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]

Just look at what they are doing in YouTube, which used to be fair playing field but now is dual-class cast system (corporate content floats to top).

Yes. And this is something that's officially admitted on record and treated as something absolutely normal. Their premise in this is it prevents questionable content from potentially being recommended to users, which then would generate bad press / liabilities for Google (election influencing, corona conspiracies, etc.). This does indeed come at the expense of independent, quality YouTube channels. But apparently they determined that this trade-off is worth it and it probably doesn't impact their revenues as much as we'd like to think. And I suspect that apart from marketers and a small minority of tech-savvy people the general public is completely oblivious to this and even so likely would not be bothered by this in the slightest.

The same principle is most likely valid for Search as well. It's the same company, after all.

[christianz]

Tech seems to have been butchered during this update.

I am tracking several tech niche sites that for the past 5-10 years were dominating but now all are bleeding and are taken over by the Techradars, PCMags, Comparitechs and all the other big name mainstream publishers. While the site in your example does have great metrics, it's not a "big-name" publisher like techradar and the others.

I am seeing the same in Auto. Autocars and Motortrends of the world are eating all queries, regardless of relevance. Even if I had insanely specific and narrow niche site, lets say, steeringwheelcircumference.com which provides largest set of data about steering wheel sizes and all kinds of lists and info about this one subject, I would still get eaten by Autocar if they merely mentioned "steering wheel circumference" in one of their posts.

Absolutely not helpful for users, only helpful for large media companies.

This kind of anti-competitive regime used to be confined to broad keywords and YMYL sites. Now its expended to screw independent publishers everywhere.

I don't understand how there was so little pushback after the first EAT & YMYL update. As if everyone assumes it is OK to monopolize entire health vertical to two websites.

With no pushback, the frog boil will continue.

[mzb44]

I don't understand how there was so little pushback after the first EAT & YMYL update.

Because they started with the actual YMYL topics only where it was not controversial.

Now they gradually, core update after core update, roll the same thing out generally across the board.

Also, like I said in the previous post, the general public is completely oblivious to this and even if they weren't they would not care. We only care because it's our jobs to care / think about Google and its updates.

And all the important media publications that could potentially push back are actually loving all of this, as it's them who benefit from it now. Just look at the number of big mainstream media sites that in the last 2 years began posting all kinds of affiliate "best x" keyword or "x review" pages that are completely unrelated to their sites but still rank top 3 everywhere.

And finally, big name SEOs and SEO influencers also love this, because now they are being hired by these sites and publications to work on these projects as consultants. No blame here at all. You gotta do what makes money. None of us are here on a moral crusade. This is a profession like any other and you go where the money is.

[not2easy]

I apologize for the edits. Several posts needed to be removed from this Google Updates and SERP Changes discussion due to the discussion of a specific website.

We try to avoid discussing specific websites because of the distinct possibility that their owners might be members of WebmasterWorld. I'm sure you would object if people here were reviewing your own sites in the same negative manner. You are welcome to discuss any unrelated issues privately via StickyMail.

Please try to stay on the topic as outlined in IMPORTANT - The Focus of This Forum [webmasterworld.com]

Your overworked Moderators thank you.

[Dooku]

@not2easy moderator, thank you for the explanation, much appreciated.
It appears my post caused some turbulence :-) If I offended ANYONE, I do apologize sincerely.

I should have posted statistical data as a comparison between different websites instead to prove my point, sorry for being lazy.

[samwest]

It's been at least a month since my last post...struggling to tread water in this sea of uncertainty. In the past 48 hours we've been hit with a wave of zombies and bots. It's still a mess. Must be an ongoing cyber war.

[renatovieira]

From my side, everything is still warm. A small increase since December 3rd.

@JeepersCreepers1 - Also here: Website with own technology, not based on WP.

Live streaming, Global

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing the surge from yesterday quickly return to normal traffic levels...so much for the big update, I guess I should feel glad that I wasn't clobbered again like in May and January. It seems that traffic from Euro zone countries is unusually low, as are Canada and Australia. USA and UK are normal.

[worker]

Just did a test with a new three-word search phrase I have not used in the past.

It was pretty specific.

