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.

[mzb44]

'In essence, a search engine’s business model is a numbers game: for any page containing sponsored
links, on average, users will click on one or more of these links a certain percentage of the time. A
search engine can grow its revenues either by increasing this percentage (perhaps by lowering the
quality and relevance of its search results) or by increasing the average number of pages containing
ads that each user views per visit.'

I believe this is what core updates are meant do in part. Shuffle things up so much people are forced to perform multiple searches, increasing the chance of clicking on an ad.

Google is now #1 in search - realistically the only one, actually. The only other search engine is Bing but that search engine is just a side show of a larger corporation that doesn't consider search a priority - and in essence is just copying whatever Google is doing. DDG etc. don't count as they are just a skin of Bing. No one else is actually developing an in-house search engine from scratch.

Google reached a stage it does not need to optimise for user acquisition and user retention anymore (by improving quality for its own sake, even at the expense of revenue targets).

It's in a stage it now can optimise for revenue alone, as there is nowhere else to go for anyone.

It's the ever classic example of when a company becomes the sole provider - or near sole provider - of a good or service on the market and then it starts increasing prices and lowering production costs (i.e quality).

Core updates, people also ask, search features, 2-4 Youtube videos on every serp. All revenue optimisations and not user experience optimisations. Core updates are a major disruption and based on real world testing and experience they can affect perfectly legit and quality sites as well. Even if just 1% of these start doing Google Ads after each core update it means hundreds of millions in extra revenue. Even if just 1% of searchers perform an extra search now because of less relevant serps and click on an ad, it means hundreds of millions in extra revenue.

From a pure business perspective, this absolutely makes sense. Why anyone would believe this would never happen is beyond me. These decisions are made by business executives and not by search engineers. This is pure business 101.

[yollo03]

Many years ago (over +10 years) one of the google's internal documents leaked. Their goal at the time was to make people 'stupid' so they will be completely dependent on them. Whether it's calculations, books, information, search etc. Once they get people to rely on them for anything (smart homes?) they will achieve complete dominance (thus higher revenue).

Edit: If this is only a page experience update, all my core web vitals are below the minimum requirements. Whatever they pushed has nothing to do with page experience. Perhaps at a later stage it will be pushed but it is not what is being rolled out now.

[edited by: yollo03 at 8:35 am (utc) on Jun 19, 2021]

[christianz]

Core web vitals will have nearly no impact on your ranking, or if they do, it will be minor, you should not notice it.

Core web vitals is just a "hey, look over here" distraction, while they are stealing traffic with top ads, Googlespam, YouTube etc.

For me it seems like the June update (you can merge CWV update into this June update, why separate them?) is still rolling out, as I am seeing the same traffic patterns for 3rd week in a row. These patterns are getting tamer, however, so the update is not going as fast as it was in first week.

[ichthyous]

Another big shakeup this morning, I had a loss of 21 long-tail terms...down 50-70 spots in some cases! Is anyone else seeing this? All of these terms now have the same groups of stock photo and ecomm sites sitting at the top over and over. It could be a temporary shakeup, but soon there will be nothing left of my rankings at all.

I think it's clear that this is not only about domain authority...most of the sites now ranking above mine have a much lower DA than my site does....only perhaps those on page one (and not even some of those) have a higher authority. Something else is at play and I believe it to be a penalty of some sort.

[mzb44]

I think it's clear that this is not only about domain authority...most of the sites now ranking above mine have a much lower DA than my site does....only perhaps those on page one (and not even some of those) have a higher authority. Something else is at play and I believe it to be a penalty of some sort.

Of course it's not just about "domain authority" and especially not about any third tool's party numbers.

It matters what kind of links a site has.

You can have 1,000 links from irrelevant sites and the tools can show you have a DA of 70.
Another site can have 100 links of highly relevant ultra tier links, (think of new york times, etc.), have a DA of 30, but will almost always outrank site 1.

