Google Core Update May 23 - June 3, 2021

Google *finally* confirms 11 days later.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Yower, SEMRush is freaking out. A few of the other sensors seem to be spiking too.
This is hell. Never know what to do anymore, where to look...or what is actually evening happening.

[topaz]

Seems to be a indexing/ranking issue in News and Discover for new articles published in the last 36 hours or so. It's stale, except for the extremely high authority sites.

[yollo03]

Big stop yesterday, today I rebounded a bit, at least with ranking, not traffic, Traffic is still low since the core update in December. If you got hit you might rebound later today or tomorrow.

[samwest]

If our sites are all down in lockstep across a broad range of topics, that means this drop is planned by Gorg. If 90% of traffic suddenly disappears, where did it go? One guess...

After 20 years of evergreen content, Google deindexed 90% of our pages...from 1750 to 168. and core vitals suddenly decided our mobile pages are all too slow. Insanity by design.

[lammert]

(...) competitors; who may be years behind Google in terms of technology, but who can still produce vastly superior search results; are waiting in the wings

Simple answer: No.

I grew up in the time of Altavista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot and the likes. When Google came, users switched within months, because Google's results were superior. If Google's competitors were better now, users would have switched long ago. Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

[mzb44]

Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

Pretty much. Been saying this a few times here but seems like it's an unpopular opinion.

Us webmasters are an extremely small subset of users and our expectations are completely warped and biased simply because we have websites of our own we'd like ranked higher.

The vast majority of regular Google users are satisfied with Google's search results. In fact, I'm convinced the recent radical changes Google did are actually perfectly in line with what searchers actually would want to see more.

The fact we can't accept the above is entirely our own problem to deal with.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Disagree a bit. Personally speaking, what is so painful is the complete decimation of traffic, despite ranking well (featured snippets) and the contradiction of their own "best practice policies", particularly for things like Discover. Then when you try to engage genuinely, it's either ignored or you're told "not aware of anything being wrong" even if you share examples

[MayankParmar]

Indexing issues? 30 minutes and post is not yet indexed, but they've indexed a scrapper's post (they're grabbing articles from RSS). What a trash search engine.

[yollo03]

Whatever happened in the past 24 hours it's still going... I haven't seen a day like this for a while, it might continue on Monday as well

[nikkimc]

Specific keyword rankings that were boosted on 8th April that started slipping down from 22nd April and then were lost on May 1st are now recovered and held over the weekend (from May 21st). Those dates stand out in my data, is that the same for anyone else? It's like the SERP has gone back in time a month.

[superclown2]

Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

I put my my first site up in 1998 so I've seen quite a few come and go <G>

Google was like a breath of fresh air. It had a clean interface, uncluttered SERPs and it was way ahead of the rest in quality.

That was then and this is now.

The new Google interface is horrible with masses of googlespam, annoying videos and search results that move when you hover your mouse over what you want to click on thanks to popups; an invention of the devil. Try to search for what you want and they thwart you at every turn, showing you results based on 'authority' or a stack of obviously bought links rather than relevancy, whilst leading you into areas you never intended to go into.

Google are marketing geniuses. They gave away a first class browser, Chrome for free; it just happens to have their 'search' engine' as default, as well as advanced tracking systems. They nearly missed out on mobile but brought out a great OS and gave it away to all comers - subject to them being default search engine of course, which they now are on just about every browser and OS on the Internet after they cut deals with the owners (apart from MS of course, which has the dire Bing - hardly competition).

In the meanwhile G has become the bloated advertising agency it now is whilst other engines have quietly improved their offerings steadily. Sadly their marketing didn't keep pace. How do you spell Coil? Couil? couill Cewl? And who wants to type in 'duckduckgo.com' when they own the much easier duck.com? And did you see the laughable Bing 'howling' TV ads a few years ago? What were they all about?

