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).

[TalkativeEditorial]

What I'm actually not getting is why this subject is almost never discussed by almost any mainstream or "famous" SEO at all.

I suspect it's because most of them are not site owners themselves - they might see a lot of data from a lot of sites, but unless it is your main source of income, these are not the kinds of issues they'll feel on the same deep level of destruction that many site owners do.

[mzb44]

I suspect it's because most of them are not site owners themselves - they might see a lot of data from a lot of sites, but unless it is your main source of income, these are not the kinds of issues they'll feel on the same deep level of destruction that many site owners do.

Yeah, and it would be them admitting that they have less power over influencing site rankings/update recoveries than they pretend to.

Telling a client that - "I don't truly know what caused your core update demotion, but if you pay me $xx,xxx in consultation feels I will attempt to guess it, which may or may not fix it. And even if you recover, it may not have been because of what I did. Also, if you don't hire my expensive service and don't make any changes, your site can still recover by itself. Or you may never recover even if you do everything I say." - would be a terrible sales pitch (even though it would be an honest one).

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yeah, and it would be them admitting that they have less power over influencing site rankings/update recoveries than they pretend to.

Pretty much. And, for the most part, most of the "known" ones seem to have clients that aren't so much in the content driven niches. I've seen quite a few "not popular on social media" SEOs with some BIG multi-national clients speak about some of the issues, but they just get brushed off/ignored on Twitter. Gotta love a popularity contest.

Some of it might also relate to most of the "prominent" ones being US based. Ithink it is slightly easier / more consistent in terms of what causes flux for very specific US sites....anything outside of that and you're usually told "I've not seen this personally" so it can't be true (slightly paraphrasing, but you get the point)....even when supplied with a substantial docket of evidence/examples.

[mzb44]

they just get brushed off/ignored on Twitter. Gotta love a popularity contest.

Oh yeah, on Twitter you must show absolute Google-positivity as an SEO if you don't want to be ignored.

Just look at Rand Fishkin and how's he's being avoided by a lot of the "famous" SEOs now that he's criticising Google.

Even those who are interacting with his critical Tweets are doing so in an extremely neutral / cautious fashion.

Nobody wants to get on the naughty list and lose the privilege of interacting with JM, Sullivan etc.

[saladtosser]

These youtube videos are really eating up more and more organic space and traffic. I understand why Google wants people to visit youtube (because of more ad revenue) but I don't understand why they have a separate tab for videos when so many are now placed in SERPs. Why are there no organic listings under the video tab? If google didn't own youtube would they still be displaying them as much?!

[RedBar]

I had a very surprising number for an Easter holiday week:

Global 113%
UK 111%

With lockdown / furloughs / whatevers, historical data seems to have been thrown out of the window since checking my SERPs positions for some products does not seem to make sense at the moment because my most popular product page, at the moment, is one of my lowest-ranked pages!

[shadowlight]

my most popular product page, at the moment, is one of my lowest-ranked pages!

Someone posted on here not long ago that they went from page 2 to page 1 and their traffic declined by 3 quarters.

I also have a few pages that declined in rank and started getting more traffic and conversions!

My traffic has increased by 40 to 90% compared to same period last year.

[JesterMagic]

These youtube videos are really eating up more and more organic space and traffic. I understand why Google wants people to visit youtube (because of more ad revenue) but I don't understand why they have a separate tab for videos when so many are now placed in SERPs.

Because normal search falls under the All tab but I agree if you include Video's in the All search then get rid of all the timestamp stuff as it takes way to much space (keep that in the video tab). In the All tab I don't think I have seen an image search result ever appear. If you are going to show thumbnails for videos under the All tab then all results should be equal and you should show thumbnails for actual webpages. (or don't show video thumbnails at all which would be better IMO)

I am just waiting for Google to add an Organics tab that shows just organic search results without any ads or any of their useless widgets. I wonder how long I will have to wait... ;-)

[saladtosser]

>>>I don't think I have seen an image search result ever appear.<<<

I know in the pet niche google plonks tons of images at the top. 1st is a "colour widget carousel", then a ton of images, then 4 videos, then people also ask, then organic results. Test for example

"tiger discus" it's a fish breed.

