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.

[MayankParmar]

No movements over weekend. Calm and stable... ahead of the core update drama.

[RedBar]

It must be fun working at Google watching the WebmasterWorld expectations, updating and which is then immediately followed by the moans and groans from many not getting what they thought they may do ... :-)))

And then the speculation starts again about when will be the next update, January, and what it may or may not bring!

[StupidIntelligent]

Let's be honest. This entire thread is just three to four people talking to each other. The rest of the internet is at least 8 times bigger.

[pontifex]

Well, SI, a lot are lurking, because we all wait for the core update :-)

[jmorgan]

This entire thread is just three to four people talking to each other.

Well, wait for the next major update and there'll be an influx of new (and old) people coming in here complaining about Google and asking why their site dropped in the rankings.

People generally only post here (and that includes me, at times) when their site drops in the rankings which is why you get this skewed image of everyone's site just tanking and nobody benefiting from an update.

[glakes]

Let's be honest. This entire thread is just three to four people talking to each other.

Let's take honesty to an even higher level. Ranking #1 for many keywords produces only a fraction of the traffic it did years ago. All of Google's "fluff," including ads, siphons off much of the traffic and spenders. Google has devalued organic search results so much that I don't even notice many of Google's updates at all. Much of the recent discussion involves discover traffic, which is not directly searched for and is isolated to a very narrow group of webmasters participating in much of the discussion.

Yes, many are waiting on another core update. Hundreds of updates each year would indicate either Google can't figure out how to rank pages, or simply is looking for new and creative ways to dig deeper into our pockets and/or steal our content to display directly on Google itself. My glass of Kool-Aid spilled years ago, so I'm inclined to agree with the later. Call me a "woke webmaster" I guess...

[MayankParmar]

My Web Vitals stat is a roller coaster ride: [imgur.com...]

[ichthyous]

Google has devalued organic search results so much that I don't even notice many of Google's updates at all. Much of the recent discussion involves discover traffic, which is not directly searched for and is isolated to a very narrow group of webmasters participating in much of the discussion.

Yes, many are waiting on another core update. Hundreds of updates each year would indicate either Google can't figure out how to rank pages, or simply is looking for new and creative ways to dig deeper into our pockets and/or steal our content to display directly on Google itself.

That's exactly right. Actually the second Google went public organic search was doomed. It was only a matter of time before Google needed to cannibalize organic search in the name of higher quarterly profits. It's been squeezing and squeezing for years now, hoping to squeeze all of us into submission and pay for their crappy ads. Well, if Google's ads worked for my business I would have paid them long ago and not lived with so much angst regarding my organic SERPs. The fact is that organic placement used to bring in far more traffic and no amount of spending on ads can replace that. My guess is that most webmasters who ranked well will never become Google's customer now. They will simply move on to market themselves in other ways. I would rather pay Facebook for an ad with a huge picture than stupid text links on Google...they are a total waste of time. At this point I would welcome a recovery from May's disaster, and I am already seeing signs of higher impressions and clicks like last September. However, there is now so much crap loaded onto page one that it will NEVER again produce steady or reliable traffic.

[samwest]

This entire thread is just three to four people talking to each other

Maybe this handful are the only ones observant enough to recognize the problems. As far as fixing the problems...you can't fix a black box.

Like JMorgan, I typically only post when I see a high and unnatural delta. Back to high bounce zombies and foreign bots again. Volume is still on a slow downward trend...and now even FB ads aren't doing anything to stop the bleedout. They get your number there too..

[edited by: samwest at 12:54 pm (utc) on Sep 14, 2020]

[Dooku]

Web Vitals are a complete joke. Pages that were "bad" yesterday are "good" tomorrow and vice versa.
Also, considering what G is doing now and where they are headed regarding (syndicated) news websites I am wondering why anyone in their right mind would even consider starting such a website. And for those who are running websites like that, well.........you can not avoid the steamroller. Yes, talk is cheap, but the choice is yours, better switch to something else while you can?

