Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2020

[jmorgan]

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System: The following 16 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5008345.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 2:13 pm on Oct 1, 2020 (utc -5)

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I, personally, am not experiencing any negative effects from all these alleged issues that are being reported. However, the following has been a bugbear of mine:

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?"

I always cringe when he says this. Typically in these forums (such as this) you get a lot of hysterical webmasters frustrated with Google and not really providing much helpful advice. Soliciting advice from them could actually prove more harmful than beneficial.

[goodroi]

Mods Note: Please stay on-topic. Off-topic comments will be moved or deleted.

[MayankParmar]

From Glenn Gabe: New email from Google to publishers when they don't have larger images (which Google likes for Discover): [twitter.com...]

Interesting.. I hope they also make a tool to preview articles in Discover feed.

[Athedian]

I'd rather wish Google would focus on fairness and stop throttling traffic with filters than them trying to come up with more things that will break in the future.

Absolutely disgusting conversion last night. And despite fixing up 450 articles with much better headlines, Google thinks otherwise:

"Is your site a massive site with millions of links, regardless of spams, useless content, and interlinking of your own sites together with different languages? No?"
"Is your site an authoritative site, and by that, we mean not only giving us the revenue that we demand but also one that would push our own products to consumers? No?"
"Is your site filled with simple snippets with 2 sentences so that our bots can crawl easily without wasting our resources? No?"

"Well then, the verdict is: Tanking your page ranking just because we feel like it. Oh and by the way, 50 of your pages are now de-indexed because we're still having a problem with indexing issue. And no, no manual re-index request right now. Good luck! At Google, we do no harm and we do our best to make everyone's life easier."

[RedBar]

when they don't have larger images (which Google likes for Discove

So ... assuming one knows how to optimise an image correctly, any larger image will automatically be a larger file size thus making the page slower to load (even marginally) therefore does this mean that Google is advocating slower / heavier pages?

Me? I'm not changing anything, I gave up with G's destructions 10 years ago!

[insideout]

I see some signs of a possible Algo updates starting yesterday evening.

[edited by: insideout at 2:41 pm (utc) on Oct 21, 2020]

[MayankParmar]

Fairly stable for me.

[glakes]

@insideout

I saw a substantial drop in traffic from Google yesterday, which continues today. Something appears to be going on.

[ichthyous]

Traffic normal for me...which is to say USA -36% while UK, CA, AU all up. By the end of the day USA might make up the difference If I am lucky, but early in the day (EST) traffic is always down now.

[RedBar]

Not seeing much movement except for the odd removed Pinterest page but not for all queries.

[BushyTop]

We've seen a drop in traffic these past few weeks. I am assuming it's these indexation changes? anyone else seeing the same?

[waterpebble]

We've seen a drop in traffic these past few weeks. I am assuming it's these indexation changes? anyone else seeing the same?

I’ve had a big drop. Starting October 10 and getting worse about a week ago, around October 15. So far I’ve lost about 1/3 of my organic traffic. I haven’t made any changes to my site.

Back in June 2019 I lost over 90% organic traffic from the core update. Since Jan 2020 I’ve had small traffic boosts every core update, but never got my traffic back to what it was. I’ve been waiting for another core update, but now it looks like I’ve lost again. It’s been 2 weeks with a big drop.

[joamuk]

Traffic dropped off a cliff since Tuesday. No traffic whatsoever today - I would normally expect 50 or so conversions. Not had a lead in 3 hours.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Some SERPS are looking EXACTLY like they were when the mobile indexing issues started at the start of September.
And traffic on the site behaving the same way.

[MayankParmar]

Semrush sensors are spiking again, but no movements on my end.

[gabmorelli]

Hi there, anyone else experiencing the issue that no new published pages are getting indexed? It started around October 10th to me, i since published 3 pages and none of them got indexed. They have all been crawled, discovered, they are in the sitemap.xml, the sitemap.xml is accessible and all pages, while doing a live test are eligible to be indexed and no problems are shown.

My site is around 6 years old, it was put aside for a while and i started publishing again around august, and up until October 10th all new pages got indexed, but since October 10th not.

No old page got de-indexed.

Anyone there having the same issue?

[ichthyous]

Hi there, anyone else experiencing the issue that no new published pages are getting indexed?

Indexing of new pages has been problematice since last year. I still have pages that I published last fall and have requested indexing several times and Google still does not have them indexed. Check the number of inbound links...I suspect thin pages without a lot of internal links or IBLs won't get indexed moving forward

[BushyTop]

@waterpebble weve seen a very similar pattern to be honest

[ichthyous]

I saw a big jump up in clicks on Monday and Tuesday according to GSC. Traffic has been stable Monday and Tuesday, and higher yesterday. Today so far a huge increase in UK traffic and USA will prob end up average by end of the day.

I am filled with glee to see the huge amount of press the Google antitrust case is getting, along with other analysis of Google's monopoly. Do keep in mind that Alphabet is a 1.1 Trillion dollar company...it will be hard for any government to impose its will on Google. I suggest an intergovernmental non-profit corporation be set up to develop a competing search engine without any profit motive or commercial intent. Only democratic governments would fund the new competing search engine and develop it. People would flock to a search engine that has no profit motive and no ideological goals. Would it really be that hard to build a competing search engine? The biggest barrier would be hiring talent away from Google and paying competing salaries.

[samwest]

Anyone get the feeling that there is direct communication between FB social media posts and Google SERP activity and traffic shaping? Been doing some SM experiments over the past few months and the coincidences seem uncanny. I call it the Dugan effect. hmm

[StupidIntelligent]

@SamWest - It probably triggers an algo which gives boost in the rankings based on how many people are visiting a particular webpage. It's not gameable; because Google probably has a few many ways to determine if the traffic is genuine users visiting and not a bot.

My theory is that big brands get a lot of ranking boost, because they also get natural type-in or click-through traffic from popular sources.

But other algos can also rank pages (say that reward content over popularity), though it take may take many months and years.

[jediviper]

Nothing shows that an update is coming.
Semrush has no special spikes for Europe and USA is just a bit higher.

Also traffic and crawling looks good for our main sites/

[MayankParmar]

All sensors across all platforms are calm. This was expected as they've fixed canonical issues and pages have been restored.

[samwest]

SERPS may not be moving...but traffic suddenly stopped and/or went all zombie again. Best day of the year and worst day of the year all within 4 days of each other.

[RedBar]

I assume Statcounter's borked again, all metrics way out of kilter.

[Dooku]

@Redbar, statcounter is working fine, checked with second different stat service also to compare and make sure. There is also no issues reported on the "isitdownrightnow" website.

[RedBar]

@Dooku - Some sites are "catching up" however my biggest ones are well out of norm ... earlier today they were recording 1 PV per visitor with hardly any multiple PVs plus my usual Far and Middle East traffic's absence was very noticeable.

Wind up the elastic SC!

[samwest]

Not to be off topic, but anyone ever get a blank white screen when trying to access [analytics.google.com...] ?
I cleared cookies and cache, but still nothing but a white screen. Works on all my other PC's.

[samwest]

Traffic behaviour is very poor right now, started yesterday. No page interaction...full zombie. Filter dials are turned up to 11.

[RedBar]

This month my traffic from USA and Canafa 42.8%, today 63.0% ... way out of whack!

[StupidIntelligent]

@redbar - In your experience when the filter dials are turned up; is it an indication of an upcoming core update?