Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2021

[goodroi]

---

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)

---

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).

[KaseyM]

Anyone else noticing that Google is favoring freshness big time at the moment?

Got a competitor who is just republishing the same type of article every few days with a different title and respinning the content and rocketing up the rankings and doing well on Google Discover. Fluff article just respinned every few days.

[MayankParmar]

Pretty normal in my niche. They'll change the title and URL, but the content mostly remains the same. They'll rank better, surface again and again in Discover feed + Top Stories.

It's a big site so nothing is going to happen lol

[ichthyous]

Huge drop this afternoon. Has anyone noticed any fluctuations?

My USA traffic down 24% today...drop started at 2pm. Traffic from every other country either average or up. I'm getting awfully tired of my USA traffic being throttled for half the day...

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Exactly the same. At 2pm the drop started. This is becoming commonplace every day. Yesterday was more significant.

[whoa182]

I saw a big drop yesterday as well. Still very low today...

Seems once you get hit by a core update, each small update just makes things progressively worse. When you benefit from a core update, most smaller updates are beneficial.

[mzb44]

Seems once you get hit by a core update, each small update just makes things progressively worse. When you benefit from a core update, most smaller updates are beneficial.

I have noticed the same.

If you are under a core update hit it's almost as if Google is now biased against you and most if not all smaller updates in between will also negatively affect you. Even if you made substantial changes which make you recover during the next core update - almost as if all the smaller updates in-between are evaluating the snapshot of your site as it was at the time of the last core update.

Have also seen exceptions to this but generally the above seems to be true in most cases.

Also, the core update is "delayed" again. If there won't be a new core update by May 4, then technically we only had one core update during the last 12 months period.

If the last cycle is now the new core update "schedule", then we'll see a new one sometimes in July. If you are unlucky and don't recover, you get another chance in February 2022.

This is now worse than Penguin. At least back when Penguin was only refreshed every X months most sites that were hit legitimately deserved it. Now many great sites get hit by core updates and to make it worse it now seems they changed refreshing it every 3.5 months to 7 months.

[renatovieira]

Seems once you get hit by a core update, each small update just makes things progressively worse. When you benefit from a core update, most smaller updates are beneficial.

I agree!

[NickMNS]

I was up over 30% yesterday vs same day last week. Last Saturday was lower than usual but not significantly. It was up 20% compared to the previous Saturday. Good fortunes are continuing today as the traffic is holding the trend.

[ichthyous]

I ended up the day yesterday with -18% on USA traffic. Meanwhile Google has been sending much higher than normal levels of traffic from Germany at +100% yesterday and +300% today...that has lasted about ten days now. UK and Canada also up strongly. USA traffic still limps along and never recovered from the drop on 2/13 and the even bigger drop on 3/15. The drop also seems to target my most important and profitable landing pages and keywords, as if Google analyzes what your most important content is and shuts off the traffic...it's amazing how accurate they are.

[edited by: ichthyous at 6:22 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2021]

[RedBar]

I was at 75% yesterday and usually expect between 60-80% so ok, however today with 5 hours of my Googleday to run I'm at 54% and it's seems slow across all sites.

[renatovieira]

And as usual, huge drop in traffic after 2pm. G limited my traffic a little earlier today :-|

[Athedian]

Seems like traffic pattern got shifted. Conversions were always lowest during weekends and after beginning of this month, Sunday conversions seemed to be high for the past two weeks now.

[yollo03]

I am getting old errors from 2020 again! These are errors that were fixed a year ago. To me it acts as a sensor that the algorithm was tweaked again. Does anyone else experience this? Screenshot: [ibb.co...]

[RedBar]

Sunday for my global site ended at 66%, fine, but why would several other sites all of different subjects, some trade, some retail, some local, some international, how could they all be at 66% too?

Coincidence ?.?.? I think not, this is happening all too often!

[JesterMagic]

Got a competitor who is just republishing the same type of article every few days with a different title and respinning the content and rocketing up the rankings and doing well on Google Discover. Fluff article just respinned every few days.

Google fails here big time. I have competitors who just update the date and change the title to include the new month and they constantly stay on top. Articles are long winded and never get to the point.

Apparently Google is all about user experience and these type of sites may have good UI but have a horrible UX as the content itself is just spun or written by cheap non-native english speaking labor.

[ichthyous]

For the first time since 2013 I enabled my Adwords account to run an ad for a limited number of keywords that I no longer rank for. Despite bidding up to $5 per click my ads aren't running. Why? I excluded the low relevance searches through negative keywords, removed the demographic groups that don't work (i.e. too young and too old, lower income), targeted my geo area of typical buyers. I burned through $40 in about a day and a half until I started tightening up...Once I started tightening up the ads stopped running completely. I have only gotten bursts of fake traffic from crappy spammy sites that are in Google's extended network. I was charged $17 in one burst from that so I turned off display and extended search networks completely. So, it appears that if one targets their ads too closely and is unwilling to allow people to waste your money you won't get anywhere by running ads. Of the 16 clicks I received not one converted...$57 wasted. Paying for ads to recover lost organic traffic is not a viable alternative...not even in the short term, let alone the long term.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:31 pm (utc) on Apr 26, 2021]

[RedBar]

I've just been checking the G US Serps for a few of my more popular products and what a change, it is dominated, I'd say 80+%, by US retail sales sites with 3-6 images, a very brief description with pricing, no techie info and zero information regarding origin, ethical production, product ecology, real tech specs ... It's almost simply a list of US shopping sites for those specific products.

