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]

[RedBar]

i've just been going through some stats and whilst traffic is down overall for 2021 so far it is very noticeable, for me, that European PVs are down considerably.

For instance UK PVs -33%
Netherlands -88.25%

Likewise China -25%

Usually I would say it's too early to tell however talking with both wholesale and retail widget sellers they are experiencing similar.

This seems to be a general business downturn, not a ranking issue.

Anyone else?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Down all-round (Discover is down for the poster who asked, but that has been so unstable in general that it feels kind of pointless to note).
Behaviour is.... odd... to say the least.

[ichthyous]

My overall traffic has returned to early December levels, with traffic especially strong from the UK and AU. USA traffic is up but not nearly as much. Interestingly, GSC does not show an increase in clicks or impressions...both dropped on 12/8 and have remained in the same level. Last week I had gained about ten top three spots but since then gave them all back.

[saladtosser]

For anyone who is in the informational website area and not PURSUING Facebook, I would urge you to look into it. I was always like "ugh you never going to get traffic from Facebook like you would google" but after the December core update decimated my site (and i thought it was game over) I turned to Facebook and in a matter of a few weeks I am getting 70% of the traffic I used to receive from google directly from Facebook, hundreds of likes, engagements and shares per day. Google says my content is no longer good, but real users on Facebook are lapping it up, go figure

[ichthyous]

@saladtosser Are you paying to boost posts on Facebook? I can assure you that my posts get nowhere and are seen by nobody now because they want you to pay. I have a Facebook business page which I have considered deleting completely because I do believe that if your account is linked to a business page they simply won't allow anyone to see posts unless you boost it. I am not in the informational website niche, I am selling products.

[TalkativeEditorial]

This might explain some of what many are seeing.

Google is reportedly admitting to blocking Australian news sites from search results following a government order to pay news publishers.
Source:
[searchenginejournal.com ]

[saladtosser]

ichthyous no not paid for anything on Facebook, we don't sell anything just provide detailed information, original images, original videos on a specific hobby google decide we aren't worthwhile ranking for any more on December 4th. As far as I can tell google AI doesn't care about our content or website (ranking non mobile sites above us since Dec) but Facebook users do, I'm going to concentrate on Facebook users going forward and stop stressing about google (happy days), remove AdSense and use amazon as an Alternativ for ads! Like goodroi posted the other week, Google is not my friend, time to stop using Google products :)

[shadowlight]

Google is not my friend, time to stop using Google products :)

The more people who do this the better!

[Psalber]

The story about Google blocking the Australian News sites is incredibly important for 2 reasons:

1. This could be a purposeful manipulation of the algorithm to discriminate against companies they are mad at (because of the new Australian law.). Google denies it saying they are just doing an experiment. But think about this: If they do something like this, could they also be redirecting traffic to sites they are in love with (including those who buy lots of Google ads or some other quid pro quo that we don't yet know about? Not accusing, just raising the issues.

2. The issue in Australia is the request by Australian news sites to be paid for the use of their content. Interestingly, I was just discussing this with a friend. He wanted to know if Google paid the sites that they used for the featured snippet. I said no. Publishers are supposed to be considered lucky to have gotten a position 0. BUT, are they? ~50% of searches are now clickless. (i.e., They see my featured snippet and get their answer - no need to click over to my site). According to a recent SEJ article, only 30% of clicks are from organic search, the rest of the clicks are paid.

[NickMNS]

1. This could be a purposeful manipulation of the algorithm to discriminate against companies they are mad at

Not sure I see it like that. If the government told me I had to pay a website because I was displaying some content, then I would most likely remove the content. Essentially what you are saying is that now the government will force you to use a service and to pay for it. Interesting concept, so this was where again, communist China?

According to a recent SEJ article, only 30% of clicks are from organic search, the rest of the clicks are paid.

I not sure I trust SEJ to calculate anything when they quote tweets that say:

I did some calculations on this. If 86.5% of the AU population uses the internet (21,936,400) and Google has 95% market share, 1% is over 200,000

200,000 what exactly? 200 000 Google market share people percent ratio? WTF?

[seomotionz]

This might explain some of what many are seeing.

Google is reportedly admitting to blocking Australian news sites from search results following a government order to pay news publishers.

@TalkativeEditorial Ofcourse they are blocking Australian news sites. Because Australian media is reporting about the US election debacle unlike the media of US and other countries.

[superclown2]

In my vertical there are four business that are big, big spenders on ads. These four companies are almost invariably on page one of the organic SERPs as well as amongst the ads for just about ANY search term remotely connected to my vertical, usually at or near the top. They don't actually sell the service mentioned in the search term but are in effect affiliates of other businesses whose own web sites are pushed down. Their content is ultra thin and often don't include relevant words from the search term at all - just a mention of a synonym in the body copy seems to be enough.

