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.

[gatormark]

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.

I know many of you from the UK are being impacted adversely and I’m sorry to hear this. However, breaking up monopolies can DEFINITELY affect us adversely. Frankly, I am planning for the worst.

[saladtosser]

>>>>I reckon the challenge by Apple is inevitable. Some interesting comments on that article:<<<<

Had Steve Jobs not died we would have seen this years ago, Steve jobs wanted to bury Google from what I understand.

>>>However, breaking up monopolies can DEFINITELY affect us adversely. Frankly, I am planning for the worst.<<<

I don't see how worse it can get, what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone (excluding shar holders and the execs of said company)? Having another big player in the market can only be good for us IMO. Monopiles are good for *no one* and even if it turns out worse for us (hard to imagine because now there will be choice) i'd feel better knowing google lost half their traffic overnight and finally knows how that feels.

At the end of the day they brought competition on themselves, they once were and would have also been the best search engine if the bottom line didn't come first, I welcome competition even if it doesn't benefit me, competition always brings benefit to the majority!

[Dimitri]

what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone

In Europe, the breaking of monopoly in Energy, Trains, etc... resulted in higher prices, and lower quality of service.

[gatormark]

I don't see how worse it can get, what monopoly being broken up ever had an adverse affect on anyone (excluding shar holders and the execs of said company)?

Um, virtually every breakup of a monopoly has resulted in higher prices for the consumer. Research the history of the breakup of monopolies. Not sure how this would affect us though.

[Abaros]

In Europe, the breaking of monopoly in Energy, Trains, etc... resulted in higher prices, and lower quality of service.

No, in Europe this happened with the privatization of public services. No relation with monopolies.

Monopolies are bad, economists of all ideologies agree. The only one who benefits from a monopoly is the monopoly itself.

On the other hand I have been seeing a lot of Googlebot activity for two days now.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

The history of monopolies is very clear and well documented. It is GOOD for those who want to set up similar businesses. It is HORRIBLE for the consumer. This is not even a mute point.

A better, and more challenging question is to ask which break ups of monopolies has impacted the consumer in a positive way?

[Abaros]

Um, virtually every breakup of a monopoly has resulted in higher prices for the consumer. Research the history of the breakup of monopolies. Not sure how this would affect us though.

No, what you say simply did not happen, you should give concrete data when you say something.

In Europe when telecommunications were privatized the prices of telephone services went down. On the other hand, when energy was privatized, oligopolies were created to raise prices.

In the United States something similar happened with oil and communications.

The history of monopolies is very clear and well documented. It is GOOD for those who want to set up similar businesses. It is HORRIBLE for the consumer. This is not even a mute point.

Please cite concrete cases.

**** I think all this is off topic. The moderators are going to "scold" us.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

The breakup of Ma Bell is the most obvious answer for us in the USA.

[Abaros]

A better, and more challenging question is to ask which break ups of monopolies has impacted the consumer in a positive way?

A simile...

Imagine that Apple disappears and Android is 100% a monopoly.

Although for the price of an iPhone you can have two Android, you could no longer boast of having a phone with a bitten apple, it's not just the price, it's the freedom of choice.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

Clearly freedom of choice is good. I’m just stating the history. Don’t blame the messenger. How we perceive things and what history reveals are often two different things.

Most true monopolies are regulated. When a monopoly ends and free enterprise starts, the regulation ends and prices almost always go higher.

[superclown2]

I can't remember the last time I was able to say this but I've noticed a definite improvement in Google's results this morning with less focus on big brand and better relevance. Will it last?

[BushyTop]

@superclown2 where are you based?

[superclown2]

@BushyTop I'm in UK

[BushyTop]

@superclown2 weird... I wish I could say that I am seeing the same.

[saladtosser]

>>>>Most true monopolies are regulated. When a monopoly ends and free enterprise starts, the regulation ends and prices almost always go higher.<<<

How does that impact content creators though?

[mzb44]

Google is a near-monopoly in search because creating a search engine, contrary to popular belief, is not easy at all.

Just look at the amounts of patents and research papers Google information retrieval researchers produce. This is not a simple field of study and research!

