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]

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar Since when for you?

[Chickensalami]

Last two days were fine but traffic today is unusually lower than what I’d expect on a Sunday aka the highest traffic day of the week.

[RedBar]

Saturday's traffic was lower than usual however today's is higher than usual therefore between them ... an average weekend.

I've just been checking some trade widget keywords and whilst the actual sites ranking at the top are fine it is is very evident that their pages are what I would refer to as thin with a 100-150 words plus 3 relevant but average images, and that's it.

Fine for a quick retail read yet almost useless for professional trade or specifiers use.

I'm going to have an experiment:-)

[MayankParmar]

@TalkativeEditorial Very low on Saturday and Sunday, but it seems to be coming back today. Discover started showing a week old news stories again and CTR dropped.

[RedBar]

Coming up to 11 hours of a Googleday for me and unusually quiet so far with many European widget retail outlets in lockdown I guess they'll not be getting enquiries?

Far East, Middle East and North African traffic seems normal.

[renatovieira]

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!

There is certainly no single rule for every niche. On my side, since christmas, I have received a huge amount of traffic since I started my main site.

Today, in the week when "things start to return to normal", I am having the biggest drop since I started this main site.

[StupidIntelligent]

@renatovieira - is your website new or old?

[renatovieira]

@StupidIntelligent - I am currently following more closely two sites in the same niche, but they do not compete with each other. Their AdSense are pretty good, so I spend more time on them. One started in april/2013 and the other in march/2019.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I'm not sure if this is something anyone else has seen or if it is affecting all niches, but there seems to be a fair increase in 'exact match' results for search queries, specifically for named things that include "the".

For example (and funny enough, it's not present for this specific search) but a search for the yankees oldest player / yankees oldest player will yield notably different results in some cases.

It's something that I've seen even before the December update, but it is always very noticeable a few days before/after there are these 'ghost' updates that probably aren't updates.

Has anyone noticed similar in their niche?

As an aside, Discover is doing its showing-old-articles thing with us again, at least it's picking some more relevant (not completely outdated anyway) articles this time. But it's not regisering anything new from Friday last week. Usually, when it is working 'well', there'd be flickering signs of at least some of the new stuff appearing, even if it is only briefly.

[topaz]

right now, discover is dead for my older website...only a trickle to outdated articles being surfaced
on my newer website..it's back to record levels after zero impressions for three months.
[imgur.com...]

the flat line you see there..is actually is a very significant bit of traffic from regular serps, social and direct. the spike is when the Discover switch magically flicked on a few days ago.

The sites are both news, but completely different niches... It's been a see-saw effect when it comes to search traffic for them.

[ichthyous]

So was it confirmed that there was another update in January, or was it just speculation? Something major has happened in terms of traffic with my site...Traffic is up 33% from the previous four week average for a Monday. UK traffic in particular is back with a vengeance, but USA, CA and AU all up.

[MayankParmar]

Looks like another indexing issue is happening and a lot of sites are affected.

[christianz]

Looks like G Analytics is half-broken up showing 90% drops in real time hit count every 20 minutes or so.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@topaz

The bizarre inconsistencies and seemingly no obvious connection between the sites that show ups/downs is maddening.

But it does indeed seem like there is something strange going on in terms of indexing. Nothing quite a few instances where GSC shows "indexed" but can't find any trace of those pages when searching, even word for word.

[Psalber]

This seems relevant to the current discussion but let me know if it should be a new thread.

Google Ads Salesperson Alleged to Link Organic Ranking to Ad Spend
[searchenginejournal.com...]

I know Google has vehemently denied directly linking ad buys to organic search ranking, but this allegation raises the issue again. Thoughts?

[mehmethasana]

While my important words before the update also increased, my words disappeared after the update. I have been fluctuating continuously for 1 month. Is this just me too? By the way, my website is 6 months old. I need your suggestions.

[superclown2]

Google Ads Salesperson Alleged to Link Organic Ranking to Ad Spend

And why not? It was common in the early days for other search engines (not Google I must add) to mix unlabelled paid ads in with the SERPs. It is interesting that so many search terms in my financial vertical are dominated by a very few big spending companies with thin content to say the least, and that are, in effect, just affiliates of companies whose own web sites, packed with useful information, are lucky to see page 2. Naturally these supplier companies have to pay for the business hoovered up by the big spenders, and they no doubt have to pass the cost on to the consumer. Not the best possible experience for visitors.

