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]

It will take a few more days to clear, I wouldn't get excited about ranking boost or declines at this point.

[delorean]

For Blogspot users, you might notice indexing issues since June 1, 2021, the cause is still unknown [https://support.google.com/blogger/thread/111978981/crawl-error-server-error-5xx-failed-server-error-5xx-please-help] and still being monitored by Google forum product experts. Google Search Console gives vague Server Error 5xx to most blogspot-hosted websites. This might lead to lower visits. Hoping that Google will resolve this issue soon.

[sofie77]

The last few days it was quiet, now the update is showing its face. As always, when we have improved the site again despite all the highs / lows and increased our income, it goes down again.

[sofie77]

The last few days it was quiet, now the update is showing its face. As always, when we have improved the site again despite all the highs / lows and increased our income, it goes down...

[RedBar]

@yollo03

it's been over 48 hours and nothing.

One site 24th April - 6 weeks - Nothing
One page 24th May cached 3rd June

I had assumed G had given-up doing anything but promoting its favourite sites.

Google - Successfully supressing the world's information!

[yollo03]

@RedBar, things are happening in my niche. One of my competitors that received a big boost from end of May update had it reversed. A news publisher that managed to be on the first spot for a very popular keyword now dropped to second place. I am also noticing sites with poor DA are now ranking higher than they should be. The main shuffling is with high DA sites at the moment, at least in my niche. I dont think its over.

[saladtosser]

I'm literally seeing no movement of anything except one site that's come out of nowhere to dominate, looking at the backlinks the only links they have are from what looks like previous hacked pages that were selling ugg boots or viagra, all the backlinks anchor text is about these spammy products (the site itself isn't remotely in the area of viagra or boots) but these backlinks seem to have given the site overall a huge boost, very strange!

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing another big drop in both ranking and in traffic to my most important pages. My home page and my more popular landing pages with the most inbound links all vanished and have had one visit this morning. For the first time ever I am seeing low rank and low traffic interior pages receive more visits than my top ranking pages. For me this seems to be an indication of some sort of penalty in action. I'm finding myself dropping to page five for terms that I was at the top for years, and it's not because the other sites have high DA, links or content.

[MayankParmar]

I was seeing more movements when they did those unannounced weekend updates, but nothing changed after the core update.

[christianz]

So far the first impressions are that Google hasn't improved at all with this core update after 6 months since December 2020 core.

They are absolutely determined to go into wrong direction and it would take some drastic changes in the company to turn this around.

[shadowlight]

It will take a few more days to clear, I wouldn't get excited about ranking boost or declines at this point.

I wouldn't get excited about any changes at all this month seen as there is going to be another update in a few weeks and any changes could be reversed.

Its utter madness, they are forever changing the goal posts. Winners and losers? Their is only one consistent winner and thats Google.

[yollo03]

As soon as google will have some competition they will be more transparent regarding core updates and automatic penalties. Until then they will keep everyone in the dark with kindergarten tips to think global and don't worry about you rankings, focus on quality content.

[lee_sufc]

To be honest, I'm pretty panicked seeing the results for my site. I've done nothing drastic to my site / structure for a long time. It's naturally grown over 20 years, naturally gaining backlinks from articles, etc. I don't do anything "spammy", just concentrate on doing what my clients want (high-quality content) with regular updates and improvements to the design every 18 months or so.

If these results I'm seeing now stick, it's game over for me as 80%+ of my business comes from organic results. I can't afford to spent thousands on advertising.

I'm just hoping the results are still in a state of flux?

[yollo03]

@lee, probably by the end of the week you will know if it sticks or not. My rankings also dropped today.

[lee_sufc]

@yollo - typically, my free advice pages are still holding up (give or take 1/2 positions). However, it's my "revenue generating" pages that have all been massively hit (from mid page 1 down to page 3/4...and in some cases, gone entirely).

It's all just frustrating and disheartening.

