Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2021

[goodroi]

August is typically a holiday/vacation month in the northern hemisphere as people take time out to recuperate, and to prepare for a busy quarter, and 2021 is likely to follow similar patterns. Black Friday and cyber Monday, along with many other regional holiday dates usually have an impact on business in the quarter, as well as Christmas and New Year.

Looking back at the past quarter of Google's SERPs changes has brought the usual shenanigans, and winners and losers. Traffic, and most importantly, conversions, is a goal of publishers selling services and goods to business and to end users. Here are a few of the changes worth noting in the past month or so that you may have missed.

The Google and Link Spam: Qualify Links for Affiliate Links or Sponsored Guest Posts Update [webmasterworld.com] took quite a while to roll through, and it was probably a good four weeks or so of changes.

There were quite a few observations of note in our Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Also, there was a Google Image Rendering Bug Causes Some Failures in Top Stories [webmasterworld.com]

Do you want to know how to control parts of snippets displayed in the SERPs "Data-no snippet" How to Stop Parts of a Google SERPs Snippet From Showing [webmasterworld.com]

There was also a piece about How to Remove Web Results From Google Search [webmasterworld.com]

Is it a penalty, or the result of an algo change. [webmasterworld.com]

Google changing descriptions in the SERPs have been going on for years, and here's the latest on the changes in our thread titled Update: Google Generating Page Titles on SERPs [webmasterworld.com]

Supporters forum (paid subscriptions) Google's NLP demo taken down and it's still available if you know how [webmasterworld.com]


Plus lots of other Google search and SEO topics [webmasterworld.com], and recent discussion in other sectors on WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

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

[RedBar]

<not a rant, a Sunday afternoon chill:-)>

I have been saying for a number of years now that the WWW outsourcing / resourcing / finding / promoting / sector for my industry was over. Through the late 90s and into the noughties wholelsale importers from all countries especially were trying / testing / etc possible new product suppliers from many different countries.

My factory order levels and profitability are precisely where I want them to be however the WWW is not driving anything new. A few years ago I could get up to 10 enquiries every day. This is huge in my industry, at an annual level this would translate into massive production investments on our part and the addition of hundreds of millions of Dollars extra sales. Over the past few years I have watched these enquiries slowly dry-up to one or two a week meanwhile business has not only been maintained it has grown with both existing and new customers.

Obviously I am not a big box mover, never will be, that's the nature of my industry. Several global players in my industry gave up with their website 5-6 years ago, they realised they were not driving anything other than an invoice from a webmaster whose sole criteria was more of the same.

So what's this to do with Google and its SERPs etc?

Well, localisation came to the fore several years ago and it is going to feature more, after all, the quantity of Joe Public individual purchases out-weigh, in one of my sectors by 150:1 in a weekly basis.

Whay 150:1? For this very popular widget pruchase in a 24 tonne container there are 150 widgets. Joe Public only requires one of these widgets and let's say the wholesaler sells 150 widgets a week, and if he is happy with the product and price, that is almost 8,000 per annum.

Now all of a sudden that 150:1 becones 8,000:1 since he has no necessity to go shooting off to source new supplies meanwhile the market for the widget remains and is actually growing.

So why should Google list me #1 when the possibility of their SERPs is not going to drive a potential buyer? The only way I have conducted my business since the late 1960s is to ensure all possible interest and information in my widgets is available to everyone. Since 1993 my sites have been unamshamedly company brochure sites extolling all aspects of our widgets yet with zero pricing anywhere.

I spent hours yesterday checking my SERP rankings, I honestly CAN NOT complain, some of the "other" results and Pinterest I did not like however for mysely, excellent. What does this mean? A much less-updated website and some time off for the first time in years, that's about 15 years in case you were wiere wondering!

What does this post mean to you?

Can the WWW actually drive any new business your way? Is there any to be had, is the market saturated? How is anyone buying / sourcing your widgets? Are you chasing something that does not exist? And in-conclusion, start to ask yourself realistic questions about your business model and expectations and lastly, stop stressing so much and be happy when you are successful.

