Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2020

[jacobjack]

Though there is not change in SERPs, traffic is down due to holiday season. Looks like in December, it will go down more.

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Previous Monthly Thread [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: goodroi at 10:55 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2020]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[mzb44]

Also if they admitted that because of COVID they made radical temporary ranking changes that favor huge authorities [...]

Exactly.

I think most will agree that covid might be a legit justification to push high-authority sites (maybe if it were in the health niche only and not across the board as they do it now, though). But something admitting to this would achieve is it would prove Google is willing to manually skew search results in a certain direction if given enough justification.

They will never openly admit to this.

Currently Google gets away with claiming the algorithm is neutral and it just looks for "quality".

Edit:

Also, there is no indication that any of these would be temporary. Both the May update and the December update directly follow the direction of all the previous core updates since at least 2018.
They just seem to gradually turn up the "authority site" signals (whatever those are) and update by update big sites go up, smaller sites go down.
This seems to be a planned process spanning several years back and is now gradually implemented update by update. Covid may have offered a great opportunity to speed this process up, actually.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Still, GSC should have never captured it. It's like the parameters were never followed by Google bots. Very frustrating. And the manual re-index button is still disabled.

Yup. My staging site was being use as the canonical version. And while using a local site is useful for most things, there are some tests that can't quite be replicated on it and it takes much longer to push live.

[mzb44]

It appears that the general public is starting to notice the decline in Google search quality: [reddit.com...]

Front page thread. 21k upvotes.

The timing of this post is also interesting. Seems like people are starting to become more aware of this after the December update.

Also mentions of "Pinterest spam", "generic unrelated content ranking" and "big site dominance" - interesting to see non-SEO people catching up to the same things we discuss here.

[Athedian]

And Danny will probably go: "Everything's fine. Here's a link for you on how to create a proper website with EAT."

[nmbrsk]

I guess it's my fault for having a site that relied on Google - but really, within my niche, there aren't many other options.

2019 was incredible (I even hit a new height of 420k unique users in one month). But 2020 has been absolutely tragic, ever since the January update. I made a slight recovery with the latest update - keywords went up by 1300 - but things seem to have reversed a bit again, at least with the more profitable keywords.

I was averaging around 150k users per month from Google searches in 2019. This year? 15-20k, if I'm lucky... This pretty much happened overnight sometime in January. My revenue has accordingly fallen from £3-5k per month to £300-£600 - only just covering the cost of running the site.

I'm giving it till the end of May for things to improve - otherwise I don't see how I can keep going. I have a full-time job so I'm financially OK, but hey, going from making £3-5k per month, pretty much on auto-pilot, to making less than half that while doing a traditional 9-5 hasn't been what I hoped for in 2020.

[jmorgan]

Breaking news: Google has crashed!

[robzilla]

From the Reddit frontpage: Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google? [reddit.com] Seems to be striking a nerve there. I'd have to agree that on certain very specific queries, the results have been less helpful lately.

Breaking news: Google has crashed!

Indeed. Google services knocked offline in rare outage [bbc.com]. No access to Analytics, Gmail, AdSense, YouTube.

[renatovieira]

Same here:

No access to Gmail, AdSense, YouTube.

Dead traffic this morning...

[TalkativeEditorial]

Maybe they turned the algorithm update off and on :-)

[TalkativeEditorial]

And right on cue (though the signs have been there since the 'reversal'), Google Discover feed starts surfacing completely outdated and irrelevant content from our site, obliterating the CTR and probably resulting in decreased visibility for a couple of weeks.

[ichthyous]

A lot of people are presuming that these core updates are all about Google trying to rank good quality sites organically and ensuring that their organic results are top quality.

Personally, i think these core updates are more to do with Google trying to make the maximum amount of money from users who perform a search. That is their main priority. That is the main goal of these updates. They dont want users performing a search, finding good quality organic content and clicking away from the search engine, there is no money in that for them.

Of course...everything has been blamed on AI and the ups and downs of machine learning...total nonsense. The reality is that Google is killing off organic search in order to force users to click paid links. Considering that there is no real alternative for most people, they will continue to use a Google devoid of good organic content and just click the paid links.

The US government (and 48 state attorneys general) may try to tackle this, but I doubt they will fix search in any meaningful way. Even if another brand (like Apple) were to start a competing search engine, who is to say it wouldn't be more of the same? Corporations maximize profits, and that is what Google is doing.

[ichthyous]

Thursday is when things took a nosedive for me too.