[yollo03]

@lee, be grateful, My top keyword that has provided the most converting traffic disappeared for 48 hours now, I am not showing for it at all, not even in page 15. There is nothing you can do unless someone figures out what was targeted or if they decide to be more transparent and say what the core update is about.

[lee_sufc]

@yallo, OUCH. The only updside is that if it's dissappeared entirely, it could be an indexing problem? I've had this with multiple pages in the past where they just went, and then reappeared a week or so later - for no reason!

[yollo03]

@lee its a highly competitive keyword. It disappeared in the past, yes but not during a core update. So far all I saw is a drop in rankings. The only upside to this is that one of my affiliates received a ranking boost so I might end up receiving more traffic from him. I am working on expanding my affiliates rather than organic search.

[mzb44]

The last few days it was quiet, now the update is showing its face. As always, when we have improved the site again despite all the highs / lows and increased our income, it goes down...

Same here.

The work we did the last 13 months was insane.

We even got featured and linked to from major mainstream sites like PBS, forbes, entrepreneur, att, businessinsider, theconversation, venturebeat, etc - all 100% organic, they just linked by themselves without any SEO outreach. We got more than 1,000 new referring domains the last 6 months all from the aforementioned ultra tier sites, all organically with zero "link building".

Plus insane amounts of specialist created and fact-checked content (validated by the large number of ultra-tier mentions and links from the above-mentioned sites).

And we're now hit by the 3rd core update in a row. Google now actually thinks we are now even worse than we apparently were before.

Google's message is now well-received. Apparently, we didn't get the hints earlier, but we totally get it now.

It's time to close shop.

I do get that it might recover in the future if we're just going to be consistent but it's really so much you can do while constantly being in minus. And now, with ~2 core updates per year only you can't really wait years to potentially recover, maybe.

I am pulling the plug and will begin sending termination notices next week to everyone.

[yollo03]

@mzb, I am sorry to hear. I am not in much better position myself. I would consider waiting until the end of the week, what happened in the past couple of days might get reversed by the end of the week. No guarantees obviously.

[mzb44]

If it recovers by itself in the future I can always re-start again.

There were examples of sites recovering by itself without doing anything at all (shows again how ridiculous all of this is).

But until then things will have to be stopped. It's not possible to operate in minus indefinitely.

[lee_sufc]

@mzb - it's really disheartening, isn't it? I know we cannot "expect" traffic from Google, but like you, we've concentarted on what Google advise as the right thing, only to be punished for it. What makes it harder to stomach, is when you see sites that you know use shady tactics (plagiarism, etc), showing on page one!

[mzb44]

@mzb - it's really disheartening, isn't it? I know we cannot "expect" traffic from Google, but like you, we've concentarted on what Google advise as the right thing, only to be punished for it. What makes it harder to stomach, is when you see sites that you know use shady tactics (plagiarism, etc), showing on page one!

Yes, we cannot expect traffic from Google.

But based on how Google treats my site, my stance is that Google is objectively wrong. I disagree with the quality and results generated by these core updates. I think Google's way of evaluating sites through these core updates is deeply flawed.

My site, content and expertise was validated by real user feedback, site comments as well as constantly growing 100% organic links from ultra-mainstream and authoritative sites. This wouldn't happen if my site would be "low quality" or "less relevant".

Yes, I do know my opinion does not matter in the slightest and won't change anything.

It's the reason I'm closing shop. When you are doing everything "right" - and by all objective metrics you are good at it - but then Google still demotes you like it penalized pure-spammers and link schemers in the past, is when you know all of this is a scam and a huge waste of time.

[JS_Harris]

Some Advice: If a major update does not take a huge bite of your traffic - keep building. If a major update does take a big bite switch to improvement mode for older content, site structure, etc.

You can't closely watch Google anymore, the changes are too nuanced. Example: If Google suddenly decides that pages about A need to be fresh and about B need to be old you're just not going to have access to such a list to know, nor can you change page age.

