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]

[yollo03]

I left this forum in 2018, I decided to try and return. My website is a little over 6 years old. I got literally hammered by the recent update, Keywords dropped by -60%, top ranking pages in the top 10 in my niche got pushed to the back.

I can say that this is not a page speed or user experience update. On almost all pages my score in the core web vitals is all green, In mobile only the LPC is orange in most pages but all rest are in green. According to semrush my website only got hit by the most recent update yesterday (8.5) and today it is 7.1. The next 10 days will tell how it goes.

I did notice some indexing issues prior to the update (in the past 14 days).

[ichthyous]

I haven't recovered any of the terms I lost over the last few days but two. USA traffic still down 33% as of 2pm...this is the fourth consecutive day of much lower USA and CA traffic...that's very bad. Typically google blips last 2-3 days and revert...if you're still down by the 4th day it's likely going to stick. But let's hope this time I'm wrong because it's a huge decline in USA and CA traffic only. UK, EU and AU are all stable or higher.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Passage Index started rolling out yesterday in US, which explains some of what we've been seeing, maybe. Also increases the likelihood that something might have brok with indexing in the process

[christianz]

By definition you can't see improvements/changes unless sensors climb back again or stay somewhat elevated for some time. If they revert back to mean, it just indicates that update (or downgrade, rather) is rolled out fully.

[TalkativeEditorial]

And still today the weird indexing continues and I am growing seriously concerned that something has broken during this "passage indexing" roll out.

Inspect URL on GSC: Says URL not indexed.

Search for exact term and the url is indexed. Publisher Centre is instant and the article appears.

Index coverage shows "url crawled not indexed".
Sitemap coverage report shows sitemap last crawled 8 Feb - when everyone started noticing weird things.

Anyone else seeing this?

[ichthyous]

Whatever Google rolled out on Monday it's been a total disaster...my USA traffic is down 69% this morning. I went from a stream of great customer inquiries in January and early Feb to nothing but spam this entire week. As usual, Google has surgically targeted the best and most profitable traffic to blitz. It's all just a game to constantly pressure businesses to pony up on ad spending. It's no different at this point from the mafia coming into your business and threatening to hurt you and your family if you don't pay them. I sincerely hope that governments everywhere start to hammer Google mercilessly, because the company deserves it!

[RedBar]

As expected Chinese traffic and emails down substantially today. All other countries looking normal, USA down a little, India up a little and overall for Ferbruary traffic is up about the usual.

International bulk trade enquiries are like the classic bus scenario, nothing for 3/4/5 days and then half-a-dozen all within a few hours with none of them being related.

My SERPs are looking normal other than the single keyword page with one mediocre image results ... SO early noughties, their bounce rates must be horrific.

This is how I taught SEO 25 years ago!

[TalkativeEditorial]

@ichthyous

It doesn't appear to be an issue with an update in the traditional sense (as in, Medic or Bert or whatever), rather that something has broken with the rollout of passage indexing - which is throwing the whole indexing processing out of whack and resulting in the decimation of US traffic.

[gatormark]

Weird, pageviews are decreasing but revenue is increasing.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Still have no idea what's going on with indexing.
Had a little bump from US Traffic thanks to something hitting the Discover Feed, but overall, things just do not look right in terms of what GSC is showing in its reports. Losing my mind.

[samwest]

I see this topic hasn't changed one bit. Still griping over what cannot be controlled.

[shadowlight]

Google used to be a great search engine with supplementary ads, they are now an advertising billboard with supplementary search. They are killing off what made made them rise to be the dominant force they are today.

[ichthyous]

Google used to be a great search engine with supplementary ads, they are now an advertising billboard with supplementary search. They are killing off what made made them rise to be the dominant force they are today.

That's exactly right...Google is now nothing but a collection of ads with a few poor search results thrown in, along with a lot of links to other Google properties. And the bottom line is that since they have monopoly power nobody really cares. People are not decamping to other search engines in mass and never will, because Google is their search engine, phone OS, maps, email, docs, sheets, calendar and everything else too. People will just suffer through the crappy search results, or not notice at all. The only company I can see challenging Google is Apple, but they are betting on electric cars so I doubt there is impetus there to push into search and advertising.

[mzb44]

Google used to be a great search engine with supplementary ads, they are now an advertising billboard with supplementary search. They are killing off what made made them rise to be the dominant force they are today.

It's like what ichthyous said. They aren't killing off anything. This is pure revenge fantasy on our part.

Google revenues are bigger than ever and faster growing than ever.

They now have market dominance and do exactly what every single company in their place would do. Scale back on quality (and as such, expenses - the switch from manual algos to pure-AI suddenly makes perfect sense) and squeeze out more revenue from the captured market. There is nothing wrong with this. Everyone else would do the same.

It is what it is guys. It's all just business. Wishing that all of this would stop and go back to how it was in the old days is pure fantasy. It will not. That would mean Google deciding to do an instant revenue cut of 20%-30%. Something like that would be catastrophic. It will never happen under any circumstance. Expect much more of this until this market will eventually be disrupted by innovation from others (I'd say 10-15 years).

[saladtosser]

>>>and do exactly what every single company in their place would do<<<

I don't think this is true, some companies would be happy with 10 billion a year in profits and would be happy to maintain that without compromising quality, unfortunately the same can't be said of companies who have floated on the stock market and have the legal obligation to increase profits year over year until they implode.

