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?

[yollo03]

The updates they are rolling out in the past 48 -72 hours did some damage to my website. Only high volume keywords were targeted, pushed down the serps (-50). There is no way tell if this is temporary or not. Some sites with high authority were also hit, Im not really convinced this is about the web vitals. A google chrome extension that has a high volume keyword in my niche is in the second page, outranking numerous websites. Pinterest and YouTube returned to the top pages.

I doubt this will stick, I would have expected google to show some transparency and confirm what they are rolling out. The ultra-authority websites are unaffected, they continue to dominate any keywords they want.

[RedBar]

As many know I look at websites from several different points of view being a business person firstly for 25+ years and then taking up the mantle of a webmaster in 1993 when, realistically, no one else in my business knew a thing of what was about to happen.

For several years now many webmasters / businesses have chased rankings when they have actually had no need to. Webmasters did it for themaselves and street cred, businesses did it because they were told they "had to".

Plus for several years now in MY global industry ranking has had absolutely nothing to do with a business's success, I do it because I do it and it's my "thing" however I could never justify the cost of what a "pro web" company would charge to achieve the same result.

I've said it before, The Net is no longer a business driver for us and the vast majority of my industry.

Surely other sectors must see the same and realise they have no necessity to throw money at the G ad machine?

[superclown2]

Surely other sectors must see the same and realise they have no necessity to throw money at the G ad machine?

I've spoken to both Google employees and representatives of major companies who have admitted to me that the only reason why these large companies pay unrealistic prices for adsense clicks (which they inevitable lose money on) is to stop competitors from getting a foothold.

[ichthyous]

Google is giving all the big news media an opportunity to double or triple their revenues. This means big bonuses for Journalists, Chief Editors, CEOs etc.

In return, the same news media will not bash Google on its legal wars with the US government, and instead lower its coverage of such events to just a ceremonial level.

I agree that Google is pushing up large media sites, especially since the Australian government went after them and they now have to pay. Instead of paying, they just decided to let them have more traffic and potential revenue. I do not agree that journalists will see any increase in pay or bonuses...the US media market has consolidated and a few media conglomerates own almost everything. There is no need to boost pay for journalists and other peons, the pay and bonuses of executives and profits of the hedge funds scooping up these media companies just increases. Far too much consolidation was permitted in the US media market.

[RedBar]

is to stop competitors from getting a foothold.

Basically spending on ads and buy to retain their vurrent market share?

IMHO this has to be a recipe for disaster and expecially so if we see more and more actual realworld manufacturers selling direct? Obviously this mostly applies to consumer products since global markets for most products existed pre-www, all the www did was make things easier and faster for most of us. Sure we have seen the rise of China but even they are paranoid about "other" countries gaining a competitive edge however that has nothing to do with G nor advertising.

Stop the G koolaid people !

[StupidIntelligent]

Gary Ilyes who actually worked on ranking codes years ago (now he just mostly travels around, and does a bit of this and that, at Google's Swiss resort). He's the guy that can tell you how and what, only when he's in the mood.

According to him, there's a super ranking code on top of everything. So, your site could be 10/10 in content, but if Google decides to favor another factor, say overall popularity, the super ranking code would multiply everything by 0.

This means you could be the top candidate to hit the top 3 spots, say securing 9 out of 10 points, but at the final stage, that super ranking code can throw you back to the bin by multiplying 9x0=0.

This is why popular news sites with low quality score can hit the top 10 with just a few rewritten words here and there.

Say Nytimes secures 5 points out of 10 for a keyword in terms of content; the final ranker code can multiply this value with 1.75 and its total score would then be 8.75 securing it the 3rd or the 4th position on page 1. Whereas you with the actual 8 out 10 score would be stuck at page 4 and above.

Therefore, until Google decides, no matter how good of a website you have, you're going to kicked back down right from the very top during the final ranking process.

Barry had posted an article about it. I even tried to Google it, and couldn't find it - the irony!

[yollo03]

Barry posted it on his website, its the magic numbers. If the algorithm doesnt like you it will multiply your score by 0 like you said.

Edit: Found it [seroundtable.com...]

[RedBar]

Edit: Found it [seroundtable.com...]

I'm glad he doesn't run ANY of my businesses since they'd soon go bust.

Keep drinking the G Koolaid or simply use a three word titlebar, three word description and one poor image, automatic top spot with that!

[yollo03]

I notice in the page experience section 'security issues' and 'ad experience' sections disappeared. All I have is https, mobile usability and web vitals. Is it the same for everyone else?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Several major Youtubers have been showing their youtube stats pages to confirm they were hit by the last core update.

[yollo03]

Something was rolled out over the weekend, it hit all my high volume keywords. Big drop, -50 more or less in ranking. The 'funny' thing about this is that it only targeted high volume keywords, all other keywords are pretty much the same.

So if the youtubers were hit recently (past few days) it is not the core update.

