Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2021

[MayankParmar]

The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5025541.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:12 am on Mar 1, 2021- (PDT -8)


Web vital update is expected to live in May and there should be a core update too. They might be testing something for the next core update...

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:19 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2021]
[edit reason] cleanup after thread split [/edit]

[Athedian]

Talk about these major corporations monopolizing everything that they can get a hold of. = =

Now free content becomes paid goods that can be used to manipulate online users.

[MayankParmar]

I think the deal happened recently, but they've been copying Wikipedia content for the knowledge panel for a few months now. I first noticed the knowledge panel with the citation "Google" in December.

[renatovieira]

Things are pretty bad today. I see clear signs from an update yesterday.

[mzb44]

Things are pretty bad today. I see clear signs from an update yesterday.

Can confirm. Pretty significant demotion again. Maybe even up to 30% or more.

It just keeps going down and down.

Expert & specialist written content, ultra super fast site, regular media mentions and citations by big mainstream sites (no manual intervention, all legit-only links). Truly nothing helps at all.

I guess time has really come to put everything on hold.

[yollo03]

I want to share something with all of you. I have a certain keyword that was ranked in the top 3, first position most of the times. That keyword is from a specific page. By error I de-indexed it (dont ask how it happened), which is why you see the big drop and then it went back up. Most of the times the position (orange line) was flat.

Since mid December there are constant fluctuations. It constantly dips down and then up again every few days. To me this means that there are numerous algorithm updates, some were not picked up by the monitors like semrush.

Something major occurred in December's core update and it's still affecting numerous websites. My theory is that it's a new AI from google that was not revealed but I can only guess.

See the keyword position chart (12 months): [ibb.co...]

[lammert]

The peaks down seem to be weekly. Does the position change of the keyword happen in the weekend, or at random moments during the week?

[ichthyous]

Things are pretty bad today. I see clear signs from an update yesterday.

Things were atrocious this past week, but especially yesterday. Today it's not quite as bad, so perhaps will bounce back. Regular very large drops seem to be the norm with Google now. You can expect to have entire weeks with almost no new inquiries.

On another note...Google is indexing and showing my tweets and YouTube Vids at almost real time. As soon as I publish them they show up in the index. I can understand YouTube, but why Twitter? It takes half the first page.

[NickMNS]

@yollo03

Since mid December there are constant fluctuations. It constantly dips down and then up again every few days. To me this means that there are numerous algorithm updates, some were not picked up by the monitors like semrush

When it comes to position in GSC one needs to be weary. The position is the position given an impression. If there are 1000 searches for "blue widget" and you website only gets an impression for 100 of those searches, your position in GSC is based only on those 100 impressions and not on the total 1000 searches. For more details see my post on page 7. One must always consider impressions when using the position metric.

My interpretation of your graph is different, there was an update in December that impacted you and since then, the position metric reflects a change for how your website ranks. Now, after the update some other factor is being taken into account in ranking. How it changed is difficult to say since I don't see the impressions for the same period. The dips appear cyclical, every 7 days (Is this the case?), so whatever the new factor is, it appears to be influenced heavily by day of the week, and given that this started in December, one see the dips occurring during the holiday period. This may suggest the factor could be something like store opening hours, your ranking drops when your business is closed (this may not apply to you I don't know what type of business you have).

Whether this is positive or negative really depends on the number of impressions.

[yollo03]

It occurs every 5 days more or less, weekend or not, every 5 days. The day of the week doesnt seem relevant, almost all the time its 5 days, sometimes 4 days. Maybe this is a re-evaluation every 5 days? It seems quite solid.

I dont have a physical shop, this is e-commerce, online, 24/7. I get what you're saying about impressions but throughout 2020 until December the position was fairly solid. What has been happening is that every time the keyword drops from position to 2 to position 20 in one of those dips for example the number of impressions rise by over 40%. Quite odd.

All I can conclude is that it started since the core update in December. Perhaps this is the new norm.

[NickMNS]

The day of the week doesnt seem relevant, almost all the time its 5 days, sometimes 4 days.

My suggestion was speculative, the exact factor is impossible to determine as it can be anything or a combination of factors.

What has been happening is that every time the keyword drops from position to 2 to position 20 in one of those dips for example the number of impressions rise by over 40%. Quite odd.

Yes it is odd, but positive. Essentially what is happening is that you are suddenly gaining impressions that you previously didn't get. Sure you are not ranking in position 2 for those new impressions, but an impression at position 20 is better than no impression.

All I can conclude is that it started since the core update in December. Perhaps this is the new norm.

The current norm, until the next update.

[yollo03]

I looked into position by country, it seems that in most countries I am in the top 10 aside Canada where that keyword is ranked around 45. Anyways, it is positive but I lost over 5k impressions since December and they are not coming back. I've done a lot of things but I am not getting them back. For some reason nearly all of my competitors (that I an tracking in semrush) are unaffected, its just me.

Man plans and google laughs.

[mzb44]

I think we all can agree that the last core update has been especially atrocious.

I, however, do not have any high hopes for the next one.

I think it will be a double-down of the December one.

[christianz]

Smallish demotion since yesterday. Maybe ~4%. Basically undoing similar uplift during last week. Overall trend is still steady up but not yet close to fully undoing damage of December core.

May update will probably be another elevator ride down. Stairs up, elevator down, over and over.