[samwest]

Use DDG and Firefox.

[yollo03]

Its still early to say whether I am beginning to recover from this update. I noticed a drop in google crawling my website since the update last week. My main keywords that were virtually killed by the update are yet to recover. I am suspecting what may contribute are backlinks and domain rating, which perhaps received greater ranking points. It's only an assumption, nothing concrete to back it up with.

I am working on my backlinks, will update with time whether it improved anything. It can take a while. The alternative is that I got penalized by the algorithm (not manual action).

[mzb44]

I don't think this is true, some companies would be happy with 10 billion a year in profits and would be happy to maintain that without compromising quality, unfortunately the same can't be said of companies who have floated on the stock market and have the legal obligation to increase profits year over year until they implode.

Yes. Google is a publicly traded company. Once something that lead to an increase in revenues is implemented it will never be rolled back no matter what. Revenues of a publicly traded behemoth like Google falling 20%-30% during a quarter would be absolutely devastating.

You can be 100% sure that all these things such as pushing ads everywhere, diluting organic results, pushing other Google properties everywhere, pure AI-generated rankings to cut costs, big brands ranking everywhere by default because it's easier and cheaper than making tailored and complex algos to account for particularities - all these things that resulted in higher Google earnings - will absolutely stay as they are and never rolled back.

[ichthyous]

This is ridiculous...I am seeing a 72% drop in USA traffic and an 85% drop in UK traffic this morning compared to the norm for that last four weeks. Whatever google rolled out on the January 8th has been a total disaster. I have never seen anything like these drops in traffic in the 18 years my site has been live. I checked GSC...there are very few pages which are not indexed so that doesn't seem to be the problem with my site. Roll it back Google, the experiment has failed!

[ichthyous]

The alternative is that I got penalized by the algorithm (not manual action).

Yollo I have very good backlink profile and I am still getting hammered. I thought perhaps this was related to a penalty of some sort but I doubt it. This is affecting my English language traffic only...USA, UK, CA...and not on the same day. UK was higher while Canada traffic vanished, now Canada has shot up while UK has dropped 85%. Are you seeing all of your traffic across the board dropping equally or just some countries and some pages?

[ichthyous]

You can be 100% sure that all these things such as pushing ads everywhere, diluting organic results, pushing other Google properties everywhere, pure AI-generated rankings to cut costs, big brands ranking everywhere by default because it's easier and cheaper than making tailored and complex algos to account for particularities - all these things that resulted in higher Google earnings - will absolutely stay as they are and never rolled back.

I agree...all of these companies must maintain revenue targets and increase share price so that their executives and shareholders are satisfied. We live in an age of monopolies and we are seeing how the American government's passive attitude and lack of concern for monopoly building has come back to kill small business. Now we have a few massive monopolies with so much money it will be hard for even the US government to deal with them. I also agree that before any government deals with the issue a newer and better technology will come along to disrupt Google's rapidly aging and unusable search. By that time Google will have moved on to other sources of revenue so it will not kill the company. That's why all these behemoth companies have their fingers in so many pies.

[Dooku]

The genie is out of the bottle:
[bloomberg.com...]

G was strongarming the Australian government last month by denying australian users to login to the G services because Australia is demanding the same thing from G as the French.

People who are of the opinion that G does not owe anyone anything and that webmasters have been earning money using a "free" SE have it backwards and just simply do not understand the concept of creating value at cost of time effort and (software)tools, which in turn is being stolen by a SE and used as free assets to make money of off.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Dooku

That's kinda old news. Was discussed here last month already.

[seomotionz]

This is beyond ridiculous. Is the entire population (90%+) busy celebrating valentine's day today?

US traffic is down to zero. And UK, Canada including the English speaking Jap & Korean traffic are down almost by 80%.

Even during the updates and other what nots, these numbers were not observed. Even during the high time of pandemic and locked down's, some traffic from any country did countered to some point other country's deficit.

All traffic from all origins are down, WOW ! this is new.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@seomotionz

check your coverage report/inspect individual URLs in GSC. Something is definitely broken with the indexing. Even the urls that are indexed are showing up as 'not indexed'.....seems something is very confused between "page" and "passage"

[sk7411]

@seomotionz Did it start today or from Feb 8/9th ?

[seomotionz]

@sk7411 It's been like this since the last 24 hours or so. During Feb 8-9th traffic was pretty decent, no sudden surprises..

@TalkativeEditorial I am not seeing any odds in GSC.

[sk7411]

@seomotionz : Then i believe it would normalize by tomorrow or day after for you due to valentine's day. We are seeing the same pattern of decimating English speaking countries or more precisely US and CA , except that it started during those passage indexing update . Don't know for sure WTH is it!

[seomotionz]

@sk7411 I am hope you are correct.

Our Indian traffic is down which was expected. But all English speaking traffic will be down and not just down, I mean to this level. I am just wordless. Like I said it hasn't happened in the past.

[yollo03]

@ichthyous It must be some sort of a penalty by the algorithm. Many of my keywords disappeared. I had way over 6k keywords. Since the update the amount of keywords I had per day is below 500. On top of that, some of my top ranking keywords that did not evaporate after the update were pushed down near 100 position. I have no idea what's going on but nothing is recovering yet.

The daily impressions is sinking from day to day.

The passage ranking update must have penalized dozens of sites. Many of my pages got removed from index as well (as if it wasn't enough). I requested reindex, some did get indexed again.