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.

[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...]

[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...]

[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.

[mzb44]

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.

Yes, everything is possible. I just don't think they would release an update that would hit sites they're trying hard with every other update to boost, and benefit sites they're trying hard with every other update to demote.

Also, let's continue the CWV talk in the CWV thread before all this gets moved or deleted? I just realised this is the core update thread.

[christianz]

I think now they must have done something to remove the authority of older sites

Could be just how their link weighting algo works. Older sites host a lot of content (including images) and are barraged with spam backlinks. Hence why the dumb algo may think their backlink profile as a whole is "low quality".

I don't have a large sample size of sites to make this conclusive, but my own experience is that the younger the site and the less backlinks it has (including spammy ones) the better its doing since December 2020 update.

My oldest site has lots of backlinks (nowadays 95% spam, of course) and lots of pages - many of which have been properly maintained with redirects since 2007 (!), yet the pea-brain google algo thinks I am on same level as AI generated word salad created yesterday by a spammer in Thirdworldistan.

[LynMan]

I just got +50% from early June update and since yesterday another +30%

[Samsam1978]

It's pants!

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 9:15 am (utc) on Jun 22, 2021]

[Samsam1978]

Anyone else got the email from Google today? My gut feeling is that it will be fixed in July, maybe our ranking drops are to test the waters with new sites. Anyway been doing this stuff for 24 years, and I know what I am doing. My core vitals were pants still working like a nutter to improve them but had to remove images that users love but they are too heavy. Code (ads, Google analytics, youtube) from Google is weighing down the site.

Worse rankings in all my career history.

Messy spammy results outranking me.

Complete shambles.

Can't believe they would revolutionize the results like this and demote the independent publisher, noticed those people saying they got more traffic are newbies on here.

[mzb44]

I agree that the July update will be very revealing and course setting for a lot of people.

If they fix the algos and ensure fewer quality sites get (perhaps accidentally) demoted and more spam sites hit, then we'll know it's worth continuing.

If, however, the next core update will continue with the same trends as the previous ones - especially the May and December 2020 ones - then I believe a lot of us here that keep getting negatively affected should seriously think about quit working on the affected sites. There comes a point you tried everything and if nothing works then it's clear the site is done and probably won't ever recover.

[Samsam1978]

@mzb44

Keep going. You did not work this hard over the years to quit. Apple may bring out its search engine soon. If it carries on I think a list needs to be drawn up and one of us sends it to the search team. If we all came together (as I know users on here serve >4 million-plus a month being hit) Gosh the famous SEOers are being hit and staying quiet why? Why are the famous SEOers staying quiet - maybe they know this is only temporary? What we are seeing is a mess, I'm sure Google knows this.

[golderberger]

what pissed me the most is that i've created my own product, it was good enough and it spread around the internet and I've never done some SEO or paid for SEO at all (only now after the dump I have ordered some services) but finally my sales and traffic went to #*$! due to google algo changes

[saladtosser]

>>>Why are the famous SEOers staying quiet<<<

Probably fear, would you want to publicly criticise the hand that feeds you? Read an interesting quote today

"PROVIDING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
A handful of publishing companies own hundreds of media websites that collectively receive billions of search engine visits each year. E.g. Search for "best smartphone" and you may see results from websites like TechRadar, Android Central, T3, Tom's Guide, Anandtech, iMore, Louder, Creative Bloq, Digital Camera World or Top Ten Reviews. It doesn't matter which site you vote for with your click, the ballot is stacked: All of those websites are owned by a single company".

[mzb44]

Gosh the famous SEOers are being hit and staying quiet why? Why are the famous SEOers staying quiet - maybe they know this is only temporary?

For several years, they've been promoting the Google narrative that core updates are rewarding quality, authoritative and relevant content and websites and demoting low-quality and non-relevant content and websites. And that if you become their clients they will "fix" and recover your sites.

Now, how would it look if they were to admit their own sites are getting demoted by core updates?

I have looked at a lot of sites run by the famous SEOers the last couple of weeks. What I have noticed is that those sites get hit at around the same rate as sites from the "general population". One would expect sites of known famous SEOs and "core update" experts to get hit less or even not at all in comparison to "genpop" sites, but it seems about the same.