Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2020

[jmorgan]

---

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)

---

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]

They do an insane amount of A/B tests and shuffling. Pretty much impossible to get Google to show the same results for the keywords across all devices.

[Mr_Dok]

Google doesn't release the algorithm update because of the congress procedure.

[Dooku]

@Mr_Dok, I just voted for your previous post and would have given another 10 votes if possible.
Most people living in the USA complaining about G just do not understand that this is caused by their own mentality.
I have a few good friends in the USA and they admit this view and mentality regarding being self-reliant en hate toward government is just ingrained in the american psyche by decades of well executed propaganda by the 1% of their society.

That is the sole reason companies like G and FB can only exist in the USA. Those people working for G or FB did not arrive from some alien planet, they are your neighbor. They are now part of a gatekeeper controlling essential parts of the economy and literally influencing your life in ways that is particularly unhealthy. It is just mind boggling why citizens in that country accept this control from a bunch of criminal companies but they are against government trying to get those companies in check because they are obviously out of control.

Just look at the many examples in Europe when they try to pass laws that give too much influence to large companies......people rise, protest and make very clear that they do not except such injustice where the rich get richer and the poor get the short end of the stick.

Until that does not change than nothing will happen and G, FB and the likes will keep controlling you, your business and your life with each algo update.......and it will only get worse.

[RedBar]

@MP

I have a feeling the core update has been further delayed because of their on-going problems trying to resolve "whatever it is" they've discovered to be "faulty".

[samwest]

Worst week again, they just keep stair stepping it down, down, down. We should be underground by now.
SERP layout is shifting almost hourly, to several different layouts. It's not and A/B test, it's an A/B/C/D/E/F/G... test.
It seems each change is associated with a huge drop in conversions. Back to all zombies, again. SMDH

[Cyril TechWebsites]

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 think that this is the most important problem of Google. They are ignoring any issues, they are sure that they are the smartest, and we all here just stupid idiots that are complaining day after day how they are bad. Now the US government followed our "Big G club" of complainers. But they still see no issues, everything seems to be OK from their point of view... It's so interesting to see what will happen in next 5 years with Google's monopoly. I think that they still have some time to change their politics of "endless fuc**ng of everyone" before Google will follow all "monopoly leaders" way of slow dying as a company.

Did you make a thread in the [very, very always useful] help forum?

Yeap, John. I did. And guess what? No one from Googlers answered me (as to other millions of people complaining on SERPs results...).

[edited by: Cyril_TechWebsites at 4:35 pm (utc) on Oct 9, 2020]

[TalkativeEditorial]

Anyone else seen a notable drop in traffic to AMP pages (again)? Assuming it's connecting to the still ongoing mobile indexing issue...

[StupidIntelligent]

I'm part of the 1% then on the mobile indexing bit.

[RedBar]

@SI

At least you know where you stand, errr, sit, errr, lay ...hmmm, it's only the depth that varies, not the smell!

[StupidIntelligent]

People expected core to happen in September. It didn't.

Now people think it may not happen this year. It d....

[BoredMeteor]

There are a lot of confounding issues happening right now that I guess might be slowing the update. Could be the pandemic, could be bugs/glitches they're trying to fix, could be politics. Could be a straight up change in how they do updates altogether (no more big ones?).

Ideally, I'd like to think they're taking the reported bugs seriously, and all the Pinterest spam, and clearing all of that up before they nuke everything again.

But even if they fixed that, I have no idea if it would help my rankings, since I'm still in the dark about why I (and many, many others) got what appears to be a penalty on May 4.

[MayankParmar]

Could be a straight up change in how they do updates altogether (no more big ones?).

That would be great. Core updates are very nasty with potential to kill a site overnight and such powerful updates should not exist.

Also, John once said that they do core updates when they're ready and Google is clearly struggling with these issues lately.

[koncept]

Hey guys. I haven't posted on WW since 2012 (!), but here I am, back to moan and groan with the rest of you.

