Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2020

[RedBar]

The following 11 messages were cut out of the October 2020 thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5011839.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton



My numbers are in for Occtober 2020:

Global B2B Melded Sites October v September 2020 +8.68%

Melded Sites October 2020 v Sites 1+2 October 2019 +418%

The last week of October was much quieter with, seemingly, no SERPs changes. I am expecting lower traffic levels during Npvember and December.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:51 pm (utc) on Nov 2, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

[glakes]

Semrush is reporting some movements

As it is here in the USA as well. Google's election algo can be suppressed until next year and next up is Google's holiday algo where they pump the SERPS up with Amazon crowding. With most sellers on Amazon living in China, it should help the Chinese economy rebound...

[ViktorN]

so far huge decrease in traffic today (especially US traffic). I suspect (and hope) there is a relation to the elections

[ichthyous]

so far huge decrease in traffic today (especially US traffic). I suspect (and hope) there is a relation to the elections

I'm seeing the same thing, but it's early here. USA traffic has been way down since the weekend. I'm sure the election has something to do with it, but seeing that only my home page and my top landing page have been affected I think an update at Google is more likely, otherwise it would be an across the board drop. I have had a sustained drop in just those two pages since the weekend and during that time the SERPs have bumped up and down...today I lost five top3 ranking terms.

[MayankParmar]

Just had a delay of 25 minutes in getting a new post indexed in the news tab of Google News.

[glakes]

I think an update at Google is more likely

Both SEMrush and RankRanger SERP monitors indicate a Google update is occurring.

[shadowlight]

Massive increase in bounce rate, and after some quick investigation, found out that Google had decided to direct useless, irrelevant spam traffic to the site, forcing the bounce rate for a lot of our pages to be 100% with 0 second session duration.

So if it's 100% bounce rate + 0 second session duration, it's obvious Google's screwing with traffic with broken filters and algos. Not only that, conversions totally tanked last night (11/2), with over 50 pages de-indexed. I've checked our page speed, it's fine. There's no slowdown at all. No 404's as well.

Absolutely disgusting corporation

Same here, October was an ok month for me. November so far......dreadful.

Not quite 100% bounce rate but bounce rate up 20-30%, very little conversions, load of crap.

This is for a keyword that I know converts and has done for a decade or more.............when Google arent messing about with their shady tactics and it is a number one result on page one. So far today, 0 conversions.

It has nothing to do with any election as its UK based.

[ichthyous]

My traffic has surged today, but from Turkey, Egypt, India, Philippines, Nigeria and Republic Of Korea. A lot of that is suspect, they visit the exact same page over and over for days on end...I am blocking the IP addresses from Turkey especially as no real user has that pattern. My USA traffic is down 65% today at 10am, after multiple days of double digit decreases. Not a single conversion or inquiry since last week. As I mentioned, all of the decline seems to be targeted to just my home page and my highest traffic landing page. Is anyone else seeing this pattern?

[RedBar]

Not seeing much movement other than a couple of old Pinterest pages moving down, one is 7 years old the other 3 and both refer and link to my image at #1.

[Athedian]

Massive drops in conversions compared to the same month of last year. Traffic's also way down as well. Keywords kept on disappearing and pages were de-indexed for no reason.

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is again reporting movements in Europe. Seeing some movements.

[renatovieira]

Massive drop yesterday. Today things remain terrible. Something big is going on.

Live streaming cameras, global

[webdev29]

@renatovieira Same here (FR), -80% trafic yesterday, -90% today...Now i ony see marketplaces and very big websites on the 30 first results of the niches that i'm checking ! semrush sensor is still high today, SERPs should continue to move a lot this week

[ichthyous]

This entire week has been a train wreck...my USA traffic is down since Monday from 13-25% below the norm each day. My SERPs did drop but seem to have gained back most of it...I'm down 4 Top3 terms this week. The election is definitely distracting people here, not sure if that's it, but it is only USA traffic.

Meanwhile I am busy blocking odd traffic from Turkey which is repeatedly hitting the same page every day, and also had a huge spike in visits from China in one hour this morning...they hit the page and don't stay long, but it was from all different IP addresses all over the country. Has anyone ever seen a scraping attempt where each page is fetched from a different computer / IP address? All are running Chrome, most on Windows but some on Android, and all under 10 second visits. That would have to be something like a coordinated indexing / scare or DOS attack from a Botnet wouldn't it?

[webdev29]

@ichthyous there is a lot of scraping from china, especially because of search engines like Baidu. In case of a Ddos type attack (Botnet etc.) it would be much more violent. you should check ip range to qualify your trafic or why not, a simple reverse dns on these may help you.

Since Google uses BERT and implements A.I i in a massive way in its search engine, it is able to qualify the traffic in a (very) precise way and its attention (informative/purchasing). I'm sure that the increase in bounce rate and zombie traffic is due to Google's advances. Indeed, what could be simpler for them than to optimize the SERP of a keyword to promote clicks on ADS. Strange thing, since May, Google's turnover has increased by more than 14% ... The mediocrity of the SERP and the increase of the bounce rate is something wanted, and I'm convinced that this will not change after the next hypothetical core update...or maybe in worse ?

[samwest]

For whatever your rank you can expect a certain amount of traffic. In so much as your rank holds steady, the amount of traffic should really not change much.

Sure wish that was true. My rank "appears" solid, but daily / weekly traffic levels have no pattern whatsoever, yet volume is adequate. Like I said, back in the "good old days" it was the same every week...for years. Now it's a daily traffic casino, but mysteriously always seem to amount to the same conversion amount by week end. That's what I mean by quota.

