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]

[RedBar]

My traffic's down, every Valentine's Day it's down and it's lower today with it being a Sunday ... Oh well.

[renatovieira]

For me the drop started today.

[TalkativeEditorial]

US Traffic still acting strange. Had a bit of an uptick over the weekend with an old article that was republished (with some updates).
Everything new, including original, long interviews....Google's not interested.

[ichthyous]

The drop started exactly one week ago on the 8th, and it's getting worse. At 10:30am my USA and UK traffic are off by 62% each compared to the previous four Mondays. Searches down 30%.

You can see that whatever this is is evolving. Last week UK traffic was strong but Canada was down as much as USA traffic, now UK is down and Canada is up 120%. The scary thing is that the drop in UK/CA traffic matches the USA drop almost exactly by percentage. Direct searches were hammered last week, down 50+%, but now it's search queries that are down and direct traffic is climbing back.

I would think that such drastic drops are a penalty of some sort, but it only targets certain urls (home page and my two most important landing pages) and certain countries and I would think that a demotion of some sort would apply more generally to the site. While I have lost 6 top three ranking terms and sixteen top ten ranking terms over this past week, the terms are not related to the landing pages on my site which have lost traffic!

I have also noticed that traffic from Pinterest.com to my site is way down. Only the main url, not all of thee Pinterest country subdomains...perhaps the Pinterest party is over? Is anyone else seeing such drastic drops in USA/CA/UK traffic over the last 7 days?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yes, that's pretty much what most here have been saying (and it appears to correlate with the roll out of Passage Indexing).

US down 23%, UK 19% and Canada 18%
US can fluctuate for us, but usally not more than 10%

[ichthyous]

I'm down 60-65% at 11am today for USA/UK traffic @TalkativeEditorial. It seems that Passage Indexing is hammering me worse than others. I have had a fraction of the new customer inquiries since the 8th. That might improve by day's end, we shall see.

Hypothesis: perhaps sites without a lot of text, i.e. no passages to index, are being hit harder and pages being demoted. Mine is a more image based site without a lot of passages, no articles etc. The only thing is, this is limited to the same landing pages that always seem to get hammered by Google, so if my hypothesis were accurate it would apply site-wide.

[DarkSilence]

My decline started on Feb 10 -5% and following day also brought -5%. Decline increased on Feb 12 -10%, Feb 13 -13% and Feb 15 -18%.
Website has mostly US traffic (>80%). No obvious problems are visible in GSC.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@ichthyous: Do you have much traffic from outside those countries and how do they compare?

My hypothesis is that something either reset/broke/isn't working right with the "passage ranking" part specifically. And that the crawler isn't understanding page/passage on some sites - especially for sites with US traffic. I take this from the fact that a couple of articles recently have been showing up as "not on Google" when putting the URL into GSC. But when searching for them, they appear in the SERPS (some quite high too). So there might be a disconnect between how to classify what is being ranked as a page and what is being ranked as a passage, but only for US traffic.

A few of our recent articles that's more for a UK audience - and performed as expected - are STILL showing that they were "excluded" according GSC's coverage report.

[ichthyous]

@TalkativeEditorial About 45% of my traffic is non-USA. 2nd largest is UK at 15%. Then everyone else

[topaz]

well, i'm happy with serps and discover over the last week. my DA35 has been trouncing its DA82 competitor by putting out better content, and having faster page loads.

[MayankParmar]

Discover is better today. It was down for more than two weeks. Finally some imrovements today.

[NickMNS]

Something appears to be going on, I'm seeing a 30% drop in traffic, consistent since about 9am EST.

[insideout]

Drop in traffic as well in UK and France

[strummer19]

@insideout

Same for me in France since last thursday / Discover down since two weeks

[NickMNS]

The drop in US traffic may due to Presidents Day.

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS USA traffic has been down every day since the 8th, and by large numbers...it's not President's Day, Valentine's Day, Impeachment Day...something major happened at Google on the 8th.

[RedBar]

Above average traffic for me on Monday, +20%, wasn't it a US holiday?

[renatovieira]

USA traffic has been down every day since the 8th, and by large numbers...it's not President's Day, Valentine's Day, Impeachment Day...something major happened at Google on the 8th.

@ichthyous - I agree! My main site is about weather forecast. Why not search for this content on holiday? That theory doesn't make sense.

Regarding 8/feb, on my side it's been very positive since dec/2020.

