Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2021

(Part 1 of 2)

[sk7411]

---

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)

---

Here we go again ,

Something started brewing yesterday.

[saladtosser]

Reminds me of the old saying "You put a frog into a pot of boiling water, and it jumps right out. But if you put it in a pot of nice comfortable water and then turn on the heat, the frog will complacently let himself be boiled." just replace the pan with google and the frog with webmasters.

[mzb44]

I think the reason I am receiving old keywords back is because I increased the domain authority by +2

No, I do not think that is the reason.

You seem to be referring to the Moz metric when you mention "domain authority".

That third-party metric is not used in Google search.

[yollo03]

You are correct but as far as I know google is using a similar metric. While it may not be identical there may be many similarities if you agree

[mzb44]

You are correct but as far as I know google is using a similar metric. While it may not be identical there may be many similarities if you agree

For sure, I just don't think your +2 point increase was the contributing factor. That could be just one link.

Also, it's not that straight forward anymore.

My "domain authority" increased from 35 to 68 from May to December 2020 - all from real natural links, not one built or paid - and I was rewarded by a -50% demotion at the December core update.

It's not really this simple anymore.

[ichthyous]

Wowser, 14 hours into my Googleday and the USA is no longer my most PVs country.

@RedBar I've been saying this day after day...it seems to have started around May 6th. The decrease has gotten worse each day...yesterday my USA traffic was -30% from a normal Sunday. Some of this is the normal shift to summer patterns, but not that much and not that quickly.

Check what time it drops...it was 2pm sharp at first, now my USA traffic drops at 9am sharp and stays unusually low for 6-7 hours. I am seeing huge peaks and valleys where before traffic was more evenly spread hour by hour. Meanwhile...UK / AU / EU all strong, but Canada seems to be following the US pattern starting on the same day.

[Neohippy]

I work on a UK site on a topic that's not strictly health, but health-related. The US treats it very differently, with different procedures/norms, yet US content has been gaining on UK content in this space for years now (in UK SERPs). Terrible for users, as they're getting entirely the wrong info.

[TalkativeEditorial]

oh great...and now GA real time is borked again too (the total is miiiiiiiiiiles off)- because stressing about the traffic decimation isn't enough, let's also break this. Well done Google.

unless *puts on tinfoil hat* maybe they do they broken real time on purpose in the hopes that webmasters just glance at that and don't notice how they are stealing content with Featured Snippets and killing traffic in the process

[SEOGiant]

On my end, I've seen my site drop from rank 2-3 for a handful of keywords (high volume money keywords) to not even being on the first 20 pages, and neither were the competitors we had been fighting with for the top spot for the last few months. We've been ranking page 1 for those keywords for over a year and don't do any shady seo or linkbuilding practices.

A colleague is being displayed completely different SERPs - his are normal (close to what they've been the last few months). The SERPs I'm being displayed literally don't share a single site on page 1 with the previous SERPs that he's still getting displayed - every single site on pages 1 and 2 have dropped past page 15 for some keywords in what I'm seeing.

Anyone else experiencing the same?

[ichthyous]

My "domain authority" increased from 35 to 68 from May to December 2020 - all from real natural links, not one built or paid - and I was rewarded by a -50% demotion at the December core update.

I agree with this...I have the same or better DA as sites that are now outranking me, yet I have lost 40% of my top three ranking terms since mid-Feb.

[NickMNS]

I have the same or better DA as sites that are now outranking me, yet I have lost 40%

That is because DA is BS:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[mzb44]

That is because DA is BS:

Of course, this is what both my and I assume ichthyous' comment is referring to. That's exactly why I pointed out that my "domain authority" (I sincerely hate this term) increased from 35 to 68 and site still got core update demoted. That this third party metric is not a good predictor for high rankings and in no case is it a ranking factor (I mean obviously, but seemingly many think it is for some reason).

[westcoast]

Although I'm not seeing anything in the seo weather reports yet, our vertical is seeing massive volatility over the past hour.

Literally every return of the same query is yielding completely different results.

Some update just get triggered?

[yollo03]

While it may not be a good predictor most sites on the first and even second page have high DA. A demotion can be for many other reasons, content not relevant, mobile compatibility, increased competition and more. Same with high quality content BS if you remember.

[superclown2]

The end game is when Google will provide direct answers in most cases while perhaps linking (or better said cited below the direct answer) to a very few extremely authoritative sites in some cases. Everyone else will be completely purged.

This may be what Google wants. But is it what the public want?

I've been looking today at some of google's 'people also ask ' answers. Some of the information in there is frighteningly bad. What would you rather trust, a website that has pages of information by people who know what they are talking about, or something generated by an AI engine with a similar IQ to a bowl of vegetable soup? And will legislators put up with their populations being served nothing but Google's version of all the facts, and opinions, about everything?

Most people out there don't even know that proper search engines exist, let alone how to switch to them. When they find out it will be interesting to see what the result is.

[topaz]

It's gonna get worse for a lot of queries....

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3—or a future version of them.

[technologyreview.com...]

[mzb44]

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3—or a future version of them.

Yeah, this is what I was referencing as well in my post from the last page.

