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.

[ichthyous]

I feel like everything since 2018 has just been conditioning to force us all to accept that organic search as we know it is going away. Many on here talk about brand building or diversifying traffic and income sources, and in general this is correct. But I have tried a lot... Email campaigns, social media, adwords, Facebook ads, partnerships with other brands. Most of it simply was and is overhyped, overpriced and underperforming. The bottom line is that for sheer profitability nothing comes close to ranking at the top in organic search, so this is not going to be easy or possible for many small businesses to survive. It is the death of competition and small business on the internet. From here only large conglomerates will survive and take all of the market share, just as they buy up all the ads and drive prices far beyond what any smaller business can pay. Eventually a new competitor to Google will emerge and perhaps provide a glimmer of hope, but the drive to monetize means it will turn out the same no matter what. It's time to face the reality that search is a public utility which cannot be left only to private corporations to monetize without any oversight or responsibility. That means some sort of government intervention or corrective action, whether people like the thought or not.

[trabis]

June was stable week after week with 5% oscillation. Noticed -15% on 28,29 and 30 of June. From 1st July at mid-day until now i am averaging -25%.

Since 2011, since semantic web, since structured data, it has been down the hill for ugc.
My theory is that, for each query, google selects several user intents.
User may be looking for information, news, images, shop, definition, pdf, loans, others. Google presents the best result for each intent and that is it. If you are not the number one site for one of the intents, you do not have a place in front page anymore.

I would prefer 2011 like results and then be presented with a useful box with sugestions based on different intents.

Google has more information about each page today but has no clue on what to do with it. Presenting results for each possible intent makes Google feel bloated and webmasters sad.

[ichthyous]

@trabis I'm seeing the opposite in my niche. Google has selected the intent for us and it all switched to either how-to or "top ten" articles or blog posts, or for other searches the same large ecomm sites over and over... Add a healthy dose of pinterest. There is no possible alternative, Google has decided what the intent is despite many many users looking for something else. How do I know? Because they used to find me through such searches every day, so it can't be that they all just vanished overnight.

[RedBar]

I feel like everything since 2018

I have to disagree with that because although we had experienced various issues with Google the biggest hit and game-changer was its image theft of 2010 ... they got away with that which gave them the signal they could do absolutely anything with complete impunity ... Let someone else do all the hard work then steal it, no one can or will do anything, granted Getty Images had a small victory.

All G does is take, take, take from all the creators and then sell ranking positions to the advertisers ... period.

And believe me, it's going to get much, much worse for many!

[trabis]

"Add a healthy dose of pinterest"
I'm triggered.

I guess Pinterest serves diferent intents:
Images about, quotes by, (choose number) lists with, ideas for, mindless endless scrolling, amazing ad placement...
I think you can come up with some more.

I have seen 10 Pinterest results in first 3 pages. Down to 7 since last spam update. In my opinon, 7 more to go.

[RedBar]

Question, has anyone here ever tried putting their entire gallery on Pinterest / Instagram and seen them destroy their actual website?

[renatovieira]

Heavy traffic since yesterday. Let's wait until when this is positively affecting me.

[ichthyous]

@redbar being an arts site I had everything posted to pinterest but don't bother now. I'm finding that posting my images to higher authority partner sites killed me, and then pinterest did the rest. I actually had to start removing content from partner sites, but instead of my own site returning it's just not ranking at all now.

I had a huge 50%+ decline in image traffic in early June and most of my images were nowhere to be found after maybe thirteen years of ranking well. The past two days "direct traffic" has returned so perhaps more images are ranking again. I'll have to check that. And yes, 2010 was fatal for image based sites but I managed to survive and have my highest earning years in 2017-18-19 and 21 started off very strong until mid-march when Google started all this new crap!

[not2easy]

@RedBar - some pointers on using Pinterest profitably: [webmasterworld.com...]

[RedBar]

Thanks, just had a look, is this fact?

If your site is not for the 18-34 86% female crowd Pinterest is not for your topic.

That is one of the retail sectors of my industry, not one I supply specifically and I'm fairly sure my prospective global clients are not scouring Pinterest for ideas ... However I am going to ask and see their reaction.

[NickMNS]

The weirdness continues... It seems like my traffic is up by about 30 to 50% from the lows of June. But, only before noon (EDT). Starting around 12pm traffic returns to same low levels. So net recovery is in only the order of 10%.

It is really strange.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Obviously it's still early days - and this has been happening intermittently from time to time anyway - but while doing a search for personal research (looking for a good FTP client), the majority of the featured snippets are linking to very old articles (2016 and before, 2018 in some cases if you're lucky). ergo, a lot of the 'best bla bla bla' top ten listicle nonsense results are...well.....of no use anymore.

Ouch.

[christianz]

the majority of the featured snippets are linking to very old articles (2016 and before, 2018 in some cases if you're lucky). ergo, a lot of the 'best bla bla bla' top ten listicle nonsense results are...well.....of no use anymore.

I would rather read outdated listicle than read one that was freshly spun by computer program 1 second ago and published on a spam site with .info TLD.

[TalkativeEditorial]

Sure, in some cases absolutely. Less so when it is both spun, old and lists nothing of use at all.

[ichthyous]

This is insanity... today I've had a 94% drop in my home page traffic. I checked and my home page is not coming up in a G site search at all, it just vanished. This is on a day where my ranking climbed. Has anyone else seen this happen?

[NickMNS]

This is on a day where my ranking climbed. Has anyone else seen this happen?

Are you referring to GSC rankings?

If so, then yes this is common and to be expected.