That aside: a site I had that took a 40% drop in the Dec 2020 core update by virtue of losing ALL featured snippets overnight has roared back, regained them all, and traffic is up 50% compared to Nov 2020. All I did was spend the time between then and now publishing once per week instead of 4-5 times and I went back and improved older content.

It works. What no longer works is Google at bringing be new sites to explore which is what made them fun oh so long ago.

[edited by: JS_Harris at 3:27 pm (utc) on Jun 6, 2021]

[mzb44]

That aside: a site I had that took a 40% drop in the Dec 2020 core update by virtue of losing ALL featured snippets overnight has roared back, regained them all, and traffic is up 50% compared to Nov 2020. All I did was spend the time between then and now publishing once per week instead of 4-5 times and I went back and improved older content.

It works

yeah that's what I did got smacked for the third time in a row.

It's all just random honestly.

[yollo03]

It works if that was the issue... There could be many other factors, every website is different

[JS_Harris]

Oh lordie, Google has just unhooked one of my sites. I only have a handful so it's noticeable.

What do I mean by unhooked? I mean it's getting the same amount of traffic but it's no longer US based, now it's coming from all countries wether they speak the language or not. Same amount overall but a 70% drop from the US. My site would have to be being translated for that to make sense.

Hey <G>, how do I respond to foreign language comments?

[edited by: JS_Harris at 3:32 pm (utc) on Jun 6, 2021]

[mzb44]

It's all about Google not being transparent about these updates.

"Just create useful and relevant content" is obviously bs.

You follow that advice and then as a consequence of you doing that all your metrics like user engagement and links from ultra authoritative sites increase. Directly as a result of you following Google's advice.

And then what happens? You get demoted by every new core update.

Waste of time. Roulette. Random luck.

Google 2021.

[edited by: mzb44 at 3:32 pm (utc) on Jun 6, 2021]

[yollo03]

I have 2 errors that keep repeating themselves every time they change the algorithm. These errors were fixed and validated at least 7 times in 2021. The errors are from 2018 and 2020. On top of that, all my core web vitals are green. Did a lot of work on reducing CLS, LCP and TTI. I had errors in the past with CLS and LCP and they keep showing as new errors even though they were fixed. I sent feedback with a screenshot, nothing helped. Yesterday all core web vitals dropped to zero. Meaning, no good urls, no need improvement, no failing. Just zero. The keywords that are currently affected all the major keywords, not the small ones. We'll see how it ends by Friday.

[westcoast]

I am seeing pretty much the same trend as previous core updates: smaller, lower DA sites taking our rankings over a huge number of keywords.

Our site is 25 years old, entertainment/education. My existing theory of "large sites getting caught within some unintended algorithmic penalty box that gets worse and worse with every passing year regardless of improving content" remains stronger than ever.

Last night's semrush position scan shows us losing positions on the majority of our keywords, so it feels to me like another site-wide authority downgrade that has hit all our rankings.

According to ahrefs:

Our site's DA is 71, links from 14500 domains

We are now being dominated under most phrases by sites with the following profiles:

50 DA / 740 domains
42 DA / 1500 domains
56 DA / 660 domains
53 DA / 1300 domains
40 DA / 990 domains
63 DA / 5800 domains
45 DA / 3800 domains
46 DA / 950 domains

In addition, the "Massive hacked domain cloaked-spam-attack" that our site has now been caught up in for months continues. It appeared Google had dropped the offending sites from the index, but they all popped back up again the day after and now the spam is increasing. There are now 25,000 hacked-domain backlinks spamming up our backlink profile, making us look like bad actors. I can only assume we are being penalized heavily and continuously for this.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ And our core vitals are fantastic compared to pretty much every site we compare against. We definitely weren't dinged for any of that stuff ]

[christianz]

Massive hacked domain cloaked-spam-attack

You are not alone with spam/fake/automated/spun/generated site backlinks. My sites have probably 80-90% spam site backlinks and 10% real (if that), based on pure numbers. And they have been around for many years and all these thousands of spam site backlinks appeared maybe in last couple years.

