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.

[StupidIntelligent]

@SnowMan68 - Wait a few hours. It will come back.

[Webweeb]

Managed to index one article from 1 day ago.
The one from 2 days ago is still not indexed. Even made a sitewide link. Amazing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/technology/google-employees-antitrust.html

Yes, lets not forget that Google is quite experienced with censoring speech and information, since they created a censored search engine for China.

Personally, I think the speech issue and information monopoly is just as dangerous as the economic side of things.

For some reason, politicians of all people are totally ignoring that part. More worried about Russia who has a search engine that noone in the west uses...

[Dooku]

From that NYT article MayankParmar referred to:

“The reality is that Googlers are paid well, and that’s because of the monopoly. In effect, the monopoly is on their side.”

The above actually says it all, and as far as I am concerned the phrase "Ich habe es nicht gewusst" is as relevant to these employees also. They know damn well what they are doing, they participate in it on a daily basis and condone these practices.

[mzb44]

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

People expected it in August.

The last 4 or so core updates happened around 113 or so days between each other. Accurate to the day.

Now it's +2 months "delayed". - I know G never guaranteed or promised to release these updates on a specific schedule, so it's not reasonable for any of us to expect it. That being said, many agree that the May core caused many weirdness, bugs and overall terrible rankings. I can see why many wait for a new core update.

I just don't think it will happen before the elections and maybe even during the pandemic.

Seems like one of the things that may have happened in May was that they significantly turned up trust signals to give a massive boost to big mainstream sites (even if content is mediocre). Likely to combat covid conspiracies and election influencing by fake news and misinformation sites.

This, however, caused a lot of collateral damage of also "penalizing" (yeah, I know the core update isn't really a penalty) legit but not that authoritative sites, which otherwise would have deserved to rank.

It's just hard to me to imagine that they would modify this right before the elections and in the middle of the pandemic. I don't think there will be a core update anytime soon.

I think many people waiting for the next core update will be very disappointed. And not just because it will be delayed. - I would honestly not be surprised if the next one would be ever harsher than the May update, boosting mainstream sites even further at the detriment of everyone else, considering that the pandemic is nowhere near the end and misinformation and conspiracies are still spreading like wildfire.

[MayankParmar]

If the core update is not released in October, it will probably not happen in 2020 or they might do smaller unannounced updates instead.

[Webweeb]

@mzb44
Agreed. It does seem like mainstream big sites won in may, which is why parasite spam on those sites does so well.

It does seem like a blunt attempt to fight 'conspiracy theories' with lots of collateral damage. I remember when I was called a conspiracy theorist for saying that Irak had no WMDs by dems, republicans all of them. Funny how time changes things.

Now its like.. of course they didnt have any. duh. I wonder what people will say about COVID in 15 years.

Also I am seriously starting to believe in traffic quotas for channels driving traffic to websites on YouTube:
[ibb.co...]
Also since may I cant seem to get my channels above like 2k views a day. As soon as I make a new channel I can get it to 1.5k using under 10 videos, meanwhile my old channel with 200+ videos still gets 2k views a day. Its extremely weird. Its like there is a per channel ceiling.

[KaseyM]

Seems to me an update occurred on Sunday for my niche - down maybe 20-30%

[renatovieira]

Things are quite strange today. My US traffic is gone... Another long day.......

[SnowMan68]

Home page came back sometime overnight.

[ichthyous]

Things are quite strange today. My US traffic is gone... Another long day.......

@Renatoviera Same here...a massive drop in USA traffic today....down 65% as of 10am EST. UK down 8%. Meanwhile, I gained one top 10 SERP today. Google is simply rotating the SERPS now, and it's not our day to be on top it seems. That's why others reported massive drops on other days...they are probably normal today is my guess.

