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]

If the new site is working, spend time considering whether it is worth investing in more. As google currently has ZERO transparency on automated penalties and inability to have them manually reviewed, new sites will benefit more. Clean slate, no hidden penalties. I am thinking about doing the same after July core update.

[Samsam1978]

check this out. Hope my site does not follow this bad, no reason for this site to drop.

[ibb.co...]

[mzb44]

I'm with yollo03 on this. If your new site does much better then absolutely focus there instead.

Just waiting that you might get lucky (it's really just this) in some subsequent core update is not a real strategy.

I don't think there is anything you can do to influence your recovery chances unless there is something fundamentally broken with your site.

So, definitely work on your new site. If your old site recovers at some point that's great but by that time you will most likely have another successful site up and running.

[BushyTop]

@Samsam1978 who's site is that?

[Samsam1978]

Cannot post links due to mods. It's a site I use that I could not find, not in my niche or anything.

[ichthyous]

Many of us cannot simply switch to a new site...my site is my brand name and it is unique and involves almost 20 years of brand building and reputation. So there's no way I'm starting from scratch, and not sure if there is an actual penalty or just more of the same from Google. I have been climbing somewhat in ranking this past week, although no where near where I was before I started to bleed position in mid Feb 2021.

Traffic however continues to be a train wreck, with new patterns every day...it drops to nothing at prime hours of the day (reported by many of you), USA traffic is perpetually lower and replaced by traffic from distant countries which will never provide sales (also reported by others), and now my 'Direct traffic' from Google Images has dropped dramatically due to changes in who is ranking in image search now (also affecting my competitors). New inquiries are nil for the last week, and zero conversions.

[Samsam1978]

@ichthyous

Ditto. 20 years of hard work. You cannot just turn it off. I think I will stick to my plan to create each page how I want and once done if I still lost all my traffic at least I have done my best.

[ichthyous]

@Samsam1978 Have you tried looking at your inbound links? I have spent a couple of months beefing up unique on page text, small design changes, etc and it hasn't helped that I can see. Too many inbound links with similar/over-optimized anchor text might be one cause of a drop.

[mzb44]

It's the new normal now.

I don't see them caring that much about these. This "spam update" also largely did not affect any of the real genuine spam that is going around.

[westcoast]

"I don't see them caring that much about these. This "spam update" also largely did not affect any of the real genuine spam that is going around."

The combination of the tens of thousands of spam backlinks and the scraping from these spam attacks is completely destroying our website. The primary keyword we held as #1 for 20 years has plummeted to #38 (!) over the past 4 months as this spam attack has accelerated. Every week thousands of new spam backlinks and scraped content gets indexed, and every week our rankings plummet. It's insane! We cannot stop the scraping because the spammers are using these hacked domains and hacked PCs with spoofed user-agents to scrape. They are scraping using THOUSANDS of IPs, and these IPs come in, take maybe 3 pages, and are never seen again. Totally undetectable and unstoppable.

And get this... We are still #1 in Bing! We are #1 in yahoo! We are #1 in duckduckgo!

AND #38 IN GOOGLE ? WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL. Google is algorithmically penalizing the CRAP out of us. It is the most obvious thing I've ever seen.

These SEO guys who say that external spammy backlinks and scraping can't hurt a website are TOTALLY WRONG. Websites and healthy businesses can be DESTROYED by them.

[superclown2]

I have been working on a research project for the last week. I am searching for information full stop and my search terms are highly specialised but no matter which terms I have put in the same half dozen price comparison sites and other sites that they own fill page one so I automatically go straight to pages two and three but even there I am chased around by the googlespam popup which is driving me crazy. Ignoring the fact I'm an IT professional and looking at it from a searcher's point of view only I am *sick and tired* of the junk that Google has become and if they are trying to destroy their product completely they are going the right way about it. If this sounds like a rant I make no apology whatsoever.

[RedBar]

@westcoast

Is that site in DDG / Bing / Ecosia / Brave / Yahoo / etc?

[westcoast]

In today's edition of "Google Spam is Completely Out of Control" I bring you query site: <snip> from a hacked domain.

48,000 NEW pages of pure cloaked spam that leads to malware. All of these pages crawled and indexed TODAY. Totally searchable for a huge combination of keyword combinations due to the scraped, spun, and cloaked content (click view cache).

My report shows a ton of other domains just like this one, for millions of new spam pages indexed this morning.

