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.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Pretty sure most of what everyone is seeing relates to some extent to the mobile indexing issue. Since restoration of these URLS started, seeing pretty much the same traffic patterns as when things were broken. I'm assuming that things are still broken in that way - and that the only difference really is the restoration of the URLs affected by the indexing issues. The mobile bug - which started early September, is very much still there, in my humble opinion.

[ViktorN]

@ichtyous also seeing huge traffic decrease since yesterday's afternoon. Our site is 40% USA. So it has to do something we that.

[pontifex]

@Cyril - US Election: oh boy, 4 more weeks of complaining :-) - you could be right, though

[KaseyM]

Noticed a big drop in traffic from yesterday afternoon. Rankings look stable.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I don't know how about you guys, but my website is crushed for more -10% last week till today. It looks absolutely like an update correction. I updated a lot of most trafficking content, but nothing really helps. I can't do nothing, Google doesn't care on content, it's just killing all the job I did for last 5 years. All these years were years of increasing and since 8 November 2019 it kills it with every update more and more, I don't know how to stop it.

[Soulofmonk]

I have been facing the same problem. November 8, 2019 - went from 25K/day to 15K/day. Me and one of my competitors both tanked because of that update and still not recovered. Spam sites, Pinterest images, and scrappers are ranking well but our posts would not - I've optimized the site's speed, writing quality content regularly, updated old articles, but nothing seems to work. It's like there is an invisible penalty from Google; it would rank spam, Pinterest images, and scrappers but not quality content. I gain a very little boost in January 2020 update, but got hit again in May. No idea how next update will impact my site!

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Soulofmonk
It's so absolutely the same as for my website: got hit on November 8 2019, then recovered a little bit and then smashed with May update once again. Nothing helps: content, technical fixes... NOTHING... I just don't know how to continue my bussiness right now, I'm facing with a darken thoughts and my hands are down right now... I made so many things, I ordered audit in the best SEO agency in my country, I found a best SEO freelancer from my country to perform an audit, I payed a lot of money to authors to update the content and... nothing, it crashes my website more and more...

[Terius]

Comparing today to the a same day of week average, I see one of my sites is down about 15% and another is up 18%. More than ever I'm convinced the only way to survive is to have multiple sites.

[StupidIntelligent]

So if it's taking them these many days to restore 0.2% of their index; the company would have gone bankrupt had it hit say 50% of it.

Don't think Google has contingency plans for such an event.

[ichthyous]

I've lost a full 20% of my top three ranking terms in last 30 days, but it's churning every day. It seems that perhaps Google has introduced a constant rank churning to its index in the last two weeks or so? This could be good for some sites that had dropped to page two and stayed there since the May update, it could also be a disaster if you lose your solid ranking terms.

Today traffic to my second most trafficked page is down a whopping 38%, while my home page is up 89%. The new normal? My overall traffic is up quite a bit today, but USA traffic is still down and may end the day even. Google clearly manipulates the hell out of USA traffic now, you never know what you're going to get.

[Dooku]

@Cyril TechWebsites, you had a PAID seo audit done........and what? The seo company could not find anything at fault, or they did, but obviously not the correct issue I gather, as your website is still going in the wrong direction.
I notice that people some times are staring themselves blind and not seeing the information any more which caused the decline. Whatever it was or is, there is always a reason.

[RedBar]

perhaps Google has introduced a constant rank churning to its index in the last two weeks or so?

Excellent, I was calling it shuffling however churning seems more appropriate. I think there has always been a tiny element of that there however, as you have noticed, it seems to have been more prevalent in the past couple of weeks otherwise why would I go from 1 to 5 to 3 and back to 1 along with the other top sites?

To coin an old description, we're having a Google dance:-)

[ichthyous]

@RedBar...Yes, it used to be called that, and it appears to me that is back, but on a daily basis. Today my traffic from everywhere is up, total traffic up 20%, USA is even, and for the first time UK traffic dropped 28%. I would almost prefer to have the deck shuffled than to constantly stay down for months after an update...but some terms bring home the bacon and others don't. Google also seems determined to deliver non-USA traffic but USA traffic is more often dropping than increasing.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Cyril TechWebsites, you had a PAID seo audit done........and what? The seo company could not find anything at fault, or they did, but obviously not the correct issue I gather, as your website is still going in the wrong direction.

@Dooku

I know what you are talking about. But... I'm in bussiness since 2013, I have a piece of experience and till now I "cured" all the downshifts of my websites (and I was already hit in 2016 and 2018). But I always found an issue and corrected it. But since this year, I have 3 millions times double checked all the things I could. And that's why I decided to ask some people outside to take a look at the website. Those SEO agency found some issues like some "liitle" bugs (like URLs with caPitaL letters in its names, duplicating main URLs; 301 redirected a bunch of URLs that have backlinks, but were prunned earlier, added some strings to robots.txt, etc.). But they DIDN'T find anything serious, that can do a serious damage to rankings. I implemented all the changes. but nothing seems to be changed.

