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]

[ichthyous]

It's amazing how G sends me users every other day. It seems that everything is scheduled, users are interested in my content on even days. On odd days, traffic simply evaporates.

There is definitely a lot of cycling going on. What I have noticed is that traffic to my main pages will suddenly get hammered for a period of time, then return to normal traffic. Then a different set of pages will get hammered. Right now I am seeing one page lose 80% of its traffic...for the last ten days it was another couple of landing pages...but they have recovered now. It's as if google is selectively targeting your most important content in order to inflict the maximum amount of damage.

The last few days I had a huge drop in UK traffic, today it's back but a huge drop in direct traffic from the USA. There are very few days where traffic is up across the board and so the overall effects is just a big loss of business.

[westcoast]

No signs of rollback here on our large site. On the 4th we got an immediate 20% jump which has held so far every day since. Fingers crossed. We did do a lot of disavowing over the last few months (I found we had been targeted with black-hat linking from a 300 domain attack network), so I wonder if maybe that helped us.

The #1 entry in our niche for months has been occupied by a major player (BuzzFeed) that happens to have a single page on our topic. At the same time there are 2 or 3 large niche-specific websites that clearly should be in that top spot that are below that brand. I understand using brand signals to bump authority, but Google seems to be completely lost to the idea of niches and experts / authority within niches. It's quite confounding how such a simple concept could elude them.

I agree with the statement above re: machine learning. Machine learning is only as good as its input. The google reviewer process is biased and flawed because intent of the end user is not a part of the process. The reviewers are not searching -- they are comparing results from queries that are forced upon them. They have to invent intent in their heads and then come up with what they think the best results are, which is a fundamentally broken process.

The "big site bias" discussed above is spot on too. If your job is to determine "authority", and you are beaten with that word over and over again, then of course you as a human reviewer will tend to take BigBrand.com by default over SmallBrandNicheExpert.com if you have never heard of that niche expert. People vote for what they like, and are comfortable with, and have seen. It's a crap process that yields crap results. Those crap results are shoved into the machine learning and the machine learns... wait for it.... crap.

[edited by: westcoast at 4:27 pm (utc) on Dec 12, 2020]

[RedBar]

Some of my widget sector is a topsy-turvy joke right now, many pages looking ok whereas others are a downright mess even G would have to question WTF?

Obviously this "update" has not finished as yet, we'll see what the next few days reveal.

[saladtosser]

I want to thank google and all of the employees of Google.

The reason I want to thank them is that from a teenager, I had disabilities that prevented me gaining employment outside of the house to support my family. For the last 15 years, I was able to build an income from my home despite my disabilities and provide a living for my family, it wasn't a flash living, we live in a UK council house, BUT I was able to pay the rent and provide food and warmth to my family without any state handouts, thanks to google ranking my sites well.

I have survived every Google update from the last 15 years (penguin, panda, core-updates) without noticing any significant drops, covid was harsh to us but I wrote off so much to help my fellow man..... But the curtain has come down, core update dec has been worse than covid and all previous updates, and obliterated my ability to provide for my family the way I have been able to in the past.

I am generally shocked google has deemed websites that arent even mobile-friendly or been updated in years to suddenly rank above my sites that have been sincerely improved constantly with Grammarly correct information, mobile-friendly, SSL, amp, schema, passing all the cors and lighthouse tests with flying colours on top of well written textual information.

But some may say I'm biased to my sites, (i probably am) the problem is so was google for a good 15 years.... but now I'm out of favour.

I honestly don't have a clue how I could improve the sites further for speed or information because they have ticked all the right boxes for so, so many years, however clearly I have done something wrong as of today my sites aren't any good for google, and I have been demoted hugely.

I've read horror stories over the years from others and have always told my family one day google will destroy me; they always scoffed at the idea we could be fine one day and then not fine the next, but I knew it would happen one day. I've had so many sleepless nights over the years thinking I could I wake up one morning and my income is gone.

But I want to THANK google, because without the years of being rewarded by them I would have never been able to provide the basics and watch my beautiful children grow. As a man, I feel it is only right I provide for my family and the massive depression I had for so many years before this job was wiped away with being able to provide the basics for the time I was able.

Thank you google for allowing me to raise 2 of my three girls to late teenager years before I fell out of favour, I'm sorry my sites aren't up to your last update standards, I don't know why but I'm sure there is a reason, but your guidelines on writing awesome content have literally no meaning to me after being held in favour for so long, so I have no clue where to even begin.....

I want to wish Danny, JM, Gary and the rest of the crew at google a very happy Christmas and thank them for the years I had. God bless you all at google because, without you, I wouldn't have been around to have had the pleasure of watching my children grow, sincerely thank you for the years I had that I was able to hold my head slightly high! God bless all the website owners and everyone.

