Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2021

[MayankParmar]

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

---

Previous Monthly Thread [webmasterworld.com]

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

[NickMNS]

I am seeing a huge spike in traffic this morning it started at 6am EST, but it appears to be mostly coming from the UK, and even more odd a good portion is landing on my home page, which is not typical. The traffic is shown as coming from Google search. I'm talking 100% to 300%.

[RedBar]

PVs are extremely variable at the moment which makes a big difference to overall daily PVs for me.

I have always had a lot of single PVs since each of my widget pages are focussed on that widget and if that's all they want to know about, fine.

I then have the multiple PVs when a user must think it's Xmas having located so much widget information that sometimes they stay for hours and read hundreds of pages ... that does still surprise me how often this happens.

Why am I mentioning this? Yesterdat was a mostly single PV day, today is a multiple PVs day.

Trade enquiries are slowly increasing, as is usual in January, BUT most are still non European / N America.

[renatovieira]

On my side, things are a little strange today. High and low traffic swings since morning.

[NickMNS]

As the day progressed the traffic remained at high levels. Today is a first, in that my UK traffic is higher than my US traffic. The days is not done on this side of the pond so I suspect that the US traffic will catch back up, but the final number will be pretty close. But to put this into perspective my UK traffic is typically accounts for less than 10% of my total, today it will be close to 50%.

Judging by how quiet things are around here I'm guessing that this is not due to an update but something specific to my site.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I am unable to load edit anything in Publisher Centre today. Keep getting a "can't open the page" error. Anyone else seen this?

[topaz]

Same here. Something is borked.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Probably has been for a while too! Would be really nice of the "community forum" actually informed on issues like this instead of sending us into a blind panic convinced it MUST be something at our side, ALWAYS.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Traffic now plummeted to the horror of single figures - not seen this since the site started. Can't even tell if this is a Google glitch or something technically wrong. So frustrating.

[davidyowa]

Got a big hit on my 1-year-old website at the end of December, my main keywords were on top 20 and getting 700 to 1000 users daily but after that my some posts were deindexing automatically and dropped a lot of keywords, now indexing issue is resolved but keywords are decreasing day by day, I can't figure out what really happened, this is my website <snip>

[edited by: engine at 10:37 am (utc) on Jan 14, 2021]
[edit reason] Please see charter [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

Glenn Gabe's analysis on December core update is now live. This is part two of the series and it covers the update impact on news publishers. It's a good read: [gsqi.com...]

[StupidIntelligent]

@TalkativeEditorial - Isn't your site just over a year old?

[westcoast]

Is anyone else noticing that searches on iPads now display results that usually appear on mobiles? At least for me, I had been getting the typical desktop results on iPads, but that seemed to change a few days ago.

[markseo]

Traffic appears to be slowing down again this afternoon after a revival yesterday afternoon and into this morning. Doesn't appear to correlate with rankings but presumably overall visibility is down. Extremely frustrating.

[MayankParmar]

"URL is on Google" bug is so frustrating. The URL is not appearing on Google, but it's indexed proper according to search console. It happens every week and there's no fix

[ichthyous]

Traffic appears to be slowing down again this afternoon after a revival yesterday afternoon and into this morning. Doesn't appear to correlate with rankings but presumably overall visibility is down. Extremely frustrating.

I saw this yesterday morning into afternoon, but then it picked up into the evening. Today traffic is very strong for me. It's been strong since around 1/5 or so, with business finally picking up

[Psalber]

I just learned something very interesting. Although I have tried to stay on top of toxic backlinks - ultimately by disavowing them, I had an astonishing 1000 new backlinks to my site in the month of December - almost all were scammers or otherwise undesirable for a health website (e.g., #*$!). We are wondering if this toxic backlink profile could be contributing to the fall in traffic that persisted long after the Dec. core update was said to have completed its rollout. I was told that getting this many toxic backlinks in such a short period of time is very unusual and raised the specter of whether someone had intentionally targeted my site. Prior to the Core Update I was having amazing traffic growth and whether you put any credence in Alexa rankings or not, it was of note that I had achieved a global rank of under 50,000 and 9,000 in the US. Since I run a health information site and my major competitors are owned by multinational corporations with very deep pockets, this was quite an accomplishment. Sometimes I outranked the big guys for some key phrases. Does any of this sound credible or am I looking for answers where they don't exist?