Most people haven't a clue how to change from Google to a proper search engine. Even more don't know there are better options than G. However, like we now hoover our carpets with a Dyson or stick a Chinese bandaid on our cut finger we will eventually google something on Duck, Ecosia, or any other new entrant that comes along. Possibly one created by Apple to replace the billions they currently get from Google?

[christianz]

So far seems to be positive effect for my senior site, which typically got the short end of the stick since (and including) December update 2020. But I am not sure if this is meaningful or transitory bump.

[RedBar]

Saturday 52.4%
Sunday 49.6%
Normal weekend range 60-80%

Weekend US traffic -9%

Traffic was increasing steadily Monday to Thursday then dropped 41% Friday and today's not looking that healthy either.

Just checked G US SERPs for my industry's biggest keyword, no change.

Only one non-USA company at #11 in the top 20 blatantly manipulated results!

Pathetic G ... Bear in mind this is an Indian origin product, the USA does not process it, it simply buys it in, an utter farce especially with some of these US sites ranking at the top in UK, India etc :-((

[Cryogen]

My sales vanished since about 7 days ago. The traffic decreased a little, but not as much to explain the sudden disappearance of sales. E.g. this Sunday I was about 6% down compared to the previous Sunday. It looks like these new visitors are a completely different bunch now, much less likely to buy.

At the same time in search console I see a massive drop for my keywords (the aggregate orange line that shows the average of all keywords combined). But when I look at my best ranked keywords, there is little to no change. Very puzzling.

Could it be that G decided to start taking into account the site's core web vitals, and that that caused this change from 7 days ago? I have a significant number of pages that "needs improvement" in GSC for the desktop version of my site...

Has anybody experienced something like this? No big change in traffic, big decrease in aggregate keywords, and bad sales?

[JesterMagic]

Traffic is down for me as well 6% over the weekend and maybe 20% since the beginning of May. Site is almost 20 years old.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is way down since the beginning of last week, and especially this weekend. I am not seeing much of an improvement today, but I am seeing a reversion to the pattern before last week where traffic to my home page is way down again. My ranking is significantly down since all these changes started mid-Feb and especially since mid-March. I have had a fairly massive loss of top ranking terms and it shows no sign of recovering to any real degree.

I don't think Core Web Vitals has anything to do with this, but it has thrown most of my desktop pages to red again for "CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop)". When I run a Pagespeed test the pages all come back as 70+ on mobile or 95+ on desktop so it's rather annoying.

The patterns are changing on a daily basis...one day a sudden drop in organic search traffic, the next day search is normal but direct traffic drops. USA was very much down for weeks, but now it seems totally random how traffic from a country will drop off a cliff for a day or two, then come back.

I am still seeing a sharp upward step traffic pattern, followed by a drop to almost zero visits in the middle of the day. This traffic pattern is totally abnormal...a throttling upward of traffic early in the day, followed by no traffic for 1-3 hours sometimes. I have also noticed that the traffic is not converting...I just had my first new customer inquiry in five days.

[RedBar]

Wow, traffic almost at a standstill for my global site, after 17 hours 31.4%.

In contrast UK hotel site already at 103%.

Conclusion?

Google is no longer an independent global search engine, utterly useless!

[TalkativeEditorial]

Hardly a surprise, but there does not seem to be any consistency (at least from sites that I monitor) in terms of who is going up and down. And there certainly is ZERO application of the 'content policy' in my (personal) Google Discover feed. They certainly aren't favouring 'authority' sites over there. It wouldn't hurt so much if they actually applied those 'policies' consistently.

[yollo03]

This has nothing to do with core web vitals. I have no idea what is going on with this update. A real mess, traffic is almost brought to a halt. Blackhat appears to be thriving.

