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]

[superclown2]

Wow. Yet another turn of the screw today here in the UK. More long established specialist websites topped by price comparison sites with just a mention of a search term.

Time to remove Google from my phone and computer I think. To call it a search engine is like calling a potato a strawberry.

[MayankParmar]

Wow. Incredible. Found a site which is like 40% up after the core update and they're clearly engaged in keyword stuffing. The author name is 'Editor' and articles also have unnecessary keywords in sub headings.

Definitely sounds like a quality update

[mzb44]

So perhaps, this particular December core update is to make sure that bigger brands get bigger attention because they have bigger influence that Google trust them more?

Rather than betting its algorithms to surface and rank high authentic content and legitimate sources from small websites, knowing that smaller sites may have bad UX UI, less safe, scam and so forth, Google would rather play safe by surfacing bigger websites that are generally safer, and more trustworthy?

It does seem like it. This theory was voiced by many others since May. It could explain why the May and December updates were so strongly in favour of brands at the expense of smaller sites regardless of quality.

I'm just wondering if this is the case will Google decide to relax things a bit after the pandemic passes or decide to keep it as it is permanently.

My bet is on not relaxing and it will stay like this permanently going forward. There will always be an emergency justifying these measures, whether an election or some other large national or international event(s).

[edited by: mzb44 at 9:32 am (utc) on Dec 9, 2020]

[TalkativeEditorial]

I searched for 365/12, which seems like a math operation that would be pretty common, the average days in a month. I was expecting to see the calculator, and then some links about days in a month or something to that effect. No!

I'm curious how much of this is generated through the 'personalised' search results.

I ran the same query. Desktop, got the calculator and then two math websites dealing with the query.
Amazon was third but for "Office 365 12 month subs" - which makes sense based on my personal search engagement.

Results on mobile exactly the same, except for zero results being returned initially with just the calculator. Could then go on to choose "show all results" and got the same top three.

[Athedian]

I searched for 365/12 and got the calculator but the first two results were Case-Law in EU.

I think it's based on where you are located geographically speaking, and results are different for everyone.

[ViktorN]

did any of you succeed in getting a website to appear in the actual Google News search results after applying to the new Google News Publisher?

[MayankParmar]

No, it is nearly impossible.

[JesterMagic]

For a long time there are several obvious things broken with Google search that should be easy fixes (relatively speaking) but have not been for some reason.

Original Content is one. It shouldn't be to difficult for Google to determine who had the content up first even if it was spun a little.

Redirects in the organic results. Obviously these sites show one thing to GoogleBot and then something else to regular visitors (either through redirects or just displaying different content based on IP, etc..). Google could tackle this in 2 ways. Have some bots that check for these things that operate outside Google headquarters (so not a Google IP address) that don't use a regular Google User Agent. The other way is they should be able to detect this through Google Chrome when someone visits the page. They already use Chrome to help them with determining average page load times why not add other checks for bad behavior by the site (like redirects)

These things while important to us doesn't help with Google's bottom line therefor they are a low priority to them. The only way to change this thinking is by breaking there monopoly and make Google actual work to keep and find new users.

[christianz]

Looks like google is doubling down. Semrush index is up and further cuts of traffic for me.

[RedBar]

It's utterly random for me, Global sites up, then down, this morning I saw a UK site with 0, zero, visitors in its first 12 hours ... the first time ever since 1999, I had to check it was actually up!

[samwest]

Looks like google is doubling down.

Seeing the same here. December 8th safe harbor seems to have emboldened Google that they will be free and clear to do as they please for the next 4 years...at least. Buckle up. They are coming for it all now. Our conversions turned off like a switch.

[ichthyous]

I saw a big surge in both search and direct traffic yesterday. My UK traffic was double the norm yesterday and up 63% today. I dropped from #2 to #3 for one term and that has caused a reduction of traffic of about 17-20% for that one landing page every day now. These days even dropping one spot makes a huge difference in traffic.

[MayankParmar]

Indeed... They need to dedicate one core update to "bug fixes".

[mzb44]

Indeed... They need to dedicate one core update to "bug fixes".

If the goal indeed is to eventually only rank mainstream sites and publishers then no need to fix all these issues. If after a couple of more core updates only big publishers will rank in top 10 for everything then it's a waste of time to figure out how to accurately rank page 2+ sites.

[mzb44]

Looks like google is doubling down. Semrush index is up and further cuts of traffic for me.

And many people were actually convinced there will be a roll back. :)

[topaz]

There was a big drop off of Discover traffic following the core update. In addition, to my own 75% drop, I've seen similar reports on the google community and reddit over the last 2 days.

Danny unhelpfully responded to a site manager at CBS with the same issue...
[twitter.com...]

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed, my visitors are looking more normal now, all the single PVs have reduced substantially, let's see how the next few hours pan out!

[MayankParmar]

Discover always drops when a site is hit by core update. It dropped for a lot of people after the May core update and users are reporting the same result after the December update. Not surprised... but the real problem is again lack of transparency

In my case and others, Discover dropped around the August 10 glitch when the core update *officially* did not happen.

[Athedian]

Danny unhelpfully responded to a site manager at CBS with the same issue...
[twitter.com...]

One of the most useless replies he could have right there lol. He might as well don't even bother replying on Twitter.

