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.

[gatormark]

@JustSEO

I was positively affected too by this core update. The first time in a few years. One of my main keywords which had been consistently 1 or 2 for years until it dropped to 12 in the December 2017 update, is now back up to 5 overnight. Many other lesser keywords have gone to 1.

[ichthyous]

Traffic seems to be stabilizing and recovering slightly, albeit at a lower level. My USA traffic is still off by about 15%, GSC impressions are a straight line down almost 30% from June 1st-13th, and I am seeing the 9am drop-off-a-cliff in traffic reappearing after taking the weekend off.

Large corporate sites have completely taken over the top 10-12 spots in my niche. Add in the Amazon and Ebay listings, and Pinterest crap and whammo...no room until the middle of page two. The large corporations will accrue all the sales and profits, while the small to middle size sites starve to death.

After being out of town this weekend at a family event, I see that tourism is coming back in full force in the USA and people are definitely not sitting indoors looking at the computer or shopping on their phones either...they want to get out into the world again. This is definitely a factor in the drop in USA traffic.

[gatormark]

@ichthyous

“The large corporations will accrue all the sales and profits, while the small to middle size sites starve to death.”

This has already happened to the brick-and-mortar, mom and pop stores here in the United States. I guess it was just a matter of time before it would happen on the Internet.

[NickMNS]

I appear to be impacted by this update, but the drop is progressive. I'm down about 15% in terms of clicks from search and 30% in terms of impressions. But more worrying is that there is slow downward trend that appears to be continuing. My second site is impacted too, worse but it had very little traffic to begin with so the actual impact is negligible.

[ichthyous]

Anyone here getting strange (useless in terms of conversion) traffic from India and alike countries?

Yes...India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Iran, Latvia, Romania, Egypt, Malaysia. These are all top referrers now that the converting traffic has been reserved for google properties, Amazon, Pinterest, and the same list of huge companies over and over

[christianz]

high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates

What a load of dog excrement! What is "high-quality site"? There is NO WAY he could objectively judge a specialist website like mine in a narrow niche and tell whether it is higher quality than its competitors. He would have to be knowledgeable in this domain to tell which sites are "high quality".

If any random human can't judge quality of niche websites, how can the google AI/algos do it? They can't!

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

This is why all sites are aiming for certain word counts, culling pages that could qualify as "thin content", removing images and interactivity to pass pagespeed requirements and doing all kinds of other things which make them fit this template but often make them WORSE and LESS "high quality" in the eyes of real human user.

[mzb44]

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

This is probably one of the best summaries of how core updates work.
<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 9:30 pm (utc) on Jun 14, 2021]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to stay on topic :) [/edit]

[BushyTop]

G has completely turned off for us yesterday. having endured the past week following this update, I can confirm that this has produced the worst results from an update ever. I have to think that their admission that this would be a two parter and that some websites would be negatively effected from this June update, to then be reverted in July was an admission of the update not being the finished product. Now here we are, in the depths non converting hell.

[BushyTop]

Additionally, our good page experience report is now up to 58%

[mzb44]

I have to think that their admission that this would be a two parter and that some websites would be negatively effected from this June update, to then be reverted in July was an admission of the update not being the finished product.

They did explicitly say that this update is not a finished products and developments they planned were not finished yet, so they'll do another core update in July.

I think the implication that sites impacted in June could see a reversal is two fold.

It could be due to the new changes they will be pushing out, but perhaps also simply because a new core update may imply refreshing all core update components again.

They will not confirm it obviously, but the latter would be very interesting to know. It would mean it's using machine learning/AI gathered signals, so the same update run again a month later could generate significantly different results.

[edited by: mzb44 at 9:00 am (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]

[BushyTop]

"They did explicitly say that this update is not a finished products and developments they planned were not finished yet, so they'll do another core update in July."

Exactly, this is what I'm saying. You might be right RE refresh, but I personally dont believe that they would have confirmed what they did, if that was the case. My guess is that July will be additional changes and tweaks. Not refreshes to the current ones.

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today... Has anyone else noticed?