At least when I'm using the term "domain authority" or "high authority domains", personally I'm not referring to any tool scores but big mainstream sites that have hundreds of thousands of links from other extremely authoritative sites. Others on this forum call these "priority publishers". These are the sites that will outrank absolutely everybody on the spot even with extremely shallow and generic content.

[JesterMagic]

The only real losers here are smaller brands and genuine companies that can't churn out new bs sites and need to rely on their main branded site - these, if they get hit it often means game over.

Overall I agree with what you are saying but the real losers actually ends up being everyone. It means we all have to try and wade through all the crap content to find the gold.

It's sad what the internet has become in order for a business to try and survive. People who generate poor quality site are just in reality ripping people off. Either stealing time from the visitor or money from the advertiser. They are just hustlers.

It's sad Google is purely about profit now and hasn't devised a way to make search work. What they are doing now is not working and the serps are worse now than before.

[mzb44]

It's sad Google is purely about profit now and hasn't devised a way to make search work.

It's neither sad, not anything of that kind. This is the wrong way of looking at these things.

All companies are about profit and there's nothing wrong with that. But under normal conditions this is checked and tempered by competition. This currently does not apply in Google's case.

What they are doing now is not working and the serps are worse now than before.

Depends what frame of reference you are using.

If you think that Google's objective is to offer high-quality search results at all costs first and then perhaps make some money too, then yes, it's not working.

If you believe Google's objective is to make as much money as possible doing anything possible - including lowering serp quality - up to the point users would start leaving the platform*, then what they are doing is absolutely working.

*It turns out this point is very far away still, as there are kind of no real alternatives for anyone to leave.

It's really this simple.

[ichthyous]

It matters what kind of links a site has.You can have 1,000 links from irrelevant sites and the tools can show you have a DA of 70. Another site can have 100 links of highly relevant ultra tier links, (think of new york times, etc.), have a DA of 30, but will almost always outrank site 1.

@mzb44 What I am saying is that now you can have 1000 links from highly relevant sites with a very high DA and those links are now being discounted. Most of my links are from sites in the same niche as mine, so highly relevant. The ones that were spammy or scraper links dropped out of my GSC panel earlier this year almost completely...not sure if that because of the disavowal file I uploaded or if Google finally found a way on its own.

What I suspect is going on is that if you have a lot of inbound links from the same domain they are being discounted, or even worse, penalized. I have thousands of Inbound links from about six different sites, all with a much higher DA than mine...they are without a doubt authority sites. Yet from March 15th until now all I have done is bleed my top ranking terms...long-tail, short tail, high volume and low volume...a march downward for months without any sign of stopping. I have never had a penalty in the 18 years I've had this site up. So this is either a major change in how links are being valued or a dialing up of the link spam filters.

[saladtosser]

>>>So this is either a major change in how links are being valued or a dialing up of the link spam filters.<<<

I've felt this about the last so called core updates, i personally think "core update" is just another name for "penguin update".....esp since they totally haven't mentioned the word "penguin" since they started mentioning "core updates", if they said penguin you would know its about links and they don't want you to know what "core updates" target. Just my opinion after 22 years of this game!

[gatormark]

You guys pay way much attention to these core updates than probably is necessary.

I’ve been in this game for over 15 years and one thing I know is that it is a losing proposition to focus too much on what Google is doing.

I have had ups and downs over the years. I’ve been impacted negatively in a significant way by core updates and have benefited from other core updates. I am at the point where I don’t spend any time worrying about what Google is doing. That is time taken away from making my websites better.

I focus on a few things now. Number one, I try to make my website as fast as possible. I remove any advertising providers, aside from Adsense, that do not provide super fast ad loading. I try to build as many features as possible into my sites. I promote my sites on social media and by using Google Ads. I never stop advertising.

The biggest hit I ever took in a Google core update was a few months after I added new advertising providers that greatly slowed down my primary website. There was another factor that I think may have impacted it, but it’s merely speculation so I won’t mention it. Anyway, I do think google penalizes you when you use other advertising providers that compromise website speed. This, of course, is an assumption based on observation and I have no numbers to back this up.

