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]

[MayankParmar]

Organic traffic is strong and I still have featured snippets, but I don't have the knowledge panel "Topics they write about" since late February. Discover crashed on 2nd March and it's still horrible.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@MayankParmar - Yup, Discover dead for me too. There have been a few "pick ups" of some of the "evergreen" content pieces, but they get ripped off again just as quickly as they surfaced - even with CTRs between 5-10% for some of them and Page Speed score in the 90s :'-)

I wish I didn't have to complain here, but on the "Help Forums" over at Google, the "Product Experts" will just copy and paste things from Google Help Docs, so this is my outlet.

[superclown2]

My impressions continue to fall despite reasonable positions in the SERPs. All down to Google Clutter. A popup 'People also search for' box only appeared in my UK vertical a few weeks ago (I understand it has been seen elsewhere before this) and it is so irritating but it succeeds in it's purpose of pushing organics even further down the page which is already dominated by mainly useless diversions.

Lets face facts: Google has no choice but to keep growing because that is the only reason for people buying their overpriced shares. So expect more problems in the future not less.

I have switched to DDG for searches because they are improving daily. People use Google because it is the default search engine on so many devices. That may well have to change when the legal actions start to bite. That will take years so maybe it's time to re-assess our business strategies. For most of us Google is a lost cause and if they lose their monopoly they will be a busted flush. Time to plan for a future after Google. What will come then? Perhaps a new topic entirely but a reliance on search engines to decide what to show us is certainly not the only way of finding information on the web and when a better method becomes adopted Google will join Altavista, Snap and Lycos. Remember all things must change, that is the law of nature.

As an aside; I wonder if the SERPs are so bad because they have been over-simplified; for example search for red one legged unicorns and Big Brand unicorn sellers dominate by just having the other words either buried in the copy, in a link to their sites, or even mentioned on another site which contains a link to them. Perhaps the AI is still learning and needs time to progress beyond nursery school. I can't believe that Google are deliberately pushing out such awful results with everything going to mega businesses regardless of relevance - it would be economic suicide in the long term. Then again are they going for broke before regulation breaks their monopoly? This could make a great film one day.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I think part of the reason the SERPS are so bad is because:

1. AI doesn't understand anything beyond US English and context - so yes, it's still learning, but the understanding beyond basics for anything beyond US english is a mess - perhaps made worse with the rise in popularity of VPNs.
2. added to the learning of the AI, the last few months have changed the way people search and what they are searching for dramatically - so that May update which was, perhaps, supposed to benefit AI's learnings, destroyed it completely because all the search data from the last 12 months will largely be an anomaly.

[MayankParmar]

Thank you for complaining. At least I know I am not alone and my site is not plugged with technical issues.

[ichthyous]

I can't believe that Google are deliberately pushing out such awful results with everything going to mega businesses regardless of relevance - it would be economic suicide in the long term. Then again are they going for broke before regulation breaks their monopoly?

You can't? Google gave up on trying to maintain the quality of the organic SERPS years ago. At this point Google is a behemoth trillion dollar company with many different irons in the fire. Their search business is antiquated and based on a lot of factors that no longer work...like sites linking from one to another naturally...that hasn't happened since around 2004. Perhaps we should all see the bigger picture that Google is focusing on a post search future. Right now they have a monopoly and are using it to squeeze the world into paying them. They do not care about the quality of organic search, just quarterly profits. It was inevitable the minuted they went public.

[JesterMagic]

Lets face facts: Google has no choice but to keep growing because that is the only reason for people buying their overpriced shares. So expect more problems in the future not less.

That is the main problem. The SERPS are so cluttered with other stuff now. It's not that our main competitors get more traffic Google just takes more of the quality traffic for themselves with all of their stupid widgets that just send you endlessly in circles.

[mzb44]

Google gave up on trying to maintain the quality of the organic SERPS years ago. [...] Perhaps we should all see the bigger picture that Google is focusing on a post search future.

This makes perfect sense and is perfectly in line with what we are seeing with big mainstream brands ranking for almost everything.

Making sure algorithmically that big brands rank for almost everything solves the issue of having to constantly improve search and work on finding newer and newer ways to discover quality content, and at the same site makes sure that SERPs are at least semi-decent/acceptable not to push users to different search engines.

So, with the big brands ranking for everything I guess the SERPs are "good enough" not to get people to leave but also eliminates a lot development/research/maintenance costs.

[ichthyous]

Hello was wondering if anyone can advise whether StatCounter allows you to compare traffic from two date ranges (i.e. before / after an update) like GA does? I removed GA months ago and am using Clicky and also my own server, but GA allowed me to drill down more than Clicky. I need to be able to make a more in depth comparison without resorting to GA again. I tried Matomo but it simply will not work on my server.

