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]

[saladtosser]

Just tested DuckDuckGo for the first time, wow I'm impressed! It like google was 10 years ago, relevant. Doesn't hurt that I'm ranking 1st on almost everything I tested either lol Shame we cant start some sort of grassroots movement to get people to switch! Don't like bing its worse than google IMO

[shadowlight]

@shadowlight. That Cnet video sums it all up.

It does sum it all up nicely and no matter what Google say, that is exactly what they are doing [virtually ensuring that any business that wants to be found on the web must pay Google a 'Tax'.]

How long before the golden goose gets choked?

There are no signs of this.

I think the fact that the Government know exactly what they are doing and Google are being investigated is a sign that eventually their golden goose may indeed get choked. I think Google realise it too and that is why they are being as aggressive as ever in making as much money as they possibly can, while they can.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yeah, DuckDuckGo is pretty good. AskJeeves vibes.

That said, AFIK, they don't have any sort of webmaster tools to assess performance/submit to their news section, right? So, in a way, for publishers....it's kind of more of the same with the big guys raking in the benefits.

[mini_007]

I really don't understand how its possible our page have gone from page 1 in google Japan to end of page 6 in google. There is zero penalty in console, no change in links, no change in content, the security is all on place, nothing has happen to our other pages :(

[superclown2]

AFIK, they don't have any sort of webmaster tools to assess performance/

Google webmaster tools were never intended to help webmasters. They were designed to spy on us and to encourage us to put tracking code on our sites so they could spy on our visitors without their knowledge. There are better systems.

[engine]

Mods note
Please keep the focus of this thread on Google and SERPs.

[superclown2]

I think Google realise it too and that is why they are being as aggressive as ever in making as much money as they possibly can, while they can.

I agree with your conclusions. I think it is very short sighted of Google though. They have the abilities to produce a first class search engine which would give them dominance in search for the forseeable future. Instead they have attracted massive hatred and worldwide legal actions.

They are still a one trick pony, relying on online search for their profits. They have massive overheads with 120,000 plus employees and huge infrastructure costs. Their electricity bill alone must be eye watering.

Take away their monopoly; let a few newspapers trumpet their awful search results; a twitter storm; even a reddit campaign; and they could go the same way as myspace, aol, yahoo, altavista; all 'too big to fail' failures.

Will they turn round and revert to producing the best possible search results and an uncluttered interface? No they can't because their share price would fall and investors would get jittery - after all they don't pay a dividend and stockholders rely on an ever increasing share price to compensate. If this goes into reverse the results will be interesting.

As I keep saying; soon we will have to plan for a future post-Google.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing a big drop in USA traffic today from search? I'm down 50% from the norm. Direct traffic seems to be holding up.

[NickMNS]

Anyone else seeing a big drop in USA traffic today from search?

I'm seeing the opposite, up 30% since 8am EDT.

[ichthyous]

Strange, I dropped off a cliff for some terms, down 16-50+ spots. Now the same very large ecom sites are crowding out the SERPS completely over and over. Google is definitely favoring large sites and also clearly urls closely matching the search. Ranking pages with keywords in the url is ridiculous...like it's the early 2000's again.

I am winding down an account with a partner site which sells my items, and as an experiment I turned off more than half the items listed over a few days. Each page had direct backlinks to my site for the last couple of years. I am seeing what the effect of losing 800+ links from a very high authority domain is first before deciding to pull the plug on the account for good. The account is very expensive and they do not refer enough sales to make it pay for itself, but losing the links may be what's causing the plunge. It's only been four days since I started deactivating my items on their site.

[mzb44]

I think the fact that the Government know exactly what they are doing and Google are being investigated

To say that the government knows exactly what it's doing, in my opinion (and I REALLY and truly do not want to sound offending), is an extremely naive take.

Google is also being investigated for years now. They pay a fine and move on, business as usual.

A congressional hearing is almost always political posturing and PR by the congresspeople asking the questions. Almost never (like, really) does anything at all whatsoever come out of it.

