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]

[renatovieira]

@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.

I agree 100% - I didn't have that traffic spike you had yesterday. But my situation is similar to yours.

Since may I have added 2,000 new pages and my traffic has remained exactly the same since may. No matter how much new, relevant and unique content I create. SC remains on an infinite horizontal line. Small fluctuations happen, but they are irrelevant.

It looks like my site hasn't received new content since may. Google no longer sees my publications and it certainly left me stuck in some filter.

There is nothing to do :-|

[RedBar]

I am definitely seeing movement on the first pages of my SERPs, I need to delve more to see if / how much I have been affected.

One thing is noticeable today, Saturday, email spam is way down, I've been getting all sorts of garbage this week!

[RedBar]

Ouch, just done a couple of widget searches in G.uk, first one not a SINGLE UK result, second one two UK results at 7 and 8!

To be honest ALL results were garbage.

[NickMNS]

@ichthyous and ChokenBako
I saw a similar spike at 5am EST today, it lasted only the hour. Traffic spikes to between 6 to 7X the regular traffic for that time of day. According to GA it was organic traffic and the landing pages were diverse and distributed as I would expect for normal human traffic. As of 6am traffic continued as usual. Strange...

[ViktorN]

Problem in GA, anyone else is facing? looks like the reporting is not showing well (opened the website on 4 devices, seeing 1 visitor on site).

[MayankParmar]

Analytics down for anyone? Seeing 20 visitors real time

[Zgaga]

Yeah. I'm also seeing a lot less real-time people as usual.

[insideout]

Indeed Analytics is not working properly...

[mzb44]

@ChokenBako & renatovieira - current consensus is that if you were negatively affected by a core update you will have to wait for the next one to see improvement if you made significant changes.

I know JM said you can "recover" before a new core update and I'm sure that's technically possible but there have been extremely few reports of this happening so far.

We just need to wait for the next core update. It doesn't mean that the changes you made so far are useless.

[DarkSilence]

I'm seeing huge traffic spikes on two of my sites for 2.5 hrs. GA shows it as direct traffic.

[RedBar]

Bearing in mind the significance of today I am not at all surprised by the extremely low traffic levels across all my sites.

[GoodKush]

Also saw traffic spike on one of my sites on the 6th. Same as August 10th, but much less intense.

[ichthyous]

I got excited to see a big spike in traffic yesterday, but it was mirage...today right back down and then some. My USA traffic is -23% today. Something happened last weekend and USA traffic has suffered all week. The elections are over so not sure if there was a minor update in the background, but it feels like it.

[Dooku]

From what I am seeing on the news the last couple of days about the elections in the USA I suppose for a large part of the population, unless it's essential stuff, going online to purchase discretionary items isn't a big priority at the moment.
Especially when you take into account the number of people who lost their job during this pandemic is twice as high as the total population of my own country!
So, the current traffic behaviour from the USA might not be entirely the cause of a (minor) algo update.

[MayankParmar]

Google Investigating Complaints Of Original Content Not Ranking [seroundtable.com...]

[GoodKush]

Its a buggy mess. My social media profiles are outranking me, scrapers are outranking me, my new articles are not searchable even using exact match text.

Google has no clue what they are doing. If something is not affecting multiple % of the index and every webmaster out there is screaming their lungs out, they are never going to fix it.

[rthree]

Mostly Indian 'trolls' who are backing each other up.. Indians even try to rank for Dutch pages, they are full of spam and luckily not ranked at all.

[christianz]

Google can hardly distinguish auto generated image spam sites from legitimate sites, much less determine which content is original content. For long blocks of text they could try (but will fail with improving text generation / spinning AI used by spammers), but for sites with different type of content (tabular data for example) they will never give due credit for website who comes up with that data first. Scrapers and those who put that data into (sometimes even auto generated) YouTube video will get all the traffic.

They are relying so much on AI, but AI works in both ways, spammers use it too.

[MayankParmar]

Users have raised valid points in Barry's article. Original contents should be ranked above scrappers and they do rank on other search engines, so it appears to be Google exclusive problem.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 3:53 pm (utc) on Nov 9, 2020]

[RedBar]

Traffic seems to be back to normal today for me however it's generally inconsistent now until January with many wholesale buyers only fishing for pricing for the New Year.

[Athedian]

Same keyword searched on Google, and my site ranked #2 or #3. Same keyword searched on other search engines, and my site ranked as #1.

Google sure knows what they're doing, especially their AI.

[StupidIntelligent]

@Hr365 - A general consensus is that a core update may not happen this year. At least in this thread.

Never say never.

[KaseyM]

Super volatile right now. Yesterday was very poor after a good weekend. US election threw my traffic off last week so hard to say what's going on.

[MayankParmar]

My Discover traffic is completely dead right now.

[StupidIntelligent]

@MayankParmar - Google may be suppressing Discover, as it tries to stop misinformation being spread on 2020 elections. It can't take any chances.

[insideout]

LOTS of volatility going on now....

[StupidIntelligent]

But Semrush is as green as a spring-happy tree.

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is literally blue in Europe for the first time in two months.

[RedBar]

Traffic looking stable with normal PVs for me however G has let a load of email spam loose from somewhere !.!.!

[insideout]

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search [webmasters.googleblog.com...]
get prepared guys