[mzb44]

It should not be possible for a website that follows all the best practices and google's webmaster guidelines to be completely wiped -80% -90% by a core update. Except maybe if the site is ancient and totally outdated.

Until 2 years ago that thing exclusively happened to spammers, link schemers and blackhatters only.

One of the incentives before to stay within google's webmaster guidelines and create quality content was that you extremely rarely - almost never, in fact - had to worry about wipe-out / total obliteration level google updates. Ups and downs, sure, but never complete obliteration (and then "sandboxed" and frozen for months or more) like it is the case today.

This now sets up some extremely perverse incentives.

With the same effort of operating a legitimate website you can now create and operate 20-30 spam sites - apparently today with the same penalty/obliteration risk. I am not really surprised by all the people who in this thread are reporting an increase in spam.

[browndog]

The "big site bias" discussed above is spot on too. If your job is to determine "authority", and you are beaten with that word over and over again, then of course you as a human reviewer will tend to take BigBrand.com by default over SmallBrandNicheExpert.com if you have never heard of that niche expert. People vote for what they like, and are comfortable with, and have seen. It's a crap process that yields crap results. Those crap results are shoved into the machine learning and the machine learns... wait for it.... crap.

I am outranked by a national government-owned news site in which the author admits at the very start she didn't know anything about the topic until somebody told her about it. She then went and wrote the article, with no images (images are super important for this), thin and inaccurate information. But it ranks no. 1. I rank nowhere with my comprehensive article, with factual and accurate information and twenty years experience on the topic. Because it's a well-known source, G loves them even if the information is incorrect.

[MayankParmar]

@saladtosser You can ALWAYS bounce back without making any changes to the site. It's safe to assume that nothing is wrong with your site and your traffic will return in the next core update. Good luck.

[ichthyous]

It's safe to assume that nothing is wrong with your site and your traffic will return in the next core update.

The last update was in May, before that in January of 2020...both killed my traffic. This December update is now reversing and I'm going even lower than where I was. Waiting for Google to maybe release an update in the future that might favor your site is not a plan. Deciding that Google is no longer a reliable source of business but needs to be just one of many sources is the only real option now. The problem is that it takes a long time to transform one business model into another and most businesses cannot hold on that long. Add in a huge pandemic driven recession...most people won't make it unless they have considerable savings and can cut expenses. Question is...is it worth it?

[Chickensalami]

@mzb44

Are you frozen as well?

[mzb44]

[twitter.com...]

It's absolutely shocking and unprecedented that one week Google decides to reward you with +60% but next week it slaps you with a -95% complete obliteration.

"just make better content"

[TalkativeEditorial]

@mzb44

That pattern is not that unusual. Ask any of the people on this forum who have been on the swings and roundabouts of the mobile-indexing ups/downs and Discover Feed wild rides over the last few months...

[mzb44]

Another core update theory:

So, we know that Google is now heavily invested in machine learning and AI to rank websites. To those unfamiliar this - oversimplified, I know - means manual reviewers review and rate a large set of sites. Then that data is used to train the AI to find patterns that come up with search results similar to the manual reviewers ratings.

It was already mentioned before that this could potentially explain why big brands and mainstream sites now rank for everything even with a mediocre page & lack of expertise. Manual reviews could be biased towards known sites and as such rate them higher vs. smaller unknown sites.

But this could also explain why seemingly high-quality sites that are always within google's webmaster guidelines are hit with -90% and get completely obliterated (rather than just overtaken by a few positions by better sites).

Let's say you are an affiliate site that focuses on pure white-hat and quality content but are in a niche where most other sites are either spam and low-quality / spun content. - So you have the same type of site but executed in a different way.

So, on average, this type of site will have a very low rating because of all the spam sites the manual reviewers will rate lowly.

Now the AI will on its own try to find patterns that aim to down-rank these kinds of sites. However, those patterns could be anything from having affiliate links to just attempting to target the same keywords or write about the same kinds of subjects, having a similar site structure, similar language, expressions, literally anything that can form a pattern, etc.

So now you get slapped with a -90% core update "penalty" because the AI thinks you belong to the same category of sites the manual reviewers rated lowly, because it found the same patterns on your site as on the real spam sites.

Individually, your site can be of exceptional quality (from a user point of view). But if whatever patterns the AI found - to reverse-replicate the manual reviewers ratings - also apply to your site, then you get hit too.

You are now collateral damage.

And there is absolutely nothing you can do as it's not because of your site but because of all the other sites that are low-quality and now collectively drag the score of your site down too.

