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?

[ichthyous]

Because certain keywords only rank well for a certain domain rating in my opinion. The higher your domain rating is the better you will rank.

In general yes, however there are competitors with DR one point higher than mine that are ranking higher than ever, and have risen to top five in sone of the old high-volume terms that I have lost in the same time period. I've lost 2/3 of my high volume terms since March...in some cases I am at position 70-90. They now rank at the top for some of those searches. I also see sites with lower DR than mine ranking at the top now. So it's not always the case.

The issue is that they are ranking because they write how-to articles about subjects, while I don't. My pages are simply thematic archives of images with plenty of text. Google has made the decision that the intent of all these searches is informational and not commercial, period. Well, that clearly is not the case since many many customers were hitting my site looking to buy before Google decided that it was the best arbiter of intent and no other choice is now offered. I am hoping that they roll back deciding the intent of every search somewhat, but it's not likely.

[yollo03]

Are the lower DR sites are relatively new websites? If yes, that explains it. These websites that are ahead of you in the search, do there articles have blog in the url or do they have a blog and you don't?

[ichthyous]

Are the lower DR sites are relatively new websites? 

No, they are established sites

These websites that are ahead of you in the search, do there articles have blog in the url or do they have a blog and you don't?

They are either sites like mine which also have a blog, or they are just e-zine sites, no e-commerce component. Clearly articles are what Google is pushing now...most of my high volume terms that had e-commerce sites ranking in the top ten until the March update are now completely flipped over to how-to articles or articles only with no commercial sites. Google has decided the intent for all of these searches, there is no mix.

But many people do perform these searches to shop too, and they haven't gone away. Google now wants the old commercial sites that used to rank to pay for ads to rank above blog posts. I would be happy to do so if it worked...I tried it and the Adwords traffic was so abysmally bad that I turned off all my ads. It's just a complete waste of money.

[yollo03]

I am not suggesting you to do it but perhaps having the blog on a subdomain might be better. So instead of yourdomain.com/how-to/ to use blog.yourdomain.com/how-to/. No idea whether this will even work or do more damage but that might separate the ecommerce from blog articles.

[EditorialGuy]

But many people do perform these searches to shop too, and they haven't gone away. Google now wants the old commercial sites that used to rank to pay for ads to rank above blog posts.

I just did a variety of product searches to check your hypothesis, and the top results were a mixture of manufacturer pages and e-commerce pages from major online retailers. (One of the searches also had a review in the top five.) As always, YMMV.

[ichthyous]

I just did a variety of product searches to check your hypothesis, and the top results were a mixture of manufacturer pages and e-commerce pages from major online retailers

How can you test my hypothesis without knowing the terms / niche in question? Answer is: you can't. The high volume terms I was ranking at the top on until March can be interpreted in a couple of ways...one with commercial / shopping intent and one with informational / learning intent. Before it was a mix of entries, but now no commerce to be found, just articles, top ten lists and how-tos.

@Yollo3 I don't have a blog and don't intend to get one. I sell very high priced items...think one sale a month and you have a good year. Sitting and writing top ten lists and silly blog posts copying the same crap everyone is pumping out isn't going to bring in the clients who purchase these items. The problem is that Google has decided the intent, period, and commercial sites are out. If I sat and pumped out the same how-tos and top tens #1 my customers would be confused because the brand is high end, and #2 I would attract a totally different user that won't convert to sales. I have thought about it, but sitting and writing useless informational posts isn't going to bring in the users that were searching for something to buy.

[engine]

For the record, Google says "The link spam update is now complete."

[twitter.com...]

[MayankParmar]

Has CTR dropped for anyone?

[mzb44]

Has CTR dropped for anyone?

Yes.

Mostly because of the force-rewritten titles.

Seems like Google wanted to remove webmasters' possibility to optimise for organic CTR. This was largely achieved through writing and testing different variants of titles.

I think the end game is to completely remove webmasters' control over this process and ensure Google alone has full control over CTR on the entire SERP.

[yollo03]

@ichthyous if you dont have a blog then enough websites need to mention you and about what you offer so the algorithms will know what you are offering.

