Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2021

(Part 1 of 2)

[sk7411]

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System: The following 21 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5032067.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 9:52 am on May 2, 2021 (utc -5)

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Here we go again ,

Something started brewing yesterday.

[MayankParmar]

So my crawl refresh rate is still dramatically down (started on 24th April). Articles are getting indexed (discovery is fine). Is there anything I can do or should I be worried?

[yollo03]

I tried figuring out why my crawl is low for some time. It is a bit higher now but not back to normal. I was failing https in the new page experience. I fixed it and that seemed to have fix it. Are you failing https in the console? Another thing is optimization, remove unnecessary scripts that could be affecting the page rending. Also check your DR. If it fell recently that may be related but this is a guess.

[superclown2]

I believe that Google is going for broke. That is the only way to explain the mess the SERPs are in right now.

They are top dog at the moment because they have a monopoly. They are default 'search engine' on Chrome and Android which they own, and they have cosy agreements with most other major browser and OS providers. This is likely to end when the legal issues are finally resolved.

Most people don't realise that there are real search engines out there and they don't know how to switch to them. That will change.

People are getting ad blind. How many will be using their annoying spam boxes in the future? Most people I have asked tell me they tried them, found they were a waste of time, and now just skip over them. Videos cluttering up the SERPs? Useful for seeing how to to change a battery in a phone or fix a dripping tap but otherwise we can get information much faster from the written word without jumping through hoops; and there is a video button for them anyway. What will Google do when their efforts to hide the real search results and force visitors to use their ads no longer work?

What value has a paid adsense click when a visitor is practically forced to click on it, when the search term that was specified produces just plain vanilla results? Already, for the majority, paying for clicks produces a negative ROI. To big companies they are loss leaders, compensated by high positions in the SERPs. A coincidence, naturally. But how long will they keep paying high prices for clicks from people who click on them as a last resort, as well as the usual bored kids, bots, and competitors running down their advertising budgets?

Yes Google got 30% more profit as a result of the Covid epidemic. Amazon increased theirs by 300%. Why the difference? Amazon stepped up to deliver a better service. Google devalued their 'product' in order to keep their share price growth.

So: I reckon that for the next few years, until some sensible regulation comes along, Google will continue to squeeze every penny they can out of their monopoly and most of us will have to either tighten our belts or choose a different way of making a living. They have no choice, their shares sell for about 40 times yearly earnings and they pay no dividend so they have to keep increasing profits to avoid a huge sell off. Popcorn time may be a way off but the day their profits actually fall will be interesting.

[christianz]

But if a country like, let's say, Germany, feels that the monopoly of an american company on german web is a threat, I hope that Germany will put some mesures. Block Google in Germany.

Block all search related services and Chrome browser in entire EU. It would be huge long term boost for all European businesses. But Google's lobby money is too much for the politicians to do the right thing. So they are only pretending to do something.

Frankly, it is very suspicious that company like SAP hasn't been developing their own public cloud and there is still no European public cloud hyperscaler.

[samwest]

Here we go again...it took about 6 months to fall right back into the punitive sandbox Gorg started on May 10th 2010. No doubt encouraged to cheat webmasters out of revenue by their new partners in Washington who turn a blind eye to any of their corrupt practices. Site income has dropped by 80% in the past week.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Yes Google got 30% more profit as a result of the Covid epidemic. Amazon increased theirs by 300%. Why the difference?

May be because they are in different sectors of activity ?

General Motors recorded a lower profits % than Google, so it means that General Motors delivers a less good service than Google ?

[samwest]

Google is making 34% more profit because they have plastered multiple forced ads on every YT video...and plaster auto ads everywhere. We need competition, now. Google needs to pay a lot more taxes to pay for all the crazy gov spending, after all, they put this mess in motion.

[Rageboi]

Noticed the organic search traffic for some sites (mostly Indian) and their growth is phenomenal. These are 2-3 year old sites with traffic above 200K per month. Also noticed one common thing among them - all have 200K backlinks pointing at them. (Courtesy SEMRUSH). Strange.

