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.

[christianz]

Its great to see some of you doing well, but this June update is garbage and to make matters worse the July one looks no better.

June was garbage but July very sharply more than recovered June losses for my oldest and biggest site. It was so sharp and sudden as if Google woke up from episode of amnesia and recognized that there is this website that has accumulated back links for 15 years and actually serves a purpose unlike billion spam pages that they slowly were giving more traffic to.

Still, even if this recovery lasts for a while, I am slightly down from before December 2020 update, so hardly you can describe this as "doing well".

My second oldest site saw reduction in traffic (not too dramatic) and my newest site got significant reduction in traffic. I am ok with this, as I, in part, created these sites only because Google has this obsession with giving new sites too much credit.

If I watch real time traffic, it almost looks like perfect inverse correlation - when the senior site has influx of hits, the younger site has a drop, and vice versa. As if Google is A/B testing something.

Overall I don't see any followup for the boost for senior site. Traffic seems to be flat now and maybe falling off slightly, as they are tweaking things and maybe regretting some of the changes they made with the initial July volatility spike.

[yollo03]

I should say that only mobile core web vitals are ZERO. Meaning, no good urls. no bad urls, just zero. In desktop it's all green. I sent multiple emails in the feedback section, all ignored obviously, I am not amazon. It's been like this since the end of May. All my core web vitals are green for mobile in tests I conducted in almost all pages (95%).

Seroundtable published an interesting post about how google ranks keywords, and more interestingly how it de-ranks or eliminates certain keywords. To cut the story short, the ranking is done in numbers. The higher number you have, the better you will rank. If they want you out of the search they multiple your number by zero. That will make sure you are kicked out the search for a particular keyword. So even if your score is high, if the algorithm wants you out all it has to do is multiple your score by zero and you are out.

source and full details on the magic numbers: [seroundtable.com...]

[Samsam1978]

My rankings have stopped dropping but have not seen an increase. I am going to move servers in case I have an issue somewhere. Glad it has finally stopped dropping so bad every day though.

[yollo03]

I tracked one of my competitors in my niche for a long time. He received a huge boost from the recent update. What he has done is the following:

5 posts per day (short), 3 pages per week (long articles)
PR with high authority brands
No google ads
Loads of backlinks on a daily basis

Perhaps this is the magic formula to rank higher. This PR is very expensive, at least in my opinion. Some of the sites he paid for PR charge over $2,000.

Edit: The owner pays people to write obviously, he doesn't write anything himself.

[mzb44]

Perhaps this is the magic formula to rank higher.

I don't think it's this simple.

You can find examples for any type of site that recovered/got hit.

I see sites that didn't post any articles for 6 months and didn't get one single link since now recovering. I also see sites posting new articles all the time that got hit.

You can find examples for any narrative you would like to form when it comes to core updates.

This is what the mainstream SEOs are doing when they say they improved E-A-T and "jUsT cReAtEd HiGh QuAlItY cOnTeNt" and recovered. Your narrative works if you focus only on that specific subset of sites.

My personal conclusion re: core updates is this: At some point in time if you operate a website for long enough, eventually you will get negatively affected by a core update, no matter what you do. Sometimes you recover fast, sometimes much slower and sometimes maybe you do not recover at all.

[frankleeceo]

magic signal = ad spend?

(put it less blunt, "brand awareness")

[samwest]

They should call this years update(s) "The Limbo", because it just seems they want to see see how low traffic can go. 6 days into the month with zero sales. This is the absolute lowest the test site has ever been (in 21 years), despite still being on page one...and traffic is STILL trending lower. Something is very, VERY wrong. Same thing across the board. My clients are screaming for answers. [youtu.be...]

[RedBar]

@samwest - How low? That's easy when it's overt manipulation, I had a 40% PVs cut again and it's now at its allocated new ceiling of +3% to -7% not including Sunday 4th July.... Very, very natural traffic flows!

[yollo03]

Anyone have any theories how the algorithms determine when to limit traffic and when allow it to flow? I am not sure it's just by certain hours.

