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]

[TalkativeEditorial]

@BushyTop anything from a few hours to a day or two. It's particularly noticeable because pages remain in the News index - but disappear from the general SERPs. Nightmare.

Also firmly believe the Discover drop is down to this. I went and compared the drop in Discover during that period (20 Sept to 1 Oct) to the current one (2 March to 17 March). The lines are almost exactly the same in terms of how the drop started and then flatlines.

[shadowlight]

Just got a notification in analytics off Google.

"Get sales help from Google. Share your data with Google specialists and they'll look for ways to improve your results"

In other words now we have decimated your traffic get in touch with us and we will get adwords set up for you. Erm no thanks.

[saladtosser]

TalkativeEditorial my discover went into free fall on the 14th Feb and haven't had a single click since 27th of Feb, AMP pages are all still indexed so might not be an amp issue?!

[TalkativeEditorial]

Are you getting impressions though?

[BushyTop]

Does anyone have any experience in actually getting a manual notification? Does it come before or after the de-indexation or ranking decrease?

[MayankParmar]

@BushyTop I got a manual penalty last year for selling links and it was revoked after three months. Traffic was completely normal before, during and after the penalty. Discover and News were also not affected. I wasn't selling links though - I explained that it was an app review and they accepted.

[MayankParmar]

Discover traffic: [imgur.com...]

[TalkativeEditorial]

Here's our Discover graph [imgur.com ]

Dashed lines from September (clicks = blue, purple = impressions). That spike came on 2 October when they confirmed the issue was fixed :-) that downturn is 20 September when the issues first began. The current downturn has been slightly more gradual with a few glimmers of 'normal' - but that is eerily similar.

[saladtosser]

Does anyone know what actually happens/happed to the money google has been fined in the EU? Does it goto the coffers of a specific country or distributed between the block? Or is it given to the companies that have been hurt by the antitrust investigations? In which case wouldn't they now need to spend that back on google advertising to make up for what they have lost = goes straight back to google? And why are fines a one-off? If I leave my car double-parked I get multiple fines over and over every day until I move the car. Any clues on this?

[Hollywood]

Superclown, with all the data they have, from Facebook, data breaches, user data, trends, personal files, email... I think Google looks for if you are with them or against their agenda politically, democrat, republican... you think I am nuts all of you right, but they destroy you if you are not with them. It's a SICK agenda! But I truly believe it. Just my two cents.

[TheJackah]

Noticing some odd behaviour on competitive keywords at the moment. Keywords are going from page 1 or 2 to not ranking, and remaining there for at least a few days, despite consistently ranking page 2+ for a year. Other keywords unaffected, just a few specific keywords. Some gradually recover, others haven't started to yet (but it may be too soon).

Anyone else seeing this or have any idea what could be done to solve it?

[Athedian]

The amount of social media posts, videos, snippets, etc. that pushed down actual organic search results is so overwhelming that it's impossible to find anything useful now on Google. Instead of sites with updated, informative information, I am constantly getting sites that sell products or links to social media posts (forums, Facebook, Twitter) that weren't helpful whatsoever.

I searched for scholarly sources (research papers, for example) and got back search results from Amazon, Google Play Books, eBay...

And instead of useful links, all these feature snippets are taking up so much space at the top with only just a sentence highlighted THINKING they're helping me, is bringing more aggravation than appreciation. = =

Aaaaaand GSC is delaying reporting, again, for the nth time.

[TalkativeEditorial]

GSC delayed, Publisher Centre completely broken and yet, happy to keep aggregating content for free under the guise of "user experience" on the featured snippets :-)

[MayankParmar]

At least they show our site links below the featured snippets. They're stealing Wikipedia and other contents for the knowledge panel without any citation.

I Googled a city name and there's a knowledge panel (or whatever they call it), the description is from Wikipedia and other sites, but the citation is "Google"

Example: [imgur.com...]

[TalkativeEditorial]

All I want is an actual functional way to troubleshoot things because those "community" help forums definitely aren't the solution,

[BushyTop]

So the indexation of said URL seems to be back to normal. Absolutely bizarre. Frightening that they can take away a page like that for a full day. At least I can get back to business as usual.

[markseo]

Anyone else seeing big variance again today? In fact this whole week has been crazy for traffic changes - hot and cold day in day out

[superclown2]

I'm wondering if personalised results are what is causing much of our problems with low clicks despite decent positions in the SERPs.
Like most of us I delete cookies before checking my SERPs positions. However the majority of searchers don't know how to.

If a visitor has checked megacomparisonsite.com for green square widgets, and then searched for red triangular ones there seems to be more likelihood that megacomparisonsite.com will appear higher in the SERPs for that particular person than it should have done, because of the cookie record, even though it has very little value for that search term. This effect may be magnified by the fact that sites like megacomparisonsite.com are already favoured by the current algo.

We then get a chain reaction in which this site gets more clicks, gets higher in the SERPs on the back of those clicks, so gets more clicks, ad infinitum.

Just a hypothesis, not even a theory but possible I think. Anyone agree/disagree?

[lammert]

Neither agree nor disagree. The bounce rate of those comparison sites may be high, pushing them again lower in the SERPs. The problem is, there is not much you can do about the SERP position of other sites (except shady tactics).

Stoicism has taught me that if I can't change something, I just ignore it and focus on the things I can change. One of the things I can change in the SERPs is the title of the pages, the snippets and the experience for people who land on my pages.

[MayankParmar]

Some new updates? New articles not ranking well (got outranked by a #*$!ty site). I hope this is temporary.

[RedBar]

Am I missing a major holiday somewhere?

Traffic across all my sites has been averagely normal this week however this morning, Friday, much lower than average, about 50% ... maybe simply a quieter day?

[ichthyous]

Seeing an absolutely massive decline in traffic this morning...USA down 76%, UK down 17%, AU down 100%, overall searches down 53%. The whole week was down, but nothing like this. It's only 8:15am here so perhaps it will recover somewhat, but is anyone else seeing massive dips?

[boost12]

High ranking website completely wiped out all of a sudden for keywords ranking. Like 60 keywords in top 10 to past 10th page! Anybody else seeing this!

[ichthyous]

@boost12 No, my SERP rankings actually went up, although from a somewhat lower level than a couple of months ago. What has vanished today is the traffic. Seems like @RedBar is seeing the same thing...my USA traffic is down 76% so by 8:30am EST.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I maintain something is/has been broken. I see the sensors are looking rattled again...maybe more breaking or maybe finally trying to fix things and hoping nobody notices something broke :-)

[Soulofmonk]

I am seeing a lot of web stories in Chrome discover(Android). Also, very old articles; 3 weeks, 7 weeks, 6 months old.
(https://prnt.sc/10q1p07) (https://prnt.sc/10q1pju)

[TalkativeEditorial]

Very very old content in Discover has been happening all month. The "in case you missed it" feature is not new, but since whatever happened on 2 March happened, things have been terrible. Sometimes there are only three stories in my my personal feed and they are all from the same publisher.

[shadowlight]

They're stealing Wikipedia and other contents for the knowledge panel without any citation.

They have made a deal with wikipedia in regards to paying them for content

[url] [google.co.uk...]

[shadowlight]

[google.co.uk...]

[christianz]

They have made a deal with wikipedia in regards to paying them for content

Wikipedia and Google are the same company as far as I am concerned. Same kind of biased fanatics operating both. I am glad I have never donated single cent to Wikipedia.