It would be virtually impossible to create something like Google today without a few billions of investments and without attracting top scientists and information technology professionals - and an army of lawyers to wade through all the existing Google patents! It would probably take years of development and research to even come up with a draft version of a semi-functional genuinely original search engine.

Just look at all the other alternative search engines: Brave, DDG, etc etc - what do all of these have in common?

They are all an obvious ripoff of Google. Yes, really. They look, feel, operate, generate very similar results, have the same features as Google.

It's blatantly obvious all these companies are just copying whatever Google is doing.

Just look at PAA. Google introduced PAA a few years ago and now all these alternative search engines have PAA as well. :-)

All these search engines operate under the assumption that whatever Google is doing it clearly has a very good reason for and they'll immediately copy them as-they-are. This should say everything you need to know.

Even Bing is just copying whatever Google is doing.

Creating a completely new and original concept of a search engine that's not Google is extremely hard, extremely expensive and is an extremely big risk for anyone. I would not count on it happening anytime soon.

Apple could have probably done it but Google is already so entrenched now they might not want to do it anymore.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing a steady recovery of top-3 and top-10 terms, although mostly low volume terms, I have returned to the top spot for some very important terms that drive traffic and convert. I am also seeing less referral traffic from Pinterest, so perhaps Pinterest is no longer appearing in every search. I do wish Google would get rid of the multiple listings for the same site in top 10 results though...it's ridiculous to have two pages from same site back to back, unless it's from my own site of course ;-)

[Martin Ice Web]

very, very bad weekend. sales from search traffic dropped like a stone whereas sales on amazon picked up again.

@ichthyous, it is not only multiple listings but also having 5 times the same description even the same site structure because these shops just take the site structure and data from manufactures and make up a silly shop. google seems to love duplicate content over multiple sites.

[renatovieira]

(Here We Go Again) - Big drop today. It's been standard every monday :-|

[superclown2]

Apple could have probably done it but Google is already so entrenched now they might not want to do it anymore.

You may be 100% right.

However; there is very real likelihood that after the legal arguments, foot dragging, appeals etc Google will be stopped from paying other companies for making their search engine the default. This could mean a loss to Apple of a lot of money - estimated by some to be between 8 and 12 billion dollars a year. I can't see them shrugging their shoulders and accepting that.

It wouldn't surprise me if Google licensed not only their technology but also their database to other companies in the future.

In the meanwhile; I got up early this morning (5am is usually the middle of the night for me) to check the SERPs. I was trying to see if there was a reason why I was getting so many clicks overnight but then few (or none!) until early evening. For a lot of the search terms I've been tracking there was a definite increase in relevance over authority but by 10.00am things were back to normal with the big spenders once again reigning supreme even though they are, in effect, just affiliates. The real producers of the services they were top for (who they sell their leads to, thus shoving up costs for the consumer, but that is another story) were back to around page 2. What I was just as interested in though was that for some terms PPA and other junk moved from the very top, where, for these particular search terms, it has been for months, to below the second organic result. That seems to have stuck so far. Conclusion: G is still testing, as always.

I should add that all my testing was done on desktop; I've pretty well given up on mobile now. I get hardly any mobile business these days because the googlespam affects it a lot more than on desktop.

[edited by: superclown2 at 2:00 pm (utc) on Jul 26, 2021]

[MayankParmar]

Google News indexing is delayed by several hours for me. Is anyone having the same issue? It started yesterday.

[EditorialGuy]

However; there is very real likelihood that after the legal arguments, foot dragging, appeals etc Google will be stopped from paying other companies for making their search engine the default.

That might actually be a blessing in disguise for Google, because those "other companies" would no longer have the leverage to squeeze money out of Google. They'd have to suck it up and stick with Google (without getting paid) or rely on other, inferior alternatives.

Like it or not, Google represents the state of the art in search, and the name "Google" has become synonymous with "search" among users. Users don't want substitutes or knock-offs (as Microsoft has learned to its frustration over the years).

[superclown2]

Like it or not, Google represents the state of the art in search, and the name "Google" has become synonymous with "search" among users. Users don't want substitutes or knock-offs (as Microsoft has learned to its frustration over the years).

Google may well be 'state of the art' but nevertheless their search results are awful and have been for long while.

I have persuaded numerous people to change to Duck and to the best of my knowledge they are all still happily using it. Most people will accept whatever the default is and continue to 'Google' on Duck, Brave or even Quant, if they can remember how to spell it.

