Google Core Update July 1, 2021

[sk7411]

---

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)

---

July Core Update has started rolling out :

[twitter.com...]


Good Luck everyone.

[RedBar]

@samwest

Not tried Barve yet?

[search.brave.com...]

I'm looking at my logs etc and traffic seems much more settled and akin to earlier in the year with many multiple PVs ove 30-60 minutes rather than 1 PV bots and gone.

Many rankings looking good even in G USA except for the presumed big money widget ketwords ... To be honest even though those keyword widgets are still in very high demand I'm also pretty sure that people do not search for them anywhere near as much as they used to ... I do have two guides I wote one 15 years ago and the other 20 years ago and they have been read and circulated a huge amount, maybe my advice and information has gotten through to both the industry and public?

Generally mid-July to end-August is widget trade holiday time, this year some are closing, many are not, I honestly don't know whether I'll see the expected drop in traffic, steady or an increase!

[yollo03]

@superclown, I see it too. High authority sites that have nothing to do with my niche posted an article 2 weeks ago. Today they are at the number 1 spot for multiple keywords. When the core update 'ended' they weren't at the top spot.

I just checked again and they got pushed down to number 3.

I also discovered something I have never seen before. About half way down the first page of search results I see 2 queries (like PPA but it does not say PAA on top). When I click on the question, it opens a short answer WITH NO URL o the site that wrote it. Did anyone see this before?

Edit: I checked the site above and below the questions to see if the answers were scraped from there. The short answers are not from either site.

[RedBar]

What I have noticed in my widget sector is one specific company site that has always ranked top 20 for many queries now has many top 1-5 rankings with no change to any pages.

It's a good company, nice site but only one image plus magnifier per page plus haf-a-dozen lines of product text ... and that's it ... absolutely nothing wrong with it except for what I would have thought is a shortage of product information. I was building pages like this 2000-2005 then upgraded them since I considered them "too thin".

Anyon else seeing similar?

[samwest]

Did they just bring back the right sidebar ads? Never seen so many different variations on the fly. Looks like they are A/B/C/D/E/F/G....testing. Gorg is just one confused mess.

[trabis]

My perfect 1st spot widget about knifes was demoted to third place. 1st place for "did you mean widget about wives" and 2nd for an image slider of widgets about knifes.
This are fake examples. I scratch my head.
I'll be bald soon.

[edited]
Thinking about it.
It's physically Impossible to mistype the query because letters are on oposite sides of keyboard. However, the spoken version may be similar enough for the AI to hesitate. The case can be made that google is using voice input database to give sugestions even when the user is using text mode.

[samwest]

At this point I am unsure if we are experiencing an update or a coordinated censorship. One thing is sure, this so called "update" is a disaster for already struggling small businesses.

[ichthyous]

Part of what is really damaging smaller sites / businesses is the complete loss of high volume keywords since March of this year. I have lost a full third of my terms and almost all of my high volume terms since mid March. Until that turns around there will be no way to recover for any of us.

Traffic for me is generally better and more stable than June, and there are some conversions now at least, buts it's not back to any kind of level where my business could prosper, as it was in Q1 2021. I am still seeing my home page vanish for half a day or a full day in and off, and also traffic from specific countries gets turned on and off for the day... Typically UK, Australia and Canada. Plenty of new traffic from Madagascar, Mongolia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India... Etc etc etc

[samwest]

Anyone else noticing the entire web slowing down? I'm beginning to suspect this is a much wider issue than just an "update". I never get abandoned carts, but half a dozen in a row now. Not a single conversion in 10 days now.

[RedBar]

For me real traffic has got better all week however now it's Saturday, presumably not so many trade visitors, I've returned to 90+% single PVs from most countries.

We'll see what tomorrow and Monday brings however the contrast is remarkable.

[golderberger]

semrush sensor spiked again ...

[topaz]

Discover traffic returned on July 8 for me. And still going strong, picking up new articles like it's supposed to.
My own personal feed seems more relevant now with content I care about from other sites.