If Google is reducing my ranking because of this, they are just incompetent. I know there are many many sites with similar problems. Its Googles job to ignore spam.

[mzb44]

I have seen that if you've been negatively affected a few times by core updates in the past it's extremely difficult to recover even if you implement substantial changes.

I'd say it's probably not worth the effort to attempt a recovery unless you are a brand that gets to lose its brand value.

Yes, recoveries do absolutely happen but more often than not a previously hit site will continue to have difficulties in the future and will always be at a disadvantage.

The changes and improvements you implement on a core update hit site might actually pay off more if done on a completely new site instead.

[Ecopac]

@mzb44 - I couldn't agree more with what you're saying, it's all pure chance now as to whether you're in the good books or not - I took a huge hit in the May 2020 update and haven't recovered a single position since, in fact, it's just got worse despite me making all the changes in the world.

At some point you have to accept that Google will do what it wants, it's not a level or fair playing field.

All I would say to you is that don't forget there's 2 more updates coming within the next month so maybe don't throw the towel in just yet, you never know what will happen

All the best

[mzb44]

So I went through most of the important and authoritative industry sites in my niche. Around 20 sites.

About 15 or so were hit hard by the core update. All with genuine expert content, constant stream of ultra tier links and by the looks of it acquired organically. Some of these sites having several tens of thousands of root domain links.

A few were unaffected.

Two are surging. One of these massively.

From these two one is a pretty decent site. Doesn't do anything different than the first 15. It's pretty much in line with those. I guess it was their time to just be lucky. There doesn't seem to be any other explanation.

And then there is the second site, which is the one surging the most. Probably up to 100% just in the previous 24 hours which is insane.

So, what's so special about this site? It's a pure affiliate-only site. Up to 4,000 pages, every single one has affiliate links, every single page is a money keyword page built solely to guess what might rank in search engines. All just best, best, best, best, best X and Y pages and reviews. The whole site is powered by high-profile paid links and guest posts. Think forbes, huffpost paid links etc.

So, we have 20 sites. 15 legit and in my opinion authoritative industry sites, all massively hit. A few unaffected. A legit industry site surging. A pure-SEO, paid link, 100% pure-affiliate site surging massively embarrassing all the other industry authority sites.

Sincerely, fck this fking bllsht. Sincerely. This is complete and utter bs. I am so fking done with this sht. Absolutely incredible man. Literally the spammiest and purest made-for-SEO rankings manipulation black hat site is the one surging the most. Absolutely unbelievable.

I am definitely and 100% done now. The message Google is sending is absolutely clear to me now.

[westcoast]

"So, we have 20 sites. 15 legit and in my opinion authoritative industry sites, all massively hit. A few unaffected. A legit industry site surging. A pure-SEO, paid link, 100% pure-affiliate site surging massively embarrassing all the other industry authority sites."

I'm noticing a similar thing too in our niche... a couple of new-ish sites with low DA, low # of linking domains, and mostly spun content are now dominating 20+ year sites that have far more history and authority on the topics.

I am hoping what we are observing is just an intermediary processing step as this update "rolls out".... and that it's simply a matter that perhaps the better sites have not yet been processed and ranked correctly yet.

I'm hoping. So, so, so, so much.

[lee_sufc]

westcoast....you're not alone in hoping this, too! Fingers cross, eh!

[christianz]

@mzb44 You don't have to give up. You just have to make your website worse. And I am being only slightly sarcastic.

It seems that best strategy is not to have one high quality "halo" site but instead have several #*$!tier sites all competing for the same keywords with different type of SEO manipulation and different levels of blackhat-edness and just throw them all at the stupid Google AI and see what sticks.

As added bonus you will get insight on what works with current iteration of stupid Google AI and what doesn't.

If you have one high quality site, it will still get outranked by one of those priority sites owned by large media company, but one of those spammy sites can steal some of the rankings just purely based on nasty black hat SEO.

