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.

[christianz]

Instead of tackling spam links by ignoring them.....by penalising them Google actually created a whole new and shiny spam industry that never existed before.

As I wrote earlier - penalizing spam links is the same as rewarding spam links. Its not one bit better - arguably, it is worse. The only thing they can do is ignore them.

[ichthyous]

I'm not seeing any recovery in my ranking, but the losses seem to have stopped. UK traffic has been way off for the last two days, -40% yesterday. USA was also off by -20%. The day starts out fine but then the hard clamp kicks in and kills traffic for the rest of the day. Yesterday I had a straight line of exactly 4 visits per hour for the entire middle of the day.

[ibb.co ]

This is making business impossible...I have not had one new inquiry this entire week...just an endless amount of spam and emails submitted on my website from Indian SEO services. I've begun to block their IP addresses.

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2021-06-25-at-9-58-29-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2021-06-25-at-9-58-29-AM hosted in ImgBB

[mzb44]

I'm seeing a slight decrease in traffic and keyword rankings on my main specialist-made / zero manual link building / zero made-for-guess-what-might-rank keyword spam site that correlates with the spam update.

Some keywords dropping from page 1 to page 10+. In their stead now page 1 for those kws is dominated by made-for-keyword sites, ex: (made-up examples, mods don't delete pls): besthowtoinstall2021antivirusxxx.biz , antivirus-best-toplist-rankings-new.co , .etc (but they do indeed look like these)

My site is ultra legit, zero spam, or as some mainstream Twitter SEOs would call it, "clearly it's pure-spam without even looking at it, and you're lying and/or not knowledgeable enough".

[iamlost]

Twitter SEOs ... love the term.

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little,
Talk a little, cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more...
—-Music Man

Apologies for off topic :)

[topaz]

Anyone noticing better visibility in Discover, News just before and during the rollout of an update? I observed that happening on the last core update and the spam update. Afterwards, the traffic tapers off as if the site is filtered from Discover and News, especially for US users.

[ichthyous]

Anyone noticing a lower backlink count in GSC? It just updated yesterday and the counts are lower from most domains.

[MayankParmar]

@topaz Yes, minor improvements. Started on June 21, but it's dead today. However, it could be due to high competition in my niche. Hopefully, improvements will continue next week.

[christianz]

I'm seeing a slight decrease in traffic and keyword rankings on my main specialist-made / zero manual link building / zero made-for-guess-what-might-rank keyword spam site that correlates with the spam update.

I am maybe also seeing small decrease but today is better than yesterday so overall its probably flat-ish.

Anyone noticing a lower backlink count in GSC? It just updated yesterday and the counts are lower from most domains.

No. Still absolutely drowning in fake website backlinks. No improvement whatsoever.

They are going to need another 10 "spam updates" before things are actually improving. The spam problem is astronomical right now.

[mhansen]

No position changes for us, including when I search from behind a proxy in a private session window. That said, the number of people coming from G to the website is off about 40%. #1 or featured snippet ranking on commercial intent or transactional queries that used to deliver 100 daily visits, now gets around 60 visits from the same queries. Google is scavenging the traffic for it's own use and either keeping those visitors inside it's walls or pressing more ads onto the users screen.

I realize this is tiring observation, but crowding of ads and Google owned widgets is making it much harder to get to any organic results on desktop and nearly impossible on mobile devices. You simply MUST be searching for an organic result if you plan to go to it (brand?). This holds true for any query with remote commercial intent.

Another change I noticed is that if you click on an Adwords Ads and return back to Google search, the ads still show, but now they have a "Visitors also asked" box in between the ads, pushing everything farther down the page.

[golderberger]

No position changes for us, including when I search from behind a proxy in a private session window. That said, the number of people coming from G to the website is off about 40%. #1 or featured snippet ranking on commercial intent or transactional queries that used to deliver 100 daily visits, now gets around 60 visits from the same queries. Google is scavenging the traffic for it's own use and either keeping those visitors inside it's walls or pressing more ads onto the users screen.

This +1, as multiple guys already reported (including me) they started controlling the traffic like a water tap

[mzb44]

@mhansen, yes, this seems to be the "normal" now.

Google is REALLY trying to anything that's in their power to prevent the searcher from clicking on an organic result. I think this is now obvious to anyone (who doesn't have an agenda).

Ads are also almost indistinguishable from organic now. Especially on mobile where organic links show favicons and the "Ad" label is intentionally placed in the same spot as the organic favicons are, essentially making ads indistinguishable.

