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.

[ichthyous]

Woke up to find that Google wiped out one entire swath of my highest ranking terms this morning. Where I was ranking #1 for years I am now at #42. About five different terms including the same keyword (a place name) has dropped between 26 and 41 spots all at the same time. It has nothing to do with domain authority apparently, as mine is higher than some of the sites that stayed in the top five. Is anyone else seeing place related searches get whacked over time?

[renatovieira]

Another huge drop today. The rollercoaster has already become a standard in my graphics :-|

[Samsam1978]

I'm dropping terms I've ranked for in first place for 5+ years now. Nothing changed. Not sure what they doing as lower-ranked spammy sites with terrible content ranking higher. Lowest users yesterday in years and dropping 3% every day, this update is not good its all over the place.

[dolcevita]

After about a year, my domain, which is really perfectly done in terms of content, link structure, coding, and the choice of domain itself, entered the top 15-50 with 15 prominent words. I was already starting to worry if I had done something wrong since the 12 month sandbox seemed too long to me, but it is possible to be kept at a distance for so long.

A lot has changed compared to 7-8 years ago when my domain exploded after 4-5 weeks and grew from then until the Core update in April last year. I expected something similar now, not a year of sandboxing. Practice and work make experience and if nothing else I am glad to have experienced it now.

[Treud]

Looks like GA corrected itself today. Seems that it’s a GA bug that first input strange outcome then correct it the day after of 12h later.

[yollo03]

For those that are watching their keywords evaporate, I experienced it for a long time since December core update. I lost thousands of keywords. They are now combing back (months later) at a turtle pace, 2 - 5 keywords per day and not every day. I calculated it will take several years to obtain these keywords back at current speed. I am not sure there is anything you can actually do.

[RedBar]

Unusual yo-yoing traffic recently with yesterday, Saturday, for my main global site with its 3rd highest PVs in a month and back to the first week of March averages. ... Seemingly crazy, crazy Gorg manipulation with easily the majority main views NOT from the USA ... No interference whatsoever.

UK sites performing absolutely normally with steadily increasing traffic as we approach the summer season.

[mzb44]

For those that are watching their keywords evaporate, I experienced it for a long time since December core update. I lost thousands of keywords. They are now combing back (months later) at a turtle pace, 2 - 5 keywords per day and not every day. I calculated it will take several years to obtain these keywords back at current speed. I am not sure there is anything you can actually do.

No, there isn't that much you can do, as you (or me, or anyone else) don't actually know what a core update does to a site and why.

All we know it might be several things - including things not even necessarily to do with your site directly.

Yes, the last part may seem paradoxical, but it does seems to works like that in some cases. For example, G may determine that for certain terms / niches / etc. a certain type of sites are preferred. Then, if you don't fit into that pattern you get a core update demotion. Nothing necessarily might be wrong with your site, G just thinks it doesn't fit into the picture they'd like to paint.

Remember, the very first "advice" they gave about core updates was that "there is nothing you can/should do, there is not necessarily anything wrong with your site. The internet is always changing, and maybe different type of content is now preferred to your bla bla bla...".

Of course, if there are things "wrong" with your site ( think of technical, thin content, spam links, etc.) you should absolutely fix it. But there are zero guarantees it would lead to a recovery.

Yes, I know it's very depressing not knowing what - and if at all - you should be doing to "fix" your site.

I think Google's communication about core updates is very irresponsible. Right now hundreds of thousands of websites are burning (wasting) resources on trying to guess what to do to recover their sites. It's throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Most of these will be completely useless and just waste everyone's time and resources.

That shallow thin content blog post from Danny Sullivan from 2019 is not really helping.

[RedBar]

I concur with mzb44

The problem we all have these days is not only is there not a level playing field, the playing field has been ploughed-up, again, and anyone new to SEO, say the last 4/5 years, could find it very difficult to navigate if they've not had longer-experienced hands to guide / advise them.