As for Microsoft's Bing their results have always looked a jumbled, incoherent mess and you'd need a microscope to tell which were ads and which were organic - something the regulators would probably look at if they were a significant player.

As for Google's current SERPs they are still in a state of flux here in my vertical whether the latest update is over or not. I've even started bookmarking sites that I use more than a couple of times because they never seem to be in the same position in the SERPs for more than a couple of days. Speaking as a searcher rather than a webmaster, some stability would be welcome.

[Abaros]

@EditorialGuy

Like it or not, Google represents the state of the art in search, and the name "Google" has become synonymous with "search" among users. Users don't want substitutes or knock-offs (as Microsoft has learned to its frustration over the years).

Google has directed users to its search engine, through agreements with browsers and the imposition of its search engine on all cell phone manufacturers using Android.

Identical practices to those of Microsoft with its operating system.

Users have never decided whether to use Google, Gmail and all the apps they install on Android, as if that were not enough, they also have an agreement with Apple, any phone model today takes you to Google search and its apps, without the user having participated in that decision.

Indeed now users are used to Google and it will be difficult to make them change their minds, simply because of the user's inertia to use what they already know.

@superclown2
Google may well be 'state of the art' but nevertheless their search results are awful and have been for long while.

Bing results are currently much better than Google, for common searches, in research searches Google is still better, when I search for technical information on computer science or any other sometimes I have to resort to Google, usually I use DDG which uses Bing.

[gatormark]

@Abaros

I wish Bing was even a third as popular as Google. All of my major keywords are ranked one or two in the Bing search results.

[Abaros]

I wish Bing was even a third as popular as Google. All of my major keywords are ranked one or two in the Bing search results.

Same for me.

As an example of the quality of Bing, about two months ago I migrated a domain (small, about 100 pages), Google did not show the change in the searches for a month, I lost a lot of traffic and even today the migration is still not complete. I think Google scrupulously measures each pixel of each page, I do not understand how it is possible that it takes so long for something so simple.

Bing took three days, where was A put B and end of story, no loss or gain of traffic.

[robdwoods]

Seeing a fairly serious downturn in rankings starting on Friday the 23rd. We saw nice steady gains through the June/July updates; the best traffic we had seen in a year then Friday we took about a 10-15% traffic hit with 1-3 position declines that were pretty widespread. We are in the health/medical space and the winners seem to be the big brand names like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, WebMD, NIH, Johns Hopkins and the less well know brands, including us all took hits (at least according to the not great, but best I can get data from tools like SEMrush). No idea what it is yet. There seems to be no pattern as far as Core Web Vitals or Page Experience in the winners and losers.

[saladtosser]

Anyone know why google doesn't scrap blogspot.com? (they own it as I understand) The spam that comes from that one domain is astonishing!

Edit: check out the list of July core update winners and losers here [sistrix.com...]

Copy and paste some of the winners URL's into your browsers, is this the type of sites google are rewarding now? OMG words escape me! I notice BING was one of the biggest losers lol

[BushyTop]

@saladtosser

This site on that list lolololol! <snip>

Looks fantastic. Definitely worth a 130% promotion

Honestly I want to rip my own arms off. Frustration isnt even the word.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:32 am (utc) on Jul 28, 2021]
[edit reason] For everybody's protection... no outing specific sites, even awful ones... [/edit]

[saladtosser]

@bushytop, lmao clearly I have been going down the wrong path with my own site, if that's the type of user experience, design and level of content (I don't see hardly any content just links to other sites and ads everywhere) Google is now looking for I'll never be able to compete unless I delete all my content and start with a Microsoft publisher design from the 90's.

Talk about devolution of the internet! Most of the other examples are also mind boggling and don't even check out their backlinks, pure spam and even some dofollow links from google by manipulating query strings. Frightening whats expected of us if these are the core winners! How can G justify a 130% promotion like this?

[JesterMagic]

Apparently there is a Google Search Link Spam Update rolling out now (started on July 26) so that will explain some of the changes people are seeing yesterday.