Eye roll.

[edited by: engine at 4:46 pm (utc) on Jun 28, 2021]

[edited by: not2easy at 5:13 pm (utc) on Jun 28, 2021]
[edit reason] no specifcs, thanks, please see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[yollo03]

@Westcoast, it will get worse, you are lucky you are not in the sandbox yet. Are you using a cloud-based firewall for your website and if yes, which one?

I wrote about this before, if you content is being scraped and you are certain it is causing issues and you don't have WAF, just try it. Almost all cloud WAFs offer a free trial. Find one that meets your budget. The one I started using (unfortunately I should have done this a long time ago, I preferred speed over WAF) is blocking almost all of them. Very, very few are passing through and they are blocked shortly after. You can customize the WAF rules to meet your needs.

[mzb44]

That case from the previous page posted by Martin Ice Web is an extremely convincing proof that all this spam is going to continue and won't be fixed and all of us with real sites hit are pretty much screwed.

I'm always complaining and ranting about core updates here and called them dysfunctional before, but that specific example even managed to genuinely sock me. Even I did not think it's THIS bad.

A pure doorway site, with 100% auto-generated scraped content with every single element on the literally hundreds of thousands of pages being an affiliate link. Literally a directory of hundreds of thousands of pages with every single element on every page being an ad - no main content at all.

And beginning May 2020 core update, every additional core update gives that scraper pure-spam site a super massive boost. We're talking here about millions of keywords and millions of visits. It just got doubled again by the June 2021 core update.

I am still completely shocked. It's why I just keep repeating myself here like a crazy person. I'm still not sure if many here realise the magnitude of what this means and represents. All that talk about E-A-T, expert content, high-quality sites etc. in the context of core updates and then you see an example like this.

I still can't fully process how that site can be boosted so much by every single core update and how meanwhile our sites here that - which if we were to believe and trust each other - are high-quality get hit.

Google now entered pure clown world.

[sk7411]

Well apparently the second dose of Google Spam update is live. I don't see any spam sites moving and in fact seeing the opposite.

[yollo03]

It takes time, it will hit tomorrow or Wednesday. It will not remove those sites quickly if at all. But it will provide an interesting insight. If the second update does affect the rankings of many websites, it means July core update (second dose) could have a similar effect.

[yollo03]

Since December core update I receive old errors from the years 2017 - 2020 that require a fix validation. I validated the same errors over and over again but they keep resurfacing. Today I receive the errors again from 2018 and 2019 but this time it was for newly published pages. How can a newly published page have mobile-friendly error from 2019? Can anyone explain this to me?

[westcoast]

"I wrote about this before, if you content is being scraped and you are certain it is causing issues and you don't have WAF, just try it. Almost all cloud WAFs offer a free trial. Find one that meets your budget. The one I started using (unfortunately I should have done this a long time ago, I preferred speed over WAF) is blocking almost all of them. Very, very few are passing through and they are blocked shortly after. You can customize the WAF rules to meet your needs."

Nope, there is simply no way to detect this. The scrapers used by a lot of these spammers are from hacked sites, and only scrape from a tiny number of pages. They simply use thousands of different IPs to do the scraping so that they can't be detected. To external tools, the page accesses from scrapers doing this look like normal traffic. It's not like someone is scraping 20000 pages from one IP. It's 10000 hacked domains from across the world each scraping 2 pages.

[yollo03]

The issue is not with the number of ips, its other things. I will give you an example from my WAF:

1.
Challenge requests if the user or device behind them uses an automation tool that initiates browsers but is actually an automation tool without real display—such as phantomJS, Selenium, or other. While such tools are favored by programmers, they are also extremely popular with scrapers, hackers and even in sophisticated DDoS attacks to circumvent standard anti-bot measures.

2.
Challenge traffic from IP addresses known to be of hosting service companies. This rule is unlikely to see legitimate human traffic on these IP spaces since they are typically used for server hosting. In most cases, traffic from these IP spaces originate from infected servers that are controlled by hackers.

3.
Challenge and block requests if the user or device behind them does not keep session cookies and does not execute Javascripts correctly. Most malicious automated activities (bots) do not meet these conditions and will, therefore, effectively be blocked by the Javascript challenge triggered in any suspected situation. Clients can also be blocked depending on whether they act in an abnormal to the specific domain—by scraping content in a way that most sessions on this domain don't—or clients that try to, for example, avoid detection by switching IPs.

