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]

[yollo03]

I recently received the following:

"Updates to the Search Console and Google Analytics linked properties terms of service We're working on a new experience that combines Search Console and Google Analytics data to provide you with more useful data about your site. We are updating the linking integration between Search Console and Google Analytics to allow the export of data from your Google Analytics property to the linked Search Console property. We'll notify when this new experience becomes available (probably in a few weeks)."

That might explain some of the issues a lot experienced in the past few weeks.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Is anybody having issues with their own Discover feed on your personal device? Mine has either not been populating at all or only adding two stories, usually irrelevant, and only showing one more when selecting read more

Wondering if there is a wider issue that might explain the patterns in traffic

[topaz]

Seems like Google turned up the YouTube dial in Discover....way up.

[southernguy]

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

@mzb44 In my situation, I am being outranked by one expired domain with a bunch of 301 redirects followed by Pinterest and parasites like medium and tumblr. It's been this way for a while.

[ichthyous]

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.

Of course large sites predominate on most searches...they have 1000 or 10000X more content than I do. But not across the board. In May of last year a lot of the searches switched from ranking big ecom sites to ranking informational articles and blog posts and stayed that way. It suddenly became highly segmented with no overlap. For example, anything with the work "photography" suddenly switched completely away from ecom to articles, tips, best of, etc. Even though a good number of people would be looking for a genre of photography in the past to purchase they wont find it now...they'll have to search for "photographs" etc. That plus stuffing the page with more and more ads and links to youtube, articles, local, snippits, twitter, and pushing the organic SERPs down so far on the page that even if you are top three it doesn't send traffic. I also have one blog type site suddenly outranking me on many terms...why? They have many more articles and in depth content, where my site is just an archive without much how-to type info. My links aren't moving the needle at all since about 2018.

[Athedian]

Man, I am seeing Google just indexing the heck out of all the URLs that I've requested removal AND added to the robot.txt. It's like once every while, it decides to crawl everything and index all the URL's despite you did everything on your end to PREVENT Google from indexing. I can't count how many times I've requested certain URL's to be removed from index since two years ago, and some of the URL's that were being indexed were the same ones from two years ago.

It's like Google is just ignoring robot.txt altogether.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Folks, if there is someone who is fully recovered from May 4-th 2020 update? To pre-update levels? How did you do that? What you've implemented? Will be appreciate for sharing your experience.

[TalkativeEditorial]

This is unbearably painful, traffic just keeps declining - rankings aren't actually that bad, but suspect whatever has been going on specifically related to publishers [see the blog post by Google below] - is going to be detrimental to a lot of smaller publishers.

From google's blog:

With this launch, we’re introducing new technology that is able to detect long-running news stories that span many days, like the Super Bowl, to many weeks or months like the COVID-19 pandemic. We then organize the Full Coverage page to help people easily find top news along with additional content like explainers and local coverage that are helpful to understanding these complex stories.
Full story: [[blog.google ]]

This isn't 100% new - but something must be new enough for them to feel the need to 'announce' it.

[strummer19]

@TalkativeEditorial
Our websites are in french and italian, and we have same problem.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@strummer19

Seems like a lot of smaller publishers are going through the same. It's extremely difficult - even if others are going through the same - to not panic and worry that there is some sort of technical error on your own site.

This is brutal.

[RedBar]

My traffic from 24th Feb until 8th March v 1-23 Feb is -18.5% on a consistent daily basis however this is not unusual for me at this time of year ... With an early Easter I would expect traffic to increase from 12th April onwards ... We shall see!

[ichthyous]

This is unbearably painful, traffic just keeps declining - rankings aren't actually that bad, but suspect whatever has been going on specifically related to publishers [see the blog post by Google below] - is going to be detrimental to a lot of smaller publishers.

This issue with Discovery is separate from all of the other issues driving declining traffic from Google. My site has zero traffic from Discover and my traffic still fell off a cliff and has stayed down since 2/13. The period of decent traffic in Jan and early Feb was just Google giving us a taste of what it could be like if we paid them for traffic. I see the same strategy with FB / Instagram... some days the posts get reach but then it's suddenly tamped down hard. It's a strategy to wear people down and entice them to pay for what they no longer have.

[worker]

I'm still seeing massive manipulation of Google search results by spammers/scammers. On page one of most of my many test phrases there are search results that look valid if you only look at the text displayed. Even a casual glance at the URL screams that the search result is a manipulated scam result that will inevitably redirect you to a different site (many times a malicious site or a p0rn site).