In my niche, I am beginning to see some of the old school players moving back up in the website rankings. I don’t know why this is the case, and frankly I don’t care.

Just focus on making your websites better and let the chips fall where they may. Think LONG TERM!

[mosxu]

The bots are scamming me to death right now.

Wonder where this this hate is coming from?

[christianz]

I added new advertising providers that greatly slowed down my primary website. There was another factor that I think may have impacted it, but it’s merely speculation so I won’t mention it. Anyway, I do think google penalizes you when you use other advertising providers that compromise website speed. This, of course, is an assumption based on observation and I have no numbers to back this up.

I have similar experience, but AdSense just doesn't pay enough, even with the traffic boost that Google may be giving sites that use AdSense. And AdSense itself completely ruins the site speed benchmarks anyway.

I don't understand why ads have to be a factor in site speed at all. In ideal world it should be possible to load them completely in the background. All sticky ads, popups don't need to contribute to site load speed at all (they float above layout), and units that fit inside the layout should be also initially rendered as white boxes with fixed height and loaded in background.

Why ad providers are not implementing it this way is beyond me. Why everything happens in the "main thread"... Perhaps JS needs better parallelism.

[yollo03]

I paid a lot of attention to speed and that didn't help. I did have a peek to my competitors ranking, not my own. Massive shuffling. A website that got hit hard by prior updates climbed all the way to the top again (the core web vitals is pure crap, over 7.5s for LCP but that didnt affect them). This has nothing to do with authority either.

[ichthyous]

Has anyone else seen big drops to their home page traffic recently? Since May 25th my home page has received 20-50+% less traffic than it used to get, and from June 16th it's dropping to almost nothing. Today home page traffic is down 70%, overall search is down 40%, and direct is down 26% at 11am...almost all of that drop is lower USA traffic. This is on a day where I gained back 14 top ten terms after losing 21 yesterday...there is a much weaker correlation between ranking and traffic these days.

[RedBar]

Extremely low traffic to global site today, Sunday ... Father's Day effect?

[golderberger]

same here, every weekend looks that way since last month

[MayankParmar]

Found a network of sites operating on expired domains.

One domain has over 10M views, another has 6M and another 1.6M, according to Semrush. These sites had less than 100K traffic before May.

They're ranking on the first page of Google for different topics: Games for Android, Windows, education, health, employment. Their COVID-related article comparing vaccines has outranked BBC and it's written by "admin".

These sites are using simple WordPress themes and they're also doing keyword stuffing

But content is the king, right?

[RedBar]

using simple WordPress themes

I do realise that WP is the most used template however G has been obsessed for years with ranking WP highly, I've never understood why?

[golderberger]

I do realise that WP is the most used template however G has been obsessed for years with ranking WP highly, I've never understood why?

probably because they want everything standardized and wp is some sort of standard

[KaseyM]

Really struggling to know what's going on. It doesn't help I think analytics real time is/was delayed?

Search results are a bit of a mess though.

[ichthyous]

Traffic to my home page is 70% lower this weekend. Some of my other landing pages which were down for weeks fared much better this weekend. I can only consider such a massive drop in home page traffic to be some sort of penalty in action as I have never seen these kinds of low levels in 18 years. I doubt highly its because of father's day.

[gatormark]

@ichthyous

What is the niche, if you don’t mind me asking? You don’t have to be specific.

[ichthyous]

@gatormark The niche would be considered "arts and entertainment"...it's basically a portfolio site with thousands of artworks. There are no prices shown and no ability to purchase on the site, only to inquire.

[golderberger]

another day and almost no traffic, all my pages are green (up to 98%) in terms of performance, this makes no sense at all

[yollo03]

This wasn't a performance update. Whatever they rolled out triggered big movements in my niche. Sites with very poor web vitals and speed climbed up to the first page. There is a reason why they said it will be a slow release, they are rolling other things in the meantime.

