Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2021

[goodroi]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5028704.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 5:38 am on Apr 1, 2021 (utc -5)

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With Google continuing to evolve its ranking factors and growing the influence of AI influence on the SERPs, the updates seem to be more frequent (due to so many moving parts) but less drastic (due to most parts only being a small cog in the Google machine).

[teokolo]

I confirm traffic increase starting March 27th.
+100% compared to same day of previous week
Still -60% compared to 1 year ago (before May2020 punishment)

YMYL site, improved on site E-A-T

[insideout]

Anyone seeing any improvement yet ? Most of our websites are still suffering huge traffic loss (UK and France)

[saladtosser]

Traffic from SERPS is down, Traffic from disc is up, it was dead (no cliks or showing at all from 27th Feb UNTIL 24TH March when it was switched back on!)

[renatovieira]

Huge drop since 29/march. Something happened...

[einserpirelli]

in germany yesterday +160% - today +90% open end...

[yollo03]

Something changed for sure, like all past updates, some will benefit and some will not. I will know in a few days where this is going, I was among those that didnt benefit from this. What I am noticing is that pages that 'qualify' for core web vitals are unstable, they keep rising and falling.

[ichthyous]

A huge loss of USA and UK traffic...starting around 25% on March 15th and now it's almost 50% traffic loss for both countries. Canada and Australia were also down from the 15th until yesterday...today they are up. Europe traffic never dropped much, and is up strongly today, especially Germany.

I saw a big drop on Feb 13th, then again on March 15th. I've lost 1/3 of my top three ranking terms in the last 3 months, most of that from Feb 13th onward. Only the same large corporate sites ranking now over and over.

[saladtosser]

Had my best day with Adsense traffic today, £3 if I can triple that I can cover the dedicated server I'm hosted on :)

[christianz]

Down ~4-5% compared to previous Thursday. Not promising start for April.

[insideout]

Still google is not indexing new content ! It's been like that for almost a week now !

[yollo03]

There was a glitch in the console that they fixed. Yesterday when I run a live test on any urls the page was tested on desktop and not smartphone. That was fixed today. I can only assume that whatever they did was done to the smartphone algorithms. So perhaps part (small one if my opinion) of the update is related to the core web vitals.

[webdev29]

an impressive +150% conversion by the 29th then huge traffic loss since the 30th march (-30% traffic). never saw a such drop since the ecommerce i'm monitoring is online (2013), hope they will fix-it, that's clearly too uncommon to be a simple algorythm tuning from GG.

[universenet]

yollo03
Do you use adsense in your website?

[strummer19]

Niagara Falls in terms of trafic in Europe since yesterday (News websites)

[yollo03]

No, I dont use adsense. Its an e-commerce website, not meds.

[Markedd]

For those that think it's a Core Vitals issue, it's not. I monitor a few websites and they have horrendous scores, but still grow every day. Again, I noticed that they post at least once a day (or twice) and the type of articles is either a "How to do something" or guide to something. Heavy pages with lots of graphs and images (from other websites, including my own) seem to get hammered though, so I am not entirely sure what Google is up to (I doubt anybody knows).

[engine]

The odd day or two isn't a picture of the trends: For example, Friday and Monday are holiday days in certain countries, and many people take time off, along with the week prior, and/or the week after. Additionally, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, some countries are being locked down and others are easing restrictions so there's likely to be patterns emerging over the coming weeks.

[ichthyous]

I'm starting the day -75% in USA and -59% in UK traffic compared to a normal Friday...this is not a simple drop due to the holiday. I already had a sharp drop on Feb 13th which never improved, and then the second sharp drop on March 15th followed by an accelerated daily decline. I have lost 1/3 of my top three terms since the Feb 13th drop, mostly replaced by very large ecomm competitors, but not exclusively so.

[RedBar]

I had a 63% Thursday which poor traffic until about 22.00 UK time and then the switch was flipped and I've had normal traffic across all sites until now and already at 61%

And isn't it strange, low traffic = low spam, higher traffic = more spam ... Am I the only one?

[MayankParmar]

Discover problem is widespread and a lot of big publishers in the tech space are also affected. It will be fixed soon if it is a bug.

[9to5google.com...]

[mzb44]

Discover problem is widespread and a lot of big publishers in the tech space are also affected. It will be fixed soon if it is a bug.

This is Google's wonderful AI in action. Which is also what brings you all the nice core updates that nuke completely legit and quality sites.

Meanwhile if you bring this up on Twitter JM and the rest don't even have a clue anything might even be wrong at all.

[TalkativeEditorial]

It will be fixed soon if it is a bug.

Considering it has been reported as a bug several times over the last few weeks on many different forums (including on Twitter) and JM didn't even seem to be aware of it, not getting my hopes up.

[Markedd]

Well, here we go again, I got back to the May 2020 traffic levels which means I currently get 60% less traffic for whatever reason. It seems that I am not the only one bleeding keywords like crazy and all of my competitors are also falling. What does that mean? We're all in the same niche and we're all using Amazon. Furthermore, none of us are posting daily. I would have been tempted to thing it's seasonal, but no, the drop started in the middle of February, gradually and less dramatic and then took a steep nosedive at the end of March, which seems to coincide with what other users have seen as well. My Discover traffic seems to be alright, not great, not terrible. I still have a healthy amount of keywords at the top of first page, but again, dropping every day. I guess it's the time of the year and I'll have to wait until the next core update and hope it doesn't kill the website completely.

[RedBar]

Surprisingly Good Friday delivered 95% acrosss all sites which historically was very good.

As expected today is very quiet and it will come as no surprise to me if it stays at this level for several days.

[ichthyous]

@Markedd I'm seeing similar, but for me the keyword bleed has been going on since mid February...I have lost 39% of my top three ranking terms and it's getting worse not better. My impressions are a little over 50% of what they were before February 13th, with a huge drop on March 15th.

Some of this is due to an almost complete loss of ranking for the images on my website in Google Images on March 15th. If I search for my own name very few images show up from my site, they all come from other higher DA sites now. As I syndicate my content out to partner sites they are getting the traffic and my site is losing it. Keep in mind that each one of these sites has links back to the original source page on my own site...so numerous backlinks to the source from sites with DA of 75-88. That's not helping to rank my page or the images on it anymore though.

[yollo03]

Whatever update they made yesterday it hit my website today, got 9.4 on personal score (semrush). To me it shows something derailed and they are trying to fix it with patches. Like ALL updates the current one is not really helping.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Blessed Easter to those who celebrated.

Discover Feed is now serving April Fools content lol. Not marked with ICYMI obviously. Everything is fine, I'm sure.

[RedBar]

Lots of single page visitors from many countries yesterday with 64% of average, today is a different story altogether though, after 14 hours of my Googleday I'm at 22%, no surpise there.

Whatever update they made yesterday it hit my website today,

You feel that G rolled-out an update on Easter Saturday and you're feeling the effect today?

Insofar as my experiences are concerned Easter week is always, always way down ... Unless you are in a sector that traditionally does well during holiday periods the next few days could be all over the place.

[topaz]

Discover traffic is holding..but I see an obvious difference. Recent articles (1-2 days old) aren't getting good traction. Articles that are 3-7 days are doing good when previously they would have started dropping off.

My guess is maybe that they're more sensitive to stories with good CTR over a period..and so they're showing those more now. That could be good, but people use Discover to get their recent news too. The problem of stale content comes up then.