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]

[insideout]

@TalkativeEditorial same with all our websites :(

[TalkativeEditorial]

Appearing perfectly fine and near instantly in News though. Sigh

[mzb44]

Apparently no core update in March either?

This means this is now officially the second longest core update period (after May-December 2020).

Maybe they decided to do fewer core updates per year. Which I guess is great to those who got a boost/no change last time but awful for those who got negatively impacted and implemented many changes after.

[yollo03]

The semrush score for my website is 8.5 today. It began over the weekend after my impressions got sliced by 50% and the unusual amount of googlebots hitting the website. Until today, every update like this (over 8.0 on semrush) damaged my website. I really hope things will change from today onwards.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Unless there is a drastic change in the next 24 hours, we're on course to be down almost 60% vs February, which is extremely painful and financially devastating and I will have to let all of my freelancers go.

With the growth we'd had since July last year, I was able to create part-time roles for people who had lost theirs as a result of the pandemic and even when things were a bit unpredictable, it was manageable because of income sources beyond the site. With the decimation this month, which included hours of my time troubleshooting since there is no helpful support from Google, and hitting the lowest traffic since July, I am completely broken and back at square one from when the pandemic was at its worst financially last year.

My heart is very heavy.

[yollo03]

I had over 20k impressions per day. I know its not huge compared to others, thats fine by me. As of today my impressions got down to just 1k. I dont spam or anything of the sort. All the top sites in my niche got edu and gov links by buying or spamming. Im considering doing the same if thats how you get ranked better in 2021. All this started in December and just deteriorated from there.

[RedBar]

Whatever "difference" they made yesterday taking my global site to 96%, evidently was changed again late last night about 21-22.00 UK time since traffic has reduced again and, in fact, some sites have had almost no traffic in the last 12 hours.

All of these sites are small and focussed usually with consistent traffic and not socially or newsworthy fickle therefore I suspect something else is happening.

Here is something I have noticed over the years when this sort of thing happens with G ... ZERO spam this morning, not one piece of garbage to any inbox ... I may be wrong however I do not recollect such an occurrence for what, 20 years?

With early May only 5/6 weeks away and usually one of G's favovourite "update" times, possibly testing?

[yollo03]

Someone is getting that traffic. Traffic can't disappear, it has to go somewhere. There was not a single update that actually caused abnormally high traffic to my website, only the other end of the stick. I wouldn't count on May for a miracle, I'm convinced that for me it is all about backlinks, the more the merrier.

[einserpirelli]

I've been a silent reader here for several weeks.
Maybe a little ray of hope for everyone who was badly hit ...

I have been running my website in Germany for almost 20 years and have never been hit by a Google update, neither positive nor negative. (Auto tuning for 20 years, auto parts affiliate for 2 years). At the beginning of February I suddenly had a good upward trend without knowing why. When I was already looking forward to the fact that my income continued to rise, one day I think it was February 8th, the big slump came.

Day after day it went downhill compared to the same day of the previous week. I didn't know why and at first I suspected a technical error on my website because I had been working on it continuously for months. At some point I realized that I was being hit by a Google update for the first time, because not all keywords went down, but completely arbitrarily. Overall, I had a drop of over 80%!

The motivation dropped a lot in the last few weeks, but I was hoping that everything would get better again with the next update in May at the latest. I have spent the last few weeks preparing my site for the Web Vitals and so I was busy.

Last Friday night, something suddenly happened and it felt like Google flipped a switch.The numbers continued to rise every day and are almost at the old level today on Tuesday. No matter what you do, Google is in control of how much traffic they allow you!

If you make yourself dependent on Google, don't complain afterwards! I make myself dependent, but always plan a crash as a safety measure!

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld einserpirelli

Whilst my traffic has "only" been affected for this past week, the one thing I have learmed over many years with G machination is to do nothing until its seemingly completed. Trying to do anything right now could be counter-productive plus one may never know if there was anything "out-of-favour" to start off with.

Traffic can't disappear, it has to go somewhere

Precisel ... BUT where?

When one has several site across several widget subjects and none of them have a temporary boost, just where does / has that traffic gone?

[TalkativeEditorial]

@RedBar out of interest, do you use any tools to track rankings of competitors?

[einserpirelli]

One more addition: In the last few weeks I had spikes of 8.0 and 9.0 several times at Semrush without the positions having changed much. Since last Friday the sensor has been showing between 0.6 - 2.5 although there are several ranking changes from e.g. 80th to 10th place. So much for Semrush ...

[yollo03]

@ReBar There are different databases per country. There is Google US, Google Canada (CA), Google UK etc. In my case I discovered that these updates took most of my keywords out of Canada, UK and other regions and left some keywords in Google US only. I doubt I am the only one that was affected by this so check your rankings across multiple regions.

