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]

[ichthyous]

@renatoviera Your site and mine seem highly correlated. After three days of extreme drops in USA traffic, it suddenly turned yesterday evening and is now shooting up again. Let's see if it results in any real customers though. Google is just a casino now, we are at their mercy and have to be content with whatever good days we get.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@saladtosser that's very funny.
Another variant will be a customer saying "I don't drink" and yet... still with all the wine.

[mini_007]

Lot fluctuation today in Norway for almost all keywords I check

[saladtosser]

@TalkativeEditorial, lol.

Google throw so many distracting elements in the SERPs these days to take you away from the results they just delivered that I'm just wondering why Google doesn't also include "Other people also searched on" Bing, Yahoo, Duckduck go", at the top of every search! (could help their anti-competitive lawsuits lol!)

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - I don't know if we are in the same niche, but our numbers are very compatible. Two days ago big drop. Heavy traffic today since morning. My niche is weather forecast & streaming cameras...

PS: I can't say anything bad about Google, AdSense pay my bills : - )

[TalkativeEditorial]

Out of interest, does anyone know if any of the sites that write about SEO/tech stuff have an open dialogue with any of the search engine folks? I mean, I know there are sites that report on the 'chatter' on forums, but does anyone know if there is quite obviously a glaring issue (say like the mobile indexing bug last year) that gets mentioned, do they have a contact point to go to and say 'hey, I'm seeing a lot of talk about this, can you comment on this?"

Really curious to know.

[delorean]

Am I only one experiencing this? My indexing suddenly slowed down. Previously, my pages are being indexed within hours, but now it will took 3-5 days before being indexed. I have no penalties whatsoever.

[Athedian]

@TalkativeEditorial - most likely no. It's like telling those companies to give out their schemes and algos for all to see. The best they can do, if they even bother replying to these inquiries, would be answers that are so vague that there's no value to speak of whatsoever.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Unfortunately the traffic died early on in the day again, so another down day but not by much. Searches down 14% so far today. The problem is that since the decline started I haven't had any new inquiries. So whatever it is the quality of the traffic is also not very good this week.

[jmorgan]

@TalkativeEditorial I believe @rustybrick who manages seroundtable does have contacts at Google and regularly engages with John Mueller on YT or social media.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Thanks folks. I certainly don't think that the big tech folks will give their secrets to ranking away, but I'm just curious if there is a level of engagement/attempt to seek accountability. And I'm not talking about the 'little' updates we feel and notice... but rather about the serious technical issues which are later acknowledged. Appreciate the input from the members here, thanks!

[Chickensalami]

Traffic down the last 3 days. Seems like I get hit with every update there is. Time to start looking at pursuing other business ventures because Google is a joke of a search engine.

[gatormark]

@Chickensalami

I’ve been hit negatively with just about every update since the December 2017 apocalypse. This most recent update FINALLY helped me. It’s impossible to figure out, so I just work on the quality of my websites and let things fall where they may.

[ichthyous]

@Chickensalami Google has really made things impossible for years now. It is not a viable source of consistent leads anymore. Google killed off my business completely in 2020, then this January traffic zoomed back and it seemed like the old days...but back down this week and it's crickets again. You cannot grow a business when Google has its hands around your throat.

We are in a time when a few monopolies control everything...between Google killing off search, Facebook killing of access to eyeballs on FB and Insta, and Amazon controlling e-commerce they are going to ensure that all small business dies on the internet. They want the entire pie, and so far there is no way to stop them.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - What is your niche? If you have more than one website, what is the best ranked niche?

[No5needinput]

I'm surprised Google even knows what day it is!

Each time we publish a new unique article on our 20 year old authority site we add the URI to GSC and it is spidered and ranked within minutes. However, there is a scraper site that scrapes our new articles within hours of us publishing them. Despite still having OUR articles canonical tag/link in their source code they outrank us within hours.

In addition other on page information such as our citation resource box (containing a non-linked URI to the article on our site) are also listed on the scraped page. There are so many signals that the article was originally posted on our website (including date/time listed in serps showing we published the article first.)

Google search results, and methods, are becoming ridiculous.

