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]

I really don't think our Discover traffic will get back to normal.

I would be more optimistic. There's a good chance your discover traffic problem, along with others, is the result of the canonicalization bug.

Your site is suffering from a Google bug which is deindexing old pages and not indexing new pages if memory serves me correct. If this is true, then pages not in Google's index will not appear in discover. If Google fixes the bug, and your pages are indexed again, I would expect discover traffic to not only rebound but rebound rather quickly if/when Google fixes the bug.

I'm trying to stay positive for you, and I'm a pessimist!

[MayankParmar]

@glakes Unfortunately, Discover dropped on August 10 when they had a glitch. Canonicalization problem started last week, so I doubt both are related.

[ichthyous]

I'm not having any canonicalization issues that I can see...just hundreds and hundreds of garbage urls categorized in one way or another, while my correct urls are dropping or not getting indexed. But the canonicals being reported back in GSC are correct from what I see. Still having a big drop in USA traffic since Monday

[pontifex]

I would like to add some observations for my new site, which went live on the 30th of July:

Fresh site, fresh domain. Got some (20ish) strong backlinks from various sources (my other projects, 3-4 friends). Constantly expanding pages, currently around 550 live.

In the course of the last 8 weeks, I have been watching and thinking about the process. These thoughts are only focussing on fresh domains. The previous problems you guys have with existing pages, I can not comment on. Existing pages in my other projects showed no clear behaviour - either these rank good or not so good. But for the fresh domain:

Opinion 1: Fresh domains are quickly eaten, but not ranked before a core update. Even "accidental" rankings are currently not happening as they did before (at least in DE - last year, I ranked accidentally for "SEO Cityname" on #2 in my city about 10 days after going live).

Opinion 2: The real available pages of fresh domains are shown, when you are logged in with Google and set your result set to 100 entries in search config. They increase in steps of 1-3 weeks.

Opinion 3: The "site:" query only delivers the amount of discovered pages, when you are logged out and your results are set to 10 entries.

Personal conclusion: We still have 2 states on Google, like we always had. Persistent ranking on a larger amount of pages happens after core updates. You are then fighting for a few positions up or down, once the core update is done - until the next one.

My 2 pennies at the end of an interesting September!

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is high again in Europe.

[pontifex]

On a side note: in my niche I get too many top level domains of pinterest.* for a meme search in German - even the Korean and Polish ones. Looks really spammy/broken for that long tail search!

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Guys, everyone keep silence - but did nothing happened with your website's rankings on this weekend? From Monday I'm seeing -8% drop and it looks absolutely like an update correction.

[MayankParmar]

Google Search ranking update or canonical issues and pages dropping out of Google's index - things seem unstable right now with Google Search [seroundtable.com...]

If you see a sudden drop, make sure all your pages are indexed.

[StupidIntelligent]

September is gone. No core.

[MayankParmar]

They'll probably not do a core update in the middle of the bugs.

[samwest]

I am seeing movement. My home page is gone for one of my top terms, and a single sub page remains. In 20 years, this has always been the bellwether of an update in progress. The home page will pop in and out, then return in a day or two (I hope). It's just like the old Google dance days...which for me, never went away. Hard to believe I'd say it, but even with this removal, traffic looks natural and brisk....for now.

[StupidIntelligent]

@samwest- when you say "old Google dance days," you mean 2010 and before?

[insideout]

What is going on with this F**** Google .. several pages are no longer indexed ! Traffic sucks big time

[ViktorN]

traffic sucks here but the same as the past 3 days. Got a severe drop for highly-ranked article. what's going on with Google...

Not mentioning Discover/News traffic tumbled since September 1st

[Abaros]

A lot of googlebot activity on many sites since a few hours

[samwest]

@ SI - yes...before 2010 it was like a bubble sort, totally gone, then back - now it's still noticable, if you watch very carefully. If I activate my VPN, I can look around the world to watch the movement.

[RedBar]

@Abaros

A lot of googlebot activity on many sites since a few hours

Source?

