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]

Also seeing lower than usual activity. There was a bit of a flutter between 17-25 Dec (peak on 23) and it's been quite low since then.
Search Console's "average position" data has also been strangely volatile (more so than usual anyway) over the last few days - the level that we last saw when there were severe mobile indexing issues in September. .....

[RedBar]

December traffic was where I estimated it would be for my quietest month of the year at 79% of November BUT it was +262.25% v Decmeber 2019 therefore I'm definitely not complaining.

[TalkativeEditorial]

The dismal downward trend continues. Hilariously, as always, monitoring tools show no drastic changes in position. In fact, GSC shows a very notable INCREASE yesterday - despite it being one of the worst days in months. Brilliant.

[AdrianRozic]

Page 1 is just full of spam sites with 50-200 words content.
My page is pushed to page 2 and never received so much traffic from page 2, people are not finding relevant items on page 1.

[JesterMagic]

Sales are way down... overall traffic levels are about the same as last year but keywords that bring the traffic have changed somewhat.

From all the media press releases you see about our niche you wouldn't think Covid has hit our niche that hard, but it has based on the sales I see (except for maybe the most popular of the services).

[TalkativeEditorial]

@AdrianRozic - agree, the results are terrible, from a user experience. Was looking for information on some info on something (ironically, a google product) earlier and could not find anything immediately useful - and there was an actual hacked site in the top three results on desktop.

[ichthyous]

This has been by far the worst holiday season I've had since the global recession of 2009-2010, and it makes no sense since most of my clients are better off financially now than one year ago. It's almost all due to Google destroying my visibility across the board. Traffic has been abysmal since mid December and there have been few new inquiries and only one sale this entire season. I don't see this turning around, only getting worse in terms of Google continuing to degrade the organic SERPS and intentionally killing off organic traffic. It's been one year since the deadly January update of 2020, followed by the even more disastrous May update...nothing has improved in the slightest. Google organic is effectively dead as a source of business.

[Abaros]

Again the indexing problems, the home page of some of my sites has disappeared, GSC shows it as indexed, re-indexing does not solve the problem.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Wish there was an actual support forum for Google Discover and something more helpful than copy and paste answers from the "forum experts" for Publisher Centre. No sign of improvement here (and yet GSC shows the opposite...)

[mini_007]

In Norway from December to now I see big change of sites when it comes to different casino keywords, some even a lot low quality sites and spam sites

[ichthyous]

Yesterday I saw a reversion to more normal traffic levels, then this morning by 11:30am USA traffic is again down 70% over the norm. Could be that a late day surge will wipe that out but not likely. Google seems to be very precisely targeting traffic to main pages that bring in the most searches and conversions on my site. The entire site has normal traffic, except for a few of the most important pages which are regularly down 50%-80%. My SERPs are stable and have even risen slightly, so it's not that I have lost ranking, but GSC is showing greatly reduced impressions and clicks.

[RedBar]

Saturday's traffic was busier than average for me, I actually checked it out to see if I'd been hit by anything untowards but everything was normal.

Toda; so far is also ahead of the usual Sunday / weekend traffic.

[Robert Charlton]

the home page of some of my sites has disappeared, GSC shows it as indexed, re-indexing does not solve the problem.

Aboros... if you post that question as a separate post, in the forum but outside this thread, and you observe our guidelines and don't mention specific domain names, it should get through premod OK and would probably make a good discussion.

It's the kind of discussion, though, that would probably take the SERPs thread off-topic, so I'm not going to post a response here... and it's too much work to excerpt a post from the thread to split it off.

[MayankParmar]

"Pages crawled per day" started to drop on December 31 and it hit all-time low numbers on January 2 (50% less than the average). Is this normal?

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MP - is this when you are looking at the 'new' crawl stats report?

[MayankParmar]

Both new and old.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Our crawl report varies wildly from week to week (sometimes more than 50%, for no apparent reason and rarely any noticeable impact on traffic. So 'normal' in that way, yes...probably.

[BushyTop]

Anyone having issues again with G platforms. My GA is constantly down.

[renatovieira]

Anyone having issues again with G platforms. My GA is constantly down

I don't know if it's a issue with GA or if my traffic is gone since this morning :-\

[TalkativeEditorial]

@renatovieira exactly how I feel sometimes. It's not funny, but I just laugh these days because I'd lose my mind otherwise.

[ichthyous]

I also saw a big uptick on Saturday, it was the first up day for USA / UK traffic since the 12/21. Unfortunately it vanished on Sunday, which was down 15%-18% respectively. Today my UK traffic is up again but USA still way down. It may break even by the end of the day with a late day surge...that has been the pattern with my USA traffic this entire year for some reason...

[MarvinG]

How do your SERP's look? When I search for random terms or widgets... top spots are taken by pinterest pages. Also when I search for, for example, a recipe on my website I am outranked by 3 pinterest pages... who display my recipe

[RedBar]

Sort of first day back at work for many of my European industry and France seems to have gone into total spam mode.

Anyone else?

[christianz]

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

if (strpos(url, 'pinterest.') !== false) dropFromIndexBanDomainPermanentlyWithNoAppeal();

[NickMNS]

It's been a month since the December update and fortunately I haven't seen much of a change in my traffic. However, a pattern is emerging (based on GSC data) I have noticed a gradual decline in impressions, with an offsetting gain in clicks, (this is seen as an increase in CTR). Now this could be a result of the holidays, as traffic (impressions) naturally declines during this period. I tried to compare it to last December but I was benefiting from continuous growth in traffic (which eventually and abruptly ended with the May update), so basically the numbers are not comparable.

Anyway, dropping impressions always makes me nervous, even if CTR is strong. CTR can only climb so far but impression can easily trend to zero.

[superclown2]

I'm getting a lot more business from Bing so far this month. Have the British public realised how bad Google results are now?

[Martin Ice Web]

Big new hit yesterday at 4pm in germany, at least 50%.And it took away the converting traffic.

The last core update in december resolved in serps are now dominated by amazon ( like ever before ) 1-2 brands and then lots of made for amazon sites.
I donīt get the intention why sites with only pictures and low to no content but with hundreds of links to amazon are in top 10? Why is google not removing sites with more than 2 amazon links per page?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Had a day or so of vague improvement and now back to dismal levels. Average rankings in SERPS remain relatively stable - as per both GSC data and other tracking tools we use. It's very, very frustrating.

As for Bing, a partial increase - but they have also updated their webmaster tools recently, so it might be a combo of improvements on their side and people trying something else.

[Abaros]

@christianz
Is it really that hard for Google engineers to add this one-liner to fix the Pinterest problem?
if (strpos(url, 'pinterest.') !== false) dropFromIndexBanDomainPermanentlyWithNoAppeal();

That's easy, the problem is that you put it in its place.

I have the personal conviction that those pages are there just so that ours are not.