Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2021

[goodroi]

As usual, it's both entertaining and frustrating when monitoring Google's SERPs, and the performance of our sites. Google's core algorithm updates have proved interesting, to say the least.

First we had Google Core Update May 23 - June 3, 2021 [webmasterworld.com] referenced in Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Before long, in July, we see a Google Core Update July 1, 2021 [webmasterworld.com] which created much more frustration and angst, with some successes, which we referenced in theGoogle Updates and SERP Changes - July 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Without much delay we heard of a Google and Link Spam: Qualify Links for Affiliate Links or Sponsored Guest Posts Update [webmasterworld.com].

And during July we had an interesting question How long for Google to Index a New Website [webmasterworld.com]
Did you see the news that we might get a sneak look at Google's ranking algorithm. Google "About This Result" in SERPs Indicates Ranking Info [webmasterworld.com]
Most of us know about the Google search operators, and here's an overview of SEO search operators [webmasterworld.com]
Plus lots of other Google search and SEO topics [webmasterworld.com].

What are your observations on the algorithm updates/changes to the SERPs?

[renatovieira]

As usual, it's become a pattern every monday morning, huge drop again today.

[ichthyous]

And another crap traffic day from Google. Traffic started low and is going even lower...more big drops in home page traffic and landing pages today. Placement for top 3 terms is actually higher today, but Google has chosen to show only the same major stock photo sites, mega e-tailers, and media site articles over and over and over for the high volume searches now...I'll never have decent traffic again unless they reverse this ridiculous trend. Who wants to see the same ten sites repeated over and over for every search

[edited by: not2easy at 3:38 pm (utc) on Aug 2, 2021]
[edit reason] cleanup / post import [/edit]

[RedBar]

As usual it's a continuation of the manipulated farce.

Our local sites continue to do ok however globally G (and cohorts) manages to supress non-USA sites extremely well in its SERPs ... It's all pretty pointless since importers and exporters have not been taking any notice for ages.

Once again this morning I had good traffic until about 13.00 UK / 08.00 New York and then it was switched off. It's so blatant now that G doesn't even try to hide it by varying the time.

[EditorialGuy]

Pretty much business as usual. Overall traffic was down a bit over the weekend, and Search Console showed a very slight drop in average rankings, but Google traffic was up a few percentage points.

[saladtosser]

Website traffic is going down day by day week by week. My YouTube traffic is going up day by day week by week, I suspect the seesaw of traffic away from website content and onto video content is based on googles increasing YouTube promotion of the SERPS. Cant complain I guess except I prefer to create website content rather than youtube content. I may stop adding new content to my website and concentrate on YouTube only if this continues.

[OldFaces]

Traffic began to get 'light' on 7/23 then big plummet on 7/30 continuing today.

Search Console shows biggest dip in Desktop SERPs while Mobile remains consistent. I figure that competition that was previously hurt by bad links have recovered. Since mobile remains constant it makes me believe that competition is not mobile optimized which leads me to guess that they might be older sites.

[ichthyous]

What I am seeing is a total disappearance of 'direct' traffic again, which means traffic from Google Images. This was the case in June, but improved in July. Search traffic remains stable.

[philooo]

Steady decline in Google Discovery Traffic since 7/23
BIgger drop on 7/29
Leveling out on 8/1

I had a big increase in traffic in May 2021. I am wondering if the two are linked.

For those of you seeing big drop this summer, Did you had a large increase in the previous 12 months ?

[ichthyous]

For those of you seeing big drop this summer, Did you had a large increase in the previous 12 months ?

No, 2020 was also awful. It's been downhill with Google since 2018 really. The last few days I am seeing the direct traffic is down 70% again, just like in June. Google must be ramping up the domain authority signals so that only huge media sites have any images ranking again. Also, my images collected tens of thousands of links from hotlinking over the years. Perhaps those links were wiped out by the link spam update? The sites were mostly low quality

[BushyTop]

Yeah, I can see that there's something going on too, confirmed by the comments above. We have actually seen a positive change though. I'm guessing link spam?

