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).

[EditorialGuy]

I dont have ads so I am unfamiliar as much as others with ads but cant you block them in ads.txt?

Ads.txt has a different purpose entirely. It's basically a publisher's list of authorized ad networks and other resellers. The Internet Advertising Bureau explains it this way:

"The mission of the ads.txt project is simple: Increase transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers and is a simple, flexible and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly declare the companies they authorize to sell their digital inventory. See:

[iabtechlab.com...]

[ichthyous]

I rarely see sites with real organic link growth demoted during core updates. I see sites with SEO link building patterns (even pure white hat) hit by core updates all the time.

I would agree with this...but it also depends on the DA of the site linking to your pages. If it's higher than your own then it tends to help you no matter what. The question is the speed of the link acquisition and the age of the links. I have noticed that if a lot of new links come in at the same time and with similar patterns your site tends to get demoted for a while, but as those links remain in place (real links vs transitory spam links) the demotion starts to slowly fade. I could be wrong on this but I have seen the pattern numerous times now.

[yollo03]

Thank you for the explanation.

[mzb44]

I have noticed that if a lot of new links come in at the same time and with similar patterns your site tends to get demoted for a while, but as those links remain in place (real links vs transitory spam links) the demotion starts to slowly fade.

This makes a lot of sense.

Google wants to see how yo u react to those links and demotion. If someone gets demoted after they manually acquired those links, what most will do is they immediately take the links down. Google will now assume you are a spammer or link builder and make the demotion permanent.

If you do nothing and cary on business as usual, then like you said, the demotion will fade.

[Caty]

Hello everyone, sorry for my English, but I can't be silent) We are one of the largest news sites in Russia (site is 22 years old). After the February Google update, we lost an average of 2 million visitors per day. The biggest fall was from Google Discover. We are well optimized for Google, including Cor Web Vitals. More than 100 professional journalists work in our editorial office. Every day we publish 150 articles and hundreds of news, video and photo reports. Google Discover just died - only 5-6 publishers show up, very few original articles and a lot of rewrites from other sources. This is a great tragedy for us, we are the last independent media with such a large audience in Russia.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Sorry to hear that Caty, unfortunately there are many publishers all over the world going through the same. There are many user reports of Discover being broken. Google does not care.

[mzb44]

I'm sorry to read you are having those problems, Caty. But like TalkativeEditorial said, many other publishers experience the same problems. You can read this whole thread and see it's one of the most frequent issues brought up. I know this won't help but the only thing that can be said at this point is that - unless there's something fundamentally wrong with your site - there doesn't seem to be anything you can do.

Clearly Google is having some serious problems lately (2020-2021 at least) and Discover seems to be a significant part of these problems.

It's uncertain if / when / how this will be fixed, as Google does not always communicate about these issues.

I wish there were other things I could tell you but this is kinda all we know at this point.

[saladtosser]

Caty, only suggestion is to reach out to Google official Search Liaison Danny Sullivan, as it's his job to liaise. Twitter: [twitter.com...]

[eugen1u]

Hello, sorry for not creating another thread, not related to Google Updates but on one of this threads someone posted a link and I can't find it anymore, it was about that short content could be first on google too, as far as I remember it was about a disease, something like 'isthisdiseasereal.com' and there was a single word on this page simply saying 'No.' which was ranking first on google on query 'is this disease real', something like that (it had more than 100referring domains) does anyone remember this website and may help me out?

[christianz]

I have noticed that if a lot of new links come in at the same time and with similar patterns your site tends to get demoted for a while, but as those links remain in place (real links vs transitory spam links) the demotion starts to slowly fade. I could be wrong on this but I have seen the pattern numerous times now.

You could be on to something. I am also having major issues with spammy links and site that gets the most of them seems to be struggling the most.

These links are so numerous that I can't physically keep track and/or disavow them all - endless rotation of new domain names and new fake/spun/generated websites. Also I believe its not my job as webmaster to manage inbound links. Therefore currently I don't have a disavow file at all.

I am also not convinced that someone is targeting me in negative SEO attack. I think at least half of those links are back references for stolen (often hotlinked) images and scraped content. I think their goal is to capture search traffic with this scraped content, and not specifically to demote my sites. Maybe I am native.

[westcoast]

"These links are so numerous that I can't physically keep track and/or disavow them all - endless rotation of new domain names and new fake/spun/generated websites. Also I believe its not my job as webmaster to manage inbound links. Therefore currently I don't have a disavow file at all."

Google is currently completely failing to handle link spam and cloaking. There is one specific massive cloaking / backlink campaign that I have been watching now for over a month that has run wild on Google -- and continues to grow -- at an alarming rate. I have logged 9000 (hacked?) domains currently involved, and the number is probably far, far greater.

On my site, this attack has resulted in my "Google Console External Links" section to be filled with spam domains in 850 of the 1000 results it shows. Insane!

I reported this to Google a while ago, and nada -- they either don't care, or have no idea how to stop it.

To see the scope of this current attack, do these queries on Google:

"See full list on msn"
"See full list on buzzfeed"
"See full list on lifehack"

In total, millions of cloaked pages and growing, all of them indexed and searchable. It's also resulting in hugely skewed link profiles for smaller sites like mine with who-knows-what SEO ramifications (try putting YOUR site name in the query to see if you are hit).

I am a little tired of hearing "don't worry, Google has it all under control".

They don't.

