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.

[BushyTop]

I know its been said 100000 times already, but this might be the worst update I've ever experienced. Cant get my head around it. In our verticals, the SERPs all look the same. The bigger the brand, the more likely you are to rank, regardless of code compliance, regardless of whether you build spam, regardless of content. No vertical is granular. there are no specialists in any industry of a specific product. Now, if you google anything related to that industry, the same SERPs appear.

[saladtosser]

BushyTop agree seeing more of this since July 1st, even non mobile version/non HTTPs sites that have been what look like abandoned by the owners (because comment sections are spammed by link builders daily) ranking above everyone who have covered every base. Another update def hit the last 24 hours as this has been dialled up more and i'm seeing out of town national service providers with local landing pages ranking above dedicated local business with the landing page. Basically I feel they have just turned up the dial on sites backlinks more than normal.

I THINK SSL, CWV, Mobile friendly and even on page content have **all** been demoted to "tie breaking" signals at the point....

[Martin Ice Web]

@Bushytop, it seems this update rewards all sites with most slightest content and the most slightest knowledge.
And google seems to get stupid. E.g. it does not undersstand between 1m and 1mm².

[RedBar]

Oh heck, DDG is now doing a G for me with ads. Just checked G UK for my #1 keyword and what did I get?

Scrolling image marquee of ads
To its right instead of PAA I have Related Searches
Then a large block ad for one site with 5 dedicated links
Then a regular Amazon ad
Then a block of 10 images

After a full screen and a half of scrolling on a 27" HD monitor the first real result.

Bearing in mind I had UK selected, please tell me why the second result is a USA company that does not supply the UK, in fact the furthest it goes is Canada. Actually the results were pretty porr overall.

DDG need not wonder why its search traffic is down:

[duckduckgo.com...]

Off to see what Brave's up to!

[RedBar]

That was interesting, I went to Brave and entered my #1 keyword phrase:

1. Diabolical results, not one UK company listed.

2. Prefixed it the search with UK and ... 90+% excellent and not a replica of G.

You need a UK button Brave!

[mzb44]

Brave search is an obvious 1:1 Google clone though?

They might even be scraping Google search results as-is?

[saladtosser]

Seeing more and more "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" results recently, that I used to be able to find information for. Almost as if large swaths of the internet have gone away and given up?

[superclown2]

Seeing more and more "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" results recently, that I used to be able to find information for. Almost as if large swaths of the internet have gone away and given up?

No. It's simply that large swathes of the Internet won't return a profit for Google.

This is what happens when a service that should be a utility falls into the hands of an unregulated business.

The bigger the brand, the more likely you are to rank, regardless of code compliance, regardless of whether you build spam, regardless of content. No vertical is granular. there are no specialists in any industry of a specific product. Now, if you google anything related to that industry, the same SERPs appear.

See above. Nothing will change until government action forces it, or the public finally wake up to what a mess Google is.

[not2easy]

Almost as if large swaths of the internet have gone away and given up?

well, maybe...
Seems to be some wide DNS issues [webmasterworld.com...]

[Edge]

This update is interesting, I going to assume G has acted in the best interest of search end users.

Therefore, the last 8 years have been a dismal failure in my vertical's search results from G..

Stay & think positive

[Samsam1978]

I know its been said 100000 times already, but this might be the worst update I've ever experienced. Cant get my head around it. In our verticals, the SERPs all look the same. The bigger the brand, the more likely you are to rank, regardless of code compliance, regardless of whether you build spam, regardless of content. No vertical is granular. there are no specialists in any industry of a specific product. Now, if you google anything related to that industry, the same SERPs appear.

