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.

[renatovieira]

Another day of big drop in the morning.

After the last update, all patterns were changed.

Impressions remain the same, but the way G sends me users has completely changed.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Same with me...Last two days I had a big boost in page views in the early morning, but today at 8am sharp my traffic dropped and I've had only 16 visitors from 9am-1pm. USA down 32%, search down 7%, direct down 43%, home page down 38%. This is now becoming the norm, and there is no way on earth that it's not sheer manipulation on the part of Google. My impressions have fallen every day since June 1st, and clicks are at an all time low.

[trabis]

Is anyone seeing a decrease in Pinterest impressions?
Because i'm not.
It feels like spam.

2 or 3 results per page in almost every query. I'm following one query where Pinterest has 10 results in the first 3 pages. It feels like spam.

I am not seeing the update on my niche yet. If the only update they do is remove pinterest from text search then googling would be 33% more efficient.

Ohh, and for some Pinterest results you get a popup to login if you want to see the content. It feels like spam.

[christianz]

2 or 3 results per page in almost every query. I'm following one query where Pinterest has 10 results in the first 3 pages. It feels like spam.

It is spam. Spam is thriving. Google is busy with much more important things like developing all kinds of new Googlespam widgets (trending searches carousel etc.). As long as they secure the top spots for their priority publishers (some of which they have actual written deals with) and their friends in silicon valley (like Pinterest), the rest of the web can drown in sea of AI generated spam. They just don't care.

[superclown2]

As long as they secure the top spots for their priority publishers (some of which they have actual written deals with) and their friends in silicon valley (like Pinterest), the rest of the web can drown in sea of AI generated spam.

Are you saying that Google has written deals to give certain companies preference in the organic SERPs? If this is correct it could be dynamite (as well as explain the state of search results at present).

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:12 am (utc) on Jun 13, 2021]
[edit reason] Post cleanup after split and resplice [/edit]

[Samsam1978]

Can someone summarise what is going on my SEMrush ranking has halved, traffic down considerably. I'm trying to understand why. My 6,000 word article is being outranked by spam - Is this due to CLS update that has come into place?

[mzb44]

@Samsam1978 - It's probably due to the June 2021 Core Update that was launched last week.

The page speed/core web vitals update is not live yet.

I'm sorry this happened to you. Many are in the same boat. Most of the time if there is nothing majorly wrong with your site (i.e. technical issues, content spam, link spam, inaccurate/misleading information) there is not much you can do or "fix" to recover from these hits, unfortunately*.

Edit:

* I always recommend that if there are things actually wrong with your site then of course you need to fix them. Also, if there are room for improvements then absolutely go ahead and implement those improvements.

But these may not necessarily guarantee a recovery.

On the other hand, I'm not a fan of implementing major changes just for the sake of changes and to guess what might help you recover. If your site is genuinely good and was hit it may recover during a subsequent core update without you necessarily doing anything**. It happened many times before.

** or it might not. Yes, it's all messed up. Not much we can do about it though.

[edited by: mzb44 at 8:59 am (utc) on Jun 10, 2021]

[mzb44]

As long as they secure the top spots for their priority publishers

Are you saying that Google has written deals to give certain companies preference in the organic SERPs?

I don't think this is true.

I think all of the Pinterest spam is simply a consequence of the root domain authority (not the moz metric!) > everything thing google is doing now.

Pinterest being the most authoritative domain for images (like, by A LOT) in comparison to absolutely everyone else, you are now seeing Pinterest everywhere for image search.

Same with the major news sites everywhere for informational queries, press release parasite spam, expired domain spam, etc.

These all operate on the same underlying mechanism Google pushes now and boosts with every core update.

[Martin Ice Web]

this one is getting bigger thant panda update years ago.
Unbelievable how google pulls up amazon on terms that don´t match with the query

[Samsam1978]

I felt sick when I logged into SEMRush. My site is the best designed and content above any others, users email me every day thanking me. I just don't understand why this has happened. I have looked for technical server issues and there is no problem. Spam from India is ranking above me with terrible English. It's just such a mess that we cannot have a voice and say please take a look, especially as I was reaching millions of people a month. Surely serving millions of people a month for 15 years who are happy has no bearing on this AI. It is a mess.

[christianz]

Are you saying that Google has written deals to give certain companies preference in the organic SERPs?

Absolutely. They have priority publishers in YouTube (large media companies, cable TV companies) with which they have deals and which they prioritize above anything that any mortal human could ever publish no matter how good the content. And they have the same for search and news, with large news outlets and media companies signing deals with Google to feature their content, which, of course, gets absolutely rammed to the top spots for every query (other than ads of course).