I still remember last year they also wanted to push this on desktop and pretended that it's so that "brands could better showcase their identify" (lol). It didn't happen in the end because even the mainstream media covered this essentially commenting that this is obviously to scam searchers into clicking on ads.

Also, recently they updated the Google Ads platform so that it spams you with a warning that your account is "unoptimised" unless you change your bidding strategy to automatic (that essentially just results in higher auto bids / more spend and nothing else - it does not improve performance in almost any way). In think this might even legally be argued to be fraud / scam.

Why anyone would think that search updates would be immune to this mentality is beyond me? Like, why? Really. Why? Please explain if this is what you actually believe.

Is it so hard to believe that they would intentionally generate search results in such a way that would determine searchers to either click on ads instead or perform multiple searches increasing the chance of them clicking on ads?

Why would organic search results be in this magic unicorn land where everything is ethical and objective, while in every other area this company is bordering on committing fraud / scam? - They are clearly willing to mislead / scam their customers (i.e. advertisers) which is 1000x more serious than anything they could do in organic. So why would organic be this magic place of ethics, morality and objectivity?

[webdev29]

@mhansen @mhansen @golderberger glad to see that more and more people are reporting this "traffic control" phenomenon as anormal behavior from Google.

To share with you concretely the effect of the recent updates and more particularly of the one of June on an e-commerce that I own. We have gained visibility since May, however the traffic keeps declining over the last 3 months (CTR is the lowest in our history since 2013). Since the update of June, the e-commerce has gone from 20-25 orders / day to 3-5 orders.With the same or better positions, visibility is up and coverage is increasing. This is a total nonsense !

Generally speaking, we can conclude that the problems we have been experiencing recently are an abuse of Google's position. The inclusion of machine learning on a large scale since several months allows a large scale manipulation of the SERP in favor of GG, a simple correlation analysis between their financial results and SEO reports across Europe and the USA is enough to determine why...

[westcoast]

Anyone noticing a lower backlink count in GSC? It just updated yesterday and the counts are lower from most domains.

Indeed we have had a GSC update. Total # of backlinks to us is down 10%. (which is a good thing -- we have a massive number of spammy backlinks)

The "top 1000" linking domains shows a drop of about 10% in spam domains from the massive spam campaign we had been watching. 90% of our backlink spam domains remain. But, all of those losses of old hacked domains are taken up by new hacked domains.

[edited by: westcoast at 9:39 pm (utc) on Jun 25, 2021]

[westcoast]

An example of new hacked-domain spam that GoogleBot crawled and indexed just today (Jun 25):

Do google query site:jbb3333.* to see 23,000 pages that Google thought were wonderful enough to add to their index just this morning. Cached pages show the crawl date, the cloaking, and clicking through takes you to all manner of malware and crap.

It's just one of about 30 similar hacked domains that also were excitedly indexed by Google this morning post "spam update" (that I'm tracking -- it's probably sucking in thousands more daily). And yes, they are searchable via a number of long-tail queries, which is where spammers make their $$. It's not like only extremely specific strings will pull up these pages. There is enough scraped content in each spam page to allow for any number of keyword combinations in search. In Google's eyes they are quite legit.

Google has some work yet to do.

[christianz]

Google has some work yet to do.

As far as I am concerned, they haven't really done or improved anything with this "spam update". Nothing tangible. Maybe if you keep track of your incoming spam domains you can see single digit or 10% reduction. But they will soon be replaced with new ones.

I see no slowdown in *****.blogspot.com spam domains also. Approximately 20-30 new ones every day, and I am counting only those who actually get traffic (hit my images at least once).

Do they have actual people actually running and moderating blogspot or is it all automated, because I don't think they even realize that 99.9% of their *.blogspot.com blogs are fake spam pages.

[ichthyous]

Traffic turned off at 12pm sharp and stayed down until 4pm. UK traffic is down by 40%+ for a second day.

@ westcoast The decline in links I mentioned are not spam links...it's a decline in genuine backlinks that have been in place for years. I checked and they are still up at the source

[MayankParmar]

Regarding the spam update, nothing changed. Sites abusing expired domains are still ranking. In fact, one expired domain site is ranking #2 for vaccine comparison article outranking BBC and others. The article is written by "admin". Whatever happened to EAT?

[mzb44]

Whatever happened to EAT?

It's still there, it's just that E-A-T is actually domain authority (not the Moz metric!).

So, if the expired domain is strong enough, it can work just fine even if you put some garbage affiliate site on it.

[christianz]

Whatever happened to EAT?

EAT is not your friend. Unless you are large media megacorp.