[mosxu]

the suggested terms in the search box is making people dumm, more than 80% click on without the need to type or think

when a brand is suggested over a product in the box it means 80% of buyers will not even know about your ads for that product

than look at impression share, it is hilarious

[glakes]

@ichthyous

I'm a confessed serial entrepreneur. Years ago I saw some of the writing on the wall with Google attempting to corner the market and the economy with it. I did exactly what everyone preached - built a very popular website that was worthy of being linked to. And linked to it was. I got far more direct and referral traffic than Google could ever send. Then came along Penguin, which penalized websites for linking to others. This scared so many webmasters that most who were linking to us took our links down along with many other links on their sites. In a matter of a couple of months, our referral traffic plummeted. In one simple penalty based algorithm update, Google took out one of the pillars of our website traffic. This I believe was a huge anti-competitive move by Google since referral traffic competes against Google's search traffic. Now, with far less referral traffic, webmasters and consumers alike are left more dependent on search engines.

Fast forward to the present time.... I remain focused on quality but that quality is centered around a product line. Google's SERPS continue to push Amazon, but when consumers/businesses have problems with those Chinese Amazon sold products they eventually find us. I've grown tired of watching Google abuse their dominance over the years and realize little ole me can't stop it. Same applies to Amazon. What I can do is set my business on a path that leaves it less reliant on any search engine or marketplace and whatever antics they use to extract more money out of our pockets and economy.

[seomotionz]

Let's be honest. This entire thread is just three to four people talking to each other. The rest of the internet is at least 8 times bigger.

@StupidIntelligent What can we write man? Rather than just watch.

[samwest]

GART broken again, showing false climbing numbers. Usually indicative of another "glitch". 100 technology years behind where we should be by now.

[mhansen]

Observation from the last 2 months.

We're in lead generation (USA only) and we gather the leads via our website, then distribute them via API. Over the last two months, we've seen a noticeable drop in leads without any changes in ranking. The first thing that caught my attention was the new widgets in our sector, showing brand names and other related phrases above ALL search results, encouraging users to dig deeper into the Google box for answers versus going to a website.

Today, I dug through 2 months of leads as part of a normal audit, and found that we're seeing much fewer leads with gmail.com addresses. I'm not sure if it's relevant at this point, but at first glance it may be a new type of personalization for signed in users, or even higher use of voice search.

Has anyone else in lead gen noticed fewer gmail addressed users?

[Dooku]

@mhansen,
Very interesting, and another example of proof how G uses one of their assets (Gmail) to squeeze a business.
I do not do lead generation but on one of my website I just plainly deny customers that use Gmail.
As soon as a customer enters a Gmail email address they see a popup to use a different type of email address or we will not accept the order. I can afford to do this on this particular website because I have practically no competition to speak of.
I don't want to have the order confirmation email to end up in a Gmail mailbox so G can see what this customer is interested in. I don't believe their statement that G do not use Gmail any more for data collection......they still do.

[pontifex]

So, for all the lurkers: my first real post on Google updates for 5+ years: I have had a wild ride since 2002! I have had my Florida, Caffeine and Penguine updates for all the estates I was building.

Earlier sites with 4M visits per day for 6+ months (spam)...

Core business pages with 150k+ per day (clean business) for years....

So, I am used to the turmoil, fear and anger here ;-)...

Now I am starting a new venture and it went live on the 30th of August. I am watching the traffic closely, as you can imagine.

From my point of view, not much has changed since 2012. Google takes its time between core updates and good placed pages are eaten up earlier.

So traffic is picking up SLOWLY.

As ALWAYS, first visitors are coming from OTHER places (reddit, hackernews, etc.) and interestingly enough: the first pages bringing traffic from G are the pages listed in those other platforms.

So, pushing an optimized site freshly out of the gates:

. Google loves traffic from respected sites. I guess Chrome is the source or links FROM these sites are pushing that. The more you get from reddit or hackernews, the earlier your pages are listed well.

. Freshly found pages do not really rank, unless you have a sh*tload of traffic from other respected sources

. Google has eaten 700+ pages within hours, in the index are 40

My conclusion: the core update is where you make your stand. You need to work in intervals and place your links NOW to be included in November (or later) - I always believed in the "Christmas Shopping Update" around Halloween.

