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]

[mzb44]

re: Core updates
re2: why people seem to be so negative these days.

I just remembered this story from serountable: [seroundtable.com...]

So, you have a leading industry site, highly authoritative etc. It gets nuked by a Google core update. Then Barry decides to do absolutely nothing at all to see what happens and guess what next core update site is up 100%-150%.

So, one update puts you under almost spam-level penalty and the next one rewards you as an industry leader. And meanwhile you changed absolutely nothing whatsoever.

And this happened multiple times to a large number of sites. People complain about seeing exactly this all the time after every core update.

You expect this behaviour from an early 1990s search engine where they haven't really even figured out what a search engine is supposed to be and are running all kinds of wild experiments.

How can in the eyes of Google the same site be one month almost pure spam and a few months later top 10 leading industry authority, without the site (and the industry) changing at all?

This is why there is so much negativity and frustration on this forum.

[TalkativeEditorial]

How can in the eyes of Google the same site be one month almost pure spam and a few months later top 10 leading industry authority, without the site (and the industry) changing at all?

Exactly this. And, for those who are publishers on this forum and who get traction from Google Discover, this rings even more true. And while that is usually unstable, it is more difficult to accept it when the results that do sometimes show up when things swing so wildly (much like in the SERPs) from being actual spam, redirecting to 404s, completely irrelevant content - and yet your content is nowhere to be found.

Add to this that Google folks over on Twitter just say "go to the forum for help" and on the forum the "product experts" just copy and paste generic answers they're used to giving to spammy sites without actually offering helpful information by assessing each case on its merits.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

Currently down almost 60% for the first five days of March vs Feb. Changed absolutely nothing at all. It wouldn't hurt or be so frustrating if the majority of the "replacements" in the SERPs were actually really, really good sites...you know... the ones that "focus on awesome content". But they're not.

[mzb44]

Add to this that Google folks over on Twitter just say "go to the forum for help" and on the forum the "product experts" just copy and paste generic answers they're used to giving to spammy sites without actually offering helpful information by assessing each case on its merits

You should avoid the google help forums like the plague.

Whether it's Search or PPC, if you post there with a problem it's automatically assumed by the "product experts" that you're either a spammer (search) or someone who does some kind of fraud or runs a scam (ppc).

You will be summarily dismissed.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Absolutely. Which is exactly what makes the forum experience so frustrating and the "go ask the forums" from the Google folks on Twitter so maddening.

[ichthyous]

Clearly there was another update in the second week of February around the 12th. My traffic dropped and has plateaued at a new lower level ever since. The loss was mostly in "Direct" traffic (-40%) but search traffic also took a hit (-12%). It was also concentrated in USA traffic, but now traffic from UK, AU, CA is also rotating. By "rotating" I mean that one day it will be normal, and the next day it will suddenly drop by 15-45%. Today my UK traffic is up 79% but not one single visit from AU, and CA is -45%.

The net effect is lower traffic overall...but more than that, the quality of the traffic now is just crap. A 15% average decline in traffic has resulted in another 70% drop in business. Considering that this was the case for all of 2020 from the May update onward, I have to consider the five weeks from beginning of Jan 2021 through the end of the first week of February 2021 an aberration. This miserable traffic pattern is the norm.

[renatovieira]

Massive drop yesterday and today remains the same trend. Someone else?

[superclown2]

In my UK vertical search term are whittled down to their lowest common denominator. Search for green lame unicorns and you get unicorns, full stop. Which leads me to wonder: Has Google's AI system got a really low IQ? Maybe it will get more intelligent as it gets older. Hopefully a real competitor will have come along by then. In the meanwhile producing a site that is an ideal match for a search term is a complete waste of time. Quality and relevance is trumped by spending power and the ability to sustain a negative ROI in the SERPs.

Google Delenda est

[TalkativeEditorial]

@superclown2

Actually, I think it is that the AI doesn't really understand anything outside of US colloquialism/nuance beyond USA yet, especially in multi-lingual countries.

Sidenote: Love how fast GSC will send WARNING ERROR ISSUES HERE ON THIS PAGE when you're even just TESTING something, but can't get its indexing right.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira No massive drop recently, just a huge decline in direct traffic from English speaking countries and a smaller decline in searches from same countries since 2/13. It dropped off a cliff on that day and is now bouncing back and forth between new lower levels. Business has almost vanished again since the 13th.

