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.

[KaseyM]

What worries me too is that things are changing literally by the hour that any tools I pay for to measure them are worthless.

Definitely seeing wild fluctuations since last Friday.

[RedBar]

@MP

I actually don't mind the shuffling so long as all the other results are qualiy, shuffling garbage for the sake of it is pointless.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar Exactly...but the overall effect for me seems to be lower USA traffic since the days where USA traffic are way down seem to outnumber the ones where USA traffic surges. USA traffic has been hard clipped since May for me. But it's really too soon to tell about this latest twist...

Google can actually make a strong argument that shuffling websites which all rank around the same is a more equitable solution than having the same set of sites showing at the top for months at a time

[janvitos]

@Webweeb

Without explanation or recourse, Google can deliver a fatal blow to a website’s search
ranking visibility

I read the entire interview by Brian Warner, and he’s absolutely right. Google can kill any business overnight, and they absolutely do not give a damn. Because at the end of the day, THEY will be making more money and they will be pleasing the investors.

And it's not just about search anymore. Google is now sending traffic to "chosen" publishers through News and Discover as well. But as the August 10th glitch has shown, that kind of traffic can also vanish overnight.

My website has never relied so much on search for traffic as it always got much more traffic from social media. But referral traffic from Facebook has been declining rapidly. And this year was probably the worst decline for me since I publish mostly uplifting content and Facebook seems to have focused all its efforts on Covid (and divisive content).

But at least, for the past year or so, Discover had been sending me tons of visitors per day, almost every day. This actually compensated quite nicely for the Facebook reach / referral crash and even brought my website stats to new record highs until... it all vanished overnight. So now, my website is actually back to where it was a year ago.

I have to be honest, being at the mercy of Google and Facebook is probably one of the worst feelings. You never know if your content will be ranking or chosen, even if you know you're doing the right thing. Although I agree uncertainty can arise with any kind of business, it seems as if it is much more prominent with a web business that relies on big tech for traffic. But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when you were actually rewarded for publishing quality content. But it seems those days are over. We have arrived in the era of pleasing the algorithms.

[glakes]

My website has never relied so much on search for traffic as it always got much more traffic from social media. But referral traffic from Facebook has been declining rapidly.

Bottom line is the internet and traffic is controlled by a handful of companies all seeking to drain everyone's wallets. While webmasters/businesses struggle to stay afloat, these handful of companies are producing excessively large profits for their executives. Regarding the antitrust report from Congress, don't expect anything to happen as a result. Congress forms a committee that recommends changes that are evaluated by another committee then that committee sends it off to another committee and the beat goes on. These committees generally produce no results except to function as a pacifier for those that are being harmed.

[Webweeb]

Same with facebook and YouTube. They used to be decent sources for traffic, but is quickly became a pay to play game. Luckily YouTube cant stop you just yet from linking people to your website, though videos that reduce time on site certainly will rank a whole lot worse for sure.

Im usually against Gouvernement interfering in business, but these are literally monopolies on information and speech we are talking about here.

If Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon ban you, you essentially lose your voice and your business.
(and lets not forget that all these companies also have political bias<<<)

They can make any rules they want and enforce then selectively against whomever they want.
On top of the algos that can do whatever they want anyways because noone understands how they work.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Guys from US, I'm not so good at knowing some nuances of political and economy life in States, but how do you think will this document and the overall process will change something or it's another one "bla-bla-bla" and no changes to wait?

[trabis]

On top of the algos that can do whatever they want anyways because noone understands how they work.

I think the algos have reached the conclusion that the answer is 7.

Number of backlinks ends in 7? +1.
7 words in the title? Good job.
Word count 437? Great.
127kb of page size? Keep it comming.
17 h1?! Humm, not bad at all.

So if your page is a hit, do not touch it.

Gained a backlink? Entered the 8 month? Looser.

My last good year was 2014. I'm waiting for 2023 now. Easy math.

You know what else has 7 letters?
Sarcasm.

On a serious note, the real answer is:
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42

[MayankParmar]

Just another bla-bla-bla. Nothing is going to change.

Regarding canonical and indexing, URLs are getting reindexed rapidly. Should be resolved completely this week. Hopefully, we'll see a core update once the bug is fixed.

[Webweeb]

If they cant fix a simple CCTLD bug with pinterest, they sure cant work on a core update.

I am starting to believe that the may update was an effort to influence the election through a new algorithm. Sadly in the process huge parts of the web got screwed. But I guess its worth because Orange Man Bad. Thats also why they wont fix this crap, because they know its gone 2021 depending on how postal voting goes.