If we are waiting for the government (of all things, really) to come and "fix" Google, then we should really just close shop and give up.

[MayankParmar]

I have tested several sites: Google is definitely having slow indexing issues in some regions.

[shadowlight]

I think the fact that the Government know exactly what they are doing and Google are being investigated

To say that the government knows exactly what it's doing, in my opinion (and I REALLY and truly do not want to sound offending), is an extremely naive take.

No offence taken :)

I maybe should have worded that differently.

When I said: 'I think the fact that the Government know exactly what they are doing and Google are being investigated is a sign'.

I meant the Government know exactly what Google are doing.

I should have worded it: 'I think the fact that the Government know exactly what Google are doing and Google are being investigated is a sign'.

They pay a fine and move on, business as usual.

I get what you are saying about paying the fine and moving on but surely they cant just pay a fine then continue to do exactly what it was they were fined for in the first place?

[Hollywood]

"Google webmaster tools were never intended to help webmasters. They were designed to spy on us and to encourage us to put tracking code on our sites so they could spy on our visitors without their knowledge. There are better systems."

Amen brother!

[NickMNS]

"Google webmaster tools were never intended to help webmasters. They were designed to spy on us and to encourage us to put tracking code on our sites so they could spy on our visitors without their knowledge. There are better systems."

In terms of GSC there is no actual tracking code involved. What ever "code" you add is there simply to ensure that the owner of the account is the owner of the website. All the information shown in GSC is from Google and exists whether you choose to signup and see it or not. So feel free not to have a GSC account, it wont change anything for anyone.

Now you may be confusing Search Console [GSC] with Google Analytics [GA]. With GA there definitely is tracking code, but here again, I would think that Google has sufficient alternate means (Chrome browser) to collect all the data they need without anyone using GA. So again, feel free to use another product. But over the years that I have been part of this forum many people have said "I'm not using Analytics", no one has ever seen any difference either way.

So if you want don't want to use the Google products out of conviction, go for it! But if you are doing it because you think it is going to change something then I wouldn't bother.

[superclown2]

My stats yesterday showed possibly the lowest number of clicks since I first began in this business more than 20 years ago. This is despite us having more websites than ever before and innumerable positions on page 1 for useful search terms. I put it down to Google's ever increasing number of ways to keep all the business to itself. The writing is on the wall. Until this company is hopefully brought to book by the pile of legal actions that are stacking up my future SEO efforts will focus on persuading as many people as possible to use a search engine instead of this advertising and personal data gobbling behemoth.

A quick glance at DDG shows that if they were the default on most browsers I would now be rolling in money. I reckon that would apply to many more of us too.

In terms of GSC there is no actual tracking code involved. What ever "code" you add is there simply to ensure that the owner of the account is the owner of the website

Yes I know. This is why I said the intention was to persuade people to add tracking code. I reckon a high proportion of people who use WMT do go on to add it. As with the spider and the fly, the first step in trapping a victim is to persuade it to enter the parlour <BWG>

[BushyTop]

We've had one of our main pages completely de-index today. I hope it reappears

[BushyTop]

Additionally, quite a few of our old pages aren't showing an cache? Anyone else experiencing this...?

[TalkativeEditorial]

@BushyTop

Had some caching issues here too - but opposite to you. Extremely old cache - like outdated by over two weeks (roughly the time the recent issues began in March....) showing for the home page when accessing it from the AMP cache/search. Which is why I am convinced that there is a serious glitch on G's end somewhere - as there was last year with canonicals and mobile indexing.

I've disabled the caching plugins our end, cleared everything repeatedly and the problems persist.

Do you use AMP, out of interest?

[BushyTop]

@talkative we do use AMP and the page that has been de-indexed has an amp alternative. Its not anywhere in the index though, nor does it appear as a sitelink if you search for our brand name... concerning

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yep, that chimes with a lot of what I am seeing (again, I am certain that there is a serious issue somewhere).