Large drop yesterday, for obvious reason. Today is struggling to get even half way there.

[GoodKush]

@renatovieira Same here (FR), -80% trafic yesterday, -90% today...Now i ony see marketplaces and very big websites on the 30 first results of the niches that i'm checking ! semrush sensor is still high today, SERPs should continue to move a lot this week

Welcome to my world. Parasite spam? Same here first actual websites usually are on page 4.
I still believe its a bug. A half year old bug.

[webdev29]

@GoodKush , nope, the link profile of the websites are 100% clean, nothing to report on this point apart from the Russian roulette of Google :/ lets see how its evolving following days !

[hitendudhatra]

On 3rd & 4th NOV, my main keyword was in the 6th-7th position. From 6th NOV that keyword is on 16th number.

[MayankParmar]

Scrapper scrapped my article on a service's outage and the legendary Google, which always favours great and unique content, decided to highlight the scrapper in Top Stories above me! The scrapper has thousands of copied content and they even have "This article first appeared on..." at the bottom of their post. And they're getting a lot of clicks by outranking me using my own article!

This is getting ridiculous. Google is the most incompetent search engine. The 'feedback' link never works and DMCA is not the solution.

[nmbrsk]

[imgur.com...]

I've been in the SEO game for years, but took a long hiatus before returning by re-launching my old website. Between January 2018 and December 2019, the site rose from 0 unique visitors/month to an average of 150k (highest-ever for a month was triple that, but to be fair it was a fluke good month due to events in my niche). From the outset, I didn't purchase any links and neither did I employ any blackhat tactics.

I was hit by a negative SEO attack in December last year. My keywords halved from 6k to 3k pretty much overnight sometime in January. It fell even further to 2k in February and again in May, but since then I've slowly managed to build my keywords back to around 3.8k. Nothing to brag about, but I'm hoping the next update gives me a bigger boost as I'm a bit at a crossroads of what to do.

I have a full-time job outside of this and the workload I've put on myself is unsustainable. Seeing the site crash in January was disheartening, to say the least, for plenty of reasons. None more so than the fact I'd created the original website back when I was a 12-year-old boy, to then re-launch it years later and for it to be successful enough for me to buy a house with the income.

I relied heavily on my search traffic, so the lost rankings translate to my users being down from an average of 150k to 50k a month (if I'm lucky), my page views from around 350k to 120k, and my income... well, the less said about that the better! My income is down 70% on this time last year.

I have a full-time job now, so really, if the next update or two see more decreases or more of the same, it's probably time to pack it in.

[webdev29]

for all those who have problems since November 2-3, know that there is again an undeniable bug in our very dear google...We are many SEO in France to have noticed the deindexation of random pages and this explains in part the traffic problems (in addition to irrelevant SERPs in some niches). This time as the indexing tool is no longer available, it will be complicated to force the pages to be re-indexed.

[JesterMagic]

Seeing a high number of hacked sites in the SERPS for my niche lately.

One of the hacked site is a .org wordpress site that is an European association for medical equipment. Absolutely nothing to do with our niche but for some reason this site ranks really high for blog posts that have been added that when you visit automatically redirect you to some other site.

[GoodKush]

So not only is my clients niche full of spam, no new pages are getting indexed either.

Search Console says its indexed, but there is no way to find it in Google. So for all practical purposes not indexed. All the social posts and pictures promoting the post show up, but the post is nowhere.

That's basically the whole niche now. Posts/Spam promoting sites are ranking, but no sties are ranking. about 5 spammers are dominating the whole niche, 2 of them are blatantly criminal fraudsters all of them extremely shady.

[topaz]

Got several referrals from hume.google.com over the last three days on a site that was hit with 0 Discover traffic about two months ago.
That's the human quality raters at Google, right?

Discover was 80% of the traffic..still hoping for recovery.

[christianz]

I don't think human raters directly penalize sites. They just build a dataset of site -> score pairs for AI learning.

[MayankParmar]

Hume Google com is allegedly used by Googlers to edit knowledge graph, as per the second answer on Quora: [quora.com...]

[ChokenBako]

Strange thing happened today. Visits spiked up 133% compared to last week for about 3 hours than bounced sharply back to previous weeks levels. Did someone experienced the same?

[ichthyous]

@ChokenBako Yes, I saw the exact same thing. I had a huge surge of traffic from 10am-noon and was excited, then it dropped off and by end of day my traffic is a bit down.

[MayankParmar]

Scrapper got more than 20K views in less than 12 hours by outranking me using Top Stories. I know because they've views counter.

I checked the domain on Ahrefs and Ahrefs said it has only 3.6K traffic!? Turns out that it's a fairly new site but the domain is OLD with thousands of links from big publishers such as Business Insider. The domain is also Google News approved.

It's another expired domain scam and it again confirms Google's love for old domains with links.

Regardless of the domain's age and authority, they should not be ranked when every single page on the site is copied. It's only Google. I have never seen this happen on Bing or other search engines.

I've given up now. Nothing is going to change. They don't care about quality and original work anymore.

[ChokenBako]

For myself i came to the conclusion that no matter what you do, it will not affect anything on Google. I deleted 5000 pages and added actual content to nearly 2000 pages. Nothing happened. As I wrote before traffic remains the same since May. With the Spike yesterday it is clear that google controls your traffic and reduces it to a lower level even if it is good quality content.