[ichthyous]

With regards to the May update...I see in my niche that everything went to the same very large companies / sites with hundreds of thousands to millions of pages. Most of these are multi-million to billion dollar companies. Google clearly blitzed links as ranking signal...they count for much less than they did in May. My link count exploded as reported back by GSC...and I have had new links from high powered publications. It didn't change anything. I suspect Google will never revert to weighting links as heavily again in any future update as they need to get away from links as a main component of ranking pages since they can be spammed so easily, or purchased.

Does anyone have any idea of whether social media follower count is having any influence on the algorithm these days? Does having a larger following on FB / Instagram / Twitter change anything? I know that youtube directly correlates since Google is loading the SERPS with videos now.

[Webweeb]

Only testing groups can tell you if social moves the needle. - They are about the only ones who can still manipulate the algo easily.

Only reason why I have not joined them yet is because I'm 100% sure that my niche is bugged and therefore its useless anyways.

But from what I hear it can still easily be manipulated if you know how it works.
And practice confirms that. Upload any PDF onto a .int .gov .edu and it will rank #1 for just about anything. Probably becasue of Covid. Even if the PDF is about teddy bears, Google does not care. Its from an authority, therefore rank it even if its obvious fraudulent spam.

[MayankParmar]

"Every year, we make thousands of improvements to Google Search, from advancing our ability to understand language to introducing new features that organize the world’s information in useful ways. We’d like to invite you to tune into our Search On livestream on Thursday, October 15 at 12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET where you’ll hear about the latest ways that Google is harnessing the power of AI to help people understand the world around them" ~ [twitter.com...]

Interesting... we might learn more about the core update after this event :)

[mzb44]

Google clearly blitzed links as ranking signal...they count for much less than they did in May.

I think it's the exact opposite.

Sites with monster link profiles dominate absolutely everything. And here I mean sites with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of domains linking out to them. And not just any referring domains but the majority being major and legit publications, universities government sites and so forth.

In other words, sites belonging to major mainstream news orgs, publications, institutions or government agencies. Only those sites are able to have such a gigantic and hugely authoritative link profile.

No link builder on Earth will ever be able to replicate the link profiles of such websites. The only single way to have such a link profile is for yourself to actually become one of those major sites, like TechCrunch.com, CNN.com, Healthline.com and so forth. It's not possible to fake or build a link profile like the ones of those sites. You need to actually become like one of those sites.

So, for 99%+ of the internet it doesn't really matter if they increase their link profile by 2x, 3x, 10x... etc. - how much would that be for most sites? 100 link to 200 links? 500 links to 5000 links? - These are still overshadowed by all those monster sites that literally have several hundreds of thousands of sites linking to them continually, on and on and on.

And it seems that Google since May is extremely heavily favoring those kinds of sites. It's probably a way for G to identify "mainstream and trusted sites", as generally, it's those kinds of sites that have those kinds of link profiles. In other words, it's heavily link based.

Now, the argument is if Google actually went way too far with this or not.

I'd say it did go too far.

I'd just like to show one example. Google for "best online casinos".

The #1 page is from TechRadar.

Why would Google rank #1 a random 400 word page from TechRadar, a site that does not deal with casinos and likely only has this sole page talk about casinos. Yet, it's #1 for probably one of the top 3 most profitable keywords on the whole internet.

Also, if you go to https:// www. techradar. com/best - you will see that they have hundreds of "best <keyword>" pages with thin content, most which do not actually relate to the theme of the general site. But they rank for everything.

Something like this never happened before May or before any of these core updates.

If you are one of these kinds of sites, you can today post about absolutely everything that makes money online, and you will immediately rank page 1 top 3 with zero effort, outranking specialized sites focusing on those specific niches with expert content for multiple years.

I am not convinced that this is a good thing.

Now, it seems that authority (whatever this may mean for Google) is the only thing that matters, something that is very likely based on backlinks.

It appears that for the past 20 years Google tried to figure out how to present the most relevant search results to searchers. This year, however, they appeared to have just said "screw that, big mainstream sites are the most relevant for everything, let's just rank those by default for everything and call it mission accomplished."

[MayankParmar]

@mzb44 The site that you just named is definitely being favoured by Google. Even unrelated pages from that site appear in the Top Stories as long as the keyword is on the menu.