[Soulofmonk]

I don't know if anyone has noticed it or not, there is now a "short videos" section in SERPS(on mobile) that takes you to YouTube/Facebook short videos. There's the first video section, which only features YouTube videos and then there is this short videos section. Is it new or old?

[prnt.sc...]

[ichthyous]

At this point my traffic from all English speaking countries is way down since the March 15th drop ...UK down about 35%, AU down 50%, CA down 40%, USA down 8-27% from the average depending on the day. Everything else is actually increasing...anyone else seeing bloodshed in traffic just from the English language countries?

[rustybrick]

Soulofmonk - short videos are not new, but not old. About a year or so old.

[MayankParmar]

Discover remains dead and I guess it's not coming back anytime soon. I've given up on Discover.

[yollo03]

If anyone here is using cloud based WAF that doesn't cache html at all, how much does it weigh on your time to first byte in ms?

[yollo03]

@Rebar, im a non-US business and I rank almost exclusively in US. Its international ecommerce so I dont target specific countries. Until December that was great, now only I mostly rank in US. I've never seen anything like it. It can be temporary but how long? It's almost 6 months now.

[SteveWrz]

How has everyone's traffic been? My sites are getting killed. I am hoping it's some lingering spring break/Easter hangover, but itnreally doesn't look good for me anymore.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yep, getting absolutely nuked, despite GSC showing a positive trend in "average position".

Discover is also still dead. Personal feed is somewhat better, but usually only for a few hours

[Markedd]

Just like everyone else here, the keywords continue to drop and so does the traffic. But it doesn't feel the same as in May 2020, this time, my Discover traffic is still active. The strange thing is that the competitors that have a similar type of website (in terms of traffic and article posting frequency) are also hammered. I adjusted everything to be ready for the vitals update and try to undercut Google's insanity by posting articles that nobody else has yet (while there is demand for them), so they have no choice, but to put me on top. Weirdly, even this is difficult to accomplish, since Google pushes random websites at the top nevertheless.

[widgetized]

All of a sudden no more conversions since 5th April, damn it... I was running a sale that started two weeks ago and it was going so well that I decided to extend it for another week. Guess it's totally pointless since something is currently going on with Google.

I can totally spot a weird movement in GSC that happened on 3rd April.

[christianz]

How has everyone's traffic been? My sites are getting killed. I am hoping it's some lingering spring break/Easter hangover, but itnreally doesn't look good for me anymore.

Monday was an actual increase (spike) in traffic of about 7-8% (huge for my type of traffic). Over next few days Google seems to have fixed their "mistake" and traffic is back to where it has been.

The traffic spike coincided with big increase in number of indexed pages pages in "site:mydomain.com" query. This number is back to "normal" now also.

Its as if they realized that some tweak has accidentally returned some of the traffic to certain type of independent publishers. Obviously, that would be outrageous, we can't have that!

[christianz]

I am just waiting for Google to add an Organics tab that shows just organic search results without any ads or any of their useless widgets. I wonder how long I will have to wait... ;-)

Exactly! I've been saying this for years. But those pesky websites obviously are second class citizens and don't deserve a tab.

If Google actually wanted to be search engine, not just advertising machine, they would replace most of the YouTube video results with videos hosted on independent sites and small video platforms. That would actually be useful search function.

Otherwise, if I want to watch a YouTube video I go to YouTube and search for it there.

[christianz]

Thanks for pointing this all out. Yes, these spammy news sites with lots of authority and terrible content that is not even researched are ranking above me. Hope Google listen to this forum and give some weight to the niche websites rather than supporting such a strategy.

