Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2020

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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.

[ichthyous]

I've seen a moderate increase in traffic this month...perhaps the kiddies going back to school? Today seems to have dropped somewhat, and I have lost 13 top three ranking keywords since Monday. As usual, any drop in traffic is USA traffic only, and sometimes Australia disappears for an entire day. UK traffic is strong. I cheer the decline of the US dollar...perhaps some of my UK/CA/AU customers will jump in. EU customers require a stick of dynamite under the ass to buy anything, so I don't hold my breath anymore for that.

[markseo]

Strange things happening. Yesterday saw very low conversions / increased bounce rate despite maintaining traffic volumes. All month I've been seeing featured snippets coming and going for some of our biggest keywords too. I've picked up other people talking about this too.
SEMRUSH is still up today. Hard to make sense of what is happening right now. Could be the run up to core update or more glitches.

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is again reporting something in all regions.. but no major changes for me. The only change I have noticed is that they removed and added back featured snippets.

[sessi0nben]

Have noticed volatility in education and software serps.
One primary keyword kicked to page2 and replaced with 5 listings of the same domain monopolising most of first page.
Another dropped from #2 to #9 out of nowhere.
Surely an update / bug?

[Athedian]

Conversion totally tanked today for me. Traffic is at all time high. Ahref tracking is way off, same with GSC. Analytics doesn't seem to update anything at all for the last few hours. It does seem like an update is going on for sure.

[MayankParmar]

They'll not release/announce an update on Friday though. Could be some testing/bug.

[KaseyM]

I have absolutely no problem being dropped in the rankings for articles that are better than ours. What I do take issue (and what the current update seems to be promoting) is Indian based sites that read like bot scraped articles that get republished every single day to sit in the top stories and above us in the search engine.

So demoralizing.

[Dooku]

@KaseyM,
G is NOT "promoting" that kind of spam, those Indian websites know how to circumvent the algo to their own advantage.
There are literally tens of thousands SEO companies in India, and I am not counting the individuals working from their home!
I have been dealing with Indian SEO companies since about 18 years.......I know a little bit about how they work :-)

Ever since G went "commercial", every Tom, Dick and Harry jumped on and wanted a piece of the pie, it's only normal. However, some want a bigger piece and want it more badly than others.....and voila the blackhat community was born.
About 4 to 5 years ago G cleaned up big time in regards to adsense accounts of Indian websites. The spam was at a level and volume you would not believe. I remember Indian webmasters begging on certain forums for citizens in EU countries to open adsense accounts for them in return for some compensation. G also cleaned up BIG time deindexing a huge amount of websites from that country as they were involved in blackhat tactics and outranking established well known websites. I am NOT defending G in any way here, let's be clear, just describing a situation.

So what you and all of us are seeing is the constant fight of an algo trying to keep up and to control the tsunami of spam being produced. And unfortunately the volume of spam from certain countries is just huge with India leading the way by far. Most webmasters in that country have nothing to loose so why would they not resort to blackhat methods of which they know WILL work. And if they get wiped they will start fresh next day and keep themselves updated on the current blackhat methods. Just check blackhatworld website where a handful of the "bigger" Indian "seo" companies sell thousands and thousands of seo packages to the gullible, and in the process spamming the cr@p out of the internet. And now transpose that one forum to an entire country with tens of thousands of such "seo" companies doing the same.

[MayankParmar]

Yup. Indian mainstream media sites, UK clickbait media sites, and popular clickbait publication Fo***** are dominating Top Stories/News/Discover.

I'm not sure how they're able to manipulate Google or why Google trust those sites more? Pure clickbait, no author, no bio, and they manipulate the ranking by updating the same article for more than three days.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I'm not sure how they're able to manipulate Google or why Google trust those sites more

This is very much the frustration for everyone. Also, paywall content cluttering up the Discover feed. Why are paywalled articles even showing up in Discover? I know there is some sort of early deal/exchange with some EU publications where Google News will subsidise some of the paywall fee, but not talking about those partners.

Something very odd going on these last few days though. Just not sure if it is good or bad yet.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is being throttled like crazy this week. September is usually quiet for me but it's unusually quiet now. All the fires in CA, hurricanes, deep recession, election, etc are adding up...but it's mostly Google squeezing us to death.

[worker]

I just did a test of the first 3 pages for a very specific search phrase consisting of 5 words. Here are the results:
Page 1:
3 out of the 10 organic results were hacked sites that redirected to inappropriate sites
1 out of the 10 organic results went to a 404 page on a completely unrelated site
1 out of the 10 organic results went to a Pinterest page with a related link at the top of the page, but overall, a bad result
50% of page 1 results had problems

Page 2:
8 out of 10 organic search results were bad
- hacked sites redirecting to inappropriate sites
- hacked sites redirecting to sites attempting malicious browser attacks
- 404 pages on completely unrelated sites
80% of page 2 results had problems

Page 3:
- repeat of page two with different results but the same problems almost exactly
80% of page 3 results had problems

Total:
7 correct results in the first 3 pages of 30 results
23 hacked/redirecting/404 pages/sites

This is approximately a 23% success rate on returning valid search results.

How Google could have so many incorrect and malicious results in the first 3 pages for a single 5-word search phrase (meaning highly targeted results) is mind-boggling.

[MayankParmar]

Search quality has gone bonkers after the May 2020 update. From SERPs to News, it's all garbage and spam content.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic down 20+% today vs. the average for last 4 Fridays...I guess losing 13 top three ranking KW does have an affect. Wondering, has anyone who has cleaned up or improved GSC Core Web Vitals stats seen any real improvement in their rank / traffic?

[janvitos]

Very interesting changes happening on Discover today.

First of all, I got an article on Discover with good traffic (not great), my first in 3 weeks. It's not from the category of articles that usually goes viral on Discover, but it's better than nothing.

