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).

[mzb44]

But something is seriously wrong somewhere.

Wrong for us, but absolutely as intended for G.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I seem to have many search terms in high positions in G SERPs I have never had such a low number of clicks on my sites as I am getting now.

Same :-(

Feeling utterly and completely hopeless and out of ideas. My spirit is completely broken and my mental health is shot - their content policies are a total contradiction and extremely confusing.

[shadowlight]

Sorry for these short comments, but I noticed another strange occurrence. More than half of the websites on the first page have wrong snippets, like the bots don't know which part is relevant or not.

OR.....the bots are doing what they are programmed to do by Google and know exactly which parts are relevant and avoid using them as less relevant snippets lead to reduced CTR's. Reduced CTR on organic listings leads to less traffic and revenue for the publisher making it more likely that they will either start paying for ads or increase their ad spend.

Also if you a presented with a SERP that has most of the organic listings pushed down by all the crap alongside having irrelevant snippets while all the ads on a page have relevant snippets, what is a user more likely to click on?

Its all part and parcel of Google's greed that will eventually lead to its downfall.

[JesterMagic]

I've seen this SEO manipulation technique grow in one of our niches over the last few weeks and Google has not done anything about it yet. (I reported it via feedback link)

This also just shows you that a large part of SEO is still about domain authority (and links) and not about content AT ALL.

This technique takes advantage of WordPress search page where websites have not blocked search results from being indexed in their robots txt. All sorts of websites are being used like this including popular Universities.

Someone is basically submitting links to Google for these sites that uses the search page and includes search terms with emojis for their niche which includes their website domain.

For one set of keywords right from the end of page 1 to like page 7 or so is filled almost completely with SEO manipulated results showing a search page of results with listings from different websites with almost the same keywords.

To see this in action use Google Chrome in incognito mode and Google.com. Then search for

acronyms dating

and look at the results. (Mods I hope showing these keywords is okay and generic enough)

Not only does this show the manipulation of the results and Googles fail at doing anything about for a few weeks now it also shows what Google Search algo really cares about and it is not content but brand authority.

[yollo03]

I noticed a correlation between the amount of crawls to the given impressions that day. Less crawls = less impressions, more crawls = more impressions.

Anyone that experienced or is experiencing a drop in impressions can you share whether you have a similar correlation?

[Markedd]

@shadowlight I understand what you're saying and you're right, but I was referring to actual garbage in the snippets, like words mashed together incoherently. This was the first page yesterday and today as well, up to a certain point (it seems to be slowly getting fixed).

[Jori]

Exact matches domain with a little bit of content are still working. Sooo all of those updates and such, for me, are... "pffff"

[superclown2]

acronyms dating

Wow that is bizarre. Have you any idea how on earth a setup like that can affect the SERPs? And why have they picked such a crazy search term?

Looks like a good way of persuading people to switch to a proper search engine though. DDG as usual give relevant results <BWG>

[Markedd]

I did a little experiment: about three days ago, I posted a new article on one of my websites. This article covers a popular topic and my competitors didn't properly address it, so it should have been very easy to go to first place. So, after I post it, in a couple of hours, it shoots up to second place and stays there for a while. On the first place, the article is from a mega-domain (millions of people a day), but the content is stupidly thin, with the info seemingly copied from Amazon or the manufacturer page; there are no phrases, just a list of things. A few hours have passed and my article is gone from the serp and into oblivion. This usually happens and it returns after a few days (7-10 days). But this time I was fed up and I decided to fight back. So today, after three days (and my article was still deindexed), I went to reddit and did my best to put the article at the top of the hot page. After a few techniques, I manage to do it and the traffic starts to pour in. Google starts to panic and after about two hours, it reindexes the article and puts it on the fifth place. I am not satisfied and pushed some more. Three hours later and the article is again on the second place where it currently sits, unable to go past the ultra-thin-content of the mega-domain. What did I learn from this? One, that Google has further enforced the rule that the authority is the one and absolute way it dictates which article is on the first page and which is not. Two, even if your content is miles above the mega-domain, you will stay underneath it, even if you push third-party traffic, something that did not happen two years ago (I know because I tried). Third, white hat SEO is dead. Sorry for the long post.

[ichthyous]

The daily patterns a swinging wildly...most of last week was strongly down. Then both Saturday and Sunday were up strongly and resembled 'normal' (pre-March 15th update) traffic from both USA and UK. Today it reverted right back to much lower numbers (-40% for both countries). Let's see if we reach a point of inflection at noon and it changes again.