[strummer19]

European website : -40% last three days on mobile trafic. Discover +-0 - Bye bye cruel world

[TalkativeEditorial]

It;s like Google has been "stuck" on 2 March for the last five days and not recognising any new content beyond that - whether that relates to its issue with caching or something else, it's hard to tell. But that's roughly the date where the "worst" of the latest round of "who knows what is going on" guessing game started.

[RedBar]

I can't see much difference in my SERPs however traffic has slowed since 24th February with Friday being one of my lowest days of the year.

Realistically no one can expect ever-increasing traffic plus genuine enquiries are still coming in but substantial "Western projects" are still noticeable by their absence and, IMHO, expect it to stay this way for some time to come, possibly all year for my industry..

[JesterMagic]

How can in the eyes of Google the same site be one month almost pure spam and a few months later top 10 leading industry authority, without the site (and the industry) changing at all?

Because people expect to much from Google and the term AI gets thrown around so much. Google's Search AI is at a very primitive level and used just in small parts of the algorithm.

Google does not understand web pages and the content on these pages. They use signals to determine quality. They do not determine quality by understanding the content.

So when Google adjusts the ranking signals to try to push quality content higher, you will get some sites get pushed down that shouldn't be.

[MayankParmar]

Discover is really low since 2nd March.

[ichthyous]

Yesterday and today has seen a surge in traffic for me. +84% direct traffic, +8% searches, +40% UK, +575% AU. We shall see what the 2nd half of the day brings. Thus far, these surges have lasted about one day before traffic falls again, since this started on February 13th.

[superclown2]

Google does not understand web pages and the content on these pages. They use signals to determine quality. They do not determine quality by understanding the content.

Google is not trying to find the best quality websites. They are trying to maximise their own profits.

In my vertical just about every conceivable search term is dominated by less than half a dozen aggregators, all high spenders on adwords.

They are in effect affiliates, hoovering up clicks to sell to those who actually produce the services they advertise.

Inevitably their plain vanilla pages about specialised products are listed in the SERPs above the actual producers of these products, even though the latter have websites with multiple pages packed with information. A kid with a GCE in computer science could write an algo that produced better quality results than this.

The term 'Google search Quality' is an oxymoron.

[ichthyous]

Google is not trying to find the best quality websites. They are trying to maximise their own profits.

Absolutely, and it's been that way since the day they went public. Google will continue to #*$!ize it's own organic search results until which point a better competitor comes along and starts to steal away its search traffic...I think the only real competition is Apple. MS has tried for years but hasn't made any headway.

[superclown2]

If you look at Bing results - at least here in the UK - they look a mess and the ads are scarcely distinguishable from the SERPs with just the tiniest 'ad' labels imaginable (OK Google's have been becoming less obvious over the years too) and they are following Google's lead with filling the SERPs with junk designed just to show ads. Replacing Google with Bing wouldn't help much.

In the meanwhile search results seem to have settled here after some turbulence of the last few days but there is so much junk and ads that any site under the top one hasn't a hope; and with big money terms even the top search result is so far under the fold that it might as well not be there. Having a listing on page 1 used to guarantee at least some traffic but now I actually get a substantial portion of my business from listings on page two. The reason? Far less googlespam. People can actually find things without wading through all the rubbish.

[jmorgan]

Just posting to put stick this in "My Threads". Carry on.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Ouch, things continue to look pretty dismal in terms of traffic here. GSC suggests rankings have not deviated much from the usual, which always makes these dramatic declines incredibly difficult to stomach. Right now, traffic is down over 60% for the first seven days of March vs Feb.

[Athedian]

Activate users showing 12, yet Analytics showing 79 users on its real time stats counter. = =

[TalkativeEditorial]

@Athedian

Yeah, that seems to be an ongoing issue for a lot of people (myself included) which Google has never acknowledged or probably doesn't even know exists

[saladtosser]

@superclown2 agree Bing results are just as bad if not worse for ad blending and junk "people also searched for" etc crap! So even if everyone defected to bing we wouldn't be in a better situation!

[mzb44]

Google's Search AI is at a very primitive level and used just in small parts of the algorithm.

According to Google's official communication, it's the opposite.

Unless you argue Google is intentionally lying.

