Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2021

[JesterMagic]

The following 2 messages were cut out of the January 2021 thread at:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5022136.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:19 am on Feb 1, 2021 - PDT -8)



Notice Google Bot has been extremely active our our site yesterday and today. Probably about 3-4 times the visits compared to a normal day.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:25 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2021]
[edit reason] cleanup after thread split [/edit]

[ichthyous]

@renato It's strange now...Wednesday traffic down 21%, Thursday up 14%, today dropped again but it's early yet. I find that traffic usually drops late in the week, as if Google is saying..."ok we sent you some traffic on Monday and Tuesday, now shut up and go away". My SERPS are bouncing around more than usually...dropping out of top three and top ten, then all returning, and today dropping again.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - On my side, things get better on the weekend. So I don't think it's related to your situation. The dec/update was incredible for my main website. Jan I broke several records. When feb arrived, it returned to the level of nov before the update. I don't know if this will continue, we just have to wait...

[ichthyous]

@renato Yes, January was a very good month, and in fact between Jan and now Feb my sales will almost equal the entire year of 2020! That's the power of Google to make your business succeed or fail. Of course the easing of the pandemic may have something to do with it, economic conditions improving a bit...but mostly it's just Google. I am determined to diversify away from depending on Google but it takes a long time.

[TalkativeEditorial]

After a big dip starting on Wednesday, have seen a recovery, especially in the high-value US/UK audience. Will be interesting to see if it holds over the weekend/

[RedBar]

Solid traffic Monday to Thursday however today's has halved, strange.

[browndog]

I've been absolutely decimated. I had one article which had hundreds of comments thanking me and it's been demoted to page 33. Insurance and food companies are absolutely killing it. The content isn't written by an 'expert', but they are at the top of every search I do. It's not complete, it doesn't offer more or different content from the others which is what Google tells us to do.

As an individual, I just cannot compete with these global brands worth billions.

[ichthyous]

Solid traffic Monday to Thursday however today's has halved, strange.

Wow, that's a big drop. Google is definitely experimenting with us this week. Traffic is fluctuating wildly this week...I'm down today 28% on USA traffic. I hope it does not settle in the lower range because there is a huge difference in the quality of traffic and number of new customer inquiries.

[gatormark]

Strong traffic and revenue. I’ve gone from 90,000 page views a day to 120,000 page views a day in the last week. I’m getting back to pre-2018 numbers.

[AdrianRozic]

My traffic is up by 30% but revenue is down by 40%. Irrelevant traffic

[RedBar]

Solid traffic Monday to Thursday however today's has halved, strange.

Wow, that's a big drop.

I really ought to know better than say that on a Friday afternoon!

Traffic ended up being solid again, a good start to February plus some excellent project enquiries this week.

[Athedian]

Massive avg. page ranking drop today. Conversions started to tank badly since Thursday and continued to get worse. Core Vital also showing big changes by marking all pages as "need improvement" when in the past at least 50 of them were in good standing. Lots of irrelevant traffic. With this new keyword match change, I'm suspecting Google's doing a big change to get more money and hitting on smaller players. They can't touch the big daddies (brands) as these are the biggest income from them anyway.

[renatovieira]

High traffic above average for a sunday morning. AdSense with low conversion. Zombies again?

[gatormark]

@browndog

Keep fighting. You never know when things will turn around. After 3 years, my revenue is starting to get back to the numbers before the December 2017 apocalypse. FIGHT!

[browndog]

Thanks gatormark. I'm really happy that things have turned around for you, that is awesome news.

I think I'm going to look into a partnership with somebody. I have a friend in sales who is going to put feelers out to see if she can find anybody who'd like to co-own the site with me. I'll focus on content, they can do the SEO/marketing. She must be pretty good, Google contacted her for a project last week, she meets them on Thursday.

Bringing in a partner is my last-ditch attempt to save the site. My previously no. 1 ranked article (for years) is now in position 71. It's had hundreds of thousands of visitors and was really well-loved, but brands dominate that phrase now and I've been obliterated. It's not even a branded term.

[guarriman3]

Starting on Sunday Feb 7 at 11:30AM (Central Standard Time), my organic search visits from Google dropped 30-40%.

My website is a directory focused on Mexico and the Mexican people living in the USA, with thousands of pages suffering from thin/duplicate content. It had already been penalized with BERT in October-2019.

The average Googlebot's crawling rate had been 100,000 pages/day, but starting on Jan 31 it rocketed up to 270,000 pages/day.

Starting on Jan 24, 90% of my pages were orange-flagged by 'Core Web Vitals' with FID "issue: longer than 100ms (mobile)"
[webmasterworld.com...]

[widgetized]

My traffic is up by 30% but revenue is down by 40%. Irrelevant traffic

Similar situation here, a lot of spammy traffic.

Also, I lost 15% of indexed pages judging by the Coverage section of GSC, despite having introduced a totally new section with new products to my site.

[renatovieira]

My traffic is up by 30% but revenue is down by 40%. Irrelevant traffic

Same here

[ichthyous]

Big drop in traffic on Monday...down 22%, very odd for a Monday!

[TalkativeEditorial]

Bit of a drop here too. Waiting to see if it's the usual drastic ebbs and flows that are normal these days.

[jmorgan]

Just posting to get this on my "My Threads" list. Carry on ...

[renatovieira]

USA semrush sensor on fire!

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yep, something is definitely up. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig dip here.

[gatormark]

My traffic was down about 5000 pages from last Monday. However, my CTR, clicks, and revenue were up from last week. I wonder if Google is getting better at filtering out invalid traffic.

[ichthyous]

A massive overnight drop in USA traffic, down 65% by 8am EST. It's always the USA traffic that drops for my site...UK, EU and everyplace else stays stable. Let's hope that this is temporary...

[TalkativeEditorial]

Ah, hang on. It seems just the US sensors are waaaay off the charts (moderate movement in the UK). Possibly related to the hearings starting today?

[Neohippy]

Haven't they previously rolled stuff out in US first, then global? I'm gonna be keeping a v close eye on UK stats next few days, just in case!

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Neohippy for sure, but this follows a similar trend of astronomical spikes just before major events. much of this oooh aaah what if whaaaa can of course be solved by Google having a clear comms policy for situations like this, but... you know...

[engine]

Not good: This is the first time in a long while a bad actor's site was near the top of the SERPs. No warning in the SERPs and it redirected me to a cheap and nasty page wanting to extract data.
Clearly, I would not have clicked if it wasn't what I was seeking: fyi, details of a pub, nothing dodgy.

[RedBar]

My traffic is still at my normal levels however it is becoming very evident that "Western" project enquiries are not happening and as I expected if the lockdowns were to continue.

It's already estimated that 700K London residents have relocated out of the city.

[euroweeklynews.com...]

Empty shops, empty office blocks, empty hotels ... and this is being replicated across other cites.

[Neohippy]

Sure enough, SEMrush is now in high range for UK, too (not as high as US, though)