Google is being run in circles by scammers who are regularly on page one with a number of redirecting search results. I have seen 2 or 3 on page one of some search results. It is unbelievable that Google is allowing redirecting links to sites attempting malicious browser attacks and sites redirecting to p0rn on PAGE 1 of very specific search phrases (and common search phrases). The security aspect of crawling through to the destination page is either completly broken or it is seen by the scammers and Google is redirected separately to some safe page to trick it. In any case, the search results are catastrophic for casual searchers and those that do not use some sort of virus protection system are at risk just by searching in Google and going to websites it lists on page one. How can this be something Google allows. It makes absolutely no sense. How can the scammers be running circles around Google without Google slamming them down. They can see every destination site that is ultimately redirected to by these false search results.

[ichthyous]

I've just discovered the reason that Direct traffic has plummeted for my site, and perhaps some of you can confirm it. Google Images has had a big update in the last few days and now when I search for images by title from my own site that ranked for the last decade, they are mostly all gone and instead other websites using those images are ranking above my own. These are NOT spam sites, they are mostly sites I partner with to sell my products, Pinterest posts by me or others, or blogs writing about me and using the images with permission. Most of these pages / posts link back to the original source page for the product / image on my own site, but my own page is no longer is ranking or even showing up at all! Some of these sites are much larger and more authoritative than mine, others are not. Anyone else seeing a big loss in Direct traffic recently? Check your image ranking!

[mzb44]

@mzb44 In my situation, I am being outranked by one expired domain with a bunch of 301 redirects followed by Pinterest and parasites like medium and tumblr. It's been this way for a while.

Yeah this happens all the time.

If the expired domain they 301 over is strong enough then they get propelled to orbit even if their site is not that good/is trash.

Spammers seem to time these 301 redirects with core update releases, adding them immediately after, to prevent the 301d links to get evaluated (and down-ranked) by the core update. Then they ride that for the next 4-6 months. By the time the next core update hits they have new expired domains ready to be redirected to other newly launched sites immediately after.

So, this way you get the full benefits (until the next core update) of all the powerful links of the redirected expired domain without them being potentially downgraded by the most recent core update.

Meanwhile legitimate but smaller sites get hit, as their sites/links get evaluated normally (and maybe downgraded) by the core update.

With the above it's so ridiculously easy to abuse the way core updates work and get around potential core update downgrades.

There is a reason why I specifically said that only major brands (ultra link profiles -> ultra authority & trust) and 301 redirect spammers (who can bypass getting evaluated by core updates) win after core updates.

---

PS:

You also mentioned Pinterest, Medium and Tumblr. All these are ultra authority sites. And as I said, Google has massively boosted authority signals, especially after the May 2020 and December 2020 core updates. Those sites can outrank every other site just with a random article or pages randomly mentioning your keyword once just by sheer domain/link authority. You will never be able to outrank those ultra massive and authoritative sites no matter what you do, unless Google changes its mind and tweaks things during a future core update where they balance out authority vs. relevancy (but I would not hold my breath for this).

[MayankParmar]

Extremely low traffic this month. The drop is largely due to Discover, which is now showing more videos and unrelated contents.

[Athedian]

Seems like traffic is starting to recover for me right now. Google ads I'm just focusing on one or two campaigns with ads that have proven to work (so far at least) after close to a thousand ads of a/b testing, so the cpa is really low and conv. rate is really high (for now).

But the GSC is still showing that one freaking page still having robot.txt blocking error. Funny enough, I checked using Google's robot.txt inspection tool and THAT one found NO error to speak of whatsoever. So it's like a robot.txt bug on GSC side, one that Google will never, ever fix.

Now let's wait for the next Google Update to once again screw everything up. Relish the short victory and achievements while you can, even if it's just going to be for a few days at most before Google takes away everything again.

In terms of search results, lately I've been seeing multiple sites copying each other's content being ranked as top 3 on SERP. So if I searched "Will running be good for the body", there will be at least 3 results of 90-99% same content being displayed at the top. And some of the sites have basically the same content, completely duplicated, just in different text fonts and colors. It's like Panda Update is non-existent now.

[mzb44]

"Will running be good for the body"

This is such a nice example of everything that was said about how Google works in the age of core updates.

You have a fitness/health search term and what's ranking #1? A 2018 random and "meh"-tier article from BusinessInsider. - Because it's BusinessInsider one goes to for fitness tips now, apparently.

What's special about BusinessInsider vs. all the other sites on that SERP? BusinessInsider has a ridiculously high link/domain/brand authority in comparison to all the others. It doesn't even come close.

So, BI can pretty much post about anything whatever, even 100% completely irrelevant to their site, and they will be top 3 immediately.