Google does not understand web pages and the content on these pages. They use signals to determine quality. They do not determine quality by understanding the content.

This is correct.

So when Google adjusts the ranking signals to try to push quality content higher, you will get some sites get pushed down that shouldn't be.

Google adjusts the ranking signals to try to push authoritative sites higher, under the assumption that these sites generally correlate with quality content and trust.

It's not the high-quality content that will get the boost directly but the authoritativeness of the site (usually measured in links - as admitted by Garry Ilyes).

As such, you can have the best-quality content site there is, but if you do not have high authoritativeness in comparison to other sites trying to rank for the same things you do, you will get demoted during core updates (not just overtaken by the stronger sites!).

The reverse is also true. If you already have an extremely highly authoritative site (think of mainstream brands), you can literally get away with almost anything. Just mention a keyword once in a random text and you're instantly page 1.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with the idea that authoritative sites should rank high. It was always like this. People are upset because the authoritativeness dial has been turned up significantly over the last few years at the expense of relevancy.

[edited by: mzb44 at 12:24 pm (utc) on Mar 8, 2021]

[JesterMagic]

Google is not trying to find the best quality websites. They are trying to maximise their own profits.

For sure. That's why they are showing so much more content from websites and all the useless widgets they now have on the page. Why does the searcher have to leave?

At some level Google wants to return good results (even if it is a hold over from before they went public). I was just trying to point out that a lot of people seem to think that this "AI" can understand content and make a decision about the quality of it. And what is quality to Google?

1) Is it how factually correct the content is?
2) Is it how well written it is?
3) Is it the UX of the page?

Google tends to lean heavily on the last 2 as it is much easier to measure along with a few other things like how popular the page is (incoming links).

Google really has no competition. I find Bing to be almost as bad as Google (and so far behind in terms of % of users that they will never catch up). Apple could maybe take them on but I don't think they really want to as they are happy in their current relationship and the billions of $ they receive each year from Google to be the default engine on their devices.

[ichthyous]

Here we go, the Google merry-go-ride! A brief half day surge, followed by a huge drop this morning. Traffic to my home page -72%. Direct traffic -68% after surging yesterday. Search -17%. It's still early in the day, but I doubt that the day will end positive with these kinds of numbers. These days it's mostly miserable traffic days interspersed with an almost normal day here and there ...no good days and certainly no new business coming from Google at all since this crap started on the 13th.

[ichthyous]

Google tends to lean heavily on the last 2 as it is much easier to measure along with a few other things like how popular the page is (incoming links).

@JesterMagic I don't agree with this. My site has attracted more high quality links from high-authority sites in the last few years than ever before. It has not moved the needle at all. Links are not nearly as important in building authority signals as they were before. I'm not sure what the criteria are now but it's not IBL. That changed in 2018 or perhaps 2019...it's been downhill since September 2018 so I haven't paid close attention to updates as much. I feel like these days a certain amount of randomization is built into the algo, and also the page just has so many more options than it did in 2018 that the traffic just isn't there in organic search anymore no matter how high you rank.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:40 pm (utc) on Mar 8, 2021]

[mzb44]

^ Yeah, these last two months have been an extremely wild ride.

I'm not sure what's going on at Google. They must be testing something like crazy?

Ultra massive core update incoming once they figure out where they want to go with all of these?

[mzb44]

@JesterMagic I don't agree with this. My site has attracted more high quality links from high-authority sites in the last few years than ever before. It has not moved the needle at all. Links are not nearly as important in building authority signals as they were before. I'm not sure what the criteria are now but it's not IBL. That changed in 2018.

How do you compare to other sites that rank for the same terms you are?

Are there some supper massive sites? Think of sites like TechRadar etc. or whatever their equivalent are in your niche.

Because if yes, then Google will measure and compare everything against those sites.

You can have 5,000 ultra tier links if those sites have 100,000. Google will compare you to those sites and catalogue your site as lacking expertise, authoritativeness and trust.
Like, say from a scale of 0 to 100 TechRadar is 100. In this case you will be a 5. Meaning Google will treat your site almost like it does with pure-spam sites.

I know the above is extremely oversimplified but I strongly believe it kind of works like this.

[strummer19]

Today from 12PM to 13PM - Sudden increase in search and discover trafic, a real miracle since february update. But after 60 minutes....back to zero.