I run 20+ active sites. Unlike many here, the May update was fantastic for my sites. They all got crushed in January but have come back strong since May.

Then.. September 2020.

September 16th / 17th - that's when a bunch of my URLS started tanking. Like, from position 2 to 60+. I've kinda been hoping it was the de-indexing bug, but the fact is they didn't disappear from the SERPS, they just got dropped WAY down the rankings. And it seems almost random.. just a few key urls from each of a variety of sites.

To complicate things, I also see that one of my sites has a few urls that have jumped to #1. And this also happened right at the September 16/17 mark.

We have made changes here and there, but some of the affected sites have had no changes at all made to them. So my ranking issue doesn't seem to be related to any changes we made. They all happened at pretty much the same time (mid September).

Around September 17th is also when there were lots of reports online of SEO tools spiking, reflecting a lot of volatility in the SERPS. Did anyone see anything significant around the Sept 16/17 mark? It was a big moment of change for my rankings.

I am tired of chasing answers on this one (looking for answers is time consuming!). My personal conclusion is that, regardless of what Goog has or hasn't said, there HAS been some kind of update last month. Perhaps it was related to the bugs, perhaps not. But something changed the rankings, and them fixing the deindexing and canonical bug have done nothing to revert those changes.

Having multiple sites is sometimes useful when trying to work stuff out.

[HereWeGo123]

@koncept

Having multiple sites is sometimes useful when trying to work stuff out.

I definitely agree there. Sometimes it's best to not have all your eggs in one basket as they say. Plus if you are trying to cover a wide variety of topics on a single site, it can get diluted and the various topics, even if some are problematic, may bring the rest of the site down. By having multiple properties, there are more ultra-focused efforts done site-by-site, you're sending more clear signals to google site-by-site, and everything is just compartmentalized.

It's a strategy that we're currently beginning to entertain and will most likely act upon. It's less risky. We have one major site that covered various topics and we got into some serious YMYL content during 2018. We feel it negatively affected our whole site, even in the areas where we previously excelled well in. Yeah, we cleaned it up, did the best we could, and now we're just waiting for the next broad core update after being negatively affected back in Jan 2020 and it has been a slow and steady decline ever since, which brings me to the next point.

I agree with what people are saying here about the delayed broad core update. Every day that passes, it's becoming more and more clear that the update has been delayed due the various issues Google is experiencing and trying to address right now. it all started with that indexing glitch in early August, which lasted for several hours which boosted our traffic by over 50%. And the timing of this glitch was right at the marker of when the next broad core update would've been due if we're measuring in 3-month increments, historically, plus or minus. That could've been a test that went haywire.

Next, the whole mobile-first deindexation and canonicalization issue -- it began much earlier than people think. It began on or around mid-late August. The chatter picked dup in the subsequent weeks as it became more common and noticeable.

In my opinion, I believe, until google confirms that both mobile-first deindexation and canonicalization are fully resolved, there won't be a broad core update. At a meeting this morning I said that once Google confirms that those issues are fully resolved, we can then begin anticipating an update, any week. Although, I doubt it will be released on or around elections. Maybe late November or early December? If not, then I suspect we're looking at January right after the dust begins settling after the elections and holidays.

These are just anecdotal observations. You never really know. Anything is possible.

[renatovieira]

After a week with relative "recovery", today a big cliff in my main site traffic.

Apparently I returned to rollercoaster party :- /

Has anyone else noticed a considerable drop in traffic today?

[gedop]

For the past month, there have been little daily traffic drops. The fall has increased for the last 3 days. Today, I can say that it has dropped 30 percent compared to last week.

[RedBar]

Dare I say it? Everything seems to be remarkably stable and normal.

UK sites fine, global sites seeing the steady shuffling of the first page, to be honest I've not looked any further, the global ones see ebay and Pinterest much more than the UK sites, yet even they have joined the new Google dance.

Although not common big updates have happened in October, will they do one for Black Friday?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Dare I say it? Everything seems to be remarkably stable and normal.

As you say that... real time analytics has gone and conked out for me.
Anyone else?