[RedBar]

The G.com for me is looking more settled and, generally, I am still ranking extremely well with only the occasional URL MIA !

BUT the G.co.uk SERPs is all over the place, many phrases I rank #1 in .com I am lucky if I'm even on the first page, some are missing altogether. How can I be #1 in .com yet not found in .co.uk meanwhile a US company is #2 in .com and #1 in co.uk YET does NOT supply ourside of the USA?

Utterly bizarre, please G why? This is not a plea, I'm genuinely mystified and would like to comprehend.

[mzb44]

Maybe it's not rolled out on UK data centers yet. It will probably settle in a few days.

[nativeTransWoman]

Don't worry too much.

Google currently is having huge trouble getting anything done, even more trouble getting it done correctly. Pinterest bugs, indexing bugs, request indexing down for 2+ months. Clearly they have some huge trouble with something. Not sure if it is COVID, home office or something entirely else.

I assume they, just like us thought COVID was going to be a temporary thing, so they created temporary mods to their systems... Now it seems the situation is here to stay, which came as a surprise to them and us and is probably why it took them 7 months to do another update.

No excuse to ruin peoples businesses unfairly by ranking spam, but it is what it is. More than likely a temporary state of affairs.

I see very clear indications that much of the rankings currently are a result of temporary COVID measures that overemphasize authority irrelevant of topical relevance. As an example I see .edu .gov .int and especially the WHO website rank for pretty much everything under the sun. Cant go into specifics, but it is extremely clear to me that much of this is a temporary fix with collateral damage. Just like all COVID measures btw.

They built a temporary contraption on top of Google in anticipation of a temporary situation and now it is slowly falling apart and the situation continues and they are continualy plugging hole after hole.... from home... with the cat peeing on the keyboard... the kids setting the house of fire... and the wife cheating in the next room. That's basically the situation.

I would bet good money that after COVID is definitively gone from the world, the SERPS will revert to something approximating what we saw before the may 20 core update.

Just like in the real world, online the virus only benefits the big guys and kills the small.

[RedBar]

Maybe it's not rolled out on UK data centers yet. It will probably settle in a few days.

Hahaha ... Nooo ... I was posting here before their confirmation announcement, it's been bouncing around for days now.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld nativeTransWoman :-))

[Chickensalami]

@nativeTransWoman

But why won’t they just be transparent about these changes instead of giving us the run around is what I’m trying to figure out.

They’ve acknowledged “bugs” in the past so why not now. I think a lot more people would be at ease knowing things are messed up on Google’s end rather than their own, but Google has a lot of people thinking that they as an individual are having issues despite being in compliance with what Google wants.

As a result of this lack of transparency, there’s tons of theories and solutions going around from people that aren’t even qualified to give either, therefore making site owner’s focus and make changes that aren’t even necessary. It truly is a mess.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Chickensalami

The opposite is also a question worth asking. Why WOULD they?

When the canonical bug first surfaced, one member of this forum was one of the first to notice. Despite reaching out to the powers that be (including through the favourite 'go to the forum' route).... it took at least another week for them to even acknowledge the problem exists.

Ditto for the mobile bugs.

Superficially, there is a certain air of arrogance from some of the more 'public' [as in present and active on social media] Googlers. Often, it appears is they think most people who try to engage with them are some sort of spammy site with no clue what they're doing.

Recently, a certain flatpack furniture brand's SEO raised some concerns about the issues relating to multi-lingual canonical issues to one of the search team (can't remember who) on Twitter. Up until the point that the conversation venture into the senior member of the team stepped in saying "this is the site we're working on", the general tone of the conversation was somewhat flippant.

So it is at least partly because of a sense of superiority....you know, like when you work in retail and you and your colleagues will roll your eyes when a certain type of customer complains.

But, it is almost certainly partly because half of the time (especially in this unprecedented situation) they do not even know about all the problems. Instead of reaching out to or at least engaging with reliable independent parties (webmasters who know their sites inside out), like they do with the searchraters sorta....)....well...you know.

Acknowledging that they are struggling / unsure /not quite got it all together would also be tantamount to acknowledge weakness... which won't be great for those share prices... not ideal in an already volatile economic climate.

[samwest]

Google currently is having huge trouble getting anything done

Really? While it may LOOK that way to us, I can assure you, Google is raking in cash at record paces.
That's not a "problem" for them.

This has been like being robbed every day for a decade.

[samwest]

temporary COVID measures

I spit my coffee out my nose...temporary?
Try permanent. "They" figured out to scare people into submission.
You seriously thing that will change?