[StupidIntelligent]

@Sgt_Kickaxe - I searched Twitter for youtubers and updates, but didn't find anything. Please share the tweet.

[mzb44]

According to him, there's a super ranking code on top of everything. So, your site could be 10/10 in content, but if Google decides to favor another factor, say overall popularity, the super ranking code would multiply everything by 0.

This means you could be the top candidate to hit the top 3 spots, say securing 9 out of 10 points, but at the final stage, that super ranking code can throw you back to the bin by multiplying 9x0=0.

This is why popular news sites with low quality score can hit the top 10 with just a few rewritten words here and there.

I just came here to post something very similar.

Google has now clearly stopped using only objective metrics to determine rankings and now clearly has built-in overrides to achieve desired subjective outcomes.

A very good example is that of affiliate sites.

We know Google has a disdain towards affiliate sites these days and unless you are a big corpo affiliate site like Wirecutter you will have a much harder time ranking than before.

But that's good, right? Affiliate sites suck, right?

Well there're many affiliate sites (that aren't Wirecutter corpo level) that are great and acquire organically - without abusing the webmaster guidelines - thousands of high-quality backlinks from major, trusted and authoritative sites. Have great UX, a huge number of real and genuine positive user comments, etc.

But they keep getting hammered by core updates, every time.

Clearly they have all the metrics right, great natural links, amazing UX, great content, great user engagement. This means that objectively people like those sites and other trusted and authoritative sites are willing to endorse them by linking to them.

But they still keep getting hit.

It's obvious Google has something that's coded to override signals gathered by the algo.

Like, Google now believes that it knows better what websites searchers should actually visit. Even though searchers love that site, and third party authoritative websites highly endorse that site, they are still wrong. Google employees have determined that actually you should not like that site even if you do, therefore you should not visit it. Instead, here's a list of sites that you should visit, even if you actually do not want to.

You can never win in such a scenario, no matter what you do. You can have amazing user engagement metrics, never violate any google guideline, have a large number of endorsements (links) from top sites, but if Google subjectively believes that the type of site you have actually isn't good, then you will get hit.

[yollo03]

@mz44, what determines if a site is good or not? I don't think it's done manually. One of the algorithms must have a greater weight than others and it is the one that seals the fate of a given website. And that weight is being pushed around at updates. If someone can figure out what has more weight that will get you in the top spots very quickly. Its not the core web vitals, its not domain age, its not speed and its not content. It is (was) authority, now Im not sure what it is.

[golderberger]

practically every day semrush sensor is spiking, i don't think SEO makes and sense currently. Right now this is pure search result manipulation by google

[saladtosser]

You can easily prove the problem with DA. Simple take one of your in depth product pages, cut and paste a small section on e-bay and once google has indexed it it will immediately outrank you organically, proving scraped lightweight content will beat in-depth original content based on the domains authority alone (not the moz metric). This happens to me every time I sell anything on e-bay that's already on my site!

[RedBar]

but if Google subjectively believes that the type of site you have actually isn't good, then you will get hit.

Precisely and I'm pretty sure this has been going on for longer than they are prepared to admit.

I used to have a Coca Cola site!

The product was discovered by me 40+ years ago.
I have the global trademark for it.
The global industry refers to it by this name.
I have had the EMD Exact Matrch Domain since 1995.
I HAD the only 100% totally dedicated site to this product with all product technical descriptions, hundreds of unique images and all relevant information.
It was regulalry updated.
The product is still one of the top 5 worldwide in my industry.
For many years it was #1 and even though some of my images started appearing on other sites, I said nothing.

Then about 5/6 years ago it suddenly started to slide and within 6 months could not be found except for typing-in the EMD!

It was replaced by an importing wholesaler who compressed many pages of info into one page page with extremely brief descriptions and "sexy" latest-style graphics.

One year later I removed the site.

The importer is a US company, my product is sourced and produced in India.

Absolutely zero manipulation whatsoever.

[mzb44]

@mz44, what determines if a site is good or not? I don't think it's done manually. One of the algorithms must have a greater weight than others and it is the one that seals the fate of a given website. And that weight is being pushed around at updates.

I'm pretty sure it's both. And about what determines if a site (rather type of site) is good or not is the opinion of people working at Google.

I am pretty sure they do "manually" decide what type of site is not good anymore and then apply hard-coded overrides to algorithmic signals.

Since 2018 they have essentially nuked all natural / alternative medicine sites. Most - if not all - of these have lost up to -99% of their rankings and traffic.

Now a lot of these sites had ultra massive authority, hundreds of thousands of natural backlinks etc. Yet they essential got nuked.

It's clear to me it was decided by people over at Google that despite the good algorithmic signals these sites are dangerous to rank, so their quality scores get zeroed out (or greatly reduced) by the "super ranking code" mentioned above.

In this particular situation honestly it actually makes sense to do this. Those sites are actually harmful to people.

