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]

[KaseyM]

@stupidintelligent Ahrefs has be up - couldn't be further from the truth.

[glakes]

Semrush is as green as a spring-happy tree.

I think their SERP monitor updates only once or twice a day as most other public SERP monitors do.

[MayankParmar]

So those with AMP are whitelisted from the core vital update even if their desktop site is slow and pages are red in the console?

[Athedian]

I have never seen conversions being so bad before. Before all these horrible updates by Google, conversions were stable and they were improving based on the strategies that we used. Now it's like we're falling under the whim of Google. I don't know what to do anymore. I've tried everything I can. I've read through everyone's posts and suggestions and did just about everything that I could. It's infuriating.

Update: Did more investigation and checked with our colleague, seems like a core vital penalty is in play right now, despite Google saying they will be rolling it out by May of 2021.

[goodoldweb]

I think it is safe to assume that a major (BAD) update is taking place just by looking at the level of traffic to this site.

I am here the first time after about 7 months to check what might be causing the fall in conversions (to 0) across all my 6 online shops. From Jewellery to Electronic components. Sales are off a cliff in the last 3 weeks or so. Even my eBay sales have "suddenly" dried out.

Google is an absolute disgrace of a search engine, clearly abusing their overwhelming power. That's all I can say really.

[MayankParmar]

This is unbelievable. Discover is zero in all region. It never happened before.

[RedBar]

Not seeing anything other than the normal shuffling around of the SERPs in my sector.

Those who are seeing movements, in which general sector are you? Health / news?

[Dooku]

@Goodoldweb, I hear the same from other ecommerce website owners also that conversions are really bad. The quality of traffic is just completely cr@p. Some of my sites are ecommerce and the same thing is happening, BUT mostly from G traffic. Traffic from other sources still converts decently. But then again the holiday season is starting and I know that G enables their "holiday season" algo each year to scoop as much of the profit away from anyone else into their own system. Not even an extinction level disaster will stop G from doing that, let alone some small pandemic nuisance.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Anyone else using AMP noticed that old dates are being displayed in the SERPS as the published date? I know there was a similar bug years ago, but just started noticing this on some posts.

[MayankParmar]

Delayed indexing (10-15 minutes) to get posts indexed and delayed indexing in News tab as well. This is all so frustrating and annoying. Wish I hadn't started the site, life would have been better.

@TalkativeEditorial I noticed that date issue on sites with infinite scrolling.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Hrm, turned off infinite scrolling a while ago because the date issue is a sort of known problem. Doesn't seem to be a reason (is there ever really a reason?) for why some posts are showing older dates and others not.

[optimist]

I just keep seeing a downward trend in organic and my competitors keep changing my citations they change the phone number and GMB listing title often. I even complained to GMB, then it stopped - temporarily. I'm wondering if Negative SEO is a factor here, went from Page 1 to past page 3 in Oct and each update gets worse including nov.

[shadowlight]

Im on page one ranking 1 or 2 on G (keeps jumping around) and conversions arent great either.

Thank god its not bing we rely on though, they are becoming even worse than G. A lot of kw on bing only have 4 organic results.

[arfmedia]

Hi, I found this discussion while searching on google. I am facing the same problem... for over a year now, the traffic still the same. No matter the big effort I put into new content creation or updating old content.

I'm trying very hard for several months, now, I am working on a NEW website that I will launch in Feb. 2021.

Part of my strategy is also to delete the best content I have from the old site (that is not working anymore) and merge it to the new one after some months.

Not too much I can do now... so I decided to start working on a new one.

[Athedian]

@RedBar - Education.

It's not so much of a shuffle as SERP shows same rank, same position on the results. It's the massive amount of spam traffic that Google decides to throw around to our side here. Seems like the ranking can remain the same but the traffic quality can become as bad as how Google wants it to be, ie. giving a bunch of irrelevant traffic to a site that has nothing to do with that those people are searching for.

[MayankParmar]

Discover is completely dead in all regions. This has happened for the first time. They did some updates for sure.

New posts have stopped ranking in Google News apps or site. Unbelievable.

[Athedian]

Could be the Core Vital starting. Friend of mine said it seems like he's getting hit by a Core Vital penalty right now.

[widgetized]

I'll contribute to the reports here: this week has been terrible so far, 0 conversions since 8 November, and a lot of spam coming in.

On the other hand, the end of October and the first days of November have been great, traffic converting every day, etc.

This kind of pattern is not new in my experience, things get super positive right before Google makes some changes / updates.

[MayankParmar]

It's really looking like a rollercoaster ride for me. Something in their algorithm is trying to push me down. Here's the timeline:

- In the first week of August (when their update caused indexing issues), my Google Discover traffic in the US and UK tanked. I was literally the first person to report this problem. Others were hit eventually.

- In late September, Google incorrectly deindexed my pages due to canonical issue. I was again the first person to report this problem. It was acknowledged and fix later.

- In October, pages were reindexed and Discover traffic started improving. I was on the path of complete recovery.

- Now, I am hit with another issue. New posts published after November 9 are no longer ranking in Google News and Discover. Hits from both channels are zero in all regions. In Google News, the pages show up if I enter very very specific keywords, so it's not an indexing issue.

Before anyone questions the quality of the site, here's some insight: My site is regarded as one of the industry experts in the niche with accurate reports and leaks. Every single day I am cited by top publishers. I have backlinks from all top USA and UK publishers. Citation and expertise in the niche should be enough to prove authority, but still, Google's bugs/updates are hurting the site.

