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]

[NickMNS]

@petterijokelainen I was thinking of posting the exact same comment.

@Ichthyous
It doesn't really matter what you compare it to, the point is that you consistently and exclusively post about double digit percentage drops, week after week, and never or rarely about gains in traffic. This leads the casual observer to question how much traffic is left. I assume that your double digit losses are followed by more days without losses and even some gains, but you don't report on them. Which of course, makes your comments more about volatility than actual changes in traffic.

[MayankParmar]

Delayed console reporting, console bugs, and indexing issues is a new normal :)

[mosxu]

A fantastic number of zombies on my sites

[RedBar]

For my Googleday the last 6 hours of Friday evening were surprisingly busy with PVs ... maybe people getting the chance to look without any office disturbances? No idea!

[ichthyous]

I assume that your double digit losses are followed by more days without losses and even some gains

@NickMNS Yes this is correct, but the days with steep losses far outweigh the days with gains this entire year since the January update. It was recovering in April, then the May update just trashed my traffic. The overall effect is much lower traffic. I generally don't post as much about days where traffic recovers because there aren't as many. My last posts about increasing traffic were the week of the May 4th update, when traffic suddenly was quite a bit higher. That vanished within six days and now I'm hitting new lows. UK traffic, which has been strong for most of the year, has dropped through the floor this week. USA traffic is also weaker, but tends to recover later in the day so one never knows how that will end up until day's end.

[webdev29]

December's core update is a social pandemic...There is no more interest in making quality content because self-generated text punctuated with keyword stuffing rank better than natural content and greyhat techniques are much more profitable than white hat... Internet users don't even need to visit your site to get an answer anymore, Google takes care of looting your content and keeping the user as much as possible in its interface by exposing him to ads that multiply at the same rate as Jesus multiplied the loaves...

Before the May update, it was still possible to create content and exploit it commercially thanks to Google.....Today, we create content, exploited by Google and for its own interest... The famous ""Make great content"" takes all its meaning.

[browndog]

I'm outranked by sites who have spun my content. This update caused a 50% drop in already declining traffic. I wish I could pay an SEO to help because I'm just so stumped. The site is fast, completely white hat, 20 years experience, I always aim to create great content and keep getting blow after blow.

[ChokenBako]

Looks like a small rollbacl on my site. Gained 30% during December Update. The last 3 days I lost 17% im average. Dont think it has something to do with christmas but with Google...

[MayankParmar]

My traffic dropped on Monday and it's still looking bad :(

[topaz]

They seem to have added quite a few new sites to Google News.

Also for the first time I'm seeing advertorials from established newspapers in google news ...with keyword "advertorial" in the title, I'm seeing forum threads in google news for the first time ...plus..a commercial webpage for a product.

[MayankParmar]

They've also added me to the Top Stories for longtail keywords with this update. I'm also seeing new sites in Top Stories and News. And they've also removed some spammy sites, which is good.

Forum threads and commercial product pages are appearing in News since December 2019.

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today. Holidays do not affect my traffic. The effect is the opposite, I get more users at this time. Anyway, there is something strange going on today.

Live Streaming, Global

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira I'm also seeing huge drops yesterday and today in all English language traffic...USA - 26%, UK -46%, Canada -40%, and my Australia traffic is almost zero now (-80%). I do normally see a seasonal drop around the 20th. Could be that it is particularly large this year, but other countries seem to be steady

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - I have similar numbers :-\

[Abaros]

During this update one of my sites has been overtaken by a site that has the message "End of service notice" indicating that it will stop providing service in July 2020, it has not been providing service for months now.

I think it's intentional on Google's part to keep sites below a certain threshold, they can't be that useless.

I have limited in robots.txt 60% of the pages of this site for Google, it is a site with about 20000 pages. And all the images.

If Google continues with its strategy, I will create 100 sites with 200 pages instead of 1 with 20000.

[Athedian]

A phishing, scrapper site that has stolen our site's content ranked #1 by using our brand name keyword and pushed us to #2 spot. And despite over 10 requests to Google through phishing report to de-index that scammer's site since late 2019, Google did absolutely nothing. Now this new Dec Core Update favors scam sites with keyword stuffing, broken 404 page links, and stolen content.

Now our organic conversions are getting hit badly because of this scam site using our name and layout and being ranked as #1. And ironically enough, the URL displayed below the search result is a Chinese URL, not even close to our site's URL.

I'm soooooo tempted to start doing blackhat SEO as whitehat SEO doesn't mean crap anymore.

Great job, Google, great friggin' job.