My own main site is getting more clicks than ever but they are all for irrelevant pages which never appeared in the search results in the past. All the money earning pages have lost positions dramatically to the above mentioned big spenders. A coincidence obviously.

I still see SERPs movement here in the UK; inevitably it is the smaller specialists being pushed further down by the big spenders.

I don't think for a moment that Google is deliberately pushing out these dreadful search results; in the long term that would be commercial suicide. Perhaps their IE is very much in the learning phase. Still primary school level.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, we're back to Google Discover surfacing outdated articles despite having newer ones available.

[EditorialGuy]

Google Ads Salesperson Alleged to Link Organic Ranking to Ad Spend

It's hard to imagine a rank-and-file ad sales rep having access to what would have to be a tightly held and potentially explosive secret.

If the rep actually made that claim, he or she might have been clueless (the most likely explanation) or simply lying. Just because a sales rep makes a claim (especially while trying to sell something) doesn't make it true.

[MayankParmar]

Google is now showing feed pages in "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" after they retired the crawl anomaly tab

[TalkativeEditorial]

Pretty dramatic plunge in traffic here out of nowhere since late yesterday.

@MP - We've seen that error before (not under duplicate, but have been seeing feeds showing up as being crawled for quite a while.

[widgetized]

Converting traffic disappeared again for me, and as usual, I get a lot of spam emails from SEO agencies (how ironic) and similar.

This will be an horrible month in terms of sales, I can feel it.

[superclown2]

It's hard to imagine a rank-and-file ad sales rep having access to what would have to be a tightly held and potentially explosive secret.

If the rep actually made that claim, he or she might have been clueless (the most likely explanation) or simply lying. Just because a sales rep makes a claim (especially while trying to sell something) doesn't make it true.

Do you have another explanation for why the big spenders in many verticals dominate the SERPs even for terms for which they have little or no relevance, and in which there are clearly expert sites that they appear before? Google has had years to learn how to give the best search results, but then that was when they were a search engine and not an advertising agency.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the rep gets the sack, and if so what he or she has to say about it <BWG>

[markseo]

Traffic started drying up yesterday early evening UK time out of nowhere after a strong run of traffic for a week. Back to normal-ish this morning but concerning because its very unpredictable right now, has been since start of Jan for us.

[Neohippy]

Didn't Google put Search under same leadership as head of Ads (Raghavan)? Not much of a silo there!

[TalkativeEditorial]

Traffic started drying up yesterday early evening UK time out of nowhere after a strong run of traffic for a week. Back to normal-ish this morning but concerning because its very unpredictable right now, has been since start of Jan for us.

This restores my sanity a bit. Exactly the same. Seen things plummet to their lowest ever figures in months today. Out of nowhwere. Like a switch. Gone.

[markseo]

Yes, for us initially we didn't take a huge hit in december, but since last few days of 2020 and early Jan things have been very volatile and definitely we've seen drops in conversions, though not necessarily in overall traffic - familiar story. Its impossible to know which way its going to go right now. Best thing is just to crack on trying to improve the quality of the site to try to stabilise and recover drops.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I know you are making a broader pint here @markseo, but it is very difficult to "just crack on" when Google themselves say "well sites with bad SEO practices can still rank well" [source: [seroundtable.com ]].

It becomes even more difficult when for some products, there is just no actual, useful help - the official forums do not count because too many with a Napoleon complex sit on those copy and pasting answers without actually answering the question - and nobody to reach out to for actual advice.

When members of this forum raised the alarm over the canonical bug and mobile indexing issue at first, it took weeks for Google to even acknowledge it. So while we everyone certainly does try to improve (we got our core web vitals into the 90s at one point, then Google had one of its flurries and we couldn't tell if there was a technical glitch their side or ours, so we ripped everything up because nobody could provide us with a helpful answer) .... what would be really helpful is if there is an actual route to helpful assistances rather than just the "google guys" making snarky comments on Twitter.

[MayankParmar]

Back in the old days, it was so difficult to get Google News approval. I literally got rejected two or three times.. and I started to appear in Top Stories after nearly five years of original news reporting.

BUT NOW (after the recent updates), you need to pay someone to find an expired Google News domain and you can get traffic from News, Top Stories and Discover by scrapping others content.

[TalkativeEditorial]

To add to the frustration of the feeds appearing in the crawl report, Publisher Centre seems to have stopped reading our feeds - despite them being populated, we're back to the old "missing content" error.