The result is that they pay Google for the ads, the businesses that actually produce the service pay them for the business that is rightfully theirs, the customer eventually pays for everything.

This system is rotten to the core.

[edited by: superclown2 at 10:55 am (utc) on Jan 17, 2021]

[superclown2]

is the 'Find Results' bar which is sticking a new source of ads in the middle of the organic SERPs something new? I've only noticed it over the last couple of weeks.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Ofcourse they are blocking Australian news sites. Because Australian media is reporting about the US election debacle unlike the media of US and other countries.

This is not why they are blocking sites. It's because they don't want to pay for 'using' content in the SERPS - much like in the EU - where there is now some level of rev share going on.

[EditorialGuy]

1. This could be a purposeful manipulation of the algorithm to discriminate against companies they are mad at

It isn't a "manipulation of the algorithm," it's a filter.

And I find it hard to blame Google (or any Web site) for not wanting to pay businesses for the privilege of sending them free traffic.

[saladtosser]

>>>And I find it hard to blame Google (or any Web site) for not wanting to pay businesses for the privilege of sending them free traffic.<<<<

when you put it like that, it's hard to argue.

[christianz]

Except its idiotic way of looking at it. Traffic from Google is NOT free and is not a gift from Google. Webmasters own that traffic. If there was no Google, there would be other search engines that would always point to those same websites.

People are visiting Google not because of how awesome Google is but because of how awesome the collective wealth of information in the WWW is. And WWW is a web of websites that we make.

[Psalber]

Am I the only one dismayed by what has happened to Google search? Back in the day (not so long ago) when search yielded many pages of SERPS to choose from you were free to read good or bad content (not that I am a fan of the latter). But once they went into a full-court press on monetization, the experience is quite different.

For example, I did a search in my field the other day and was treated to 6 ads, followed by a carousel of You-Tube Videos, then the featured snippet and the "people also ask" answers. Then, I got another 4 or 5 ads! (this seems new to me and it is not welcome). I gave up before I got to the truly organic search results. So I was one of those "clickless searchers."

I talked to a doctor friend today who told me she is so disgusted with Google search results that she moved to another search engine.

Also, a few words about what makes it into the featured snippets and Q&A. In my field (health), you want to read current content because things can change so fast and the results are so important to your life. I can't tell you how many times stories with dates 3 to 5 years old show up there. Unfortunately, the "right" answer to your question could have moved on since the time that article was written.

It does not give me confidence that the search has provided me with the most "awesome" content.

Sorry, one more thought about this comment <<<<And I find it hard to blame Google (or any Web site) for not wanting to pay businesses for the privilege of sending them free traffic.>>> In my opinion, Google traffic is not free. In order to get any kind of decent traffic, you have to spend a ton of time and money analyzing and optimizing your site and/or hiring people and software products to help you do it..

Or you cave and buy Google Ads (or Facebook boosts). Google is making money off of us from their ads. And, they make a lot of money off of the people with badges that certify them to help folks manage their ads. I do not feel sorry for them. But I do feel sorry for the content creators and others who make their living off the web only to have their traffic and income disappear every time Google releases a Core Algorithm Update that they believe makes search better..

Content creators and publishers are increasingly under the gun to generate more and more revenue to cover the high costs of running even a medium to small-size site. (but heaven forbid that you do this by putting up "too many ads" or you get hit by the algorithm again!)

This is why you see so many publishers putting content behind paywalls ("awesome" content that is no longer available to everyone) or resorting to begging for contributions to keep their work going. It's pitiful.

[NickMNS]

In my opinion, Google traffic is not free. In order to get any kind of decent traffic, you have to spend a ton of time and money analyzing and optimizing your site and/or hiring people and software products to help you do it..

Yes, you need build high quality website and that costs money.

Or you cave and buy Google Ads (or Facebook boosts).

There is no "caving" it should be a business decision. What provides a better return, purely organic traffic, or buying ads, or some combination.

It sounds to me like you want everything for free, but this is exactly the problem. There have been no barriers to entry into this industry, nearly all the barriers that have come up, are quickly exploited and then disappear. Take Wordpress as a perfect example, at certain point in time you needed to know how to code, not much but enough. Now with Wordpress not even that is requirement. What is the result, now everybody and anybody can have a blog, e-commerce shop, a website, whatever. So yeah, guess what, you got everything for free, but now you are one a million, because everyone else got it for free too and only 1 website can hold the top spot. You have to up your game, better content, better UI, faster response... and the list goes on.