[christianz]

all have 200K backlinks pointing at them. (Courtesy SEMRUSH). Strange.

I would guess that 199900 of those 200k backlinks are fake. This is a huge problem. I have real, aged websites and even for me 90-95% of all new backlinks are fake - from auto generated websites which take image that I host or scrape title/parts of content and link back to my site. All kinds of autogenerated junk - fake blogs with spun text and scraped images, "keyword directories", reddit clones, wikipedia clones, fake product review sites with stolen images and thin content, its just endless deluge of garbage.

Semrush counts them all as backlinks, because, technically, they are. Google search console is now smart enough to filter out bulk of them. Google, I am sure, nulls SEO value for most of these fake site backlinks. Semrush and AHrefs still count them in when calculating the DR rank. Which is why I am saying that DR means absolutely nothing.

Now the problem - what happens with those fake links that initially slip through the cracks of Googles spam detection and give me SEO juice for a while, and get marked as spam only months later? This could maybe flag my sites as SEO manipulators. Should I spend 1-2 hours of my every day to manually pick them out and disavow? I don't think that's a good idea either - the presence of disavow file alone could be interpreted as admission of guilt and I could be penalized permanently, in the same way that they penalize manipulators who remove backlinks in response of ranking drop (as described in one of Googles own patent applications).

So far my strategy is to do nothing about these fake links and I haven't received huge penalties yet. But I was hit in December and have not fully recovered.

[yollo03]

I am in the same boat as you but I am gradually beginning to recover. It's a very slow process.

[superclown2]

General Motors recorded a lower profits % than Google, so it means that General Motors delivers a less good service than Google ?

General Motors isn't an Internet Portal. I could write a book on why they are failing but it would be off topic <BWG>

I have checked my search results with a number of friends today. I delete cookies several times day, they never delete them at all.

Their search results are entirely different to mine. They are far more weighted towards the bigger companies, simply (I think) because they visit them more, for different reasons, than they do the smaller sites.

So; I reckon that when we all look at our positions in the SERPs we are seeing a completely false situation because these results are so distorted by Google's cookies.

[renatovieira]

Did anyone notice a big drop this afternoon?

[yollo03]

My recovery momentum is continuing but at a sluggish pace. The drop was fast, recovering is excruciating. I double checked the ranking for the past year. Prior to December 2020 core update the website was at its peak. Since then it collapsed until recently. I would say I recovered 30% so far. It's not a lot but it is better than the beginning of April.

[NickMNS]

Did anyone notice a big drop this afternoon?

I don't know if it was specifically this afternoon, but the 30% increase I saw last weekend has fizzled. I'm back to close to where I was two weeks ago, but a little below and that was already a little below a normal Saturday. The day is not done.

[MayankParmar]

- Semrush sensor is orange
- Reports of AMP indexing issues: [twitter.com...]
- Reports of homepage deindexing: [twitter.com...]

[Samsam1978]

My 3000-word article on a topic with full research behind it and great writing content is being outranked by a short news article on the same topic. It's just a joke. At the bottom of the search page you can feedback, I have been feedback that I am getting news sites on topics and too short articles. It is not working for seach quality, just because it is a news site it appears to outrank all other sites regardless of quality content.

[Markedd]

@Samsam1978 You may need to give it some time. Google seems to have adjusted the ranking of new articles (on smaller websites) to take far longer than before. For example, a couple of years ago, I would get at the top of first page in one week, last year it took 10 days and now it seems that it's 20 days. Just go on and create other articles and hopefully Google will put them above articles with thin content.

[Samsam1978]

@Markedd - thats good to know for new articles, but these are old articles that are 5-7 years old that were top 1 for years, now I am being kicked off by some indian news site that is terrible English. Totally downheartened. Annoying but Ill add more content to make myself feel better :-) Thanks for the heads up on 20 days I can work that into my schedule.