Apologies for any typos, my eyes are not as good as they used to be!

[yollo03]

@Rebar, I would check the serps again today. From what I can tell a major update was or is being rolled out. Regarding the business model, couldn't really agree more. What was relevant in 2018 might no longer be relevant in 2021 (almost 2022). Things evolve. If you don't adjust you will get burned out.

[RedBar]

A cursory look at 10 popular keyword phrases and they are as "normal" with a little shuffling about, nothing calamitous as yet!

[frankleeceo]

Do start to see some material change from my first observation 3 days ago. I have had a site that got -70% from the peak to trough this year (hit hard by December 2020 core update), it's climbing up 10% week over week. Nearly zero work done so far just whatever magic.

Maybe whatever work I did is working, or it could be magic, I did throw some coins into the wishing wells. Maybe my fairy godmother changed the algo. Well, now I am motivated to spend a little more time on the site.

Still nowhere near the highs though. I need to 200%~300% at this level to go back to the past glory (logical from a -70% drop).

[Cryogen]

For me, sales were modestly improving in September and Sep 8th was especially good. It reminded me of good old days from 2014 or 2015 when it wasn't odd to get 4 or 5 sales a day. However, sales stopped after that date and since Sept 9th, it's been pretty much the same wasteland as it was in August, which was totally brutal. Interestingly enough, the traffic fell only very slightly after Sept 8th and this amount of traffic decrease cannot possibly explain the lack of sales. I think the type of users that G is sending to a site changes over time more than their number. So, I think the quality of users that you're getting from G will be a more important factor than the traffic per se in the future.

Was September 8th some kind of holiday somewhere?

[MayankParmar]

widespread indexing problems.

[RedBar]

September traffic down across all sites by about 20% so far even the UK hotel.

Normally September shows a good traffic increase for my widget sites however realworld orders and enquiries are, as expected, up.

I did post in my message at the top of this page some of my conclusions.

[JesterMagic]

Looks like something happened yesterday in our niche. I dropped for a number of keywords and replaced by unknowns.

[RedBar]

As always these days there seems to be a permanent mini-shuffling of MY SERPs. I assume that this is by design to make its results seem "fairer" because quite often several of the top pages are equally good depending what info one is seeking.

For less popular terms it is easier to rank simply because others may not have put as nuch effort into that page ... that's a definite in my widget sector.

What does throw a spanner in the works is localisation of results and just how G determines whether a query is a local or national / international site.

For my local sites I always ensure that town / county is included in all the right places and this works extremely well in ALL SERPs. I started doing that in the early noughties since I had clients receiving enquiries that they had zero chance of supplying to.

[ichthyous]

Traffic was zooming higher from Sept 4th until today...even on days that started off with a big drop ended up normal or higher. Today is the first big drop since the 3rd. USA down 30% at 5pm, Canada and Australia also way down. I'm hoping that this is priming the pump for another move higher, but who knows. I have not seen significant recovery yet for most of my high-volume terms, and overall my traffic is 25% lower for the last three months than for the same three month period of 2019...so it would take a lot of gains to make up for that.

[KaseyM]

Still yet to find that floor here &#128557;

[RareBit]

My SERPs were all over the place this morning, we had dropped from 1st to 5th and were showing two results again. Now we are back on top. Seems like it was just a quick shuffle?

[ichthyous]

Oh here we go...back to hugely manipulated USA traffic again. My SERPs are bouncing slightly but my USA traffic is down 57% at 11:30am. Search and direct traffic both down. UK traffic is strong, but Australia traffic has vanished since the 13th, and Canada also way down.

[RedBar]

A very worrying aspect is starting to affect international trade and that is a sudden and huge escalation of seafreight rates that will affect the price if every export product weighing more than a few grams.