There is going to be a massive paradigm shift in regards to search and Google within the next 5 years or so. I really do think the whole idea of ranking based search and displaying 10 links (it's not really even 10 anymore) will completely go away. All this new AI, ML, GPT-3, etc. stuff will completely change everything. They are still somewhat rudimentary, but eventually they will get much better.

This reminds me of Game of Thrones (of all things lol) where all those kingdoms were squabbling against each other while the threat of complete annihilation was looming above everyone by the army of the dead that absolutely no one took serious.

It kinda feels the same here. We're getting frustrated about weekend updates and site rankings and happy about some meagre increases from now and then, while in a few years most of us here will most likely be completely purged and there might not even be "rankings" anymore in the form we have them today.

Interesting times. Nothing we can do to change these really. But just need to keep all these in mind and account for these for any long-term decisions we make. There's going to be some massive changes coming the next few years.

[yollo03]

There may be many different proposals, it does not mean to say Google will choose this direction. Things will change over time, yes, but it does not mean to say that such proposals will ever be implemented.

[samwest]

This whole mess is precisely why I never use Google search anymore. I switched everything over to DDG. I suggest we all do the same, rather than feed this beast exactly what it wants. If you still use Google search, GA, or any Gorg products, you should not be complaining. Google has become a real lemon.

[RedBar]

There's going to be some massive changes coming the next few years.

I sincerely hope so.

I've been SEOing since 1993, yes we were, and it has always been called SEO, never REO or Ranking Engine Optimisation.

I honestly cannot remember but who gave any company the right to acturally rank sites according to its algo without any consultation or suggestions? It was their algo, their results, their decision as to what was the best result according to them, no one else.Whej I worked with AV we did actually trial a "paid for" system which definitely turned into G AdWords!

Yahoo initially did it differently creating a directory along with DMOZ however neither, seemingly, could cope with the volumes of information and DMOZ, well, enough said about its internal politics but at one time it was an essential listing.

SEO should be REO for those who want to compete with each other for financial reasons / gains / sales / whatever, invariably the best results are never seen in Google because that's its decision and for a decision no one will ever explain to you.

What other decision-making system works shrouded in such mysterY with absolutely no questioning whatsoever to its validity.

If your elections or school exam results were given by a machine and you couldn't challenege them ... think about it..

[samwest]

@REDBAR - I will agree 100% with that last line. We are being told to trust machines run but greedy and quite frankly, unfair big tech corporate giants hell-bent on ruling the world. This must stop.

[yollo03]

My ranking continues to improve but it may be a bit late. The people ask for feature (I assume) is grabbing all the traffic. I was on that feature only 7 times, way to go, Impressions and ranking is much higher than a month ago but traffic is the same.

[christianz]

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3—or a future version of them.

At that point, hopefully, more and more countries will outlaw / tax to oblivion Google because it would suck out too much money from local businesses. Makes no sense to have foreign company be the gatekeeper for all commercial searches. (and non-commercial alike). There is simply no reason for countries to pay the "Google tax" and have this monstrosity as middleman between their customers and their businesses.

[dolcevita]

Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3—or a future version of them.
The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but how we interact with them.

The only thing that will possibly stop them on that path is Adsense. What are wthey going to do about it?
Adsense is still Google's biggest revenue. Implementing that system where 'users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly' with Adsense will not work in practice. It doesn't even seem compatible at all.

[RedBar]

Makes no sense to have foreign company be the gatekeeper for all commercial searches.

I can assure you that G has been almost useless for this for several years now, roughly going back to 2012-14.

I work in a global industry of co-operation, all our different sectors need to talk to each other and know what the other is doing at any specific time so that we can each be as efficient as possible.

Yes, it's a competitive commercial world BUT we make it work, Google doesn't, we've made it work for many, many years and its attempted interference will not change anything since, quite simply, they haven't a freakin' clue how the realworld operates.

Similar applies to MS Teams ... Anyone would think the entire world is created by computers, it is not!

[RedBar]

Has anyone seen better USA traffic levels?

Yesterday I was at 66% of average and late in the day the USA just retained its #1 position.

Today US traffic is already looking better with nearly 3 hours to run and at 67%.

UK sites are all performing extremely well at 160-200%.

[topaz]

No..USA traffic levels have never been worse.

My sites carry content that is of interest to millions of first and second-generation immigrants to the US and Canada from a certain part of the world, as well as those who did not migrate. Feels like whatever geotargeting they're doing in SERPs, Discover and News has decided that the content isn't relevant to those users in the US. Similiar (and clearly subpar) content from US sites (or sites that cover other US-centric topics) are being shown instead.

[mosxu]

I have huge problems buyer traffic has been reduced again but I am paying the same.

Singularity does not work

[ichthyous]

@redBar USA traffic was better today...it's 9pm and I am -11% compared to the last four Tuesdays (already much lower since mid-March). The 2pm pattern was in full effect today...at 2pm sharp traffic dropped 75% and stayed almost nil for four hours until 6pm. I am seeing this happening mostly on weekdays. @renatoviera has also seen the 2pm drop pattern.

[MtraX]

We're also seeing major drops across the board with slow recoveries. Mostly non-US sites. US-based clients have stayed the course.

[TalkativeEditorial]

This is a new one on me....did a search this morning (fairly generic, something I am personally looking for information on in the DIY niche).....the top result....was.....a forum? And the question wasn't answered there....it's from 2014.