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]

[Martin Ice Web]

Anyone else seeing an inexplicable drop in impressions and traffic?

yes, since yesterday biggest drop ever seen. We have lost 95% of traffic. But rankings are stable or better than before.
Lots of scrappers since yesterday. We seee this across all domains.
germany

[BushyTop]

@MartinIceWeb thats exactly what we are seeing. No change in ranking but huge drops in traffic, CTR and impressions

[TalkativeEditorial]

I feel to get some real transparency we need again someone like Matt Cutts to act as liaison to webmasters.

I mean this most sincerely, but I would really like to put together some sort of proposal to drive some better engagement with regards to the fluctuations that impact publishers and content creators specifically. We can all sit on this forum and voice our frustrations, but that's unlikely to change anything. And sure, it might be naive to believe that Google will care. But at least I'll know that we tried.

The reason being that small publishers will be able to pick up issues before even Google realises there is an issue (case in point indexing and canonical issues from last year). I'm aware that's off topic for this thread. I'll start a separate thread for this discussion for anyone who'd like to engage constructively.

[Athedian]

Isn't there supposed to be a Core Vital launch sometimes around May of this year? Could be that's the Core Update everyone's talking about.

[RedBar]

As an approximation I am seeing traffic turn on and off for about 12 hour periods at roughly:

On 09-10.00 UK time
Off 21-22.00 UK time

Or am I imagining this?

For UK posters, my big sites are global, they have nothing to do with UK shop opening hours, well, not for the past 28 years anyway:-)

[mzb44]

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.

Lol, the jokes are writing themselves at this point.

Check this: [twitter.com...]

He has not the slightest clue that anything may even be wrong at all. People have been complaining about this for at least a month on all available channels.

Incredible.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing traffic turn on and off for about 12 hour periods at roughly:

@RedBar No, I've been saying the same thing for a while now...that traffic is now being throttled not just on a day to day basis, but during the course of the day. It does seem to be in 12 hour periods...you can start the day way down and the second half of the day recovers all that territory, or start strongly and then it just dies. Overall traffic is just a train wreck now, I'm looking at 25% overall loss, with up to 80% for some landing pages on my site.

[ichthyous]

Isn't there supposed to be a Core Vital launch sometimes around May of this year? Could be that's the Core Update everyone's talking about.

@Athedian Perhaps, but I doubt it. My site has had miserable Core stats for months so a drop might be expected, but many on here were well optimized and still lost traffic I suspect. I have recently cleaned up the problems on my site and it's all loading much faster...I doubt it will change a thing, but if it does I will report back here

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Yesterday I ended up with 80%, today after 15 hours of my Googleday I'm on 30% which has only just beaten Xmas Day and New Year's Day yet nowhere near New Year's Eve ... Perhaps we should should re-name G to Laurel and Hardy?

Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Going to end the month on almost 60% down on Feb (astounding considering 28 days vs 31).
Lowest month since March. This hurts.

[RedBar]

Interesting, my traffic has almost come to a halt ... Good job it's a holiday weekend coming up!

[renatovieira]

Here too. Huge drop since yesterday.

[ichthyous]

Yes, it started badly today, but around noon it fell off a cliff and down 50% on USA traffic, 25% UK, 25% AU. I've also lost a ton of top three ranking terms, about 15 since mid March.

[RedBar]

With 3 hours to go I'm at 46%

I decided to check my SERPs, all my rankings look normal however there are plenty of Pinterest and HomeDepot listings.

What is annoying though is that G will not let me make a search for something IT decides I have spelt incorrectly, it keeps insisting on showing me an alternative spelling and product even though my spelling and product is used widely within the industry.... that's new for me.

[webdev29]

it's the same thing on the French SERP, huge loss of traffic and no movement in the positions that can explain such a chaos. there is less than an hour left and I already have a 30% loss compared to yesterday. today i just lost 100% of my progress since January...

[edited by: webdev29 at 8:57 pm (utc) on Mar 31, 2021]

[TalkativeEditorial]

@RedBar - can you search normally and is your search history working as expected? In addition to the Discover issues, seen some reports of people's history settings being reset and being forced to jump through the trending searches hoop.

[mzb44]

March was a mess of a month. Updates and changes almost every other day.

Wondering if they do a core update in April or they wait 7 months again like last time.

[yollo03]

I suspect there were several updates since last Friday. For me the updates seem to be over for now. Like all past updates nothing good came out of it. I dont think it was a core update, from my end it affected large volume keywords and not keywords with lower volumes. It doesnt appear to be related to core web vitals.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5032067.htm [webmasterworld.com]
5:38 am on Apr 1, 2021 (utc -5)