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.

[yollo03]

It's like all the top positions change in specific hours. I think it's a test, I dont see it happening in all keywords. Obviously my traffic from that affiliate is being screwed every time it happens. It might also explains the sudden drop in traffic others are experiencing. I will make an educated guess that it's related to authority.

[EditorialGuy]

I've noticed that some page titles are blasts from the past. (Maybe this has been an ongoing problem?.) I just found a couple of my pages that rank #1 and #2 for [query] but have long-outdated SERP titles that include the year "2020."

[KaseyM]

Also indexing is all over the place today. May take the weekend off!

[Samsam1978]

Don't make yourself ill over it. Taking the weekend off sounds like a good idea.

[Hollywood]

I got buried with leads this past Mon. & Tue. Then piddled down, yesterday and today nothing.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 12:39 am (utc) on Jun 12, 2021]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to stay on topic [/edit]

[shadowlight]

Its disgusting what they are doing, everything about the SERPS now is designed to push down organic listings, increase clicks on ads and their own properties and reduce CTR on organic results. I have been experimenting with several pages changing content, titles, descriptions etc. I've noticed that once changes are made and they get around to changing the SERP, if things start picking up and more people start clicking through, next time I take a look they will have changed the description in the SERPs to something else until CTR reduces and the page goes back to not attracting many clicks. Sometimes it will be absolutely dead all day, the traffic is their but no clicks on anything (zombie traffic) then all of a sudden its like the flood gates open and its like your normal traffic is turned on for a little bit, then off again.

Some of the site descriptions in the SERPS for various web sites don't even make sense. Like the middle of a sentence on the page somewhere, totally out of context

I'm just glad that Governments and States are now taking notice, looking into it and doing something about it. Yes it may take years by which time, numerous online business will have gone extinct because of them but one thing is for sure change is certain. Its just a pity that for many it will be too late

[golderberger]

All your stories sound almost exact same like mine. Before I had stable traffic and stable sales - been selling my own things for 12 years (most of my traffic was organic and based on my product name put in google search). Now it looks pretty much like this, for 10 hours no sales. Then someone opens the traffic tap and I suddenly get 10 sales in 5 minutes and after that it is dead again.
This is disgusting.

[christianz]

This week could be exact repeat of last - spike in semrush sensor on Friday, initially no effect or slight recovery, then Saturday / Sunday it propagates and we see further traffic cuts.

[RedBar]

At least I seemingly have some consistency with PV numbers since revising my old daily average (-40%) to my new one as follows:

May 1-10 has been 106.9%

This week

Monday 132.7%
Tuesday 136.7%
Wednesday 115%
Thursday 130.7%
Friday 106.3%

Average 124.3%

We'll see what mext week brings.

Genuine business enquiries are normal, in fact several new potential good prospects.

[yollo03]

According to semrush my rankings improved a bit. It's not translating into more traffic though. I reported indexing issues, nothing was fixed. All my core web vitals are zero, no bad, no good, no need improvement. Big fat zero. I reported that too, nothing was changed.

I published new posts/pages, the keywords I got for all of them are less than 5 where two of keywords are mydomain and mydomain review. This is a 3k article. I thought that perhaps there is an issue with crawling the page but I couldnt find anything. Did anyone here experience or is experiencing something similar?

[samwest]

Dropping ever single day to less and less. New algo update should be called "Death by a thousand cuts".

[RedBar]

Today's traffic is at an almost standstill, after 18 hours of my Googleday I'm at 33%, heading for my lowest day of the year.

[christianz]

In Search Console Links page top 3 places are once again all auto generated keyword/image spam sites on expired domains. Not only do they appear in Search Console links section, they also appear in Google live index and most of them are also getting actual traffic from Google.

So Google is still ranking auto generated spam. The most blatantly obvious type of spam imaginable, that a 3 year old would be able to detect.

It is likely that they are also penalizing or associating with this spam real 10+ year old niche websites that are at the receiving end of millions of backlinks from these generated sites.

Otherwise it is hard to explain why my youngest sites with least backlinks, least content and least direct traffic are consistently doing better since December 2020 update.

This should be core competency of search engine - to detect bad quality or straight spam pages and not present them to the user. Yet Google seems to be getting worse at this - are they really losing the battle against spammers (Google AI vs spammer AI) or are they just not trying hard enough and only concentrating on ensuring that large publishers/YouTube etc are on top not caring about the rest?

[Hollywood]

I agree with Shadowlight and golderburger "Sometimes it will be absolutely dead all day, the traffic is there but no clicks on anything (zombie traffic) then all of a sudden its like the flood gates open and its like your normal traffic is turned on for a little bit, then off again."

[gatormark]

So if your server is behind cloudflare how google would know whether it is USA business or not?

For me, the change seem to start once I started logging in to my Google account from my new country regularly. Google changed my country of residence to Portugal and not too long after that my websites traffic greatly decreased. Coincidence? Maybe. By the way, my server location was always in the same location, Texas.

[mzb44]

Coincidence?

Yes.

Anyone can just load up a VPN and get a dedicated IP even and fake this. It would be ultra simple.

I believe this is overthinking it.

[KaseyM]

Rough weekend. Entertainment news niche

[superclown2]

Over the past fortnight my main keyphrase has risen from number 10 in the SERPs to number four. Since then clicks on it have fallen by 46%.

The reason? The pile of junk that Google has buried the organics under. Improving a website is now a complete waste of time.

Even Google's favoured few, who spend megabucks on advertising, must have seen their organic clicks plummet. They are feeding the beast that will eventually devour them.

