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.

[Steven29]

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

Or they are just deleting threads. I'm not sure why my post was deleted. Everyone is talking about all of this spam like:

"it would take 30 years to go through every page"

"It takes an average of 30 minutes to check a website"

Not in the links i'm seeing and reporting. They are so very blatantly spam, it would take no longer than 20 seconds to review and can basically be hammered down in a second. I myself have to "review" over 100 of these links daily as they show up in my Google Alerts now every day.

Heck, 90% of the them are .xyz domains and other irregular extensions with .html extension. The sites are all made in the past 30 days, from the same registrar, on the same cloudflare hosting with 10,000+ links in google all in less than a month.

I'll try posting again, as this usually means i'm onto something:

Does anybody know what happens when a spam complaint is sent in? Does it get read by anybody? If it does get read, does it get ready by somebody in the same country or is it outsourced to keep the costs lower?

If it's outsourced, you could see how this could bring conflict of interest especially with all that is going on.

No internet company should say "things are slower because of COVID", this is what we do!

On other news, Bangladesh has now surpassed India GDP.

[KaseyM]

Went from my worst day of 2020 on Tuesday to looking like one of my best ever today. What in the world is going on.

[samwest]

@steven29 - you have heard of algorithyms right? A decade ago, Gorg bragged about being able to sort a pile of pages 5 miles high in under a second. It's now all sorted and tracked by an AI thats either still riding the short bus...or a 5 mile long solid gold limousine. At 40 billion a quarter, I'll guess the latter.

Gates couldn't afford AQUA so Sergey probably bought it.. [forbes.com...]

This what they do with the billions harvested off the backs of millions of little guys...like us.
We've gone from six figures to subsistence wages in the past decade and working 10 times harder just to tread water on this platform.

The money went somewhere...

[ichthyous]

Big decline in USA traffic, -23% today and -14% yesterday. That's after several up days, and also I'm still gaining top ten SERPS while traffic is dropping. I would like to dismiss the gyrations, except for the fact that on down days I get zero calls or emails, so it's hurting my business big time.

[samwest]

Come on, this week has been a total loser...gotta be a ketchup day tomorrow

[jmorgan]

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

I think there were some noticeable changes in the SERPs (at least for me) in late September or early October. Funny that nobody else really mentioned or noticed it, although the SERP trackers like SEMRush were reporting quite high volatility at the time.

[MayankParmar]

Google has successfully manipulated the trackers/sensors - now we don't know if they did an update or there is a new bug ;)

[Athedian]

Great conversions yesterday, mediocre conversions today. Filters off, filters on.

Getting really tired of this. Well, happy 2020, everyone, when everything especially Google goes to crap.

[ichthyous]

I had a 40% decline in clicks between the 14th and the 15th. The swings are enormous these days...you get a few days of highs and a few days of lows. It's not really reliable to make a business when your site isn't found half the week. I have had zero new inquiries since the weekend, despite my ranking increasing.

I would like to know, has anyone actually seen a major improvement with a redesign geared toward improving all of the issues found under coverage? GSC keeps ranking my mobile pages lower and lower and there is nothing that seems to be able to fix it. I am considering scrapping my wordpress theme and starting from scratch with a new custom made faster theme.

[samwest]

Congratulations Athedian, you are the roulette wheel winner of the day. Over the past 20 years, this has gone for rock solid, stable, set-your-watch-by-it consistent conversions to what amounts to casino chances of a page 1 result getting any more than trickle traffic or a sales conversion. The manipulation is so obvious to us old timers. If they are trying to make us extinct, they are doing a great job. Problem is, that may turn around and bite them in the back side one day.

@ichthyous - exact same patterns here.

[Neohippy]

I don't see where it says major update next month anywhere?

Me either. It does hint at several changes, e.g.

"We’ll start rolling [subtopics] out by the end of this year."

"We’ve started testing [key moments in videos] this year, and by the end of 2020 we expect that 10 percent of searches on Google will use this new technology."