I am NOT saying this is the solution but I have seen quite a few sites by less-experienced constructors who have immediately bypassed all / most of what I consider the essentials. Now let's get something right, G keeps repeating these essentials are not neccessary so sophisticated is their algo etc ... Being polite I shall simply say "bunkum".

The first criteria I check are the essential basics and how they relate to that page and for independent websites without a massive marketing budget this has to be completed first.

If anyone has a site that has seemingly collapsed for no known reason you must get another opinion and their view. As much as we like to "hate" G, considering the amount of data it has to digest and churn out every day, it doesn't do too bad a job, except when they plainly have screwed-up yet will not / dare not admit it.

If they did that then they might not have so much vehement criticism from so many.

[KaseyM]

Very flat for a weekend. Suspect more losses this week in store.

[yollo03]

I run multiple SEO audits and 'fixed' what I could. When the keywords started coming back I thought it was because of what I did. Until I noticed my competitors that were hit are rising too. You can argue that they also fixed things but it was probably an algorithm update. You can fix whatever you want but nothing will change until the next update and even then you have to guess what things needs to be addressed.

[ichthyous]

Traffic was just awful today...USA -35%, Canada -42%, Australia -65% from a normal Sunday. Traffic to my home page has declined 50% in a straight line over the last month, and today was down 32% from the norm.

[MaHi84]

Bad weekend, worst Sunday. About 40% less than usual. Maybe because of Mother's Day and good weather.

<snip>

[edited by: not2easy at 10:48 am (utc) on May 10, 2021]
[edit reason] Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Samsam1978]

Terrible weekend, the worst Sunday for entire 10-year website history about 40% down. Don't know what is going on with Google AI but looks like old niche sites overtaken by spam, newly created sites with poor content and news spam articles. Not good.

[mzb44]

I can confirm the above. Lowest traffic in 2 years yesterday (Sunday). Not sure if an algorithm update or just weekend/mothers' day or anything else. Was there some kind of major event/holiday?

[TalkativeEditorial]

Not quite as bad here as some others have mentioned - but things have been utterly devastating for some time now. That's despite rankings being steady. In fact - decent improvement in rankings on Sunday = lowest CTR for a Sunday since Feb (LOL!)


Today, however, is very, very, very, very bad. To that point again where I have to constantly check to make sure the site has not gone down.

[yollo03]

The algorithm was definitely tweaked again (on 8 or 9 May). I am starting to receive old errors all over gain from 2020 that were already validated as fixed at the time and multiple times throughout 2021.

[samwest]

Watching Google Analytics is like watching a bad car wreck. My advice is to just back away and find something more productive.

[yollo03]

Something really odd is happening. My firewall is usually blocking bots all the time or hacking attempts. It's been quiet there too, very few attempts in the last few hours. I've never seen anything like this. Traffic of course is zero, which is also unusual.
Update: Traffic just started coming in.

[superclown2]

I have a competitor racing up the SERPs right now. No doubt the owner has scrapebox because most of the links are comments in pigin English on pages full of the same. I thought this kind of abuse disappeared years ago - it's pathetic what google has become.

[RedBar]

Having less traffic because of a loss of SERPs positions is understandable however whern a site has consistently high rankings or even improving them, the question has to be why the loss of so much traffic for the many who are reporting it?

Has no one seen any increase in their traffic? Mine's been down a little at times but nothing like some are reportng however Sunday was quieter than usual and today is extremely low so far.

I don't have multi-million Joe Public lastest retail fad type pages yet I have have noticed that my global trade buyers are not chasing down every possible lower-cost supplier these days ... The "old" widget trade order seems to have been reinstated and The Net's revolution is now just an everyday useful tool.

Am I close to or way off the mark?

Big box movers may well question my observations !

[widgetized]

Things improved a lot for me on May 4 and 5, got many orders, even within a couple of hours. After this weekend though, things are going back to zero again.

