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]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery. Every time the website did recover it slid back down several days later. There is very little that can be done is your website is artificially being pressed down. Only you can do is fix any errors and improve site structure. Once the website will be reviewed again (could be tomorrow, next month, next year or 5 years) you have a small chance of recovering. The more pages the website has the higher the risk of some sort of a penalty.

[ichthyous]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery.

@Yollo Did you see traffic to your home page decline rapidly like this? The thing is that while overall traffic is lower since mid-March, most of the traffic seems to have moved to other interior pages on my site.

[golderberger]

In my case them main problem is traffic coming from countries like India, Mexico etc. (never had so much traffic from those countries and I was never interested in them, not my audience) instead of USA / Europe. My sales are 50% down for the past 5 weeks.

[ichthyous]

@goldberger Many of us are seeing this...My USA traffic is perpetually down while I am getting traffic from Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America. UK traffic swings wildly, Canada and Australia are
almost nil on any given day. Western Europe also much lower than earlier this year.

Another big problem is that traffic just shuts off for hours at various points during the day, and that is now a daily event. Today my traffic dropped at 1pm and has stayed at 2 visits per hour since then. My sales from new customers are zero for the last five weeks and it's been a week with not one email or call.

[yollo03]

@ichthyous yes, one interior page gets most of the traffic. The homepage hardly gets any organic traffic. I am beyond the point of declining rapidly, I hit rock bottom for the homepage. Until the automated penalty is lifted (that started in Dec core update) it's out of my hands. You just learn to accept it.

[golderberger]

@yollo03 i wouldn't say this is penalty per se, this is just Google maximizing its revenue and screwing up everybody else in the process (except the big corps)

[BushyTop]

An absolutely horrific weekend of conversions. This is the most severe strain on our income we've encountered in my tenure of this job.

[Martin Ice Web]

@BushyTop,

confirmed. Started Friday at noon, big drop (-70%) and it last till now.
And again google means that MFA sites ( mainly amazon ) are good and informative sites.

And very strange: the last 3 days before this update we got 1000s of hits to 3 specific sites in very short time from all over the world. It went back to normal traffic and hours later the same hits.

[Samsam1978]

Awful results in my history of doing this. Terrible 10 line articles by non-english writers outranking my 10k article. It's a joke that makes you want to give the whole thing up.

[mzb44]

I think it's a penalty. I was hit by December core update and since then almost no recovery. Every time the website did recover it slid back down several days later. There is very little that can be done is your website is artificially being pressed down. Only you can do is fix any errors and improve site structure. Once the website will be reviewed again (could be tomorrow, next month, next year or 5 years) you have a small chance of recovering. The more pages the website has the higher the risk of some sort of a penalty.

Agree with everything said here.

I'm seeing exactly the same.

If you are hit by a core update your traffic gets "frozen" to the level after the update. Even if you double your number of pages after the update and traffic starts to increase due to the new content, G will at one point reduce the traffic of your pre-existing pages to equalise you back to the level it put you after the update.

You are at the mercy of the core updates that now are run every 6-7 months only (june-july is kinda the same update in two parts). You can now be stuck for years. This is harsher than penguin when it was still manually refreshed - except 99% of sites hit by penguin really were spammers. With these updates anyone can get hit.

[saladtosser]

Been seeing less and less traffic over the months while positions have remained stable, my webmaster tool graph is on a slow decent month on month which I suspect is down to the google distractions that are slowing filling the serps. I often wonder what the state of search would have been like today if Steve Jobs hadn't died or google never floated on the stock market, two alternative universes we will never know I guess ...

[Samsam1978]

Maybe a penalty attached to our backlink profiles and the amount of spam copycat sites that Google ignores. Google should know the source of original content but this all remains a mystery. I do think a penalty seeing what I do. The lack of transparency from them ruins companies.

[Martin Ice Web]

In our niche a site called picclick (de) took over the search. It is outranking amazon and ebay! It is full of pics, bad german and 100.000 links to amazon and ebay.
And it is ranking for every single item in our vertical.

Big deal google.

