Google Core Update July 1, 2021

[sk7411]

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System: The following 120 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5037667.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 12:10 pm on Jul 7, 2021 (utc -5)

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July Core Update has started rolling out :

[twitter.com...]


Good Luck everyone.

[Samsam1978]

I have realized that there are millions of cloaked pages of my website in the search results. So many that I cannot manually raise them all. Wondering if this has affected my ranking drop. I don't even know how they are in the search engine at all. I cannot report every link as there are thousands. Any advice on what to do?

[saladtosser]

@Samsam1978 Was the website hacked? When you say cloaked what are they cloaking? Are they located in a single directory you could easily delete?

@gatormark what niche are you going into with your new site?

[gatormark]

@gatormark what niche are you going into with your new site?

@saladtosser
C’mon, you know not to ask that. Too many sharks out here.

[saladtosser]

Not sure what you mean, its pretty vague question and most people here share that info pretty frequently here?

[yollo03]

@samsam, it sounds like a negative seo attack. Consider using a web application firewall. It may only prevent further damage, not what was already done. There are many WAF services for every budget. I am not sure what can be done with the current cloaking but it should 'die out' with time after the WAF is running.

[Samsam1978]

@saladtosser it is completely off my website but there are millions of websites copying and cloaking my pages, too manuy to raise all to google via there online form. I have done 300 so far but I cannot do them all. I agree, it looks like I am being attacked.

@yollo03 what service do you recommend?

What do I do guys? I cannot believe that this can even happen and Google allow all this crap in their engines.

[Edge]

Thought experiment:

21 year+ website, typical traffic (800K+). Historically for the last several years, 73% desktop, mobile 26% and tablet < 1.2%.

As I type, 51% desktop and 48% mobile.

Speculation, are we seeing post pandemic out of office traffic drop?

Any evidence based research on traffic trend?

[RedBar]

I cannot believe that this can even happen and Google allow all this crap in their engines.

Come on ... do you honestly believe they care what the mess is beneath all their ads? So long as it "looks" as though they're making a slight effort why would they care?

There's a relatively easy way to tell:

1. Search for highly competitive terms and examine its SERPs.
2. Search for low volume queries and, in general, see how much better its SERPs are.

In many, many sectors, the more competitive it is, the worse the mess.

This may seem obvious to most however IF you are in such a widget sector then surely it is time for you / your company / your employer / your investors / et al to re-consider everything you are doing.

The spamming IS going to get worse, the scraping IS going to get worse, look even the huge gated sites can't control the mess some bad actors take to their reputations, if they can't then the open sites haven't a clue of being protected.

Me?

I'm going to have fun experimenting with something new simply to find out whether my inklings are correct:-)

Yes, that means I've unofficially sort of given-up with this stupid charade since it sure as heck does not drive any new business enquiries any more.

Build Back Better? One of the best jokes for the 21st century already! ...

[gatormark]

@RedBar

There's a relatively easy way to tell:

1. Search for highly competitive terms and examine its SERPs.
2. Search for low volume queries and, in general, see how much better its SERPs are.

Can you give an example of the competitive terms? I just did a basic search of “best computers” and I didn’t see unusual results.

Many months ago Pinterest results were suddenly dominating my niche but they have since been removed by Google. Things are back to normal in my niche.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop in traffic in the first half of the day yesterday...USA, UK and Canada. 2nd half of the day returned to normal. Today a big recovery of top three ranking terms and normal USA, CA, AU traffic, but UK is down by 68%. I am noticing updates almost every Friday, with UK traffic vanishing on weekends and a big dip in "direct" traffic. Also traffic to my home page mysteriously vanishes for half a day on a regular basis. These are all types of traffic throttling, but also there are way more videos and other types of feeds now, so if you aren't top three you basically get pushed to the end of the page or page two.

In general my traffic is as low now as when I started my website in 2003. The volume is less than half of what it was in 2019. Most of that is Google, but also I think that this summer people are not spending on material goods but on getting out, traveling, eating out etc.

[yollo03]

@samsam, first it has be a service that meets your budget. I am using stackpath firewall but there is a js injection and some websites don't work well with it. So I cannot recommend it as I don't know how your website will perform with it. What you do need to pay attention to are the costs.

Can you create as many WAF rules as you wish or they cost more money? Do you pay per request or a monthly threshold of lets say 5 million requests are included in the monthly fee?