There ya goes, Google's Advertising Platform has distintly turned into Google's Shopping Channel.

I must add that all the links were good .. Simply devoid of any "real" information, congratulations G and Joe Public in achieving such mediocrity.

[MayankParmar]

@yollo03 It can happen with core vitals and other enhancement reports. Safe to ignore if it is fixed

[universenet]

if you using adsense on your website but
your Core web vitals is bad
you can remove adsense from page and Core web vitals will be much better
but what is sense of this activity?

Is everybody here using HTTP/2 ?

[gatormark]

I guess it’s official. Page speed will now be a factor and how your website ranks in Google search engine results.

In 2020 Google introduced Core Web Vitals, three metrics that publishers and Google can use to measure the quality of user experience on a site. These metrics assess speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website.

Now, those three Core Web Vital metrics are being included in the page experience search ranking signal.

[web.dev...]

[universenet]

yes, it is official, but how avoid problem with adsense?
Adsense is calculated in problem for now, google do not exclude it

[superclown2]

Paying for ads to recover lost organic traffic is not a viable alternative...not even in the short term, let alone the long term.

The big companies will pay less for their ads so will get the top spots. Even then I suspect that many of them use adwords as a loss leader to keep everybody else out.

There ya goes, Google's Advertising Platform has distintly turned into Google's Shopping Channel.

Yep, search engine to advertising platform to shopping channel. What next? Why people still use it is beyond me.

I did some research today on some competitor sites that used to be the ones to beat. I'm talking of sites spanning the last 20 years. These sites were top quality despite some of them appearing back when most sites were unashamed spam.

I found about a quarter of the list. Those I did find were all specialist sites packed with information but most hadn't been updated for ages. I'd say the majority weren't even responsive. All of them were on page 5 or lower for the search terms they used to be at or near the top for.

So what happened to them? Did they stop updating their sites because Google downgraded them? Or did Google downgrade them because they stopped updating them?

One thing is certain. I didn't find any sites listed above them with anything like the information that these sites had. Which tells me that creating the best content is a complete waste of time.

In the meanwhile the multiple .it viral sites on page two onwards (page 1 is dominated by thin boilerplate big brands, naturally) that I mentioned a few days ago are now joined by .de viral sites. This is in the UK for a not uncommon search term. Pathetic.

[RedBar]

Or did Google downgrade them because they stopped updating them?

I would surmise a combination of everything.

Are all these commpanies still in business and doing well? That is what has happened in my global industry, the well-established players concluded about 2010 that chasing rankings for the sake of it it simply was not a worthwhile excercise, their reputations going back 100-200 years easily stood the test of time compared to yet another website update.

Specifiers / buyers in my industry are not interested in the short-termism of fads / gizmos / instant gratification that Joe Public seems to be, they have a professional job to do and it has to be done correctly since mistakes could cost lives.

[christianz]

Is everybody here using HTTP/2 ?

No, not yet. Was pondering about this couple years ago and decided not to do it due to compatibility/support being kind-of green in my server software stack.

I will revisit HTTP2 this year, maybe it is worth it now.

[christianz]

yes, it is official, but how avoid problem with adsense?
Adsense is calculated in problem for now, google do not exclude it

They can't give special treatment to AdSense. That would be too obvious conflict of interest and manipulation. They have to speed up AdSense and relax page-speed requirements.

[universenet]

They can't give special treatment to AdSense. That would be too obvious conflict of interest and manipulation. They have to speed up AdSense and relax page-speed requirements.

For now google have many problems with java and images and some other code from adsense
so making trouble to core web vitals, problem is not speed, problem is protocol and order in time when adsense
including inside page, it is just disturbing design of page , working asynchron but disturbing harmony of loading page

[westcoast]

"They can't give special treatment to AdSense. That would be too obvious conflict of interest and manipulation. They have to speed up AdSense and relax page-speed requirements"

The irony is incredible... Our Google "page insights" statistics were so horrific when our pages were using AdSense that we have slowly transitioned away from Adsense and on to other advertising platforms. Pretty much any adsense code we stuck on any page would put our page into the red/fail Google Page Experience category. Idiotic.

Since Google Adsense doesn't abide by Good Page Experience guidelines, and Google Search is going to penalize their own Adsense publishers, they are going to lose a ton of Adsense publishers.

Talk about biting off your own hand.

[topaz]

I run both adsense and taboola and there's no problem with core web vitals. On mobile Pages with 6+ ads, they check out as "good". 93% of the Urls on the site have "good page experience" in GSC. On desktop, there's a lot of pages marked "need improvement"..but I'm not worried about that.

Where are you guys getting that adsense doesn't abide by page experience guidelines? You need to get your site to a perfect score without adsense..then when you add adsense..you're still left in the green.

[gatormark]

@topaz

Agreed. Almost all of my desktop pages are in the 90 plus green range while using AdSense and Analytics code. All of my mobile pages are in the yellow space.

[universenet]

topaz

I run both adsense and taboola and there's no problem with core web vitals. On mobile Pages with 6+ ads, they check out as "good". 93% of the Urls on the site have "good page experience" in GSC. On desktop, there's a lot of pages marked "need improvement"..but I'm not worried about that.

So, do you have responsive website or separated mobile pages?
Everyone has problem with mobile pages
and you have better mobile of desktop pages?