[ichthyous]

@BushyTop Yesterday was very close to normal for my traffic, but at 7pm the traffic just went down to nothing and stayed that way for the rest of the evening. This morning I start my day with my USA traffic down 80% from the norm.

This has become the norm for the last month or so...the USA traffic just turns off for hours at a stretch and you lose a good chunk of the day...typically this happens from 9am-6pm for my site. And the traffic that is coming is not converting at all.

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:33 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]

[renatovieira]

This morning I start my USA traffic down 80% from the norm.

@ichthyous - On my side, today the drop is huge!

[JesterMagic]

@mzb44. Your post was an interesting read. I had a laugh at the term "SEO celebrities".

If someone truly believes high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates then while they may have good SEO techniques, their root thinking is fundamentally flawed.

What is a high quality site? How can Google really determine that when it is blatantly obvious by doing a search on Google that it still has huge issues understanding the content let alone knowing if it is quality content that is accurate.

As you quoted before:

If your site doesn't fit the generic template of what Google AI is currently trained to think a high quality site should look like, you will be vulnerable to get hit by core updates.

It's what the generic template deems may be high quality content.

BTW I really dislike the term AI and how it is thrown around so loosely by companies and the media. Google (and others) is still far away from actually creating something that can truly understand what content on a page is about.

[BushyTop]

Is anyone else seeing the changes to the page experience report that I have been reporting?

[mzb44]

If someone truly believes high-quality sites do not get negatively impacted by core updates then while they may have good SEO techniques, their root thinking is fundamentally flawed.

Or they just push a certain narrative not to push away potential clients. Admitting that core updates and recoveries may not be as much in SEOs control as they claim it to be is not a good way to advertise your services.

It is what it is. It's clear to me that core updates are a completely different thing from the "traditional" old-school updates we used to experience in the past. Before, whenever you got hit by an update, usually there was always one or multiple specific reasons why and if you fixed those issues you generally recovered.

Core updates seem to be different in the sense that they may not even target specific sites themselves, but rather look at types of sites or sites that fall into certain patterns. So, if your site happens to fall into a template google doesn't like now, you get hit. Even if your site individually on its own has no issues at all. And you won't recover unless google decides not to hate that type of site anymore in a subsequent update or if you completely overhaul your entire site (even though it may be good as it is) in an attempt to guess what google may approve of now (which always changes after every core update).

What's clear to me is that there is a lot of collateral damage. If Google is hitting site patterns now broadly instead of individual sites, then it's very easy to accidentally fall into such pattern or for Google to misidentify your site belonging into such a pattern.

[Dimitri]

May be a high quality web site does not use SEO techniques, ... I support the idea that the best SEO is just common sense, all other tricks, are BS on the long term... so says someone who has never (yet) been impacted negatively by a Google update (excepting the change in the Image search).

[jasodo]

big changes in the Google Indian SERP as of 13:00 local time, many movements since then

[mzb44]

May be a high quality web site does not use SEO techniques

Some use, some don't.

Some of the biggest and best known mainstream brands use black hat shady SEO tactics including paid link scheme campaigns (yes, really), expired domains, etc.

There are also a lot of obvious pure spam sites that never get hit by any updates. Eventually some might, but some may never.

Most sites never get hit by google updates - good, or bad, high-quality or low-quality.

What you are seeing here on the forum are the people who did get hit. Usually, those who benefit or remain unaffected do not create profiles on SEO forums to write about it.

Just because someone got hit does not necessarily mean they used shady "SEO techniques" or have a low-quality sites.

Sometimes you are just unlucky and your good site can get hit.

Sometimes you are just lucky and your low-quality spam affiliate site powered by paid links never gets hit.

People who have actually ran multiple sites from good to bad, low to high-quality can absolutely confirm the above.

[RedBar]

Is Google actually indexing new sites?

Bing is, the Chinese are, the Russians are, Google doesn't seem to be doing.

New pages on existing sites they are indexing and ranking.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic down 40% by 2pm EST. Traffic to my home page and a couple other major landing pages also down 30-40%. I knew the two day "recovery" was too good to be true!

[rustybrick]

FYI, the core update, according to Google ended on June 12th - ten days to rollout...

[twitter.com...]

