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]

@Samwest, can you check if you lost any referring domains in the past 72 hours? I lost about 10 referring domains and that's when the drop happened. I have no idea if it's even related unless everyone that were hit can confirm they also lost a bunch of referring domains.

[mzb44]

@yollo03, I believe you are overthinking it. "Losing 10 referring domains", "DA increased by +2 points", etc.

You are reading way too much into these things and I believe all this is side tracking you from seeing the big picture.

I mean this with all the best intentions and definitely not to criticise you. You are focusing on the wrong things.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a widening gap between impressions and clicks on web search for three months running now:

[ibb.co ]

Also a very significant drop in Image Search, followed by a hard cap on image search clicks and impressions at the new lower level. Image traffic fell off a cliff on March 15th and is now clipped every day at a fixed amount it looks like:

[ibb.co ]

Anyone else seeing same?

[shadowlight]

Same boat as Yollo on the core vitals, suddenly 0 good pages. If that is feedback for something else, then this IS about core vitals...at least in part.. The drop started on May 1st and it just keeps getting worse. Zero income days while Gorg hauls in millions per hour. Income equality...right. What a mess. They could care less if they upset all the applecarts with these "updates"...as long as its not theirs. If all the traffic is gone, where did it go? Gorgs insatiable maw.

I don't think its about core vitals, ALL my pages are classes as good. My traffic hasnt dropped though, it has increased. Conversions and income have decreased though. Googles insatiable greed, that is what its all about these days.

[RedBar]

I seem to be heading for a fairly consistent -40% on my weekdays now.

My main drop in PVs is definitely the bigger money keyword pages which, I assume, are being creamed-off with ads and all the other stuff at the top as well as being removed from not only the top rankings but completely from the top 20 ... anything beyond that is fairly pointless for me.

Interestingly for medium /low money key phrases I still have many top 3 rankings and most of those PVs are still delivering their average traffic, therefore it is blatantly obvious G + ads + manipulation is the cause of my drop in traffic.

Fortunately my business model and customers are a lot more reliable than G's short-termism!

[penitentman]

My conclusions after analyzing a Google Update that began on May 17th for me

BACKGROUND:
law and government vertical
style- directory website
Mainly US traffic
ranks for thousands of long tail kws

I compared 6 days of search console data from before the update to 6 after the update.

I sorted the kw's by Impressions 5/19/21 - 5/24/21 and looked at all the kw's that had 0 impressions.

I searched google for dozens of these kws and the serps are a mess. What stuck out to me most is a 6 month old website on a url with very old domain authority. It was showing up page 1 for almost all my test queries out of nowhere. Moral of the story, this old tactic is still working. Buy any old URL in your vertical with authority, throw content on it quickly, and wait. I have seen this whole scenario post update before. After a while Google will catch it and roll back the update to correct this issue. But it's alarming that these updates are still falling for this initially.

Everyone please check your search console data in this same manner as I have and see if you notice the same scenario unfolding. Hopefully we have a big rollback on this one!

[ichthyous]

My main drop in PVs is definitely the bigger money keyword pages which, I assume, are being creamed-off with ads and all the other stuff at the top as well as being removed from not only the top rankings but completely from the top 20 ... anything beyond that is fairly pointless for me.

I am seeing the same thing, most of my main landing pages that brought in the most traffic have seen greatly reduced traffic since the mid-Feb update, then especially after March 15th. In that time I have lost 40% of my top-3 ranking terms, and most of those were the highest volume terms. I have seen only very large multi-million dollar ecomm sites take over the top ten spots across the board, OR articles about the subject matter, depending on what AI considers to be the intent. There has been one notable exception...a poorly designed website by someone that wasn't even a competitor very long ago. This cheap nothing of a site has steadily crawled to the top spot on many of my former high ranking terms while I continue to slip down week after week. I assume that is because this person writes articles in addition to having an ecomm site, and Google is absolutely favoring sites with long-form content. It's a wake up call for me.

[RedBar]

With a UK holiday weekend my two main UK sites are showing interesting stats v their predicted monthly traffic with 4+ full days to go:::

1. Hotel site 125%
2. Widget site 100%

Both these sites rank extremely well but are regionally focused and neither are ecom.

[christianz]

The May 22 boost was rolled back yesterday afternoon for all my sites. As if Google realized they made a mistake and accidentally increased traffic to organic websites instead of corporate ones :D

FYI: it wasn't a very big boost but it was noticeable.