4.
Captcha-challenge and block sessions conducted by standard web browsers if there is evidence that these sessions are being automated and not driven by a human user. Such automation is used primarily for screen scraping and other very targeted, site-specific malicious automation.

There is more obviously.

I respect your decision not to use a WAF, at the end of the day it is a decision every person needs to make as it does mean increased expenses.

[Samsam1978]

I don't see any spam sites moving and in fact seeing the opposite. I see Cloaking, spam, spam and more spam.

They need to revert back to December 2020 as this is a disaster- even my 80 year old gran told me she got taken to a suspicious website yesterday.

WTF Google?

[ichthyous]

To external tools, the page accesses from scrapers doing this look like normal traffic. It's not like someone is scraping 20000 pages from one IP. It's 10000 hacked domains from across the world each scraping 2 pages.

I have seen this coming from Chinese IP addresses...various IP address from all over the country hit different pages on my site in short order. The only thing I can do is block the entire country, which works to stop it if you catch it fast enough.

[westcoast]

"I don't see any spam sites moving and in fact seeing the opposite. I see Cloaking, spam, spam and more spam."

No changes at all. New hacked/cloaked/spam domains this afternoon getting sucked in en masse. One new hacked domain of the same massive spam campaign I've been following has 23,000 fresh crawled and indexed pages over the last few hours.

This massive spam campaign (into the billions of cloaked pages directed to malware at this point) has been reported by me and others numerous times over the past 4 months to Google via their official spam reporting channel. Completely ignored.

Spam/scraped content is going to soon start affecting some of the larger sites and their queries, so we should eventually get movement on this.

Google query "see full list on apple". Apple alone now has over 500,000 spam backlinks to it from that query alone, and that's only picking up the tip of the iceberg.

[Hollywood]

GOOGLE-SPAM-INC

Who does Google love? Who ever has the most $ to line their pockets, eBay, Amazon Fewrkzos, etc.

Spam is a top priority, given that so many hackers are winning, and making a killing, really sad.

The evidence is CLEAR!

See image attachment --> [ibb.co ]

[BushyTop]

Seen this reported on here many times. Last night we didn't have any enquires for 4/5 hours, then in the space of an hour 5 enquiries Just like turning a tap on. Insane.

[RedBar]

Something's happened, quite what I'm not at all sure however my global site has had 3 of its 4 best June days in the last 3 days as follows:

Saturday 182.7%
Sunday 133.3%
Monday 207%

The UK hotel pub has also seen a big traffic upturn with its busiest day of the year and the highest since August's Govt 2020 Eat Out campaign at 230%. ... there, that should scew-up everything!

[yollo03]

@Westcost How do you know google is not treating these sites differently? I am fairly certain that Apple and Amazon will not be negatively affected by any spam backlinks or any core updates.

Edit: I crossed my competitors desktop vs mobile visibility. I noticed that those with poor core web vitals on mobile are slowly losing their visibility only on mobile devices, very slowly. Desktop remains firm. So the core web vitals might actually be doing something.

[saladtosser]

Anyone having a long wait for google to index new pages even when submitted via webmaster tools? Taking about 10 days for me the last week or so

[RedBar]

Taking about 10 days for me the last week or so

Indexing of new pages on an established site has been taking a couple of weeks with ranking starting in the 2nd/3rd page however I am still waiting on two new sites, one is now 2 months old and doing nothing.

Bing / Yahoo / DDG / etc all have it indexed and ranking!

As they say ooop North "There's trouble at t'mill"!

[RedBar]

For my industry's #1 keyword phrase I am seeing some re-inclusion of non-USA companies, a couple on the second page and three on the third ... OK, not many go that far however at least it's better than nothing.

What is interesting and coming in at #6 is a Pinterest page copying the #1 result ... Hmmm, ok ... why do I mention this? It's from 2012 ... Read that gain. a scraped page from 2012 ... Come on Google .!.!.!

[yollo03]

Is anyone else experiencing long waiting time when inspecting urls in the console? It just started now, was working a few minutes ago.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Is anyone else experiencing long waiting time when inspecting urls in the console? It just started now, was working a few minutes ago.

Yup. I'm getting a 'something went wrong, if the problem persists, try again in a few hours' error.

[yollo03]

@Talkative, thanks for answering. Maybe its related to the spam update or something else is glitching

[TalkativeEditorial]

Probably glitching considering the shower of $%!#! the SERPS have been lately. It just worked on a newly published article for me, showing not indexed (it is).