5 out of 10 of the search results on the 1st page of Google were FAKE. They redirected to 'Adult' sites and to P0RN sites.

50% of the organic search results on the first page of Google for a pretty specific search phrase are redirecting to different URLs with different text (and none of the text in the search result display appears anywhere in the redirected site source code).

If HALF of Google's search results on page one of a search can be manipulated in this way, Google is just flat out broken.

[Chickensalami]

I’ve only been running websites since 2018 but from what I’ve seen over the years things are worse than they’ve ever been regarding SEO.

Seems like my site is still frozen so far while others are recovering and honestly I’m just stumped at this point.

No way should I be stuck at 15K monthly pageviews still with 300 quality and carefully researched articles.

[Hfzai]

I think there is no way for anyone to convince Google. As long as end users are happy, advertisers are happy. And when those two are happy, Google is happy.

This will leave smaller publishers (like the most of us) to succumb to whatever is Google’s decision

[RedBar]

No way should I be stuck at 15K monthly pageviews still with 300 quality and carefully researched articles.

Forgetting SEO, then It all depends on the qualiy of your subject matter plus the amount of interest there is for it.

Are your expectations too high?

Just because a very few sites get millions of PVs per month does not mean every subject in the world will. I know of many sites with 1-2K PVs per month who have fantastic online businesses, it's all about its focus.

In which generic subject are you and what is your USP (Unique Selling Point)?

[Chickensalami]

Definitely not looking for anything close to that, just for what the site deserves.

I’m not one of those people that are naive to what’s going on with my site and don’t give it more credit than it should get.

The site is fast, 95% of the articles are after low competition searches that are triple checked before being sent off to writers, there’s nothing intrusive that would kill the experience. It’s simple, clean, and tackles what should be 100% beatable competition. Not sure what’s going on.

Hypothetically speaking, even if my analysis was wayy off and the articles were of trash quality, it shouldn’t be stuck at 15K with that kind of volume.

There’s tons of others in my same position after the May update that were frozen which was discussed in the November thread.

I wonder if any of them have recovered with the Dec update being here.

[JesterMagic]

I am tracking several tech niche sites that for the past 5-10 years were dominating but now all are bleeding and are taken over by the Techradars, PCMags, Comparitechs and all the other big name mainstream publishers.

Yup it is killing our niche as well. Plus a lot of these "Media sites" are really owned by one company.

Sometimes the content is okay but most times it is not. it is written by someone who has a passing knowledge of the field. Plus the content neve r gets updated and ranks years later meanwhile it is completely outdated and incorrect.

[worker]

I'm kind of surprised that my post above about 50% of Google search results on page 1 for a targeted search phrase were scam sites redirecting to completely different sites (than those listed in the search results), many of which were p0rn sites.

50% of results being manipulated on the 1st page of results indicates a fundamental technical problem.

No company providing a service where half the time you got what you expected and half the time you got something completely unrelated could stay in business.

It's like saying please give me food without any peanuts or peanut residue in it and half the time that is what you get. The other half of the time, you have to reach for your EpiPen.

How can this be happening? What has broken at Google that they would allow 50% of results to be manipulated so significantly? Why aren't webmasters here even shocked anymore? LOL. That may be the most telling aspect of all of this.

[Chickensalami]

For those who have been in the SEO game for a long time, would you go as far as to say that this is the most screwed up the SERPS have been?

[Dooku]

"For those who have been in the SEO game for a long time, would you go as far as to say that this is the most screwed up the SERPS have been?"

That depends on how you look at it. From G's viewpoint the current SE looks like the most purposefully designed and crafted SE for their goal, which is making as much profit by keeping visitors as long as possible in their ecosystem and at the same time plainly stealing and scraping content from several different industries to make money off of them also.......and G is getting better at this each day. For webmasters and seo people it's becoming a nightmare!

[mzb44]

Seems like my site is still frozen

There’s tons of others in my same position after the May update that were frozen which was discussed in the November thread.

I have a theory that could maybe explain this.

It relates to the increasing number of websites and online content and the difficulty of algorithmically determining quality and accuracy.