I guess its not election hacking if its not russia. Also with this antitrust investigation, Google REALLY needs Biden in the White House to survive. It could literally be life or death for them. I expect the Clinton Fundation will get some donations from Google associates any minute. Also dont be surprised if Hunter Biden gets a board position at Alphabet / Google.

Should have elected Hillary, this crap is not worth.

[edited by: Webweeb at 10:38 am (utc) on Oct 8, 2020]

[KaseyM]

Noticing indexing errors again (AMP page being indexed and not the main canonical).

[Martin Ice Web]

As of the latest traffic changes to the bad i did some investigations in my niche.

So every search in my niche results in more or less the same results.
#1 - #3 big brands changing in order
#4 - #10 mainly very small websites with little to no content and no EAT. Mainly no user interaction is possible on this websites (like seach or filter items or order by option)
This sites look like beeing setup 15 years ago, while they have actuall content.

I wonder why this kind of websites did it to the top?
So I have 2 different approches

#1 All of the websites have something in common. They all have very little HTML Code, very small amount of pages. If you look at errors ( HTML 404, HTML coding, broken links, broken pictures ) and compare this small websites with big websites you will see that the relation errors/website size will be better for the smaller once. -> Less pages -> less errors. Loading times are better and bots can easily understand the content. Less HTML code -> better Content/HTML Code relation.


#2 We know that a ranking factor will be useability. Smaller websites with no EAT and small navigation are better to understand by bots, while big websites with lots of content, coding and links needs lots of power to understand.
So current results could be a life test of the new ranking factor.

So my niche is like every seach dominated by google followed by ebay and conrad.
Big brands enjoy somehow a better tolerance. Example: conrad has a loading time >4s.

[mosxu]

AI is very unhappy with the distribution of wealth, the world is unfair to them as small businesses are trying to make ends meet using their platform.

Make ends meet or not zombies have been more active in the last 2 days

[ichthyous]

My website has never relied so much on search for traffic as it always got much more traffic from social media. But referral traffic from Facebook has been declining rapidly.

Facebook and Google have both achieved monopoly status. They don't need to give anything back, just take. Facebook turned off visibility on Facebook Business Page posts years ago already...my posts went from hundreds of likes to 0-2 likes now. I keep the page up but I don't pay for boosting posts and I don't post often there anymore.

Instagram has sharply curtailed post reach now...you can see it happening almost day by day. I tried to warn a few people in my field with large followings that this was coming and they better diversify away from social media, but in my field they aren't very pro-active and don't care. Now they are crying because soon they will have to pay for their followers to see their posts.

Social media does not drive sales and requires more and more time these days. It is a dead end for my business and for many others in my field. On Monday I had a discussion with the director of a partner site I work with owned by a famous global publisher. They have around one million followers on instagram. She told me their social media drives no sales at all, which is depressing.

I've heard that influencers can sell high volume / low price items quite well through social media, but I have no direct experience with that. I know one supermodel and his wife quite well and they invite us over to their house sometimes. He has about 2m followers and she has about 500k. They don't sell anything through their Instagram, which I find very odd. I would kill for 2m Instagram followers...I have 14k and they are mostly useless ;-).

[ichthyous]

It is clear that the US government intends some action against the major tech players. But in reality, how can a company like Google be broken up? From what I read they aren't even focusing on the search manipulation we most go on about here all day. They were debating whether to even include search in the federal lawsuit being built against Google. Does anyone have any opinion on how Google can be split into smaller search engines without ruining the brand? I don't see it happening...just more fines.

[rthree]

Tweeting John or Danny doesn't help at all. Like others noticed there is something brewing. I found it strange that I seem to belong to the 0.02% of affected pages with the indexing bug lol, something is really statistically wrong there at google.

I've been out of business for more then 10 years and I just started to build a brand new site this June. I have one monitor dedicated to my raw webserver log so i've seen everything almost real time for 12 hours per day for now 4 months. I do a lot of manual indexing requests for new pages, normally Google will visit those new pages 4 times within 1 minute (image-bot not included). The last days is different though, it will accept the indexing request, it does one visit but thats it..

Other strange things I noticed is the following:

I get a visit from a 'searcher' (not a zombie lol) then a little while later, sometimes 30 seconds sometimes a few minutes the same user is visiting my site again... is that like pogosticking in a good way for me?

In four months I went from 0 traffic to now average 110 searchers a day. Not a bad start.

[glakes]

Tweeting John or Danny doesn't help at all.

