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.

[ichthyous]

I saw a sharp reversal today and traffic was strong all day. +21-30% USA, UK, AU...+200-600% for Europe and Mexico. It's fairly evident that we are going to see wild swings in traffic moving forward. If the pattern holds tomorrow morning around 10am my traffic will tank again.

[MayankParmar]

Google is indeed a mess. I don't understand why and how they're indexing AMP pages sometimes. AMP pages are appearing when we use site command or when we paste the URL directly in Google search. When we search for the keyword, non-AMP appears. Indexed AMP pages are under "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" in the search console. Is this the new normal?

[StupidIntelligent]

@MP - I think Google's network is way overstretched. They got way too much data to process, and not much technical skill and infrastructure, despite making over $10 billion dollars a month.

[Webweeb]

Takes much longer to index pages now than it did before may. Like MUCH longer. Usually would happen within minutes.

In dont think Googles network is the problem. They have more than enough resources.

Its the code thats getting too complex and less and less people still understand whats going on. Issues get exponentially more difficult to fix, add compartmentalization and you end up with a situation where noone understands how the whole thing works and how to debug.

Especially with machine learning, you necessarily end up with a situation where you have to trust the machine, since noone can even start to decypher the processes derived from it. So the machine says this is a good serp, therefore it is.

And if you want to correct machine learning you need to feed it a whole new dataset, which means you need to have 1000s of low-cost laborers in india rate the web according to new criteria.... so yaaay. We are screwed.

[MayankParmar]

They should just open source their algorithm and let this community fix it ;)

[RedBar]

For the moment shuffling / churning in my widget sector seems to have stopped with Pinterest still there but not quite so dominant.

Regardless of how many #1 rankings I have for my global B2B, they are not driving much traffic. How much this is due to total lack of trade interest with Covid fears slowing demand in some countries I am hesitant to speculate, certainly some countries are not being as restrictive as others.

[samwest]

They should just open source their algorithm and let this community fix it ;)

Great concept, but how many seconds would go by before it is gamed?

The old Google worked, but when greed and a political agenda entered in, it collapsed as any stable kind of platform for free market capitalism.
We either need an entirely new platform with a totally new transparent, reciprocal model that works or full regulation of Gorgs unfettered blackbox control of the world market.

[RedBar]

The old Google worked, but when greed and a political agenda entered in, it collapsed

Precisely, I worked with and on the algo in the late 90s and it was quite a simple creation because there was very little perception of corruption / fraud, why would anyone bother, what financial gain would they have?

Of course all this changed with the introduction off AdWords and then AdSense, the game changed completely and whilst the basic algo remained all the additions to it were fire-fighting "evil" people.

[samwest]

@RedBar -I always learn something new and interesting about you. ;)
I installed Tor and used DDG to see what result that gives. I'm #1 and listings appear at the top across all my search terms.
I'm buried on Google below all that which profits them. I suspect so is everyone reporting here.
Funny thing, Google does not like my use of Tor...won't even allow a search.
They INSIST on having full control of everything we search for.
Another connect the dots moment.

[RedBar]

G hates TOR intensely!

More stuff? Used to work with AV developing an ad sales system based upon a user's search ... What was it, a good 6 years before AdWords?

[Athedian]

Manual indexing on GSC totally broken and has been broken for almost half a year now. Google never bothered fixing it and instead they roll out this Core Vital. How are we supposed to "fix" our sites if Google doesn't even crawl or doesn't even want to crawl manually requested pages for indexing?

Some of the problematic URLs were dated as far back as May 27th, 2020 and despite over 5 manual indexing requests, they were never crawled again, ever.

[Webweeb]

@Athedian
I can confirm. Manual indexing is at the very least extremely slow now. Not sure if entirely broken. You want your pages indexed, put them in YouTube video descriptions or make a statewide link for a while if you dont want to use black hat techniques.

Google crawls YouTube extremely often... no idea why. Definitively not because they own it.

[Jack82fi]

There is another bug today? Some page are deindex in search, in Italy. From search console them are OK and index. But all page that are crawled from 13 Oct are deindexed from search console. Not only for my site but for some. Them are disappeared also with site: command.