[renatovieira]

Saturday and sunday very and very high traffic. Today a huge cliff. Here we go again :-|

[KaseyM]

@renatovieira same boat

[ichthyous]

@renatoviera At least you had high traffic Sat and Sun...It's been awful for a solid week for me. Today my direct traffic is down 40% and search is down 8%. USA down 13%, Canada down 20%, Australia down 52%...UK is up 20% though

[mzb44]

Rollercoaster.

I am going up with this update or AI-made "auto-update".

This now means the last two weeks looked the following for me:

- down
- up
- down
- up

Talking here about major penalty/update level events.

Never seen Google this confused and it's been going on for months now. What are they trying to - seemingly unsuccessful - achieve and feel the need to reshuffle everything on a weekly basis? Where is all of this leading to?

A bit of transparency would be great in this case. Clearly something is up for some months now. They are doing something new or different. The usual "we are doing updates all the time" is not good enough in this specific situation.

[RedBar]

An "interesting" Monday with my global site at 77.8% however it was from where and when traffic happened.

It was looking like another disappointing multi single page views' day and then about 17.00 UK time (12.00 East Coast), multiple visitors and PVs until about 23.00 (18.00). Much of this traffic was from mid-eastern USA especially Florida, and then it slowed to how it had been before 17.00 and back to multiple single PVs.

In the past 12 hours I have had half the traffic I had in that 6 hours.

Needless to say this is nothing like my normal traffic ever used to be.

[TalkativeEditorial]

I don't think transparency or consistency is something we can expect from Google about rankings/updates any time in the near future.

[RedBar]

expect from Google about rankings/updates

All G does is pay lip service to the semblance of a search engine with its manipulated advertising platform ... the big brands love it since it's easier to cater for than tv / print and can be updated far more quickly and at lower cost.

Joe Public's been taken hook, line and sinker, freedom of choice, what?

[yollo03]

I got hit by the algorithm, ranking dropped hard. My impressions were sliced by 50%. Truly amazing, I am thinking about shutting the website down and starting from scratch. I am getting old errors again from 2020 and 2018, core web vitals dropped to 0 good urls although there is a glitch on google's end (it happened before).

[ichthyous]

SEMrush shows that my visibility halved today...the biggest plunge I have ever taken and competitors that were far below me for the last 6-7 years are now far above me. I am bleeding top ranking terms across the board. Despite this, traffic today is stronger than it has been in weeks.

The odd thing is that if I search for the terms using a non-chrome browser in private mode I find my site placing much higher for some searches than is being reported by the SERP trackers, and it seems stable.

[samwest]

Same boat as Yollo on the core vitals, suddenly 0 good pages. If that is feedback for something else, then this IS about core vitals...at least in part.. The drop started on May 1st and it just keeps getting worse. Zero income days while Gorg hauls in millions per hour. Income equality...right. What a mess. They could care less if they upset all the applecarts with these "updates"...as long as its not theirs. If all the traffic is gone, where did it go? Gorgs insatiable maw.

[Mark_A]

It might interest you to know that not only is organic traffic down this week, also Google Ads traffic is down for us, we didn't change anything but impressions and clicks are down from Monday.

[yollo03]

@Samwest, can you check if you lost any referring domains in the past 72 hours? I lost about 10 referring domains and that's when the drop happened. I have no idea if it's even related unless everyone that were hit can confirm they also lost a bunch of referring domains.

[mzb44]

@yollo03, I believe you are overthinking it. "Losing 10 referring domains", "DA increased by +2 points", etc.

You are reading way too much into these things and I believe all this is side tracking you from seeing the big picture.

I mean this with all the best intentions and definitely not to criticise you. You are focusing on the wrong things.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a widening gap between impressions and clicks on web search for three months running now:

[ibb.co ]

Also a very significant drop in Image Search, followed by a hard cap on image search clicks and impressions at the new lower level. Image traffic fell off a cliff on March 15th and is now clipped every day at a fixed amount it looks like:

[ibb.co ]

Anyone else seeing same?