It's getting worse and worse actually...Friday, Saturday and Sunday all awful, but today so far is looking even worse for USA traffic, which is down 57% as of 10:45am. The only good news is UK and other countries are back into positive territory. My SERPS have not been stable, one day I gain 5-10 top places, and lose them next day...back and forth for days.

[insideout]

Today is a A BIG MESS

[namnek]

I'm experiencing the really odd changes today with this recent update, I was wondering if anyone was having similar issues:

After searching for only my "brand name", my homepage URL is not even ranking the 1st position. It has been replaced by our "About Us" page. I even tried internally searching (eg. site:www.domain.com + 'brand name'), the homepage is not even within the top 10 results)

I also noticed that some of our pages that were ranking 1st its target keyword pre-update have dropped and replaced by another URL (ie. the blog post about the topic).

[MayankParmar]

Discover is dead today

[browndog]

I'm not getting what I searched for.

Ie: 'is x (x being a very specific thing) bad for y' - results 'ten abc's bad for y'.

I had an article which was shared thousands of times, had hundreds of comments (until G told me the page was getting slow so I removed them), 2,700 words covering absolutely every aspect of this topic (with table of contents for those who don't want to read it all), and I've moved onto page two, the no. 1 result is 480 words, no author name, no references.

We keep hearing that we need to make good content, but when you do, it's outranked by thin content. The other no. 1 article I keep seeing over and over again is one I referred to in my last post, where the author admits she knew nothing of the topic until she started writing the article. My 20 years experience counts for nothing.

[Athedian]

@browndog - keywords, stuff them, backlinks, stuff them, take someone else's content, spin it around a bit to make it your own, make the page as simple and as short as it can be while offering no SEO optimization whatsoever, done. Dinner is served.

[saladtosser]

Is it new to have google ads in image search? Ive never noticed it before but shopping ads coming up all the time now....

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Is it new to have google ads in image search? Ive never noticed it before but shopping ads coming up all the time now....

It appeared on Mobile image search, 4 years ago, and progressively expanded to desktop.

Google AdWords Shopping Ads Now on Image Search (May 17, 2016)
[webmasterworld.com...]

New Google Image Search interface (Apr 22, 2018) . MrSavage mentioned he was seeing ads on desktop
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google Tries Shoppable ads on Google Images (Mar 6, 2019)
[webmasterworld.com...]

etc...

[RedBar]

Welcone to WebmasterWorld namnek

I'm seeing a more settled USA G.com SERPs, G.co.uk's still a bit bouncy with rankings only an algo could generate however a human would demote. By this I don't mean scraped or bad pages, simply pages that should be ranking for a different, more relevant query, but at least they're not re-directs or total garbage.

[BushyTop]

Seeing loads of change again at our end, UK, Automotive.

[Pranshu Sharma]

Google always Hungary for fresh content keep updating

[TalkativeEditorial]

Dunno man, I always thought they were getting a bit Chile about fresh content.

[petterijokelainen]

I like how Google gives, and takes.

Oh, I was going to attach a screenshot of my Google Search Console, but apparently this relic of a forum doesn't have support for attachments.

What platform does this even run on? Why not use something semi modern like IPS or XenForo?

[RedBar]

Oh, I was going to attach a screenshot

To stop newbies spamming one must have a minimum quantity of posts, not sure how many.

[seomotionz]

To stop newbies spamming one must have a minimum quantity of posts, not sure how many.

@RedBar Now ain't that a hypocrisy? !

"We don't want want the elderly or the ill people to get the virus. So, we are locking everything and everybody up".

And talking about Google. Is something happening now? Spammers, bots everything is on stop for the last 10 hours or so. Also there is a significant fall in UK traffic. I am wondering why?

[Athedian]

GSC hasn't updated for the past 21 hours. Everything's broken at Google.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Gosh, despite KW rankings improving steadily this month (gained a few additional top 10 places for 'evergreen' terms), we're back to levels of traffic as bad as they were during the mobile indexing issue back in September. Starting to think instead of playing by the book, we should just start accepting those paid-linkbuilding offers.

[MayankParmar]

Search console is delayed as usual.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Ok, it's actually hysterical how bad the SERPS are. What the hell are they doing? Had a genuine search query and couldn't remember the site where I'd spotted the solution before, but I knew it ranked high in the results. Instead, I got top five results with spun content trying to push really terrible software on people, complete with a made up author profiles - as in more than one - and a stock photo "author image", which is very easily detected with Google's own reverse image search. WTH