[superclown2]

They do not care about the quality of organic search, just quarterly profits. It was inevitable the minuted they went public.

You may be right. It does seem short sighted though. It would only take a ban on them having cosy agreements to make them the default on so many browsers (a distinct possibility looking at all their pending legal issues) and a decent competitor (DDG perhaps?) to get favourable publicity and it could all disappear. I remember Altavista and Yahoo at the top of the pile once - and they fell almost overnight.

When Google had decent results they were the darling of the Internet. Now they are probably the most hated company, at least amongst Internet professionals. I would be amazed if they were still top of the pile in five years' time unless they change their culture. Which I agree isn't likely.

[shadowlight]

Went from last place on page 1 to first AND second place on page 1, yet traffic appears to have been quartered.

Im in a similar position. I rank third on page one for several good keywords in my niche, although traffic and conversions are like i was on page 100. Traffic is up overall site wide. I know my site, i know how it performs / converts and yearly trends, ive been running it for a decade, there is definitely something going on.

Either google manipulation or people are just starting to scroll past all the crap, maybe page 2 is the place to be these days.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@shadowlight

Would you mind to explain what you mean when you say "google manipulation" please? I see people use this term often, but I don't understand quite what they mean.

[mzb44]

Would you mind to explain what you mean when you say "google manipulation" please? I see people use this term often, but I don't understand quite what they mean.

I think most often this refers to things Google does to discourage people from clicking on organic search results and direct them to ads or other google features/properties instead.

This can include knowledge graph, direct answers, moving the "people also asked" box below the first or second organic search result (a feature that in the past was always only at the very bottom of the page - so now giving the impression that the serp ends there, discouraging people from scrolling further), making ads look almost indistinguishable from organic results, etc.

All the above result in lower CTR for organic results. This is a real thing. This has been documented extensively over the years. Google is your biggest competitor.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Gotcha, thanks. And yep, I know that despite that featured snippet being seen as the holy grail by many, it does not always benefit a site to have one.

[Lisa01]

Are the schools closed in the US?

[shadowlight]

@shadowlight

Would you mind to explain what you mean when you say "google manipulation" please? I see people use this term often, but I don't understand quite what they mean.

Yes, what mzb44 said and this is the manipulation we can see and cannot be refuted. Who knows what they are doing behind the scenes that we cannot see and prove.

My traffic is up overall, serp positions remain consistent yet conversions are terrible. In 10 YEARS there has maybe been 4-5 days EVER that my site has had 0 conversions, in the past 3 months there has been 4 days this has happened.

The fact that traffic is up, serp positions are stable yet conversions are down suggests that Google is using my content to add value to their serps by using & promoting my content for informational queries and for transactional queries............well we all know what their main focus is these days don't we.

[TalkativeEditorial]

@shadowlight I feel ya.

and it appears the sensors are on the spike again today :-(

[ichthyous]

My ranking gained quite nicely today, however my actual traffic is a disaster. USA down 48%, search down 37%, direct down 50% over a normal Sunday. It's 10:30am and we lost an hour, but still, this is a very bad start to a Sunday, one of my busiest days generally.

[lammert]

It is not manipulation, it is Google's business model from the early beginning. Their goal is to make all information in the world accessible in as less clicks as possible. They do it by presenting direct answers, calculators and other widgets which give the searcher the information they need faster than when clicking through to a website. In the process they monetize your scraped content with ads.

Fortunately there is a solution with the following line in the robots.txt file. But that has its own side effects :)

Disallow: /

Expect more changes to the SERPs in the future where less traffic is forwarded to other sites and more traffic remains on their property.

[JesterMagic]

[sarcasm]Just great[/sarcasm]... for keywords related to my niche I see most youtube videos now have the key moments time bar located just below the video thumbnail through out the SERPS. This means more organic results gets pushed down while Google gets to promote their own property where they get to make ad revenue.

[Mentat]

Yes, something very strange is happening.

Same problem here with traffic:
- stable rankings
- I see a lot of my articles on MY Google app - discovery

My traffic is 50% down.

[superclown2]

Expect more changes to the SERPs in the future where less traffic is forwarded to other sites and more traffic remains on their property.

I checked some big money terms in my UK niche today. In all of them the number one organic result was way below the fold because of ads and junk. In most cases even the second organic was buried even further.

Google will either change tack or fall, probably sooner than we expect. Governments all over the world have voters and taxpayers to keep happy and they will not tolerate a corporation like Google destroying businesses, pushing up prices for consumers and obstructing progress in this way. The Internet is too important to be dominated by a powerful predator.

