I wasn't sure if it was just me but now I'm seeing it reflected in mozcast too. Anyone else seen this? Definitely since the 18th and I have a suspicion it has caused our drop in conversions.

[moz.com...]

[ViktorN]

traffic really decreasing from day to day. I really think there is something huge going on behind the scenes with Google since September 1 that got screwed even more around September 20.

Very frustrating to see low quality sites getting listed as Top Stories and above us. Those sites used to scrap our content.

[jimmymicheal]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5011526.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 10:10 am on Sep 29, 2020 (utc +1)

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@redBar - Congratulations...enjoy it while it lasts...
I had a similar bump in early March, but it was all taken back...then moved even lower and then flattened out.
It's a total zombie fest today.

[jediviper]

Checking the Crawl Stats of GSC and for 3 different websites there is a huge growth of Pages crawled per day after the 16/9.
Is this related to the Indexing and Canonicals problems? I don't see the Excluded pages increasing at the Coverage section during the last weeks.

[BushyTop]

Hard to know whether its Covid related, but traffic and conversions for us have taken a huge dive. No changes in SERPs though

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld jimmymicheal

@redBar - Congratulations...enjoy it while it lasts...

Unless you've been lurking for years, this is not an overnight success story. I have been doing this since 1993, had a few bumps along the way including an almighty spanking from Google, together with many others, during its great image theft 10 years ago.

My business sites are niche-specific supplying a large specialised global market and only by studying in-depth G's algo preferences, and dislikes, has it been possible for me to generate more valid traffic and genuine enquiries.

Little tweaks and the latest plug-in does not work either for me nor G, expert analysis does. I'll be posting some amazing, even for me, statistics on Thursday.

[ichthyous]

Hard to know whether its Covid related, but traffic and conversions for us have taken a huge dive. No changes in SERPs though

Not related to COVID...in the last few days traffic has fallen off a cliff. It coincides with a drop off in impressions and clicks in GSC. My impressions doubled in one week, then dropped back down to where they were. My USA traffic was down 37% yesterday and looks like today will be almost as bad. My UK traffic was down 21% and 24% on Saturday and Sunday but normal Monday and Tuesday. These numbers are comparing to the previous four same days of the week. Hopefully it's just a blip, but may be a stealth update.

[ViktorN]

@ichthyous exactly what I see. and no changes in SERP. This is sick. May update killed us, we managed to recover July and August, but this month and the past days are horrible. Something seems not functioning well in the search quality of Google.
I keep seeing Top Stories, all three from the same website. Before May we were there, and never saw all Top Stories taken by only one news outlet all the time.
Discover traffic is crashing despite some bumps during Septermber.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Discover traffic is crashing despite some bumps during Septermber.

This is one of the really painful things for me. If Discover had the approach of the SERPS where my personal feed was flooded with ads, fine... I'd roll with it. Bit the way things just vanish for no reason is something else.

And yes, MP, seeing that AMP is being indexed as pages.

[RedBar]

Blimey, 66% of a Googleday and I have a new PVs high, mind you it has been helped out a bit by a Japanese customer who was having a good look around the new melded site.

[ichthyous]

exactly what I see. and no changes in SERP. This is sick. May update killed us, we managed to recover July and August, but this month and the past days are horrible. Something seems not functioning well in the search quality of Google.

@Viktor My SERPS dropped recently, but then recovered, dropped, recovered. As of the last two days I am increasing Top 3 ranking SERPS. So the drop in traffic is definitely being shown in GSC impressions and clicks, but not in the loss of SERPS. Of course, the loss of just a few terms that are highly searched will produce a disproportionate loss in traffic. I have noticed that the bounce rate is now 70% and the average time per visit is down 50%. So the traffic is not really great quality either. My traffic is not originating in Discovery either, I have none of that.

I don't have all day to worry about Google...it's always something new, some new Google tragedy so I am focusing on other means of marketing myself, which I have neglected for years due to Google.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar My UK traffic has been very high this entire month...I can't figure it out. As of this morning it's higher than my USA traffic! It is not producing many new inquiries though, and that's because the economy is in the tank now. In the old days I would have had many more inquiries from UK and AU with less traffic. Even with the lower dollar, no inquiries.

[RedBar]

My UK traffic is 7.1% this month.

[MayankParmar]

I really don't think our Discover traffic will get back to normal. We need to wait for another update or another bug that they may or may not acknowledge publicly. Remember, Discover issue is still not acknowledged.

But we can ask John in his next hangout call (keep checking Webmaster YouTube channel community tab for next hangout date). I'll definitely ask him again.