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]

Guys, did anyone notice a big jump in semrush yesterday?

Look at the screenshot of my two sites in the same niche ----> [snipboard.io...]

[ichthyous]

@renato Yes, but it came after an equally big drop last week...neither of which appear to be connected to reality as traffic isn't being affected either way from what I see.

By the way...traffic is way down today, after being higher the last few days.

[edited by: ichthyous at 5:52 pm (utc) on Nov 18, 2020]

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Exactly. SERPS's and traffic remain normal.

[globalrminc]

I have a YMYL life site which ranks well getting about 450k users per month. Over the past 2 weeks I have lost rank BIG on many of my articles. Like down over 50 places. Yikes. Traffic down 30%. This all started for me the last week in October. I thought maybe election related but it's not really recovering at all. This site is well established and traffic and rank has been steady or growing for years. This is highly unusual and quite disconcerting.

[Athedian]

@StupidIntelligent - Things looking absolutely disgusting on my side here. I wish I can say I'm numb towards the bugs and glitches of Google (as well as the sheer manipulation of traffic from them) but I can't.

[topaz]

Ok, this week has been the worst it has been all year. Traffic is gone....

[MayankParmar]

Is Console delayed/slow lately?

[TalkativeEditorial]

It's getting a bit tiring going in this seemingly predictable circle now.
Seems like every odd week or so, something gets hit out of whack on the mobile indexing/tech.
Nothing changes with rankings (no more than the usual).
Traffic dies and GA does not track AMP sessions properly.
Lasts for anything for a few days for up to three weeks.
Rinse. Repeat.

Edit: And seemingly always coincides with issues on GSC.

Reporting delayed by two days, mobile weirdness started on the same day. Go figure.

[Athedian]

GSC delaying for 24 hours so far and continuing. Conversions completely dead. Whatever, Google.

[Dooku]

If a site gets deindexed in Bing and you post a request to index it again than their "human evaluators" will show up in your stats as "https://prod.uhrs.playmsn.com/UHRS/.........long url" and they are based out of Hyderabad India.

[Ankit_Singh]

Getting more fluctuations in ranking, and going traffic down from 5 November.

[ichthyous]

And right on cue today traffic has dropped like a stone. Tuesday's traffic was too good to be true. I have lost five top 3 ranking SERPs in the last 30 days, and gained ten top 10 spots. In my experience, once it falls below top 2-3 there is very little traffic to be had.

[insideout]

Google is going crazy.. Semrush sensor is up to 9.3 in France

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is green/blue everywhere.

[RedBar]

Definitely seeing strange movements, domain clustering and Pinterest back again!

The #1 spots seem unaffected right now for me.

[Athedian]

Another GSC reporting delay, conversion at 0, lots of spam traffic.

[ichthyous]

My UK traffic down 46% today, Canada down 31%. My main category landing page is down a whopping 71% today. This is just the new normal...any high traffic days will be followed by mysteriously large drops in traffic.

[strummer19]

Back to normal since 24 hours.

[jediviper]

@renatovieira
A big sudden jump in Semrush deosn't mean anything.
You need to crosscheck with other tools, like GA to make sure that this is an actual traffic jump.

Semrush or ahrefs can have some database changes that can cause this impression.

[renatovieira]

@jediviper

I know it. In my next post I commented that my SC and GA numbers remained the same.

The next day, the jump in the semrush disappeared. It was a bug.

[StupidIntelligent]

I believe Google does Index updates every Monday or Tuesday, which is why the rankings jitters for about a day or two.

[JesterMagic]

Customer service? You are not Google's customer, you are their product.

Actually you are both.. we are also the ones who click on the ads.

Any thoughts on my comment about the relative value of links post-May update?

@ichthyous Natural Links are still the most important part of ranking but from the sounds of it your links are not natural if you are paying for a service that can remove the links at a press of a button. Why you would want to be tied to a company that can hold you hostage like that is beyond me (I realize the irony in what I just wrote as I am myself tied to Google in a similar way).

Link services like this obviously are either buying link placements, using hacked sites, or creating bogus/spam sites all of which Google will eventually track down. Plus these type of websites are probably competing with you for keywords anyways. Don't use black hat techniques as it never lasts long.

[ichthyous]

@JesterMagic You are making a lot of incorrect assumptions. This is not a link service, nor are they spreading links across hacked pages, I would never dream of using such a risky service! These are very high authority marketplace sites which I pay to feature my products on. Those pages have backlinks from the products to my own site. Since I have hundreds of products featured on their site I have hundreds of backlinks. Multiply this across about 4-5 sites which are paid membership sites of various kinds. All very high trust / authority. The idea is not to create a link farm, but to sell the product on these sites, but some do allow you to insert backlinks.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic down 83% this morning, Canada down 36%...UK jumped back up +30%. None of this is normal...traffic does not swing that drastically from country to country without some major manipulation going on on the part of Google.

[StupidIntelligent]

@ichthyous - You could be showing on and off in top 3, for your most converting pages.

[ichthyous]

@StupidIntelligent I think so...my 2-3 top converting pages have seen huge drops in traffic this month, while the overall site has increased. Oddly enough though, today my top pages are seeing an increase in traffic, just not from USA and Canada. I have seen over and over that USA traffic can start very low and then make most of it up by the end of the day, but not an 80+% drop. This weekend traffic will suddenly be higher is my guess.

[TalkativeEditorial]

It's just so tiring having to play the constant guessing game called: Is Google up to something or is there a glitch/update/something Google has not noticed.

If we all saw these wild fluctuations in traffic and it chimed with a drop in rankings, sure - that I can live with.

But these ups and downs never matches with a rankings drop. In fact, at times it coincides with an IMPROVED ranking for some pages.

[RedBar]

My traffic levels are in the region I'd expect them to be coming up to US holidays, realistically for me it's a steady decline until the New Year and then, if it's anywhere near "normal", panic will set in for Easter deliveries, again!

[MayankParmar]

The holiday period is almost here... core update or any big update looks very unlikely at this point. I hope they utilize this extra time to fix the indexing issues that they have currently.

[zeus]

Anyone know when the this special update takes place from Google Dec-Jan. They said they would make some bigger changes. I could imagine that links will loose some credit and AI takes over.