That's 2/3 of Google's search support department. It's funny how Google holds a large part of the economy in their hands yet they are too cheap to support their search product with an actual staff. Businesses and consumers across the entire economy are reliant on Google, yet USA politicians and regulators don't require Google to do more. There's so much incompetence across the Federal level of Government that I think Government needs to be broken up first before addressing issues involving Google.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Does anyone have any opinion on how Google can be split into smaller search engines without ruining the brand?

@Ichtyous

I think you can misunerstood what they have on their minds when saying to split Google. As I understood some strings in the document, the US government doesn't like that the same company like Google owns search engine (can manipulate it), and the same company earns $ from showing ads in this search engine; when Facebook owns it's nearest competitor Instagram and the company's managers saying not to compete with each other on their staff briefings - that's true monoply, when you have a control over the whole niche.

When all these "parts" belongs to a single command center, it becomes easy to manipulate all the system to receive unlimited part of money that are going through this niche. So when all these parts of Google will become splitted (sold by parts, force splitted, I don't know), each of them will have its own profit goals, strategy of development, etc. That will make competition possible again.

[mehmethasana]

My 2 month website goes in and out of the rankings is very inconsistent. Nobody is helping about this.

[RedBar]

@mehmethasana

2 months old? Sorry to tell you this however unless you have a big ad budget, an exclusive product /article or a part of a well-known company, then for local rankings expect up to 6 months however if you're brand new and trying for global rankings maybe 12-18 months.

You would need to have some serious kudos to rank faster than this.

For a completely unknown subject easy, however who's going to write that?

[mehmethasana]

@RedBar

I received a promotional letter from quality sites. Their value is pretty good. Previously these were effective, but not in my new project. I'm just looking for the reason for this.

[MayankParmar]

Nothing. It's entirely Google's fault. They are doing nothing to reward original news coverage. I am done trying everything I could. I fail to understand how their algorithm is unable to detect the original coverage when a particular site is cited for a particular topic by all other bigger publishers on the same day? It's just so basic and they're doing nothing to fix it. Or it's a shadowban.

[RedBar]

@mehmethasana

I'm just looking for the reason for this.

Now that's someething you are most unlikely to find out, G seems to need no rhyme nor reason for some of the things it does, what may work well for one site may possibly not for another.

The best advice is to study in-depth which sites are ranking well in your sector and how they have created everything around those key words / phrases / images / etc. and then wait, and wait ... then again if you want immediate results there are always ads!

[StupidIntelligent]

@topaz - Google cannot detect the source of the content. This is why scrappers exist and flourish.

Making a news website is not hard nowadays. Spin articles created by others, and profit.

Google doesn't have the technical capacity to fix this. They can't even sort out their index. Look at them, trying to correct 0.2% of their index for days now. So, it it were 20%; their stock would have gone Florida.

There are the good guys. There are the bad guys. Then there are who make money.

[Mr_Dok]

All criminal googlers over there - August "glitch" has revealed many of your serp manipulation and it will be accountable under law against you all.

[ChokenBako]

I add content every day, but since May it doesn´t have any effect at all. The daily amount of visitors stays the same since May 4th update. Does anybody experince the same? Even if I get a spike beacuse of a Facebook post Google will shorten my visitor stream so that at the end of the day i will have the same amount of traffic +-2%

[hopepro]

I'd like to share my findings partially proving that google has become either very stupid or greedy.

Last year my site with avg of 3M visitors / month high quality, been there since 2008 started to fall and up until now there's no sign of recovery. My team fixed everything and no improvement in search receiving only stupid keywords.

I tested last month, bought a spam domain and a 37 DA domain tons of wikipedia backlinks. Both using same topic of unique article, same means, exactly the same title, H2, H3 but different in contents in paragraph.

The spam domain keeps winning no matter how stupid the contents are.

This tells me that I should stop worrying about fixing SEO and focus to do other task .

[Webweeb]

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 laughed a painful laugh when I read this from John Mueller.
They are not aware of a bug affecting 0.4% of the index (probably a lot more), then how will they ever fix smaller bugs. And right now lots of SERPs are blatantly bugged, unless spam is a good user experience.

Does anyone have any opinion on how Google can be split into smaller search engines without ruining the brand?

Set up a 5 way random redirect or confiscate the Google brand entirely and let them build new brands.

Personally I'd prefer the latter.

[samwest]

Just horrible traffic again. 2 conversions per day if I'm lucky...and apparently I’m not very lucky. The clamp and gouge is back in full force after a slight let up last week. Less than half this week...serps layout still moving. Interesting finds now at the top with devastating results.

[JustSEO]

For the last two months, for one of my websites, every other week or so my star snippets disappear across all my articles. When my star snippets disappear, my rankings completely crash as well. This has been happening non-stop for 2 months now. This is complete insanity.