[OldFaces]

Yes, I had a big increase in May.

[ichthyous]

My direct traffic dropped like a stone every day from July 15th-24th, then skyrocketed every day from the 25th-28th and recovered it all. Then dropped off a cliff again even worse. Is anyone seeing these wild swings in traffic classified as "Direct"?:

[ibb.co ]

[philooo]

I am wondering is we are collateral damage from larger sites being impacted.

let's say businessinsider.com linked to your site, it was great, good PR juice there. And you get a boost from that in a past Google update.

Now let's say businessinsider did some spammy marketing and got hit with the July 21' Spam Update...

Now I guess businessinsider 'mistake' is becoming your problem, as their PR juice is 're-evaluated' lower.

PS: this is pure speculation, but that is how I understand potential consequences of this update may play out for sites like mine.

[KaseyM]

Wow my Google Discover has fell off of a cliff.

Normal search is fine?

So hard to tell with the world opening up if Google no longer likes our site or people are too busy living lives again!

[saladtosser]

Can the mods consider pinning a thread on this forum for things that don't help SEO rankings? Think it would be helpful to have, that way people can steer clear of debunked SEO strategies and put their time into what does work.

I can cite 3 below to start it off?

Forum Links Do Not Work For SEO
[seroundtable.com...]

Google: No SEO Advantage to Dedicated Hosting
[searchenginejournal.com...]

Website Downtime Shouldn’t Impact Search Rankings
[searchenginejournal.com...]

If I would have known about the dedicated server having no impact I could have saved a couple 100 per month and wouldn't have singed a 3 yea contract the website doesn't come close to covering thanks to July core update

[StupidIntelligent]

John Mueller says Google has no problems with newspapers publishing and promoting affiliate content. Since, they naturally get ranked above all others, it's very unfair to regular website owners, who don't have their level of authority.

This also presents a great chance to earn a lot money by doing content partnerships. One can sign a contract with a local newspaper, get the content published on their domains and share the profits. Best of all, Google doesn't care as stated by John.

Why waste money on your own website, and wait months, when a newspaper can get the job done within days.

[twitter.com...]

[ichthyous]

I am seeing the same patterns from June reassert themselves, in some cases even more aggressively:

- My home page traffic is down 67% this morn and several top landing pages keep dropping through the floor for 12-24 hour periods. This is on a day where I am gaining ranking in keywords.

- Direct traffic is now down 80%+ and still falling since July 28th. I believe this to be traffic from Google images, but it does seem to have a major effect on how many conversions I have, so perhaps some other forms of searches are hidden under "direct" too.

- My UK traffic is down 76% today, and traffic from AU and CA also seem to be rotating on a daily basis, you never get good traffic from all three countries.

- No conversions whatsoever since all of this started up again...not one call or email.

My hope that the worst of June was over was clearly misplaced...Google has been encouraged by their 69% increase in revenue in the 1st half of the year and now intends to experiment with us even more.

[StupidIntelligent]

@ichthyous - Start a news website in your niche. Push 30 to 40 articles daily. Get millions of signals, and then promote your business through that.

This is the only way the system works nowadays. Small website owners or businesses have zero chance.

The only bit of decent organic traffic comes to people running news websites in their respective niches.

[superclown2]

If I would have known about the dedicated server having no impact I could have saved a couple 100 per month and wouldn't have singed a 3 yea contract the website doesn't come close to covering thanks to July core update

Maybe. Maybe not. Google tells us what Google wants to tell us, and what promotes a site today could sink it after the next core update.

[Martin Ice Web]

Something is going through again. 15pm germany. 90% Drop. And again our unsupported website with no EAT is doing better than our main site.
I guess it will come to the point that it is much more easier to drive 20 slight different websites side by side without putting to much work into it. At least 5 out of 20 will do better with google quality updates while the others tank.

[ichthyous]

Start a news website in your niche. Push 30 to 40 articles daily. Get millions of signals, and then promote your business through that.

