Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2021

[goodroi]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5046713.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 7:12 am on Oct 2, 2021 (utc -5)

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As we reach October we're gearing up sites for the holiday push through to the new year. Most of us have probably had our plans laid out for this coming quarter, and there's always a hope that Google's SERP changes are kind to us all.

Here are a few of the Google changes and threads worth noting in the past month or so that you may have missed.

Firstly, here's last month's Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Brett noticed more exposure for Google making moves into auto industry ecosystem. [webmasterworld.com]

We've got more on Google changing titles in SERPs [webmasterworld.com] with a little clarification from the company, following the earlier confusion. [webmasterworld.com]

Although the search console reports seem to have delays built in as it refreshes, this last month it became a bigger problem, however, it's now fixed. [webmasterworld.com]

Just recently Google made a number of announcements on how MUM AI Model is changing its search. [webmasterworld.com]

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

How's your traffic holding up, and, importantly, your conversions? Let's discuss your observations on the Google algorithm updates and changes to the SERPs?

[ichthyous]

When I shop online, I rarely go to Google. They have made it so difficult to find products, Google is probably the last place I go. I'm sure there are many others like me which is why despite having a 90%+ search marketshare, their product search marketshare continues to deteriorate. I think these updates, which appear designed to do precisely as you said (make Google more money), also erode consumer confidence in using Google to find products. Because of this, I think Google's marketshare of product searches will continue going downhill.

While I agree with this is doesn't pertain to my case. I don't have products listed on my site and they cannot checkout and purchase anything. People would search, find my site, and inquire as to the pricing. Even for sites like mine which are not obviously e-commerce ranking has been eroded this entire year starting with the March updates, and especially in June. By September I had recovered some of that, but given it all back during the month of September. Google is strongly preferring blog/article and "how-to" based sites for many searches, not catalog based sites...that is irregardless of domain authority. My site is much higher DA than many of the sites that are ranking now.

[EditorialGuy]

How's your traffic holding up,

Our travel site's traffic is actually ticking up a bit, compared to the last few weeks and (perhaps more important) compared to the same period last year. I think this has less to do with search engines than it does with the itchiness of people to travel, or at least to think about traveling if and when the coronavirus is brought under control.

FWIW, we have hotel affiliate links on our site, and bookings are up as well--but with a different pattern than in the past: The majority of bookings are for the next month or so, and in some cases for the next few days (or even the same day, which is almost unprecedented for our audience).

[MayankParmar]

Semrush is 8.5 / 10 for the US. A new update?

[RedBar]

As I mentioed here a few weeks ago worldwide shipping costs have escalated enormously and over the past few days I have been talking with some major wholesale buyers and their reactions have been almost identical, they're not looking to buy new stocks at present since the import cost is all out of proportion therefore they're keeping it under review.

It is very rare Joe Public contacts me these days however there has been a noticeable increase the last 2/3 weeks from Joe asking where they could possibly locate specific widgets.

Knowing how long shipping times usually take, I guess this situation will not start to resolve itself until gone mid/end November.

That is a guess on my part, others may see it diifferently.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic still way off, down about 30% from the first two weeks of Sept and still dropping. USA has dropped so much that my UK traffic is now 2/3 of USA, for a population 6+X larger. Australia traffic also completely blitzed for a month. Interesting how USA and Australia are where the majority of my sales come from. Google knows far too much about my business.

@RedBar perhaps you can shed light. For years I had sales to the UK, but now they just inquire all the time and buy nothing. The dollar isn't that strong vs the GBP why are people so hesitant to part with money these days? Brexit? COVID?

[yollo03]

Big movements across all topics and countries. The volatility is similar to a core update. It's the update they started rolling out yesterday.

[RedBar]

It's the update they started rolling out yesterday.

That's very doubtful since G updates 3-4 times daily if I recall correctly?

This constant obsession with "updates" is ridiculous, G does tell us when major updates are happening but to expect G to tell us when minor tweaks are occurring will drive you mad.

[MayankParmar]

A sudden spike in mobile usability errors for AMP pages, but the live test says everything is good. Validation failed. I've cleared cache and applied for validation again.

Something wrong with console?

[yollo03]

@RedBar, yesterday USA (ony USA) in semrush was over 8.0. Today all countries are above 9.0 on semrush. I am certain the rollout began yesterday. As USA is also above 9.0 today it means the rollout continues. This is far from an ordinary update that they do on a daily basis in my opinion. Perhaps it is the MUM? Any thoughts?

[ichthyous]

Continued decline of top 3 ranking, but recovery in top 10+...I am dropping out of top 3 ranking for high volume searches for a month, so back to where I was during the June mess. USA traffic still way down and my home page is down 73% this morning.

[RedBar]

@yollo03

I'll be honest and say I have never, ever taken any notice of third party attempts to guess what G is doing simply because they are guessing. Sure they may see stuff going up and down however they have no direct conection to what G is actually doing ... they could easily be good or bad guesses either way.

Some times G does make a huge update that affects many sites but if one's site construction is solid and valid it invariably comes back without even touching it, and yes, sometimes they disappear for absolutely no reason after ranking extremely well for years ... been there!

I'm more concerned these days as to why many good sites, ranking well, are constantly seeing less traffic. Is it G, is it G's ads, is it a change in searching by users, is there less disposable money, have many people decided that they, quite simply, can't be bothered to shop around any more?