I am noticing movements in the past 48 hours that the sensors are not picking up. Is anyone else noticing movements in their niche?

[JesterMagic]

Google has been rewriting titles forever but there latest attempt in the update does produce some laughable results which unfortunately is at the expense of webmasters and lower clicks to those pages.

Looking at the rewritten titles does point to how Google's AI doesn't comprehend the content or titles at all and they have A LONG WAY TO GO before even it can begin to understand what is written.

Still at least in our niche, page titles by some sites are extremely click bait. Instead of rewriting these titles, Google they should just push it lower in the search results.

I would also say Google Discover feed on my phone has the same problem. 75% of the content shown is garbage (titles, long winded content that in the end has no new news, and too many ads). I've started to visit sites directly for news now instead of dealing with the mess that is Google Discover.

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today. Here we go again :-|

[ichthyous]

Has CTR dropped for anyone?

Not for me, it's stable within a range...but that level is less than half of what it was in 2019. 2020 decimated CTR and it never improved.

My Impressions and clicks inched upward every day from Aug 9-21, then fell off a cliff from Aug 21 - Aug 24 and are right back where they started.

GSC reporting 100% green pages on both desktop and mobile, and 99.9% good urls in user experience. I spent a lot of time on that, but it hasn't helped to improve my ranking at all...zero.

As a laughable aside...today for one search for a high-volume term, one site has THREE urls ranking in the top ten results. Two spots are devoted to the same article listed twice, then below that the home page for the same site. You would thing it would be relatively easy to stop that from happening, and the article listings don't appear to be anything special. I think the freshness factor has a lot to do with it, so sites that constantly publish a lot of crap articles every day are getting multiple spots.

[edited by: ichthyous at 12:56 pm (utc) on Aug 25, 2021]

[ichthyous]

Huge drop today. Here we go again :-|

Yesterday was a big drop for me for specific segments, but ended the day stable. Today the direct traffic seems to have returned and the UK traffic, but USA traffic is down 60% to start the day. It may catch up by day's end. 12-24 hour mysterious drops in traffic for certain segments are the norm now.

[southernguy]

As an aside it is interesting for me to see that my clicks from Bing on my main site are increasing every month. Over the last few years they have averaged less than 3% of my Google clicks but they are now up to around 10%. Maybe it's my SEO that's doing that, but maybe the public are waking up to how a great search engine has morphed into a greedy advertising agency.

My search volume from bing on many sites now exceeds 25% and it (continues to increase) I am also getting more and more traffic from Ecosia and DDG. No one I know uses Google anymore, most have switched over to another search platform because of the obvious irrelevant results and the annoying people also ask boxes.

[ichthyous]

My search volume from bing on many sites now exceeds 25% and it (continues to increase) I am also getting more and more traffic from Ecosia and DDG. No one I know uses Google anymore

Wish I could say the same. In the last 28 days Bing provided 2.4% of my search traffic, DDG 1%, Yahoo Search 2.3%. Google properties combined provided over 94% of search traffic. I know one person that uses DDG, and nobody that uses Bing.

[RedBar]

Across all sites since lunch UK time it has been unusually quiet for me to the extent some sites at 18.00 have not reached 25% of their daily average ... Very strange for a Wednesday.

[MayankParmar]

Google's title update working as expected [imgur.com...]

[NickMNS]

I'm seeing a massive increase in traffic. It started on the 22, when I was up almost 20% from the previous week. Yesterday I was up 25%, and today I was up 40 to 50% for most of the day but in the last few hours I've seen an increase (hourly) of nearly 300%. I'm up more than 70% on the day.

The traffic looks normal, that is, it follows a typical pattern, same geo distribution, same landing page distribution and the increase is coming Google (organic). But based on the posts here it looks like things are quiet. I would be very surprised if this was the result of the title update.

I've had a new website scraping some content and posting links could that be the cause?

[RedBar]

Lower levels of traffic across all sites yesterday with none reaching their daily average, in fact one site had 41% of its average and the previous lowest in August was 59.8% also on a Wednesday. This site has 96.7% UK traffic.

