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.

[Markedd]

I checked out one of those sites that posts spun content and there was one that was relatively high 'quality'- good images, proper structure, the English was readable. What stood out was that 'the guy' posted 150 articles in a single day... If he's using any automation software, it really has become better at this than a few years back. Also Google loves this website, it must have up to 10k visitors a day and rising. The thing is, I bought a new domain, installed a lightweight theme and I'm just standing and watching the screen. I should give into the temptation.

[yollo03]

It looks like another update is rolling out, probably be felt tomorrow or Wednesday.

[marcus528]

@yollo03 I am not seeing much movements, how do you know another update is rolling out?

[yollo03]

@Marcus, semrush updates the algorithms' volatility at the morning of the country's local time. That's why UK for example updates before US. Australia was updated not long ago, it's showing a spike in the volatility. That means another update is being rolled out. I am not suggesting it will be as large as the core but it will probably affect many websites.

[marcus528]

@yollo yes your right. I always check US, didn’t realize I could be checking other countries as well.

[mzb44]

They are probably tweaking the update, as expected. And as it used to be the case with every other core update launch.

[yollo03]

Could be but maybe they broke the update into several parts. Usually they wait several days to a week before tweaking. This time the 'tweak' was rolled out too quickly. Either something went horribly wrong (yes, my rankings are up) or this is the second part of the core update, could be a small part too.

[mzb44]

Could be but maybe they broke the update into several parts. Usually they wait several days to a week before tweaking. This time the 'tweak' was rolled out too quickly. Either something went horribly wrong (yes, my rankings are up) or this is the second part of the core update, could be a small part too.

I know, right? My rankings are also up and all I can feel is suspicion and skepticism.

Google has already conditioned us not to trust any recovery or rankings boost.

[BushyTop]

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. Onsite seems a complete waste of time. As long as you have root authority based on loads of links, you can do what you want. No vertical is granular anymore. In my industry the same supplier rank for every product, where previously there were specialists. I'm sick of moaning about it, but its difficult not to when its crushing my livelihood and mood, having frantically made adjustments to cater and score highly on CWV

[superclown2]

I do a lot of online research. What I need is information, not adverts. Since December Google has become very frustrating for this with all the top organic spots filled even more with the same old high ad spenders, regardless of expertise, but after this last update I've pretty well given up. Now I use DDG first, Google second and I've even ventured to Brave a few times, and although I've been generally disappointed with it, it is early days for them yet.

It's interesting to see a lot of big advertisers spending on DDG ads now. They know where the future lies and it's not with a once wonderful search engine turned advertising agency.

[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