SEO is still valid. I agree with my previous posters: a lot of keywords are stolen by ads, maps, images, videos and stay within the G universe. But I still see hundreds of visits per keyword like in the old days, once the keyword ranks. And there is no reason, why we can not cross-publish good keyword content on all these "other" sites... reddit, youtube, scribd, etc. that old game is still working, as long as you create a little value for that user....

Still waiting for the core update,
P!

[hopepro]

10 months now, and traffic is still in decline. The only thing that shows up in GSC is core vital LCP, CLS, etc....

[Athedian]

So many things cramming into the first page of the SERP right now that it's a chore just reading through the "results" that Google is spitting out. It makes one want to move onto a different search engine instead of using Google, then Google starts freaking out when they noticed a decline in traffic (revenue) so they added more things and tossed out more updates to make up for the losses. Then it's just a spiral down to the abyss.

Oh yeah, and it's been over a year and a half and Google still hasn't validated nor fixed the link coverage issues that the GSC has reported, even though those pages were fixed long ago. Such incompetency.

[samwest]

By the sound of it..every one here is in decline. Everyone I talk to outside of here is saying the same thing. Yet...Google still improved 18% on paid clicks for the year. They hit 40.5 Billion, when the expected target was 40.32 Billion. How are they magically doing so well year after year yet we are all dropping. Thats a rhetorial question. [cnbc.com...]

[Athedian]

"We've evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that helps you get things done," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call with analysts.

LOL sure, Pichai, sure. You mean from a company that helps people to find answers to a company that makes bad algo so that webmasters have to pay for the ads to give you that revenue to satisfy the shareholders.

I didn't bother finishing the rest of the article, after reading what the CEO of Google said. It's vile.

[BushyTop]

Seeing throttled traffic today.

[Mark_A]

@ichthyous

.. I would rather pay Facebook for an ad with a huge picture than stupid text links on Google...they are a total waste of time. ..

Google text ads work, google still receives volumes of niche searches for many many sectors for which ads are the top ranking result - i.e. they rank way higher than any organic listings you may have achieved.

If they didn't drive relevant specialist visitors businesses like ours wouldn't spend on google ads.

Organic used to rule, but now there are limited viable alternatives to Google Ads.

[mosxu]

“40.5 billion vs. $40.32 billion expected”

I mean half of advertisers have been seriously affected by Covid not sure they keep spending with G being shut down.

I am getting less and less exposure to buyers as a result my spend was going through the roof and sales down. Overnight end up paying double for same traffic?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Seeing a fair bit of instability on mobile today across different niches. Anyone else?

[glakes]

If they didn't drive relevant specialist visitors businesses like ours wouldn't spend on google ads.

I've often wondered how an identical ad campaign/landing page in Google would perform for someone in the EU -vs- the USA. EU regulators have been far more aggressive in going after Google for alleged abuses of their dominance then their passive USA counterparts. Still European countries have allowed the same Asian invasion to occur via Amazon and the high percentage of Chinese based sellers they host (58% of Amazon.es, 55% of Amazon.fr, and 53% of Amazon.it top sellers are China-based). Do these regulators across the globe suffer from tunnel vision or perhaps they are unable to chew gum and walk at the same time?

Back to my original thought....

The aggressive nature of EU regulators likely produces SERP sets that include less Google cross/self-promotion fluff that is known to siphon off traffic/buyers from not only ads but organic search results.

[mosxu]

EU are so useless when it comes to tech but they might open their eyes if trade deals fall apart

[RedBar]

Touch wood traffic and enquiries still going well here, my combined B2Bs overnight surpassed its half month totals. Usually the second half of September sees a drop in traffic since my widget world normally descends on Italy for a massive trade fair and obviously that will not be happening this year. Instead they are having a virtual fair and it is, to be polite, awful and useless.

October into November usually brings in visitors for one specific sector of the trade sourcing stock for the first few months of the New Year, that will be interesting.

[MayankParmar]

Fairly stable here again.

[markseo]

Hi - anyone else noticing featured snippets disappearing for some queries? Happened last week and recorded on Mozcast, seeing it again now. So there is no position zero, just standard 1, 2, 3?