[ichthyous]

This also just shows you that a large part of SEO is still about domain authority (and links) and not about content AT ALL.

I'm not seeing this at all in my niche. If I look across numerous terms there are much lower DA sites outranking mine now. They have less than half the domain authority I do, yet my site is sinking across the board on terms and they have risen. I do agree that for e-commerce related searches that very large ecomm sites are totally crowding out every SERP now. Otherwise I am seeing a bunch of junk articles from sites which do not have particularly high DA, they are ranking on their content.

[superclown2]

I am seeing a bunch of junk articles from sites which do not have particularly high DA, they are ranking on their content.

By 'junk articles' are you saying that their content is thin? Are the domains very old? Do they have the search terms in the heading or domain name? And finally do they advertise on Google?

As I'm sure you know there are lots of reasons why one site is above another - at the time. The opposite can be true after the next update.

Right now there is little logic to Google's SERPs which, as I keep saying, are the worst I've ever seen, both from a webmaster's and a searcher's point of view.

[ichthyous]

@superclown2 I honestly haven't had the time to inspect things like the age of the domain and make a study of it, but certainly these are not domains I have seen ranking highly before. The top serps are crowded out by how to articles that are all very similar, perhaps not quite thin content but not unique in the slightest. What they DO have are the keywords in the url and page title, and in some cases in the domain name yes. That to me seems to really be a deciding factor these days. I have no idea whether they all advertise on Google or not, I tend not to pay attention to ads but I will keep an eye out for that. Do you contend that sites paying for ads are also ranking highly these days?

[yollo03]

Good news for me, this the second day of recovery but to get back to levels pre-December core update is miles away. I agree what some have said, its all about domain rating and authority. You can write the best article by google's standards and it won't matter if your DR or DA is low.

[superclown2]

Do you contend that sites paying for ads are also ranking highly these days?

There was an allegation a short while ago that a member of G's adwords staff told an advertiser that if they bid more their site's position in the SERPs would improve. All nonsense of course, no ethical company would stoop to that as we all well know.

However; there is a trust issue here. Businesses that advertise on G do have to give full contact details and credit card data so G knows that they are genuine businesses and not fly-by-nights so a higher position could be justified. By a good lawyer anyway.

Over the last few days I have watched the authority screw tightened even further and relevance/expertise demoted yet again despite G claiming that they are elevating sites that go in-depth into their subjects. I have a site that falls completely within the new G guidelines for in-depth analysis, and a few days ago it was demoted for it's main search term from position 8 to position 12, beaten by four more high spending price comparison sites with single page thin content. So I don't believe a word of what G say about rewarding good content.

An exact match domain does seem to be a factor but I am seeing conflicting evidence here. It is not unusual though for G to have different algos for different verticals. For some the trust element may be far more important than anything else, including quality and relevancy.

These constant nibblings at SERPs quality in exchange for ever higher profits has been going on for years now so I doubt if they will end until this monopoly is ended. This is the reality we all have to face now.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Going back to the discussion earlier in the thread about "known" SEOs not talking about some of the things webmasters here notice, I saw a notable SEOs (if we're using social media followers as a benchmark) seemingly surprised/only just learn that there are labels in publisher centre which can be added to sites.

The publisher SEO space is so unique, it's not something I expect them to know - but it kind of underscores the point that engagement (from Gs side) with smaller publishers needs some serious improvement - because "notable" SEOs just aren't aware of the smaller nuances which the majority of technically-adept smaller publishers will notice/pick up on immediately.

[saladtosser]

>>>Over the last few days I have watched the authority screw tightened even further and relevance/expertise demoted yet again<<<

Yea I see a stock photo place gaining a lot of positions in e SERP I watch the last 3 day, all they do is have a photo and the name of that widget. Must be based on the authority of the domain rather than the quality of the page because there is zero information, one photo and a title tag.....

Also, a few sites beating me have no SSL, no mobile-friendly version and the worst speed scores I've ever seen, what they do have is more backlinks because they have been around for a very long time and they were worth linking to back then before mobile phones came out. Think it's clear links are still the be all end all and we are just chasing our tails focusing on these other things!

[mzb44]

Over the last few days I have watched the authority screw tightened even further and relevance/expertise demoted yet again despite G claiming that they are elevating sites that go in-depth into their subjects.