Some of the popular WAF services are sucuri and cloudflare. Imperva, barracuda and Microsoft azure firewall are more expensive and in my opinion are for large websites. You need to confirm whether you can use only the WAF (in azure you can I think) without the CDN they are offering.

There are many other WAF services available, most do give a trial. Some WAF services may not work smoothly, a trial period lets you see which service works for you. Also learn how to implement the WAF before the trial.

[superclown2]

It looks like Google is doing too much too soon, and doing it abysmally. For example this morning, in my UK financial widget vertical, for a popular search term:

Inevitably there are four ads taking up the full screen of my desktop monitor. Fair enough, it is their site. However after that the top space for many financial widget search terms is then a 'find results on' bar: this was insisted on by Europe when they last fined Google a few billion euros and is supposed to contain alternative directories but the top spot is nearly always taken by a certain affiliate website. Why this site is there I have no idea but it looks like a clear breach of the EU instruction - accidentally no doubt.

Next there are three local results. The first one I checked linked to a domain which is up for sale. According to archive.org it never was a local business and it was offline by September 2019 anyway.

The second was, eureka, a genuine local business.

The third was again a genuine local business that sold a widget but an entirely different one to the one I specified in my search term.

Next of course there was People Also Ask. Most of the top answers were either from American sites (in other words at best useless, at worst misleading) and those that weren't were from 'Authority' sites rather than specialists. A couple gave incorrect information; not that the information on the sites was incorrect, but the snippet that was displayed was misleading unless the visitor read the full text on that site.

Google is flirting with danger with PAA. In the United Kingdom and throughout Europe (I don't know about America) it is illegal to offer financial advice unless officially authorised to do so. Giving general advice on questions such as "Which financial widget is the cheapest" or "What is the best way to buy a financial widget" is dangerous since every individual's circumstances are different. If a company authorised by the FCA was to do that it would face severe penalties, civil action by anyone who lost money as a result of taking that advice, and loss of authorisation to practice.

I have searched the FCA register and Google is not, to the best of my knowledge, registered with the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority and so cannot, again to the best of my knowledge, answer many of the questions in PAA except in the most general terms. They are nevertheless giving direct answers, but those I have seen so far relate to American businesses, not UK ones. Whether or not this is legal is a question a lawyer would be better able to answer.

To sum up: well, I'll leave that to others.

[Samsam1978]

[businessbusinessbusiness.com.au...]

Wonder how the apple search will impact our sites.

[techblood.in...]

[RedBar]

They are nevertheless giving direct answers, but those I have seen so far relate to American businesses, not UK ones.

Yes, PAA answers for my industry can be not only extremely misleading but also very inaccurate.

Most of the PAA answers I have seen have been pulled from USA retail websites, very few wholesalers or producers have within 10% of the tech specs I have, plus that information has mostly obviously been found by the website builder because the same inaccuracies keep appearing on site after site.

Whever I see these inaccuracies I gently advise the site owner of their inaccurate information, most get it changed however I have had some US site owners call me more than a "liar", they always back down when I prove to them otherwise.

So yes, IMHO, G is leaving itself wide open to possible UK action but we all know that "money talks" and we wouldn't want to be seen upsetting a monopoly would we?

[RedBar]

Wonder how the apple search will impact our sites.

Depends whose database they use however this surprised me:

Apple devices account for about half of Google’s worldwide search traffic

Half of G's search possibly "gone" with one update?

[Dimitri]

Apple's search engine might deserve a separate topic.

[superclown2]

I reckon the challenge by Apple is inevitable. Some interesting comments on that article:

Apple has a challenging path ahead; Google might simply be TOO big. Google’s data is so finely tuned by hundreds of millions of searches every minute from all over the world, in terms of data, there is a lot for Apple to catch up on.

And yet their results are so bad? Even a tiny engine like Duck shows more relevant results.

But more commonly, users are complaining about the increases in paid results which decrease the accuracy of their searches; hence society might benefit from a new search engine more than they think.

i think we've all been saying that for a long time ....

[RedBar]

I suppose it will when / if we have any idea what may be happening otherwise it's all mere speculation ... unless you know better? :-)

[superclown2]

So yes, IMHO, G is leaving itself wide open to possible UK action but we all know that "money talks" and we wouldn't want to be seen upsetting a monopoly would we?

