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?

[pritz]

There is a down in traffic approx 10-20%.

[Soulofmonk]

GSC is stuck on September 18th, 2021. Anyone else? Also, I am having indexing issues for the past four days.

[RedBar]

Global site yesterday back to May-July average, realworld enquiries are normal however there is a lot of nervousness about huge seafreight price increases which will inevitably have to be passed on.

UK-focussed hotel site -19% this month so far, accommodation bookings still going well, wet sales definitely up but food sales down, Xmas bookings well-established.

All my SERPs looking pretty normal apart from that darned Pinterest scraping collection.

[Alex_1729]

GSC stuck on the 18th here as well.

[ichthyous]

GSC stuck on the 17th for me, and I have given up all the upward trend in clicks from the 3rd -13th. As clicks have dropped, impressions have increased.

I'm seeing very few new inquiries and the ones that have come are not buying anything. This follows the general summer malaise. 2021 started strong but will be a bust in the end unless it really picks up speed from now through the end of the year.

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop today. Here We Go Again :-|

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Alex_1729

GSC stuck on the 18th here as well.

You ought to try UK Govt ONS servers! I have 20 data processing jobs to do, usually 1 hour, so far I have done 6% ... :-(((

They'll be getting a BIG bill for this since it's going to screw-up my entire worlk schedule.

[yollo03]

Mine is stuck as well. Whatever they are rolling out it will probably hit me tomorrow.

[RedBar]

Has GSC anything to do with roll-outs? I don't use it, period!

[frankleeceo]

@redbar

I don't think it has anything to do with roll-outs lol.

gsc is useful to diagnose simple issues, it's useful. Google has and uses those data whether you choose to take a look at them or not.

[Niresh12495]

GSC stuck on the 17th. Count me in.

[ichthyous]

Traffic shut off completely at 11am...it's now 2:28 pm and I've had only a handful of visits since 11am. My USA and UK traffic are both down 25% today after this...they were both up strongly this morning. My ranking is up two days in a row.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Same here. This morning was a disaster. I thought it was something broken in G Analytics... But it wasn't. Anyway :-\

[Alex_1729]

GSC completely off. Clicking on "Overview" gives a 500 error. Well this is a first

[Niresh12495]

Same here

500. That’s an error.

There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.

[yollo03]

September 18- (Search, Discover)
An internal problem is causing a delay in the performance report data. We're working to resolve this delay. This is only a reporting issue and does not affect your site's crawling, indexing, or ranking in Google.

[ichthyous]

An 81% drop in USA traffic this morning by 8:45am. Canada down 100%. Home page down 38%, a few landing pages down up to 60%. This has been going on since last weekend but seems to be getting worse. Today my serps are down, but not hugely...up one day, down the next but zero improvent in recapturing high volume searches that were lost from the end of March through end of June 2021. Let's hope that this is a blip and doesn't last the entire month like in June.

[RedBar]

Canada down 100%

Zero, no traffic?

My traffic was slow this morning however has recovered ro average with 6 hours to go of my Googleday.

[ichthyous]

@RedBar I has 6 visits from CA and 2 from AU the entire day! USA caught up and is now only -6% at 7pm. I am still seeing traffic to my home page and several landing pages way off.

[RedBar]

Until UK 12.00 today I had my old volume of traffic and spread back, it started yesterday evening, however since 12.00 the switch has been flicked off and traffic has almost stopped.

Natural traffic patterns, my a**e !

[not2easy]

Google says they are working on fixing the GSC issues - updates here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[ichthyous]

Today I had more normal traffic levels, but all of my Australia and Canada traffic is once again down 60%+. Instead among my top referrers today are Nigeria and Pakistan. Nigerian traffic was so high that I blocked the entire country as in my experience it's nothing good.

[rayankhaled]

semrush Very High range today 24 September
8.2

[ichthyous]

GSC finally populated with data through the 22nd...as suspected my clicks were way down since the 13th. It appears that there is no real rhyme or reason with Google anymore, it's just rotating similarly ranked sites now...one ten day stretch up, then right back down to the same low level. My USA traffic has started each morning down at least 50% and making up the difference late in the day...today all other traffic is above average except for USA. This week from Sun-Thu I have had zero new inquiries from customers...not one inquiry. Unless we are already in the throes of a major global recession, that is almost entirely due to Google siphoning off any viable commercial leads.

So it appears that unless you are rising in clicks, ranking, and traffic at the same time you just aren't going to get any viable sales from Google organic traffic anymore. I have been focusing on other sources of revenue and and slowly rebuilding my business away from Google entirely. From now on business from Google will be sporadic at best no matter what you do.

[RedBar]

semrush Very High range today 24 September
8.2

I never take any notice of these things however does anyone have experience of a direct correlation to their rankings etc?

Just wondering, that's all.

[frankleeceo]

i think correlation is becoming less relevant, everflux and huge changes continue to happen at different times for different verticals.

[KaseyM]

Traffic being pretty dreadful this week. Our ranking tools says we're up though!

[NickMNS]

I never take any notice of these things however does anyone have experience of a direct correlation to their rankings etc?

Why would such a metric correlate with a website's ranking? If there is any correlation it would be spurious.

[BigKat]

Why would such a metric correlate with a website's ranking? If there is any correlation it would be spurious.

Wouldn't a specific organic position also be spurious since feature sets (images, videos, ads, etc.) coming and going change the position where organic listings are visible to users? I've found organic rank positions have not correlated with visibility/traffic for quite some time and can't be relied upon as a trusted metric. Where on a display any listing appears at is far more important then the outdated rank metric. For example, having a #1 position on a high traffic keyword produces less traffic then a #4 position on a keyword with 10% of the estimated traffic because of where these listings are viewable at. Google has heavily monetized the high traffic keyword results with a layout that drives the #1 listing so far down the page I doubt many even see it whereas Google has yet to heavily monetize the layout for the much lower traffic #4 keyword.

[frankleeceo]

might as well as say tracking anything at all is useless, just put all of your trust in google to always do the best for humanity lol

once you get into the logic loop that google has all the keys, all tools are useless, the final iteration is that we all work and become slaves for google.

ranks, studies, research, tools = resistance is futile. just be absorb already and give up and pull out credit card for google ads.

who needs brand when the only brand left standing is brands who pretend to be brands while dishing out billions to appear on google shopping? in essence, they are just all google who do retail on the side.

with this said, I think I want to go work for google at one point, if I haven't already done so because I am so absorbed in the ecosystem with google ads, SEO, google ad manager, adsense. in fact, I already work for google in principle. it's like...do uber drivers for uber?

i probably made google more money than for all of my previous employers combined in my life time.

with that said, i have been noticing some traffic shifts between broad and longer tail search terms, I have been working steadily to increase my long tail contents, and as a result seeing some more losses with my homepage. Not sure if it's related to algo shifts or my own content work. it could be algo is refining certain meanings about certain words, while trying to keep the overall traffic level intact.