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.

[NickMNS]

Is Google really investing millions in Core Vitals simply for the "tiebreaker" of Web pages?

Let's not get carried away here, the concept of "tiebreaker" is meant as an analogy. As in, the impact will be marginal at best. But it is not to say that it will be implemented as a literal tie breaker. I read this as Google saying not to expect your site to rank at number one just because you achieved a perfect score in the report.

The sum of many marginal increases can be significant, but alone any one is unlikely to be noticeable.

[gatormark]

@ ichthyous

One should never look at Adwords as a way to supplement their traffic. That’s certainly a bad approach.

Really, one should always look at advertising from a long-term perspective. Primarily with a goal to build brand awareness and hopefully over time this will lead to the sale of products, assuming that you have something to sell.

I have been using Adwords every month for over 10 years with the goal of acquiring members of my community. I spend anywhere from $160 to $350 a month on Adwords alone. The cost of advertising will not immediately be made up by them becoming a member, but if I have a good website (or product) and they remain a member (or client) long enough, then the payoff will occur over a period of time.

[edited by: gatormark at 9:49 pm (utc) on Jun 22, 2021]

[gatormark]

@christianz

Removing ads is not an option for everybody, because many websites can only exist if they are funded by ads and in many cases they can not fund themselves by AdSense - the yield is not enough.

The question you have to ask yourself is if you are inundating your users with ads does that have an adverse outcome on your traffic and subsequently your income. I know there are variables based on country. Maybe you are using an advertising provider that focuses on your country or niche. However, if yours is a USA-targeted website, then Adsense should be enough if you are relying mainly on advertising income to survive. The other providers, as you noted, may end up hurting you in the long term if their code is slow.

[ichthyous]

@ gatormark The intent is to bring in sales, not just traffic. I'm already a brand and the highest number of searches coming into my site by far now are searches including my brand name. What I need now is to replace the eyeballs that were visiting before Google destroyed my organic traffic between March and June.

Google adwords is miserable at converting...actually useless from what I see. Many others here have posted the same experience so perhaps it depends on the niche. I certainly have no intent to pay $3-$5 per click to get fake clicks from India while Google reps lie to my face and tell me they are from the USA. When confronted with the actual stats from my own analytics they say they cannot discuss it or sign off. I tried it and now I know, it's not an option for my business. I wish it were, if Adwords were effective I would gladly pay them and have less stress in my life!

[gatormark]

@ichthyous

I understand that for you sales is the goal. My point is simply that people will advertise for a month or two and then say that, in this case, Adwords doesn't work and they will never use it again or disparage it. Unfortunately, that's not how advertising works.

[ichthyous]

@gatormark The purpose of Adwords isn't really brand awareness, its targeted clicks geared toward sales. It doesn't take more than a few weeks to see the abysmal quality of the clicks from adwords. If two thirds of the clicks hit one page, stay under ten seconds and leave then they are useless for my business. Why keep wasting your money month after month when the leads aren't going to improve? Move on to other methods of advertising...display network, social media ads, email. Continuing to pour money into Adwords when there is zero ROI is actually foolish, at least in my book. Now it could be that Adwords just doesn't work for my niche and my site, and works better for yours.

[ichthyous]

Google shut off my traffic at 2pm sharp today and kept it off for the entire day...0-4 visitors per hour for ten hours in a row. It used to be two hours, then three, then five, now 8-10 hours at a stretch. Is anyone else seeing this?

[mzb44]

After having looked at hundreds of sites the last 3-4 years, all related to core update hits, I have realised something today.

It's that I have seen more sites recovering that didn't do absolutely anything at all, than sites that made all kinds of massive changes (*usually recommendations by mainstream SEOs and Google employees) trying to desperately "fix" things.

The ratio may not be that different between these two categories but even this in itself shows that "fixing" things may just be placebo at best in most cases.

* One of the worst advices that is going around at the moment - and I know this may be extremely controversial and some may dismiss this out of hand and even laugh at me - is that trying to follow E-A-T guidelines and having experts create in-depth authoritative, accurate content can help you or it's what core updates are rewarding.

I have just seen way too many hit sites that have been desperately pumping literal fortunes into completely remaking their entire content by actual experts and specialists and genuine known authority figures... and absolutely nothing whatsoever happened at all. No recovery at all and they keep getting outranked by cheap $0.01/word third world writers.