[Samsam1978]

@yollo03 me too the December 2020 was a good month for me traffic wise. Now it is the lowerst in 10 years. Not sure what is going on, but hope they change it so terrible, poorly written sites are not outranking quality content. Ive lowered my ad bar too, as autoads seems to place ads all over the place. Not sure if this will help but as they are part of Google themselves it is hard to believe that sites will be effected by what Google are automatically inserting on each page.

[yollo03]

@Samsam1978, I am beginning to think they added a new AI that is more sophisticated than the others. Something was reset at December core update and the AI is learning it all from scratch This is a pure guess and might explain why I am receiving old errors that were fixed in 2017, 2018 and 2020.

Do what you can to keep your head above the water. I worked on backlinks and it seemed to have worked but I can't really tell if this is the only thing. I can tell almost for sure that is not about content quality so I am not relying on it anymore.

[Samsam1978]

@yollo03 - Good advice I might have to invest time in backlinking now. Have not bothered before as the quality of the content was always enough. I have seen lot's of poorly written competitor sites ranking so it might be time to do some backlinking now. Any tips? Thanks.

[yollo03]

@Samsam1978, sign for a trial with semrush or any other SEO sites. They have a link building tool that you might find useful. You can also track you competitors backlinks too and just do what they do if you can. Don't get too many backlinks (like hundreds) in 48 hours or the algorithm will hunt you down.

[RatIkette]

Hi guys!

Just wanted to share with you my feedback about the last months.
- may 2020: improvement of the ranking of many main KW in my niche.
- may 2020 to October 2020: rankings and traffic continue to grow.
During this time, we updated content, made internal linking improvement, made speed optimisation etc ....
- October 2020: hard drop of the traffic, and lost the 1st position of many main KW on my niche.
I analyzed where we lost them, and can see that many 1st and 2nd positions are given to play store and YouTube.

The actual situation:
- since 8th April, I can see an improvement of our rankings, but the traffic is really slowly growing. And this is only on one of my 2 biggest website.
- On the second website, the ranking of my main KWs stay "low". We are in 3-5 positions where we was 1st before our drop.

We are continue to working hard on content improvements, speed optimisations (of course), and preparing viral contents to hope new organic backlinks.

In the end, we still are in an unconfortable situation, even if it's not dramatic, we didn't yet recover since October.

[EditorialGuy]

It's mostly business as usual for our editorial travel site. Rankings have been edging up lately for our popular evergreen pages, but that bit of luck may be cancelled out by the increased amount of visual clutter above the conventional search results on Google's SERPs.

Traffic has been rising slowly but steadily as more people have received COVID-19 vaccinations and are looking forward to trips later in the year or in 2022. We did have a spike of about 15,000 percent on one of our evergreen article pages yesterday (and for most of today), presumably because the topic was featured on a megasite and people rushed to Google.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Terrible start to the month so far - and weekends are usually the best days for traffic for us.
Saw a minor improvement in the last few days of April, but now back to constantly wondering whether the site has gone into a permanent downtime. Awful.

[MayankParmar]

Terrible start (traffic and earnings).

Also, what is going on with core updates? It's been five months.

[yollo03]

The next core update can make things much worse though, it's not that a core update fixes the prior core update.

[RedBar]

Also, what is going on with core updates? It's been five months.

I can't remember where I read it a few weeks ago however the "planned" May update has been postponed until June / July, darned if I can remember why.

Do we need another update? Would it be an improvement?

Insofar as I can see the G USA SERPs are getting worse day by day, in my widget sector very few non-US companies are "allowed" to be listed whereas checking non-US SERPs US companies are ranked even when they cannot supply.

It's become a ludicrous and farcical advertising site and some of the alternatives seem to be chasing G's pursuit of spammy mediocrity.

Just why is it that all these "algos" do not recognise genuine quality sites, not just mine, and promote so much badly scraped garbage plus stolen images?

[strummer19]

Google analytics realtime broken for you ?