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.

[renatovieira]

Every day at 2pm, traffic is reduced and is limited both by clicks and by online users. This pattern had stopped for a few days, but it returned. The straight line with the traffic limitation is shameful, it is clearly something manipulated.

[yollo03]

@renato, they did an update (and not a small one). I can tell when they 'have fun' with the algorithms when I receive old errors that were validated and fixed. Initially I received errors from 2020 all over again (yesterday), and today I received old errors from 2018. I counted how many times these 'errors' appeared since the beginning of 2021. Seven times.

This is not something common. If old errors resurface even though they were validated and fixed to me it suggests some code in the algorithm was changed and then reset, perhaps similar to purging cache. Screenshot of 2018 error that was validated numerous times incase John M keeps an eye on this thread like he does on reddit: [ibb.co...]

[Athedian]

It's a losing keywords galore here with traffic bombing ever since a week ago. Gotta love the non-stop excitement from whatever bs update Google's running, again. :)

[ichthyous]

USA traffic down -32% from a normal Monday, that's after what seemed to be a normal start to the day. Traffic from all other locations surged. I actually gained in the SERPs, but my USA traffic has been off since ~April 26th

Every day at 2pm, traffic is reduced and is limited both by clicks and by online users.

@renato I concur, my traffic was a strong upward stairstep pattern until exactly 2pm EST. Then it dropped off a cliff and stayed down the rest of the day

[guarriman3]

Starting on early Monday, I started to loose 20% of my traffic (Americas).

I lost tons of keywords, and my main competitor is in the first position for 80% of such keywords with much lower and older content, with much lower PageSpeed score (48 vs 99), with lower Domain Authority (40 vs 56), and without HTTPS. In my humble opinion, it's not good for Google users.

[mzb44]

The weekend drop seems to have recovered in my case.

I suspect it was just weekend/mothers day low traffic. Rankings are stable.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - I can't understand why this pattern has persisted for months. After 2pm users disappear. Look at yesterday's print:

[ibb.co...]

[saladtosser]

Wow getting outranked by a stock image site with one photo and one title tag. Did google officially kill the content is king philosophy for Domain authority is king? And I don't believe this "we don't use domain authority" rubbish, clearly, they do (they just call in something else in-house and use their own metrics to judge it...Brand authority? Link authority? Ballerina authority? or whatever...) or they wouldn't rank blank stock image pages so highly that have no information for informational queries.....

[RedBar]

getting outranked by a stock image site with one photo and one title tag.

Yep, I've mentioned this a few times, very late 90s/00s ... I wouldn't mind so much if it were a decent image but invariably they're "stock".

Just been checking my metrics and for this past week my US traffic is -25% v long-term average.

Rankings checked with a cache-clean browser appear normal.

[mzb44]

In case you were wondering why your CTR suddenly went down: [twitter.com...]

Seems to have started on May 5, around the time people in this thread started to report lower CTR but no ranking changes.

Also they now appear most of the time straight below the 4 ads instead of a few spots further down the SERPs.

Seems like they need to boost Q2 numbers.

[ichthyous]

Dropped another 4 top-3 ranking terms today, which makes a whopping 40% loss of top three ranking terms over the last 12 months. 30% of that occurred since the March 15th update. The great business of January and February were a brief illusion, now it's worse than ever. What I am seeing is that the top spots have all converted to 1) Huge companies like major stock photo houses crowding out all the top searches over and over, and 2) How-to articles from low domain authority sites

@renatoviera I am seeing the exact same pattern of afternoon traffic falling off a cliff, but it's only my USA traffic. My non-USA traffic is stable. Google is definitely targeting the USA traffic.

[TalkativeEditorial]

What I'd love to know - and perhaps somebody here can answer - what average position would those 'people also ask' snippets show up as on GSC? Featured Snippets can [sort of] be filtered - but these questions and answers are so sneaky.