The internet is bigger than ever and trying to constantly rank and re-evaluate all these sites and pages in real-time I'm sure consumes astronomical resources. Also, let's be honest, most sites have the same kind of content - it's not possible to have 500 different and useful versions of a page about "best antivirus for iphone" etc.; everyone will just say the same thing, recommend the same apps anyway. Do we really need 1,000 sites that review iphone antivirus apps, talks about the best online casinos, best steering wheels and rice cookers?

So, how about just favour a set of websites, say, mainstream big publishers and brands (meaning that statistically the chances of ranking trash tier / inaccurate content will be low) who will then rank for most things in their niches, while most other sites will be suppressed and not be evaluated in real-time anymore. This saves massive resources and ensures less trashy results (yes, there's exceptions, nothing works perfectly).

Enter core updates.

A noted phenomenon by many is the consolidation of niches and industries in the hands of a few very large organizations / publishers / corporations, almost always known brands.

Another reported phenomenon is the freezing of sites negatively affected by these updates until a new update.

So, what might happen here is that Google stops evaluating and ranking these sites in real-time. Now they appear to be frozen to the level they were shortly after the core update.

There is no point in constantly re-checking these sites. If Google wants a few big mainstream sites to rank for most things as a general principle, then no point to constantly rank and score the entire internet.

Then, once in a while, Google does a new core update in order to again re-process the whole index just in case some of the suppressed sites have implemented major changes to now deserve to move back into the pool of "real-time ranked" sites, as well as to determine into which pool to place sites launched after the last update.

[MayankParmar]

The problem is that Google favours the sites owned by big media publishers even when they link back to independent sites as the source. If my one article is cited by top 5 news sites operated by one company, I should be the one ranking above them or I should be at least ranking next to them in the Top Stories.

But nope, Google only wants to show them. They've taken zero steps to 'fix' the problem

"We've made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting. Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer. This prominence allows users to view the original reporting while also looking at more recent articles alongside it" - [blog.google...]

Propaganda and lies!

The above blog post's URL slug itself is "original reporting". In reality, they're doing nothing to surface independent sites!

Eventually, big tech news companies will absorb the remaining independent sites and the entire industry will be dominated by one or two company's editorial teams.

[Chickensalami]

That’s an interesting theory. Sounds very possible as well. If that’s truly how Google operates, then it’s hard to see a sustainable future as a website owner. Yes, you’ll win and you’ll lose. But ultimately either one of those fates are up to Google and not because of your own doing.

[Hfzai]

Never rely heavily (or too much) on Google for traffic.

Smaller publishers need to diversify their traffic sources. Social media, forums, QnA sites, other search engines and others. If you cannot expect Google to deliver you the traffic, better get the traffic elsewhere.

But then again, this is where Google inadvertently created a game that we are playing without knowing right from the start.

When we try to rely less on Google and get traffic from others, we will make more backlinks. The more backlinks you get and Google will start noticing you, another core update and voila, Google’s PageRank will give you a little boost in traffic.

A smile on your face and there we are back in Google’s grip.

Remember that big publishers have tons of traffic sources. And they are all playing Google’s game even when they can still live without it.

[frostitomik]

I cannot agree more with the last post. I have completely changed my strategy and instead of doing SEO research and link building to rank on top of Google I have been focusing on other search engines and social media. It seems to be super easy to rank on Bing and Yahoo nowadays with no SEO and no backlinks, while Google takes ages to even notice you. Just update your content, post to social media get as much traffic as you can from other search engines and forget about Google...

[Athedian]

Page ranking went from #2 to #1 for two days and back down to #2 again. It's like Google can't decide how to rank our site at all. And they clearly still favors sites with massive backlinks. Forget about quality and content, that's not even what they're looking for anymore. Traffic bombed so badly right now that I don't really want to care anymore (as if that can actually happen).

Headlines? Useless from what I've seen. I've used certain keywords from GSC results as headlines to do A/B tests on. They worked for a few weeks when the minor update in Sept occurred then the Nov update happened and traffic totally tanked. It's like a complete reversal of what they were trying to do before (ranking content instead of backlinks).