[mzb44]

It really does feel weird to have to pull the plug on a site for the first time, after more than 15 years being a webmaster.

This is the first site ever to be negatively affected by Google updates. Never in 15 years was any of the sites I managed been negatively affected by any Google update. I never did any spam at all in 15 years.

It's more amusing that this was the most professional site ever built by us and was fully in line with Google's recommendations, E-A-T, everything. Everything by real experts, unique research, true ultimate guides focusing on user needs. Regular media mentions in big publications even without any outreach.

It should really be a perfect example of sites Google always claims to want to rank.

Overall, it's -90% down from the May 2020 core update. It's like what happened only to pure-spammers in the past. And even they could get out of Google jail if they cleaned up their spam. Core update demotions are solitary confinement for life on a wrong conviction and without appeal.

I guess it really should be edition.CNN that should rank for all my terms with some random 300w blog post style page, published 4 days ago, with 5/100 page speed score, with pages loading in 34 seconds or more, full with CLS and popups.
Brand authority really does override all other signals. All the other guidelines are just for us plebs, but even if we do follow all of them it doesn't matter.

[yollo03]

Its all about domain rating at least in my niche. If your domain rating is not high, you can have the best content and user experience and it won't matter. I am working on my domain rating, I strongly believe this is currently the only way to rebound from the recent core updates. You can argue that writing quality content will lead to many sites linking to your content but I am not convinced.

I looked up all my competitors even sites that are pure junk and they have a higher domain rating than me. Since the core updates my domain rating went down by -3 and this may have done the damage. Check your competitors pagerank and compare it to yours, you will probably see they outweigh you in that category.

[edited by: yollo03 at 7:46 am (utc) on Mar 21, 2021]

[teokolo]

Since mid December there are constant fluctuations. It constantly dips down and then up again every few days. To me this means that there are numerous algorithm updates, some were not picked up by the monitors like semrush.

@yollo03 for my site (impacted by May 2020 update) sometimes GSC shows old structured data errors (fixed in June 2020).
In my opinion some parts of the algorithm start their calculations with an old snapshot of your site and then evaluate the evolution of it.
I guess this happens when AI algorithm is updated: after rollout AI is feeded with website history instead of the current website snapshot.

[yollo03]

Same here. I got old errors from 2017 and 2019. It makes a lot of sense and maybe explains why newly created websites may have the upper hand as there is no history to evaluate.

The more pages you have the more screwed you are likely to get.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Weird stuff, on my personal Discover feed, I am seeing loads of stuff from a site that does not have a single article published with an actual author name - just "Staff Writer". I thought it was a requirement to have actual attributions to articles to surface there?

[superclown2]

Check your competitors pagerank and compare it to yours, you will probably see they outweigh you in that category.

Pagerank no longer exists and hasn't for some years. Domain authority does though and I agree that it trumps everything including relevance and expertise. That is why I switched all my defaults to DDG a while ago - I prefer to find what I'm searching for and not what G finds it the most profitable to show me.

Google results are continuing to get worse by the day in my UK vertical and frankly I have given up on them. It was good while it lasted before they became an advertising agency.

[strummer19]

Is it possible to have an analytics referer for Discover trafic ?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Is it possible to have an analytics referer for Discover trafic ?

Sometimes it's recorded as googleapis - but I think that might only be for Android.

[shadowlight]

but why Twitter? It takes half the first page

Probably for that that very reason......it takes half the first page!

[renatovieira]

Another day with massive drop. It didn't close the day, but I would say 50% less flow for today. And so life goes on :-|

[yollo03]

For those that suffered from the recent updates like me, does anyone actually not have any errors or warnings in the console and still got pushed down in ranking? I had several old errors that were fixed and resurfaced again because of the new algorithm. I have 1 error left (CLS) that was already fixed in 2020 and came up again as not fixed. I have to wait until it's gone. I cleared all errors I had.

[ichthyous]

I confirm a huge drop today in USA traffic...down 50% from the norm for a Sunday at 6:30pm. That's my biggest one day drop in USA traffic every. This whole weekend was a train wreck, but oddly I did get multiple new inquiries. UK traffic us up strongly and AU traffic is up somewhat as well.

[lammert]

I see slow indexing in Europe and Asia for a set of new pages which are in four languages. Through a proxy in the US I see all four languages: English, Spanish, German and Dutch. In Europe and through a proxy in Central Asia I see only English and Spanish. The weird part is that the Dutch google.nl doesn't show the Dutch pages in the index, but shows the English and Spanish versions.

It seems that the languages most spoken in the US (English and Spanish) are prioritized over other languages, even for searches on localized google domains in their native areas.

[Athedian]

Thank you for another abysmal update, Google. Appreciate you screwing with my site again and again. One day you like the site, the next day you hate the site. You must be that bully at school that loves to see the suffering from the ones you've bullied.

[mzb44]

Not sure if there is an indexing bug or Google is just ignoring my site now after the most recent demotion a few days ago.

I have 4 days old posts and articles not indexed. This never happened before. Usually, new pages get indexed within just a few minutes or hours of being posted on this site. Every time.

I assume it's because of the demotion, as it started around that day. Not a good sign. Google thinks I'm pure-spam now, which is amusing considering the actual site quality, media mentions etc. but whatever.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@mzb44 - how are you checking indexing?

[mzb44]

URL inspection in search console and searching for the URL in google.