[samwest]

-60% sales for the month.
My guess is if we all lost 60%, someone else must have gained 60%.

[superclown2]

The update seemed to have benefitted exact match domains but I may have detected a weakening of that this morning.

I'm sure this algo is very much a work in progress.

[RedBar]

UK sites fine yesterday and continuing so tody.

Main global site yesterday at 69.6% however USA demoted to #2 again by India with 35% more PVs.

Today global is looking like extremely low traffic from everywhere not just USA.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing the same thing @RedBar...traffic is way off this morning...it's 10:30am and my USA traffic is -70%. UK is -35%. It started to wind down the second half of the day yesterday. It's Memorial Day weekend in USA so people may be traveling, but the rest of the drop?

[saladtosser]

I have 5 friends who I do local sites for (tradesmen) all position #1-page #1 and since Google put the people also ask widget below maps/above organics, not one has had a single lead in a month, even at the height of the pandemic they were getting leads daily. I've told them to use adwords at this point!

[JesterMagic]

Yesterday saw a drop of 8% traffic when compared to same day last week (and last week we had experienced a slow drop of 10% since the beginning of the month).

[ichthyous]

@saladtosser My traffic improved considerably for Tuesday, Wed, and Thursday and I had leads those day. For the previous 8 days or so when traffic was much lower, nothing. Unfortunately I am seeing traffic reverting to the lower level, with traffic down across the board.

[saladtosser]

ichthyous + thanks for the feedback dude! Could be the sudden increase in the Indian variant in the UK spooking people into not having people in their homes but the "people also ask" has really been promoted to the top of all tradesmen serps in the UK this month. Do you have that widget over there in the USA directly below the 3 map pack?

As for my site, informational (pet niche) traffic is the lowest ever since google started putting a block of images at the top, then youtube videos, then "people also ask" then organics. I've managed to claw back 2% of traffic by working on FAQ daily to be included in the "people also ask" widget and been working on youtube as well (220 subscribers so far). Just to pull back some traffic as google now gives complete preference to youtube and "people also ask" organically in our niche.

[samwest]

In my vertical, the SERP layout has now become four spammy ads (where none existed prior to May 1st) all for the same ClickBank garbage (Teds WW), then Images for (search term), then below the fold, the #1 result, is me, yet no traffic. Depending upon the device and incognito mode, I am seeing at least half a dozen variations, and they churn daily. The dynamic layout display is clearly where the traffic steering is happening.

[mhansen]

We have a well established site that was effected on March 30/31st, which was the product review update if I recall. We have no product reviews on the website and it's a purely informational site with lead gen. Fairly well branded. No ads, as all leads are handled through our own homegrown distribution setup on the backend.

Traffic fell off about 20-25%, similar to what SEMR and other tools showed for us at the same time.

At some point yesterday (27th), it fell off again and when we'd usually be churning through 60-80 leads/day right now, we're lucky to see 8-10 per day.

GSC and other tools show very little change in search positions.

One thing of note: I was checking serps through a proxy and was only able to get 3 searches deep before Google blocked me, stating suspicious activity. That is the first time I've had that happen. During those 3 search results pages however, the layout was crazy bloated with various Google products and only showed 4-5 organic results per page, "people also asked" widgets between each organic result, etc.

Google is basically taking all this data we feed them like starving artists willing to do anything they state will "help us rank better", "help Google understand your site better" (talking metadata, schema, amp, etc) and walling off users from reaching us.

Happy Memorial day - It's time to go camping or something.

[webdev29]

here (FR/ecomm) its a carnage today. CTR is dropping a lot and we lost something like 50% of our organic trafic from last update then 25% more today... ranking is not moving a lot, or at least, nothing that Can explain a such trafic drop. clearly, that's not about core web vitals.

With AI implementation, Google is now clearly able to manipulate organic traffic (SEO) with commercial intent to the benefit of ADS (SEA).

If the result is catastrophic for business, either it is a bug or it is wanted and we are clearly facing a problem of monopoly abuse. Surprisingly, the commercial traffic collapses at the same time that Google concludes an agreement with shopify.... a coincidence? I don't believe it

[RedBar]

I was checking serps through a proxy and was only able to get 3 searches deep before Google blocked me, stating suspicious activity.