They have this term EAT which they use as a codeword for "if you are not a signed large media company, you won't get any traffic".

When they started pushing EAT (beginning with YMYL sites) I pretty much knew that its over for the WWW.

[saladtosser]

>>>Spam from India is ranking above me with terrible English.<<<

This is because (google have stated) they can't understand your content, they can only understand external signals to your site that says if it's quality or not (links basically). You would think with googles mantra of "content is king" and "create good content" they would factor correct spelling and grammar as some sort of signal but apparently not. IMO if you haven't bothered with basic correct spelling and grammar then you didn't put much effort into the content in the first place, and if you didn't put the effort in how great can it be?! Google needs to buy up grammarly.com and incorporate it into the algo, clearly, google doesn't care or know how to recognise on-page quality signals, or in this case the lack of.

[JesterMagic]

It's weird some of our pages got pushed down to page 3 while others stay on page 1. It's like there is some ranking signal (good or bad) that Google has turned the dial on. I have a feeling it deals with more of negative SEO we have been suffering that Google doesn't understand is not our doing.

The problem I had with this update that Google has confirmed it is only half of it. The second update happens in July and who knows what that will attempt to accomplish.

Not sure how many of us will be able to survive before the FTC will step in and actual do something about it. There is so many obvious things with how Google operates that needs to be address by the Government since no real competition exists in this space. If and when something does happen it will take years of court battles before things get decided and then a few more years for things to be implemented.

That is the same for all tech companies (Apple and Facebook) that have walled gardens that consumers cannot escape.

[yollo03]

As long as there is no competition they will do whatever they want. I noticed that for some reason google thinks I am a product review website. Bing and yahoo understood my website but google is struggling. I think July will do a lot more damage than June.

[shadowlight]

Well my site is ranking well, traffic up overall yet the traffic im getting is rubbish, non converting and high bounce....all of a sudden. So even when you rank in top spots you dont get decent traffic anymore. All part of their plan to try and get publishers spending on ads no doubt.

[Samsam1978]

"The problem I had with this update that Google has confirmed it is only half of it. The second update happens in July and who knows what that will attempt to accomplish."

This is worrying. Could be the end of large independent English-driven websites that cannot compete with huge media outlets or foreign spam.

This is not good for society.

[yollo03]

There might be a great wipeout beforehand. It doesn't mean there weren't be any updates beforehand. I can say that web speed is not a major rank factor (yet). It's possible the core web vitals will give you the same ranking boost as https.

[Samsam1978]

There might be a great wipeout beforehand. It doesn't mean there weren't be any updates beforehand. I can say that web speed is not a major rank factor (yet). It's possible the core web vitals will give you the same ranking boost as https.

What do you think is in store next for the July (I dread to think) been doing this for 21 years and never been so low traffic.

Google phrase: Content is king
June 2021 - This Is Now Obsolete

[RedBar]

Pinterest being the most authoritative domain for images

Absoutely no way in my widget sector, I will agree that it it the BIGGEST scraper of images in my sector, in fact I would go as far as to say in my sector there are very, very few non-scraped images.

And not only do these leeches scrape images they copy on-page text descriptions and information which then outrank the original.

Pinterest, like Google, is nothing but a massive scraping operation created solely for generating advertising Dollars and who helped to create and promote it ... yep, just like Google Joe Public established this monstrosity of totally unorignal thinking by a massive den of thieves many of whom believe they are not doing any harm by scraping and blatantly copying anything and everything they find.

They had a good teacher with the Google model!

[mzb44]

This is worrying. Could be the end of large independent English-driven websites that cannot compete with huge media outlets or foreign spam.

Probably.

It's getting there core update by core update.

This process might still take several years to complete but by that time everyone will be like "it's always been like this" and no one will find anything off about seeing only big corpo media everywhere by default.

[saladtosser]

Pinterest, I struggle to see that fascination with this site at all, do people really use this garbage? Should be deindexed completely, imo

[ichthyous]

What do you think is in store next for the July (I dread to think) been doing this for 21 years and never been so low traffic.

It's getting worse and worse. Yesterday the traffic got shut off at 9am and stayed off the rest of the day. This morning my home page is down 60%, USA traffic is down, UK down, and direct traffic is down 50%. I don't see this turning around, this update actually started weeks ago and is just designed to finally kill off organic traffic to all independent / medium sized sites.

This is now damaging my health and well being working long hours seven days a week and still my business is being strangled by Google. Google is a menace to the internet and needs to be broken up.