This is what the core updates did.

It's why latimes, the guardian, cnn, nbcnews, businessinsider, forbes is now ranking top 5 for all the "best x" keywords by default with thin content and unrelated topics.

It's why spam press releases are outranking 20+ year old websites.

It's why expired domain spam works.

Google doesn't understand language and content as humans do (they say exactly this in the official core update blog post) so what they do is they try to correlate good content with external factors. This generally means quality links from trusted websites (as said by Garry Ilyes when asked what "EAT" largely consists of).

Of course if cnn / latimes were to start posting 200 words spun content that would probably be detected and demoted. But all these ultra authority domains need to do is to just post semi-decent stuff. 500-600 words written by a real human. Include target keywords once or twice. That's that. Instant page 1 rankings for anything.

You could be the most authoritative site in your niche with 50,000 real organic and ultra authoritative links and content created by PhDs, it won't matter, as latimes, cnn, etc. have hundreds of thousands if not millions.

All of the above is not necessarily wrong in principle - authoritative sites should rank higher. But right now Google does not seem to make any difference between niches / topical authority / topical relevancy.

An nbcnews / businessinsider 600 words article on "best mousepad for office" should never outrank a specialised niche expertise authority site.

They need to reign in these core updates. But they won't.

[lammert]

Google's main AI use in search ranking is not trying to understand what the text of a website means. It's purpose is to mimic the rating given by human content raters in an artificial way. Do a search on the internet for the "23 questions asked by Amit Singhal" which were the foundation of the Panda rollout in 2011.

If most of the answers are positive for your site, chances are quite high Google will give you a good ranking, even now in 2021. Not much has changed of what Google sees as content valuable to be displayed in the SERPs. The only thing changed is the sophistication of the algorithms determining the factors.

[superclown2]

The only thing changed is the sophistication of the algorithms determining the factors.

The sophistication has gone backwards. When Google first started there was great enthusiasm from webmasters. Their results were great. Now they are beyond awful - everything seems to be ground down to the lowest common factor with precise searches, at least in my sector, highly frustrating after wading through googlespam, pinterest, and most of all scarcely relevant content from the big boys. G are capable of doing much better than this.

Here in the UK I am still watching continuous change today with sites moving up and down three or four places every few hours. The overall result is depressing though; further and further advances based on authority only. So is G getting worse at judging relevancy? Or are the big authority sites getting better at gaming the system? I suspect the former. It shouldn't be too difficult for G to decide that a price comparison site is authoritative for price comparisons, and that publishers are authoritative for publishing. Right now they are deemed to be authoritative for just about everything. How can price comparison sites be seen to be expert on products or services that they doesn't even produce but merely sort according to their prices? It simply doesn't make logical sense.

Looking at the search results today, which have been following this downward trend in relevancy for years now, I am seriously wondering if I should sling my hook in until after their many anti-trust cases have been settled. I don't see how it is possible today to make money by building better sites when mediocrity is rewarded and expertise ignored. The latest update has been worse for relevancy than the previous one which was worse that the previous one ad infinitum. The public deserve much better than this.

[Markedd]

For anyone that read that long experiment that only confirmed what all of you were saying before, I got an update! The Reddit post that I made is now raising up fast on the first page and I bet it will overtake the original post (I will update if anyone cares when it happens). Google has a loose screw. I need to fully move to social media.

[christianz]

The sophistication has gone backwards. When Google first started there was great enthusiasm from webmasters. Their results were great. Now they are beyond awful - everything seems to be ground down to the lowest common factor with precise searches, at least in my sector, highly frustrating after wading through googlespam, pinterest, and most of all scarcely relevant content from the big boys. G are capable of doing much better than this.

Google is now just answers engine with bunch of ads and political bias.

Most of the time when I search for something, I don't want out of context single paragraph, I want to do some form of basic research. Hence why I have the word "wiki" in my muscle memory and append to most basic information queries.

Branded searches are now mandatory, unless you want to get lost in YouTube, ads, widgets or spam by big budget "priority publishers".

Gigantic featured snippet and "people also ask" block is frequently covering entire screen real estate of my (very tall) Galaxy S20+. There is no "Page 1" on mobile anymore.

[christianz]

The Reddit post that I made is now raising up fast on the first page and I bet it will overtake the original post (I will update if anyone cares when it happens). Google has a loose screw. I need to fully move to social media.