[ichthyous]

magic signal = ad spend?

That's exactly right...I see the large corporate competitors spending a fortune on ads also ranking much higher now. The same list crowding out every search with any commercial intent. I tried it, the ads are a huge black hole for income and produce nothing...they are sacrificing ad spend to get total domination across all the serps and have the money to do it.

Despite my average search position continuing to rise I am back to seeing very low traffic...almost all of it from reduced USA "direct" traffic...USA is down 51% at noon. Meanwhile every other country is normal or above normal except for Canada, which seems pegged to the USA serps.

[Moiz Banoori]

Seeing good changes, good luck guys.

[Jeff_Fidler]

Please for the love of god Google, stop showing the same domain multiple times in the top 10 results. We see this in all the verticals we work in, and I can't believe they're still doing this. Wasn't there a fix they supposedly applied to correct this? Same crap here in Canada after this "update". Disappointed in the lack of improvement in the serps that's for sure.

[MayankParmar]

Google Discover recovery. I hope this will continue.

[mzb44]

Yeah, weird we are still technically in the May thread.

This forum is legacy now. It doesn't even correctly count posts. It probably isn't counting about 40%-50% of users' posts.

[NickMNS]

Yeah, weird we are still technically in the May thread.

No you are not "technically" in the May thread, you are in the thread for the June and July Core update. Unfortunately some felt like the June updated actually rolled in the end of May hence the title:

Google Core Update May 23 - June 3, 2021

and why the thread includes posts from as far back in May. So technically there really isn't anything "wrong" with this thread. But traditionally (more or less), most updates have just been included in the "monthly" threads and a new thread was started each month. Personally I agree that monthly is the best approach, as the timing of update is somewhat random, we've just had 4 updates announced in the past few weeks so trying to time all that seems like it would lead to a bit of a mess.

Does really make a difference, the posts are just added to the end, I doubt anyone really goes back to the previous pages anyways.

[mzb44]

Yeah, NickMNS, agreed. I just said "technically" May thread because this one was cut from the regular May one and continued from there, without opening subsequent monthly ones.

I don't mind still being in this thread, just got used to the monthly threads.

It's just that the thread's title is now outdated as it refers to the June core update - and rather incorrectly. It wasn't released on May 23. Even if you think Google is lying, ranking changes and usual core update patterns around the first week of June clearly point towards that it was then the core update was launched and not May. As I said back then as well I was rather surprised to see this move from WebmasterWorld as generally this is a white hat forum, where apart from isolated discussions here and there (usually in the monthly threads where people went) conspiracy theories aren't really that frequent here. Seeing this now coming straight from the admins looks a bit weird.

[yollo03]

Interesting assessment on the July core update: [sistrix.com...]

[BushyTop]

@Jeff_Fidler this was supposed to be fixed back in like 2015, with the horde update... madness that it still exists isnt it?

Anyone else experiencing a penalty for AMP pages... I'm interested to know whether I might be causing myself some issues by using them on ecom landing pages?

[samwest]

The PINTEREST BUG is BACK! Taking up to positions again. What a mess. 96% traffic loss this week. Not even enough to keep the lights on. Meanwhile at the plex, lobster bisque and kobe beef for lunch...again.

[NickMNS]

I love it!
The new title of the thread.

Google Core Update July 1 - July 14ish, 2021

Specifically:

14ish

[saladtosser]

BushyTop all my 100% AMP sites tanked in this update! Anti Amp up[date

[ichthyous]

US traffic dropped to nothing from 10am-2pm today, now 30% down at 3pm. Canada -16%, Australia - 28% today...only UK is mysteriously high every day now up 220% today. My UK traffic is almost the same as USA. Despite gaining back rank and clicks and impressions increasing in GSC, that persistent drop in the middle of the day is just draining all my viable US traffic.