[Kash1111]

Well mate, google has never been fair. They only care about the people that advertise on their platform. If you had free traffic all this time, you got a nice ride so far. Don't blame google it was free along.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Don't blame google it was free along.

The serious problem that it WASN'T actually free. I'm paying a lot of money to authors to create great content. And now I loose competition to scrappers, spammers, and thin content... So who can I blame nor than Google?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I had to shed staff as a result of this, and it took months for us to recover from having spent all that money in materials/labor to manufacture items that just sat on the shelf.

And how many actually number of months you needed to restore the traffic? I'm in the same situation, I shed 1/3 authors team, and putting all the money and all efforts to recover the traffic for 9 months already. I tried fixing technical issues, updating content, disavowing bad links - nothing really changes.

[Delta3Girl]

I hope this is the correct place to put this question.

I have a large, well-established website running AdSense and also with a WooCommerce shop where I sell high-quality printables. I have tried removing the ads from my site in order to drive more sales to my shop (and also affiliates). After trying this a number of times over the past six months, I'm starting to see a pattern. I'm wondering if this is a coincidence or if there is something to it.

Every time I remove AdSense ads, my traffic drops and my WooCommerce sales drop. Am I getting some kind of search boost by using AdSense? I know AdSense and Search are supposed to be separate entities, but I'm seriously starting to wonder about the connection.

Google likes my shop. I also have a forum and Google likes my forum. But not if I remove AdSense. I almost feel like I'm being blackmailed into keeping the ads on my site. Am I imagining things? Is there something to this?

Thank you for your time.

[RedBar]

Am I imagining things? Is there something to this?

I am not saying there is not something to this however in my experience after I removed AdSense from all the sites I had it on, nothing happened whatsoever, in fact since my major rconstruction my main B2B is better than ever.

[RedBar]

@MayankParmar

What kind of website template do you use, WP, custom, something else?

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar WordPress with all ready to use features :)

[ichthyous]

This is insane...today gained back 8 top ten spots. USA traffic has plunged 46% as of 11am EST. Yesterday USA traffic was up 20%. Yesterday UK traffic was down 30%, today it's up 140%.

Also of note...my site has had the same top pages ranking for years in the same order. All the sudden now a totally different set of landing pages is ranking from day to day. Google HAS introduced an update, but not one we recognize as such. Instead of shuffling all the SERPS and re-ranking everyone, they are now shuffling everyone daily. Is anyone seeing the same stable results they normally have anymore?

[KaseyM]

@ichthyous what niche? site type are you?

[RedBar]

It's a constant shuffle on the first page now for my widgets with 60% valid results and the other 40% between eBay, Pinterest, Houzz and Homeluf.

Even being #1 doesn't drive any extra traffic now.

[RedBar]

@MP

WordPress with all ready to use features :)

Have you ever wondered if it's that causing any issues?

[glakes]

And how many actually number of months you needed to restore the traffic?

After traffic/conversions tanked in November, it took until February to restore similar traffic/conversions.

I can't tell you why I recovered since I sell products and our content does not regularly change or get added as one would expect in your case. But I will say it appeared we were under a traffic cap. We have some info pages that are quite popular during winter. As these pages saw record levels of traffic, it appeared Google was trying to offset this by killing traffic to our product pages.

[ichthyous]

@KaseyM Fine arts / creative / gallery with an inventory of thousands of artworks. I run no adsense, nor do I pay for adwords. 18 year old domain with a solid backlink profile

[edited by: ichthyous at 5:06 pm (utc) on Oct 7, 2020]

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar I don't think so. Works pretty well. I'm monitoring it with the new Relic and Pingdom. So far, it works well.

I'm seeing the shuffle too. Started around two weeks when they had the canonical bug. Only the first page is shuffled a few times in a day and this is not usually noticeable in the console or trackers. SERPs are no longer stable for sure. Is it a feature or something?

[Pokwerpok]

I got hit the same day last year (November 8th), and also, no matter what I do, nothing helps. Until that day Google loved my quality, white-hat site (and so did the visitors), but now they love high DR sites with no relevancy and thin content, and there's no competing with them in terms on links. What I've learned, is that relevancy or quality content doesn't play any role anymore, authority within niche doesn't matter. All I can do is to pray for the algo to change.. I'm done hitting my head against the wall

[ichthyous]

@MayankParmar Canonical bug and the shuffling have nothing to do with each other I think. I had no canonical problems. It's a stealth update of a new kind. Every other day now my USA traffic gets blitzed. Seems to be a 2:1 pattern...two days off, one on...or two days on, one off. For me, it affects mostly my USA traffic, although I am starting to see signs of UK traffic swinging too. Australia / Canada / Germany / France traffic have already been swinging wildly for months for me.