All this spam ranking well in the SERPs is not because Google forgot about EAT (I wish they did!), but because they are unable to detect auto generated gibberish from real content.

[samwest]

I have not posted much lately, simply because it is pointless and hopeless. The traffic decline continues, yet position seems unchanged and in some cases improved. The real tell is the widening gap between impressions and clicks, and right now it's WIDE. Now what could be causing that? My guess is all the ad garbage along with Gorg distractions above the fold. If I were to go by empirical evidence, I'd surmise that less people are using Google these days...a LOT less...that or the AI has learned how to best redirect traffic to monetized Google interests. I'm leaning towards the latter. If you are suffering, you are not alone...meanwhile, Google is laughing all the way to the bank...at YOUR expense.

[ichthyous]

The traffic decline continues, yet position seems unchanged and in some cases improved. The real tell is the widening gap between impressions and clicks, and right now it's WIDE

I was posting this in April and May, when I noticed that a huge gap had opened. On June 1st impressions fell off a cliff, down 30% and the gap closed. Now clicks and impressions are more in line, but both much lower than before 6/1. I have also stopped bleeding terms, but traffic is still going lower and lower. Today is shockingly bad...USA is -40%, search is down 18% and direct is at 0...yes zero direct visits. I've ever seen this in 17 years. This means that my site must have vanished from image search.

At this point it's been getting worse and worse for months and it's highly unlikely to be reverted. I cannot devote more time to trying to recover...Google will not permit anyone to survive on its platform without paying through the nose, and their ads just bring in junk traffic. We are all looking at a very painful period of rebuilding our businesses to account for a much much lower level of referrals from Google. My inquiries are so low now that it's effectively zero leads from Google.

[ichthyous]

Keep an eye on your direct traffic today...has it gone down dramatically? Google has apparently rolled out an update to image search. Now only images from major news and media companies are ranking and have taken over completely. My direct traffic has gone to zero for the first time in 18 years. My smaller independent competitors are also mostly gone from image search. Can anyone else confirm this update?

[RedBar]

What a strange Saturday with my global traffic already at 133% giving me my second best day of the month.

All visitors look normal with the usual PVs and downloads, nothing excessive, simply a much busier day, mind you Friday was below average at 83% but I didn't expect a "catch-up" today!

[Samsam1978]

900 top 1-3 positions declined yesterday. Joke. Got spam websites above me without the keyword in title. Cannot work this whole thing out.

[christianz]

Traffic seems to have stabilized for me. The reduction due to June update/CWV/spamupdate is so far not too terrible - I could live with it.

I am down year-over-year thanks to the December 2020 update - did not recover, had a steady recovery trajectory until June update which whacked me somewhat and erased half of that recovery.

It is very disheartening when you add so much more content during a year and end result is actually less traffic, and this traffic goes to worthless copycat/scraper or even AI generated spam sites. Some of it also goes to big media sites which target my keywords with lame, instantly outdated articles. Some of it goes to YouTube and googlespam.

Almost every week I have someone thanking me for maintaining this website and telling how useful it is. Meanwhile Google "thinks" its borderline worthless spam and demotes it with every update since December 2020.

Maybe I shouldn't complain at all, since many here have experienced reductions way way worse than I have.

YoY I am down about 10% on my main site. My newer, less useful, less valuable, less reputable sites are hovering near all time highs - the newest and smallest with almost no backlinks is breaking records every month...

[webdev29]

In France I start to see pinterest going up in commercial results...
All I can hope is that the second part of the core update planned in July will solve the hecatomb created by the one in June.
I can only sympathize with those who are currently experiencing troubles, this update is an extreme violence for a large majority of small commercial web actors (in many niches). And do not think that you have done something wrong or that your site does not correspond to the expectations of Google, quite the contrary! Our beloved search engine simply leverages your content to its sole profile !

[gatormark]

Strange numbers. Up until Friday, June 11 my page views were consistently higher than last year's page views. On average about 15% higher than the previous year. On June 11, my pageviews dropped and have been about 13% fewer than last year's page views. Worse on the weekends. However, my clicks are about 40% higher than last year even with the drop. I know the COVID advertising numbers of last year are skewed, but the page views for my websites are changing in an abnormal fashion.

[RedBar]

Saturday's global site ended with 182.7% and only a few PVs short of my highest day and today is already at 99.7% with almost 11 hours to go.

What is noticeable is the "return" of international multi page views which have been lacking. USA PVs were well down Saturday, a long way behind both India and Italy and today, so far, behind Indonesia and India. Overal for the month the USA is still 17.2% down on its long-term average.