Europe's Ms Vestager doesn't seem fazed by Google. America I'm not so sure of. As for the UK our legal mills grind exceedingly slow, but exceedingly fine. When there finally is major change I reckon it will be Europe led.

In the meanwhile my SERPs positions in Google have never been higher, whilst my clicks have never been lower. The irritating spam that Google is displaying these days to block visitors from our sites (even though it annoys users) is obviously working to their satisfaction so I hope I will be forgiven for celebrating when their monopoly is finally over.

[superclown2]

I suppose it will when / if we have any idea what may be happening otherwise it's all mere speculation ... unless you know better? :-)

The American regulators have G's monopolistic practices in their sights. One of their major abuses is the way they have cosy agreements with companies like Apple to make G the default search engine. This is likely to have to end and Apple would be crazy if they didn't get Plan B ready. Plus all those search engineers they've hired won't be spending their days playing table tennis.

Whether or not all this will be to our advantage remains to be seen but I for one will welcome it - after all things could hardly get worse.

[gatormark]

Whether or not all this will be to our advantage remains to be seen but I for one will welcome it - after all things could hardly get worse.

I know many of you from the UK are being impacted adversely and I’m sorry to hear this. However, breaking up monopolies can DEFINITELY affect us adversely. Frankly, I am planning for the worst.

[saladtosser]

>>>>I reckon the challenge by Apple is inevitable. Some interesting comments on that article:<<<<

Had Steve Jobs not died we would have seen this years ago, Steve jobs wanted to bury Google from what I understand.

>>>However, breaking up monopolies can DEFINITELY affect us adversely. Frankly, I am planning for the worst.<<<

I don't see how worse it can get, what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone (excluding shar holders and the execs of said company)? Having another big player in the market can only be good for us IMO. Monopiles are good for *no one* and even if it turns out worse for us (hard to imagine because now there will be choice) i'd feel better knowing google lost half their traffic overnight and finally knows how that feels.

At the end of the day they brought competition on themselves, they once were and would have also been the best search engine if the bottom line didn't come first, I welcome competition even if it doesn't benefit me, competition always brings benefit to the majority!

[Dimitri]

what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone

In Europe, the breaking of monopoly in Energy, Trains, etc... resulted in higher prices, and lower quality of service.

[gatormark]

I don't see how worse it can get, what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone (excluding shar holders and the execs of said company)?

Um, virtually every breakup of a monopoly has resulted in higher prices for the consumer. Research the history of the breakup of monopolies. Not sure how this would affect us though.

[Abaros]

In Europe, the breaking of monopoly in Energy, Trains, etc... resulted in higher prices, and lower quality of service.

No, in Europe this happened with the privatization of public services. No relation with monopolies.

Monopolies are bad, economists of all ideologies agree. The only one who benefits from a monopoly is the monopoly itself.

On the other hand I have been seeing a lot of Googlebot activity for two days now.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

The history of monopolies is very clear and well documented. It is GOOD for those who want to set up similar businesses. It is HORRIBLE for the consumer. This is not even a mute point.

A better, and more challenging question is to ask which break ups of monopolies has impacted the consumer in a positive way?

[Abaros]

Um, virtually every breakup of a monopoly has resulted in higher prices for the consumer. Research the history of the breakup of monopolies. Not sure how this would affect us though.

No, what you say simply did not happen, you should give concrete data when you say something.

In Europe when telecommunications were privatized the prices of telephone services went down. On the other hand, when energy was privatized, oligopolies were created to raise prices.

In the United States something similar happened with oil and communications.

The history of monopolies is very clear and well documented. It is GOOD for those who want to set up similar businesses. It is HORRIBLE for the consumer. This is not even a mute point.

Please cite concrete cases.

**** I think all this is off topic. The moderators are going to "scold" us.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

The breakup of Ma Bell is the most obvious answer for us in the USA.

[Abaros]

A better, and more challenging question is to ask which break ups of monopolies has impacted the consumer in a positive way?

A simile...

Imagine that Apple disappears and Android is 100% a monopoly.

Although for the price of an iPhone you can have two Android, you could no longer boast of having a phone with a bitten apple, it's not just the price, it's the freedom of choice.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

Clearly freedom of choice is good. I’m just stating the history. Don’t blame the messenger. How we perceive things and what history reveals are often two different things.

Most true monopolies are regulated. When a monopoly ends and free enterprise starts, the regulation ends and prices almost always go higher.