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.

[ViktorN]

@renatovieira what niche is your site at?

[renatovieira]

@Viktor - Niche: Live streaming cameras, global

[BoredMeteor]

Just a quick look...some rankings have gone "up." I put that in quotes because traffic hasn't improved. One thing I do notice is that another Pinterest pin linking to one of my articles has jumped from page 3 to page 1.

So, congrats to Pinterest, I guess.

[RedBar]

These Pinterest listings always confuse me! Whenever I click thru on one of them to see what's there invariably I find one of two things:

1. It's an image from my site with a direct link to my site.

2. The image is often not good, there's no information and the rest of the page is worthless for the keyword phrase.

I honestly do not GET Pinterest although millions of users seemingly do!

Is it by people for people with nothing else to do all day?

[samwest]

Once again traffic and conversion dropped off a cliff for us too. Want to say much more, but what's the point. They've won.
You can be on page one and still get nothing. So different from the good old days gone by. It's a different ecom world, shaped entirely by Google and FB...and yes, Amazon. Funny how these execs then preach and gripe about economic disparity.
Looking at shuttering some sites soon. Maybe spend some time writing that book on the subject.

[RedBar]

You can be on page one and still get nothing.

Not only page 1 but ranked #1 and get nothing or very little that is tangible.

This is very evident after discussing with several sites in my widget niche.

[MayankParmar]

I guess you're technically #1 in GSC even if you get pushed down by ads, top stories, videos, interesting finds, and other features they test.

[MayankParmar]

Google made numerous changes to auto-complete, news, fact checking, knowledge panels, breaking news detection and more [searchengineland.com...]

[RedBar]

It's a summarisation:

over the past year.

[rustybrick]

Yea, when I wrote that I made sure to say nothing is really new...

[ViktorN]

On my finance news website I've seen almost "silence" in regards to Google Discover traffic over the past week. Like almost zero. It used to be a few thousands daily. Anyone else had seen that?

[topaz]

Same here Viktor. I don't believe the changes revealed today were all old. Something(s) went down between August 5 - 10 as it concerns News and Discover.

[MayankParmar]

Regarding Discover, I asked John but he has nothing to share at the moment. It's not just us and it started around the glitch period. On 10/11th for me.

Unfortunately, nothing can be done.

[widgetized]

Woah, total zombie traffic here... I launched a storewide sale on Monday (Back to School), and still not a single conversion was registered so far! Usually, this kind of sales works very well for my website. I should also mention I'm seeing a small rollercoaster in my GSC stats. What the heck Google :(

Another observation I want to add to my previous post is that over the last months I received orders for my *very old* products. Items that I added in 2010 and so on. I wonder how visitors ended up finding those pages (with very thin description), that sounds like SERPs are very messed up to me.

Did anyone notice something similar?

[MayankParmar]

Scrappers enjoy Google News and Top Stories, but the genuine sites that applied after December 2019 do not appear in the news tab. Amazing.

[MayankParmar]

5.3, 5.2 Semrush in the UK, US.

No movements here... yet

[mosxu]

Only thing that works is stopping the ads

[rj87uk]

UK here I have noticed only a slight change in traffic over the past week. A quick check seems to show the slower loading websites have dropped ever so slightly and the faster loading ones have gained ever so slightly.

The slower ones also perform worse for mobile based on the Google metrics. This is only based on 6 websites targeting local terms so may not mean much.

Google have been pushing for better mobile response times for a while and ever increasingly penalising website content shifting which effects usability.

RJ

[glakes]

Wow, what a dead day for conversions. Some SERP tools are reporting an update? On 9/11 no less...

[SteveWrz]

Traffic has been all over the place for me this week across two sites. A third remains unaffected.

I don't know why I bother to look anymore. There is never any good news.

[topaz]

There seems to be a problem with indexing for at least the last two hours.
two tweets that see what I'm seeing.

[twitter.com...]
Mobilanyheter
@mobilanyheter

@rustybrick
Google down in Sweden. Not a single article are now indexing from sources all over the world.....

[twitter.com...]
Amir Saleem
@AmirxSaleem

@JohnMu
what's the isuue with Google indexer?
Sites are not getting indexed and backlinks are also not indexing..
Can you fix it?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:57 am (utc) on Sep 13, 2020]
[edit reason] added context for links [/edit]

[Treud]

I had a quite a boost on end of August, with more conversions as well.

Yesterday « update » for now seems to have revert that. But since July it’s the roller coaster, nothing stable.
Keywords literally are falling from the cliff. Or are able to climb the north face ! :D

[MayankParmar]

Google confirmed indexing issues with Top Stories: [twitter.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

To expand on MayankParmar's post...

[twitter.com...]

Google SearchLiaison
@searchliaison

We had an indexing issue with new articles appearing in Top Stories beginning around 3pm PT. We've now fixed this, though full restoration will likely take several hours, maybe less. We'll update when that's reached.

5:45 PM · Sep 11, 2020

[RedBar]

A very busy Saturday across all sites for me, in fact that busy this morning I had to check my logs to see if I had been "hit" by something however everything is looking completely normal. If this continues all day some new records may be set!

[southernguy]

The day before yesterday "Thursday" I had a gangbuster day with quality traffic and conversions all day long, yesterday traffic fell off a cliff for all my sites, literally dead, they seem to have turned the switch back on today lots of traffic but mostly bots it seems. Rankings remain the same. So I got my one great conversion day for the month of September, guess I will have to wait till next month again.

[MayankParmar]

Just realized that I'm doing great on Bing and Bing is driving decent traffic. Gives some hope!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:52 pm (utc) on Sep 12, 2020]
[edit reason] cleanup after thread split [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Mods note: I've just split off several posts to business issues because they were off-topic here, and they were political commentary as well, something we try to avoid.

It's very time consuming to do this... In the future, I will simply delete these without comment. Volunteer mods here are just that... volunteers... and we have only limited time. Thanks.

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Split-off posts now here...

Observations on search and politics
https://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/5009549.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:30 am (utc) on Sep 13, 2020]

[Robert Charlton]

topaz, thanks for your post yesterday suggesting Google outage. I can't find explanation in the limited time I have, but I am seeing news stories about various Google service outages worldwide, with no confirmed cause at the moment. .

Just making a guess... Google has some major data centers in Oregon, essentially right at the Bonneville Power conversion stations at the Columbia River. My guess is that either power or fiber service was interrupted due to Oregon fires, but I haven't seen this confirmed,.. and I don't even know whether that describes the symptoms.

Google Search itself seems to be working for me in the US.

[topaz]

That makes sense, Robert.
The issues I saw are fixed now though.