[saladtosser]

JM says they ignore bad links though, they no longer punish... Reading this thread and from my own tests building links to a test site I don't care about it seems penguin is still going, def real-time these days because the sites dip further and further a day or two later every link I build. So I'm not certain core updates hit links as they do seem to hit built links in real-time (or slight lag) already day to day, but then JM says links aren't penalised anymore so you can ignore them, but they haven't got rid of the disavow tool, so very confusing?! In my mind, I think JM is doing damage control saying bad links are ignored because google would have more pressure for negative SEO attacks, but in reality, negative SEO and link building, in general, is hit?!

[NickMNS]

I have been watching now for over a month

I have seen similar sites with the same URL pattern spamming my website since at least two years ago. At 9000 domains your are orders of magnitude off the real number.

For what it is worth, I was able to stop most of it by blocking hot-linking of my images. But some of this cruft continues regardless. Also I agree Google doesn't have this under control from our perspectives.

[ichthyous]

For what it is worth, I was able to stop most of it by blocking hot-linking of my images. But some of this cruft continues regardless. Also I agree Google doesn't have this under control from our perspectives.

@NickMNS How did you block the hotlinking without blocking Google Images? Did you see your ranking improve when you blocked hotlinking?

[NickMNS]

Here is a thread I started describing what I did:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I started blocking in July 2019, my traffic continued to creep down steadily until, December 2019 where I a hit a bottom. In February 2020 I was reaching new all time record highs in traffic 4x from December. But that only lasted until May where my traffic was cut in half and has been steady ever since. The changes in traffic all coincide with algo-updates, so it is really difficult to say for sure whether the blocking played a role, but I didn't change anything else over the period.

The way I see it is, you likely wont see a difference until the next update, and only if the there is sufficient time between the change and the next update for Google to crawl not only your content but also the impacted pages of the spamming site. The time required will be directly proportional to extent of the problem. I had millions of images impacted, potentially tens of millions.

[mzb44]

In my mind, I think JM is doing damage control saying bad links are ignored because google would have more pressure for negative SEO attacks

You need to keep in mind that both JM's and Sullivan's real jobs are Google corporate PR. JM mainly for the webmaster community and Sullivan both for webmasters and the general public sometimes.

Everything they say needs to be filtered though that lens.

[christianz]

I have script that logs and/or blocks all unauthorized websites (referrers) that use my images. I only enable it occasionally because it adds extra server load.

Last night I enabled it for 24 hours. It collected over 500 different websites/domains hotlinking to my images. The real number would be probably 2x or 3x more because it only counts pages that get at least one hit during that time.

I think there needs to be a standard for signaling which domains image is authorized to be used for. Perhaps a HTTP header.

Google index is a mess. They can't tell real website from scraped/autogenerated crap. Perhaps they don't care as long as they have their "priority publishers" from corporate media placed comfortably on page 1 and YouTube video thumbnails and timelines plastered on top of every other SERP.

[MayankParmar]

Google seems to be having indexing issues again. A lot of sites affected. Indexing delayed.

[mzb44]

Google seems to be having indexing issues again. A lot of sites affected. Indexing delayed.

I am seeing this too.

Incredible that this is still happening.

I said it before but clearly something is massively wrong at Google for a couple of years now.

[universenet]

It is not issue, is like in purpose, so people waiting for google fixing this , google give new hope to people, but not real hope..
And in that way from month to month, from year to year

[jr3074]

indexing issues again

[strummer19]

Hi, what method do you use to determine that there is an indexing problem? automatic tool ? thankx

[yollo03]

On 18 April I got a lot of my lost keywords back and it was just for 24 hours. Very sad, I am not sure what else to do. I am working on my backlinks profile, got DR up a bit but it doesn't seem to help. What I did notice that apparently I had http:// to third party websites in the html from many years ago and I was flagged for it (failing https). I fixed it all yesterday, still showing as failed. I really hope that was the reason.

[Abaros]

@yollo03 you are not the only one

[support.google.com...]

[samrazzy]

indexing issue here too... I just came here to see if anyone has reported the indexing issue or it is only me.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Any Android devs / people intimately familiar with Android on here? I have a theory about the current Google Discover issues which I'd like to run by someone privately to cross check before running with it.

[yollo03]

@Abaros, all the websites that were posted there have http in the html. The problem is the scan will not pick it up because this is 3rd party links. I am not entirely sure this is related to TLS 1.2/1.3. I fixed everything on my end yesterday aside 3 pages which is nothing.

There has been a fairly significant update in my niche, a huge one. I track many keywords for my domain and competitors. My top competitors got a massive boost, I haven't seen such a boost in while now. I also got something but it's a joke compared to what they got. For those that track on semrush, they got +7.46 and +4.34, I got +0.60. What a joke but I hope I will get a larger positive shift tomorrow.

[agent_x]

This makes a lot of sense.

Google wants to see how yo u react to those links and demotion. If someone gets demoted after they manually acquired those links, what most will do is they immediately take the links down. Google will now assume you are a spammer or link builder and make the demotion permanent.

If you do nothing and cary on business as usual, then like you said, the demotion will fade.

Yes Google patented this technique of discovering unnatural links many years ago.

[patft1.uspto.gov ]

Read the bit under "Exemplary Processing". Google deliberately puts your site into a "dance", lowering the rank at first, to try and trick you into undoing the changes you made trying to rank higher.

I'm sure they've refined the technique since.

[renatovieira]

Huge drop this afternoon. Has anyone noticed any fluctuations?

[MayankParmar]

Normal day for me. Rankings unchanged and Discover dead as usual