Why is Google pushing me down with odd issues like this?

[ichthyous]

Could be the Core Vital starting. Friend of mine said it seems like he's getting hit by a Core Vital penalty right now.

I actually think this might be the case. Recently I updated my WP site and made huge efforts to remove a lot of unused JS and CSS, etc to bring up the page score. All of my content pages are now 'moderate' where they were 'poor'. My category / landing pages are still rated as poor due to CLS issues etc. Well, as soon as search console reflected the changes my traffic switched away from category pages to content pages, despite all the most important links going to the categories. I think this may already be more strongly factored in than suspected.

[StupidIntelligent]

Amazon mobile vital score comes to 39. Yet, it ranks first for hundreds of thousands of shopping-intent queries.

[i.imgur.com...]

Page score is just a small part of the cog.

[NeapTide]

@StupidIntelligent you are forgetting that Google has different approach towards monster inc. like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc. They are exempted from all such non sense core vitals. These are only for small guys like us.

[NeapTide]

On my site Cumulative layout shift is high 0.39 sec field data (while according to pagespeed insight test it's lower than 0.193 sec and within acceptable threshold) which is purely caused by Google Ads that I have placed above the fold and are very helpful in generating revenue from Adsense.

But Google has decided to f*ck up traffic due to this CLS issue which is not even actually an issue, at least it wasn't a year ago.

Other than that page load time even on mobile without amp is 0.7 Sec and so no issue there.

I mean what the heck Google wants from us? There is no way for us to bring LCP / FID / CLS time to 0.000 sec because it's not possible at all in real world.

Really tired of this crap.

[topaz]

It's not even possible to achieve low LCP, TTI with AMP right now since the whole runtime has to load before critical things like hero images. amp-wp is supposed to fix that, but nothing yet.

[ichthyous]

I saw an update of my Core Web Vitals out of the blue and the majority of my desktop pages went from yellow to green, while mobile went from red to yellow. Today my traffic is up 25%...USA up 38%, UK up 43%. Bounce rate is low at 60% Something is definitely up...I hope it will last but unfortunately the pattern this year is up a few days, they way down again.

[Athedian]

@ichthyous - yeah it's clear there's a correlation between horrible traffic and low conversions with the Core Vitals. Because how is it that page ranking remains the same, but everything else has gotten worse? If, let's say, that penalty comes from search engine algo, then we'd see SERP changes quite clearly. Yet, despite GSC showing page ranking flux and gradually dropping, keyword searches on Google shows site ranking / positioning remains the same (least for me).

So when you look at Core Vital reports, you'd see how badly it ranks your site, then you look at the traffic that you get, you'd see either a drop in traffic or an increase of spam traffic. Seems like the penalty from Core Vital would be: if your page speed isn't up to its standard, it gives you the worse of everything.

And regardless if Google said they're officially launching Core Vital May of next year, it's "officially launching". It could very well be that it's fully launched and now in the testing phase. And during this phase, Google starts randomly throwing various types of traffics toward the sites to see how it holds up.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MP

You're not alone, if that helps. Even some multi-national retailers are being impacted by what appears to be a hangover from either the canonical/mobile indexing issue or a completely new one where redirects are being completely ignored. And yet when they are approached about it on Twitter people are either ignored or seemingly shrugged off as being some random LQ site and told to go to the forum where people can give them another copy and paste reply.

I mean, I know there are a lot of chances on social media and the forums who all think their sites should be top, despite being trash, but as we have seen from the September mobile indexing issues (which took WEEKS for them to notice and acknowledge, DESPITE people telling them something was up), it'd be really helpful if there was a clearer/better process to follow when people who know their sites notice unusual patterns.

[JesterMagic]

you are forgetting that Google has different approach towards monster inc. like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc. They are exempted from all such non sense core vitals. These are only for small guys like us.

I highly doubt it. As said above, page score is just a very small part of the algo. These large sites have such a huge catalogue of backlinks that it makes smaller ranking factors moot (because these are so much smaller % wise when weighted against other factors).

The reason why that smaller sites may see a bigger jump in ranking when they improve their page score when compared to other similar sized sites, is because with such a low number of backlinks these other factors become more important to the algo.

Google has probably 100's of ranking factors. People tend to concentrate on just a few of them like EAT, Page Score, Backlinks, Quality Content. We all have issues on how Google determines these (What is a good backlink and what does Google determine as spam for example). The main thing comes down to how each of these ranking factors are weighted, and then how Google determines them.

For example Google may weight the ranking factors like this:
Backlinks - 50%
Quality Content - 40%
Page Score - 2%
EAT - 2%
Rest of Ranking Factors - 6%
= 100%

So a monster site like Amazon with so many backlinks probably ranks at 50% for backlinks and maybe page score is only 0.1%. Already they are at 50.1% to that number 1 spot. Your site may have a perfect page score that equals a full 2% of the ranking but has only a couple of good backlinks which when weighted only makes up 0.5%. Your total is only 2.5% so you have a long way to go to beat Amazon to get that number 1 spot.

(This is obviously a simplified approach to looking at ranking factors and how they work)

[renatovieira]

I have developed hundreds of sites since 1999. In my humble opinion:

Backlinks - 85%
Quality Content - 10%
Page Score - 5%

[arfmedia]

About backlinks: a member in this discussion reported the site has hundreds of high-quality backlinks and nothing happened in terms of results.