[yollo03]

It is defiantly a penalty, not a theory. I accepted there is nothing I can do to fix it until the next core update and there are no guarantees anything will budge. I am working on the structure of the website and domain authority, content is not the issue. The more pages you have the more problems you are likely to face. I have seen new websites with only 4 - 5 pages and poor backlinks profile outrank some solid domains. It is what it is, that's why I considered launching a new site and starting from scratch after July's core update.

[mzb44]

In our niche a site called <redacted> took over the search. It is outranking amazon and ebay! It is full of pics, bad german and 100.000 links to amazon and ebay.
And it is ranking for every single item in our vertical.

Big deal google.

ahahahah ahahahah.

It doesn't even have any content but just auto generated doorway pages with amazon affiliate links. Absolutely incredible.

Note the super massive boost the site received on June 3, the core update. For those who won't be able to see it later (post edited by mods) - that site is literally a collection of 100% machine generated affiliate links without any text content of any kind. Pure old-school classic link farm / doorway pages. It ranks for about 6 million (!) keywords in ahrefs and got an ultra massive boost after the June core update.

It also got a super massive boost during the May 2020 core update. I can't even stress enough the fact that this site is a collection of hundreds of thousands of auto-generated pure-spam doorway pages. They don't even have any content at all apart from affiliate links. It's too bad that the OP's post will probably be edited to remove the site name. Mods please make an exception here.

This is how every single page looks like (hundreds of thousands): [ibb.co...] (nothing there to identify the site, mods). Like, that's it. That's how the site looks like. There is nothing else. I did not crop out anything else.

Ahrefs stats: [ibb.co...]

Mega boost during may 2020 and june 2021 core updates: [ibb.co...]

Again, the entire site is 100% like the first screenshot. No other content at all. That's how the whole site across hundreds of thousands of pages looks like. Literally. And all of those are 100% affiliate links.

What is it that all of us are missing? I always believed that "secret blackhat SEO tricks Google doesn't want you to know about" are just a scam and no such things exist but it's blatantly obvious that they do. I'm wondering what the "trick" here is to rank those literal autogenerated contentless spam for absolutely everything it targets.

Incredible that this site received such massive boost after every core update? Makes you think what these cores updates are actually about. This whole site ranks solely thanks to core update boosts. It was nothing before. Extremely interesting. This is probably the most important takeaway here.

* It's too bad that your post will be edited/deleted as it mentions that site. I would really love here to be an exception and allow that post to stay, as it's an extremely pertinent example for what is going on these days.

[Martin Ice Web]

@mzb44, it feels like this sites get back linkpower from ebay and amazo while they are linking to them.
Pure ads site. I realy donīt know what google is about. This is not user friendly.

[yollo03]

I believe that the penalty might also be affecting core web vitals.

see mobile core web vitals: [ibb.co...]

No errors but no good urls either. Desktop used to be the same until one day last week it came back and now it's green. Mobile however is still zero since the end of May. I emailed in feedback a screenshot although I knew it might be pointless. New posts are being indexed but with no keywords and then after a short time they don't receive any impressions. There is no manual action, this is an automated penalty.

[RedBar]

@MIW

It's simply incredulous that G with all its supposed abilities can even list such a load of garbage and as for Joe Publix for using it , humanity has no chance!

[mzb44]

It's simply incredulous that G with all its supposed abilities can even list such a load of garbage and as for Joe Publix for using it , humanity has no chance!

Honestly, after seeing that site I do not have any hopes for future recovery of my sites. At least I'm not counting on it.

It's extremely shocking to see the super massive boosts that site received after every core update the last two years.

Meanwhile the site is a dictionary definition of this: [developers.google.com...]

Puts in question absolutely everything said by every single mainstream SEO about core updates.

I can already see the gears turning in some mainstream SEOs head trying to rationalise that how AcKcHuAlLy this is a site that somehow matches user intent or some other bs.

[Samsam1978]

@mzb44 OMG thanks for posting this. I'm at a loss with this update. My site has plummeted terribly to basically SPAM and new websites with no crediability. My new site that I checked on yesterday has rocketed, but I don't want to invest my time in a new site I want my site to haev the credit it deserves users email me daily saying how much they love my site that has now lost 50% of rankings. This is not how it is suppose to be. Give the old sites a bit of credit Google and sort the spam out.

[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.