Google Core Update May 23 - June 3, 2021 - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

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Google Core Update May 23 - June 3, 2021

Google finally confirms 11 days later.

TalkativeEditorial

5:06 pm on May 22, 2021 (gmt 0)

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.

System

4:41 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

redhat

The following 5 messages were cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5039717.htm [webmasterworld.com]
2:50 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (utc -5)

renatovieira

7:43 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

And as usual, G cut off my traffic right at 2pm. This was constant a few months ago, it's gone, but it's coming back again.

ichthyous

8:25 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

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.

Only 10%? I've lost fifty percent since mid March so you're actually lucky

ichthyous

8:41 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

I see somewhat of a recovery from the huge losses of the last two weeks, but traffic is still much lower than before all this started and is exhibiting a much spikier pattern of highs and lows. English language traffic continues to be hit much more than anything else. This has killed my conversions completely, I've had one new inquiry in ten days... Wtf Google!

Samsam1978

10:25 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

Today noticed articles of 200 words outranking my 4k 10 year articles. Even searching personally for something to buy earlier I could not find what I was looking for. Why force the whole web design to be a logo and white background with no images. Those are all the sites I am seeing in places 1-5 or large media sites. Last update in Dec 2020 all the media sites complained so I guess large media corps have benefited from taking the traffic away from nice sites - they are not making any noise this time around.

westcoast

10:49 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (gmt 0)

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

The spammer that is affecting our site is using cloaking techniques on over 10,000+ hacked domains (for a total of over ONE BILLION indexed pages!) that ought to have been eradicated about 20 years ago. It's a disgrace. There are over a BILLION pages that I'm tracking in this one that have exactly the same code on them:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <title>Loading...</title> <script>window.location.href = "/click.php";</script> </head> <body> <h1>Loading...</h1> </body></html>

If googlebot hits the page, click.php sends all sorts of scraped (from multiple sources) and re-spun keyword rich text to Google, including links to my site and others in order to try to make them look more legit. It doesn't even appear to be a negative-SEO attempt. It's just a side-effect of the thousands of links they are creating to all parts of my site. They use the domains to create all sorts of keyword rich sub-domains. So hackedsite.net gets indexed as free-money.hackedsite.net and global-travel.hackedsite.net etc etc.. So they leverage the hacked domains to generate millions of sub-domains.

If a non-googlebot user hits the page (indexed so idiotically in Google), they get redirected to ads.

This is the same extremely-basic cloaking that was used back in 1999. There is no reason it should exist today.

If they can't detect such obvious and blatant stuff there is no way they have a hope against more sophisticated spam. Clearly spam on google is **completely** out of control.

BushyTop

8:47 am on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

We've taken another hit this morning on some really high value terms, however our page experience report has gone from 5.2% good URLs with impressions to 28.5%....

JustSEO

10:35 am on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

Well, for the first time in a long while, this update managed to boost all of my websites across the board.

mzb44

10:37 am on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

The below is a bit long, but I promise you it's definitely worth the read. Stay with me.

re: June 2021 Google core update and core updates in general.

So, a few days ago I got into kind of an "argument" on Twitter with an extremely famous celebrity SEO. I will not give names, all I'm going to say it's an extremely famous mainstream person, someone known for reviewing google patents.

This person made the claim on Twitter that "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates".

To this, I replied that this is incorrect and I can provide examples to prove it. That person then went on to accuse me of wanting him to evaluate my sites for free and asking him to "clean up after me" for free after I have gotten those sites hit. He claimed that I must be wrong and certainly the sites I'm looking at "do not pass sufficient quality guidelines".

No amount of explaining helped to convince him they weren't my sites and I just wanted to send examples. The exchange ended by that person accusing me of threatening him (!). Wow. I was extremely shocked and I stoped the conversation right then and there fearing that this could seriously escalate.

I have then figured out the reason for this reaction. That celebrity and famous SEOer's own SEO agency website & blog has been negatively hit at least once, and possibility again now in June by a Google core update.

I am talking here about an extremely famous mainstream white hat specialist who always appears top 3 in any "biggest industry experts" lists, speaks at every conference, etc. etc.

This person claims "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates" while his own website was hit by one, possibly two, Google core updates. Awkward.

Also, do you know who else is getting consistently hit by Google core updates? There is a very famous person who focuses on E-A-T and google core update analysis and recovery. That person's site and blog is even linked to from Google's 2019 blog post about core updates and appears as an official Google recommendation for people seeking guidance about core update recoveries and E-A-T. I think most will know who I'm referencing here.