THIS IS THE WORSE UPDATE IN THE HISTORY OF DOING THIS JOB - A PREMIUM PUBLISHER. I HAVE HAD INVITES TO VISIT GOOGLE IN THE PAST AS A PREMIUM PUBLISHER. MY SITE IS LOVED BY MILLIONS. I HAVE BEEN RUNNING WEBSITES SINCE 1999. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MUCH SPAM AND AWFUL RESULTS IN THE SEARCH ENGINE IN ALL MY LIFE (PERSONAL SEARCHES AND FOR MY KEYWORDS). CLOAKED SITES APPEAR IN TOP 10 RESULTS. THERE IS NO LOGIC TO THE RESULTS. A PARAGRAPH OUTRANKS A 8,000 WORD ON LOVE BECAUSE THEY ARE A DENTIST WHO WROTE ABOUT KISSING WITH TEETH, AS AN EXAMPLE. CRAZY RESULTS. CRAZY TIMES. MAKES YOU WANT TO GIVE UP YOUR WELL-LOVED WEBSITES AS THERE IS NO LOGIC. NO LOGIC. ROLLBACK.

[yollo03]

I didnt write for a while as I am working on launching a new website. Just work on your website's reputation, work on increasing its brand awareness. Focusing solely on content is just not enough anymore. With core updates there are winners and losers. With the recent core update I am among the winners.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Just work on your website's reputation, work on increasing its brand awareness<<<<

yollo03 I launched a new website just over a year ago, worked on 1/2 daily articles per day and traffic was going up slowly week on week. Since July 1st its been going down week on week (while i still work on daily content), traffic didn't simple fall off a cliff its just down week on week and about under half the traffic I had pre July first (and still dropping day by day).

I worked on brand awareness building up over 1k YouTube subscriber's and 26k Facebook followers during this time (triple of any of my competitors), some of pages have 1000's of Facebook likes and shares (most have at least 200+) and these pages have been hit the hardest. Any other ways to work on brand awareness you would recommend or are we just talking outreach to hope other websites will link to my site?

[yollo03]

Guest posting on authority websites with backlinks to your site is one way. You also have to pay attention to your website structure. If you are not on ahrefs, signup for a trial, I think it's $7 for a short time. Run an audit on mobile and desktop, it will highlight all the issues you have. Get them fixed (it will take time). Don't expect immediate recovery.

[Samsam1978]

Ok, I will try to focus on guest posting anyone have any tips please PM me x thank you so much

[saladtosser]

yollo03 I just did this on ahrefs per your suggestion but it gives my site a health score of 99% so I'm guessing that's not the problem. In regard to guest blogging for backlinks I was under the impression this was black hat as its an exchange for a link (supplying content for a link)?

Edit: Corrected the 4 alt tags I was missing and have 100% health on ahrefs

[edited by: saladtosser at 11:46 am (utc) on Jul 23, 2021]

[BushyTop]

More drops this morning for me.

[mzb44]

In regard to guest blogging for backlinks I was under the impression this was black hat as its an exchange for a link (supplying content for a link)?

It is.

But so is kinda every form of link building you do yourself. Technically only links that you get 100% organically without any influence of your own (apart from content creation) are within Google's guidelines.

Now that doesn't mean blackhat/grey hat links won't work.

Also doesn't mean you will get caught every time. In fact, most of the time you will never get caught if you are careful. Everyone is doing black hat link building, including straight up buying links or link exchanges, even most of the big mainstream authority sites Google so loves.

Regarding guest posts, you will be fine if you do it strategically on legitimate and high authority sites only. If you guest post on every single site that accepts such posts from anyone you will have a bad time.

[lee_sufc]

I thought the SERPs in June were bad...for me, things have gone from bad to nightmareish.

Semi-related question for UK-based users here:

Taking into account "Freedom Day", the nice weather we've had, and start of Summer Holidays for kids, have things been unusually quiet for you this week?

Even taking into account the changes on Google, my business is dead this week. Worse than the two weeks over Christmas (which is usually the worst time of year for my site).

[RedBar]

More drops this morning for me.

Traffic or rankings?

