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]

[MayankParmar]

Google is having indexing issues right now

[strummer19]

Game over on Discover since 17th february update :-(

[RedBar]

Extraordinarily low traffic across all my sites this morning, some UK sites with zero PVs altogether.

I had to check my servers were up and running!

Anyone else?

[jediviper]

@ichthyous what are you talking about?
There was no Feb 8 update. This is probably your own estimation, I guess?

[MayankParmar]

Discover is still dead. I got decent Discover traffic for one day this month. Not seeing any sign of recovery

[TalkativeEditorial]

@RedBar

Yep, drastically low, even by usual "low" standards, across the board.

[renatovieira]

@RedBar - The negative impact of the 17/feb "update" was strong on my sites. Today things are terrible!

[ichthyous]

@jediviper What are YOU talking about? Clearly Google rolled something major out on the 8th Feb or so many people would not have seen their traffic fall through the floor...read the posts starting from that date forward....more and more complaining about very large traffic drops. Google announced passage indexing was going live at that time, and is live now in the USA, but not sure if that's it. I don't have an article based site and would not lose much traffic from the new passage indexing changes, but I have lost a huge amount of traffic from English language countries since the 8th. Australia seems to have recovered, USA has recovered some of the traffic loss, but now UK traffic is down by 37%-50%. It may be temporary or not, but it's already been eleven days of much lower traffic from English language countries for many (not all) of us.

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:34 pm (utc) on Feb 19, 2021]

[ichthyous]

@RedBar @Renato I am also seeing very low USA pageviews...down 70% from the norm, but it is early yet. USA traffic has been rebounding very late in the day and cutting the losses somewhat. The good news is that AU traffic has recovered and UK is up 114% today. This seems to be a very fluid / rolling algo "update"...it's been 11 days of much lower traffic for me, but I see signs that this my not be permanent. Could be that Google is just reindexing pages to pull as many passages out of them as possible and we're all in limbo until that is finished? Just a hypothesis...

[JesterMagic]

Passage Ranking & Snippets rolled out recently and affects 7% of query's so this may be part of what is effecting traffic.

[webmasterworld.com...]

This means Google will quote the potential answer to the visitors search phrase right in the SERPs meaning the visitor has no need to go to the source website.

Google's snippets and content scraping are getting out of hand and is only benefiting them and their bottom line.

[RedBar]

Rankings appear unchanged for me with data steadily returning ... I'm considering slow updates since I am now showing early hours traffic on some sites whereas there was nothing a few hours ago.

[saladtosser]

So a guy in my niche was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and it was covered in several UK papers linked to his site. His site shot straight to number one because of the links and I imagine he is now raking it in thanks to abusing his pet. I guess the saying is true, no such thing as bad publicity.... when it comes to google anyway!.

[ichthyous]

@Redbar How is your USA traffic? Traffic to my home page is down 65% today at 11:30am...USA down 41% overall, however my UK traffic has surged 60% along with AU and CA. It actually seems that traffic is being throttled hour by hour now. USA traffic might pick up later in the day, but in general whatever this change is it's caused me to lose a considerable amount of traffic and customers since the 8th. It could be Passage Indexing or not, only time will tell.

[Athedian]

Traffic totally died off today. It's like everyone just suddenly disappeared from the surface of this planet and gone somewhere else.

[superclown2]

I remember the time when even being on page two produced decent traffic. Now in my UK niche there is so much googlespam that anything below no. 3 or even no. 1 is buried under junk; and 1-3 organic SERPs go to big advertisers only anyway. For heavy money keyphrases even no. 1 is buried.

Google delenda est

[ichthyous]

This Google update (yes, I'm calling it an update because that's really what it is) is like Lindsay Lohan on meth...very erratic and highly destructive. Traffic is being throttled by the hour now. Yesterday I started with UK traffic surging and USA way down. By end of day UK traffic was also down, Canada dropped 50%. Today USA / CA / AU traffic all up but UK is down 57%. Every day different, and even surging or dropping like a stone from hour to hour. Anyone else seeing this?

Two issues - #1 - I have been accumulating links rapidly from new sources, wondering if the dampening effect or penalty for too many new links too fast is at play here. If so, I usually find that over time as the links age and stay in place the traffic goes up a lot. These are not spammy or paid links (does anyone pay for links anymore?)...they are all quality links from high authority sites which feature my products on their sites that link back to my pages.
#2 - Could it be that as March approaches that sites which have not improved Core Web Vitals errors are feeling the heat more? Most of my pages are now back to red / yellow for mobile and yellow / red for desktop. Wondering if Google is counting this more now?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Feeling te traffic squeeze today, Discover is completely gone (that has happened before though, so fingers crossed it revives itself).
But hard to tell what is and what is not related to Google's swings and roundabouts - which have become the norm - and what might relate to recent updates/changes

[seomotionz]

@TalkativeEditorial Discover was falling since the week started. And today it became zero.