[superclown2]

Others may already have seen this but it is a new one on me - clickable phone numbers in a large font at the top of ads on mobile. The result has been to push organics even further down, not helped by 'people also ask' before the first one. I counted three complete top to bottom scrolls before the first organic was visible. They have gone now - an experiment perhaps?

[christianz]

Like others in this thread, I also am witnessing ranking/traffic loss since around May 4th (since beginning of last week basically). Probably biggest since the original December update loss.

My sites also are affected in similar way - the senior site is hit by far the most. The junior site was also hit a little bit but seems to have recovered (sort of).

I think they figured its best to introduce all those toxic changes to SERPs in multiple smaller updates, rather than officially announced "core update". They can get away with it more easily.

By "toxic changes" I mean everything that is primarily designed to increase Google revenue at the expense of vitality of the WWW.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Has the English Premier League and Google had a disagreement or is things just very broken? Not seeing the usual table / fixtures appear in search in some regions . Seeing it for other leagues though

[yollo03]

My recovery of the thousands of lost keywords continues (at a snail pace). 4 keywords were recovered today, no major changes for ranking. Traffic is still low. I hardened my firewall against scraping today.

[mzb44]

I think they figured its best to introduce all those toxic changes to SERPs in multiple smaller updates, rather than officially announced "core update". They can get away with it more easily.

Most likely.

I have just re-read the 2019 core update blog post again and it says "However, we're constantly making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates. We don't announce all of these because they're generally not widely noticeable.".

A Googler recently also commented that they can decouple individual parts of core updates and run them separately.

During some of the April unannounced updates some core update hit sites have recovered.

All this indicates they do seem to run smaller core updates in-between but don't announce them.

We're probably past 1-2 unannounced smaller core updates already imo.

They appear to do regular core updates much less frequently now. Maybe once a year or so.

[Samsam1978]

It appears from this thread the general consensus is older niche sites have lost rankings to spammy, poorly written content, or high authority news sites without substance, mainly USA traffic. Whatever they have done it's not good for the internet.

[RatIkette]

Yeah... It's the exact same situation here! I can add that on our niche G put google play store apps in the 1st and 2nd position slowly but surely. And G continue in that way.

[mzb44]

It appears from this thread the general consensus is older niche sites have lost rankings to spammy, poorly written content, or high authority news sites without substance, mainly USA traffic.

Yes, and quite easy to explain both scenarios.

Seems like G boosted 'authority' with the latest core updates.

- News sites: The big news sites rank now for anything they write about, as those types of sites have the largest number of authoritative links on the entire internet (because they write about latest news)

- Spammers: They rank because of expired domain revives or 301 redirects. They buy expired domains* of former extremely authoritative sites and repurpose them into affiliate sites. Content does not matter.

* I've seen many lately. The funniest was the former domain name of an embassy (had a lot of .gov and mainstream media links, think NYT etc.) that is now an affiliate site for diet pills (the scam kind). They just loaded it with a bunch of machine-generated content and is now getting probably around 10k-20k daily visitors. ;-)

Both the above scenarios make perfect sense and aren't contradictory at all if you understand what is actually happening and why. Both scenarios function under the same underlying mechanism.

The three main conclusions are that authority matters (usually in the form of backlinks - but here talking about monster link profiles, not anything any niche site can achieve), content does not matter and niche and topical focus/expertise does not matter. - Provided you have the authority part right - if yes, you can do literally anything you want.

[christianz]

Seems like G boosted 'authority' with the latest core updates.

And this is a problem in itself. Because there is no objective way to define or measure "authority".

Are government websites of illegitimate or hostile political regime high authority?
Is op-ed by biased and emotionally unstable columnist in a well known publication high authority content?
Is a random MFS (made-for-search) article written by low quality outsourced writer in a "high quality" publication considered authority content?
Is any speech that goes against Googles/liberal politics, no matter who speaks it, treated as authority content?
Is social media post in major platform considered higher authority than same post by same person in a small website?
Is website A considered higher authority just because it has more backlinks or domain history than website B?
Is website considered higher authority if it has fake author profile with AI generated headshot and links to fake LinkedIn page?

