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.

[mzb44]

Also, to give credit where credit is due, I believe one of the best core update related write-ups was actually done by @martinibuster.

You can read it here: [searchenginejournal.com...]

It contains and even cites many of the grievances voiced here in this thread.

I really liked this piece.

[superclown2]

What does google actually do with its profits (after expenses/tax) as they don't pay this to shareholders (as far as I know). Does it just sit in a bank account someplace gaining interest?

Some of it goes on paying fines for their various abusive practices. The French hit them for half a billion euros a couple of days ago, for using other people's news without paying for it. G have two months to mend their ways or face a daily fine of 900 million.

Now about the data they are scraping from our sites and using for their own profit .............

In the meanwhile the PAA seesaw continues. Yesterday it actually dropped below the third organic result and I had the best day for weeks. Back to normal today under the 1st organic which is always a certain price comparison site for just about any query imaginable, and traffic has been cut by around half. QED.

[samwest]

@superclown - those odd ON days are likely just a reboot of the AI, few and far between. In my vertical, the SERPs juggle daily, our position moves slightly , but the ASF, AA and spam Search for blocks just keep changing and every time they do, traffic and conversions disappear for a few days, rinse and repeat. GB is right, they just want us gone and want to grab it all for themselves. I just about ready to pull the plug after 21 years. 1 visit every 15 minutes can not support any business model.

[shadowlight]

As I said on the previous page, Google Ads for ages had a feature that allows you to automatically bid higher in case of traffic that it deems to have a higher chance of converting.

And here I mean on a traffic level and not keyword-specific level.

i.e. you bid for the keyword "buy backpacks online" and set a max bid of $1 per click. There is a feature that if selected allows Google to bid higher than $1 in case it believes an individual user has a higher chance of converting.

Why am I saying this? - It proves Google always knew (at least to some degree) the potential conversion probability rate of an individual searcher.

Therefore, what if now when they detect such high-value traffic they make sure to display the maximum number of ads possible, all with the maximum possible ad extensions, followed by 'people also asked', 'featured snippet', news articles, image reel etc. but do all these less in case they detect a lower 'buy' probability searcher?

So now the adwords users get a higher percentage of quality traffic while 'non-performing' traffic gets directed to organic.

My point is that the features to make exactly this happen have kinda existed before. It doesn't take making up wild conspiracies to imagine the above.

[searchengineland.com...]

[frankleeceo]

I have had the chance to really getting into the paid media part of the search business this year. It opened up my eyes to search from a completely different perspective.

It's not a conspiracy. It's really just business. Good for google business.

Sooner or later (or I would reckon, it's "now"), the best traffic that is prone to convert, will become purely paid to play. The organic part of the traffic, will still be available, but it will carry much less "value". Cold traffic and for users way up higher in the funnel.

And I don't think Google is subtle about it neither. Read between the lines and follow the development of things.

[yollo03]

The most irritant part is controlled traffic. Traffic is flowing until a certain point and then reduced or brought down to zero. This act is an artificial intervention in the AI's magic numbers. I can't tell the scale of this, I will only assume that past a certain domain rating the controlled traffic is removed. it's like shared hosting vs dedicated server in terms of domain rating.

[samwest]

As a goof, I activated Google Adwords "auto ads" on my page, holy $#it! what a mess! It even managed to slip an ad into my slider! What a bunch of garbage. I thought they didn't like spammy sites, but they seem to LOVE spammy ads. What a poor user experience.

[samwest]

Wow, after seeing the latest mess that is Google SERPs, it's DDG from now on. I am done with Google.

[golderberger]

The most irritant part is controlled traffic. Traffic is flowing until a certain point and then reduced or brought down to zero.

I couldn't agree more.

[superclown2]

Just when I thought G couldn't get any worse:

The core update may be over but there is another shakeup in the UK today with 'authority' sites given yet another boost. I just checked one out to see how it got there; the main word in the search term appears once only, near the bottom, in a form that has no relevance whatsoever for the full search term and yet the site sits at the top of the SERPs! Is it really a coincidence that this particular site spends a fortune on advertising?

I have to agree with Samwest. Google is a lost cause until the legislators finally bring it under control; or their visitors get sick of seeing the same sites over and over again for every possible search term.

[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 didnīt 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 doesnīt realize that this is a summary page with lot of items.
We figured out how to change the behaviour but didnīt 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 donīt 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.