The thing is our English speaking traffic never returned to pre-Valetentine's day numbers.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Everything ended up being normal, for a Saturday today's ;ooking fine.

I'm getting some serious bulk enquiries including the largest one ever I have ever seen, quite simply it's massive and we can cope with it:-) There are not many who can!

The good news is that "stuff" is happening, the bad news is that none of it is for "western" economies.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar UK is in a tough spot...I miss the days when my UK customers were more ready to spend big. Right now Australia has replaced UK business for me, and my USA business was so strong in Jan and Feb that I have a case of whiplash. I have not seen so much business come in so fast since 2007. However, that all appears to be over now with whatever new crap Google has thrown at us since Feb 8th. I have very little business with Asia...maybe one order a year to HK or Singapore, that's it.

[StupidIntelligent]

@RedBar South Asia is where the growth is happening. Let's be real.

[RedBar]

Let's be real.

My main business growth focus after the 1970s energy crisis has been the Middle East, Asia etc.

I experienced first-hand whilst working in Italy the immediate impact the ME's increased wealth had, it was simply unbelievable and really opened my eyes as to the potential of other countries' economies and that's why I started working much more with India.

Overall though, even after 2008, the international construction industry has not experienced too many "blips" even in Western economies however this Covid situation feels totally different.

I have never experienced so manytravel restrictions in my life, I have been welcomed in many "rogue" countries and seen as a potential export solution for their development.

This time big projectrs are being cancelled / postponed and basically not much new is happening. Domestic demand is still there however not to such a high level,

interesting times and I have to focus my SEO much more towards individual country preferences.

[ichthyous]

I took a look at my analytics more closely this morning. The big drop actually came on Feb 13th, not the 8th. The drop is massive and affecting many pages across my site, and traffic is greatly reduced from some locations like London (-43%), Los Angeles (-70%), Chicago (-60%)...awful considering that all my business comes from cities like these. Only Australia was up across the board...every city, and some by 700%! So far it looks like perhaps somewhat of a recovery starting yesterday and today, but too early to tell really. I do hope this is temporary, but it's been over a week already...

[ichthyous]

@RedBar There is a construction bubble in major cities everywhere around the world. Here in my town they slapped up ridiculously tall towers for billionaires that ruined the skyline completely...now the Chinese cant funnel their embezzled money out of China to buy them, the Russians have sanctions so they can't either, the pandemic caused a reverse migration out of superstar cities and the construction continues apace with nobody buying any of these luxury properties...they will sit empty. The same dynamic in London, which was even more dependent on laundered / embezzled Russian, Chinese and Arab money. Dubai keeps building and building even though no tourists and nobody buying. Meanwhile, there is still a shortage of affordable housing for real people everywhere.

[not2easy]

I don't see any mention here of the big freeze that has had millions of people without power for days now. The state of Texas is just beginning to come around in some areas, but for several days now there have been millions of homes without power (and many without water or heat) through several states in middle US due to sub zero weather they are not "supposed" to have. That might possibly be having an effect on traffic.

[saladtosser]

Bings worse guys, I'm moving house and searched for "removals Cambridge" Only 4 organics, 8 ads (way more blended), google gets a hard time but bing is worse for organics (test yourself). Anything commercial is on the way out of organics for bing and I dare say google will follow for commerical IMO!

[Londonwebsite]

I've had a big reduction in views - and the main reason seems to be referrals from "com.google.android.googlequicksearch" down from 50-100k to 1k in just two months. What is causing this? I've searched and tried everywhere for an answer.

Is it related to Chrome content suggestions as I never see them either personally.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Bear in mind that I am at the second stage of commercial construction development after planning and approval has been given, therefore I do know what is going on in many cities globally and I can assure you that this past 6-8 months has seen many intended projects put on hold, how many may get cancelled altogether obviously I have no idea, but I do know what I am witnessing.

Many factories in both China and India, the #1 and #2 suppliers in my sector, have already been mothballed. The specialist ones are still busy, the pile it high and sell it cheap are in serious trouble.

[yollo03]

I cant say I am recovering from anything yet. What happened today is the oddest thing I have seen in a long time, For mobile devices. all valid urls (green) in core web vitals dropped to zero. No errors and no valid urls, just one fat zero. Did anyone else experience this?

[samwest]

GA was blank all day today. Just a white page. Still is.