Also, if allowed to go briefly off topic, wahey to your lads at the Euros RedBar

[ichthyous]

As usual, traffic turned off at 9am sharp and has stayed off all day...USA traffic down 40% by 3:30pm. Overall traffic down 23% so far.

One of my own Pinterest boards is outranking one of my most important landing pages, which has dropped to second page or fifth page depending on the search...it was top three ranking for almost fifteen years. Also seeing a lot of not very relevant new articles taking over for same search, and individual forum pages with almost no content...

[NickMNS]

As usual, traffic turned off at 9am sharp and has stayed off all day...USA traffic down 40% by 3:30pm. Overall traffic down 23% so far.

I am starting to see a similar pattern emerge as well. I don't see it as traffic turning off per se, but rather it appears as though rankings outside of the US are unaffected or marginally improved whereas, US traffic is way off. I am seeing the same on both my websites and both websites target a US audience, displaying only US data. This appears to be the trend since June 2nd.

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS Yes, since June 1st my USA traffic is perpetually down. As of this past weekend direct traffic vanished, then returned for a day, and today down again by 60%. But I am seeing a definite pattern where USA traffic just stops for hours at a time...usually at 9am or around 2pm but not always. This morning it was 9am and the entire day traffic is 30% lower, which is an unusually sharp drop. There was no drop in ranking today or this weekend which would account for such low traffic.

[BushyTop]

Looks like UK semrush is booting off again. Is anyone in the UK seeing anything? **Prays for someone to say an improvement in SERPS**

[Samsam1978]

HERE WE GO: SEMRUSH detect an update. Let's pray it is a reverse of this terrible core update in June 2021

[yollo03]

Why do you think this is a new update? It's the spam update, it will not reverse any core updates. Some sites might benefit from it but the odds of it reversing anything is very low.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Well part two of the June core update should start rolling out in the coming days. So this might be the first signs of that.

[yollo03]

No it's not. They said they will announce all core updates when they roll them out. This is part II of the spam update, the same thing happened last time. It took a few days for the sensors to pick it up.

With core updates semrush is well above 8 and this is for all topics.

Edit: When the core update will be out, don't count on it to do anything in your favor. There is a greater chance it will do further damage. So those that were hit (like me) by December core update, be mentally prepared that it may make things worse.

[mzb44]

My site got a super massive boost the last 2 days that almost completely reversed the actions of the December core update.

Now, today, this has been completely reversed and it's back exactly to where it was before around two and a half days ago.

You can see on the analytics charts precisely to the hour when it started and when it stoped. It's like a switch was flipped on and then off again.

I think they may be testing the next core update.

Or it was the spam update which was then reversed.

[yollo03]

The spam update will hit my website tomorrow (most likely). It usually happens with core updates, some sites get a temporary boost or decline. I experienced it once, it lasted for less than 24 hours. The sales I received on that day were equal to almost a full month at the time.

[ichthyous]

@mzb44 I saw this on Monday...almost normal traffic and my first conversions in a week. Yesterday traffic stopped at 9am sharp and remained very low all day. I hope that isn't a portent of what is to come. Today I wake up to a big overnight surge which dropped off every hour to zero at 9am. This pattern is clear for many of us here...the traffic is simply vanishing for the prime hours for business.

There has been a very big drop in traffic classified as "direct" to my site since the weekend. We're talking down by 40-60% daily, with a reversion back to normal on Monday, then back down on Tuesday. This is mostly traffic from Google Images...has anyone else seen this drop?

[TalkativeEditorial]

That "something went wrong" error seems to have returned when requesting indexing in GSC.
Tried across a few different sites - anyone else stuck also?

[yollo03]

It happened earlier but it seems to be ok now. Maybe they are working on a bug they discovered.

[mzb44]

Edit: When the core update will be out, don't count on it to do anything in your favor. There is a greater chance it will do further damage. So those that were hit (like me) by December core update, be mentally prepared that it may make things worse.

I completely agree here.

Historically, if you were hit before the chances of recovery were against you, even if you did everything in your power to fix or improve things.

This reminds me of something interesting I saw this week. I'm seeing several sites that were launched after the May 2020 core update - the one that hit me massively - now all outranking me by A LOT.