[KaseyM]

More movements yesterday into today? Traffic off a cliff!

[JesterMagic]

Experienced lower traffic on Fathers Day as well. In previous years typically traffic is lower on Fathers Day but not as much as it was yesterday.

Could be a Covid thing and people are out celebrating the holiday more since more things are open up in North America now.

Some of my keywords are still bouncing around a bit as well so most likely lower traffic is part of the Google dance and the flurry of large updates we are seeing lately..

[Samsam1978]

I've got a new website now appearing above me again written by foreign people, and also awful foreign sites with terrible English outranking my very long and informative articles.

**********I hope this update is rolled back the quality for the user is abysmal. *************

I have read the guidelines by google and it says if my content is better etc it should rank higher that is simply not what I am seeing.

**********Such a shame we cannot submit our URLs and examples of poor content ranking higher.***********

No transparency whatsoever!

[gatormark]

@Samsam1978

When you talk about “foreign people” you might want to give a little more context to your niche and target audience. Half the people in this group are “foreign” from a USA perspective. I am assuming you from the United States since we are typically the only ones that make those type of statements.

[NickMNS]

This is the strangest update I have ever seen.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
[imgur.com...]

What the graph shows is that from June 2nd my impressions tanked, by 34% (purple line) but clicks remained somewhat steady off less than 6% (blue line). But what is really weird is that average position also tanked (orange line) while CTR rose sharply (green line).

Typically one would expect that when impressions drop, the impression that remain would be those for which the site already had a high rank. Thus, average position should go up with a drop in impressions. And, as average position drops one would expect CTR to drop as well, as the the website would appear further down in the SERPs and be less likely to be clicked.

I really don't know what to make of this, I assume that at some point in the future the average position and CTR values should revert back to normal but will this result from a drop in clicks.

The one positive from this graph is that it appear that the impact from the update was short lived it seems to have lasted from June 2nd to the 12th and the trend appears flat moving forward.

[BushyTop]

@NickMNS we've seen something similar in regards to the clicks vs impressions.

[Cryogen]

I've been in this affiliate game since 2009 and I've seen many updates, shakeups and ups and downs... but this one from May 25th, and also the additional tweaks that they implemented in June, is the one that promises to do my business in. Unless G changes something and reverts at least some aspects of this update, that is. It decreased my traffic by about 27%, but this decrease caused almost complete absence of sales.

Strangely enough, on May 25th I see a sharp decline in my bounce rate, from 54% to about 30%, which would be great if those new visitors actually bought something. The sharp decline in the bounce rate, and increase in pages per session (from 3 to 5.5) on that date, along with a sharp decline in sales can only be explained by some kind of manipulation with the visitors by the almighty G. I just don't understand why they feel the need to take every little bit of productive traffic from us and leave us with zombies that never buy anything. Is that the way to make internet better?

I do have about one third of my pages that are orange in CWV ("need improvement"), but after reading that several other webmasters have all their pages green and still experience big decreases in traffic and sales, I'm not sure anymore that CWV alone can improve anything.

[yollo03]

Why people insist there was a page experience update rollout last week? Google said it will take until August. Below is a screenshot of the web vitals of a website (one of my competitors) that surged from last week's update. They rank for almost all of the high-volume keywords in the top 3:

[ibb.co...]

Almost all of their pages are similar to the screenshot.

The update that was rolled had nothing to do with page experience. it looks like a revision from one of the past updates as they were demoted several months ago and now they are back.

[mzb44]

Even if the full might of the page experience update would be released tomorrow most likely you would not see any difference.

It has been explained several times that at most this would be a tie-breaker. Like, if everything else is equal between two sites then CWV score may decide the final position of the two sites.

What this means is that if everything else is not equal between two or more sites, then overall CVW scores will not influence ranking.

