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]

@mzb44 your argument is valid, just some counterpoints/agreement points.

On what if this is what the public wants: I was having a conversation with my business mentor yesterday and brought up the 'zero clicks' scenarios and how devastating it is to both ranking very well and have your Discover traffic decimated. The trade-off has always been an unspoken agreement that fine - you can lift whole paragraphs from content - but there's at least a bit of a trade-off through Discover. They didn't understand the concept at first - but then just showed an example (basic search query) and they were kind of stunned - seemingly having thought that the stuff Google shows in those boxes is content they wrote (because the source link is so well hidden). This is an intelligent person who runs a very successful finance business. It's not so much that it is what the user wants, it's about what the users have been told they want.

With that in mind and to lead into the "made for Google" sites - there's a fair point in that, definitely - but then that rule needs to be applied (in terms of rankings) to the publishers who do the same and who definitely do it just for the rankings and know they can perform well because of 'authority. This still makes it near impossible for sites with genuine passionate and knowledgeable people in a specific niche to compete - and there is no easy answer.

Finally, everything anyone knows about all of their data is essentially null and void as a result of the last 12 months and I have no doubt that some of the messes we are seeing is down to that. Everything about how we use search and tech, in general, has changed. So whatever the AI had learned prior to that is clearly confusing itself because of the new habits it is trying to learn from now.

[superclown2]

What if Google is just genuinely serving what people actually want?

A good question: bit of a chicken and egg situation this. People will click on the top results because they believe that G's results are unbiased. They will then conclude that big corporations, that have little knowledge about a subject, are in fact the ultimate expert.

People look at (a) the heading: will this site produce what I am looking for? then (b) How high up is it in the search listings? I doubt if many will click on a search result because it was produced by a megacorp, in fact most of my friends tell me they do the exact opposite.

A search engine has incredible power to shape public opinions, which is why regulation is urgently necessary - provided of course that the regulator is unbiased <BWG>.

Yes there are a lot of 'made for Google' sites out there with spammy scraped content but nowhere near as many as there were when Google first appeared; and for this they must take most of the credit. I remember the days when out of 20 results 18 would be created with scripts. However they are now, in their efforts to eliminate spam, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't see a mass of spam sites on DDG, the exact opposite in fact, so it mustn't be too difficult for G with all it's resources to eliminate the scrapers and other rubbish whilst still promoting the excellent content creators. And there are still a lot of them, although you have to either dig really deep into G or go to DDG to find them.

[Rndm]

@mzb44

Your comments here (last few posts) are refreshing. This is a lot of what I have been saying for a long time.

[mosxu]

Right now 2 active users...very funny

Where are the busy searchers ?

[christianz]

What if the general public genuinely wants this?

What if general public wants ads and "people also ask" blocks more than our websites?

Maybe I should emulate Google SERP pages and add more ads, irrelevant widgets and YouTube video thumbnails.

The searcher would get what he wants and Google would rank me higher. Winning!

[ichthyous]

Today's traffic is following the same pattern...way down Monday - Thursday and much higher on Friday. Last week Saturday and Sunday were also much higher and dropped like a stone on Monday. My SERPS have not improved today, in fact I lost another top3 term...but traffic is much higher from USA, UK, CA, and AU.

[ZydoSEO]

My client's US ecommerce site has seen pretty much a complete recover today from a huge drop in rankings of many of our category/collection and product pages. My client is the 800 lb gorilla in their space. They have held #1-3 for most of their category head terms and many of their main product terms for the past decade. On 3/29 many of them that were previously at 1-3 dropped so that they were no longer in the top 100. Many others dropped 50-80 positions. Then again on 4/12, we saw even more pages lose their rankings in a similar fashion.

Today it appears that pretty much all have returned to their pre-3/29 positions. Hopefully, this is not the pattern that ichthyous has been seeing.

[christianz]

Traffic is very weak today. Clearly the "reviews" update.

As an experiment, I have removed Product-derived entity markup from my structured data. Just in case Google thinks my pages are somehow reviews, even when they aren't - they just give elaborate information about widgets.

The theory that Google will eventually expand YMYL-style repressions across all verticals might be playing out here. There might be YMYL-style increase in EAT requirements for any content that Google AI recognizes as product-related.

[ichthyous]

My traffic is much stonger on Friday and Saturday...following the pattern I mentioned previously about traffic being strong Fri-Sun and then dropping off a cliff on Mon - Thu. Traffic from English speaking countries is better, but not nearly what it was pre-March 15th update. I continue to lose top three and top ten ranking SERPS, it's been a brutal steady loss since the February 13th update, but especially after March 15th. I don't know how the traffic can be so much higher on Fri-Sun if my ranking is so poor? The only thing I can say is perhaps the page layout changes and fewer ads are being shown?

[EditorialGuy]

There are too many AI generated fake information sites, information sites with scraped / stolen content and overly commercialized product pushing affiliate type sites.

Also "content marketing" junk. (I get a steady stream of pitches from agencies and fake freelancers who want to "contribute" stories on random topics--often unrelated to what we publish--for the edification of our readers.)

[mzb44]

No core update in sight.

Those who were hit last year will have to wait a very long time before having the opportunity to potentially recover even if they made substantial changes.

Seems like the new core update timelines are now around 6-7 months. Which is great if you were not affected / benefited but terrible if you were negatively affected.

You could be waiting now 1+ year to potentially see any recovery even if you made substantial changes. To a lot of businesses this is not sustainable.