[MayankParmar]

AMP pages are still getting indexed incorrectly. It's not just me or WordPress. It's definitely Google's fault!

[rthree]

It is very quiet on Twitter from Google.. there is definitely something going on with indexing.

[KaseyM]

Hopefully, analytics is slow from yesterday or I just lost 30% of my traffic.

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing a huge sustained drop...Saturday dropped, but then Sunday was high. Monday and Tuesday normal, and increasing SERP visibility. The SERPS have been fluctuating day by day for weeks now.

[samwest]

Seeing some internet related outages and DDoS attacks ramping up as election draws near.
Big tech already has their hand in this and we will once again become collateral damage.

Seeing weird traffic to obscure sub pages and nothing to those pages that rank on page one. How does THAT happen?
Very poor conversion, again. Funny how that can switch in a heartbeat to conversions on the half hour, then BAM off again...this time for days.

[edited by: samwest at 12:58 pm (utc) on Oct 13, 2020]

[ichthyous]

Of course all this changed with the introduction off AdWords and then AdSense, the game changed completely and whilst the basic algo remained all the additions to it were fire-fighting "evil" people.

Well, they learned to monetize search...how else was it all supposed to be provided to us for free? I think the date at which Google really started to change was with the public IPO. The markets and investors don't care about our plight, they want constant growth and ROI. So Google inevitably has been forced to #*$!ize and cannibalize organic search in pursuit of growth and profit. That's capitalism folks...

[SteveWrz]

Had a +30% yesterday compared to the previous Monday after weeks of stagnation. Curious to see if that continues throughout the week.

[trabis]

Portugal, poetry niche.
My site never flutuates much from week to week, at most 10%.
25% drop on monday and same pattern today.
Very noticeable.

[RedBar]

Just checked half a dozen sites and everything looks clean and stable especially the UK SERPs which doesn't have any Pinterest bug. Not seeing any significant / noticeable movements.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Steady rankings here and improving in some cases in competitive sectors.
And *whispering* a steady return in Discover traffic.

No complaints, but, just wish.... I knew why (even for the positive stuff - so that the swings don't look so completely random).

[Webweeb]

Random is the correct word to describe the may core update. SERPs seem random, traffic seems random, what pages get indexed is random, if you make money or not is random. what brand of black hat spam ranks #1 today is random... is it a spam PDF or a spam company profile, maybe a spam pin or a spam t-shirt or a spam movie review, maybe even a spam chrome extension or a spam amazon book. Who knows.

2020 the year of random.

Now some of my crap pages I have not touched in 6 years start randomly ranking. I wanted to delete them and already have deleted most of them, but now they rank... random. I giuess Panda is not a thing anymore either.

I guess you cant optimize for random. You sure showed those SEOs.

[edited by: Webweeb at 4:57 pm (utc) on Oct 13, 2020]

[glakes]

Had a great day for conversions yesterday. But with all the media attention given to Amazon Prime Day, I expect Amazon to siphon off sales for the next couple of days. I just wish the media would start reporting some truth - most of the top sellers on Amazon live in China. While media has given some attention to shopping local, all I see on TV is Prime this and Prime that. If Google doesn't bury domestic retailers, Amazon will try.

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial Yup. Discover is so much better. 1/3rd of the US Discover traffic is back. It looks like they also made changes to Discover when they started fixing indexing and canonical.

[StupidIntelligent]

Canonical for one of my websites is fixed an hour or so ago. Was broken since late September. Rankings for that page seem to be back a bit better than expected. But, I wouldn't hold my breadth; could be my eyesight.

[MayankParmar]

Canonical problem is pretty much fixed for me too. Almost 90% URLs are back.

[MayankParmar]

Sources detail how Google, under intense scrutiny, has limited discussion of antitrust issues among employees, executives, and potential recruits ~ [nytimes.com...]

[SnowMan68]

Our homepage disappeared from the serps tonight. So bizarre. We get about 13-15k visits a day from Google, so I’d say we are a fairly authoritative site.

Something is definitely broken.