The interesting thing about these sites is that they aren't that much different from my site or other sites existing from before May 2020. In a lot of cases those new sites are almost copies of my or other older sites. Not scraped and I wouldn't call them spam necessarily but they clearly got "inspiration" from all the older sites and essentially rewrote whatever those sites did and that's that (I recognise their writers from Upwork - all are from "cheap" countries).

One site even copied my design and structure. Different branding, colours etc. but the site structure is very obviously inspired from my site. This site now gets approximately 100x more traffic than what I get, even though I'm better in every way (expert content creators, perfect UX, ultra fast speed, super modern design, etc etc and all that...)

So, this made me think: What if the May 2020 core update had a component that was ran only that once and whatever it did it still affects all the hit sites existing from before May 2020 but any new site launched after that date remains unaffected. This would explain all the reports of newer sites outranking older sites mentioned here, even with inferior content and lower stats.

I'm particularly noticing that it's sites launched post May 2020 that rank very high and are usually outranking older sites.

I don't particularly have anything against all these new sites that now outrank and copy me. But it's incredible that in 2021 we still have Google updates (or components of larger core updates) that apparently are only run once a year or even less frequently (or maybe just once and never again?) and if you get affected by that you get stuck, while new sites that essentially copy everything you did (and do it less competently) meanwhile rank extremely high because they did not exist yet when that update was run.

What if whatever they did in May 2020 / December 2020 won't be done again? We all just remain stuck forever? Should we just cut our losses and create new sites instead?

At least in my case, looking at the copycat sites outranking me, I'm 100% convinced that if after May 2020 I instead would have created a completely new version of my hit site - similar content, similar everything - it would now rank MUCH MUCH higher that my older site, even though I would be almost exactly the same site.

Is Google incentivising churn and burn instead of incentivising the improving of existing sites? - In this particular scenario this is my takeaway.

Edit:

So, the point I'm trying to make is that if your site gets hit by a core update, you can essentially re-create your old site almost identically as a new site and this new site will now rank just fine for years, while the old site can remain stuck for years.

So it makes more sense to keep churning out new sites.

These are perverse incentives.

2020 and 2021 are now the years with perhaps the most spam in Google ever and largest number of spam sites and pages created.

I'm sure it's completely unrelated. :-)

[edited by: mzb44 at 2:46 pm (utc) on Jun 30, 2021]

[yollo03]

Some high authority websites are abusing their ranking and publish new posts with less than 250 words, knowing very well they are likely to enjoy very high ranking regardless of the content. It's happening in my niche. They publish dozens of posts per day, all less than 250 words each.

About May 2020, it makes sense in a way. If you get penalized for something they released in May new websites can't be penalized for it because they never existed. The interesting question is whether they will do it again, like once a year or once every 5 years?

At some stage people may come to the realization that there is no point in watering dead plants. I will probably launch a new site after the next core update and pay 80% of my attention on that and 20% on the existing website.

[mzb44]

Some high authority websites are abusing their ranking and publish new posts with less than 250 words, knowing very well they are likely to enjoy very high ranking regardless of the content. It's happening in my niche. They publish dozens of posts per day, all less than 250 words each.

Oh yeah for sure. I've seen this many times. This is because of the authority vs. relevancy adjustments.

This is a transcript from the Google video "Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers" (recommended watching!): "Every query has some notion of relevance and some notion of quality. We’re constantly trading off which set of results balances these two the best. [...] We have long recognized that there is a certain class of queries like medical queries or finance queries. In all of these cases, authoritative resources are incredibly important. And so, we emphasize expertise over relevance in those cases. We try to get you results from authoritative sources in a more significant way."

This is now clearly expanded broadly over the entirety of search and not just medical/financial. Expertise/authority > relevancy.

About May 2020, it makes sense in a way. If you get penalized for something they released in May new websites can't be penalized for it because they never existed. The interesting question is whether they will do it again, like once a year or once every 5 years?

Yeah exactly. To me it clearly seems that at least one or more components that were launched by the May 2020 update have not been done afterwards anymore in subsequent core updates. The fact that new sites launched after May 2020 that are lower quality copycats of the older sites now outrank the older hit sites and never gotten themselves hit by new core updates shows that some things done in May were not (so far) done anymore in the subsequent core updates.

Agreed that if at one point you see you aren't recovering but new - and similar - sites launched after the update that hit you rank just fine, then it's perhaps a better idea to cut your losses and just create a new site. For all you know, whatever hit you that time will never be run again and you will never recover no matter what you do.