Even panda / penguin was refreshed much more frequently back in the old days.

[RedBar]

For me this past week's traffic levels across all sites have remained within their usual range however this morning, Monday, all sites are very low, after 11+ hours of my Googleday at about 25% ... I'll see what the remainder of the day brings but worth noting that spam is also down, as is usual for me with lower traffic.

[Rndm]

Maybe I should emulate Google SERP pages and add more ads, irrelevant widgets and YouTube video thumbnails.

The searcher would get what he wants and Google would rank me higher. Winning!

Or you could just work on building a brand that people searched for and do marketing outside of just Google search.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Or you could just work on building a brand that people searched for and do marketing outside of just Google search.<<<

Good call, it can't be that hard to create an eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon or Facebook, especially in 2021. Our problems are solved, you're just not trying hard enough guys, while many of you are happy to pay your mortgage and put food on the table for your children its just not good enough, you need to push for ALL the money, not some, all THE MONEY! :)

[lammert]

If you focus your efforts on keywords and widgets, it will always be an uphill battle in the SERPs. But you don't have to be one of the big boys to be a recognizable brand in the SERPs and rake in the benefits of it. An investment in brand recognition pays itself back many times.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yowzer, suddenly getting hammered in the SERPs with a massive drop yesterday. Not sure if anything relates to the new "page experience" report added to Search Console (sometimes these things link to each other weirdly and randomly even if unrelated). I have 99.2% of pages with a good experience though..maybe that's not the benchmark G wants though

[saladtosser]

TalkativeEditorial + I see that in the search console today, does it show you which pages fail the user experience test for you?

[yollo03]

If I have a fail for one of the new page experience metrics, is there a way to submit a fix like with coverage errors?

[southernguy]

Week before last after this update a couple of my sites were hit, for a few days no traffic. I saw that some sites had copied and scraped my content and attributed it to that "I have done nothing to them" and they are once again gaining traffic." a couple of other sites I have which have been nowhere to be found are now creeping up in SERPs. I believe they had been hit with penalties a couple of years ago due to some shady link building.

It will be interesting to see if those sites continue to rise in the SERPs.

It seems to me that all these metrics from Google seem nothing more than smoke and mirrors, let's face it if your site is competitive it will be outranked by big brands, with lots of links. If it's not and some keywords have the potential to rank it will be outranked by web 2.0s like medium and Pinterest. Out of all my sites, I only have one linked in search console and many times the console is not working.

[RedBar]

A very good start to the week for me with 128% on Monday and already at 60% for today.

Considering the UK "opening up" the hotel / pub website for several days now has been solidly at or above pre-March 2020 levels.

All other sites are looking remarkably better than I thought they may do, pessimistic possibly, however I'd rather err on the lower side than be optimistically totally wrong.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I see that in the search console today, does it show you which pages fail the user experience test for you?

Yes, 24 pages registered as "failing" - they're actually highlighted as the yellow "need improvement" urls, so who knows what that means.

Imagine being obliterated for 0.6% of your site being a bad page experience.

Meanwhile, whatever wave Redbar is riding, most of us here always seem have missed the boat for it. It's very funny. Stoked for you tough.

[saladtosser]

Strange, on my main site it says 16.9% are Good URLs, highlights zero bad ones and below it says "core web vitals - no issues detected" Very odd. I know my core web vitals are bad because I use adsense and google AMP scripts (top score when I remove these) but doesn't tell me which URLs are bad...

[ichthyous]

My core web vitals stats are shifting en masse from yellow to green and back again. I don't have a single page listed with good user experience, only "needs improvement". My serps are bouncing around but generally settling at a much lower level than three months ago...I've lost a third of my top 3 and top ten ranking terms in that time. Yet traffic from Friday, Sat, Sun and Monday were all higher with a noticeable improvement in UK, CA, and AU traffic. I did notice that the bounce rate shoots up when traffic improves though, so perhaps not the best quality of traffic. I don't expect any regular pattern from Google anymore...one day it improves and then inexplicably it drops like a stone. For the last few months only the same very large sites are dominating all the spots completely in my niche, and that is depressing. Google has handed them all the traffic for now.

[yollo03]

The page experience update has been postponed to late August. I am assuming it will also include a core update. Unlike December they said it will be released slowly from current month to they can monitor its impact. I strongly believe December core update went out of control and they will not admit it, this is why they are more cautious now with the next core update.

[christianz]

Core web vitals / page experience are hands down the most overrated ranking factors in history of Word Wide Web and search engines.

They have had minimal effect on rakings, yet webmasters seem to be non-stop obsessed with them. Probably because they are the only ranking factor with real feedback from Google.

[universenet]

christianz
Do you remember stories about responsive and non responsive website in past?
Who has non responsive website now?
Everyone has responsive website...
Responsive website is technical factor,
Core Web Vitals is technical factor too
and will be important soon.....

[frankleeceo]

It depends on who you talk to. Core Web Vital is kinda of important but not that important. It depends on the competition and niche. The point that the big guys are pushing is that...just do not be the slowest in your verticle.

[universenet]

Frankleeceo
I hope what you say will be true but what I am thinking is that web pages what will have bad core results will be excluded from google search...

[mzb44]

Unlike December they said it will be released slowly from current month to they can monitor its impact.

Do you have a source for this?

Or you're making the assumption that the CWV update = core update?

[yollo03]

Barry mentioned it on his website [seroundtable.com...]

I assume it will be slow because of the chaos they created in December, this part is my assumption.