[System]

The following 4 messages announcing the rollout of the Page Experience Update were cut out of this Core Update Discussion to new thread by robert_charlton at 3:16 pm on Jun 15, 2021 (PST -8)

New thread at:

Google "Page Experience Update" now rolling out
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5039896.htm [webmasterworld.com]

---

Ongoing discussion of the effects of the Core Update continues here....

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:11 am (utc) on Jun 16, 2021]

[ichthyous]

Here we go again, Google is shutting off the traffic again at 9am sharp. USA and UK traffic down almost 50% today at 11:30am. Removing my analytics code for a second time...Google doesn't get to spy on my traffic anymore and it I'm getting better page speed results without it.

[yollo03]

I host the code locally so it has little impact on performance. I did realize something that others might benefit from. When inspecting urls I didnt check if the bot had any js errors. In the browser there are no errors. As soon as I saw it's valid it was enough for me. I discovered that even though it is valid the bot struggled to fully crawl all resources. I read that the bot doesnt crawl all resources because there is no need but I didn't buy it, sorry. I removed a chunk of code from the header and there are no more resources errors (aside analytics). I have no idea if this was even an issue, I will know in a week or so.

[HereWeGo123]

It’s been quiet here. But I just began noticing some strange behavior in the SERPs. Not that I can say my traffic patterns changed as a result of the following but seeing rather noticeable changes in the SERPs. A lot of old forgotten sites, previously hit hard by updates, skyrocketed to first page. Seeing some of the worlds largest sites in the most competitive niches in the world dropping 7-10 positions. I’m surprised at how quiet it is here - maybe only I’m seeing it within the queries I’m checking specifically. And perhaps the chatter will follow soon, or maybe not. Nothing good or bad just stating an observation. Google is known to push out more quiet tweaks and updates after major confirmed core updates. Anyone else seeing anything? Hopefully it’s just me and things remain quiet for a little at least.

[yollo03]

All of my competitors aside a few are failing the web vitals on mobile. Some do pass only CLS. There are no major shifts but I am seeing some movement. I don't believe it is relayed to the page experience update yet.

[ichthyous]

It's not quiet here at all. This morning at 9am my home page is down 70%, USA down 20%, UK traffic is down 80%, and search is down 25%. This is on a day where I recovered five top three terms. The 9am cut off of traffic is firmly in place, but now it can last almost the entire middle of the day. Oddly, traffic to my most important landing pages has slowly recovered, but there are zero conversions.

[yollo03]

All of my competitors lost some rankings today including myself. My core web vitals are good so whatever they pushed it has nothing to do with the page experience. I assume there will be a lot of volatility over the weekend so I wouldn't pay attention to whatever is happening today.

[samwest]

It’s been quiet here.

What are we supposed to say?
When the rollercoaster falls, we used to scream, now it's expected and we realize there is nothing that can be done.
Screaming never worked anyway. 90% decrease in revenue this week. It's Thursday and I'm not even at $100 for the week.
Add us to the "living on less than $2 per day" majority. It took about 6 month to go from >$1000/week to about $40 / week.

Zero visitors on site, what does show up is either return traffic or zombies.

I suggest we all keep looking for and using alternatives to Google...and Youtube.
There is no hope to be found here.

[mzb44]

Just something interesting from the core update front:

A dear friend of mine showed me the traffic stats of a total of 23 sites he owns and runs at the moment. We often share stats between each other. We've been sharing stats about these sites for years.

After the June core update, from 23 sites 2 sites were slightly negatively affected by around -10% to -20%. 18 received a boost of between 20% to 50% and 3 remained relatively unaffected.

Now about the sites:

- all are either affiliate sites or made-for-display-ads sites.
- all 23 sites written by the same writer from India for $15 per 1,000 words (all 23 sites are in different niches - that guy must be a genius to be this knowledgable, right? - Seems like Google agrees.)
- my friend told me he never actually reads any of the content his writer is writing, he just posts them as-is on his sites.
- all sites have fake authors with AI generated fake profile pictures
- all sites are a mix of either cheap paid links or expired domain redirects
- 0 link penalties in 4 years across all sites
- these are all 4-5 year old sites and pretty much almost all survived every single core update to date (and most even increased)
- he told me a few others got wiped out by core updates along the way which are not live anymore, like 3 in total the last 4-5 years.
- These aren't some 10-20 visitor per day sites, more like 2,000-5,000 per day per site.
- some of these sites are in extremely competitive YMYL niches such as finance, health, trading, cryptocurrencies, etc.