Overall though all sites have had a good month until yesterday, is it all going to fall apart over the last few days?

[StupidIntelligent]

@RedBar- This could be the reason for your traffic loss: [seroundtable.com...]

[RedBar]

@StupidIntelligent

I don't use GSC nor any other G stuff ... Global site seems to be normal today, yesterday's low-performing UK site is looking normal again HOWEVER another 85.7% UK traffic site has very little traffic today ... Thinking about it we're heading for a holiday weekend here which may explain the lower traffic, neither are ecommerce sites, purely brochureware / informational.

[frankleeceo]

Google had been showing multiple entries from the same domain for a while now. This week they started introducing indentation of the SERPs when they are from the same domain. I think it helps CTR of the SERP's below them.

[topaz]

Traffic up from google up 40%, no complaints other than the title rewrites...some of which don't seem to make sense, in my case.

Also just tried facebook instant with their ads. If you're a news site monetizing with adsense..i'd recommend trying it out.
It's same trade off like AMP/Discover, but you end up with better CPMs than with adsense for fb traffic, and you get more traffic from facebook's 'discover-like' algos, suggested for you, etc.

[NickMNS]

My traffic boost is holding strong, +~ 100% over the last 12 hours. But what is interesting is that the first datum points are shown in GSC (Aug 22 - 24) since the start of the event, and it shows a boost in CTR, with no significant change in impressions. This suggests that the boost is the result of the title rewrites.

[RedBar]

Six hours to go in my Googleday and apart from one site all traffic back to normal levels.

[ichthyous]

My traffic fell off a cliff at exactly 1pm today...UK, Australia and Canada all went into freefall and are -30% as the day progresses. USA traffic is average so far. My titles have also been rewritten, and I don't like it...they're basically using H1 tag text and nothing else

[MayankParmar]

I just published a new post and Google has removed the main keyword from the title. The title is entirely misleading at the moment. Google really sucks.

[yollo03]

Very big swings in my niche, top competitor was hit hard. The sensors are not showing it, I think the algorithms are targeting very specific terms that are 'below the radar' of the sensors. Some received received a big boost.

[delorean]

Am I the only one that saw an unusual drop of 90% (in search console statistics) on August 23, 2021. After that day, it's back to normal. So weird.

[Neohippy]

@delorean - it's an error on G's side (shocking, I know, when they're so on-it these days)

"August 23-24 (Search, Discover)
An internal problem caused a data loss in Search and Discover performance during this period. Users might see a significant data drop in their performance reports during this period. This does not reflect any drop in clicks or impressions for your site, only missing data in Search Console."

[support.google.com...]

[superclown2]

My titles have also been rewritten, and I don't like it...they're basically using H1 tag text and nothing else

I've found another of my sites in which the <title> tag and H1 have been ignored. Goggle is displaying the 2nd H2. I haven't a clue why.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing very large intra-day drops in traffic, followed by equally large swings upward. Yesterday my traffic from UK, AU, CA just stopped cold, but then inexplicable swung way back up hours later so I actually finished the day higher. Today I am starting the day with 50% drop in USA and 28% drop in UK traffic...search us off by 31%. Let's see if it swings back the other direction by end of day.

[KaseyM]

Biggest drop in a long time. That's after steadily dropping all summer. Sigh.

[yollo03]

@KaseyM, they rolled something out that targeted high volume keywords only so the sensors are not picking it up, that's my opinion. I've seen very large swings in my competitors. It's possible that you will rebound in a few days. If it doesn't, I hope you will recover later this year.

[NickMNS]

My traffic boost is fizzling, I was at +75% on Wednesday, but most of that was achieved in the final hours (~+300%). Yesterday I was at +70%, but it was progressively less traffic by the hour. Today I'm trending around +30%. I'm curious to see if any of this sticks.

[ichthyous]

@NickMNS I saw the same pattern...was up for weeks but now it is definitely reversing and heading downward, especially today.