In the meanwhile I had quite a shock when I checked my stats today. My own clicks from Bing and DDG have grown substantially this month. Bearing in mind that the conversion rate from non-Google sources is so much greater I am rapidly losing interest in G and I look forward to the day when their share price goes into reverse and the whole ponzi-type scheme fall apart.

Frankly I think that anyone who pays for advertising on Google is paying the Danegeld. There is an old English saying about this.

[ichthyous]

Google will either change tack or fall, probably sooner than we expect. Governments all over the world have voters and taxpayers to keep happy and they will not tolerate a corporation like Google destroying businesses, pushing up prices for consumers and obstructing progress in this way. The Internet is too important to be dominated by a powerful predator.

You're joking right? Google will do whatever it wants because it's a trillion dollar corporation and the government has no clue of how to tackle it. Have you ever seen some of the Congressional hearings? The questions are so silly and simplistic that it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of Google's manipulation, and search isn't even a priority. Google, the public, and the government do not care about our businesses at all...we don't have an army of lobbyists. The only way Google will fail is through the user getting consistently disgusted with the service. They aren't, and it's free so they will continue to suffer the poor results because it costs them nothing. This is how monopolies work, they don't have to compete or be concerned with who they destroy in the process.

[swright]

I don't think most people even realize that Google's results are "bad". They don't use the same criteria we do, so if a given search is not satisfactory, they either change the query or continue clicking through to page 2 or 3 until they find something they are roughly ok with. And that something doesn't need to be a page that is high quality by our standards - passable is good enough for most people.

[EditorialGuy]

Our travel site has had a significant increase in traffic lately (e.g., up 52 percent today, compared to the same Sunday last year), but the increase isn't just from Google--it's across the board. I suspect that, even with the horrible COVID situation in so much of the world, people are looking ahead to herd immunity and economic recovery.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Really starting to worry seriously that something technically is wrong with the site that I am missing, because Search Console shows the average rating is increasing but traffic keeps plummeting.

I am especially concerned around AMP pages. Having looked at some of the tracking tools, it seems that as of 2 March (when the first signs of decline were noticed) that AMP pages have taken a nosedive in the SERPs (according to Google's data).

I have seen this before - most notably when the canonical issue and mobile indexing issues presented themselves last year. I am also very confused as I thought Google gave preference to AMP pages in the SERPS.

Can others here who use AMP please look if they have noted the same? Not talking about AMP pages indexed, but rather the traffic to those AMP pages.

@EditorialGuy - Interestingly, when I was drilling down into the stability of niches yesterday, I was quite surprised to see that the SEM Rush sensors had Travel as fairly stable (compared to overall/some other niches anyway) for the last month. That's some good news at least.

[MayankParmar]

Not seeing any issues with AMP and I made zero changes to the site, so there's no chance for technical issues. I monitor the site using Pingdom, Relic.. nothing odd. Discover is dead, but search is strong.

[Athedian]

Seeing really consistent ups and downs on search clicks in GSC. Mondays slowly getting to Wed and clicks were at around 2300+ and then slowly dying down to 1200+ over the weekends, and repeat for the next four weeks.

If the traffic is truly organic and real, it's impossible to have this amazing consistency.

[superclown2]

Have you ever seen some of the Congressional hearings? The questions are so silly and simplistic that it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of Google's manipulation

You may be right. I realised the last time the USA investigated G that it was a waste of time when one of the senators only wanted to know if G would build a power station in his state. This time it is different though with a huge coalition against them.

One target is the agreements to make G the default search engine (should that read advertising agency?) on multiple browsers. Take away G's monopolist position and allow fair comparison to other improving search systems and the story will be different.

I'm not including Bing in the 'improving' list though. Swop Google for Bing? That's going from the frying pan into the fire.

However; today I am seeing more relevancy in my UK vertical; not a lot but a step in the right direction. Perhaps the AI is improving?

[christianz]

Really starting to worry seriously that something technically is wrong with the site that I am missing, because Search Console shows the average rating is increasing but traffic keeps plummeting.

I would explain this simply as Google de-listing your long tail positions. Therefore you get higher average ranking but still lower traffic.

Seeing really consistent ups and downs on search clicks in GSC. Mondays slowly getting to Wed and clicks were at around 2300+ and then slowly dying down to 1200+ over the weekends, and repeat for the next four weeks.

I have very heavy saw-tooth weekends-up, weekdays-down pattern going on for over a year. Average position also goes up on weekdays and drops with Monday and then steady lower until Thursday when it goes up again. My websites simply are not as relevant or high quality on weekdays, I guess :)