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]

[TalkativeEditorial]

Oh dear. Things are looking pretty dismal, seems the algorithm is confused again. Despite a sharp increase in average position (according to GSC - so their own data), our traffic has plummeted.

The good old 'show articles in Google Discover that are outdated by months and completely irrelevant now so we obliterate your CTR, despite the fact that there is more recent content which is indexed' seems to be back again, too.

[insideout]

IT'S A BIG MESS here ... ZERO traffic at moments :( Never seen that before...

[renatovieira]

@insideout - Same here. Today it is literally a rollercoaster. There are no traffic moments, and then peak traffic.

[MayankParmar]

Request indexing is back, which is good.

I'm again facing slow indexing today :(

[Hfzai]

Semrush still warm, as if google is struggling to make up its mind.

Traffic? Still decreasing :(

[worker]

On a single page, I'm seeing Pinterest results, Google App Store results, Fake results redirecting to p0rn sites, Fake results redirecting to unrelated sites, and VERY old sites.

I'm seeing these types of results on search phrases I test regularly and I'm seeing them on page one of Google's results, and further in as well, but to find the above on the first page of search results is what one might expect if some kid created a search engine for a science fair.

There are so many bad results, pushing good results down, that I can't wrap my head around it. The search results are so obviously bad that it looks like something someone would do if they were trying to hurt Google. It makes zero sense to me what I'm seeing.

[Athedian]

GSC still saying a few of my URLs are blocked by robot.txt. I double-checked it, totally incorrect. None of those URLs were in the robot.txt. Seems that Google can't even index anything properly still. And re-validation feature is still disabled. Damn Google.

[lxtlabel]

Oh, And indexing issues are back.

[TalkativeEditorial]

as if google is struggling to make up its mind.

Yep :-(

Never can understand how rankings can increase and everything and traffic can drop so dramatically. I'm not fully convinced the update finished rolling out.... or that it rolled out succesfully.

[MayankParmar]

Analytics delayed for me.

[Athedian]

Analytics delayed every day for me. I get conversions from the ads and other sources and Analytics is just not showing those numbers. If at all.

[TalkativeEditorial]

It's all just so.....strange. We're also seeing the moments of zero traffic that others mention.
Then, we'll see something pick up on Discover, perform well and then suddenly, it just vanishes. It's very hard when it is not clear what these metrics are that content/sites are being measured against.

[MayankParmar]

Yup, I have a similar Discover pattern. It's just not stable or normal anymore.

- Discover traffic for the US/UK/CA/AU disappeared completely in August after the August 10 glitch.
- I had the canonical issue in September.
- Canonical issue was fixed in October and Discover recovered in the US partially.
- Discover for all regions disappeared completely in mid-November and recovered in the last week of November, but the traffic from the US dropped by 50% again.
- Since December 14, Discover is completely dead in the US and partially down in other regions.

UK, CA, AU Discover traffic is dead since August 10 glitch.

This is for a site with all original content and regular citations from sites that appear in Discover with links to me :)

They'll never acknowledge that something happened in August and it was NOT a glitch.

[RedBar]

Tuesdat's traffic was not only busier than I expected but at 95% in Xmas week most unexpected. Traffic was its normal global mix.

I suspect that this may have to do mostly with the stay-at-home lockdowns in many countries v travelling etc.

Any other suggestions?

[TalkativeEditorial]

We have also seen sites that have straight copy + pasted our content (or large parts thereof) appear in Discover. It is very frustrating, because there is so little transparency or support for this product. And if the algo picks up an old article to try and put it under "in case you missed it" - it will often pick something which is just not relevant anymore (with fresher content available) - and that destroys CTR.

It creates a constant sense of panic thinking that there must be something wrong. Until we come here :-)

[RedBar]

What do plagiarists / scrapers derive when their sites do not carry any ads whatsoever?

If any of these goons were to be contacted about my specialist construction products their shortcomings would immediately be evident... well, the ones that have contact pages!