Yep, I can confirm this too, even when using Chrome with no history / cache on a squeaky clean machine but not using a proxy the other day I was getting this as well about evry 8/10 searches and having to go through the moronic robots test.

When I close browsers I have them automatically purged clean which then means if I wish to use Google I have to agree to their T&Cs ... I'm not logging-in to a G account therefore why do I need to do this? I assume it's to annoy people so they stay logged-in and they can cature even more data / info etc.

[gatormark]

It seems like Google uses a new algorithm every day and even at different times of the day. I monitor the ranking of one of my pages and its ranking fluctuates between 8 and 13. It has been doing this for a while.

[mhansen]

If anyone wants to go down a very interesting rabbit-hole, take a look at the SEMRush metrics on websites that run the (Google Partner) AdThrive Network for Adsense. There are currently more than 3,300 publishers in their publishers json file (Like ads.txt, but I won't share the link for privacy reasons).

A fellow publisher and I have collaborated for many years and he recently switched over to the Adthrive system after seeing a few of his competitors do so and experience quite a gain in SEMRush metrics. I told him that from a publisher view, it looked like suicide. His pages are very ad heavy now... To the point it looks like a spam MFA website.

In under 2 months, he has regained nearly 100% of all traffic he's been bleeding off for the last 4+ years. When I dug in and looked at other publishers on the list that were added just before and after him (I checked SEMR data on 10-15 publishers in each direction) nearly all of them have also experienced very significant increases in search exposure, rankings and traffic. To be fair though, a few have dropped slightly as well.

It begs the question:

1) Does Google favor it's partner delivered products over manual placement directly buy publishers?

or....

2) Does AdThrive deliver ads in way that helps the sites core vitals, thus boosting the relevancy of the website displaying them?

or....

Do I need a different tinfoil hat?

[ichthyous]

I am wondering if Google has ratcheted up penguin filters recently. I have a lot of links pointing to my landing pages from partner sites that sell my products, and the landing pages with the most inbound links have dropped the most. They do have keywords in the anchor text and are all from very high domain authority sites in the 70-85 range. We are talking 600-1500 links per partner site to landing and interior pages all over my site. How would one recognize if a penguin penalty had been triggered other than a slow leak of ranking since mid Feb and especially picking up since 3/15

[yollo03]

I have noticed a repetitive pattern. You have to watch the impressions and not position. A certain page for example is ranked at number 3 but the impressions suddenly dropped. You can argue that the subject of the page is simply becoming less popular but it is not the case. I am too lazy to upload a screenshot that demonstrates the above.

In my opinion, if your ranking is more or less the same but impressions dropped, fair chance you were penalized. It takes a few months to wear off but I guess it can last longer. When I was penalized it took 4 - 5 months to lift off. This was in 2020.

[topaz]

Am getting indexing issues. 30 minutes and news articles still aren't in index.
The leeches that copy off our original articles are getting indexed though.

[NickMNS]

@yollo03
I fully agree:

You have to watch the impressions and not position. A certain page for example is ranked at number 3 but the impressions suddenly dropped. You can argue that the subject of the page is simply becoming less popular but it is not the case.

I feel like a broken record, but in GSC rank (average position) is position given that there was an impression. So if you appear in position 11, but the user never clicks to page 2 of the SERP, then there was no impression and so no position. So impressions are everything, and position (rank) needs to be viewed with a grain of salt.

[sk7411]

Guys i have come to conclusion that Thursday-Friday is their testing day.

[superclown2]

I'm wondering if the fraud tsunami that has resulted, at least here in the UK, after data from the facebook hack was released, is responsible for at least some of the reduction in business some of us are seeing. A lot of people are frightened of clicking on links now, let alone giving personal details (especially CC) over the net.

Perhaps we can't blame G for preferring well known companies that they have confidence in, rather than sites that might, just might, be fraudulent.

[RedBar]

Global site 42% Friday

UK hotel site 149%

UK widget site 152%

I'm seriously considering locking-down my global site and re-think if we even want to participate this belligerently manipulated farce any more. We have a large widget trade email database of contacts with whom we can keep in contact and provide log-in details should they need / require product details.

The loser, again, will be Joe Public since my global site is the ONLY source on The Net with all its pertinent information.

If I do this G, it's your fault, no one else's and I shall not wait around for months / years on end anticipating a recovery, it will be done within weeks, possibly days.