[ichthyous]

Yesterday was very odd indeed...direct traffic dropped to almost zero. Traffic to my home page was down 43% and my USA traffic was down 25%.

Today I start the day with direct traffic at more normal levels, but traffic to my home page is off by 70%! It's been dropping steadily for a month... Is anyone else experiencing this type of drop to their home page since the end of May? Is this an indication of some sort of penalty at play?

[ibb.co ]

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2021-06-27-at-9-48-36-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2021-06-27-at-9-48-36-AM hosted in ImgBB

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

There's only one thing anyone can be certain of at the moment and that is complete uncertainty!

The most evident thing to me in my sector is the spamming of the titlebar.

I'm seeing too many early noughties pages with titlebar keyword, on page image with keyword and very little else ... Plus doesn't G have the technology to determine whether an image is of a reasonable quality and size?

[yollo03]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery. Every time the website did recover it slid back down several days later. There is very little that can be done is your website is artificially being pressed down. Only you can do is fix any errors and improve site structure. Once the website will be reviewed again (could be tomorrow, next month, next year or 5 years) you have a small chance of recovering. The more pages the website has the higher the risk of some sort of a penalty.

[ichthyous]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery.

@Yollo Did you see traffic to your home page decline rapidly like this? The thing is that while overall traffic is lower since mid-March, most of the traffic seems to have moved to other interior pages on my site.

[golderberger]

In my case them main problem is traffic coming from countries like India, Mexico etc. (never had so much traffic from those countries and I was never interested in them, not my audience) instead of USA / Europe. My sales are 50% down for the past 5 weeks.

[ichthyous]

@goldberger Many of us are seeing this...My USA traffic is perpetually down while I am getting traffic from Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America. UK traffic swings wildly, Canada and Australia are
almost nil on any given day. Western Europe also much lower than earlier this year.

Another big problem is that traffic just shuts off for hours at various points during the day, and that is now a daily event. Today my traffic dropped at 1pm and has stayed at 2 visits per hour since then. My sales from new customers are zero for the last five weeks and it's been a week with not one email or call.

[yollo03]

@ichthyous yes, one interior page gets most of the traffic. The homepage hardly gets any organic traffic. I am beyond the point of declining rapidly, I hit rock bottom for the homepage. Until the automated penalty is lifted (that started in Dec core update) it's out of my hands. You just learn to accept it.

[golderberger]

@yollo03 i wouldn't say this is penalty per se, this is just Google maximizing its revenue and screwing up everybody else in the process (except the big corps)

[BushyTop]

An absolutely horrific weekend of conversions. This is the most severe strain on our income we've encountered in my tenure of this job.

[Martin Ice Web]

@BushyTop,

confirmed. Started Friday at noon, big drop (-70%) and it last till now.
And again google means that MFA sites ( mainly amazon ) are good and informative sites.

And very strange: the last 3 days before this update we got 1000s of hits to 3 specific sites in very short time from all over the world. It went back to normal traffic and hours later the same hits.

[Samsam1978]

Awful results in my history of doing this. Terrible 10 line articles by non-english writers outranking my 10k article. It's a joke that makes you want to give the whole thing up.

[mzb44]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery. Every time the website did recover it slid back down several days later. There is very little that can be done is your website is artificially being pressed down. Only you can do is fix any errors and improve site structure. Once the website will be reviewed again (could be tomorrow, next month, next year or 5 years) you have a small chance of recovering. The more pages the website has the higher the risk of some sort of a penalty.

Agree with everything said here.

I'm seeing exactly the same.

If you are hit by a core update your traffic gets "frozen" to the level after the update. Even if you double your number of pages after the update and traffic starts to increase due to the new content, G will at one point reduce the traffic of your pre-existing pages to equalise you back to the level it put you after the update.

You are at the mercy of the core updates that now are run every 6-7 months only (june-july is kinda the same update in two parts). You can now be stuck for years. This is harsher than penguin when it was still manually refreshed - except 99% of sites hit by penguin really were spammers. With these updates anyone can get hit.

[saladtosser]

Been seeing less and less traffic over the months while positions have remained stable, my webmaster tool graph is on a slow decent month on month which I suspect is down to the google distractions that are slowing filling the serps. I often wonder what the state of search would have been like today if Steve Jobs hadn't died or google never floated on the stock market, two alternative universes we will never know I guess ...

[Samsam1978]

Maybe a penalty attached to our backlink profiles and the amount of spam copycat sites that Google ignores. Google should know the source of original content but this all remains a mystery. I do think a penalty seeing what I do. The lack of transparency from them ruins companies.