For example: [twitter.com...]

[glakes]

you’ll hear about the latest ways that Google is harnessing the power of AI to help people understand the world around them

I'll pass on listening to Google spew more propaganda about how great they are. In reality, Google's AI is so stupid that it can't discern the difference between spam and truly authoritative websites.

[KaseyM]

[twitter.com...]

Everything is fine. Please move along.

[MayankParmar]

Easy fix: Restore backup from April.

[StupidIntelligent]

@MayankParmar - why particularly the month of April? Did your traffic decline start slowly from that month onwards?

[Steven29]

"Everything is fine. Please move along."

Ha that's strange, because it hasn't been working for me and now it does.

Something funny too, for some reason in the adsbygoogle.js script has this mentioned 10 times:

.wiki(dogs|how)(-fun)

Dogs how not fun?

var d = "\.wiki(dogs|how)(-fun)?\.";

[Athedian]

All I know so far is that today when I did a test search for air purifier review, most of the results came back listed sites from India. Nothing against India, just that, I'm not located in India....

So great job, Google. The AI definitely is doing its job. :D

[Webweeb]

I'll pass on listening to Google spew more propaganda about how great they are. In reality, Google's AI is so stupid that it can't discern the difference between spam and truly authoritative websites.

Googles AI is getting more stupid as they move toward machine learning. They will never be able to compete with actual God created human minds in any way, no matter how hard they try.

But they have the arrogance to think they can and right now they are failing spectacularly.

[jmorgan]

Yes, AI/algorithms will never be 100% accurate. You can try to get as close as possible, but it will never be perfect. That's why high-quality/expert human written/curated content will always be superior to a page with robot-scraped data/content.

However, when you're dealing with the amount of data that Google does, where are you going to find the manpower to manually review each and every web page on the internet as it relates to each and every possible search query? It's going to be up to the algorithms to sift through this and, ultimately, some spam and poor content will get through the cracks.

[mzb44]

@mzb44 The site that you just named is definitely being favoured by Google. Even unrelated pages from that site appear in the Top Stories as long as the keyword is on the menu.

Hah, this is funny.

They rank for "Apple Watch Series 6" in Top Stories with a completely unrelated and irrelevant article just because the site has a navigational menu item called "Apple Watch Series 6".

[twitter.com...]

This again reinforces what I said that since May authority/trust signals have been significantly boosted, likely to prevent misinformation sites from ranking. I just think they seriously overdid it.

But it seems like they are fine with it? If this is exactly why they did it then I can completely understand why there hasn't been a new core update. Things work exactly as intended.

I would not expect a new core update to "fix" this.

[MayankParmar]

@StupidIntelligent Before May*. Only after the May core update, spam sites are doing better.

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WordPress friends, Yoast's latest update is causing issues. Make sure that you all test the update on staging site :)

[MayankParmar]

The new secret sauce to improve your ranking: Reduce your bounce rate with redirect to your homepage when users press the back button. Users will never leave your site and rank will improve.

This method is being used by scrappers to rank better.

[StupidIntelligent]

Everything being quiet in this thread seems things have settled down for most people.

[samwest]

Everything being quiet in this thread seems things have settled down for most people.

Actually quite the opposite. Google has silenced us all by removing all hope of recovery.
"It's a tactic".

Traffic has been horrible and conversion non-existent.

[Neohippy]

I think everyone just got tired of giving the same 'wtf is going on?!' complaint.

[nomis5]

The new secret sauce to improve your ranking: Reduce your bounce rate with redirect to your homepage when users press the back button. Users will never leave your site and rank will improve

That technique has been around for a long time.

It drives me crazy. I mentally make a note of sites which do that and avoid them at all costs.

It is a technique which is at the bottom of the list if you want to keep users happy.

No! The latest secret sauce is the same as was five years ago. Keep your users on your website because the content is unique, well written and informative. Difficult to do, but that's the real secret - hard work and research.