[westcoast]

"In Search Console Links page top 3 places are once again all auto generated keyword/image spam sites on expired domains. Not only do they appear in Search Console links section, they also appear in Google live index and most of them are also getting actual traffic from Google."

Ughh Im sorry it has gotten you too.

As we speak, approximately 800 of the 1000 domains listed in Search Console External Inbound Links for our site are spam sites, most of them created this year, and increasing with every passing day. All of them are in the index (I estimate over 1 BILLION pages indexed from this single hacked-site cloaked-spam attack I have been stuck in), and the attack has had a (unprovable, but I am confident) massively negative affect on our site's rankings. There are at least 25,000 spam links with more added every day to our site from over 10,000 hacked domains. In google's eyes, our inbound link profile is almost entirely spam at this point because of the overwhelming nature of it.

There is NO WAY Google has an accurate or fair assessment of our inbound link profile with so much spam crap in the data. NO WAY. Garbage in, garbage out.

So no, Google does not have a handle on the spam problem. Not even in the slightest sense. They are absolutely stuffed to the the gills with this crap, and innocent, rule-following websites are getting steamrolled as bystander casualties.

[christianz]

cloaked-spam attack

What kind of cloaking is your spammer doing? For me these spam pages (not all) return 500 error when I visit them directly.

I also have plenty spam pages linking to me without cloaking. Many are using free blogspot subdomains.

We are in a lose-lose situation. If we use disavow file, we risk looking like we actually built these spam pages ourselves, plus we can't physically keep up with it. If we do nothing, 99% of our backlinks will be spam (its probably close to 90% already for me). How do you rank a page that has 99% of its backlinks from auto generated spam pages?

If a 15 year old site with millions of hits can have all of its vast history of backlinking entirely overwhelmed by spam in 1-2 years, this shows just how dire the webspam situation is. I was hoping Google would actually make some inroads into dealing with this problem, but June update makes it look like its actually getting worse and totally out of control.

It is surprising more people are not talking about this.

[superclown2]

I checked my stats this morning over the same period last year. In May of 2020 61% of my clicks came from mobile. This May it was 22.5%.

No doubt about the reason, it's the mass of googlespam on mobile, designed to keep visitors away from the organic results.

However I have discussed this with several friends, all of whom told me that they got caught by this abuse and the first couple of times they did indeed click on ads. However they now scroll straight past them and go to the organic results that they were looking for in the first place. I shall be very interested to see what future desktop/mobile splits there are.

I can't help wondering how those who buy ads feel about visitors being 'manipulated' into clicking on them. Those clicks can't be as valuable as one from someone who clicks on an ad intentionally.

I wonder what Google will do when this tactic no longer works. This is no way to run a business for the long term.

[Samsam1978]

I checked my stats this morning over the same period last year. In May of 2020 61% of my clicks came from mobile. This May it was 22.5%.

Since the day after this update, my server has been giving me 408s on mobile traffic only, not all users but about 10k people a day (out of 100k) cannot reach the site, loads about 8am EST and and a few here and there every hour. Check your logs.

I cannot find out why this is happening still. Nothing changed on server-side or website during that time. Not sure it has something to do with the core update. Noticed sites with good web vitals outranking me and I'm dropping. My site is feature heavy and beautiful design. I don't want to be a site with white pages and a logo I want to connect with people and make them feel I give them something special. This update is favoring sites that are boring.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 10:18 am (utc) on Jun 13, 2021]

[RedBar]

A brand new low Saturday at 47% of my new average however that is not the only story:

1. It was 27% of my old average.
2. It was my lowest-ever day by a huge margin since the combination of my two main global sites last September.

US traffic for big keywords continues to be directed towards US sites, only 3 non-US companies in the top 40 for the major keyword, one at #12 the othe two in the low 30s ... It is a clear and deliberate manipuation by G

Will your widget sector be next? This has now been going on for 3 full months.

[Samsam1978]

Will your widget sector be next? This has now been going on for 3 full months.

Yes, it's been 3 months of a downhill slope for me. Worse web stats and rankings in my 15 year history.

[RedBar]

@Samsam1978

In which country are you located / your server?

[gatormark]

My traffic has plummeted 30,000 page views in one week, but my number of ad clicks and revenue have remained consistent. Very strange numbers indeed.

[gatormark]

My traffic has plummeted 30,000 page views in one week, but my number of ad clicks and revenue have remained consistent. Very strange numbers indeed.

...additionally, my rankings have taken a jump. So, I cannot believe Adsense's current pageview numbers are accurate unless they've been artificially bloated in the past. Unfortunately, I have stopped my on-server analytics so I can't compare my page views to theirs.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Google is not your friend<<<<

Sorry but I just asked my google home hub if they were my friend and the reply was "I love being your friend, i'm the barney to your flintstone, yabba dabba do".... Draw your own conclusions...

[JesterMagic]

Saw a 14% decline yesterday. For some reason our site disappeared for a number of keywords over the last few days. This is on top of the decline we have already seen of about 10% this past month for an almost 20 year old site.

We have a large number of spammers in our niche now that have made headways and over the last few years pushing out legitimate publishers posting very poorly written content (written by people that you can tell English is not their native language). Lots of black hack SEO techniques.

Google also has been promoting large media companies that cover every topic under the sun who started covering our niche using poor out dated content. No way most of it should rank above websites dedicated to the topic.

And on top of it all we have to deal with Google's own Spam it inserts into the SERPS. What else would you call all that useless junk widgets and ads they push.

[samwest]

Huge amount of non authoritative web spam articles are now on page one. All have one goal in common, to sling a profuse amount of Gorg Ads. They don't sell anything, they just drone on mindlessly about some topic in hopes of rising to the top through keyword spam and the technical deficiencies of Google...and they have succeeded.