[Dooku]

@ I think I know y,
"Cloudflare refuses to take any action onto these domains and so does Google, I don't know why!"

Would you tell your customers to take a hike and never ever come back!
The problem here is that it's not exactly a criminal activity what those webmasters are doing and they don't even violate the TOS.
So it's pretty much irrelevant what you and I may think of their actions being ethical or not. Money is the only deciding factor in this game.

So those webmasters bend the rules, abuse the system, but they did not implement the "system". If you come up with a SE that works a particular way it will always attract people that (mis)use it to their benefit.......wait, isn't that what G is already doing? :-)
G can never ever stop those webmasters from doing what they do because it's all churn and burn production. And as you have noticed by now, the scale of it so huge that it can influence the G algo.

[samwest]

Gee, maybe if you kick and scream loud enough, Google will roll back their "update". Google has again been emboldened to continue their harvest of your efforts. Get used to it.

[ichthyous]

So this rollout is very interesting...First USA and Canada traffic were hit, while UK remained strong. Then Canada recovered while UK traffic tanked. Now USA traffic is recovering, CA traffic is surging and UK traffic is down 50% from the norm. Australia traffic never dropped too much that I noticed, but is up 619% this morn from the previous four Tuesdays...incredible. I expect it will all start to recover this week. Perhaps they're just using us as lab rats for their latest fiasco / experiment in debasing the search results while cramming more ads in the page.

[ichthyous]

@i think i know y Good work you are doing...I am not seeing this in my niche (yet). I am noticing a big increase in brute force attacks on the back end of my server. I am also noticing more traffic from China, most of which is legit and coming from Baidu...but every once in a while I get a big spurt of hits from Chinese IP addresses located all over the country all at the same time to different pages on my site. This is definitely an attempt to make it hard to ban the IP or IP range, so I assume they are trying to scrape my site. If it is Baidu indexing my site then it is not identifying itself as a bot.

It always seems limited to exactly 57 visits from different IPs at the same time, then stops. Perhaps Cloudflare scrape shield is stopping it from going further. My server also has anti-scraping rules, and mod-security for the brute force attacks. This is going to get worse and worse between China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Russia and other sources of constant hacks.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Seeing signs of some recovery here for US traffic and GSC seems to be behaving somewhat normally again with the indexing inspection (still delayed data for some reports though).

UK traffic dipping slightly so far, but nothing as dramatic as the US dip was.

[yollo03]

I have not recovered at all from the recent update. Naturally, those that lost traffic, that traffic has go somewhere so many sites have probably benefited from the recent update. If there will be another update (a fix I guess) it will probably be at the end of the week. Just an educated guess.

[yollo03]

Does anyone here pay attention to the core web vitals since the update? If yes, do you notice the valid urls constantly moving up and down? And are all of you urls in the core web vitals section or just some?

[i think i know y]

@Dooku if they were hackers with thousands of domains infecting hundreds of thousands of people per day. Yes. Cloudflare's response is "We are not a hosting company", so we don't need to do anything. It's allowing this huge hack to hide behind a proxy basically. It almost sounds like you know what i'm talking about and have seen these links in the search engines.

You may think "they aren't receiving much traffic", but I see malware browser extensions receiving over 100,000 downloads in 1 night on multiple occasions. These extensions are then being used to continue the bot activity and feed the attack.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:32 pm (utc) on Feb 16, 2021]
[edit reason] No specifics, please see Charter/ToS [/edit]

[samwest]

If you are sinking in the SERPs or suddenly removed, it is advised you check your content for dissenting language. Learning from what they did for Baidu in China, Google now forbids certain speech as "dangerous" and can immediately censor or cancel your site for upsetting the global narrative. I sanitized my site of any trigger words and am now a good boy, so I will be rewarded with a top position in the SERPs along with an A1 credit rating. xie xie!

[nomis5]

^^
My main website is about gardening and has a couple of articles about apples. One article described the flesh of the apple as being being crisp white and very juicy.

Google Adsense objected to that, I think for being sexual! Ha ha!

I did resubmit for reconsideration and they immediately reinstated ad serving.

AI is not all its made out to be. Humans first, computers second should be the rule.

[samwest]

an ode of code that blew the node

[ichthyous]

It seemed like perhaps USA traffic was recovering earlier but it dropped off a cliff again at 2pm...USA and UK traffic are both off exactly 29% at 5:30pm EST. Overall searches down 25% and direct down 18%.