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.

[MayankParmar]

The first page of the News tab is out of date and Discover suggestions are also becoming irrelevant. I also don't understand why and how my Chrome feed is serving irrelevant contents from the U.S, and it looks like the Chrome feed is now called 'Discover' too.

For me, Discover is mostly mainstream sites + evergreen content + irrelevant contents. I rarely see new sites there.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Is any website under 1-2 years old getting traffic from Discover?

Yes. One of mine. But, as you can tell from my post history, sometimes randomly get booted from the visibility without any rhyme or reason.

also agree with the tools relating to the bugs FYI, tongue in cheek just does not translate on text I guess.

[ichthyous]

I am not seeing any update as yet however I am seeing a constant shuffle of the first page every time I check.

I hesitate to say top ten since it varies between 6-10 results nonetheless no matter which cache-clean browser I use sites are moving up and down, ebay is always there, Pinterest sometimes.

I'm seeing my Top 10 SERPS changing daily now...up / down / up / down. Used to be much more stable. Traffic was much higher yesterday, so perhaps a shakeup is in progress. Today it is normal

[StupidIntelligent]

Mobile indexing issue still persists. No change.

[samwest]

More crazy movement. Guess what made it's way to the very top today...drum roll please.
PINTEREST!

[HereWeGo123]

Continuing to see volatility in the SERPs throughout this weekend (U.S.) Nothing crazy where I would say that a broad core update is happening, but enough to notice to say that there is volatility. I am still attributing it to the issues with deindexation and canonicalization getting resolved. Google has not updated its most recent tweet about this issue in two days. So I'm guessing it's still a work-in-progress. Hopefully, there are some new developments on that this week.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Google has not updated its most recent tweet about this issue in two days. So I'm guessing it's still a work-in-progress.

Agree. Can see it i the way AMP pages traffic fluctuate - usually when they dip or practically disappear from GA, it means there is something to quite right - and they are fluctuating quite a bit at present. Keeping a close eye on this.

[MayankParmar]

The URLs are coming back slowly. At this rate, it will take one week.

But I'm seeing general movements too since Sunday.

[lisdaiii]

is this only in US or all over the world? I don't see any change here in Indonesia.

[janvitos]

@Webweeb, are you talking about the Pinterest bug that wrongfully flagged tons of websites for SPAM and killed Pinterest traffic and impressions? If so, I found a solution and actually got my website unblocked and put on their whitelist. My traffic came back shortly after and is now even higher than it was before the bug.

This is out of the scope of this discussion, but if you're also suffering from this glitch, DM me and I will tell you where to go to get in contact with a real support agent and NOT one of their damn bots.

[samwest]

Actually rose a spot, plenty of traffic but all zombie...zero conversion.

[ichthyous]

IF IT'S MONDAY MORNING, IT MUST BE ANOTHER HUGE DROP IN USA TRAFFIC

[RedBar]

@samwest

Wow, just did a specific search for one of my exclusive products and:

1. Pinterest UK
2. China widget trade directory
3. Pinterest COM
4. Pinterest COM
5. Me

Don't think I'll look much further!

[ichthyous]

@samwest and @redbar Google Search Console has maybe 5,000 Pinterest backlinks showing for my site now. It is dropping my own pages from the index, but indexes every single crappy Pinterest share of my content. The Pinterest posts must not have a lot of juice since all these links have made no difference in my ranking, but it does drive quite a bit of traffic.

@RedBar...What kind of product is it?

In my experience with Google, Pinterest is riding high now, and will vanish again from the SERPs sooner or later. It already happened once...this is the second time around that I have had a huge number of backlinks from Pinterest...then they all vanished for years, now back again.

[RedBar]

@RedBar...What kind of product is it?

A specialised construction product we have been making for almost 40 years.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar...Why the hell would anyone want to post it on Pinterest? That's mostly fashion, food, travel...female oriented. I have a massive number of Pinterest shares b/c it's arts related.

[RedBar]

Aha! Because it is specialised and "decorative" too :-)

Even iron girders can have a following ... not that I supply iron girders.

The last thing I want to see are concrete kitchen countertops but hey, some people love them.

[MayankParmar]

I don't have the Pinterest problem in my niche, but I do have the YouTube problem. Fake videos, bot videos, videos created by scrapping sites are pushing me and others down.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing a big drop in traffic today? At 1pm I'm 25% down in total and down 54% in USA traffic compared to the previous four Mondays. Also lost five top 3 and three top 10 results in last 24 hours...but that has been a rollercoaster for ten days now.

[StupidIntelligent]

@ichtyous - by lost you mean they disappeared completely, or were they demoted further down the line?

[pontifex]

I do not have that "pinterest problem" in my niche either, but it is there for long tail searches. It is a sign of a broken algo!

[ichthyous]

So nobody else is seeing a huge drop in USA traffic today? It's 5pm and I'm still off 37% today, which is definitely not normal. The weekend was fairly strong...

@StupidIntelligent - I'm assuming demoted further down, but I stopped paying for SEMrush so I don't track it that closely anymore.

[janvitos]

So along with Discover traffic, I have also lost all Google News traffic since around September 28.

Google News traffic had remained pretty steady although Discover traffic had almost vanished. But it seems like my website has now been completely removed from all Google referral services, except search.

This is just getting worse and worse. Very frustrating.

[HereWeGo123]

Can't replicate it across the board, but for some queries, I was manually checking in Google, I am seeing some hacked sites outranking us. There is definitely a lot more than we think, going on.

[MayankParmar]

@janvitos are you talking about news.google.com referral?

I've found it difficult to track traffic from Google's News sources. GoogleAPIs, news.google.com never match console data.

[janvitos]

@MayankParmar, yes, exactly.

I've never had any issues tracking news.google.com traffic, it always shows up in Google Analytics. But now it's been pretty much absent since September 28.

My articles are appearing in Google News Publisher and under Google News if I visit my page directly, but it seems like Google has just completely kicked me out of its algorithms.

[samwest]

Speaking Google's flavor of the day PINTEREST...
anyone remember how ezinearticles used to pollute the SERPs? lol

GART is locked and counting up.
Something broken at the plex again.

[Athedian]

Don't have any Pinterest posts showing here but am seeing a lot of spam or irrelevant traffic. It's like Google deliberately ignored my restricted keywords and decided to rank and display anything that's slightly close to the keywords being searched, however irrelevant they may be. = =

Edit: okay, something is definitely up right now. According to Ahref, organic traffic, keywords, and traffic value for everyone (including my competitors) all spiked on Oct 6th.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Oh, come on. No update for the rest of the year? Are they trying to drive me nuts personally?

For me it's obviously that no update will happen until the elections in US finish. I'm pretty sure that managers of Google understand how much social attention can be payed to the new update, I'm sure Googlers won't release an update (or at least will roll out it absolutely silently) to avoid blames on interruption into the elections and correcting SERPs to benefit one from candidates.

[jmorgan]

Noticeable traffic boost yesterday (>9%) compared to the same day the week before. Not sure if it's seasonal or SERP related.