In other words, you can have bad CWV scores but if your other scores Google measures are higher than those of other competing sites, then you will rank higher than those sites. Even if those other sites have green CWV everywhere and you do not.

Google has been very explicit about this.

Continually watching the rankings and checking other sites' CWV will be a huge waste of your time. It will NOT be the reason why they rank higher/lower than you, in pretty much almost every single case.

[ichthyous]

It decreased my traffic by about 27%, but this decrease caused almost complete absence of sales.

@Cryogen My traffic went off a cliff on May 26th and is down 46% with a constant downward trend since then. I am also seeing almost zero new business, but Google has been killing that off since the March 15th update. Do not count on this being reverted, this is the plan...Google does not care if it destroys anyone's business as long as profits trend upward.

What kills me is that I am running adwords ads now and they are barely one half step above scam. Totally useless crap traffic from clicks on ads that hit the first page and go. I've just had six in a row that didn't look at anything on the site. By my estimate I have to spend about $100 before I see the first inquiry about a sale, not the actual sale. At that rate it makes no sense to pay for ads and to just forget Google entirely and try to market elsewhere.

[mhansen]

Re: Core Vitals and Page Experience.

In my experience in comparing many websites CWV to our own, sites that I would consider garbage usually have one thing in common. The top section of the insights reporting shows "The Chrome user experience report does not have enough real-world data for this page" (Something to that effect).

Could it be that the large amounts of junk we see rising to the top is due to quality sites HAVING enough data, and Google using this as a way to actually measure the data on these sites with not enough information, versus blanket excluding them from click-worthy ranking in SERP's?

[christianz]

Noup. I think CWV/Page experience is not worth even talking about since there are massive African elephants in the room - things like auto generated spam pages ranking with nonsensical text and hotlinked images. And things like Google actually counting and factoring in backlinks from such pages (maybe even with negative consequences).

Basically their current algos are wide open for manipulation with classic black hat methods already discussed in this forum plenty of times.

[Abaros]

Is Google really investing millions in Core Vitals simply for the "tiebreaker" of Web pages? It seems to me that they spend too many resources for such a simple task.

My theory is that Google is preparing a replacement for the practically dead AMP.

And the new invention Google has to continue controlling traffic from their servers is SXG (Signed Exchanges). Keep in mind that the DNS request is already 300ms. or so, which you save by using SXG and serving the pages from Google's cache.

In short Core Vitals will have an impact where before Google forced to have AMP, for the rest of things I think it will be irrelevant.

[developers.google.com...]

developers.google.com More time, tools, and details on the page experience update     Google Search Central Blog     Google for Developers

[Samsam1978]

What I am seeing is new sites ranking well, they might have taken domain age off the ranking criteria and replaced with the core vitals. Just a thought. Ive had to reduce my images :-( my users love these.

[Samsam1978]

@gatormark

I mean people whose first language is not English are appearing above me with poorly written English.

[Samsam1978]

@mzb44


The famous search person was in the private forum with me back in 2000, I should have done SEO tbh I would be richer lol I bet they are hoping that Google will go manual on their sites. Interesting, I will look at how they are doing.

Update: Ha -Yes I see it! Down curve. Just goes to show that this update is totally messed up. I do hope they fix in. You would think he would be shouting out how messed up it is, but he keeps quiet. I hope a reverse is coming because we cannot have a search engine giving out this rubbish for long.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 8:57 pm (utc) on Jun 21, 2021]

[westcoast]

"Noup. I think CWV/Page experience is not worth even talking about since there are massive African elephants in the room - things like auto generated spam pages ranking with nonsensical text and hotlinked images. And things like Google actually counting and factoring in backlinks from such pages (maybe even with negative consequences)."

THIS. A thousand times THIS.

The hacked/cloaked domain spam situation and the penalties on legitimate websites caught up in backlink spam are the two massive elephants in the room. I have been doing this for over 20 years, and while spam has always been a problem, it has turned into an existential issue over the past 8 months or so for a number of legitimate websites.