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2021-05-26-at-10-33-12-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2021-05-26-at-10-33-12-AM hosted in ImgBB

[shadowlight]

Same boat as Yollo on the core vitals, suddenly 0 good pages. If that is feedback for something else, then this IS about core vitals...at least in part.. The drop started on May 1st and it just keeps getting worse. Zero income days while Gorg hauls in millions per hour. Income equality...right. What a mess. They could care less if they upset all the applecarts with these "updates"...as long as its not theirs. If all the traffic is gone, where did it go? Gorgs insatiable maw.

I don't think its about core vitals, ALL my pages are classes as good. My traffic hasnt dropped though, it has increased. Conversions and income have decreased though. Googles insatiable greed, that is what its all about these days.

[RedBar]

I seem to be heading for a fairly consistent -40% on my weekdays now.

My main drop in PVs is definitely the bigger money keyword pages which, I assume, are being creamed-off with ads and all the other stuff at the top as well as being removed from not only the top rankings but completely from the top 20 ... anything beyond that is fairly pointless for me.

Interestingly for medium /low money key phrases I still have many top 3 rankings and most of those PVs are still delivering their average traffic, therefore it is blatantly obvious G + ads + manipulation is the cause of my drop in traffic.

Fortunately my business model and customers are a lot more reliable than G's short-termism!

[penitentman]

My conclusions after analyzing a Google Update that began on May 17th for me

BACKGROUND:
law and government vertical
style- directory website
Mainly US traffic
ranks for thousands of long tail kws

I compared 6 days of search console data from before the update to 6 after the update.

I sorted the kw's by Impressions 5/19/21 - 5/24/21 and looked at all the kw's that had 0 impressions.

I searched google for dozens of these kws and the serps are a mess. What stuck out to me most is a 6 month old website on a url with very old domain authority. It was showing up page 1 for almost all my test queries out of nowhere. Moral of the story, this old tactic is still working. Buy any old URL in your vertical with authority, throw content on it quickly, and wait. I have seen this whole scenario post update before. After a while Google will catch it and roll back the update to correct this issue. But it's alarming that these updates are still falling for this initially.

Everyone please check your search console data in this same manner as I have and see if you notice the same scenario unfolding. Hopefully we have a big rollback on this one!

[ichthyous]

My main drop in PVs is definitely the bigger money keyword pages which, I assume, are being creamed-off with ads and all the other stuff at the top as well as being removed from not only the top rankings but completely from the top 20 ... anything beyond that is fairly pointless for me.

I am seeing the same thing, most of my main landing pages that brought in the most traffic have seen greatly reduced traffic since the mid-Feb update, then especially after March 15th. In that time I have lost 40% of my top-3 ranking terms, and most of those were the highest volume terms. I have seen only very large multi-million dollar ecomm sites take over the top ten spots across the board, OR articles about the subject matter, depending on what AI considers to be the intent. There has been one notable exception...a poorly designed website by someone that wasn't even a competitor very long ago. This cheap nothing of a site has steadily crawled to the top spot on many of my former high ranking terms while I continue to slip down week after week. I assume that is because this person writes articles in addition to having an ecomm site, and Google is absolutely favoring sites with long-form content. It's a wake up call for me.

[RedBar]

With a UK holiday weekend my two main UK sites are showing interesting stats v their predicted monthly traffic with 4+ full days to go:::

1. Hotel site 125%
2. Widget site 100%

Both these sites rank extremely well but are regionally focused and neither are ecom.

[christianz]

The May 22 boost was rolled back yesterday afternoon for all my sites. As if Google realized they made a mistake and accidentally increased traffic to organic websites instead of corporate ones :D

FYI: it wasn't a very big boost but it was noticeable.

[samwest]

-60% sales for the month.
My guess is if we all lost 60%, someone else must have gained 60%.

[superclown2]

The update seemed to have benefitted exact match domains but I may have detected a weakening of that this morning.

I'm sure this algo is very much a work in progress.