Content? Over 1500-3000 words on regular blog posts that truly focused on specific education topics that are related to our services, and yet, Google decided they're not worth ranking, because sites with less than 800 words blog posts, a scripted blurred-out image overlaying on top of the blog content, and will remain there unless users have subscribed, are more worthy to be ranked due to, again, of the amount of backlinks they got.

User-friendly website? Apparently, sites with scripts that block users from reading content unless they've subscribed are better than sites that provide open, free-source content; or sites with cluttered layout filled with non-stop keyword stuffing on a single page are better than sites with concise, straight-to-the-point design.

Now it's sites with massive amount of backlinks that matter for Google. Great backlinks from high authority sites certainly are better, but from what I've seen on our competitors' sites, inter-site linking scheme on blogs and menus worked very, VERY nicely (at least from what I've seen from our competitors). You can link EN, JP, CH, SP, FR from different sites together (and they're all owned by you), especially for blog posts and it'll be a super high backlink score right there.

Forget about if the content is less than 800 words or even less than 500 words. For Google, if you get 3.5 million backlinks (with link scheme in play), a 10-word sentence is like a 1000 word thesis. It's like Google just gave up on trying to decipher user intent altogether.

[mzb44]

The problem is that Google favours the sites owned by big media publishers. [...] Google only wants to show them. They've taken zero steps to 'fix' the problem

Because according to them this is not a problem that needs to be fixed. Everything works exactly as intended. It looks and works like this on purpose by design and not because the update was flawed or bugged.

The fact they kept the May update for 7 months without major modifications clearly shows they were very satisfied with its results.

Now this new update appears to be just an extension of the May one - it follows the same pattern of big brands / publishers up, independent publishers / smaller sites down.

As such, you shouldn't bet on this being "fixed" in the foreseeable future. It's also likely there will be fewer core updates going forward if things now finally work as intended. Maybe the next one will be around June-July 2021 or so.

[JeepersCreepers1]

One of the power keywords included the name of our domain has been decreased for our Facebook's fan page. Last update core doesn't completely make a sense, seriously.

[seomotionz]

Propaganda and lies!

@MayankParmar Damn right you are!

Sites without even SSL installed are now top of the SERP's have you seen that? How Google is judging all the pages is an absolute joke.

[superclown2]

I have seen a whole stack of excellent specialist web sites drop from top positions to page 2+, to be replaced by big brand sites with plain vanilla copy and little if any useful information. There is obviously no point right now in creating an excellent site which fulfils a visitor's needs if the big brands are competing in the classification.

Content is king? Not any more. Looking for real information about anything? Start on page two. Without it's monopoly Google simply wouldn't survive long term with results like these.

[mzb44]

I have seen a whole stack of excellent specialist web sites drop from top positions to page 2+, to be replaced by big brand sites with plain vanilla copy and little if any useful information.

Yes. This is now becoming increasingly obvious after the May and December updates.

This now obviously is not a one-off thing anymore but a general trend and direction adopted by Google and followed consistently during all core updates since 2018.

I'm just saying this because there still seem to be a lot of people who cling onto the hope that this will be reversed and rolled back any time now.

I mean it could be - but realistically it will not. This is where things stand currently and I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future. We need to accept this sooner rather than later in order to be able to make correct decisions going forward.

[Chickensalami]

Let’s all get together and sign a petition to stop bias when Google ranks content lol. Seriously though, it’d be awesome if there was an effective solution we could partake in to show Google that we’re not standing for this anymore. One shouldn’t build a website from the ground up legitimately and still have to wonder everyday if their traffic is going to be there when they wake up in the morning. People we compete with for rankings are not our competition anymore, Google is. And they’re competition that’s unbeatable and unpredictable.

[ichthyous]

Just update your content, post to social media get as much traffic as you can from other search engines and forget about Google...

Considering that Google brings in 95% of my search while Bing/Yahoo combined bring in 7% I think I'll ignore that sage advice.

This "update" seems to be a non-event. Two days of higher traffic and then it started to taper off and now right back to the old pattern. The same landing pages that were getting much lower traffic in the last month are once again much lower. USA traffic suspiciously low all day, then somehow appears at the end of the day. Right back to the pre-update patterns. This is while my position is rising and my search placement has increased.