[Chickensalami]

Anyone else seeing ridiculously large amounts of traffic from cat=plus-5-results? Traffic just skyrocketed within the last hour but sessions don’t match up with the pageviews so I’m guessing it’s a glitch in analytics. Nothing has been touched.

[Psalber]

No5need input: I am also having a huge problem with scrapers. Sometimes I have barely finished pushing the "publish" button, when I get a notification that the story is live on a scraper site. Everyone I have talked to and everything I have read, says there is nothing that can be done about it. But all of us on the forum know that Google could fix this in a minute if they really wanted to.

They tweak their algorithms all the time and get us to jump through all kinds of hoops in the name of user experience in our quest to rank just a little bit better. But, really, they can't tweak the algorithm to put these guys on page 300 or remove them altogether? Shouldn't there be some legal recourse for us. Many of us spend a lot of time on our content (research, writing, doing grammar checks, formatting, tags, featured photos, etc. etc. etc. only to have it stolen in a minute.

I want to put some of my stories behind a paywall in my neverending, but often futile effort to make some real money off of the site but I have been told that most people will just copy my title, put it in the URL bar, and read the story for free on a scraper site. (That may even help them rank above the original story on my site). Content is my product. Why can they steal it with impunity?

Yes, they do have a link back to my site (but no credit given to the author). But the link is at best worthless (low domain authority) and at worst it adds to the millions of toxic backlinks we have to continually clean up.

Why are we just complaining about this without formulating some kind of action to rid the web of this worthless, annoying, and sometimes harmful activity? I realize that we can't do it alone - there are too many of them to go after them one by one. But is there something we can do together? Thoughts?

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Psalber Of course they can do something - look at how easy it was to just cut legit Australian news publishers out for their 'experiment' recently.

Unfortunately, doing something would probably require a fairly large scale effort, often in collaboration with legit competitors. And I suspect since things are already so divisive and so many smaller publishers feel that they have to take what they can get - most probably won't join in something that might affect them negatively too.

[superclown2]

If google was a bar it would run like this

Waiter: How can I help you today sir.
Customer: Hi, yes id like a large glass of merlot, please.

Hopefully the customer wasn't a real ale fan or wine buff. All google would recommend would be the ten most heavily advertised brands - or the ones they made the most profit on.

That's acceptable for a bar of course. But for a 'search engine'?

[strummer19]

European website : Very big négative impact since thursday (more than december core update)

[delorean]

December 2020 Google SEO Update is the BEST UPDATE for SCRAPER Websites. It's the time of their celebration.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Something else I've been noticing - from a UX perspective - is that sites that have related posts with a keyword in a headline that might relate to a search term - keep showing up as an actual result to that search term. noticed across different niches for both known and lesser known sites. These are all for search terms I've been using in an attempt to find information on something.... not exactly the best user experience...

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira It's a fine arts related website...I only have one. The domain is 19 years old, and current site is Wordpress. Thinking of a redesign as the theme designers just cannot seem to get the bloated css and js files under control.

[RedBar]

As the month draws to a close I've just been looking at a daily line graph for my global widget site and the only description is the classic sawtooth rising steadily towards the 31st... I'll finalise my data tomorrow however it would seem to be slightly ahead of my expectations.

[saladtosser]

@Psalber are you using RSS? I've never had a problem with scrapers but I've also never used RSS, wondering if there is a link!?

[Psalber]

Thanks, Saladtosser. I do use RSS to send newsletters and daily updates to subscribers. However, I have recently been rethinking my entire newsletter strategy. It is a lot of work, is expensive, and does not generate that much traffic for me.

I have a health information site so most of my traffic comes from people looking for the answers to specific questions they have. Ranking in search is the main driver. My home page has never been the main draw because most people don't come to read a whole bunch of articles on different health topics. We do include internal links to related stories in every post. We are also active on several social media channels.

Your comment makes me think the downsides of RSS (scraping) may well outweigh the benefits in this day and age. I am hoping this type of conversation is considered appropriate in this forum because I would really appreciate hearing from others on this topic.

[BushyTop]

I've seen a hit this morning. Serps down for some of our longtail stuff.

[strummer19]

Update : 3 Sports news european website, 3 sudden drop since thursday at same time

[MayankParmar]

Discover is down since Thursday.