So, he had like 26 sites in 5 years, all pretty much spam, YMYL, all written by a single $15/1,000 words person from India. 3 of these got wiped out and 23 pretty much either increased or remained unaffected by all core updates the past 4 years.

He told me today "the only people who ever complain about core updates are the ones that only run one site and got unlucky."

He is right. You should have multiple sites, doesn't matter if high-quality, low-quality spam or not. None of these matter whether you get hit or not.
Always have more sites, as that way you will never lose all your traffic / income at once. You can exclusively do low-quality spam sites if that's easier for you, it won't increase your chances of getting hit. Real world testing and experiences clearly confirm this.

[Rnducjshruc]

mzb44 very interesting. Are those sites hosted on same server?

[Mentat]

Since 2nd of June:
- my Discover traffic is 80% less, so no more revenue.
- my own (personal) Google app (IOS) is in chaos about my interests.
I get news about food, health and a lot of soccer, tennis and travelling. Nothing that I search!
I have no interest in sports! NONE

Nothing about my industry, so I can't even see news from my direct competitors.
I presume that they are also hit by a some degree.

[saladtosser]

Interesting read on the last core update [centralrecorder.com...]

[mzb44]

Interesting read on the last core update [centralrecorder.com...]

Agreed. Very good article and overview of things.

It's clear that it's not just the few people here on this forum who have remarked that authority > all seems to be the main thing with these core updates.

Google seems to have boosted this so much that now even foreign sites that don't even accept clients from other countries are now outranking local and relevant sites, simply because higher authority (which usually means links). It's clear it's not relevancy or user experience as claimed by the mainstream crowd.

Meanwhile this is not being acknowledged in mainstream circles for some reason. You can only read about this on forums and lesser known SEO blogs. Very interesting.

That Google Trends screenshot where the term "google alternatives" is peaking exactly after the May 2020 core update (the worst one by far imo.) is very interesting as well.

[Martin Ice Web]

@mzb44, this is what we see in our niche. Silly websites with more silly text, text repetion, very flat insight and 100s of links to amazon and ebay. In most cases they are camouflaged as Item Test Sites. But there is no test just gibberish.
google ranks them very, very high. They must earn a lot of money.
I think that websites with more than 2 links to amazon or ebay should be banned.
I am going to think that linking to amazon seems to be a ranking boost factor these days.

Since 3 days we are back, though. Sales in the last 3 days have picked up to, but its just small sales, like 1 item. The big sales from companies are very rare at the moment.
We see strange pattern. Every day about 12am traffic falls down to nearly zero. Only hits we get are from foreign countries, brasil, japan, us ( we are in germany ). It picks up again at about 1pm.
Overall traffic stays the same.

When i see the serps and take a look at what google says it wants to have in the serps ( high leveled and informationed websites ) there are big discrepancies.
My feeling is that good websites are burried on page 2 and downwards because of having some technical issues.
I don´t realy care if a website loads in 0,5 seconds or 1 second if i get what i want to have. It is more annoying when i open websites with blatant missleading information or made for ads. This is what eats my time and my mobile contingent.

[JesterMagic]

@mzb44 and there is one of the major problem with the internet. It is too easy for people to create sites that are pure garbage. Where it is scraping content from others sites, taking advantage of low income writers in other countries who can barely speak english or using those "AI" writing services.

[ichthyous]

We see strange pattern. Every day about 12am traffic falls down to nearly zero. Only hits we get are from foreign countries, brasil, japan, us ( we are in germany ). It picks up again at about 1pm.
Overall traffic stays the same.