[mhansen]

Throughout this latest update(s) from June/July, I've lost roughly 5% of keyword positions (SEMR data) and roughly 30% of search traffic from Big-G. This equates to about 2-4 positions in search results based on my historical data. IE: Going from 1st to 3rd, 2 to 4th position, 5-7th, etc. Of course, a few of the other pages also moved the other direction from 3 > 1 etc, but those are far fewer and seem to be in the mostly non-commercial topics.

I keep a pretty good record of the sites that are most often in front of me in these positions and looking at the NEW sites who have popped up, the only things I can find that provides any type of hint of what I should do differently like they are doing, is:

- Kill my Core Vitals. Not a single one of the sites that de-positioned mine have a pagespeed score higher than 15 on mobile, 30 on desktop. Mine are at 98/100.
- Place tons of Adsense units onto the website versus using my own product/service to handle my leads.
- Use humongous, 3200x1800 pictures at the very top of the page that take 4-5 seconds to load and shift the page content down the screen. I keep mine to a more reasonable size and load them off the screen, scrolling into view in screen 2-3.
- Copy my own content and change the layout before uploading it to an aged, previously expired domain.
- I really need to find out how to attract MORE spam backlinks from places too. The kind that link my pictures to my site, that exist on hacked domains, etc.

This update is OK in some areas, but on the commercial side, it's horrendous. I guess I should be glad Pinterest is not in my niche at the same level it is on others.

[superclown2]

Anyone have any theories how the algorithms determine when to limit traffic and when allow it to flow? I am not sure it's just by certain hours

I'm wondering if they do it with their cookie. I delete them regularly but most people don't. On the few occasions when I've forgotten to do so the SERPs look entirely different.

Last year I had pretty much the same positions in the SERPs that I have now and yet traffic is down by about 75%. So I have to look beyond the search position. Maybe the googlespam has something to do with it but a cookie is so easy for them to manipulate without us seeing it easily.

[HereWeGo123]

Our website saw a nice uptick with this update. About 40-50% increase in daily traffic and positions grew in the SERPs. But despite this, we’ve had some of the lowest revenue days. Odd.

[westcoast]

Things have settled, and net result is that the July update undid the damage from the June update, so we're pretty much flat from May.

Spam situation has not improved at all. Google continues to suck in scores of new hacked domains each day in the giant "see full list on <sitename>" spam campaign. Google still has no ability to detect cloaked pages, so if you want to spam, go at it. They will crawl and index as many cloaked pages as you can throw at them. Scrape other sites, link all your hacked domains together, and make bank on long tail queries. That's the current spam playbook.

State of spam: Do queries:

"see full list on msn"
"see full list on buzzfeed"
etc...

All spam indexed # of page counts continue to increase. Some of these hacked domains have over 10 MILLION cloaked / indexed pages. Many of these hacked domains have had millions of indexed pages searchable and undetected by Google going on 6 months.

[NickMNS]

Anyone have any theories how the algorithms determine when to limit traffic and when allow it to flow? I am not sure it's just by certain hours

I'm wondering if they do it with their cookie. I delete them regularly but most people don't. On the few occasions when I've forgotten to do so the SERPs look entirely different.

There is no magic algorithm with a set of knobs that are turned on or off. It's a side effect of some ranking factor. This update probably favored some factor that is heavily related to geo-location, as traffic from an impacted geo-location ramps up then rankings change as a result.

Example site 1 ranks normally for a "keyword", but when people from Chicago and westward search for that same "keyword" then site 2 ranks higher than site 1. When the webmaster of site 1 looks at the analytics they see normal traffic until about 12pm eastern time or 11am central time (peak Chicago traffic time). Then for the next few hours traffic appears lower. It would look like someone dialed down the traffic at the same time everyday.

[Manana]

@superclown2, how do you delete those cookies?

I'm observing the exact same issue @yollo03 has been talking about. Every time my traffic seems to go up, it gets algorithmically pressed down by Google. I suspect that after this update they perfected the press-down algorithm that they manage to press it down immediately after the occasional good hour of traffic.

