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.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld golderberger

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

That is not the only criteria however insofar as a business is concerned remember that Google itself is a domain registrar and has access to loads of ownership data.

It can also easily check whether you are a business for local services, national etc .

It is said that at one time the IP address location was a ranking factor...

[NickMNS]

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

You are absolutely correct there is no way for Google to know based on your "server location" directly. Indirectly, if your server is located in India and your serving US clients than there will be considerable network latency and that in turn will impact your page speed score, which in turn impacts your ranking in the US.

But Google likely determines "location" by content related factors, like if you display location information on your business, or the location of website/businesses linking to you website. Language used EN-US or EN-UK, behaviour or behavior. There are enough other clues available to Google that server location is not required.

[ichthyous]

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.

Many of us are seeing the exact same thing...strong start to the morning then traffic goes down to nothing all day until the evening. One day direct traffic vanishes, the next day search traffic is low. English language traffic is way off, especially USA. Also, my most important landing pages have been blitzed, some down 70% today.

[Soupmaster]

In my niche (Jobs and Careers). I track around 10 competitors, 2 of which are the mega players. 8 of us are all down with this update, while the 2 industry leaders are up.

From my end, and some of the posts I've skimmed through, this update really benefited websites with a ton of authority.

[golderberger]

Many of us are seeing the exact same thing...strong start to the morning then traffic goes down to nothing all day until the evening. One day direct traffic vanishes, the next day search traffic is low. English language traffic is way off, especially USA. Also, my most important landing pages have been blitzed, some down 70% today.

exactly same thing here :|

[yollo03]

It's like someone opens and closes the tap at certain hours.

[Jori]

@gatormark :I moved to Portugal in 2016. In 2017, my website was heavily penalized. My society was french, and it changed to portuguese status.

I also thougt back in the time that it was a factor in my penalization. But some months later, it all went back on track again. I did a lot of improvements, so, I don't have strong opinions on this...

[superclown2]

From my end, and some of the posts I've skimmed through, this update really benefited websites with a ton of authority.

At least in my UK vertical the top organic result is followed by a mass of googlespam. This top result is almost always one of the high spending advertisers.

If follows that any sites under number one will get crumbs only, if anything at all.

It is all part of Google's grand plan.

[yollo03]

It happened again. My top affiliate has been removed from the first page (I cant even see him in the first 5 pages). Does anyone have a suggestion why the top spot for certain keywords change at certain hours? It can't be a penalty or random.

[KaseyM]

I think something is still rolling out - very strange rankings. Almost getting different results every hour for the same search query.

[yollo03]

It's like all the top positions change in specific hours. I think it's a test, I dont see it happening in all keywords. Obviously my traffic from that affiliate is being screwed every time it happens. It might also explains the sudden drop in traffic others are experiencing. I will make an educated guess that it's related to authority.

[EditorialGuy]

I've noticed that some page titles are blasts from the past. (Maybe this has been an ongoing problem?.) I just found a couple of my pages that rank #1 and #2 for [query] but have long-outdated SERP titles that include the year "2020."

[KaseyM]

Also indexing is all over the place today. May take the weekend off!

[Samsam1978]

Don't make yourself ill over it. Taking the weekend off sounds like a good idea.

[Hollywood]

I got buried with leads this past Mon. & Tue. Then piddled down, yesterday and today nothing.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 12:39 am (utc) on Jun 12, 2021]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to stay on topic [/edit]

[shadowlight]

Its disgusting what they are doing, everything about the SERPS now is designed to push down organic listings, increase clicks on ads and their own properties and reduce CTR on organic results. I have been experimenting with several pages changing content, titles, descriptions etc. I've noticed that once changes are made and they get around to changing the SERP, if things start picking up and more people start clicking through, next time I take a look they will have changed the description in the SERPs to something else until CTR reduces and the page goes back to not attracting many clicks. Sometimes it will be absolutely dead all day, the traffic is their but no clicks on anything (zombie traffic) then all of a sudden its like the flood gates open and its like your normal traffic is turned on for a little bit, then off again.