We have to fight on so many fronts:

1. Google pushing and shoving their own platforms above everything else
2. Google spamming search results with too many ads (sometimes even all top 4 positions)
3. Google scraping and synthesizing content, generating snippets and widgets that prevent user from actually navigating to real websites
4. Big budget and corporate-owned sites ranking above our niche, unique value, unique expertise content with generic Made For Search (MFS) articles
5. Low quality content hosted on large platforms ranking above high quality content hosted on independent sites (Pinterest spam, Amazon results etc)
6. Scrapers, AI article spinners and image thieves ranking for long tail positions with auto-generated army of pages, inter-linking with each other for fake DR

What kind of self-harming masochist would want to start a website and become a webmaster in 2021?

[yollo03]

I just checked how many times I got hit by an algorithm in the past 30 days. I got hit 15 times, there is nothing common about this.

[saladtosser]

Yea it's strange my average position is at an all-time high but my traffic is lower than last month. Discover is on the way back down to flatline.

[Neohippy]

We get a lot of natural fluctuation around Easter, so a bit hard to tell what's going on, but looks like something around the 28th hurt us, and something around the 5th helped get us back to where we were again.

Oh, and just in case any of you missed it - we finally have regex in search console! (I can't figure out how / if it's possible to use it to exclude groups of pages, though?)

[mzb44]

We have to fight on so many fronts:

Yes. It is really unfortunate that we don't have pretty much any of the more known or "famous" SEOs on our side, who have a much bigger reach and are followed by even some Google people.

I find it incredible that really none of these people ever addresses the huge number of examples provided of parasite spam ranking on high DR sites, press release spam, expired domain spam sites winning in core updates, machine-written content ranking on authority domains, irrelevant news sites with generic pages outranking specialised sites, amazing-quality sites getting demoted, etc.

It's like what was already said: They themselves can also not explain why this is happening so acknowledging these would put their own expertise in question in front of potential clients.

But this creates a perverse feedback loop for Google. If all the "good guys" seem to always be happy then it's assumed things are fine. The only ones complaining are randoms, so they obviously must be spammers and blackhatters so they can be ignored.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yea it's strange my average position is at an all-time high but my traffic is lower than last month. Discover is on the way back down to flatline.

Are we same person, haha! Very similar to I've been seeing on my main site.

TBH, all I want is some clarity/transparency on what is actually the 'policies' for things like Discover. If we are not up to scratch, fine. But the amount of crap (including an ACTUAL spam link to an illegal football stream recently) on my Feed...it's confusing. Ditto for the SERPs, getting beaten by a better site - totally fine with that.

Cause at this point it is very hard to know where to focus energy - of course keep working on the main site but if Google doesn't care for the good content, I am not going to waste it on that site and would rather put more focus on other stuff. But I also don't want it to look like I am "neglecting" that site and then get punished AGAIN for that too. When you are a start up and trying to survive after losing ALL of your work because of the pandemic, stuff like this really stings.

[southernguy]

I have several sites that have gradually been bleeding keywords for months, on Monday traffic to those sites died.

This is beyond pitiful...

I have two sites still performing well in search but both are small and with almost no competition so I guess Google sees no need to burry them "or at least not yet"

[Markedd]

@southernguy Wow, it went out completely? How big were those sites and, if you don't mind answering, what niche? (or at least the type of articles) There has to be a reason to be completely killed by the current algorithm. It's one thing to get under the big brands and another to essentially be obliterated by Google.

[yollo03]

@southernguy, welcome to the club. I have the same thing and I am certain many others are experiencing it. It started in December core update for me. It doesn't stop. My daily impressions were well over 10k and its been brought down yesterday to under 1k. The reason why its happening for me is aside killing off thousands of keywords I mostly exist in google US and not in other regions. I am not a local business nor am I located in the US. I have 0 presence in over 60 countries in the search. I dont do blackhat or anything of the sort.