I'm sure doing the above can help in some specific individual cases, but looking at raw numbers, it appears that at least statistically this does not correlate with core update recoveries.

Doing nothing actually correlates more with having better chances at recovery. (Yes, I know correlation =/= causation. I am definitely not claiming that it was the doing nothing part that recovered some sites.)

I have proof and can show hundreds of sites clearly proving my above statements but it's not allowed on this forum.

[yollo03]

How do you know they didnt concentrate on their domain authority?

[mzb44]

Yeah I checked that. No new links / no sudden link surge etc / or link acquisition was just in line with how it was before. - it did really seem they genuinely did not do anything at all.

Yes, yes, you can't actually know what someone does unless you have access to the site. But if you've been doing this for 15+ years you kinda can get a "feel" for what someone is or isn't doing.

[Dooku]

"Unless you got a manual penalty...you guys should really stop using disavow."

Sorry, completely DISAGREE on this one. Have recovered too many websites where the disavow file was the decisive factor.
That same quote that the disavow file should not be used unless you see a manual action has been parroted too many times and for too long now in obvious "famous" circles........
Do you really think G is smart enough to make the right decision for each and every backlink?

The problem however I see all the time is that most disavow files are a botched job.......because people do NOT know how to select the correct back links to be added to the disavow file........that takes experience (ahumm.....from trial and error).

[mzb44]

That same quote that the disavow file should not be used unless you see a manual action has been parroted too many times and for too long now in obvious "famous" circles........

I am unsure who first came up with this advice and how it spread.

A Google employee just recently said that simply disavowing your links in case of a manual penalty is NOT enough. You need to manually try and remove as many links as you can and show it in the reconsideration request.

So, why would they simultaneously say the disavow tool is for when you have a manual penalty?

Sometimes I do actually wonder though if the disavow tool is actually even working at all? - Does anyone know of some recent case studies where someone intentionally disavowed all or most of their good links and then shortly after this massively impacted their rankings? I would be extremely curious to know.

[golderberger]

How do you know which link do disavow and which link caused the penalty? (and it also seems if someone wants to hurt your website he should spam few places with your links? )

[JesterMagic]

@Dooku - I haven't had your experience. The disavow file has never worked for me. I disavowed many, many obvious spam links almost weekly for a while (I also tried monthly for about 6 months) and not once did I see an effect in the rankings.

Are you sure you are seeing the affect from disavowing or is it just a regular every day update?

Say a site has 100,000 backlinks with 50,000 obviously spam, 25,000 could be spam, and 25,000 good.

So how do you approach using the disavow?

Do you just add the obvious spam links to the disavow file?

Do you keep old spam links in the disavow even if Google does not report them any more?

How often do you update the disavow file?

How many weeks later after updating the disavow do you think you see ranking improvement?

For the sites you manage how old are they and how many UV a month do you see?

For example my site is almost 20 years old ang gets 100,000 - 120,000 UV a month. I wonder if older more established sites have a harder time shaking the effects of Negative SEO.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - It's the same pattern here. Everyday at 2pm my US traffic is cut off.

This has been going on since february.

It seems like everyone turns off their phones and goes to sleep at 2pm. It's bizarre!

[RedBar]

Is anyone else experiencing a seriously out-of-date Google SERPs for local results?

I've just performed a restaurant search with a simple keyword 1/2/3 +town test, the sort of search I imagine Joe Public would use, and the results were shocking to say the very least.

1. DDG - Top 4 listings spot on.

2. Bing - Top 8 listings spot on

3. Google - An utter out-of-date mess:
#1 result has been closed permanently for over a year, G even states that in its RHS column.
#2 ok
#3 TA review of closed restaurant
#4 & 5 ok
#6 News paper review of closed biz dated July 2019
#7 ok
#8 Another newspaper review July 2018
#9 Closed biz again

Half the results are for a business closed about a year ago, it has never, ever had a website and G actually states it is Permanently Closed yet still lists it.

If G cannot get local results anywhere near correct it's no wonder so many are complaining about its national and international SERPs ... Disgraceful.

A friend of mine renamed AI as Artificial Idiocy, I corrected him with Accuidiocy :-)

[ichthyous]

@ichthyous - It's the same pattern here. Everyday at 2pm my US traffic is cut off. This has been going on since february. It seems like everyone turns off their phones and goes to sleep at 2pm. It's bizarre!

