Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2021

[MayankParmar]

Traffic is very low for me as well. It dropped around December 14.

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Previous Monthly Thread [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: goodroi at 6:56 pm (utc) on Jan 1, 2021]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[widgetized]

Not a single conversion since the new year start, despite I'm running a sale right now. I'm only getting the usual spam emails, daily. Guess nothing changes for Google and how they are handling things in 2021.

What looked surprising is that my traffic doubled after December 3, which is something I have never seen in years, then everything went back to "the usual" right before January started. It goes without saying that conversions were good as well.

Feels a bit depressing, for a moment I thought that Google removed some kind of "filter" from my website, and I could finally reach all those customers looking for my products.

[AdrianRozic]

My sites are getting more visitors than ever, and still its a zombie traffic and no conversion, you know why? Because Google ranked some random articles. For example if my blog is about Hiking, I was ranked 1st and 2nd for terms like Best hiking gear, Hiking tools, Hiking pants review, Best hiking shoes. And visitors were taken to my converting articles that are making a lot of money for me. Now Google is sending 2x more traffic to my site but on my articles on Best hiking forest in Canada, Is hiking bad for babies... Old articles that never actually got any traffic before. Main keywords are getting killed by spam sites with some hiking videos and pinterest hiking images and Amazon books on Hiking... Google is going nuts and I dont know why but it seems like there are 3 people total working in Google.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@AdrianRozic

Not sure it helps, but this has been a persistent issue for us too over the last few months. Our rankings are solid... but the content they select is useless (there are more relevant ones available....)
And because their mythical algorithm might or might not look at CTR for signals to surface in Discover [and since some of our content is time sensitive and would serve no purpose to the user even if ranking #1] - traffic is absolutely destroyed.

[universenet]

AdrianRozic

Google is going nuts and I dont know why but it seems like there are 3 people total working in Google.

Yes, and one of that 3 people is with name AI and it is without any emotion

[TalkativeEditorial]

Anyone else noticed a really dramatic spike in traffic on GA about 20 minutes or so ago? It drives me insane when these things happen because I always panic whether something is wrong.. obviously, they can't (although they should) alert us on every single glitch - but how many of these glitches (anyone remember August 2020?) DO have an impact on something down the line? And we'll never be any the wiser.

[Athedian]

Noticed an increase of traffic since last week and continued to increase. The click rate went down though. I did notice avg. page ranking in GSC has increased at least 30%. It could be because of the minor changes I did to the site (lots of minor changes). We'll see how it goes once whatever this new update has settled down (if ever).

[topaz]

Just reporting that one of my sites which flatlined to exactly zero for Discover traffic around September 28, is now getting a huge surge of discover traffic to one new article. The article is an exclusive, with an interview, but I've had several of those since Sept. 28, and none of them made a difference. I'm not hopeful it has returned fully though.

I didn't change anything. Site is about 14 months old, DA30.

[MayankParmar]

I also did one exclusive news and it went viral. I got links from mainstream media, but only 300ish impressions from Discover (US) and 250K overall :)

Today, Discover is dead everywhere because of competition and Google's inability to identify original source (that's me)

Similarly, for another keyword, a scrapper is ranking #1 and the site has outranked five original sites. It's another expired domain with links and scrappers are still doing fine.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@topaz

But don't you know? You must focus on CoNtEnT to make sure you EAT!

Eyeroll.

[guarriman3]

My traffic drops always in the last weeks of December and first weeks of January, but this year the effect is more severe. Not sure if it's linked to the 'crawl budget' issue I suffer from ages, or to the pandemic (my customers prefer to search other kind of information).

[mzb44]

Is it really that hard for Google engineers to add this one-liner to fix the Pinterest problem?

I think the Pinterest issue is just a symptom of the recent authority > relevancy adjustments Google made with the last couple of core updates.

If ultra authority now outweighs most other factors then it comes at absolutely no surprise that a domain such as pinterest.com will now show up for almost any image results by default and outrank virtually any other site on the web on any image result.