[ichthyous]

Now our organic conversions are getting hit badly because of this scam site using our name and layout and being ranked as #1. And ironically enough, the URL displayed below the search result is a Chinese URL, not even close to our site's URL

@Athedian...by any chance did you notice suspicious chinese traffic to your site before this happened? I have these bursts of traffic from china hitting my site periodically. The visits are from IP addresses all over the country and hitting all different pages of my site, usually around 50 visits at a time. It seems like some sort of long-term effort to index or scrape my site..but it's shown as visitors not bots. When this starts (if I catch it) I block all traffic from china for a time to stop it.

[Athedian]

@ichthyous - Not entirely suspicious but they are mixed in with other visitors. We didn't have huge bursts of traffic from China as you have experienced but the ranking impact can be felt.

The thing is, China has the firewall in place. So it really didn't make much sense for anyone over there to use VPN and starts scraping international sites to make money, as the VPN restrictions are getting tighter and tighter there from what I've read. Then again...

[MarvinG]

Since the December update traffic has dropped about 15%. But hard to see how much of this is caused by the update. My website is in the fitness / health nice. And every year traffic drops a bit in December because of the holidays and new years resolutions (people postpone change in their diet and exercise till January 1th).

Also we have a lockdown in Holland and all the gyms are closed. So it is explainable that less people are looking for information about these topics, since they can't go to the gym. Curious what my website will do in January and after the lockdown, when the gyms re-open.

[RedBar]

I'm pleasantly surprised by my traffic at the moment, a steady weekend and a good start just a few days before Xmas with several genuine enquiries, none US / EU I must admit.

Plenty of spam email emanating from France though :-(((

[Soulofmonk]

Request Indexing tool might come back by the end of the year[https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-request-indexing-disavow-tool-30633.html]

[ichthyous]

Interesting @RedBar as my UK traffic was off by 55% yesterday and USA was off by 27% by end of the day. Today is starting even lower. Could be the disparity between industries...the shopping period for my business is already over until mid-January. There wasn't much of one anyway this year, only tepid inquiries by low budget customers who bought nothing in the end. Even though the stock market is booming here, nobody seems to be spending on higher priced items that I can see. This year was perhaps worse than 2009 in terms of the % of decline in sales.

[Rageboi]

Low UK traffic could be because of the new Covid strain scare. Maybe most of the people are watching news/browsing news related to Covid 19, hence the drop in views?

[saladtosser]

Some of you may be better of taking these examples directly to google search liason Danny Sullivan, after that's whats he's paid for?

[Abaros]

@saladtosser

I could tell google that an objectively bad site has overtaken me (read my previous comment), two things could happen:

1 - They ignore me.
2 - They remove the site and put another one on top of it, the same or worse.

We are not here to help google create a search engine (or whatever they try to do), we have business and google doesn't care about us, or we care about google as much as google cares about us (nothing).

The problem is that everything seems to indicate that google limits traffic to sites, and that... they already know.

[Abaros]

I will try to explain better my previous comment.

Let's say I have a site that was in the first position and google demotes me to the third position by putting two spam sites on top of mine.

Now I submit a spam report and I win the lottery when google does not ignore that report, removes those sites, and google puts another two sites on top of mine, and my site is still in third position. Google already knew I was in third position, that won't change.

It is a mistake to think that you have lost positions because of spam sites, scrapers, etc. You've lost positions because google thinks you deserve to be in position X.

Years ago, a good work, a good site, quality content and all those #*$!s, could help you to raise positions in google, today, do not bother, if you are not a great brand ... you are nobody ... no matter how hard you work.

Those of you who submit spam reports are working for free for google.

[Tech4]

Totally agree with Abaros. I see the same in SERP. My website is #7-9 in the list no matter which query I type. This smells like domain rank factor is crucial today.

I faced approx -30% in traffic since December 19, 2020.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Is GA behaving strangely for anyone else? I know the tools have been pretty unreliable and inconsistent for a while now, but I'm getting one of those weirdly out of whack spells where the real time total is just completely inaccurate

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

I'm going to make a forecast for this two week Xmas holiday period in that my traffic will be higher than the extremely low I usually experience.

I feel that many who have not, or will not, travel, may generate more PVs etc ... I doubt it will drive more enquiries however we do supply some countries that do not celebrate Xmas which is always a bonus!

[Athedian]

@TalkativeEditorial - not only real time inaccurate, the overall conversion tracking seems to be really whacky right now. Google Ads and Facebook campaigns all showed increase of conversions and yet, Analytics is not grabbing the conversions properly. The tags are firing properly and installed properly. They've been there since 2014.