This had stopped for a few days for me, and some days it's 8/9am other days 2pm. I have not seen traffic get shut off for ten hours at a time though. This is very worrying, there's no way anyone can survive when they basically have half a day of traffic.

Someone else posted here that the reason for this is that Google has become much better at determining search intent and turns on more ads automatically, which are sucking up all the traffic at these times. I'm not sure about this theory...people can have intent to purchase something at any hour, not just 2pm onward. It also seems to be that traffic is turned off for the site globally...I stop getting traffic from everywhere at these hours...it literally goes to 0-2 people an hour.

[saladtosser]

Any of you tested the new search engine brave [search.brave.com,...] sooo much better and cleaner than google!

[westcoast]

"Any of you tested the new search engine brave [search.brave.com,...] sooo much better and cleaner than google!"

I saw it... does anyone know what user-agent its bot uses? I can't find that info...

The organic results also look oddly very similar to Google's, like they are using google's data somehow? Some queries are nearly identical results to google.

[MayankParmar]

Tested and it is worse than Google They're clearly favouring top publishers/media companies.

[mzb44]

This is extremely interesting: [twitter.com...]

Google releases a "Spam update" today.

I'm extremely curious to see what this does and how efficient it will be in doing what it's being claimed this update will be doing.

[edited by: mzb44 at 6:35 pm (utc) on Jun 23, 2021]

[southernguy]

@westcoast

The organic results also look oddly very similar to Google's, like they are using google's data somehow? Some queries are nearly identical results to google.

Yup, I've been trying Brave search since yesterday, and yes very similar to Google, that's not gonna fly well at least in my book. So for me it's still DDG.

[edited by: southernguy at 6:40 pm (utc) on Jun 23, 2021]

[mzb44]

The organic results also look oddly very similar to Google's, like they are using google's data somehow? Some queries are nearly identical results to google.

Tested and it is worse than Google They're clearly favouring top publishers/media companies.

I gave this a spin and can confirm the above.

It seems to me they developed it with the mindset that it needs to imitate Google results for this to be considered good.

It even has a "People also ask" often times straight below the first result. They didn't even change the nomenclature haha.

Disappointing.

Until Search will have an "iPhone moment" we're stuck with basically Google and others that clearly just imitate and copy whatever Google is doing.

Edit: Their page says that this is supposedly proprietary and the data is not sourced from Google or Bing. They are either lying or their ranking factors are essentially "come up with results that look like Google".

[edited by: mzb44 at 6:34 pm (utc) on Jun 23, 2021]

[Rndm]

"Any of you tested the new search engine brave [search.brave.com,...] sooo much better and cleaner than google!"

I saw it... does anyone know what user-agent its bot uses? I can't find that info..

I don't think it has a bot, but uses query and click data from the browser. I saw this somewhere with them saying their results aren't based on crawling the web.

[yollo03]

That spam update is what they rolled last week. The page experience is not live in my opinion and it's not a slow release. They can roll things quickly if they want to. They are just not sure exactly when they will roll it out.

About the spam update, I am surprised they even bothered to make a statement what the update they pushed last week was. A change of policy?

[Hollywood]

Westcoast, amen brother! Mention of a competitor: Brave.com, I'm pretty sure these posts will be removed though. Goog is getting pathetic, and old. Need a new boy on the block.

Let me ask this, due to this core update flop, who IS using a disavow file? I could talk about my experience on this, very interesting, but sort of at the mercy of time management at the moment.

[mzb44]

That spam update is what they rolled last week.

It's possible.

That tweet didn't actually say they released it today. In fact the follow-up tweet says it's finishing rolling out today.

This doesn't exclude it being launched at an earlier date.

Usually when they announce updates it's "Today we are releasing a...". This one is "we've released a..."

I may be reading too much into it though.

Now, if I were to joke, I'd say that the reason it's called "spam update" is because it's supposed to reward spam, right?

[rustybrick]

I asked Danny Sullivan, he said the spam update started to roll out today and will finish today also. There will also be a one day roll out of another spam update next week. So anyone seeing any changes and if so, what spam tactics did you use?

[RedBar]

Any of you tested the new search engine brave [search.brave.com,...] sooo much better and cleaner than google!

Clean, fast BUT all I got were the same results as G gives me, I didn't bother any further!

[RedBar]

Where on earth is Brave getting its data?

I had another look for one of my exclusive products and sure enought I was #1 BUT, BUT, BUT, with a domain I closed and let expire in April 2019 ... WTF?