[mini_007]

All results in Norway for gambling/casino keywords show real bad sites ranking top results. It must be BIG bug in Google system, like most sites ranking top is real low quality sites. <snip>

[edited by: not2easy at 2:36 pm (utc) on Jan 15, 2021]
[edit reason] Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[ChokenBako]

On my end traffic starts rising 20%+ above previous weeks level until 10.00 AM, then suddenly a cutoff happens and the traffic remains for the whole day below 1% compared to previous levels. Itīs so frustrating. As before: You donīt have a chance to get more visitors by adding or improving content =(

[renatovieira]

You donīt have a chance to get more visitors by adding or improving content

Exactly!

[renatovieira]

Rollercoaster is on again. Yesterday big increase in traffic. Today simply all dead.

[RedBar]

Traffic levels looking normal however I've had to start using G search again for my trade widget searches since DDG has turned into a bag of manure.

Anyone else seeing this for their industry?

[seomotionz]

Roller Coaster here at various levels. Yesterday traffic fell really hard then it came back a bit today.

But today Adsense earning's are scary as hell. For many sites even with clicks and good traffic they are the lowest.

Traffic levels looking normal however I've had to start using G search again for my trade widget searches since DDG has turned into a bag of manure.

Anyone else seeing this for their industry?

DDG is showing outdated results.

[RedBar]

For me DDG is showing a lot of poor results and completely different to Bing which are slightly better however not that good.

[westcoast]

Weird, weird weird.

We got +20% bump on the core update. It held until Dec 23.
Then we hit this long slow decline to where, just 2 days ago, we were back down -20%.
This morning, out the blue, we are back to our +20% traffic level.
Given the size of our site these are no small jumps in traffic either.

WTH. Are these updates, bugs, or something else?

[westcoast]

"Although I have tried to stay on top of toxic backlinks - ultimately by disavowing them, I had an astonishing 1000 new backlinks to my site in the month of December - almost all were scammers or otherwise undesirable for a health website"

We have been battling such a negative SEO backlink link-farm attack for a couple of years now. It is incredibly frustrating, and I believe it has hurt our traffic enormously as Google has penalized us algorithmic-ly. Our google rankings have slid precipitously month after month, while we remain #1 where we have been for years in every other search engine.

I first discovered the issue in SEMrush, which picked up the toxic links and gave them a 100% toxic rating. Looking closer, it is a massive web of mostly unused domains that are being used to spam "advertised" links:

domain:webseek.in
domain:web-search.us
domain:websearch.net
domain:websearching.org
domain:websearching.net
domain:the-world.us
domain:theworld.shoes
domain:advertising.properties
domain:advertising.estate
domain:advertising.clothing
domain:advertise.town
domain:advertiserealestate.net
domain:advertisepage.org
domain:advertise.investments
etc... etc...

We found at least 550 domains in this network that Semrush had identified, and have disavowed them all.

The problem is, it doesn't appear that Semrush caught them all, and so we continue to find more and more domains in this network that are targeting us that we have not disavowed. My fear is that google has also found a ton more that we don't know about, and is still penalizing us because of them.

For those who say that black hat SEO doesnt exist and doesnt work, they dont know what they're talking about. We have been absolutely slammed by this sort of crap now for some time.

[NickMNS]

@westcoast I saw a similar pattern to this a about 18 month ago, the sites were hot-linking to my images. I blocked the hot-linking and it solved the problem, and a few month thereafter I saw my rankings increase. Correlation is not causation, so it is unclear whether the subsequent increase in rankings was related. And disavowing is pointless, as these sites are auto-generated on an ongoing and continuous basis, you disavow one there will be two more tomorrow, it's Hydra-spam.

[Mentat]

Something is broken.

1. My discovery traffic has disappeared.
2. I do not see any articles from my niche, so It's not just me affected.
3. I see articles about Ireland, UK and a lot of cookie recipes...
I'm in another part of the world.

[notoriusbean]

@westcoast
Multiple sites I work on saw changes on those days too, but in the opposite direction (up starting Dec 23, then 2-3 days ago traffic dropped). Feels like another update.

@all, is anyone looking at Discover? My search traffic seems stable, but Discover is significantly down.

[strummer19]

All is down since 24 hours (discover, search...) European website.

[MayankParmar]

Yeah. Discover is significantly down as well. New stories are appearing, but not reaching enough people.