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]

[BushyTop]

Anyone noticing more change this morning. We're seeing quite alot again and the sensors seem to be flagging.

[DarkSilence]

@yollo03 i've noticed changes in Core Web Vitals. Since Feb 5 green pages are going down. I don't have orange and red elements there.

[renatovieira]

@BushyTop - Massive drop this morning. U.S semrush sensor is on fire!

[markseo]

There has been some movement in our niche this morning for definite. Traffic volume is fairly stable but changes in rankings from last night to today.

[jediviper]

@DarkSilence maybe for you, but it's not generic
I see for one of my domains that for Desktop Green/Good urls go up after 10/2 and some others go down.

[yollo03]

@DarkSilence Same here. It's quite odd. I did send a screenshot of it, we'll see if they address it. For me, it fell, then rose again and now it's falling. At least I know it's not only me.

[yollo03]

I think this update is a fix for the last week's update. I thought they would have waited for Friday to collect more data but I guess they are not happy with what they are seeing. Thank God there is an update, I hope I will get all my keywords back after last week's mess that literally destroyed my website. Mind you, it can get even worse, fingers crossed.

[DarkSilence]

@yollo03 yea, I see the same. Usually it fluctuates up and down ±300 pages per 2 weeks with a gentle curve. But since Feb 5 it goes down day by day (~100 pages per day), but the amount of crawled pages (on performance page) stays still. Also structured data shows something similar - amount of products decreasing since Feb 5.

[TalkativeEditorial]

It seemed like perhaps USA traffic was recovering earlier but it dropped off a cliff again

On this trajectory too. All fine on GSC though.... will be watching SEM Rush very closely.

[charanpammi]

No changes for me. I am into Jobs & Education

[i rahulgupta]

Massive fluctuations in traffic and keywords ranking. Google is more active nowadays hard for us.

[ichthyous]

The train wreck that is the February 8th update continues to worsen. This morning starting with USA traffic down 75% and UK traffic down 22% compared to the previous four Wednesdays. Canada once again has fallen off a cliff, while Australia is up 167%. Overall search and direct traffic are down 25%-50% in general. I have lost 10 top three terms and 19 top ten terms in the last week.

I knew that the period of good solid traffic in Jan and early Feb was too good to last. With Google it's: "Here, we're giving you your traffic back so you can remember what it's like, but don't get too used to it because we're going to hammer you for the rest of the year"

[MayankParmar]

Discover is back to being #*$! again after two good days.

[strummer19]

Bye bye Discover :-(
Update is worst for us in Europe (French websites)

[MayankParmar]

Is Google Analytics broken for anyone?

Resource is not available. Please try again later. One or more of the services on which we depend is unavailable. Please try again later after the service has had a chance to recover.

I am unable to see the pageviews on both site and app.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar

No problems with Analytics here.

[strummer19]

No problem for me with analytics
Problem with Discover :-(

[Athedian]

Haven't seen a ranking and seo impact as bad as this. It's like the worst update, ever.

[jmorgan]

So many things happening at the moment (or have happened recently), from Valentine's day, Presidents Day, Chinese New Year, Lent and the storms in southern USA.

I wouldn't attribute any fluctuations you see in your traffic to SERPs just yet. Maybe wait a week or two for things to stabilize.

[strummer19]

@jmorgan i'm in Europe and we have massive loss, nothing to do with US or Chinese.

[Athedian]

@jmorgan - I'm focusing mostly in the asia area here and have never seen any thing as bad as what we're seeing right now for the past several years. Definitely it's not attributed to Chinese New Year.

[superclown2]

My results are currently the worst they have been in 20 years. Same for just about all the colleagues I have kept in touch with. Why? Simple.

Generic SERPs that used to be visible above the fold but are now buried under ads with more copy and wider spacing between them than before.

SERP results that are hardly relevant to the search term entered; and which are (coincidentally of course) dominated by the big spending advertisers anyway.

Simplification of search results. Look for square green widgets and you'll get the biggest widget advertisers, period.

Plus all the junk designed to push organic SERPs lower.

Result? No point searching through the SERPs, they are buried and you won't find what you are looking for anyway. May as well click an ad, perhaps you can dig out something useful there.

Google delenda est.

[DarkSilence]

@MayankParmar Analytics is down today partially. Check Google Service status tool for more details.

[ichthyous]

@jmorgan Sorry mate but this has nothing to do with Chinese new year or Valentine's Day...this is a huge and quite disastrous rollout by Google of some sort. My traffic from English speaking countries is down by 25-50% depending on the day and the country. I've never seen such massive drops in eighteen years of dealing with the Google monster. Something changed in a big way since the 8th. Sometimes it appears to be improving a bit but then it drops again...

[TalkativeEditorial]

Also now seeing a decline in Google Discover... but our graph really has looked a heart being stopped and being restarted lately.... so not getting too tetchy just yet.

[JesterMagic]

Traffic was up for us last week by about 10% and yesterday is seems to have dropped by about 10%.

Neither update really did much removing outdated (from the large Media companies) and poorly written content from the SERPS.

For about the last 2 years 1 site has taken over our niche taking 1 of the top 3 spots for all major keywords. When it was small the content was okay but now you can REALLY tell that they hire writers who's English is not their first language. Some of the content doesn't make sense with grammar errors all over the place. They also use many Grey Hat SEO techniques like changing their article titles every month by adding the current month and year at the titles.

[renatovieira]

Yesterday something big definitely happened.

[widgetized]

I didn't notice any new change in my website traffic. It's still the same non-converting / spammy / zombie traffic since February 8... :(

[yollo03]

Like last week, the new update that was rolled out yesterday discovered my website today (over 8.0 personal score semrush), I cant really tell whether it had any positive impact until the beginning of next week. One of my keywords that was in the top 20 for example was pushed to 106 last week and today it is 90. I cant call this an improvement., In other keywords, there as been some improvement but it is extremely minor At the beginning of next week I'll get some idea of the impact.

[yollo03]

In the core web vitals I go this update on 17h Feb:

"The metrics defining the boundaries for LCP, FID, CLS, which used to be < (less than), are now defined as <= (less than or equal to). Therefore you might see a change in statuses (for the better) in this report."

My positive urls (in green) continues to fall despite this.