I have pages dipping in and out of index pretty much by the hour (as a featured snippet, the one replacing it is from our site too, but older). This keeps happening with everything published since around 1/2 March. All pages are AMP, all have AMP alternative URLs. It has been driving me absolutely insane since it started happening - but you're the first person here who seems to be articulating exactly what I have noticed (which doesn't help that there is almost certainly an issue somewhere), which makes me feel a bit better.

For one specific page I have been monitoring (the one mentioned above) - when inspecting the URL, it also seems to randomly switch between a Googlesmartphone bot rendering and Google desktop bot for rendering - again, seemingly at random, seemingly on the hour. Our site was switched to mobile first yonks ago.

[BushyTop]

@talkative based on your language, I'm guessing you're UK based?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Not quite, our inventory management is, though.

What I suspect is happening - partly because of what I'm seeing as well as the AMP visibility trends in the tracker tools - is that with the mobile to mobile-first indexing, Google is trying to shift to mobile only indexing. There was a massive dip in AMP visibility across the board and all Geos on 2/3 March.

My hypothesis is that there is a disconnect somewhere with rolling out that indexation and in their infinite wisdom, Google's own technology (AMP) is confusing their own crawler between mobile/AMP/Desktop.

[JesterMagic]

I am not sure why others think another Search Engine will take Google's place for the majority of users WITHOUT Government intervention. Most users are not tech savvy and have not idea on their Android phone which is loaded with Google products how to change the defaults for search engines along with dealing with apps like discovery, gmail etc. Plus Google has deals with Apple and other companies to be the default search engine for their products. Plus every time I use a web product not using Google Chrome there is Google with a big popup trying to get me to change over.

This type of default control over OS apps needs to be taken away from all the major OS companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple). When I startup a device for the first time it should ask me (or give some sort of random list) of what browser, mail program, default search engine, etc... I want to use. This is the only way we can break the hold of these companies and their eco systems.

[saladtosser]

Don't know if this helps in any way but my pages are 100% AMP (amp only) and I haven't seen a drop off of indexed pages. Could be different for people who arent 100% AMP?

[BushyTop]

@saladtosser it helps, but not in the way I'd like it to. I've never seen anything like this before. Still no sign. Its been completely deindexed since 9.30pm GMT this morning.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Standard AMP here too. The drop won't show in GSC (it does not for us anyway). It is only when you inspect the URL at random (same url, no change, nothing) that you will see the difference in smartphone/desktop and if you have a strongly ranked page you can monitor intermittently.

That's what makes troubleshooting so difficult in this case - m ost of the time, you won't even know it's happening and because of the recent tremors on the tools - it's easy to assume that any loss of traffic is down to that. And the only reason this screams problems to me is because this is pretty much the exact same pattern of events that occured during last year/s canonical/indexing issues.

[BushyTop]

@TalkativeEditorial how frequent and lasting are your de-indexations?

[MayankParmar]

18th March and Discover is still down. It looks like they've changed Discover algorithm.

[ichthyous]

My stats yesterday showed possibly the lowest number of clicks since I first began in this business more than 20 years ago. This is despite us having more websites than ever before and innumerable positions on page 1 for useful search terms. I put it down to Google's ever increasing number of ways to keep all the business to itself. The writing is on the wall.

Writing has been on the wall since 2010 for me, when I lost 95% of my image traffic overnight. Google isn't going to change, it will only get worse from here because now they are committed to the strategy of pushing out organic SERPS without any pretense. It's their platform and they can do what they want. You are correct that even top three ranking terms are no longer returning traffic depending on which layout they are foisting on us. But from January to Feb 13th they did something that returned traffic to previous levels, then clamped down even harder. Now mostly the same 6-8 huge companies occupy all the top slots for my niche for searches which Google interprets as having commercial intent, and ads, videos, snippits, tweets, etc are pushing organic serps so far down that ranking well matters less and less. This perhaps will free us all up from trying to endlessly rank our businesses at the top. I am shifting to marketing in other ways as Google just destroyed business for all of 2020, and we only got a short five week respite in 2021 before it got even worse.