[mini_007]

So after this update in Norway for different casino keywords I see sites that have not updated their content from 2017 ranking on page 1, this sites where on page 3-4 before. I really think this update not fully rolled out or some bugs. Also in Norway we see some sort of carousel in the ranking that promotes different hotels in Las Vegas, why would anyone from Norway consider this relevant for online casino keywords. Also I see some bugs in PageSpeed Insights like filed data etc not show before show

[Martin Ice Web]

I hope that amazon can handle the new order storm that google set in progress with this last update.
Finally today all google sources quit working for all sites we manage. What's left is a junk of bots and refs from countries all over the world.

[insideout]

Huge fluctuations going on since this morning in France and UK . Traffic peaked yesterday and plunged today :(

[MayankParmar]

Google Search Team Launched Changes That Negatively Impacted Revenue Substantially
[seroundtable.com...]

HackerNews discussion: Why does Pinterest dominate Google text search results? [news.ycombinator.com...]

[markseo]

Noticed a lot of changes in one niche in the UK gambling sector today - top 6 spots have all been changing throughout the morning. TBH its been pretty volatile since first week of december - google still trying to figure out which sites it prefers.

Does anyone have any good analysis of what the December update was actually about or was it too general to nail down.?

[westcoast]

Weird action here the last couple of weeks. After we got +20% in the couple of weeks following the last core update, the last week or so has completed tailed off and we're back down to where we were before the core update.

Not sure if this is some weird end of year traffic that will rebound or what.

[renatovieira]

@westcoast - Exactly the same here.

[RedBar]

For the first week of January traffic is looking pretty normal considering all the "things" happening in various countries however all my real enquiries are from countries not in lockdown. This is hardly surprising considering how many widget businesses are closed.

Normally I would expect widget buyers to start getting panicking about their Easter supplies soon, I doubt that's going to happen this year!

[petterijokelainen]

Can someone please tell me what the "widget" terminology means. Many people mention widget, but when I think of a widget, I think WordPress widgets, etc.

Why such stupid slang?

[RedBar]

A widget is a non-specific anonymised description / explanation for a buiness product or service.

My widgets are specialist construction products however, understandly, many people do not wish to divulge their business sector hence widget business.

It makes things a lot easier to describe and explain if having any problems / issues because a generalised widget description can make it easier for others to assist or suggest through their experiences.

Stupid? Nah, have you got a better description?

[whoa182]

I've been doing better for a week now but the last two days have been lower, especially looking at traffic this morning!

I'm hoping and guessing it's to do with the Georgia elections for senate and what's going on in DC.

[MayankParmar]

Delayed/slow indexing back again.

[RedBar]

I've been doing better for a week now but the last two days have been lower,

My 25+ years of data have always shown it takes until next week for traffic to return to "expected normality" however I am not predicting anything such are the "unknown" situations!

[ichthyous]

Very odd that after a holiday season with unusually suppressed traffic numbers, suddenly traffic seems to have reverted to normal so early in the year. I saw traffic spring back from the 5th and still increasing. Perhaps working from home has altered the normal patterns a bit...normally my holiday traffic isn't down as drastically as this year, and it doesn't return to normal until mid January.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Also been seeing a notable improvement (including articles that are actually relevant surfacing in Discover). I just never get my hopes up any more these days - because when google giveth and google taketh away, they taketh a lot.

[JS_Harris]

Google serps ARE spam now.

- Featured snippet
- Ads
- The fold ---------------------
- The #1 result

[MayankParmar]

Semrush and Rank Ranger are reporting movements.

[BushyTop]

Also seeing significant changes

[saladtosser]

@JS_Harris local is even worse in increasing areas where google guaranteed ads are being taken up, increasing ads from 4 to 6..

Google guaranteed ad
Google guaranteed ad
Adwords Ad
Adwords Ad
Adwords Ad
Adwords Ad
Find results on... yelp etc
Google local listing
Google local listing
Google local listing
People also ask
#1st organic

Anyone else annoyed with google images, youtube videos and "people also ask" being placed above most organic information queries? If I wanted videos or images id to click the videos or image tabs and if wanted to know what people also ask id want to scroll to the bottom of the current result set if the current results didn't answer my query......