Then again, it's not like employees at Google can actually tell anyone what to do exactly at the expense of their job.

I did an A/B test by keyword stuff a few pages on the site to see if Google would either increase rank or decrease rank. After 24 hours, no change. Seems like Google's indexing gets delayed again.

[samwest]

Wonder where all the cash goes when this happens, we’ve been jacked again.

[StickyPaul]

I have a crazy idea that Google may have started to redirect some part of your aff/referal traffic to its own accounts. Here's how it can be possible. A visitor search in google for "cool staff" - click on you site - and then is redirected to company's site - make a purchase and you recieve commission for this. That's how aff market works, nothing new here. But I have a strong feeling that every core update google reduce your commission by stealing it with a sort of there own aff ids in google search links. Can it be possible? Yes because I don't believe "don,t be an evil" google words anymore. No because if it would be true this will be a complete end of the most "friendly" and "transparent" search engine. That's also can be a reason why big brands may not be influenced by core updates, all simple - nothing to steal in terms of aff traffic. But G possible has other schemes to manipulate with mainstream sites we don't even bother about. Why I have this feeling? Yes I was highly impacted by May, December updates (tech review niche) but my main keywords almost don't suffer, some even went up for several positions... but starting May update I see little by little drops in conversions, almost invisible, like natural decrease.. Great job I would say duplicitous or better multicitous Google. GM and similar just want to look good I mean they want/say/advice to SEO community smth that would bring perfect user experience but don't know what is "perfect user experience".

I just want to wish everyone not to lose heart, in the end "the guilty will be punished"!

[mzb44]

Seems like the BBC the New York Times and CNN.com were also negatively affected by the latest core update.

So, whatever this update did was much more complex than whatever any of us here could even begin to speculate.

However, what seems to have upset many people is Google's communication about these updates. Danny Sullivan when asked about what the update did yet again pointed to that infamous blog post from 2019 - [twitter.com...]

Then people started to troll him hard, even some known and respected SEO influencers.

Some of these are truly hilarious:

[twitter.com...] (particularly this thread)

Like, seriously do imagine actually sending that blog post to a New York Times Chief Editor or executive when being asked why the site tanked in Google.

[twitter.com...]

[twitter.com...]

It's obvious that whatever these updates do it's so much more than just "rewarding good content" - and that is absolutely fine and comes at no surprise to anybody! Google has been doing all kinds of updates before these core updates too.

It's Google's communication about these that's extremely un-transparent and I'd say even misleading and arrogant when all they do is just point to a vague and generic blog post that essentially just says "produce quality content".

The issue is not that the NYT and the BBC were hit - they may as well have "deserved" it depending on whatever this update evaluated. - It's that every time someone asks for any advice you arrogantly get slapped with that generic blog post which asks questions such as "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?" or "If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted" - which is absolutely ridiculous if you consider it in the context of the NYT or BBC.

[JorgeV]

I don't think that sites like the NYC or the BBC rely on Google to drive traffic to their site, also, they should already be all over Google news. I know, that when I read the news, I go directly to this kind of sites, and don't use Google. In fact, I barely no longer use search engines.

[renatovieira]

After three days with a significant improvement, today my traffic has dropped again in pathetic numbers...

I'm glad I didn't celebrate :-|

[MayankParmar]

Indexing slower than usual?

[sofie77]

After three days with a significant improvement, today my traffic has dropped again in pathetic numbers...

I'm glad I didn't celebrate :-|

Same here... :( I hope not all of last week's improvements are lost. We will see in the next hours. I see it coming, when all improvements are gone, google announces that the update is finished.

[saladtosser]

@mzb44 + Danny Sullivan gets paid to cut and paste links to generic vague articles and take more vacations in a year than I have in a lifetime, why anyone bothers asking him anything is a bit of a mystery.

[ichthyous]

After three days with a significant improvement, today my traffic has dropped again in pathetic numbers...

My traffic dropped back down by 25% yesterday and looks like it will drop again today. This is while I am gaining top three terms in the SERPS...another five overnight. The problem is that very large ecommerce sites have totally squeezed me out of the top 3-5 spots for anything sales / product related.

[ichthyous]

Is anyone else seeing unusual bursts in traffic from China? It comes in one burst of hits from different IP addresses all over China to different pages of my website in the matter of a minute or two. The visits are all just a few seconds and the visitors all have the same technical specs so it's clearly a network of some sort. It hits my site about once every other day. The only thing I can do is block the entire country, as it's always different IP addresses.

[christianz]

I am sliding on a constant negative slope of doom since November 29, with a -18% "cliff" on December 4th.

Google seems to have a weird Schizophrenic relationship with my site - it can't decide whether its valuable content or thin content spam farm.

It is very specific geeky niche site that hasn't had true like-for-like competition for the past 15 years. Enthusiasts who seek that kind of content find it valuable but Googlebot doesn't seem to get the idea behind it and the user intent.

Combine that with prioritization of "high EAT" mainstream "entities" and you get generic pages ranking above me for specific long tail queries.

It probably has to do with having too many indexable URLs and many of them having not enough verbal content.

I can further cut down on those kind of pages but it would negatively affect user experience (how ironic, Google!) as they no longer would be linkable with unique URLs.

Page count and amount of verbal content versus number of pages is just speculation. But prioritization of "mainstream" sites is provable fact.