I once had a plagiarist contact me for information actually, believe this or not, purporting to be me :-)))

[TalkativeEditorial]

What do plagiarists / scrapers derive when their sites do not carry any ads whatsoever?

The end game is to have the domain approved for Google News/Ad Sense and then sell off the domain.
Because despite all the sophisticated and indecisive algorithms....these still get approved - with their stolen content and all.

That story of somebody pretending to be you is hilarious. Hopefully no damage done in the long run?

[RedBar]

That story of somebody pretending to be you is hilarious. Hopefully no damage done in the long run?

None whatsoever, firstly I fed them a load of BS info and within days this BS info came back to me from a potential genuine new client in Ukraine.

I then advised the client of ALL the information I had fed to this bogus company.

Needless to say he dropped them immediately and has been a client ever since. This story soon went around the industry worldwide therefore put everyone on their guard for such amateur garbage.

These people were actually trying to sell expensive, realword products at extortionate prices, not advertising etc.

[TalkativeEditorial]

These people were actually trying to sell expensive, realword products at extortionate prices, not advertising etc.

That's wild.

Meanwhile, Discover is now back up and running on some of the same content pieces that it dropped like a stone for whatever reason earlier in the day.

[ichthyous]

I started to see a noticeable uptick yesterday...the traffic trend increased in a straight line up from morning and peaked at the end of the day at 11pm. This morning traffic isn't down by nearly the numbers of the last few days, but a normal 10-15% holiday traffic drop. The traffic lows of the last week were extreme...something was up with Google again, it wasn't just the holidays

[MayankParmar]

There appears to be a weird Discover app bug where the first card in the feed will collapse when you scroll down and then go back to the top.

[renatovieira]

it wasn't just the holidays

I agree. And today things are quite bad.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Today I am seeing the same pattern and has recovered considerably from the previous down days. Searches are only down 8% overall today at 4:30pm EST. That is the norm for the holidays for me...about 12%-20% down from the 21st to the New Year depending on the day. You will probably start to see some recovery now. I do wonder what the hell was going on with huge drops in USA and UK traffic...

[Athedian]

Conversion sucked on Google Ads but pretty decent on FB. But I do see a slight (if ever so slightly) increase of traffic by around 10%-20% for the last few days. Page ranking also seems to slowly improve as well. I don't know if it's the plugin issue that I've fixed over two weeks ago or something else is affecting the pages. Seems that the Core Update hasn't really finished rolling out. That or they're making tweaks to it right now.

[RedBar]

I had an initial surprise when I first saw my metrics this morning with a normal weekday figure!

It didn't take long to suss that various Chinese search engines were doing their monthly crawl, all known and all acceptable for us since we do a lot of Chinese impex, otherwise it would have been a normal Xmas Eve, quiet.

[saladtosser]

Is "People also ask" under the first 1-3 organic results really a good UX? Should we put on our red widget page, people also asked for blue and green widgets? At the top? I 100% understand at the bottom of the page but this annoys me to see at the top constantly.

[worker]

I just did another test of one of the many phrases I test regularly and this time there is a search result on the first page of Google for a 4-word search phrase (which is pretty specific) and the search result redirects to a site attempting a malicious attack.

Norton anti-virus blocked it, but now, aside from just bad search results on the first page of Google (like Pinterest, Google App Store links and redirect results to p0rn sites), now there is also the risk of harmful links in Google search results.

Something is horribly broken in the Google search system where they cannot see the destination site for the results they display. They are being 'gamed' by scammers in a very big way and now in a dangerous way. I do not understand how they cannot fix these problems with the tech. they have at their disposal.

[RedBar]

Phew______Wow_____Dead Everywhere

[seomotionz]

@RedBar What do you expect?

Anyway, Merry Christmas people. I hope 2021 will be better for all of us.

[ichthyous]

Yes, quite dead since yesterday. Christmas is always slow, but this year is abnormally low. On the bright side, UK and EU have finally reached a trade agreement.