Some of the site descriptions in the SERPS for various web sites don't even make sense. Like the middle of a sentence on the page somewhere, totally out of context

I'm just glad that Governments and States are now taking notice, looking into it and doing something about it. Yes it may take years by which time, numerous online business will have gone extinct because of them but one thing is for sure change is certain. Its just a pity that for many it will be too late

[golderberger]

All your stories sound almost exact same like mine. Before I had stable traffic and stable sales - been selling my own things for 12 years (most of my traffic was organic and based on my product name put in google search). Now it looks pretty much like this, for 10 hours no sales. Then someone opens the traffic tap and I suddenly get 10 sales in 5 minutes and after that it is dead again.
This is disgusting.

[christianz]

This week could be exact repeat of last - spike in semrush sensor on Friday, initially no effect or slight recovery, then Saturday / Sunday it propagates and we see further traffic cuts.

[RedBar]

At least I seemingly have some consistency with PV numbers since revising my old daily average (-40%) to my new one as follows:

May 1-10 has been 106.9%

This week

Monday 132.7%
Tuesday 136.7%
Wednesday 115%
Thursday 130.7%
Friday 106.3%

Average 124.3%

We'll see what mext week brings.

Genuine business enquiries are normal, in fact several new potential good prospects.

[yollo03]

According to semrush my rankings improved a bit. It's not translating into more traffic though. I reported indexing issues, nothing was fixed. All my core web vitals are zero, no bad, no good, no need improvement. Big fat zero. I reported that too, nothing was changed.

I published new posts/pages, the keywords I got for all of them are less than 5 where two of keywords are mydomain and mydomain review. This is a 3k article. I thought that perhaps there is an issue with crawling the page but I couldnt find anything. Did anyone here experience or is experiencing something similar?

[samwest]

Dropping ever single day to less and less. New algo update should be called "Death by a thousand cuts".

[RedBar]

Today's traffic is at an almost standstill, after 18 hours of my Googleday I'm at 33%, heading for my lowest day of the year.

[christianz]

In Search Console Links page top 3 places are once again all auto generated keyword/image spam sites on expired domains. Not only do they appear in Search Console links section, they also appear in Google live index and most of them are also getting actual traffic from Google.

So Google is still ranking auto generated spam. The most blatantly obvious type of spam imaginable, that a 3 year old would be able to detect.

It is likely that they are also penalizing or associating with this spam real 10+ year old niche websites that are at the receiving end of millions of backlinks from these generated sites.

Otherwise it is hard to explain why my youngest sites with least backlinks, least content and least direct traffic are consistently doing better since December 2020 update.

This should be core competency of search engine - to detect bad quality or straight spam pages and not present them to the user. Yet Google seems to be getting worse at this - are they really losing the battle against spammers (Google AI vs spammer AI) or are they just not trying hard enough and only concentrating on ensuring that large publishers/YouTube etc are on top not caring about the rest?

[Hollywood]

I agree with Shadowlight and golderburger "Sometimes it will be absolutely dead all day, the traffic is there but no clicks on anything (zombie traffic) then all of a sudden its like the flood gates open and its like your normal traffic is turned on for a little bit, then off again."

[gatormark]

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

For me, the change seem to start once I started logging in to my Google account from my new country regularly. Google changed my country of residence to Portugal and not too long after that my websites traffic greatly decreased. Coincidence? Maybe. By the way, my server location was always in the same location, Texas.

[mzb44]

Coincidence?

Yes.

Anyone can just load up a VPN and get a dedicated IP even and fake this. It would be ultra simple.

I believe this is overthinking it.

[KaseyM]

Rough weekend. Entertainment news niche

[superclown2]

Over the past fortnight my main keyphrase has risen from number 10 in the SERPs to number four. Since then clicks on it have fallen by 46%.