Reality is that nobody can define what authority is, because it is relative to who you are, where you live and what are your beliefs. For me none of the US mainstream media pages are any authority at all. I would like Google to assign authority score of 0 to all US corporate media and social networks.

Authority scoring is excuse to introduce absolute monopoly and shrink the WWW down to what cable television used to be - just a few channels to choose from - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon and some others.

They are doing this slowly and gradually like boiling a frag - the frog (general public) won't notice that distributed WWW is evaporating and they would only become aware of this when it would be too late.

Perfect example of extreme damage done by "authority" scoring is YouTube. What once was a platform were anyone could "broadcast themselves" and find all kinds of marginal unorthodox, original videos, now is morphing into cable television with extreme, draconian search result manipulation in favor of corporate media. In YouTube they are not even trying to hide or downplay this. In web they are still pretending like we have this level playing field free-for-all where "content is king" and anyone has equal shot at landing on page 1.

Many of the prominent SEOs and "Google watchers" are also pretending like everything is business as usual. Don't know if they are clueless or willfully misleading to avoid spoiling their relationship with G.

[mzb44]

Because there is no objective way to define or measure "authority".

Of course. Google tries to measure 'authority' using external signals they determined to generally correlate with "authoritativeness". They themselves say as much.

Seems like (currently) the closest metric to achieve this are backlinks from other authoritative sites. The more of these you have, the more authoritative you are in Google's eyes. This seems to be the #1 factor at the moment by far.

Nothing unusual here; has always been like this. Except the "authority" dial has been turned up significantly over the last few years.

Are government websites of illegitimate or hostile political regime high authority?
Is op-ed by biased and emotionally unstable columnist in a well known publication high authority content?
Is a random MFS (made-for-search) article written by low quality outsourced writer in a "high quality" publication considered authority content?
Is any speech that goes against Googles/liberal politics, no matter who speaks it, treated as authority content?
Is social media post in major platform considered higher authority than same post by same person in a small website?
Is website A considered higher authority just because it has more backlinks or domain history than website B?
Is website considered higher authority if it has fake author profile with AI generated headshot and links to fake LinkedIn page?

Probably yes to all your questions except the last. Author profiles and those things aren't a ranking factor. They just happen to correlate with high-authority sites (i.e. you might be able to get more quality backlinks if you show author profiles, as legit sites tend not to link to no-name sites).

Reality is that nobody can define what authority is, because it is relative to who you are, where you live and what are your beliefs. For me none of the US mainstream media pages are any authority at all.

Google never claimed to try to determine authority in an objective way. "Authority" for Google is whatever the mainstream audience and general public resonates with and sites that don't post controversial content potentially resulting in lawsuits/bad press (see. school shooting conspiracies ranking high in G several years ago). They probably determined pushing US mainstream media sites everywhere was the safest way to avoid any bad press while also keep ranking sites the general public resonates with.

Authority scoring is excuse to introduce absolute monopoly and shrink the WWW down to what cable television used to be - just a few channels to choose from - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon and some others.

I don't think they necessarily care about any of these. They just want safe and controversy-free search results while keeping the general public using G services. Putting US mainstream news sites everywhere for everything achieves both these things. Everything else is just collateral.

Many of the prominent SEOs and "Google watchers" are also pretending like everything is business as usual. Don't know if they are clueless or willfully misleading to avoid spoiling their relationship with G.

They aren't clueless.

It mostly comes down to not losing access to interacting with G employees (Mueller, Sullivan, etc) as well as the fact that most of the bigger and more "famous" SEOs work with/for all these big sites and publications that all now have gained due to these changes. It doesn't make sense for these people to speak out.

[westcoast]

"It appears from this thread the general consensus is older niche sites have lost rankings to spammy, poorly written content, or high authority news sites without substance, mainly USA traffic."