[RedBar]

UK sites fine yesterday and continuing so tody.

Main global site yesterday at 69.6% however USA demoted to #2 again by India with 35% more PVs.

Today global is looking like extremely low traffic from everywhere not just USA.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing the same thing @RedBar...traffic is way off this morning...it's 10:30am and my USA traffic is -70%. UK is -35%. It started to wind down the second half of the day yesterday. It's Memorial Day weekend in USA so people may be traveling, but the rest of the drop?

[saladtosser]

I have 5 friends who I do local sites for (tradesmen) all position #1-page #1 and since Google put the people also ask widget below maps/above organics, not one has had a single lead in a month, even at the height of the pandemic they were getting leads daily. I've told them to use adwords at this point!

[JesterMagic]

Yesterday saw a drop of 8% traffic when compared to same day last week (and last week we had experienced a slow drop of 10% since the beginning of the month).

[ichthyous]

@saladtosser My traffic improved considerably for Tuesday, Wed, and Thursday and I had leads those day. For the previous 8 days or so when traffic was much lower, nothing. Unfortunately I am seeing traffic reverting to the lower level, with traffic down across the board.

[saladtosser]

ichthyous + thanks for the feedback dude! Could be the sudden increase in the Indian variant in the UK spooking people into not having people in their homes but the "people also ask" has really been promoted to the top of all tradesmen serps in the UK this month. Do you have that widget over there in the USA directly below the 3 map pack?

As for my site, informational (pet niche) traffic is the lowest ever since google started putting a block of images at the top, then youtube videos, then "people also ask" then organics. I've managed to claw back 2% of traffic by working on FAQ daily to be included in the "people also ask" widget and been working on youtube as well (220 subscribers so far). Just to pull back some traffic as google now gives complete preference to youtube and "people also ask" organically in our niche.

[samwest]

In my vertical, the SERP layout has now become four spammy ads (where none existed prior to May 1st) all for the same ClickBank garbage (Teds WW), then Images for (search term), then below the fold, the #1 result, is me, yet no traffic. Depending upon the device and incognito mode, I am seeing at least half a dozen variations, and they churn daily. The dynamic layout display is clearly where the traffic steering is happening.

[mhansen]

We have a well established site that was effected on March 30/31st, which was the product review update if I recall. We have no product reviews on the website and it's a purely informational site with lead gen. Fairly well branded. No ads, as all leads are handled through our own homegrown distribution setup on the backend.

Traffic fell off about 20-25%, similar to what SEMR and other tools showed for us at the same time.

At some point yesterday (27th), it fell off again and when we'd usually be churning through 60-80 leads/day right now, we're lucky to see 8-10 per day.

GSC and other tools show very little change in search positions.

One thing of note: I was checking serps through a proxy and was only able to get 3 searches deep before Google blocked me, stating suspicious activity. That is the first time I've had that happen. During those 3 search results pages however, the layout was crazy bloated with various Google products and only showed 4-5 organic results per page, "people also asked" widgets between each organic result, etc.

Google is basically taking all this data we feed them like starving artists willing to do anything they state will "help us rank better", "help Google understand your site better" (talking metadata, schema, amp, etc) and walling off users from reaching us.

Happy Memorial day - It's time to go camping or something.

[webdev29]

here (FR/ecomm) its a carnage today. CTR is dropping a lot and we lost something like 50% of our organic trafic from last update then 25% more today... ranking is not moving a lot, or at least, nothing that Can explain a such trafic drop. clearly, that's not about core web vitals.

With AI implementation, Google is now clearly able to manipulate organic traffic (SEO) with commercial intent to the benefit of ADS (SEA).

If the result is catastrophic for business, either it is a bug or it is wanted and we are clearly facing a problem of monopoly abuse. Surprisingly, the commercial traffic collapses at the same time that Google concludes an agreement with shopify.... a coincidence? I don't believe it