I'm starting to wonder if Prabhakar even intends on continuing to do / announce major core updates from now on, or if it's just gonna be the rollercoaster in perpetuity!

(Hope I got the quote coding right - first time! ;) )

[System]

Let's stay on topic and avoid personal comments :)

Split off some messages that were more focused on Google's Use of AI & Data Gathering [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: goodroi at 7:52 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2020]

[aristotle]

Did Google temporarily suspend the "request indexing" feature in GSC? Has this already been discussed here? I haven't had time to keep up with this thread for the past few days.

[frankleeceo]

@aristotle, yeah they suspended it without advance notice. Just like that.

[aristotle]

Thanks frankleeceo
That they would suspend this feature is very surprising to me. I don't remember them ever doing anything like this before. Have they given any reason?

[frankleeceo]

@aristotle, no public reason that I am aware of, the real reason is probably classified info haha (insert conspiracy theory).

The timing of it is really sensitive though in my opinion. Before US election. Amidst google indexing issues. And potentially extend through Christmas season. Their "few weeks" can become a few months.

[glakes]

Have they given any reason?

Yes. See: [twitter.com...]

We have disabled the "Request Indexing" feature of the URL Inspection Tool, in order to make some infrastructure changes. We expect it will return in the coming weeks.

[mzb44]

Could be because due to the indexing bugs the tool was overused by everyone, which resulted in a strain on resources?

[christianz]

That passage thing looks like another way to prevent users from actually visiting websites and encourage them to stay on google search result page. Like all those snippets etc.

[MayankParmar]

Anyone noticed that Google is now crawling and indexing search page that is blocked by robots.txt? They have indexed my "search_term_string" search page (https://www.domainname.com/?s={search_term_string})

The above page is linked by Yoast schema in all pages.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Google is now crawling and indexing search page that is blocked by robots.txt? They have indexed my "search_term_string" search page (https://www.domainname.com/?s={search_term_string})

How are you blocking this kind of URL , with your robots.txt ?

[rthree]

I got the same thing.. not with Yoast luckily (who use that anyway?)

You can just disallow: /?s={search_term_string} but i wouldnt do that.. it is part schema.org..

Google has to fix this, not you.

Just to rant a bit more on my previous.. we webmasters are helping Google too much... they want to play a search engine so they have to fix their problems, I even don't use canonical tags, as you just don't need them when you have a well working system. Forget robots.txt, if you really do not want something to be indexed then do not put it public.

[StupidIntelligent]

Passage-based ranking has always been there. That's what snippets are. They're just reducing the weight given to the rest of the page.

You could have fluff and one tiny thing that could be useful, and still rank. That's what it means.

Hackers would have a field day with this. Just insert "useful text" into a hacked pages, and rank away.

[MayankParmar]

How are you blocking this kind of URL , with your robots.txt ?

This is my robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /?s=*
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Allow: /wp-admin/images/

Schema.org:

:[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https://www.mysiteurl.com/?s={search_term_string}","query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}]}

I haven't made any changes, but they started indexing it recently. The page shows up only when I use site:sitename.com command with 24 hours or last 7 days date specified. It also doesn't show up when I use the site:https://www.mysiteurl.com/?s={search_term_string}

It should not be a problem, right? Just one page and it's blocked by robots.txt already.

[rthree]

I have the problem that Google is literally indexing /?={search_term_string} lol..

But like I mentioned I do not block anything.. Google is allowed to search in my search and it is doing so.. it finds funny result sets.

[MayankParmar]

In my case, they're only indexing /?={search_term_string} and not other search pages. They've discovered the link via schema and decided to index it for some reasons.

@rthree you do use disallow "/?s=*" in robots.txt ?

[JorgeV]

Disallow: /?s=*

Okay, I didn't know this was possible.

[samwest]

Anyone getting a blank page from GA today?

[MayankParmar]

Has anyone noticed a drop of 5-30 URLs in enhancement reports (AMP, Mobile Usability, Breadcrumb, Sitelink) in the past two three days?

[MayankParmar]

Delayed indexing issues are back for me again :(