The reason? The pile of junk that Google has buried the organics under. Improving a website is now a complete waste of time.

Even Google's favoured few, who spend megabucks on advertising, must have seen their organic clicks plummet. They are feeding the beast that will eventually devour them.

[westcoast]

"In Search Console Links page top 3 places are once again all auto generated keyword/image spam sites on expired domains. Not only do they appear in Search Console links section, they also appear in Google live index and most of them are also getting actual traffic from Google."

Ughh Im sorry it has gotten you too.

As we speak, approximately 800 of the 1000 domains listed in Search Console External Inbound Links for our site are spam sites, most of them created this year, and increasing with every passing day. All of them are in the index (I estimate over 1 BILLION pages indexed from this single hacked-site cloaked-spam attack I have been stuck in), and the attack has had a (unprovable, but I am confident) massively negative affect on our site's rankings. There are at least 25,000 spam links with more added every day to our site from over 10,000 hacked domains. In google's eyes, our inbound link profile is almost entirely spam at this point because of the overwhelming nature of it.

There is NO WAY Google has an accurate or fair assessment of our inbound link profile with so much spam crap in the data. NO WAY. Garbage in, garbage out.

So no, Google does not have a handle on the spam problem. Not even in the slightest sense. They are absolutely stuffed to the the gills with this crap, and innocent, rule-following websites are getting steamrolled as bystander casualties.

[christianz]

cloaked-spam attack

What kind of cloaking is your spammer doing? For me these spam pages (not all) return 500 error when I visit them directly.

I also have plenty spam pages linking to me without cloaking. Many are using free blogspot subdomains.

We are in a lose-lose situation. If we use disavow file, we risk looking like we actually built these spam pages ourselves, plus we can't physically keep up with it. If we do nothing, 99% of our backlinks will be spam (its probably close to 90% already for me). How do you rank a page that has 99% of its backlinks from auto generated spam pages?

If a 15 year old site with millions of hits can have all of its vast history of backlinking entirely overwhelmed by spam in 1-2 years, this shows just how dire the webspam situation is. I was hoping Google would actually make some inroads into dealing with this problem, but June update makes it look like its actually getting worse and totally out of control.

It is surprising more people are not talking about this.

[superclown2]

I checked my stats this morning over the same period last year. In May of 2020 61% of my clicks came from mobile. This May it was 22.5%.

No doubt about the reason, it's the mass of googlespam on mobile, designed to keep visitors away from the organic results.

However I have discussed this with several friends, all of whom told me that they got caught by this abuse and the first couple of times they did indeed click on ads. However they now scroll straight past them and go to the organic results that they were looking for in the first place. I shall be very interested to see what future desktop/mobile splits there are.

I can't help wondering how those who buy ads feel about visitors being 'manipulated' into clicking on them. Those clicks can't be as valuable as one from someone who clicks on an ad intentionally.

I wonder what Google will do when this tactic no longer works. This is no way to run a business for the long term.

[Samsam1978]

I checked my stats this morning over the same period last year. In May of 2020 61% of my clicks came from mobile. This May it was 22.5%.

Since the day after this update, my server has been giving me 408s on mobile traffic only, not all users but about 10k people a day (out of 100k) cannot reach the site, loads about 8am EST and and a few here and there every hour. Check your logs.

I cannot find out why this is happening still. Nothing changed on server-side or website during that time. Not sure it has something to do with the core update. Noticed sites with good web vitals outranking me and I'm dropping. My site is feature heavy and beautiful design. I don't want to be a site with white pages and a logo I want to connect with people and make them feel I give them something special. This update is favoring sites that are boring.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 10:18 am (utc) on Jun 13, 2021]

[RedBar]

A brand new low Saturday at 47% of my new average however that is not the only story:

1. It was 27% of my old average.
2. It was my lowest-ever day by a huge margin since the combination of my two main global sites last September.