After reading various articles about how the heat is being turned up and how the government plans to get big tech in line I don't have any hope... The issue of how actual search is being manipulated isn't being discussed. They're only talking about how Google bundles this and that for competitive advantage. Explaining how Google manipulates search results is too complex for politicians

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:38 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2021]

[mzb44]

Pinterest being the most authoritative domain for images

Absoutely no way in my widget sector

I'm just using 'authoritative' here in the sense Google probably uses it. Meaning mainly often linked to by others.

[mzb44]

The issue of how actual search is being manipulated isn't being discussed.

Because that's not the scope of any anti-trust laws and is not illegal in any way.

Google can announce that the way they rank sites is by rolling the dice or by reading the horoscope. If people use that service it's no ones' business.

They could tomorrow announce they will exclusively rank US mainstream media for everything and straight deindex and purge everybody else and it would be 100% legal.

What may be illegal is Google's practices of bundling services together, makes deals with others to eliminate competition.

In regards to search, what could be argued to be illegal at best is them pushing their own platforms at the expense of others in search results. However, even here the argument can be made that that's just how their platform works and using the platform you agree to these terms.

If G will ever be smacked by the gov, it will NOT be because of search engine rankings and algorithms.

Edit: The word 'manipulated' here doesn't make sense - it supposes that there exists a 'google search' beyond Google that has external rules and Google manipulates those rules. Google can come up with search engine ranking algorithms in any way it wants. People are free to use or not use that service.

[saladtosser]

@ichthyous, feel for you dude, its made me ill in the past as well!

I wish there was a way we could help or google had more empathetic staff and employees with high morals you could turn to for genuine assistance but that's not where we are, they aren't the chocolate factory anymore (umbrella corporation now) and the public face of google picked to bridge the gap between Google and the webmaster community only ever appears totally put out and is short and disinterested when anyone who isn't a crony seeks any answers. So no help there, I think if you can get a reply JM is vaguely helpful and seems to genuinely care...

I can see where all this has been going and it doesn't look good for anyone who isn't a big brand or corp.

Yea yea, many have said on this forum over the years..... it's our fault we shouldn't have created a business model that ***relies on Google giving us free traffic***, but hey, didn't google base and build their entire business model based on wrapping ads around, indexing and learning from the free content we gave them?!

so ya know..... Googles a bit like an ex-wife, really needed us for a lot of years then just decided they didn't anymore lol

Hope things pick up for you ichthyous, sincerely!

[edited by: saladtosser at 3:03 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2021]

[yollo03]

something happened in the past 24 hours. One of my top affiliates got smashed by google, almost know where to be found with its top keywords. I think the algorithm is now adjusting positions after the core update was pushed.

I published an article last week, I just checked the keywords its receiving. This is a 3k article, only has 2 keywords, mydomain name and mydomain review. What a joke.

[iamlost]

Given the evergreen ever-angst commentary in the monthly WebmasterWorld serial ‘Google SEO News and Discussion’... apologies but my humour is low and ever dark ...you may find comfort in State of Ohio sues Google [webmasterworld.com] Wants G declared public utility, common carrier.
From the filing’s Introduction:

Google intentionally structures its Results Pages to prioritize Google products over organic search results.

...designed to provide Google’s own products, services, and platforms with an advantage over providers of similar products, services, and platforms, in turn, also limiting traffic to non-Google sites.

The entire filing is well worth a read.

Of course, none of the above nor any of the rest of the claims in the filing have been proven in a court of law. And even if proceeded with this case will be years and years in litigation.

Regardless :)

[goodroi]

Mods Note: Please stay on topic. If your message isn't directly discussing this core update, it may be moved to another thread or deleted.

If you want to theorize on the future of SEO, please start a separate thread. If you want to discuss Google's business model, please head over to the Google Business section. Let's keep this discussion centered around this specific core update. Thank you.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5039386.htm [webmasterworld.com]
1:30 pm on Jun 10, 2021 (utc -5)

[renatovieira]

Wow... 2pm exactly G cut my traffic. It hasn't happened in a few weeks. The cut today was disgraceful. Here we go again :-|

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a 50% drop in visits to my home page between June 1 and today...a straight line downward. That coincides with higher apparent views of interior pages and landing pages of lesser importance, so the overall drop isn't as severe as the drop in traffic to my home page.

I'm also seeing a big drop in "Direct" traffic on May 27th that has never recovered. "Search" traffic seems to be faring better. Is anyone seeing the same pattern? Is "Direct" mostly composed of image search, or does it also include web search these days?

[superclown2]

To add to the Google junk I am now seeing a 'People Also Consider' box on mobile. This is a carousel with ads on it. It is preceded by an ad with four prominent boxes; these look like search terms but they are not. They are part of the ad and clicking on them leads to pages on the advertiser's site. There are then three more prominent ads then the usual 'People Also Ask' garbage before the first organic - inevitably one of Google's favoured high spenders. The rest of the usual junk then follows including 'People Also search For' until the real organics some four or five complete scrolls down. At the bottom three more ads then 'Related Searchers'; just in case anyone is tempted to try page two.