[renatovieira]

September is being the worst month in the history of my main site. Drop followed by daily drops. This latest update is being fatal so far. Remember that my site has absolutely "no external links" and no artificial backlinks. They are all organic.

Meanwhile my main competitor is in the top positions with thousands of artificial backlinks.

Nothing really makes sense in the G world.

PS: And the traffic cut-off pattern that occurs daily at 4pm has returned :-|

[golderberger]

Nothing really makes sense in the G world.

It does make perfect sense for G, just not for you and me :)

[RedBar]

Flat Friday, no other description, rankings are fine just loads of single page tyre-kickers!

[widgetized]

Oh here we go...back to hugely manipulated USA traffic again. My SERPs are bouncing slightly but my USA traffic is down 57% at 11:30am. Search and direct traffic both down. UK traffic is strong, but Australia traffic has vanished since the 13th, and Canada also way down.

Similar situation here, since the 6th of september. Lots of spam emails coming in, and no orders or requests from real users, even though there is a storewide sale running right now, that will end soon and has generated almost no revenue for us.

[JesterMagic]

SERPS are still dancing around.

I just noticed a new change as well for listings this morning. If a listing has other listings for the same search, these other listings are indented and listed right below the main listing. Each of these listings take up the same space and look the same (except for being indented under the main listing). I saw one of these type of listings this morning on page 2 of a search that had 1 main listing and 3 sub listings under it. It took up half the organic results for the page. This is crazy

[RedBar]

Firday was flat a;; day however today, Saturday, looks like a normal weekday ... I give up !

[frankleeceo]

@JesterMagic

Listing from same domain different URL, or exactly same URL?

[ichthyous]

Some kind of change happened on the 13th...my clickthroughs almost doubled between 9/2 - 9/13. Then fell off a cliff and back down to the 9/2 level. Traffic has been lower for the last week, especially USA, Australia and Canada. Meanwhile my ranking in bouncing around on a daily basis

[renatovieira]

After 18 consecutive days of daily drops, today I see a significant improvement. Did anyone notice any movement today?

[worker]

Huge drop today.

[EditorialGuy]

No big changes here. Our travel site is running well ahead of the same time last year, and both Google traffic and traffic in general have improved substantially over the summer.(We're still a long way from recapturing the traffic that disappeared when COVID hit in late February, 2019., however.)

We're now seeing a very slight erosion in visits with the arrival of fall, which has been a normal seasonal occurrence over the last two decades. I'd expected things to be worse with the Delta variant and continuing restrictions on international travel, but there must be a lot of optimists out there who are planning for (or at least dreaming of) a return to normalcy.

[RedBar]

when COVID hit in late February, 2019.

Please EG, don't make it any longer than it's already been!

The world seems to have gone crazy, I have just had my two busiest days for 3 weeks on a weekend. All the traffic looks good with plenty of global visitors viewing multiple pages, overall for this month though traffic is down versus August which is a totally new expeience since 1993.

[JesterMagic]

@frankleeceo Same domain. The sub-listings contain other pages from the same website about the same topic as the search. Maybe about a third of my searches have one of these Listing Blocks on the first or second page. I also saw 1 where it had the main listing, one indented sub-listing, and then a spot to click "view 1 more". Over the past few days these Listing Blocks have been dancing around.

[ichthyous]

A strong rebound overnight...rankings improved and traffic has surged, especially from outside of the US. My UK traffic is up 283% this morn. Google seems to think that I have a UK business, or just isn't suppressing traffic from the UK nearly as much as it suppresses US traffic.

[frankleeceo]

@jestermagic,

I see, I saw this 3~4 weeks ago for a brief period of time in my vertical. Maybe it was limited and now they pushed it broadly. If the testing follows my observation. They will remove this after 1~2 weeks and lower domain crowding.

[EditorialGuy]

Please EG, don't make it any longer than it's already been!

Oops. Year, month, date, day of the week....At my age, it's hard to remember any of them. :-)