[RedBar]

Global trade site having its new average Sunday however UK hotel pub site is outperforming everything ... Food and booze sales incredible! The band's good too :-)

[ichthyous]

Funny, my UK traffic down 25% yesterday and -51% today. Search is down 25%. I think everyone is traveling and out, shopping is not on the agenda so much. They figure they better do it now before the Delta variant, or whatever other variant swamps us all again.

[Martin Ice Web]

@superclown2, i can confirm our observation for germany. Big hit again with -50% after we have been mostly back.

We still have gained positions back but traffic is down and sales too.

We found something that we didn´t realized till today. All our meta descriptions are not displayed. So we put much energy into writing good meta desciptions, yet they are not displayed. This is bad in the case as the site contains more different items. So we describe the sites information in the meta. google instead displayes one picked item out of the page. the user doesn´t realize that this is a summary page with lot of items.
We figured out how to change the behaviour but didn´t figure out why google does this.

Next problem: we group similar items that only differ in colour or lenght. So one item is the "master" and the other items are displayed as subitems. All subitems have a canonical link to the master item. Yet google does not show this subitems in serps. Other sites list all versions and do no canoncial link.
We thought this would lead to duplicate content but it seems to do this is ok with google right now.

With this last core update we got some more information displayed in serps like lead time, shipping cost and item no.

[golderberger]

@Martin_Ice_Web: do you experience increased useless traffic from odd places like India, Africa?

[Martin Ice Web]

@golderberger, no we don´t see that right now. But mobil traffic is flat.

[renatovieira]

Big drop today. Did anyone notice anything this morning?

[golderberger]

@renatovieira: yeah, almost no sales

[saladtosser]

Traffic is horrendous since July when PAA (people also ask), PASF (people also search for) RYS (refine your search) widgets were plastered directly under a increasingly expanded Featured Snippet, YouTube videos, and Image widgets everywhere for my niche, the widgets mentioned above also now expand to **huge** featured snippets in many cases so there isn't much need to leave google). Positions haven't changed but its like everyone's left the building lol

[samwest]

Traffic down, sales down across the board. How does all this happen in lockstep? Sure, you can say there are no conspiracies, but there are also no coincidences...at least not at THIS scale.

[ichthyous]

UK, AU, CA traffic was down by 35-50% yesterday. Today UK is still down and USA starts the day lower. That is on a day when I have gained back all my lost terms from last week. Not a single new customer inquiry all weekend.

Call it Schadenfreude, but I'm gratified to see that the one competitor who has just zoomed upward relentlessly since march has dropped back considerably in July. Unfortunately he (and I) are still being replaced by the same group of mega corporate sites over and over...

[RedBar]

Seemingly quiet so far today, how much traffic is down due to pseudo-freedom day I haven't a clue!

[superclown2]

Seemingly quiet so far today, how much traffic is down due to pseudo-freedom day I haven't a clue!

It looks like today will be the quietest day I have had for years.

I've no doubt it's the end (so far) of Covid restrictions and the weather. Who wants to sit in front of a computer when the sun is shining (except us of course).

[NickMNS]

Who wants to sit in front of a computer when the sun is shining (except us of course).

If I take my eldest son, barely a teen, as an example, he has been sitting outside with a friend, glued to their phones. Sun and screens are not mutually exclusive.

[Hollywood]

I have seen a little bit better results on conversions lately, but I think it's due to a revamp of everything on my site for months. I did not take the last major google update hocus-pocus into consideration (100%) a whole lot, but I am working a bit harder. What has me confused is the Ahrefs site (showing) killing my backlinks and referring sites totals. Lately it is coming back, but my site gets very busy and then gets dead every 2-3 months... my site has been up almost 23 years targeting the same keywords, we were first to target many of them, and it's a super niche. I don't understand why the graph at the bottom of the Ahrefs site shows what it does, very odd. Anyone else see large swings in the total-positions moving from Blue/Orange back to White, 2 months later Back to Blue/Orange.. in essence, from busy (many conversions) to dead (few conversions), to busy again?