[Abaros]

@RedBar
"my sites" (more than 50) server logs

[RedBar]

My sites are seeing nothing ... at the moment!

Where are you located?

[MayankParmar]

@samwest Hello. It will happen if you've canonical and indexing issues. Run the URL in the inspection tool and request indexing - this has worked for some users. It's being widely reported now.

"Crawled - currently not indexed"
"Discovered - currently not indexed"

Request indexing doesn't work. But I see big sites are still able to get indexed.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 4:22 pm (utc) on Sep 30, 2020]

[Abaros]

@RedBar
Europe country, small sites

[SnowMan68]

Indexing bug hitting our site now as well. Some pages dropping and others showing old dates. Like years wrong.

[glakes]

Anticipated daily sales hit at around 11AM. Should be interesting to see if the rest of the day just dies.

Why is it Google's indexing bugs never seem to impact Amazon? Would this be evidence that Amazon is ranked with a different and more preferential algorithm then the bug-ridden algo that tanks small business?

[BoredMeteor]

Search may be busted, but hey: At least they still got their animated dachshund bobblehead doodle up and running. That's the important thing.

I'm not even going to bother looking at rankings right now, but I will say that Google traffic has been slightly (slightly) elevated the past week or so, with a decent bump yesterday. But for right now I'm just going to assume that's seasonal.

Since they wiped out about 90% of my Google traffic back in May, my goal has just been to rebuild without Google (regardless of whether or not my situation improves with them in the future), and while it's slow going...it IS going.

[Webweeb]

More indexing bugs. Is it just me or has Google never been this buggy?

Another guy over at SERT seems to have been hit even worse by the may update than me:
[uploads.disquscdn.com...]

He speculates its an indexing bug. Those are some big numbers. Same loss pattern as me, just losing even more of his initial essentially down to 0.

Guy that has 300k-600k organics per day for sure has a dedicated adsense rep. If that guy cant do anything about it, we are all screwed.

[BoredMeteor]

Also, I just read that seroundtable article and I have to LOL at the people over at Google.

You've got so many people complaining about issues, de-indexing...even as a search engine user doing random searches, you see all the Pinterest and spam, even 404s getting ranked. Legit websites just falling out. And John Mueller's over there on Twitter throwing his hands up saying "I'm not aware of any issues. Did you make a thread in the [very, very always useful] help forum?"

It's maddening.

Edit: That person who shared their Webmaster Tools stats at seroundtable, mentioned above: That's more or less what my site's looked like since May (though I'm not at complete zero). Just a total falling out, with next to no improvement ever since.

[Webweeb]

@BoredMeteor
Its basic PR work. John would not have his job if he was to admit mistakes and bugs he is not allowed to admit.
The default position is always... not aware of x. our data shows improved quality.

Google knows exactly how terrible many SERPs are right now.
They know about the spam issues.
The real question is: Why are they not managing to fix even the most basic stuff right now?

I suspect the potential future of ranking without links is worth taking some spam issues in the short run. And to some extent I agree. They don't want to work on 2 algorithms at the same time either. But the current state of things is unacceptable. Some niches are literally dominated by fraud / spam / fake products / scams and other malicious activity. Black hats are making billions they did not make before may. OK, SEOs are making less. But would you rather have SEOs or Black Hats?

The algorithm is getting too complex. They have outmindgamed themselves. Now noone knows how the algo works and noone can adjust or fix anything. Upside: White Hat SEO does not work anymore. Black Hat still works, because it has unlimited domains, subdomains and parasite sites to work with.

Bravo Google, you showed those White Hats!

[MayankParmar]

Some sites have dropped a lot in September, here's one big site reporting the drop [twitter.com...] Interesting

[immrrobot]

I thought this was another update when I saw how much traffic I was losing AGAIN.

[MayankParmar]

The tweet has now been deleted... but the site in the tweet is huge with 36M views. They lost about 40% traffic for the English and Spanish version of the site in September.