This clear ON / OFF pattern feels a lot like when I used AdWords to boost sales on my website, many years ago. They have full control of converting traffic. I only wonder what parameters they are using to decide when and how much converting traffic you get per day / week / month...

[NickMNS]

however when a site has consistently high rankings or even improving them, the question has to be why the loss of so much traffic for the many who are reporting it?

The 1:1 relationship between "keyword" and position (ranking) no longer exists. You can maintain a high ranking and see diminishing traffic, if when you get an impression (in SERPs) you rank high, but otherwise don't rank at all. This is immediately visible in GSC which reports it's position metric on this basis. But the same is possible in the third party tools. These tools continue to provide results based on the 1:1 relationship, so the results shown are not representative of reality. They show results that reflect the parameters of their bot, but there is multitude of other parameters that could return different results, eg: geo-location, browser, device type, browsing history etc. Now they could improve their metrics (they may already do this) by having a bot setting for each of these, or for combinations of these, but even that would be flawed as they could never know what the mix of user using Google search at any give day might be.

I really find it strange how there is an underlying perception that "Google" is broken when the tools used to measure "Google" don't agree with reality. Google can't be "broken" because it is what is being measured. Sure, we may not like how things look, what site are ranking above, what Google owned crufted is polluting the SERPs and so on, this is valid and I share much of the disdain. Essentially, it is like claiming the weather is broken when the weatherman (woman) forecast a sunny day and instead you get rained on. Yeah the weather sucks, but it isn't broken, and if anyone could have done a better job it was the meteorologists.

[RedBar]

I agree with your points, the one over-riding factor that none of us can test for is the users' cache / history which, as I understand it, could possibly be more influential than almost anything else.

G isn't broken per se, it is incredibly fast and efficient, for me it's the simply bizarre copied and scraped sites that sometimes rank so well and as for the extremely thin keyword pages with one image and a couple of lines of almost useless text, can't G actually detect these, other SEs seem to?

[westcoast]

Is anyone else noticing Google Play App store and IOS App Store apps flying up site rankings?

We are seeing more and more apps moving into the top 20 in some of the keywords we follow.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Having less traffic because of a loss of SERPs positions is understandable however when a site has consistently high rankings or even improving them, the question has to be why the loss of so much traffic for the many who are reporting it?

Big part of it is with the Featured Snippets - even if you are not in the "ask and answer/info" type of website niche, G lifts paragraphs of stuff in some cases - and even just menial answers that form part of a much broader piece of content (often the longer form stuff too). In that way, the algorithm is very sophisticated.

For those in the content space, the trade off is, to a degree, that you usually can expect a modest boost from Discover. But with the way Discover has been a total shambles - and seemingly nobody caring to fix it, despite ample reports - G is, in some cases quite literally, destroying people's livelihoods.

[samwest]

I think another part of this mess is related to recent changes in Chrome. They kick you out of accounts and make it nearly impossible to get back in. The casual user is completely lost and spends hours fighting the overlord to get back in. Must be more interns working at the plex again as anyone with a soul and conscience quit already.

[Samsam1978]

May 2020 everything looked so much more settled, it's just all over the place since then completely crazy rankings all over the place. All my decent niche competitors with strong content including mine lost rankings to a load of news sites or foreign spammers whose English is not even sophisticated, just spun, it's so fustrating. I don't mind losing my rankings to good content, but when it's not its just down heartening with all the effort and time we put into our writing.

[RedBar]

@samwest

They kick you out of accounts and make it nearly impossible to get back in.

Not sure what you mean by this, I only use Chrome for testing purposes and don't use G accounts ... what's been happening?

[yollo03]

@Samsam, check their backlinks and domain rating. If they have more backlinks than you and a higher DR this is the reason why they outrank you. Content is not the name of the game anymore until the next update (if at all).

I recovered today 7 keywords out of the thousands I lost since December, snail pace.