I am branching into multiple sites myself but I haven't really gone down the black hat avenue yet. Seeing these latest updates and general direction that Google is taking, I am encouraged to be more devious and start to contribute to those "40 billion pages of webspam per day" myself.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing only the same top ecomm brands crowding out all the SERPS, along with the blog posts / articles. It never occurred to me that the blogs might be adsense affiliates so I will check that.

One competitor has risen to the top across the board, an independent site with mediocre content and design. The site is not well optimized and there are no adsense ads being run. The site is beating out all the huge corporate brands for very competitive terms with a page that has one title at top and five thumbnail images leading to other pages....that's it. Hardly any text on the page and no authoritative content on the page...insane. The only thing I can see is that they are using exact match keywords in the page url, which seems to work quite well these days. Meanwhile my site has dropped to page five, after complete junk like ebay listings and individual Pinterest posts.

USA traffic is down 48% from the norm at 4:30pm today and my home page is down 53%. My highest ranking pages are getting almost no traffic at all, just stopped. Only one landing page is actually improving, and that is the one with a much lower number of inbound links. I can only surmise that this is some sort of link spam penalty dialed up to 10, and / or a page optimization penalty.

[mzb44]

You don't have to give up. You just have to make your website worse. And I am being only slightly sarcastic.

Lol. Truth.

The most traffic my site ever had was when it was legitimately low-quality. Semi-trash tier content written by randoms and almost no links. It had about 800% more traffic than it has now. :-)

After expanding the site and remaking everything by genuine experts and acquiring - 100% organically! - links from more than 2,000 sites, a lot of these mega authority sites, I'm down like -80%.

It seems that best strategy is not to have one high quality "halo" site but instead have several #*$!tier sites all competing for the same keywords with different type of SEO manipulation and different levels of blackhat-edness and just throw them all at the stupid Google AI and see what sticks.

As added bonus you will get insight on what works with current iteration of stupid Google AI and what doesn't.

If you have one high quality site, it will still get outranked by one of those priority sites owned by large media company, but one of those spammy sites can steal some of the rankings just purely based on nasty black hat SEO.

This is the only real answer.

My black hat friends are begging me for a year to stop with this "creating legit site" nonsense and just do pure-spam sites.

They are all making bank now with their spam sites. One of them is now even surging massively in an ultra YMYL finance niche with machine generated content and expired domain links promoting affiliate offers that are borderline scams.

Meanwhile I'm the loser with the "high-quality white hat site".

The backhatters were right all along. All of us buying into the google guidelines and blog posts are dumbfkcs.

[yollo03]

Australia semrush is 4.9. It means the algorithm update is settling down. I dont buy that it takes 2 weeks to rollout. It takes a few days and if they dont like something they have enough room to issue another update. I wrote before in this forum that this high quality content is not relevant anymore, not since December 2020. If there is an algorithm penalty google should be transparent and show there is a penalty of some sort.

[ichthyous]

If there is an algorithm penalty google should be transparent and show there is a penalty of some sort.

Why should they start now? Google has never been transparent about that since the beginning.

[MayankParmar]

It is depressing when their biased algorithm deliberately favour top publishers even when you're the source of the news and those top publishers have linked back to you.

[Martin Ice Web]

Big drop for us so far.
But this time we got hit with updated rolling out. With prior we got a boost while updated started and got demoted some days later. Hope this time is different.

Our current vertical looks like we are back to 1995. Very old outdated looking domains. With lots of repeated keywords, old html, very long menue listings, no mobile pages.... all that i personally would say is NOT user friendly.

You have to got to page 2 and 3 to have a good choice of actually good and trustworth domains.

Main winner is amazon again even if the item doens´t match the query ( multiple entries 2 to 3 ), followed by ebay and conrad

[Neohippy]

Large site with some good content and a lot of UGC. Think we were hit by the little updates some time towards end of March and again towards end of May. Things seem to have turned around a bit yesterday, and today's looking much better than last week, too. But not counting any chickens...