[Martin Ice Web]

Another very big hit last night (-50%) again.
We have been replaced with very odd domains. Domains that realy don´t have anything to do with the query. E.g. searching for an serial cable shows me domains from installers who sells an serial cable for a heating?! No to say that there is not a description.

I think that this update hit any domain (except big resellers) that has many identical items. Like we are selling network cables and have about >2.000 different types ( lenght, CAT, color, manufacturer). But this pages have been hit very hard.

[saladtosser]

Traffic has been cut in half since July 1st on my informational hobby site, though average position hasn't dropped at all in WMT. Just on the phone to a friend who has about 8 sites and he says everything's dead across the board (to the point he's got to sell his car) while positions are the same since July 1st, very strange indeed! I think its google spam pushing everything further and further down tbh! Guess googles about to have a bumper quarter earnings wise!

edit: I notice I've lost a lot of featured snippets on mobile but not desktop and there is a new google widget at the top called "from sources across the web" replacing all mobile featured snippets in my niche, this widget has about six drop downs which when expanded show a carousel of sites not ranking on page one for the term and youtube videos. After this new widget we have more youtube videos, followed by people also ask, guess that explains while my average positions haven't changed but have had traffic cut in half!

[christianz]

Spam situation has not improved at all

I cannot see any improvement in spam situation either. Those 1000 blogspot sites with 100% auto generated text for stolen, hotlinked images are all still getting search traffic from Google.

I guess if Google is not good enough to detect basic cloaking, there is little hope expecting them to catch auto-generated spam sites.

[universenet]

[sltrib.com ]
It is like everyone is against google

[sk7411]

The dreaded Friday is here , We have seen patterns of Tests/Tweaks/Roll Out during Fridays in all the algorithm tracking tools before . Good Luck just incase! :)

[edited by: sk7411 at 5:35 pm (utc) on Jul 8, 2021]

[saladtosser]

>>>>It’s more costly. It’s less effective, and consumers are not getting as much value.<<<<

This is actually true, Google has pushed up the cost of services which is bad for users. Example I have a friend who does wasp nest removal who's been pushed into google guaranteed this year or go under essentially. He charges £55 per next removal, or did, now under google guaranteed he pays google about £25 per lead, 1 in 2/4 convert costing about £100 extra per job, he has no choice but to pass this along to the google user inflating the users price by about £50 - £100.

Ironically Google search is promoted as free for users but because the costs have to be passed onto the user its not free for the user at all if you think about it, stealth fees for users essentially!

When I want a service I always go organic because I KNOW they have less overheads so I can get a better price but with organics being phased out year on year I guess ill have to pay google one way or another for anything I buy via searching to cover advertisers overheads, the advertisers aren't really the ones paying as they pass it on, its googles users who are paying by proxy!

[ichthyous]

Today was the first day i have lost ranking in a while...traffic to my landing pages is considerably down again, and my home page is down 40% today. However USA/UK/CA traffic all normal or up, so the loss must be in traffic from other locations. I feel like I am just a rat in Google's laboratory at this point. There are very few product sales inquiries at all, and none from the USA. I am however suddenly getting service inquiries. (I provide both products and services)

[HereWeGo123]

I've been monitoring the talks about positions/traffic staying steady or not growing, but revenue dropping despite good traffic, but never really experienced it. With this update, we've been growing traffic-wise but experienced some of the lowest revenue days. Today, was a good day revenue-wise. Such a strange anomaly. We've always just had AdSense on our old site, and never worried about sales/affiliate, so to us, Adsense was only reflective of the traffic pattern. We launched this new property this past December and changed our business model to affiliates, and only now began noticing such discrepancies.

[golderberger]

@HereWeGo123: i've already reported this few times already, despite "normal" traffic numbers it doesn't convert. I am also experiencing more traffic from "useless" (for my niche) countries like India, Mexico etc. Google is redirecting traffic which doesn't convert to sales

[yollo03]

Once this ends I am launching a new website to compare performance to the old site, which I believe is penalized by the algorithms (automated, not manual). If I see the new website is outperforming I will put most of my effort on the new website. There has been some recovery but it's not good enough.