This is the only way the system works nowadays. Small website owners or businesses have zero chance.

It was doing better in July, but the June update is clearly being dialed back up. I agree with your conclusion, as I have seen many, many of my ranking terms now taken over my huge stock photo sites, or junk articles pushed out by huge sites that publish articles on every topic all day long. I may have to start writing more...

[StupidIntelligent]

With the way things are moving (https://twitter.com/hereandnowim/status/1422946641452142604), day isn't far when CNN could post something like: The Taliban attack Kabul, but first, check out these diet pills with 50% discount coupons attached!

Tons of content = tons of keywords = tons of signals = some decent traffic from Google vs. Genuine business that does what it says.

The new marketing strategy should be to buy paid articles on news websites. John has said that Google would rather rank affiliate or marketed content produced by news media / content farms than some random website. Proof: [twitter.com...]

[StupidIntelligent]

Even Barry's website was penalized for guest posting or link selling (don't remember which one was it) many many years ago. Now newspapers like the Telegraph, Denver Post,...don't how many others are doing the same, and Google says it would rather rank them instead of some random website.

Thing is Google can't control what others do with their sites. Google also cannot change their core algorithm that rewards news websites.

What they should do is to stop spewing BS around ethics, and raw sewage they call guidelines.

[edited by: StupidIntelligent at 5:18 pm (utc) on Aug 4, 2021]

[ichthyous]

It's noon here in East coast US and things are very bad today. An 87% decline in direct traffic, USA down 31%, UK down 40%, home page down 68% again today, main landing pages down 35%. I knew the June algo updates weren't going away so fast. Google is Godzilla stomping on Tokyo at this point...no concern for the destruction, only interested in higher revenues no matter what they have to do.

[saladtosser]

@ichthyous sounds like we are in the exact same boat (titanic) your traffic sound exactly like ours, image traffic as well. The strange thing is traffic didn't just plummet on July first, I mean it did but normally it levels out at that lower rate, but this time it just keeps going down each day pretty much, very strange! Right now we have gone back about 7 months in traffic, that's 7 months of daily content creation and the traffic that was going up slowly each day/week/month completely wasted! I did tinker with the idea of giving up my main job and working on the site full time (my partner already works on it full time) thank god I didn't or we would have lost the house at this point. Now even if we rebound and start growing again I'm never going to want to risk being a content creator full time as you never know what day you will wake up to find google clicked a switch and your done (for days, months or years you just don't know)

[StupidIntelligent]

@saladtosser - Not if you're CNN, WashingtonPost, BusinessInsider, NY Times, WSJ, BBC, Economist, The Atlantic, Politico etc.

I searched for iPhone coupons as a test and Wall Street Journal (WSJ is suppose to be a serious newspaper) came up among the contenders. [google.com...]

[KaseyM]

Woof still bad - hearing similar from publishers in other niches than mine.

Could just be seasonal trends given the world is opening up.

As for the spam that traditional newspapers are pumping out - it's been going on for ages. They'll do whatever it takes to keep the wheels churning.

[rustybrick]

@StupidIntelligent "Even Barry's website was penalized for guest posting or link selling (don't remember which one was it) many many years ago. Now newspapers like the Telegraph, Denver Post,...don't how many others are doing the same, and Google says it would rather rank them instead of some random website."


Technically it was when the nofollow was first introduced, I didn't want to add nofollow links on my "sponsored links" section, which was the previous advice, label the links as sponsored so users can see it. You can read about it at [seroundtable.com...] - Ultimately I gave it but I was the last SEO blog to hold out on it.

[ichthyous]

I have had ONE visit from direct traffic the entire day today. I can only assume that all of my images have been dropped from google. I will check that there isn't a problem on my end, as Wordpress just updated to a new version. Something is rotten in Denmark. IS ANYONE ELSE SEEING MASSIVE DROPS IN DIRECT TRAFFIC? If there is no response I can only deduce that the problem is just with my site.