US traffic for big keywords continues to be directed towards US sites, only 3 non-US companies in the top 40 for the major keyword, one at #12 the othe two in the low 30s ... It is a clear and deliberate manipuation by G

Will your widget sector be next? This has now been going on for 3 full months.

[Samsam1978]

Will your widget sector be next? This has now been going on for 3 full months.

Yes, it's been 3 months of a downhill slope for me. Worse web stats and rankings in my 15 year history.

[RedBar]

@Samsam1978

In which country are you located / your server?

[gatormark]

My traffic has plummeted 30,000 page views in one week, but my number of ad clicks and revenue have remained consistent. Very strange numbers indeed.

[gatormark]

My traffic has plummeted 30,000 page views in one week, but my number of ad clicks and revenue have remained consistent. Very strange numbers indeed.

...additionally, my rankings have taken a jump. So, I cannot believe Adsense's current pageview numbers are accurate unless they've been artificially bloated in the past. Unfortunately, I have stopped my on-server analytics so I can't compare my page views to theirs.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Google is not your friend<<<<

Sorry but I just asked my google home hub if they were my friend and the reply was "I love being your friend, i'm the barney to your flintstone, yabba dabba do".... Draw your own conclusions...

[JesterMagic]

Saw a 14% decline yesterday. For some reason our site disappeared for a number of keywords over the last few days. This is on top of the decline we have already seen of about 10% this past month for an almost 20 year old site.

We have a large number of spammers in our niche now that have made headways and over the last few years pushing out legitimate publishers posting very poorly written content (written by people that you can tell English is not their native language). Lots of black hack SEO techniques.

Google also has been promoting large media companies that cover every topic under the sun who started covering our niche using poor out dated content. No way most of it should rank above websites dedicated to the topic.

And on top of it all we have to deal with Google's own Spam it inserts into the SERPS. What else would you call all that useless junk widgets and ads they push.

[samwest]

Huge amount of non authoritative web spam articles are now on page one. All have one goal in common, to sling a profuse amount of Gorg Ads. They don't sell anything, they just drone on mindlessly about some topic in hopes of rising to the top through keyword spam and the technical deficiencies of Google...and they have succeeded.

[System]

The following 5 messages were cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5039717.htm [webmasterworld.com]
2:50 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (utc -5)

[renatovieira]

And as usual, G cut off my traffic right at 2pm. This was constant a few months ago, it's gone, but it's coming back again.

[ichthyous]

Saw a 14% decline yesterday. For some reason our site disappeared for a number of keywords over the last few days. This is on top of the decline we have already seen of about 10% this past month for an almost 20 year old site.

Only 10%? I've lost fifty percent since mid March so you're actually lucky

[ichthyous]

I see somewhat of a recovery from the huge losses of the last two weeks, but traffic is still much lower than before all this started and is exhibiting a much spikier pattern of highs and lows. English language traffic continues to be hit much more than anything else. This has killed my conversions completely, I've had one new inquiry in ten days... Wtf Google!

[Samsam1978]

Today noticed articles of 200 words outranking my 4k 10 year articles. Even searching personally for something to buy earlier I could not find what I was looking for. Why force the whole web design to be a logo and white background with no images. Those are all the sites I am seeing in places 1-5 or large media sites. Last update in Dec 2020 all the media sites complained so I guess large media corps have benefited from taking the traffic away from nice sites - they are not making any noise this time around.

[westcoast]

"What kind of cloaking is your spammer doing? For me these spam pages (not all) return 500 error when I visit them directly."