I think there is another explanation for the "old niche site" decay issue that doesn't get much discussion: an issue I call "legacy data choking".

Our site is now 25 years old. We were THE first in our niche, were featured on CNN, etc in the late 90s, had a ton of authority. We hit our peak around 2007 or so, and it has been down, down, down ever since. And by that, I mean literally every single core update. Just a slow and steady march down, even though our content has actually improved considerably in both scope and quality over the past decade. Yes, the glory days are gone for other good reasons: Google adding more ads, videos, etc into its SERPs, people spending more time on apps vs web, etc. But the intense march downward I have seen in our site and other "very old" niche sites is nearly universal.

I think one of the main problems is that we have to battle the accumulated detritus of 25 years of redirects, 404s, canonicals, SEO attacks, and tens to hundreds of thousands of poor quality backlinks that simply have nothing to do with us.

When I look at our Google Search Console, our coverage is 288K valid pages, 457k "excluded" pages. We have 61,000 pages GSC has marked as "page with redirect". Most of those 301s were put in place 5+ years ago.

We have thousands of pages that were redirected 20 years ago (and even some long-ago 404'd pages!) that Google STILL TRIES TO CRAWL. We did another site overhaul 10 years ago and google STILL TRIES TO CRAWL those ancient links, because long-abandoned websites and blogs still reference them. We still get thousands of crawl attempts on old HTTP pages even though we switched to HTTPS 7 years ago. Our "link profile" is a complete and utter mess because of all this legacy clutter. I suspect Google is absolutely choking on our 25 years of history and our ranking is suffering seriously because of it. Who knows how much crawl budget Google spends on this legacy crap, but it is extremely significant.

Our backlink profile is a similar shambles. As an informational source, our website has been skimmed and scammed and copied thousands of times. Our text has been lifted and spread. Spam/spun/doorway page hacked-domain operations often use us to try to make them look more legitimate, so we have tens of thousands of backlinks from thousands of spammy domains pointing to us. We have had times in the past where bad actors use black-hat methods to create proxies and in real-time scrape data from our site to create ad revenue of their own. Twice (2005 & 2019) out site was effectively entirely cloned and in many cases the cloned sites outranked us.

I have spent so much of my tiime over the years battling all of this crap. It has been a complete and utter nightmare. It has been endlessly stressful and time consuming trying to prevent bad actors from harming us in Google.

As I write this, our link profile is a complete and utter mess. Due to 25 years of activity *from other actors, none of which are in any way related to us* and many of which are automated, 95% of our current link profile is spam, hacked domains, crap, and stuff that has no value. Our disavow file is at 8000 lines.

So to Googlebot, our site looks like a complete mess. Even though our disavows are in place and our 301's are correctly configured, to Google we probably look like a huge messed up ball of wool --- a huge web of tangled 301s and backlinks. God only knows how the algorithms have been choking on all of this ancient data, trying to make sense of our site. At best all of this legacy crap has probably watered down our rankings, and at worst has resulted in us being severely and increasingly penalized with each and every core update.

Now picture a new site, created in 2021. It has a beautiful link profile because it is new. It doesn't have tens of thousands of crap links pointing to it, its internal linking structure is obvious, and it has no 301s. Its structure is obvious and clean.

We remain #1 over thousands of keywords in every single search engine except Google, which is evidence that we haven't declined due to competitive issues. In fact, I can only name one other site over the past 20 years that has been able to compete with us in quality and extensive content, and even their rankings appear to be dropping. We stand proudly in #1 over core keywords *everywhere* except Google. Google hates us. Google thinks we are a hot mess. Google doesn't understand us. And Google continues to drop us.

It is my hypothesis that Google's algorithms were designed to work fairest when applied to new websites. I think that when it tries to process some of our older websites it simply doesn't do a good or fair job because it simply was never tested against such extreme cases. Machine learning probable makes it worse too... Google "learns" what a healthy site structure and linking profile looks like by mostly learning from newer websites, and then looks at 25 years of data from our site that it has collected over the decades and has a coronary trying to digest it.