[Martin Ice Web]

In our niche a site called picclick (de) took over the search. It is outranking amazon and ebay! It is full of pics, bad german and 100.000 links to amazon and ebay.
And it is ranking for every single item in our vertical.

Big deal google.

[yollo03]

It is defiantly a penalty, not a theory. I accepted there is nothing I can do to fix it until the next core update and there are no guarantees anything will budge. I am working on the structure of the website and domain authority, content is not the issue. The more pages you have the more problems you are likely to face. I have seen new websites with only 4 - 5 pages and poor backlinks profile outrank some solid domains. It is what it is, that's why I considered launching a new site and starting from scratch after July's core update.

[mzb44]

In our niche a site called <redacted> took over the search. It is outranking amazon and ebay! It is full of pics, bad german and 100.000 links to amazon and ebay.
And it is ranking for every single item in our vertical.

Big deal google.

ahahahah ahahahah.

It doesn't even have any content but just auto generated doorway pages with amazon affiliate links. Absolutely incredible.

Note the super massive boost the site received on June 3, the core update. For those who won't be able to see it later (post edited by mods) - that site is literally a collection of 100% machine generated affiliate links without any text content of any kind. Pure old-school classic link farm / doorway pages. It ranks for about 6 million (!) keywords in ahrefs and got an ultra massive boost after the June core update.

It also got a super massive boost during the May 2020 core update. I can't even stress enough the fact that this site is a collection of hundreds of thousands of auto-generated pure-spam doorway pages. They don't even have any content at all apart from affiliate links. It's too bad that the OP's post will probably be edited to remove the site name. Mods please make an exception here.

This is how every single page looks like (hundreds of thousands): [ibb.co...] (nothing there to identify the site, mods). Like, that's it. That's how the site looks like. There is nothing else. I did not crop out anything else.

Ahrefs stats: [ibb.co...]

Mega boost during may 2020 and june 2021 core updates: [ibb.co...]

Again, the entire site is 100% like the first screenshot. No other content at all. That's how the whole site across hundreds of thousands of pages looks like. Literally. And all of those are 100% affiliate links.

What is it that all of us are missing? I always believed that "secret blackhat SEO tricks Google doesn't want you to know about" are just a scam and no such things exist but it's blatantly obvious that they do. I'm wondering what the "trick" here is to rank those literal autogenerated contentless spam for absolutely everything it targets.

Incredible that this site received such massive boost after every core update? Makes you think what these cores updates are actually about. This whole site ranks solely thanks to core update boosts. It was nothing before. Extremely interesting. This is probably the most important takeaway here.

* It's too bad that your post will be edited/deleted as it mentions that site. I would really love here to be an exception and allow that post to stay, as it's an extremely pertinent example for what is going on these days.

[Martin Ice Web]

@mzb44, it feels like this sites get back linkpower from ebay and amazo while they are linking to them.
Pure ads site. I realy donīt know what google is about. This is not user friendly.

[yollo03]

I believe that the penalty might also be affecting core web vitals.

see mobile core web vitals: [ibb.co...]

No errors but no good urls either. Desktop used to be the same until one day last week it came back and now it's green. Mobile however is still zero since the end of May. I emailed in feedback a screenshot although I knew it might be pointless. New posts are being indexed but with no keywords and then after a short time they don't receive any impressions. There is no manual action, this is an automated penalty.

[RedBar]

@MIW

It's simply incredulous that G with all its supposed abilities can even list such a load of garbage and as for Joe Publix for using it , humanity has no chance!

[mzb44]

It's simply incredulous that G with all its supposed abilities can even list such a load of garbage and as for Joe Publix for using it , humanity has no chance!

Honestly, after seeing that site I do not have any hopes for future recovery of my sites. At least I'm not counting on it.

It's extremely shocking to see the super massive boosts that site received after every core update the last two years.

Meanwhile the site is a dictionary definition of this: [developers.google.com...]

Puts in question absolutely everything said by every single mainstream SEO about core updates.

I can already see the gears turning in some mainstream SEOs head trying to rationalise that how AcKcHuAlLy this is a site that somehow matches user intent or some other bs.

[Samsam1978]

@mzb44 OMG thanks for posting this. I'm at a loss with this update. My site has plummeted terribly to basically SPAM and new websites with no crediability. My new site that I checked on yesterday has rocketed, but I don't want to invest my time in a new site I want my site to haev the credit it deserves users email me daily saying how much they love my site that has now lost 50% of rankings. This is not how it is suppose to be. Give the old sites a bit of credit Google and sort the spam out.