Second of all, my Discover feed has radically changed today and most of the mainstream publishers are gone. Now my feed is almost identical to what it used to be before the glitch, which is a nice mix of smaller and larger publishers, but mostly articles that are much more tailored to me and my topic.

I don't want to sound too optimist, but things are changing. Let's hope it's not just a glitch on top of a glitch.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

After 3 months of updating old content and making it the best, I figured out a new rule: the better your content - the lower your rankings in Google.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Wondering, has anyone who has cleaned up or improved GSC Core Web Vitals stats seen any real improvement in their rank / traffic?

With 9 'poor' URLs out 700+ good ones on mobile, our ranking on some kws decreased (to be fair, they are competitive), and we got zero'd on Discover ^_^

[hopepro]

@Cyril I'm seeing what you're seeing here too. Feels like the top position sites are spammed with GDN, one ads after another content paragraph.

[MayankParmar]

Proven steps to rank #1 on Google

- Registry multiple domains in the same niche. Install WordPress with the default theme, use English author name with 'editor in chief' in bio.
- Write content with grammatical errors once, use spinbot to multiply the work.
- Get approved by Google News 'Publisher Center'.
- Use the content across the multiple domains.
- Change URLs of the articles frequently so they appear top in both Top Stories and SERPs.
- Do blackhat link building.
- REPEAT.

Congratulations, you can now rank your high-quality-content spam sites which are optimized for EAT, real author, expertise, unique design, etc.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Mozcast is off the charts today. Anything happening for anyone?

[Dooku]

@MayankParmar,
That is EXACTLY CORRECT. That recipe list is the ultimate proof that the G "AI" is nothing more then a list of "IF THEN ELSE" commands. It simply can not discern between good and relevant content that was intended by the search term entered. It does nothing more than checking a list of characteristics against it's own checklist. It simply can not "understand" the "value" of the content on any page. And those spammers know this very well and as you can see they can very easily circumvent the G algo to their own advantage.

[MayankParmar]

Mozcast is off the charts, Semrush is again high (but lower than yesterday). But again no changes :/

[RedBar]

It's just coming up to half a Google day for me, rakings etc all look ok however very low traffic so far across ALL sites, when I write low some are at 10% some at zero.

Realistically similar to the first weekend of September, we'll see.

[frostitomik]

It has been proven multiple times by SEO gurus that Google algorithm is basically just a bot scanning your content looking for groups of words that are the most relevant to your current topic. It will then give the websites which have the most relevant keywords in the text highest ranking on Google search. Basically, all you have to do is copy the text of ten highest ranking articles on 1st page of Google search and rewrite them into a new article with higher word count and higher keyword density. Also it is adviced to use 1st grade English, so the bot doesn't get too confused. Grammar errors have no effect on ranking.

[JesterMagic]

I have to somewhat agree frostitmilk. Googles algo and AI are not nearly as smart as most people think. It doesn't understand the content at all. Just look at what can get returned at the top of the search results for proof. When you add in all the other algo checks like speed, links, and a AI trying to understand a UI it's just a mess. These last few years Google has just been spinning their wheels and slowly just reducing the organic footprint on the SERP pages.

A lot of people are complaining about discovery traffic as well. My discovery feed gears towards tech and to be blunt it is horrible (it is both Googles and publishers fault). I get multiple similar articles that repeat the same thing over and over with no new information. It is so competitive to get content out that most of it is just repeating itself (just like I am). AMP is a complete bust now (which is fine by me as I didn't agree with it in the first place). AMP was suppose to be a project to reduce bandwidth and increase usability for mobile devices. Well this summer I had to use my mobile data for my internet browsing (I am usually on wifi) and with every amp article seemly having video ads now days I soon gave up. There is so much clutter and noise on amp pages along with the repetitive content returned by feeds Discover is useless. I am back to just visiting the few news websites I like.

[Dooku]

"AMP was suppose to be a project to reduce bandwidth and increase usability for mobile devices."

No, it's about G controlling the delivery of content. I could explain all the serious cons of AMP regarding the displayed links, your domain, and harm to your own brand.......but please check for yourself online.
It's a good example how G can put the fear of God into a group of webmasters to use another of it's "products" and thereby handing over the control of the content of their websites to G.
Why would you build your own house with your own hands and then hand over the keys to some stranger?

Here is a good guide on how to SAFELY REMOVE AMP from your website:
[kinsta.com...]

Get rid of that monstrosity people, the sooner, the better.

[MayankParmar]

Unfortunately, it's too late. Removing AMP would be a suicide move for news publishers. If I remove it and my competitors use it, they'll rank better in all Google's News/Discover/Chrome feed/Top Stories channels. In fact, they show a very small thumbnail for non-AMP sites.

Google is the new Internet Explorer and we have to do what they expect us to.

[ichthyous]

Google apparently thinks I'm in the UK and not the USA...my UK traffic is almost as high as my USA traffic today! It's up 182%, France up 370%, Ireland up over 526%....USA down 8% today and down 13% yesterday as compared to the last four Fridays/Saturdays. While I welcome traffic from Europe what about traffic from my own market?

[MayankParmar]

It's really just not about auto-generated content. I have seen sites with popups/malware appearing in Top Stories/News feed. This wasn't a widespread issue before May 2020.

Semrush sensors are back to normal.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

After months of no result searches on what has happened with my website’s rankings and looking for ways to fix the situation, I started to think if I’m doing the right things and if I chose the right way of living? What would our life look like if we would did another choices in our lives?

No offence, it’s just joke! :)

Larry Page:
[imgur.com...]

Barry Schwartz:
[imgur.com...]

John Mueller:
[imgur.com...]

Gary Illyes:
[imgur.com...]