Still wondering why you are getting no traffic?

[yollo03]

Semrush is showing slightly higher numbers for Australia and Japan, it's possible another update is being pushed through, we'll find out tomorrow. The web vitals is due in mid June, did they give a date?

Edit: My top affiliate that was nowhere to be seen in search today is now back where he was was. Something happened today and will probably continue tomorrow. Google literally removed his website from the first page in most of his top keywords. He is back now. Very strange.

[edited by: yollo03 at 10:20 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2021]

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: Looking backwards & wondering if things will change going forward [webmasterworld.com]
5:49 pm on Jun 10, 2021 (utc -5)

[edited by: goodroi at 10:54 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2021]

[gatormark]

Y’all are blowing up my email. :-)

[Samsam1978]

@mzb44 and @ichthyous, feel for you dude, its made me ill in the past as well!

For those who have dropped significantly from what I have read, It is indeed making us all ill on this forum.

Google should give independent websites - at least the facility to have a voice. If not, then fantastic websites will go out of business and the big media outlets and spam will be the only ones left.

[RedBar]

I was having a nice steady day until 20.00 UK time and then G simply switched off the traffic, again ... it is so obvious and deliberate YET they get away with it again and again ... it's 12.00-15.00 US time, let's stop the traffic to the "foreigners'" sites!

[superclown2]

I'm detecting a pattern during the day. I get a good surge of business early in the morning then next to zilch until late evening. The reason is googlespam. They regulate what comes to them and what they take for themselves by the number and size of ads and amount of junk they load onto the results. The more traffic they get the more they bury genuine web sites.

Nearly all my business is now coming from desktop. The mobile SERPs contain so much rubbish at the top that organic results haven't a chance.

[Martin Ice Web]

Next big hit yesterday. Another 50% cut off.
And it seems that all we lost from google is now coming via amazon.

[yollo03]

Something started churning in the background yesterday. In my humble opinion, a new ranking factor was introduced or an existing signal was upped a few notches.

[BushyTop]

Sermrush is heating up again in the UK

[Samsam1978]

Still dropping... some foreign sites above me now. How much more bleeding is expected?

Something started churning in the background yesterday. In my humble opinion, a new ranking factor was introduced or an existing signal was upped a few notches.

Any idea what?

[yollo03]

No idea, I can only guess that it is related to user experience. Could be speed, preparation for web vitals etc.

[Samsam1978]

Yes, my web vitals are not looking great, ill correct them this weekend and report if I see any improvement

[gatormark]

I will say this about the potential foreign bias. I live in the United States and built my business while here in the USA. I subsequently moved to Portugal for three years, at the peak of my Adsense revenue. A few months after my move to Portugal, I was accessing Adsense from another country obviously, my websites plummeted in USA rankings and my revenue dropped by about 40%. I don’t know if there were any other factors involved, but I do think my living in another country impacted my USA positions negatively.

[mzb44]

I subsequently moved to Portugal for three years, at the peak of my Adsense revenue. A few months after my move to Portugal, I was accessing Adsense from another country obviously, my websites plummeted in USA rankings

I don't think it's related.There're agencies managing these kinds of accounts from all over the globe for different international clients.

It was probably something else.

[Samsam1978]

Can someone help me with something. In Google webmaster tools there is a graph that displays your impressions and clicks. Since this update, the white gaps between these two lines are growing wider every day. - Does anyone know why is that due to a ranking drop or do you think it is a server issue?

[Samsam1978]

I will say this about the potential foreign bias. I live in the United States and built my business while here in the USA. I subsequently moved to Portugal for three years, at the peak of my Adsense revenue. A few months after my move to Portugal, I was accessing Adsense from another country obviously, my websites plummeted in USA rankings and my revenue dropped by about 40%. I don’t know if there were any other factors involved, but I do think my living in another country impacted my USA positions negatively.

Depends on where your server is located, if still US then it will not make a difference.

[RedBar]

@gatormark

I will say this about the potential foreign bias.

I completely agree with you and have been saying similar for many years. It is blatantly obvious in the US Serps that G favours US company websites v non-US websites and in many G.tld sites it still favours US sites even when it is a complete impossibility for them to supply for whatever reason.

This has been on-going for many years and I'm fairly sure that the US market / consumers are totally unaware of it.

[golderberger]

Depends on where your server is located, if still US then it will not make a difference.

So if your server is behind cloudflare how google would know whether it is USA business or not?