[RedBar]

do you use any tools to track rankings of competitors?

Nope, I have many competitors in many different countries all supplying different widgets to different specifications and specialising in different sectors of my widget business.

Many of us work together on different projects supplying different aspects of the projects, ultimately it's all down to the whims of the architect / specifier / the paying client. We all need to work together to ensure stuff happens when it's supposed to.

Realistically my global site is for three purposes:

1. As a definitive widget product description.

2. To promote for new specifiers to educate them about the widgets.

3. To be the default enquiry resource centre for my widgets.

There are different databases per country.

I am well=aware how G does everything with sites for every region / continent however when traffic to local, and I mean sites within less than a 100 Km radius of that business experiencing little to zero traffic, then usually something is brewing and especially so when their rankings have not changed.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Thanks, Redbar, gotcha.

Was gonna say if you did, it'd be interesting to see where the traffic is going exactly.

[MayankParmar]

I wasn't expecting a core update in March. It will probably happen in April or May. Web vitals + core update :)

[saladtosser]

It's taking around 3-4 days to get our new articles indexed (showing in the SERPs) right now, even with submitting via webmaster tools.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I am without words. Totally speechless at how bad things are. There are times where I have to check to make sure I didn't accidentally delete the GA code, because (like others have mentioned) there are moments when it's like the site does not even exist.

My spirit is completely broken.

[insideout]

@TalkativeEditorial I also have the same feeling.

[RedBar]

This afternoon UK time my traffic is now looking pretty normal so we'll see where that leads.

I'm always concerned about low 00.00 to 08.00 traffic since that is when I usually have my West Coast USA, Japan and Asia visitors.

[mzb44]

I still have the feeling they've done a core update refresh earlier this month.

Not a new core update, but running the old one again to reprocess and reevaluate sites.

Could explain the huge (but not regular core update) volatility this month and the fact it wasn't announced. It really mirrors the December update with initial release and then tremors for several weeks. Fits with all the March patterns.

March was supposed to be a core update month according to the previous core update timings (yes, I know there wasn't an official schedule), so maybe they just did an unannounced refresh.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I just wish they would at least ACKNOWLEDGE that there is something broken with the Discover Feeds. I don't even mean to webmasters, from a UX perspective it is utterly abysmal.

[lammert]

Since about two weeks, my Discover Feed only shows about eight proposals where I could scroll through 50 or more in the past. It seems their pagination isn't working properly anymore. Or it is connected with a system update on my Android phone which was installed around the same time. I don't think it has to do with Google feeding less sites to the Discovery Feed but more something on the UI side.

[JesterMagic]

Traffic can't disappear, it has to go somewhere

Into Google's own properties. Search is either answering the searches question out right in the results thanks to the knowledge widgets and structured data or they are getting funneled into Ads or Google's own properties. In 2019 it was reported that 50% of all search traffic doesn't actually click on an organic results. This month it was reported this number may be as high as 70%+- now. Not sure if it is true but it sure feels like it....

[MayankParmar]

When Google is completely silent and only some have issues with services like Discover.. we don't know what exactly happened - a Google update, a problem on our end or something else? Lack of transparency truly sucks.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Lack of transparency truly sucks.

Yup. And let's be real now, there are enough reports from users now that makes it pretty obvious this isn't the usual "people are just complaining and their sites probably suck".

[mzb44]

When Google is completely silent and only some have issues with services like Discover.. we don't know what exactly happened

It always amuses me when in these cases someone Tweets to John Mueller and then he says he's "not aware of any issues but please send me examples".

He then gets sent several examples from multiple people.

Then proceeds to completely ignore the issue and everyone and every further tweet asking about it.

I can't even count how many times this happened.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I've also heard/read John said that Discover isn't really his domain.

So whose is it then? It's definitely not Danny's.

[mzb44]

I've also heard/read John said that Discover isn't really his domain.

So whose is it then? It's definitely not Danny's.

I believe anyone who is allowed to speak publicly or is part of the public outreach teams (JM and his team, Danny) do not actually have code/algorithm level access. They themselves probably only know what they are being told by people actually working on the code and algos, which makes JM etc not a first hand source.

I feel to get some real transparency we need again someone like Matt Cutts to act as liaison to webmasters. Someone who is actually personally and deeply involved in the development of updates, etc. I'm sure explaining concepts such as core updates would be much easier for someone like that, rather than someone (Danny, etc.) who may not actually even understand themselves how those things work on a code/algo level.

[BushyTop]

Anyone else seeing an inexplicable drop in impressions and traffic?