Here, it's even worse. That person's site is now probably being hit for the 4th time by a google core update.

I consider both these people to be genuine experts who provide some of the most advanced and most unique content in their respective fields. Real top of the top industry specialists.
I consider both of these sites to be of ultra high quality. Probably some of the best and most advanced industry blogs.

I do not consider these people to be bad at SEO. The contrary. I do not believe their sites are getting hit because they do a bad job.

Yet, both get consistently demoted by google core updates. Despite this, both these famous SEO personalities continue to push the "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates" narrative.

So, what does this tell about core updates in general? It's clear to me anyone can get hit by these updates and just having a high-quality site and content is NOT a guarantee for not getting hit.

Yet, a lot of famous SEO celebrities and industry experts ignore this aspect or even outright spread misinformation and false narratives that "quality sites cannot be hit", while their own websites are getting hit by core updates.

If people who are truly and genuinely real experts (and linked to even from Google.com blog posts about core updates!) also have their sites consistently hit by core updates and aren't successful at recovering them, then what can you or me expect?

golderberger

11:28 am on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

Since the weekend my traffic stays down, same for sales. Anyone here getting strange (useless in terms of conversion) traffic from India and alike countries?

gatormark

1:38 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

@JustSEO

I was positively affected too by this core update. The first time in a few years. One of my main keywords which had been consistently 1 or 2 for years until it dropped to 12 in the December 2017 update, is now back up to 5 overnight. Many other lesser keywords have gone to 1.

ichthyous

2:29 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

Traffic seems to be stabilizing and recovering slightly, albeit at a lower level. My USA traffic is still off by about 15%, GSC impressions are a straight line down almost 30% from June 1st-13th, and I am seeing the 9am drop-off-a-cliff in traffic reappearing after taking the weekend off.

Large corporate sites have completely taken over the top 10-12 spots in my niche. Add in the Amazon and Ebay listings, and Pinterest crap and whammo...no room until the middle of page two. The large corporations will accrue all the sales and profits, while the small to middle size sites starve to death.

After being out of town this weekend at a family event, I see that tourism is coming back in full force in the USA and people are definitely not sitting indoors looking at the computer or shopping on their phones either...they want to get out into the world again. This is definitely a factor in the drop in USA traffic.

gatormark

2:42 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

@ichthyous

�The large corporations will accrue all the sales and profits, while the small to middle size sites starve to death.�

This has already happened to the brick-and-mortar, mom and pop stores here in the United States. I guess it was just a matter of time before it would happen on the Internet.

NickMNS

4:15 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

I appear to be impacted by this update, but the drop is progressive. I'm down about 15% in terms of clicks from search and 30% in terms of impressions. But more worrying is that there is slow downward trend that appears to be continuing. My second site is impacted too, worse but it had very little traffic to begin with so the actual impact is negligible.

ichthyous

6:35 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

Anyone here getting strange (useless in terms of conversion) traffic from India and alike countries?

Yes...India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Iran, Latvia, Romania, Egypt, Malaysia. These are all top referrers now that the converting traffic has been reserved for google properties, Amazon, Pinterest, and the same list of huge companies over and over

christianz

7:28 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates

What a load of dog excrement! What is "high-quality site"? There is NO WAY he could objectively judge a specialist website like mine in a narrow niche and tell whether it is higher quality than its competitors. He would have to be knowledgeable in this domain to tell which sites are "high quality".

If any random human can't judge quality of niche websites, how can the google AI/algos do it? They can't!

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

This is why all sites are aiming for certain word counts, culling pages that could qualify as "thin content", removing images and interactivity to pass pagespeed requirements and doing all kinds of other things which make them fit this template but often make them WORSE and LESS "high quality" in the eyes of real human user.

mzb44

7:47 pm on Jun 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

This is probably one of the best summaries of how core updates work.
<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 9:30 pm (utc) on Jun 14, 2021]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to stay on topic :) [/edit]

BushyTop

7:43 am on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

G has completely turned off for us yesterday. having endured the past week following this update, I can confirm that this has produced the worst results from an update ever. I have to think that their admission that this would be a two parter and that some websites would be negatively effected from this June update, to then be reverted in July was an admission of the update not being the finished product. Now here we are, in the depths non converting hell.

BushyTop

7:45 am on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

Additionally, our good page experience report is now up to 58%

mzb44

8:23 am on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

I have to think that their admission that this would be a two parter and that some websites would be negatively effected from this June update, to then be reverted in July was an admission of the update not being the finished product.