My argument is that since at least 2018 they have been gradually expanding this manual editorial interference on what should and shouldn't rank. Beside natural medicine sites it's clear that affiliate sites are impacted as well, and their original quality scores are multiplied by 0.x, i.e. reduced.

But I'm sure there's many other types and categories of sites other than these Googlers have determined shouldn't rank and now have a times 0.X multipler applied to their "organic" quality scores.

*By manual I don't mean they check individual sites manually, of course. Rather they determine broadly that for ex. affiliate sites should not rank as much and hard code it so, say, every time the systems find an affiliate site they multiply its quality score by 0.5, etc

[mzb44]

Article by Barry is up: [seroundtable.com...]

Thanks, man. Looks really good.

[StupidIntelligent]

Barry took notice of this BS: [seroundtable.com...]

Thanks.

[EditorialGuy]

*By manual I don't mean they check individual sites manually, of course. Rather they determine broadly that for ex. affiliate sites should not rank as much and hard code it so, say, every time the systems find an affiliate site they multiply its quality score by 0.5, etc

The algorithm's perception of user intent could come into the picture, too. Take an ambiguous query like "[kitchen widget]" or "[hotel name]." Should the results be weighted toward "informational" or "transactional"? Even a slight change in Google's assumption of what the user is seeking could have a big impact on the search results. And if there's any increase of weighting toward "informational" when user intent isn't clear, that's going to benefit sites like The Wirecutter and CNET where the emphasis is on information and the affiliate links are (from a user's perspective) incidental.

[westcoast]

Heads up:

A large chunk of the "link spam" update from a couple of weeks ago has been rolled back over the last 3 days.

Billions of spam pages that had been removed in the update are all back in the main Google index, and worse than that, there are more of them than ever:

Queries:

"see full list on buzzfeed" (145,000 spam pages)
"see full list on msn" (286,000 spam pages)
...etc...

Spam pages directed at our site had dropped from 35,000 down to 5,000 after the update. Over the weekend that was rolled back, and we are suddenly up to 45,000 spam pages pointed at our site.

With the rollback we also got hit AGAIN with the "penalty box" algorithmic penalty which Google applies if it detects a very large number of new backlinks at a site. We dropped from #4 on our main keyword, to out of the index entirely, up to 20, 15, and now we're at 13.

Completely idiotic.

The worst part is that many of those 40,000 spam backlink pages to our site also contain scraped content, so Google is also dropping OUR pages from the index for what I can only assume is duplicate issues. We have now lost 25% of all of our indexed pages due to these hacked domain spammed-backlink pages. So. stupid.

Google, remove this crap. Seriously. And while you're at it, remove the damn duplicate content penalties that these spammy backlink / cloaked / scraped pages are causing on legitimate websites.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing considerably higher traffic since last Friday, after a week of terrible traffic. Something changed late on the 5th or the 6th I think. Uk traffic is back to normal after vanishing all week, and direct traffic came roaring back after being down 90+%. If Google can turn off/on all direct traffic to a site that is a massive amount of control and manipulation.

I am noting that despite the higher traffic, conversions are very low and the inquiries seem to all be low budget shoppers. Typically I have very strong summer sales with serious clients.

[yollo03]

What you described tends to happen when an update is rolling out. During updates, you may see a surge in traffic or a big drop that normalizes the next day or several days after. The switching off part was executed on a daily basis. Im not sure if it changed since the last update they pushed last week.

[ichthyous]

You may be right...traffic was high all weekend but dropped off a cliff at 2pm sharp today. USA -5%, UK -20%, AU -9%, CA -14% and still dropping.

[philooo]

OFF TOPIC:

If Google can turn off/on all direct traffic to a site that is a massive amount of control and manipulation.

My site is clearly throttled by google. When I look at the real time analytics, before and after the 'summer update', it it just ridiculous, how the ceiling has changed from one day to the other, and now is soooo stable at the new ceiling.

There is not a single question in my mind that google throttle traffic.

[iamkingsleyf]

affected as well, by at least 50%

[saladtosser]

My website traffic is down 78% and falling since the last day of June thanks to July core update, my YouTube traffic is up 87% from the same period, about to completely abandon the website and concentrate 100% effort in YouTube as that's now where the traffic is for our area! If the website bounces back in another update then I may start working on it again but as long as all the youtube videos are listed above me in the SERPS (even my own videos) I don't see G diverting all that traffic back to the serps and away from youtube after the record breaking youtube quarter, if anything they will need to increase the volume of youtube videos each quarter until the SERPS are mostly YouTube!

So this will be my last post/visit as I become a full time youtuber and ex webmaster, best of luck to you all :)!

[ichthyous]

So this will be my last post/visit as I become a full time youtuber and ex webmaster, best of luck to you all :)!

I've had a few friends tell me to focus on youtube videos for some years now. However, my niche is so saturated with people posting videos it's insane...with social media it's get in early or don't bother.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic down 52% at 11am...my home page traffic is down 72%. Every other country normal or higher today. Let's see if USA traffic starts recovering after noon today...