This is why you see so many publishers putting content behind paywalls

When you are one in a million you need to differentiate yourself, putting your content behind a paywall is up-selling your brand. But when really good content is readily available for free, making that up-sell is not an easy task.

[StupidIntelligent]

ddns.net spam is ranking again and for competitive terms.

[ChokenBako]

New content ranks for the first 24h and then disapperars and cannot be found anythere....
Is this a filter? Sandbox?

[mzb44]

In my vertical there are four business that are big, big spenders on ads. These four companies are almost invariably on page one of the organic SERPs [...]. They don't actually sell the service mentioned in the search term but are in effect affiliates of other businesses whose own web sites are pushed down. Their content is ultra thin and often don't include relevant words from the search term at all - just a mention of a synonym in the body copy seems to be enough.

The result is that they pay Google for the ads [...]

It's not because of the ads.

What you are describing is something observed by many since the start of these core updates. Google seems to have decided that big brand/publisher > all and likely trained its AI and machine learning around discovering brand signals and favouring such sites at the expense of most others.

It's extremely frequent now that big brand sites with thin content outrank smaller specialized sites with detailed and expert content.

As a consequence of this there is now an increasing trend of big publishers and news sites having entire sections of their site (usually hidden from main navigation and only discoverable from SERPS) devoted to creating pages on any money keywords as possible (i.e. "best X", "X review", "top 10 X" etc.), knowing that they will instantly rank on page 1 and outrank everyone else, even with a random 300 words page just on domain/brand authority alone.

[TalkativeEditorial]

And I find it hard to blame Google (or any Web site) for not wanting to pay businesses for the privilege of sending them free traffic.

Sure, but the issue is in part to do with the use of website content for things like featured snippets and the answer box etc. That does not always result in 'free' traffic.

[EditorialGuy]

This is why you see so many publishers putting content behind paywalls

IMO, that has more to do with changes in the ad business than with Google Search. For example, programmatic advertising has driven down ad rates. The advertising world is much different today than it was in the day when our ad reps would e-mail me and say, "We can get CPMs of $20 or better on anything you can publish about [topic]."

Sure, but the issue is in part to do with the use of website content for things like featured snippets and the answer box etc. That does not always result in 'free' traffic.

Whether it does or doesn't probably depends, in large part, on the nature of the search query: e.g., whether the person wants a simple fact ( the capital of North Dakota) or more than a snippet of information about the topic (tourist or business info about the capital of North Dakota).

On our site, we've found that Google Answers, featured snippets, etc. can be a great source of traffic. One of our articles from 20+ years ago on an obscure topic is now generating a record number of page views and ad impressions every day, thanks to Google Answers.

[TalkativeEditorial]

That's definitely not always been the case for news sites. But it's a far more complicated topic that can be distilled into snippets on forums.

As an aside, right now the SERPs aren't great. And one site I work on is benefitting in terms of visibility in news. A lot of irrelevant and outdated articles are surfacing and the AI seems to be confusing "trending" searches in some regions even for the most basic things. - like when an acronym makes up a word it thinks the trending search is the word rather than the acronym.

[mzb44]

As an aside, right now the SERPs aren't great. And one site I work on is benefitting in terms of visibility in news. A lot of irrelevant and outdated articles are surfacing and the AI seems to be confusing "trending" searches in some regions even for the most basic things. - like when an acronym makes up a word it thinks the trending search is the word rather than the acronym.

We can all thank Amit Singhal for this for not being able to keep it in his pants while at work and having to resign/force-resign. He was publicly against introducing ML and AI into search.

All this mess started when they decided it's a good idea to leave rankings to ML.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Having had a look through some other random queries in the news tab, there is a lot of old articles appearing at the top with the more recent articles (and I must stress before anyone shouts conspiracy that this is across several niches and topics) appearing all the way down the very bottom.

Is anyone else noticing this?

[ChokenBako]

"Is anyone else noticing this?"

Yes followed by an insane amount of selling pages without any value! And what I see at the moment is again domain crowding - sometimes the first 4-6 results =(

[RedBar]

I'm seeing a good, steady flow of global traffic yet enquiries are thin on the ground at the moment however that is nothing different for the time of year, what is impossible to tell / know is the quantity of potential projects that have been postponed or even cancelled due to Covid.

Getting information from many specifiers is downright difficult at the moment, I suspect that much more office and commercial projects are being shelved than anyone will admit to.

[ichthyous]

I've had good steady traffic since early January...and the first burst of real business since the Spring of last year. Perhaps the prospect of vaccines has put people at ease? More likely that Google has tweaked itself in January and for some reason my site benefited. I'll ride it while it lasts.