They did explicitly say that this update is not a finished products and developments they planned were not finished yet, so they'll do another core update in July.

I think the implication that sites impacted in June could see a reversal is two fold.

It could be due to the new changes they will be pushing out, but perhaps also simply because a new core update may imply refreshing all core update components again.

They will not confirm it obviously, but the latter would be very interesting to know. It would mean it's using machine learning/AI gathered signals, so the same update run again a month later could generate significantly different results.

[edited by: mzb44 at 9:00 am (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]

BushyTop

8:48 am on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

"They did explicitly say that this update is not a finished products and developments they planned were not finished yet, so they'll do another core update in July."

Exactly, this is what I'm saying. You might be right RE refresh, but I personally dont believe that they would have confirmed what they did, if that was the case. My guess is that July will be additional changes and tweaks. Not refreshes to the current ones.

renatovieira

12:41 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

Huge drop today... Has anyone else noticed?

ichthyous

12:48 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

@BushyTop Yesterday was very close to normal for my traffic, but at 7pm the traffic just went down to nothing and stayed that way for the rest of the evening. This morning I start my day with my USA traffic down 80% from the norm.

This has become the norm for the last month or so...the USA traffic just turns off for hours at a stretch and you lose a good chunk of the day...typically this happens from 9am-6pm for my site. And the traffic that is coming is not converting at all.

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:33 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]

renatovieira

1:01 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

This morning I start my USA traffic down 80% from the norm.

@ichthyous - On my side, today the drop is huge!

JesterMagic

1:41 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

@mzb44. Your post was an interesting read. I had a laugh at the term "SEO celebrities".

If someone truly believes high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates then while they may have good SEO techniques, their root thinking is fundamentally flawed.

What is a high quality site? How can Google really determine that when it is blatantly obvious by doing a search on Google that it still has huge issues understanding the content let alone knowing if it is quality content that is accurate.

As you quoted before:

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

It's what the generic template deems may be high quality content.

BTW I really dislike the term AI and how it is thrown around so loosely by companies and the media. Google (and others) is still far away from actually creating something that can truly understand what content on a page is about.

BushyTop

1:48 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

Is anyone else seeing the changes to the page experience report that I have been reporting?

mzb44

2:15 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

If someone truly believes high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates then while they may have good SEO techniques, their root thinking is fundamentally flawed.

Or they just push a certain narrative not to push away potential clients. Admitting that core updates and recoveries may not be as much in SEOs control as they claim it to be is not a good way to advertise your services.

It is what it is. It's clear to me that core updates are a completely different thing from the "traditional" old-school updates we used to experience in the past. Before, whenever you got hit by an update, usually there was always one or multiple specific reasons why and if you fixed those issues you generally recovered.

Core updates seem to be different in the sense that they may not even target specific sites themselves, but rather look at types of sites or sites that fall into certain patterns. So, if your site happens to fall into a template google doesn't like now, you get hit. Even if your site individually on its own has no issues at all. And you won't recover unless google decides not to hate that type of site anymore in a subsequent update or if you completely overhaul your entire site (even though it may be good as it is) in an attempt to guess what google may approve of now (which always changes after every core update).

What's clear to me is that there is a lot of collateral damage. If Google is hitting site patterns now broadly instead of individual sites, then it's very easy to accidentally fall into such pattern or for Google to misidentify your site belonging into such a pattern.

Dimitri

2:53 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

May be a high quality web site does not use SEO techniques, ... I support the idea that the best SEO is just common sense, all other tricks, are BS on the long term... so says someone who has never (yet) been impacted negatively by a Google update (excepting the change in the Image search).

jasodo

3:39 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

big changes in the Google Indian SERP as of 13:00 local time, many movements since then

mzb44

3:44 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

May be a high quality web site does not use SEO techniques

Some use, some don't.

Some of the biggest and best known mainstream brands use black hat shady SEO tactics including paid link scheme campaigns (yes, really), expired domains, etc.

There are also a lot of obvious pure spam sites that never get hit by any updates. Eventually some might, but some may never.

Most sites never get hit by google updates - good, or bad, high-quality or low-quality.

What you are seeing here on the forum are the people who did get hit. Usually, those who benefit or remain unaffected do not create profiles on SEO forums to write about it.

Just because someone got hit does not necessarily mean they used shady "SEO techniques" or have a low-quality sites.

Sometimes you are just unlucky and your good site can get hit.

Sometimes you are just lucky and your low-quality spam affiliate site powered by paid links never gets hit.

People who have actually ran multiple sites from good to bad, low to high-quality can absolutely confirm the above.

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