What's astonishing is how effectively Google has targeted conversions...mine are down to a trickle, and it isn't the economy. So even though traffic has been higher all month, business is almost zero.

[KaseyM]

This title update surely isn't helping. I'm seeing my featured image alt tag being used for the title in the SERP.

[RedBar]

Touch wood at the moment I'm not seeing any titlebar name changes except for one specific small site where G has removed the last keyword on several pages. The SERPs do not appear to be changed so far.

[MayankParmar]

Google's title update removed the primary keyword from the SERP title for one of my new articles and it can easily tank the site's CTR and hurt reputation because it's misleading. Google is reverting changes even when I manually modify the title.

This title update is clearly broken and it should be rolled back immediately.

[frankleeceo]

Google roulette is the new Russian roulette.

Your traffic is up 20%, 50%, and 100%? It's not because you did really good work, it's because your competitor just got his head blown off. Don't worry, your turn to get blown is just around the corner lol.

+-20% hourly fluctuations lol.

[seomess]

Best thing about getting no traffic and no sales ... it can only get better ;)

[ichthyous]

More losses of top-3 spots this morning...that brings it to 16 lost this week. Today direct traffic is down 80%, UK traffic down 77%, USA down 31%. Weekends tend to drop off I have noticed, but there is definitely something afoot. Looks like the old June patterns are reasserting themselves.

[RedBar]

UK hotel site traffic normal.

Global site can only be described as lethargic, in actual fact the sort of traffic I was expecting for August but has not happened until now ... What does this mean for September?

[ichthyous]

Checking my domain authority on Ahrefs it has dropped off tremendously, down 17 spots since I last checked maybe a year ago. On Moz it remains the same. I don't subscribe to either, but I am wondering if anyone else has seen this disparity and what causes it? I do have a lot of direct links to images and changed the image urls late last year, issuing 301 redirects from old to new. Perhaps those links are not being counted any longer. I wonder if this is the cause since my image ranking suddenly fell off a cliff in 2021 as well.

[mzb44]

Checking my domain authority on Ahrefs it has dropped off tremendously, down 17 spots since I last checked maybe a year ago. On Moz it remains the same. I don't subscribe to either, but I am wondering if anyone else has seen this disparity and what causes it? I do have a lot of direct links to images and changed the image urls late last year, issuing 301 redirects from old to new. Perhaps those links are not being counted any longer. I wonder if this is the cause since my image ranking suddenly fell off a cliff in 2021 as well.

I fail to see how your score shown by a third party tool company would affect your Google rankings in any way at all.

As for the disparity between the scores shown by two third party tool companies: I'm assuming different methodology used by the third party tool companies to calculate those numbers.

[ichthyous]

I fail to see how your score shown by a third party tool company would affect your Google rankings in any way at all.

A huge drop in rank implies a huge drop in links, which would most certainly drop Google ranking like a stone. That is exactly what has happened since March. The question is, why do Moz and Ahrefs have such a huge disparity now, when they matched before? It seems that Ahrefs is more up to date and thorough, but may have changed how it counts backlinks for such a large drop to have taken place

This weekend has undone most of the gains in SERPS for the last month...I am back to where I was in July and still losing top 3 / 10 positions.

[EditorialGuy]

A huge drop in rank implies a huge drop in links

More likely, it implies a change in how Google uses those links. I'd assume that Google continues to refine which links it pays attention to and which links it ignores. (Certainly there are plenty of links that are little more than background noise.)

[ichthyous]

More likely, it implies a change in how Google uses those links.

Yes, but that was not the original question, which was not about Google but about Ahrefs change (drop) of 17 spots in domain rank for my site, while Moz stayed the same. Has Ahrefs changed the way they count links and has anyone else seen this drop? Which one is more accurate?

My reported links in GSC haven't declined other than that thousands of scraper site links were removed, and also Pinterest link count is much lower.

[NickMNS]

which was not about Google but about Ahrefs

Exactly, who cares about Ahrefs, it's not Google, which means it has bearing on anything. It serves only to sucker unsuspecting webmasters to pay for a service that is useless.

Which one is more accurate?

They are both total useless garbage.