[cue broken record...]
GSC shows rankings only for searches where your website has gotten an impression. When impressions drop one is often left with only impressions for searches where your website gets a high ranking. As a result rankings (average position) reported in GSC goes up while impressions and traffic drop.

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS No, I'm referring to two rank tracking services which show a recovery in the terms I am tracking and also my average position. GSC is showing a very slow uptick in impressions but not so much clicks. I read that if your home page suddenly vanishes from Google index it's a glitch and you have to request indexing again. I tried that and hopefully it will return in the index

[Samsam1978]

20% down from last week. Ive checked and loads of sites scraped my content and spam is out of control. Wondering if this has had an impact. my core web vitals are not good either. Its all a bit of a nightmare.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 7:37 am (utc) on Jul 4, 2021]

[yollo03]

Similar to others, my rankings improved a bit. There has been a continuous climb since the spam update so I cant really tell whether the core update actually did anything major. I will know later this week. Despite the 'recovery' it will have to continue for 10 days to see full recovery from December core update. Traffic is still generally low.

[RedBar]

Recovery? Only expect a "recovery" if you are extremely fortunate to have the manipulation go in your favour.

As many of you know I re-calculated my expected monthly PVs in May owing to my drop in traffic, how has this panned out?

June 1-25 : 106% of new average
June 26-30 : 173% of new, 103.5% of old average
July 1-3 : 90% of new

So they are "natural" traffic flows? BS, nothing less than G manipulation, USA visitors were down for 25 days, then for 5 days they retuned, the last 3 days they've disappeared again.

Oh yeah, complately natural flows!

[saladtosser]

Traffics still dropping, 58% now! Seems my sites that are 100% AMP were the ones hit, the higher the CWV scores the worse they were hit! Older sites I haven't AMPed or worked on are untouched, strange!

[Dooku]

That single hacked domain has 14 MILLION (!) cloaked spam to malware pages alone *indexed and searchable!*.

Another example: There is this fake coupon code website that uses the EXACT same html/css design across all of their websites with different domain names. I found hundreds of domains from them and most probably there are several thousand.

Each website has tens of thousands of pages, most of them several hundred thousand. They do not use G search console and off course they do NOT use G analytics, no sitemap, nothing. But they do have millions and millions of pages indexed, all with fake coupon codes displaying scraped pages from websites. For example you can even see PARTS of "terms and conditions" text or "Privacy Policy" text from normal websites they scraped displaying a fake coupon code. They also display normal scraped product pages from those websites with a fake coupon code off course, but this is just to show that they scrape without much thought.

And on top of that they are growing each month and it's obvious they can afford the domain registration fees for those thousands of domains with the EXACT same fake coupon code website. As this is a finite system, it means legit pages will suffer, loose rankings or worse.

This is just one example of probably millions of similar spammers and I am not even counting all the "small few website" spammers.

The G spam update is total nonsense because G can NEVER distinguish anything to be 100% spam. This will get worse, much worse and at some time in the future the serps we are complaining about NOW, we will remember as "the good old days".

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing a further recovery of top three and top ten terms today, but my home page has vanished almost completely from the SERPS. It starts down again by 78% this morning. The page is indexed according to GSC but all the traffic has simply gone. This follows a downward trend on and off for the last month, but the traffic had returned recently. I remember a while back people were complaining about their home page vanishing from the SERPS, has anyone had this happen and resolved it?

[ibb.co ]

[Abaros]

@ichthyous

I'm seeing a further recovery of top three and top ten terms today, but my home page has vanished almost completely from the SERPS. It starts down again by 78% this morning. The page is indexed according to GSC but all the traffic has simply gone. This follows a downward trend on and off for the last month, but the traffic had returned recently. I remember a while back people were complaining about their home page vanishing from the SERPS, has anyone had this happen and resolved it?

During the last year I have had the same problem on 3 of my sites, GSC did not solve the problem, the home page has been missing from the index for up to a week. Then it just appeared.

[golderberger]

For the past 4 days, purchases/orders down 60%, traffic mostly from Africa and India - it is happening again :/

[BushyTop]

@NickMNS it always seems that we are in tandem when it comes to the patterns we are seeing. Similarly, when the update was released, we saw an uptick from the previous thrashing we took in June, accounting for a 30% loss. Julys release saw us fly back to the original psoitons, but it was fleeting. it seems things are dialing back down now to only a 10-15% gain

[Martin Ice Web]

Obviously we are now only getting traffic to low content pages. Means pages where items are listed. Just a headline and then the items. All pages with content like descriptions, hints, personal experience did suffer. We have only a few of this pages but this are the only ones that get traffic.

But this matched fully the current serps. Low to no content pages.

[yollo03]

They might push another update towards the end of the week, maybe from Wednesday onwards. Rankings has improved but traffic is still generally low. I am not seeing meaningful rise in impressions either, in fact, impressions dropped by a bit.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a continued very slow increase in both position and in GSC impressions. At this pace will take the rest of the year to get back to where I was in March. I have no confidence that it couldn't just vanish overnight.

Despite the total disappearance of my home page, traffic from outside the USA was so strong yesterday that there was a sharp upward stairstep pattern all day long until about 10pm. These patterns are just so bizarre and unnatural. Why would traffic from UK Canada Australia Germany France Japan and many other places rise higher hour by hour on a Sunday? Ranking for any terms related to my home page are still way down though...some were top five and are still languishing at #30-70.

[RedBar]

Global site has had more PVs in the first 12 hours of my Monday Googleday than the 24 hrs of Sunday but, granted, I was expecting that with it being 4th July.

The most remarkable PVs were for the hotel / pub site with its second-highest PVs of 2021, accommodation and food enquiries are surprising us every week.