It is my theory that unless you are a huge site with such an overwhelming authority that this legacy stuff doesn't matter, that you simply enter a downward spiral.... caught in the cracks of algorithms that simply can't make sense of so much old data.

We have noticed this issue because we were so early on the web. I expect more and more of you will get caught up in this trap as time goes by and your "web histories" start working against you, and the issues I'm bringing up here will become more talked about. Perhaps some day Google will tweak its algorithms to correct for such problems.

Until them, we will continue to circle the drain.

[edited by: westcoast at 2:10 pm (utc) on May 12, 2021]

[mzb44]

@westcoast that a possibility but pretty much every single of these big mainstream news sites has the same issues as you or even worse. Imagine your stolen content, automated spam links and weird redirects x 100. Yet those sites win every time, every core update.

[westcoast]

"@westcoast that a possibility but pretty much every single of these big mainstream news sites has the same issues as you or even worse. Imagine your stolen content, automated spam links and weird redirects x 100. Yet those sites win every time, every core update."

Clearly their massive mainstream domain authority so positively overwhelms everything else that they are protected from such effects. These massive players all link to one another and have an insane number of strong inbound links that would overwhelm their link profiles in a positive manner.

I am talking about smaller niche sites which simply aren't protected by such extreme domain authority.

[mzb44]

Clearly their massive mainstream domain authority so positively overwhelms everything else that they are protected from such effects. These massive players all link to one another and have an insane number of strong inbound links that would overwhelm their link profiles in a positive manner.

I am talking about smaller niche sites which simply aren't protected by such extreme domain authority.

Oh yeah for sure. Like I said in my previous post, seems like (link) authority is #1 by far and if you're mainstream media site-tier then you can literally get away with absolutely everything.

For the rest of us the regular rules apply.

[Samsam1978]

Many of the prominent SEOs and "Google watchers" are also pretending like everything is business as usual. Don't know if they are clueless or willfully misleading to avoid spoiling their relationship with G.

I checked all of the famous SEO's sites to find out if they had written about what we have observed: a massive change in rankings and NO - even the one who was part of my SEO forum community before he became a "famous millionaire" and, in my opinion, it is a complete SEO catastrophe that they choose NOT to report on how the SEO playing field has changed, to favor news sites that can write whatever they want and outrank anyone.

As you said, these corporates are the SEO gurus clients so they will not complain when their client's sites are favored, while the internet users have to put up with reading low-researched interim or freelance powered content over and over again from the same sites. The niche sites that build up most of the internet will be gone due to loss of money if this crazy stuff keeps carrying on. It's heartbreaking.

[mzb44]

I checked all of the famous SEO's sites to find out if they had written about the massive change in rankings and NO

I had a chuckle yesterday when that news was posted on Twitter showing that Google significantly boosted again the frequency of the "People Also Asked" search feature.

A bunch of SEOs, fairly known, reacted to this on Twitter with comments such as "This is fantastic news for content creators!", "Awesome, Google always working on delivering a great experience" and "This is a great opportunity for webmasters".

All in genuine seriousness, no hint of irony.

¯\_(*/*)_/¯

[RedBar]

Global site US traffic -40% yesterday and so far today -55%

UK hotel / pub site yesterday +69%, Monday +58%

Localised seems to be working, international seems trashed.

First real widget trade fair in China next week, that will be interesting.

[TalkativeEditorial]

While there might be a bit of the "don't want to compromise our relationship with Google" going on, some of the 'famous' (assuming having some followers on Twitter is the benchmark) don't actually know so much of what webmasters / site owners know - especially if they are working with big publishers, because those publishers would just be screaming PANIC.

Recently, some seem quite surprised by the fact that Publisher Centre includes labels for satire etc. The reaction to the additional People Also Ask content theft expansion is a good example too.