@Martin Many of us have been commenting on this for weeks now. I'm in USA and most days now English language traffic is awful...yesterday UK went down 56%, today only one hit from the UK! Canada and Australia alternate with almost no traffic at all. USA is down 15-25% most days. Meanwhile I am getting traffic this morning from: Lithuania, Thailand, Armenia, Ukraine, Peru, and Uganda. This is entirely intentional...Google is analyzing each site and making sure to kill off local traffic that could convert to sales.

We are all also seeing that traffic will just turn off at various points in the day for hours at a time. For me that mostly happens around 9am or 2pm, but for a while it was at 6-7pm. But it's been every day for the last five weeks, with the exception of 2-3 days of OK traffic. I have have two real inquiries in two weeks, the rest just spam and junk...so effectively Google had put me out of business now.

[RedBar]

I think we should re-name this forum as Google Wipeouts June 2021

I'm seriously considering a couple of option:

1. Splitting-up my main global site and returing it to its core individual country production facilities.

2. Retiring from this never-ending round oof nonsensical updates that seemingly only benefits huge brands, scammers, spammers and Google itself.

The Net for the first 17 years was mostly fun, the past 11 years has been tedious and, for many, soul-destroying.

If I actually worked for someone doing this as a job I would have told them where to stuff it years ago.

The Google's Advertising Display Engine benefits no one but G.

[lee_sufc]

@RedBar - everything you said was spot on. Back in the "good old days", Google would do an update, you'd learn what was wrong with your site, fix it, and move on. Now, we spend 90% of our time worrying about Google and our rankings and then being kicked further down for doing what we believe is the right thing.

I give up.

[yollo03]

I dont think its technical issues, they were probably hit by the algorithm automated penalties. They can still provide good content and great user experience. Once the algorithm decides to penalize your website you will be pushed down for an unknown period of time. There should be greater transparency with these automated penalties.

[mzb44]

@mzb44 and there is one of the major problem with the internet. It is too easy for people to create sites that are pure garbage. Where it is scraping content from others sites, taking advantage of low income writers in other countries who can barely speak english or using those "AI" writing services.

Yes. But currently the incentive structure set up by Google favours this strategy - that of creating many lower quality sites instead of one or a few high-quality ones.

You can only develop one, maximum a few, high-quality sites and this in itself does not lower your chances of getting hit by a core update, unless you become a mainstream publication. So, if your site gets hit it can be over for you.

With the same effort, you can instead develop 10-20 low quality sites. Some will naturally get hit but it's very easy to replace them. Most will never get hit though; ask literally anyone who runs multiple (especially low quality) sites.

From a purely economic calculation perspective, it makes more sense to create several low-quality sites instead of one high-quality site.

The only real losers here are smaller brands and genuine companies that can't churn out new bs sites and need to rely on their main branded site - these, if they get hit it often means game over.

These updates don't really damage spammers as much as people here believe. Having some of their sites get hit is part of their calculations when making sites - and as said, real world testing and experience shows that most spam sites actually do not get hit more frequently than non-spam sites.

[Martin Ice Web]

@yollo, in you Look at mfa Sites you will See That this Sites have easy HTML. Ready to be crawled by bots. Navigation is Short, no search Panel , no EAT. This Sites are realy easy understandable by bots. They are easy to maintain. Easy = less errors.
While our Website has some issues because of Navigation errors Or missing interlinking.

[KaseyM]

@saladtosser

That site CentralRecorder is quite amazing given itself is clearly employing blatant SEO spam lol

[shadowlight]

Google is analyzing each site and making sure to kill off local traffic that could convert to sales.

I agree, although I would replace the word 'local' with 'any'.

'In essence, a search engine’s business model is a numbers game: for any page containing sponsored
links, on average, users will click on one or more of these links a certain percentage of the time. A
search engine can grow its revenues either by increasing this percentage (perhaps by lowering the
quality and relevance of its search results) or by increasing the average number of pages containing
ads that each user views per visit.' excerpt from [foundem.co.uk...]

G are doing both the things mentioned above. All these reports about G showing sites to audiences that are not Geographically relevant (lowering the relevance of its search results), I mean is it really that hard to show a user results that are actually relevant to a users country? Are they that inept that they cant even get geo targeting correct? I don't think so. I have witnessed this myself quite a lot during and after this update. You might expect this from a start up search engine as an initial teething problem and even then you would expect it to be rectified quickly but from a 20+ year old *cough* *cough* search engine, one with the talent, power & money G has behind it?