[searchengineland.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

in our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results

they dind´t lost their humor after all

[ViktorN]

Seeing changes either on Google Analytics or else by traffic. severe drop over the past few hours. very weird.
Anyone else noticing something?
news financial website

[Dooku]

It's really funny that the link in the Searchengineland articel about the new link spam algo update goes to a best practices guide from google......and what do we see there: how to use affiliate links and guest posts "correctly".

Link spam update my @ss, just another method to identify and block any possible route a visitor might take to spend money somewhere instead of inside the google environment.

[japsec]

Link spam update will make anti-seo to grow inevitably. That's not hard to predict it. Can't figure out what they try to do.

[westcoast]

I am noticing, for the first time in many months, finally some movement in the reduction of link spam.

The massive "see full list on <sitename>" cloaking spam operation has been hit by the most recent update... I have watched the spam backlinks to our site indexed drop by about half as of this morning. As an example, "see full list on buzzfeed" has seen a reduction of 75% and counting.

It hasn't filtered down through GSC yet (we still have over 500 of the top 1000 linking sites to our site being hacked, spam domains) but fingers crossed this will change.

My biggest concern has been the scraped/duplicate content that these spam sites have generated. We have had thousands of pages from out site dropped out of the index over the past year, and my theory has been that it is because the spam/cloaked/scraped sites have been hurting us duplication-wise. Hopefully if the spammers are deindexed it will reverse this issue.

[RedBar]

Does anyone here who may have multi million page views per day see yo-yoing traffic ?

My weekday traffic used to vary 85-115% of average, these days I am seeing 65-130%.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing stronger traffic flow this week, but my home page traffic keeps dropping through the floor. It seems more stable (and more conversions) than June or most of July. I am not seeing any changes from the link spam update (yet).

Google reports a 69% increase in YOY revenue from ads...YouTube was particularly strong. Now you know why so many videos on the page. - [cnbc.com...]

[topaz]

discover/news traffic flatlined yesterday..returning today but very slowly.

[saladtosser]

>>>>YouTube was particularly strong. Now you know why so many videos on the page. -<<<

Yea we could see this coming, I guess we have more YouTube additions to the SERP's to look forward to this coming quarter. Said before and will say again (i know many here don't want to) start converting your content to YouTube videos if you can.

As commercial sites were pushed into AdWords by dominate ad/spam placement, G is now pushing hard to get content creators into YouTube using the same method IMO, we have to recognise where the market is heading and start adapting to the changes sooner than later!

[mzb44]

Total Google ad revenue increased to $50.44 billion, up 69% from the year-ago quarter

W O W
O
W

I have no words...

I knew it would increase...but 69%

I was expecting like 20%-30%. But NEARLY 70%?

Meanwhile everyone else's organic traffic is either stagnating or falling. Also those who won during core updates report now significantly lower conversions.

All the high-value traffic is going to adwords and youtube now guys. I am telling you. All these PAA etc. are now strategically applied and inserted to divert high-value traffic over to ads and youtube.

It's extremely obvious now. I mean, come on.

[yollo03]

My personal semrush score is 9.3 today. I am assuming this is the links spam update. Cant tell where this is going yet...

[rustybrick]

yollo03, did you have a lot of link spam pointing to your site?

[yollo03]

No idea, I hope this update will boost my rankings

[saladtosser]

@mzb44 so that's where all that free furlough money went, to Google ads and new houses hence the housing boom!

[not2easy]

It wasn't quite a 69% Y-o-Y increase: [webmasterworld.com...]
62% was a notable increase though.

[mzb44]

It wasn't quite a 69% Y-o-Y increase: [webmasterworld.com...]
62% was a notable increase though.

I think the 62% was the overall revenue increase while the 69% refers to revenue from ads.

Absolutely insane either way.

[Manana]

Our conversions keep dropping like rocks on a free fall because search engines keep gobbling up all the converting queries to keep increasing their profits:

[seroundtable.com...]

[christianz]

Its like they are sucking out all growth and vitality from the Internet.

Revenue growth 65% YoY while number of active websites (real not auto generated spam) across the free Internet probably is DOWN.

[gatormark]

Total Google ad revenue increased to $50.44 billion, up 69% from the year-ago quarter

We have to remember that a year ago we were in the middle of the COVID downturn. By way of example, my revenue is up 190% from the year ago quarter. Last year was horrendous.