Myself and others have been watching this issue become bigger and bigger by the day, and it's getting to the point where it will soon become a mainstream topic of conversation -- some niches are absolutely FLOODED with this spam.

It is my contention that the backlink profiles of long running, legitimate websites are getting destroyed by this tsunami of spammy backlinks and resulting in huge losses for legitimate operators. At best spammy backlink profiles are simply being ignored (removing the positive effect of legitimate backlinks), and at worst resulting in domain-level algorithmic penalties.

[edited by: westcoast at 9:02 pm (utc) on Jun 21, 2021]

[Samsam1978]

There is SOOOOO much more to this than Core Web Vitals. They are removed the "age" related ranking I am sure. Sites that should be in the sandbox are appearing.

[Samsam1978]

@westcoast

Can you just explain a bit more what you are seeing. New sites spam linking but actually now getting somewhere?

[westcoast]

"Can you just explain a bit more what you are seeing. New sites spam linking but actually now getting somewhere?"

Hundreds of thousands of hacked & expired domains, taken over by malware, which serve up cloaked pages to Googlebot. Google is not detecting cloaking properly, and these pages are making it into the index. Billions of them. Those pages in turn are generating billions of spammy backlinks which are getting sucked into GSC.

Evidence:

This is just ONE of the ongoing spam campaigns that Google is not detecting or handling correctly. Do these queries. Every result is a cloaked/hacked page. View the cache in google to verify the cloaking:

"see full list on msn" (use exact match quotes)
"see full list on buzzfeed"

In fact, this spam is getting so extensive that there's a reasonable chance if you put your site name in there you will find some spam directed at you too (from this one campaign! there are many others out there!). Some niches are much worse than others. "see full list on <your site name>" (use the quotes)

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

[Samsam1978]

@Westcoast

"see full list on <your site name>"

Yes, I see loads of spam links to my site! I'm shocked. I also seen sites stealing my content and appearing in the search results. I contacted Google and they asked for screenshots when they literally scraped my website and I do not have time to take 15k screenshots!. Your right Google are struggling with the original source because I think now they must have done something to remove the authority of older sites.

It would be useful maybe to get a list together of all the adverse things we have seen with this update.

[yollo03]

If your mobile traffic is down recently, google app crashed on android devices. Apparently the latest app update caused the crash. [androidauthority.com...]

www.androidauthority.com Is your Google app crashing? You're not alone. (Updated: Fix incoming) Is the Google app crashing on your phone? You are not alone. An update to the app seems to be causing the problem. Here's how you can fix it.

[mzb44]

Is Google really investing millions in Core Vitals simply for the "tiebreaker" of Web pages?

Probably.

I mean, which are the sites that almost never pass CWV? And here I mean not just not pass but have ultra atrocious scores. It's pretty much all the big mainstream sites such as the big news sites etc. that Google is now pushing everywhere on anything possible.

Do you think they would implement an update that would single handedly demote all these sites and essentially undo everything Google did the last 2-4 years with every core update?

Remember they initially also wanted to launch a user experience label in search results that would have shown searchers which sites have good page experience and which don't. Unsurprisingly, this idea seems to have been abandoned. It would have looked awkward to see pretty much every top 5 or so on almost all serps have a label that says they are "bad user experience". Such a label would have probably directed CTR away from those big mainstream sites to smaller niche sites, something that goes contrary to current Google objectives.

The above reasoning is why I really believe CWV and page experience will never be more than a tie-breaker. It would hurt exactly those sites Google tries really hard to boost and would benefit the ones Google is trying to demote.

[edited by: mzb44 at 7:57 am (utc) on Jun 22, 2021]

[BushyTop]

I personally place myself on the side of the fence that disbelieves that CWV will just be a tie breaker too. Far too much build up for that and its tied into everything now.

[yollo03]

If I remember correctly they did say that in the (far in my opinion) future it will be a more dominant ranking factor, not at the beginning. Any future strategies can change, it might get dismissed next year.