[ichthyous]

Oh here we go again...another disastrous weekend coming. My traffic is down 55% to start the day. UK down 72%, USA down 52%, 0 visits from Canada. Yet I seem to have gained back all the terms I lost yesterday.

Up until March 15th I was ranking top ten for high volume terms, but now Google has me at 50-90 for those terms. Google has either decided that the term does not have commercial intent and shows how-to and top ten articles, or for searches it deems commercial it shows the same large corporate ecomm and stock image sites over and over. This has excluded small and medium sites from any chance to show for any search with real commercial intent. Add on Pinterest listings and double listing of some sites and you can kiss making any sales goodbye.

[samwest]

Something is up...still on page one yet essentially zero traffic and less sales this week than I can count on one hand. Almost everyone I know is having major problems getting bank financing. It feels like something much deeper is at play, but the only indication is this common SE disaster. Dredging new lows again today. Usually we are pulling out of the summer slump by mid June. Not happening this year.

If I knew the drop was due to everyone finally abandoning Gorg search, I'd actually be happy. Still #1 on DDG though...

[yollo03]

The more pages you have the more problems you will face. I suspect it is something to do with site structure. There is no way I can do this on the current site but I can do it on a brand new website. I have no idea what it is, could be duplicate content, not sure. I have a strong impression it is related to the way the site is structured aside domain authority.

[superclown2]

Looking at a list of my sites that have been well promoted over the last year they are all doing better in the SERPs than last year but still producing far less business. I'm sure the reason is all the googlespam, particularly 'people also ask'. I'm still suspicious of their cookie too.

Remember Google's core philosophy is to to organise the world's information, not the world's websites. They have served their purpose in providing data but are now becoming less and less relevant in Google's eyes.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Google's core philosophy is to to organise the world's information<<<<

Replace the word organise with the word monetize and ill agree with you ;)

[frankleeceo]

@Martin Ice Web

I am curious, I vaguely remember you consistently say that you get increasing traffics through the different algo changes over the past few years. With this year's hit, to which "year" did it set you back to?

[frankleeceo]

@samwest

It hasn't been about ranking position for a long time. It's about a combination of position, traffic volume, and personalized visitor intent. I am observing that they are turning up the notch about intent and very recent searches / site visits to provide highly targeted results in some cases.

Goog impression is higher than ever. But with all the PAA, youtube, spam networks, the ranking position is getting diluted further and further. By the time you are at #1, you are still competing with YouTube which siphons all of that intent in your given niche. Which I think is personally logical in your case.

[frankleeceo]

@yollo03

So what structure performs better in this update based on your impressions?

[frankleeceo]

>>>>Google's core philosophy is to to organise the world's information<<<<

>>>>>Replace the word organise with the word monetize and ill agree with you ;)<<<<

Google's core philosophy is to monetize all humans. (They probably know a baby will be conceived well before the parents are even thinking about it, then serve relevant ads :))

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing my home page vanishing sporadically from the serps. Where it normally is the most trafficked page on my site for 18 years, now it drops down to 4th, 5th, or 10th because it's gone for half the day. Despite that, traffic is higher today because the other landing pages seem to be going higher, and UK, AU, and CA traffic has recovered. I have also gained back all the terms I lost and then some.

The situation is minimally better than June, and seeing some new inquiries but no where near before all this started in mid-March. When I do a YOY comparison for the last three months in GSC I want to cry...about 1/3 of all my top 3/5/10 ranking terms bring in no traffic now. I've lost 90+% of the traffic for some of the highest volume terms I used to rank on...Google has left me very few high-volume terms at all.

[sofie77]

For about 1 hour I see completely different serps. In 20 years I haven't seen such SERP changes. For most of our checked serps, 90% are completely different websites. It's not just a position shift it's a complete swap of the Top 20 results. These results are NOT better. Google, I dont know which factor you have included or gave more weight, please reverse this. I hope this is only a test...

[japsec]

@sofie77
Which country? Im in UAE, SERP looks same as usual..