The spammer that is affecting our site is using cloaking techniques on over 10,000+ hacked domains (for a total of over ONE BILLION indexed pages!) that ought to have been eradicated about 20 years ago. It's a disgrace. There are over a BILLION pages that I'm tracking in this one that have exactly the same code on them:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <title>Loading...</title> <script>window.location.href = "/click.php";</script> </head> <body> <h1>Loading...</h1> </body></html>

If googlebot hits the page, click.php sends all sorts of scraped (from multiple sources) and re-spun keyword rich text to Google, including links to my site and others in order to try to make them look more legit. It doesn't even appear to be a negative-SEO attempt. It's just a side-effect of the thousands of links they are creating to all parts of my site. They use the domains to create all sorts of keyword rich sub-domains. So hackedsite.net gets indexed as free-money.hackedsite.net and global-travel.hackedsite.net etc etc.. So they leverage the hacked domains to generate millions of sub-domains.

If a non-googlebot user hits the page (indexed so idiotically in Google), they get redirected to ads.

This is the same extremely-basic cloaking that was used back in 1999. There is no reason it should exist today.

If they can't detect such obvious and blatant stuff there is no way they have a hope against more sophisticated spam. Clearly spam on google is **completely** out of control.

[BushyTop]

We've taken another hit this morning on some really high value terms, however our page experience report has gone from 5.2% good URLs with impressions to 28.5%....

[JustSEO]

Well, for the first time in a long while, this update managed to boost all of my websites across the board.

[mzb44]

The below is a bit long, but I promise you it's definitely worth the read. Stay with me.

re: June 2021 Google core update and core updates in general.

So, a few days ago I got into kind of an "argument" on Twitter with an extremely famous celebrity SEO. I will not give names, all I'm going to say it's an extremely famous mainstream person, someone known for reviewing google patents.

This person made the claim on Twitter that "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates".

To this, I replied that this is incorrect and I can provide examples to prove it. That person then went on to accuse me of wanting him to evaluate my sites for free and asking him to "clean up after me" for free after I have gotten those sites hit. He claimed that I must be wrong and certainly the sites I'm looking at "do not pass sufficient quality guidelines".

No amount of explaining helped to convince him they weren't my sites and I just wanted to send examples. The exchange ended by that person accusing me of threatening him (!). Wow. I was extremely shocked and I stoped the conversation right then and there fearing that this could seriously escalate.

I have then figured out the reason for this reaction. That celebrity and famous SEOer's own SEO agency website & blog has been negatively hit at least once, and possibility again now in June by a Google core update.

I am talking here about an extremely famous mainstream white hat specialist who always appears top 3 in any "biggest industry experts" lists, speaks at every conference, etc. etc.

This person claims "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates" while his own website was hit by one, possibly two, Google core updates. Awkward.

Also, do you know who else is getting consistently hit by Google core updates? There is a very famous person who focuses on E-A-T and google core update analysis and recovery. That person's site and blog is even linked to from Google's 2019 blog post about core updates and appears as an official Google recommendation for people seeking guidance about core update recoveries and E-A-T. I think most will know who I'm referencing here.

Here, it's even worse. That person's site is now probably being hit for the 4th time by a google core update.

I consider both these people to be genuine experts who provide some of the most advanced and most unique content in their respective fields. Real top of the top industry specialists.
I consider both of these sites to be of ultra high quality. Probably some of the best and most advanced industry blogs.

I do not consider these people to be bad at SEO. The contrary. I do not believe their sites are getting hit because they do a bad job.

Yet, both get consistently demoted by google core updates. Despite this, both these famous SEO personalities continue to push the "high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates" narrative.

So, what does this tell about core updates in general? It's clear to me anyone can get hit by these updates and just having a high-quality site and content is NOT a guarantee for not getting hit.

Yet, a lot of famous SEO celebrities and industry experts ignore this aspect or even outright spread misinformation and false narratives that "quality sites cannot be hit", while their own websites are getting hit by core updates.

If people who are truly and genuinely real experts (and linked to even from Google.com blog posts about core updates!) also have their sites consistently hit by core updates and aren't successful at recovering them, then what can you or me expect?

[golderberger]

Since the weekend my traffic stays down, same for sales. Anyone here getting strange (useless in terms of conversion) traffic from India and alike countries?