[renatovieira]

@TalkativeEditorial

Here the same. Real time dead...

[pontifex]

Folks, just for my peace of mind:

. I am logged in
. I set the result count on Google to 100 in "Settings"
. I control sites since the 1st of August with "site:new-domain.tld"

That domain had a few old pages and we relaunched with 50+ new pages. The site: command finds 31 pages, partially old... unchanged since the 1st of August. Nothing is moving really... some random rankings for pages on new domains, but nothing moves on Google since 1st of August 2020? 2+ months ago?

[StupidIntelligent]

For the people suffering from canonical issue; I have noticed that Google is mixing up titles.

It's taking title from the original page, but showing the snippet text of the wrongly canonicalized page.

It seems the index is trying to "merge" pages, and the programming of that was faulty; or wasn't tested before being deployed.

[glakes]

It seems the index is trying to "merge" pages, and the programming of that was faulty; or wasn't tested before being deployed.

Sounds like typical Google - try to fix one thing and break a dozen other. For a company that allegedly employs some of the greatest minds, they sure make a lot of mistakes. And those mistakes cost small businesses a fortune. Because in the end, no matter how bad Google messes up their ever growing profits never seem to drop.

[MayankParmar]

@StupidIntelligent That's exactly what happens when Google picks wrong canonical. You'll see the wrong article or wrong meta, etc for that particular keyword. Initially, ranks would remain the same, but the canonicalized article will lose its original position as your CTR will begin to tank.

Most of my top pages are back and they're ranking fine, but at least one top page has failed to retain its original rank.

New posts are also getting indexed instantly, but I'm now paranoid about the indexing and canonical, thanks to Google :)

[StupidIntelligent]

A simple search would reveal that they have had this canonical issue for years.

This leads me to believe that it isn't a bug, but a way their internal indexing system ranks documents.

A lot of similar content gets canonicalized to the top-tier webpages. The original pages show in search, but never really rank, until Google removes the filters and then removes the canonicalization.

One pattern that most would notice (just sift through the dates of complaints in the past years) that these problems always surface a few weeks before or after the core update.

[RedBar]

My SERPs look completely as normal and, seemiongly,haven't had a shuffle so far today, however coming up to 11 hours of a Googleday and it's very quiet across all sites, this is from my logs not G's whatevers.

Is everyone having a Sunday morning lie-in or just totally pi$$ed-off with the CV jiving around?

[ichthyous]

Has anyone else noticed a considerable drop in traffic today?

Yes, very big: USA down 27%, UK down 15%, Australia down 67%. Every other country stable. This is compared to the previous four Saturdays. Today (Sunday) looks like it also might be down, but perhaps not as much. I gained 6 top ten spots yesterday, so it's not correlating with the drop in traffic.

In GSC I seen a big drop in clicks from Oct 6-Oct 9. It had been climbing every day From Sept 26th-Oct 6th.

[Webweeb]

People expected core to happen in September. It didn't.

Elections are november. Might take till early '21 to make it less obvious.

Until then, expect Google to be a buggy mess.

[joamuk]

Has anyone else noticed a considerable drop in traffic today?

I've got exactly the same issue. Traffic disappeared completely today.

I had the same issue last week. Like you, I gained places for major keywords, yet dropped significant amounts of traffic. On investigation, I noticed that impressions had halved - almost exactly. It was as if Google was giving away half my traffic (probably substituting my site for another). It was the same across three pages and it was almost always 50% of the impressions.

Whatever the f*** they are trying to achieve it isn't right. I'd like to see what their people thought if their salaries were halved for no reason!

[RedBar]

Looks as though everyone's managed to extricate themsekves out of bed and have a look around, now a normal Sunday average.

[samwest]

Google is a mess. Appear to be shifting their assets to the top for maximum effect. Traffic is back to trickle / drip and all zombie again.

Trending down at a time of year that it is historically trending up. Maybe everyone is over on social media fighting the cold civil war. These big tech platforms will be our undoing. It's hopeless.