[yollo03]

@RedBar

What G has revealed that every core update they weigh what you did to your website vs your competitors. If the competitors did more work/improvements than you have you will lose rankings. I am assuming these good websites put less effort into things as they are already ranking well. Their competitors work harder so they get more impressions. What are these factors? It's a mystery. That's my humble opinion.

[mzb44]

Some times G does make a huge update that affects many sites but if one's site construction is solid and valid it invariably comes back without even touching it, and yes, sometimes they disappear for absolutely no reason after ranking extremely well for years ... been there!

Yep, this is how Google works nowadays, especially after they started doing these core updates.

However do I do sincerely believe that they have a much higher false positive tolerance these days compared to how it was before.

Talking here about sites unfairly hit and nearly nuked by core updates. Some staying in limbo for months or more and some even never to recover.

It's not as infrequent as people think it is.

And some SEOs claiming stuff like "surely Google had good reasons to do it, we just can't understand" is akin to religios talk.

No, their current algos just have a much higher false positive / fail tolerance than before and the people making the decisions at G sincerely could not care less. Every quarter they are up like 30%-50%, why would they care.

[Martin Ice Web]

with new feature that google supports/introduces like Schema.org, open up free to shopping list they get more data from items (sales quantity, season, person who are interested in). Now that many websites provide this data, it is easy for goomazon to route certain queries to their ads and remove/downgrade websites selling this item.

I decided to remove all extra information, stopped google free shopping, stopped using analytics.

[rustybrick]

I kind of expected more chatter over the weekend around a Google update....

[astridhorton]

The traffic on amp pages has spied but found a little drop in desktop traffic.

[yollo03]

I am fairly confident the recent update is a reversal of the prior update.

Edit: One website that massively gained last week had it all reversed. This is a sign of a reversed update and might explain why google is quiet about this update.

[ichthyous]

Traffic turned off at 7am sharp, it's been 1-3 visits for three hours now. USA traffic starting the day down 52%, but the landing pages have returned to a more normal traffic level. Could be the beginning of a reversal of the September trends. My site went up and up first two weeks of Sept, then quickly lost it all:

[ibb.co ]

[BigKat]

I kind of expected more chatter over the weekend around a Google update....

It's really hard to see these updates anymore since even top organic ranks are pushed so far down the page that they don't get much traffic anyway. The exception is when they briefly remove the user magnets that collect and keep searchers on Google properties, which I didn't see this weekend. What I did notice was a large spike in paid Google traffic with a substantial drop in conversions. This normally tells me an update occurred since organic gets so messed up paid ads are all that is even somewhat relevant. We've been trimming our spending on Google Ads and will continue to do so. Click audits reveal most of the paid clicks resolve to Google owned host names such as corp.google, proxy.google, googleusercontent, googlefiber, etc. Seems very fishy that the majority of the clicks we are paying Google for are coming from Google. Though this would explain why getting any type of traffic out of Google that converts into sales has become next to impossible.

[RedBar]

@yollo03

I'm fairly sure something has happened however precisely what I haven't a clue!

From last Monday my global site was seeing well-above my new (lower) daily average, in fact Saturday and Sunday saw way above average PVs. Today, so far it has fallen off a cliff edge. I'm almost 16 hours into my Googleday and PVs have not reached 50% and compared to the weekend 33%.

Insofar as my widget industry is concerned this has nothing to do with the G Xmas push.

Sit back, have a beer and watch what happens time :-)

Is there a beer text symbol?

[BigKat]

FWIW, Google is back to crawling old order success pages. The last one Gbot crawled was an order number from six years ago - not linked to anywhere internally or externally. These generic order pages basically state "your order has been received - thank you" and have a noindex meta designation. I can't understand the logic behind why Google is doing this other than to possibly establish our total sales volume? Seems a bit intrusive if that's the case, though the order numbers Google is crawling are all from many years ago.

Crawled: /checkout/order-received/1234567 then 301'ed to /checkout/order-received/1234567/ (trailing slash).

Google has also continued intensely crawling our product pages. It really appears Google is checking stock, potentially quantity available, etc.

[Dooku]

There was definitely a BIG update:
[seroundtable.com...]

[MayankParmar]

One of my latest and important articles is not ranking well in the US and UK. I see the message "This result seems relevant for this search, even though it typically appears for searches outside the United States/United Kingdom" when I tap on three dots.

Any idea what could be the reason? The site is not optimized for any particular location. It's a global site for a global topic.

[ichthyous]

Traffic looked more normal yesterday, but today the day is starting off with my top sources from
#1 USA (-13%)
#2 UK (+162%)
#3 Canada (+50%)
#4 Azerbaijan
#5 Spain
#6 Slovakia
#7 Mongolia
#8 Mauritius
#9 Iran

Other than Spain / Slovakia (which I think isn't even real traffic)...not one visit from any EU country today. That is statistically impossible, since Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the rest hit my site every day for the last 20 years if the traffic isn't being manipulated. Australia also ZERO. Back to the same tricks from June...send only garbage traffic that will never convert

[engine]

One thing i've noticed right now is slightly less emphasis on Wikipedia.

[RedBar]

Did someone move my September traffic increase to October? That should stop it !

[ichthyous]

Higher traffic, but from really off locations...Venezuela, Bolivia, Mauritania, Mongolia. My UAE traffic down 80%, Australia -100%, Germany -100%, France -90%...USA -8% now. UK and Canada strong all day

[Rageboi]

Any problem with Google analytics real time view. Seeing 0 views across all websites.

[yollo03]

Looks like it, mine is zero too