See attached photo
[ibb.co ]

[gatormark]

Was there a core update within the past few days? I’ve noticed a nice jump in my rankings, but I hadn’t checked in a while.

[BushyTop]

We've seen another drop for some terms this morning. I had removed our AMP pages that tested good IN CWV, now put them back in. Seeing a huge disparity in mobile versus DT searches. For us Mobile SERPs are much better? Despite DT testing out better in PEx... Anyone else experiencing this? The mess conitnues. Absolutely no logical pattern whatsoever.

[RedBar]

What a strange Monday's traffic.

Global site slow all day and ended up at 82.7% however today's started much better.

UK sites were very, very slow to start off with yet ended up between 160-190%, again very little slow traffic this morning..

[Martin Ice Web]

What ever they did on weekend we are now outranked by big companies again.
And yes they have very compelling website. They put german and english on one page. They don´t even make the effort to translate the description to german.
Others just have copied the complete description from the manufacturer. Nothing else.
Some are Food resellers with a market place. Yes, they are big and known but reputation for our niche? ZERO.

[RedBar]

@MIW

but reputation for our niche? ZERO.

However this is happening in every industry sector ... Get yourself an MBA and immediately you know more and better than anyone who has been hands-on for the past 30-50 years.

Actually, don't get me started on this, I have to deal with these Richard Craniums every day and I'm getting to the point of total exasperation with them.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar, and this is jsut not what google says it wants to have. IMO do the opposite from google tales and you are on the winners site.

[Manana]

For the last 3 years or so, I had gotten used to Google capping the organic traffic it sends to my website. This cap only changed from core update to core update and Google organic traffic used to remain more or less the same while other sources of traffic (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and direct) would continue to grow, though at a snail pace.

After the last core update, I noticed that Google now started capping my traffic globally, meaning if I get more traffic from other sources, Google would reduce the organic traffic it sends my website's way, capping the total traffic narrowly below a round number. Call me dumb that I was still using Google Analytics until 3 days ago but this was the last straw that broke the camel's back so I removed the Google Analytics script from my website and installed Matomo analytics which I have been using for the last 3 days.

I see more DuckDuckGo traffic over Matomo compared to what I used to see over Google Analytics. In fact, if Matomo is correct, DuckDuckGo organic traffic to my website is about one-third of the Google organic traffic which goes to show how stingy is Google with the organic traffic that it sends my way considering that DuckDuckGo commands way less than one-third of Google's market share.

I would be less concerned if the paltry traffic Google sends my way was in any way profitable. Google figured out a way to gobble up any converting keywords away from my site after June 2019 core update. That update had cut my conversion rates in half and from that update on, they get better with every passing day at gobbling away conversion generating keywords, leaving my site with visitors with no intention of buying anything. If I accidentally have a few days of converting traffic, Google interferes and takes away that traffic until I go back to abysmal conversion rates. I also think Google is showing different results to people according to their socioeconomic status, but I digress.

By the way, Matomo seems to be eating up too much disk space. Does any of you know how to deal with this issue? Other than that I am content with Matomo so far. I hope I am able to break away from Google's cap over my traffic provided that removing Google Analytics code from my website suffices to stop Google from tracking my other sources of traffic.

[golderberger]

@Manana: while I perfectly understand your concerns I don't think google needs analytics to estimate your traffic

[RedBar]

I also think Google is showing different results to people according to their socioeconomic status,

Without a doubt, I see this all the time when checking from my various factories.

Remember, G has a fairly "closed" market in several countries like the US/UK/CA/etc, they can manipulate a lot of that buying traffic, some non-English languages they can struggle with and for many countries they haven't a clue how to manipulate them.

For my industry wholesale trade buyers requirements vary from country to country and for example, promoted and over-priced products sold through Google ads in some countries are utterly pointless.

G is a great source of amusement in many, many countries.

[shadowlight]

I have also removed G analytics and i suggest everyone else does the same.