Insifoe as rankings are concerned, I seem to be pretty good in G.com, in G.co.uk my global site is so-so and certainly not as good as my US rankings but the sheer weight of G ads, images, PAA et al pushes ALL natural SERPs #1 results below the fold, on mobile it simply disappears therefore ranking well seems to mean so little these days ... only the keen researcher / buyer / etc will go past the Gadmass.

For my industry the good news appears to be that several countries are re-establishing their trade fairs however just who is going to be "allowed" to attend them?

Nationals only , international, vaxxed / non-vaxxed? Such fairs can be big investments, to have extremely low visitor nubers could be disastrous.

[RedBar]

have things been unusually quiet for you this week?

UK hotel / bar / live music, business flat out, website very busy.

My sister's retail widget biz has picked-up this week so too has her website.

My widget trade traditionally goes much quieter until the first week of September, looks no different so far.

Friends' businesses ... Most are reporting an uptick in trade both wholesale and retail ... I am not in a huge population area, in fact one of the very lowest in the UK, but most are pleasantly surprised and those who have 100% pure-play websites all are reporting solid trading.

[ichthyous]

Today my home page traffic starts down 70% at 10am. Google definitely has a beef with my sites home page now, it won't allow the page to ranks for any of the terms it's was ranking well on for a decade.

My ranking recovered slightly for a week or so and then right back down. Major drops are usually followed by the term returning to its previous spot the next day. Google is selecting certain sites to rank for everything now, even if they aren't relevant to the search. All they have to do is have a page about the topic. I have seen my sites landing pages get demolished in turn, landing pages that did fine in the June turmoil suddenly dropped recently while others that vanished in June recovered somewhat. I am seeing the pages with the most inbound links getting hurt the most actually. My home page has vanished for a most high volume terms, then the next pages with the most ibl, and the ones that haven't changed are the ones with the least amount of ibls.

[gatormark]

I am curious. Are most of the websites that have been hit by Google’s recent updates UK-focused websites? If you have been hit negatively by the recent updates can you please indicate your country of focus. Have any USA focused websites been impacted?

[BushyTop]

@RedBar Rankings. A term we ranked top 2 for for over 4 years, we've now dropped to 4, to 6, to now 9.

This is related to what have been talking about the previous few posts. This is a product we specialise in. We're a relatively small company that has now been surpassed by the largest companies in the industry.

[BushyTop]

@gatormark yep, UK market

[lee_sufc]

UK market here, too. Some of the results for a few keywords now bring up low-quality sites from the US. I really hope this is a mistake somewhere that gets rolled back!

[saladtosser]

UK traffic is abysmal! Google seems to be hitting technically perfect sites that's have ranked well for years for ones with *tons* of issues to put it mildly. Maybe G is thinking these great site owners must the money required for ads or have figured they have spent to many years at the top so a sudden drop will force them into ads? I find it hard to believe Google has thought these sites were amazing for years then just said, nope we got it wrong all these years/updates and pulled the plug on them on a single month/update.

[gatormark]

I have a new website coming out soon. I’ve been working on this for over two months and I
have about one month worth of coding and DB development to go. It’s in a completely different niche (100% US American) than I have developed for previously, but I have examined the competitors and this site will be better from the start. It will be interesting to see what Google thinks of it. It has been many, many years since I have produced a website of this magnitude. I am more anxious to see if a new website from a “small guy” can break into the rankings.

[mirrornl]

At the start of this July core update i saw may spam and hacked wp sites ranking high, i thought it might be to have them float high, so they could be weeded out easlly later, but they are still there.
Did is say already there are many many hacked spam site ranking very high, outranking lots of very good normal sites, many... in my vertical at least
Bah

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Since the start of July update my website was destroyed by -40% and keeps falling every day. My average time spent on website tanked from 0:44 to 0:33. I found that my just updated content was outranked by the article of 2015.... I just can't get what's the sense of this update...

[edited by: Cyril_TechWebsites at 7:21 am (utc) on Jul 24, 2021]

[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.