[TalkativeEditorial]

The running search is an interesting example, here's a recent one of my personal experiences that might tie in to that to some extent (ie just go for link profile if all else) but for me highlights how little understanding of nuance/context the AI has outside of some very basic US English terms.

I live in a city with a serious roach problem, outside the US (English is an official language though). Sometimes the little **** get under the floorboards and I was looking for the most effective way to zap them as quickly as possible. I still don't have the answer, despite several variations on the searches relating to 'get rid of / under floors / under floorboards' - none of the searches managed to answer that particular question, but several seemed to think I was researching which floors are best to buy (not ads btw).

For another recent example, I was looking up something relating to how to disable something in a game - and the top 10 results included a terrible affiliate site selling something relating to one of the words in the search term - but... and this is the kicker.... at the bottom of the "listings" the copy included A SPUN PARAGRAPH from the top result (which did answer the game-specific question) - which as absolutely nothing to do with the site/sales whatsover other than the keyword.

WILD/

Edit: Sidenote, if anyone is in the 'how to' niche, there's an interesting experiment here to see if you can answer and rank the critter question.

[BushyTop]

Seeing more changes this morning. Seeing a reversal from the changes I saw on the 28tjh Feb. Anyone else seeing this?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Remind me what the changes on 28 Feb were again? Can't keep up with Google's changes anymore.

[strummer19]

No reversal at all from my side / Cut jobs time now.....

[KaseyM]

20% down since this weekend.

[RedBar]

My SERPs do not seem to be any different, including images, therefore where has the traffic gone?

Just a March slowdown as I have witnessed before?

Realworld business enquiries are still firm.

[ichthyous]

My SERPs bounce up and down every day...one day gain, on day lose. But my direct traffic has been blitzed this past week. Today traffic has been fine so far, but other days this week I have lost almost half the direct traffic and -30% on my home page. This is just the new normal I think.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Sensors are spiking again.

Seeing very very fleeting moments of recovery and then they disappear just as soon as they arrived. But sensor seem to be heading past the level of 2/3 March which is when the worst of whatever this current decline is started.

[mzb44]

Clearly there was another update the last few days.

Everything is going down again all across the board.

Site with expert content and original research (made by real researchers, high-level government consultants, 20+ years high-level experience) that regularly gets linked to and mentioned by major publications like Forbes (staff writers), Business Insider, etc. as well as shared and mentioned on social media all the time.

Lightning fast speed. Ultra fast loading times. Green CWV. Ultra modern style and design. Technical SEO spot-on.

Zero link spam.

==> Down after every core and non-core update.

I guess this is just how it is and Google simply just wants to rank big mainstream sites for almost everything, because it's safer, even if their content is just acceptable at best. I guess they have that right, it's their platform. Seems like the rest of us just need to accept this and move on. It does not help being bitter about it.

I'm planning to wait out the next core update and see what happens and meanwhile continue to push ultra expert content (which costs a fortune). If it does not improve (which seems to be the most likely scenario), then everything will get put to a halt and the site will just cruise on existing content. It is what it is.

[christianz]

I guess they have that right, it's their platform.

No its not their right and its not their platform. It is force-fed to nearly every living human being who has a computer or phone (minus Chinese, bless them), and there is no alternative, because most people aren't even aware that other search engines exist, much less hot to set them up as defaults in their devices.

As soon as they become absolute monopoly on information discovery with 99% market share, they lose all rights to make selfish decisions based on profitability, because at that point they are not just a company in free market capitalism - they are sole provider of essential utility - information, and last time I checked, utility companies have no right to choose, prioritize and randomly terminate clients that they don't like or don't think are best for their profitability.

[Athedian]

Long ago there were other search engines as well, like Ask Jeeves, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc.

The 90's was like the pinnacle of Internet greatness, where most of the sites were not ranked by manipulative algos but through actual content and primitive search terms. Sure, blackhat SEOs dominated the landscape back then but it was within the users' controls. We knew what to search for and what the results would be (more or less anyway, since the system itself was primitive, sometimes it wouldn't bring up the correct results).

And we could choose which search engines to submit our sites to.

[christianz]

As far as recent days - I haven't noticed any changes for my sites. Since December "update" which penalized my more authoritative site by approx -20%, I haven't seen major further punishments. Traffic is mostly flat with maybe very small, gradual recovery, despite temporary small drops on several high volatility days.

I am not expecting anything positive from future core updates. Staying flat would almost be accomplishment, knowing the "establishment, corporate sites uber alles" path which Google seems to be taking.