[ichthyous]

Continuing to lose ranking this morning, and it appears to be getting worse as I have dropped 30-40 places for some terms. Traffic to my homepage is down 73%, and my most popular landing pages have zero visits. This has been going on for three weeks so I don't see much hope in this reversing now, and I can only assume that this is a demotion or penalty in action. It is definitely affecting some pages and not others.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous, we see the same. All main traffic site got hit while low volume selling items got one hit upgrades.
Maybe the update is starting with high volume traffic sites of a domain and will dig to bottom. So that in time things will change.

[yollo03]

My analytics went haywire, I received 1k organic traffic in about 15 minutes. Did anyone see something strange with analytics? its over now.

Edit: Maybe it was a glitch in the matrix :) I think July's core update is will be the last ticket to survive in all this.

[christianz]

My analytics went haywire, I received 1k organic traffic in about 15 minutes. Did anyone see something strange with analytics? its over now.

I saw abnormal spike in one of my sites too. But it could be just a random bot, not related to Google.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Very unusual patterns all day, one hour of decreasing piece of traffic follows another hour when it's increasing, and repeating. But overally I see some small boost at +5-7%/

[Dooku]

@Mzb44, first let me say I feel your pain and situation, I know.....I have been there.

"The backhatters were right all along. All of us buying into the google guidelines and blog posts are dumbfkcs. "

Please allow me to use some of your terminology :-) .....and expand on your post.
Besides my money websites I have several test websites , either setup as new or old previous websites I no longer use but are valuable for their log data.

With each and every core (and in between algo updates) I see one CLEAR trend in that data:
- best revenue generating pages are killed off one by one.
- best revenue generating keywords impressions are killed.
- rankings mostly stay the same and so does the average traffic*
- but increasingly that traffic is replaced with lower quality and incorrect (commercial) intent.
- conversions therefore for the best keywords are dropping with EACH algo update
(Note: that traffic is not disappearing into thin air, it just goes elsewhere......in G's pocket).
- All of the above is NOT happening with traffic from other search engines, and conversions are stellar compared to traffic from G.

The main problem is actually that the huge majority of webmasters, website owners, small publishers or whatever you call them follow the guidelines from the infamous G webmaster Guidelines PDF, either from that pdf directly, but mostly from the online "guru's" parroting the same info as if it's the holy gospel.

This way a huge majority of websites will fall into a "template" that G can manipulate easily. And when a huge number of dumbfcks also use G analytics and Chrome, providing idiotically detailed data for G than it's absolutely no problem for G to devise new "search engine enhancements user experience improvements" to squeeze the lemon some more with each algo update. Best examples are all the new "trinkets" from G that have appeared on the first page.

It's not about creating great content or whatever G and dumbfcks guru's are toting, it's about fine tuning that data and finding more and more options by G to squeeze some more with each algo update.

I have enough friends using blackhat methods and each and everyone of them is laughing all the way to the bank! Everyone in that group has switched to BH in the last 5 years or so.........and in their eyes I am the dumbfck! :-) And I can't blame them!

For example they are all using PBN's and anyone thinking a PBN does not work any more......your wrong. G did not know about PBN's at the time they first appeared......they were made aware of it by people complaining about "unfair" seo practices. As if creating "white hat" backlinks is not BH? A well taken care of PBN will work great and there are many out there that G can NEVER EVER find out about unless someone goes out of their way to let them know (and even then you need many complaints filed). And this is just ONE example of MANY other BH methods.

People forget that G can NEVER know about all those BH methods if they are well implemented, it's just plain impossible. This is according to my friends that use those BH tactics the sole reason they work so well. You simply can NOT fine tune an algo to punish a website for something you do NOT know about. You can however fine tune an algo according to ALL the data you gather from GA, Chrome and many other API's and services that G has implemented over the years and which many dumbfcks use because they are "free".
And still people say "we can not just expect G to give us traffic"..........