They may still be able to track how much traffic you get via their SERPS and possibly bounce if users just click back but thats it, unless users use chrome, in any case why feed the beast that will eventually devour you?

[Dimitri]

but thats it

Excepting if you use Adsense, embed Youtube videos, etc...

[shadowlight]

Excepting if you use Adsense, embed Youtube videos, etc...

Maybe……i dont, but if i did i doubt that using adsense or embedding youtube videos would provide them no where near the amount of data and insight that analytics does.

[Dimitri]

no where near the amount of data and insight that analytics does.

Why? In all these case, you insert a piece of javascript code, which calls home.

[Manana]

@shadowlight, what benefits did you see from removing G analytics? Is removing analytics tracking code from your website enough to remove G analytics from your website?

[mzb44]

Boom.

JM on PAA and core updates: "I don’t think it is per industry, but what usually happens with these kind of elements in the search results is that we try to figure out what is the most appropriate thing to show there. And with a core update that does change somethings within our core algorithms and it can result in a different mix of elements that we show in the search results."

[seroundtable.com...]

My main impression of the last core update was that they changed how PAA is now being displayed, in the sense that now PAA show up more frequently for traffic / for searchers with high conversion probability.

The last core update increased my traffic with 50% but decreased conversions by 40%. I essentially get junk traffic now.

Could be when G detects a high-value searcher they push all the search features imaginable on that person to get them to stay in the above the fold area where the ads are.

[NickMNS]

I see more DuckDuckGo traffic over Matomo compared to what I used to see over Google Analytics.

Duckduckgo is positioned as the "privacy search engine", those using it are likely using script/ad blockers. Many of these blockers block Analytics code and do not block Matomo.

Ultimately any such tool is a convenience, if you want to know exactly how many users humans and bots visited your website there is only one single source of truth and that is your server logs. Moreover, your server logs should show that traffic is likely more than double of what GA reports, but most of that traffic is bots.

[shadowlight]

@Manana well the first and obvious benefit was much better core vitals and faster page load speeds. And yes removing G analytics is enough to remove G analytics, i dont use adsense or embed youtube videos or anything else G.

Unless users use chrome i cannot see any way that they can now track what users do while on my site.

As for other benefits its early days as i only done it after the July update.

[Manana]

Thank you @shadowlight for the answer.

@RedBar, thanks for the insight. I was certain that they did that but I had no proof. It only makes sense though.

@NickMNS, thanks for the explanation.

[HereWeGo123]

Beginning late last evening (USA), I noticed significant shake-ups in the SERPs after everything being calm for a few days. Definitely another update is underway, but that's been the new norm with Google for a while obviously. They won't confirm anything.

[ichthyous]

Traffic was better last week but I am seeing June patterns reassert themselves. The same landing pages are being hit and USA traffic is trending down again. More items on the page like the ridiculous Twitter carousel that takes up half the page. Serp ranking is up and down but clicks are trending down with impressions steady. Google organic is basically a very sporadic, unreliable, low quality source of traffic since ~2020 onward.

[golderberger]

Terrible non converting traffic from google for the last 10 hours. Seems to be corresponding to semrush serp sensor spikes

So what now, they are updating their algorithms every day now?

[RedBar]

Tuesday's traffic almostr like "old" normal, plenty of visitors with numerous multiple PVs from many countries. Today I am 11 hours into my Googleday, PVs are at about 15% and nearly all single PVs at that.

What on earth do these bozos do?

Is it any wonder Joe Public asks their FB friends for advice and opinions?

[golderberger]

[twitter.com...]

[Samsam1978]

I have never seen so much cloaking/spam as a normal user in my searches in all my life.

This whole update is awful, I'm a legit well-loved website and lost half my rankings. I thought they would roll back and not allow users to keep hitting cloaking pages. What an absolute joke.

[golderberger]

Have you guys check your webserver logs? Is it normal I have googlebot literally every 5 minutes on my website (mostly same pages)?