The screws are so loose that most have fallen out.

Random person posting article on Reddit or picture on Pinterest will outrank same article or picture by same random person on any small independent website. Because Reddit, Pinterest etc. are "priority publishers". Any crap posted there turns into gold.

[ichthyous]

Google has a loose screw. I need to fully move to social media.

Social media is even worse. Facebook wants you to pay, or nothing you post will get seen at all. That goes for both Facebook and Instagram. I abandoned my FB business page for this reason, and now you can see that they rapidly cutting off visibility on Instagram posts too...recently my posts got 13-14 likes when they used to get hundreds. My stories went from 500 views to 50. Since I do not intend to pay for likes I stopped posting so often. I see that happening with lots of accounts now.

I don't know about your business, but Google organic search brings in real customers when you aren't getting squeezed to death. Social media never at any point brought in paying customers to my business...there is no comparison to Google. Social media works for smaller, lower priced products like cosmetics, clothing, shoes, etc. It does not work well for higher priced items at all.

We are living in a time when three monopolies toss and smash our business about like toys...Google, Facebook and Amazon. Recently there has been talk of regulating them like utilities, which is really what they have become...at least Google qualifies as a utility since it's the first stop to access the internet... not so sure about the other two though.

[superclown2]

I've been looking at some non-commercial search terms for a hobby I'm interested in today. All the search terms I've entered (of the 'how to ....' variety) have resulted with, typically, six rows of youtube videos then a 'people also ask' (as if my query wasn't exact enough already) before the first organic result. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. I want information, not being obliged to click on a video, click on a 'no thanks' button when asked to log on, sit in front of an ad I'm not interested in, watch a 'clever' introduction, then listen to some high school student ramble on about subscribing to his channel. Like the average surfer I'm impatient to get what I want, now.

Needless to say I gave up and went to DDG. How long will it be before Jill and Joe public do the same?

[ichthyous]

I had two days of recovery from the drop in English language traffic over the weekend, but Monday and Tuesday have been awful again. My USA traffic -22%, UK - 36%, and AU -39% over an average Tuesday by 7pm today. Is anyone else seeing this big drop in English language traffic since the Feb 13th and March 15th algo updates? This has not affected traffic outside of US/UK/AU/CA in general that I can see.

My SERPS did not improve over the weekend, but traffic was higher. I'm wondering if this is a penalty on my site of some sort, or if others are also seeing this.

[MayankParmar]

Not as much as Google, but Social media sucks too. Facebook had removed one of my pages (in the entertainment niche) with over 500K likes. The page simply disappeared... no warnings, message or anything. I believe it happened because of copyright images.. but they should have flagged it.

And Twitter also disabled my site's account two times. It was restored after one month.. and it happened because of some issues on their system (unlike Facebook, they admitted the error and apologized).

In my five years of blogging journey, I have realized that you can end up in a helpless situation if you rely on these tech companies.

[Athedian]

It's so clear that Google's throttling good traffic to the site. Every time when there's an update, they'd turn off the filter for a brief moment and BAM conversion spike. Then after a day or so when the update settles down, they turned the filter back on again and the conversion tanked.

An example: on weekends, I would get the lowest conversion (which is normal) but this time when the update hit on the 8th, I got a historical high conversion on the weekends, triple the amount, which had never happened before. After the update had settled, the conversion died again. So obvious.

[Markedd]

@ichthyous It's true that social media is bad, but for my website, it can be a way to force Google to acknowledge the existence of a new article and that it deserves to be at the top. And it has worked for me many times. I am not really talking about Facebook, Instagram or even Twitter since these aren't suitable for my main niche, but Reddit works really well. I know that it doesn't bring conversions, but it does pay for itself. Say, I pay $10, I usually get back $15, so it's fine for me, especially since it's a wake up call for Google as well. That is, unless it goes completely out of its mind and puts the social media article at the top and forgets about the original source which may seem to be the new rule. I'll monitor it.

[Markedd]

@MayankParmar You have to rely on somebody, it's either Google, Youtube, Facebook and so on, unless you become a huge platform yourself. It's how it currently is unfortunately; at least that's how I see it. You just have to put your eggs in as many baskets as you can, so when you get crushed (it's not if, it's when), you can still recover... By the way, have you seen any improvements lately with your website, especially after you have increased the post intensity?