This along with the amount of pure AI generated spam sites that are reportedly ranking quite well.

And I don't think its even possible for them to cram any more 'search widgets' into the SERPS that encourage people to search search search (increasing the average number of pages containing ads that each user views per visit), which seems to increase every update.

Most searches now contain people also ask, people also search for and related searches at a minimum which take up a whole lot of screen space on mobile. On mobile devices you get these search widgets plus a pop up at the top that appears the minute you scroll containing the G search box with your search term and other search terms underneath and if you are a chrome user you get all this plus a search icon that pops at the bottom of the page the minute you start scrolling.

A few people have reported that they have gained rank and traffic has actually decreased, unbelievable or maybe not considering ranking organically in position one is now classed as position 9 or 10 after 4 ads, people also ask and whatever other serp features they decide to show such as image packs (Google) & Videos (Google/Youtube) amongst others.

Of course they are doing everything they do in order to benefit their users, its a complete coincidence that it also greatly increases their revenue and profits.

The word extortion springs to mind.

[EditorialGuy]

Of course they are doing everything they do in order to benefit their users, its a complete coincidence that it also greatly increases their revenue and profits.

It isn't a coincidence, it's a result. Google, like Amazon, is a data-driven company that knows how to please users. We may long wistfully for the days of "10 blue links" and no ads on SERPs, but it seems pretty obvious that Google's users aren't complaining.

[shadowlight]

I don’t long wistfully for 10 blue links, but when you have worked hard for nearly 15 years to create a top notch web site that ranks highly on G, is authorative, has satisfied users and ticks all of the boxes and all of a sudden decent converting traffic all of a sudden disappears almost entirely after a G core update then something is wrong.

Just because users arent leaving G by the droves (yet) and using an alternative SE is no proof that G are giving users what they want. Most users arent aware of alternatives and even less are oblivious to the fact that G does not always provide them with the best, cheapest, most comprehensive or most relevant results.

[webdev29]

@shadowlight @RedBar @ichthyous

I see that many of you have the same problem, here in France it's the same thing for some ecommerce, the fallout is catastrophic! although all metrics are in the green (visibility sistrix, semrush estimation & ranking and others) and they do not lose significant places in the SERP, the CTR drop everyday. We have seen drops in sales of up to 75% !

The problem is that Google is taking advantage of machine learning to better target queries with purchase intent and adapt the SERP accordingly to promote clicks on ads. All this while adapting the strategy in real time according to the time of day and the profile of the users (remember, Google doesn't need cookies to track and profile a person as the variety of data collected in their dataset is enormous).

This explains the feeling that you have that the traffic stops at certain times of the day. Keep a thorough analysis of the SERP on your queries at these key times to draw a conclusion (use residential geolocalised proxies).

Core web vitals will have nearly no impact on your ranking, or if they do, it will be minor, you should not notice it.

Surprisingly, while many businesses are complaining about their CTRs dropping since April 2021, Google announces that they had a 34% increase in revenue for the first quarter alone.....
How can we not say that Google is manipulating its real-time results in its favor with such evidence ?

[ichthyous]

Today was just awful...my UK traffic has defaulted to half. USA traffic down 25%. Despite supposedly gaining some spots, I am finding that the traffic to my main landing pages is almost nil. My traffic is at the same level as during the height of the pandemic in 2020.

Just an FYI...I have turned adwords on and off for the last month. Despite running a very targeted campaign 75% of the clicks hit the landing page and leave. I've spent about $85 to get my first lead in a month and it was for my lowest price item. If it takes a few leads before they buy I will be in the red, no profit.

Also, I complained because the clicks are coming from areas I have explicitly excluded in my campaigns. I can see the clicks coming from all over the USA and Australia in my own stats, but Google shows them all mostly from coming from my own city. There is a total mismatch in location reporting!

At 75% of the clicks being "one hit wonders" I don't see continuing with running ads as any kind of viable option to gain some traffic, I'm going to disable the campaign entirely