That would be like Google allowing us to make money naturally again.

The point they need to revert to is pre-MayDay update 2010.
That's the exact date that everything started going downhill for us.
Follow Regina Dugan's career path, and look where she is today.
Connect the dots. Google and big tech owns us.
That's not gonna change unless there is a BIG legal boom!

[topaz]

@samwest, even if they wanted to, they can't revert to way back then. What we can hope for is a change in policy in how they reward the very highest authority sites..and how poorly they trust less established publishers.

[superclown2]

I always understood that good links came from sites, or at least pages, that were relevant to the linked site's subject. I'm now watching sites rise to the top for value search terms but their links are obvious paid spam ones, all from Wordpress sites with spun content on just about any subject. Relevancy is out of the window. Backlinks rule whether these are relevant or not.

I'm also seeing sites that have risen because of hidden print links; they exist in the html but are not displayed. I thought Google was wise to this spam trick years ago?

I reckon this update is a try at switching to AI but it is way off the mark and has produced possibly the worst results I've seen from Google and I've been around since before they were just a bunch of Geeks meeting at Burning Man every year. I'm sure they will improve; they are bad for users, webmasters, and Google themselves. After all if this is the best they can do would you still use them if there was a serious competitor?

Then again maybe it's their last attempt to fill the coffers before regulators hit them, which will happen eventually. Who knows.

[ichthyous]

Backlinks rule whether these are relevant or not.

I wish this were the case, but I have accumulated quite a few excellent links from publications and high authority sites this year and my traffic is still down. It started to look promising right before the update but that only lasted about 6 days and now traffic is unusually low since about Thursday. It's too early for the Christmas dropoff, that doesn't usually happen for me until next week. Links are not at all what is driving placement now.

[Athedian]

Indexing is a huge mess. Even the sitemap crawl/discovery is a huge mess. Google is even re-crawling pages that have long been de-indexed and removed from the GSC through the removal request.

And it's telling me that the URLs were blocked by robot.txt? No really, Google, apparently I "accidentally" added those URLs to robot.txt and "accidentally" manually requested index removal a year ago.

Not only that, I created a staging environment on another domain and did a noindex/nofollow tag on that domain so that there won't be duplicated content issue (which Google claimed that it didn't like). Lo and behold, the actual SERP through site:// search yielded no results, and yet, GSC is showing HUNDREDS of links from the actual site being linked directly from the staging environment domain. What the hell?

It's like Google just ignored all parameters and crawled everything they could find so that their machine learning could get more biased data to fine tune their totally broken Dec update.

Heck, this update is as bad as COVID itself.

[shadowlight]

traffic is unusually low since about Thursday

Yes, same here. Thursday is when things took a nosedive for me too.

Rankings stable, traffic is UP, conversions down, or in the case of today totally non existant which has happened once or twice in the space of 12 years.

As long as google are raking in money from ads then things are going well in their eyes. Organic search results and their quality is way down the list of their priorities in my opinion.

Google do not want users clicking on organic results, they want them to click on what makes them money.

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.

They want everyone paying them to advertise and they want users clicking on ads and if you dont pay them then your irrelevant to them.

Serp features, ads etc pushing organic down, traffic quotas and all the other tactics they employ are just that, tactics to take away any benefit you may get via their search engine for free.

They want you paying them and they want users clicking on ads and anything else that makes them money. Everything else is secondary at best.

[RajeshKanna92]

Since the dec 2020 update, my website (Social Media Niche) traffic was down upto 70%. But my keywords are in same position.!

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Athedian

I had the same staging issue before the update. I don't think that's core update related. I eventually deleted the staging site and now just have it set up on my local machine.

But indexing is a huge mess yes, very similar to a lot of the issues that have been repeating themselves since before the update.

[Athedian]

@TalkativeEditorial - yeah I also deleted the staging server as the site's fixing has been completed and now rolled out on the actual server. Now I have to disavow the entire staging domain. Hopefully Google can at least capture that.

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.

[transSnacksual]

But why won’t they just be transparent about these changes instead of giving us the run around is what I’m trying to figure out.

Its not in Googles interest to be transparent. The less the outside knows, the easier it is for them to claim that everything is fine and the rankings are 'correct'.

Also if they admitted that because of COVID they made radical temporary ranking changes that favor huge authorities & spammers and screw the smaller guys that are having a hard time already, that would not paint a pretty picture

Its clear to me that the temporary measures are quite blunt, since spammers are now ranking things by simply paying corrupt people to upload stuff onto .edu .gov .int sites of all kinds. And they are ranking for topics that could not be more non-Health related. So they didn't even take the time to make the temporary measures specific to health topics.