Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2021

[engine]

Well, October was a mixed bag of tweaks from Google in the SERPs, interspersed with a few announcements, and we're hoping November will not be a roller-coaster.

Firstly, here's a quick round-up of news in the past month that you may have missed.

For those tracking the update threads, here's last month's Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Do you use Google Analytics? Google has said its completed rollout of the new Search Analytics API which, in addition to search performance, includes Discover and Google News data, along with Regex support to the query and page dimensions. [webmasterworld.com...]

Google has updated its search quality rater guidelines this 19 October, 2021 [webmasterworld.com...]

Potentially, we can all be on page one of the SERPs as Google in the U.S. has changed the mobile search to continuous scrolling. [webmasterworld.com...]

Had you though whether URL length affects ranking in SEO. Find out more here [webmasterworld.com...]

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

I've long focussed on conversion quality, but, obviously, need traffic in the first place. Let's discuss this, the latest changes, and how we might achieve better results.

[renatovieira]

Huuuuge drop this morning. Someone else?

[ichthyous]

Traffic seems more stable, but USA traffic always starts low and struggles the entire day to break even. This morning USA traffic is -46% at 9:30am.

Traffic to my home page has dropped by 2/3 over the course of six days...my home page just doesn't show up in the serps. That was happening in June as well. Anyone else seeing that?

I should add that interior pages and content pages are doing average (for now)...it's the home page this last week that has just dropped out of sight.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:33 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2021]

[RedBar]

So far today, after 15 hours, looking normal at the moment but with it being Thanksgiving later on I am expecting 80% this month and hopefully no less than 65% in December.

Considering seafreight rates I am actually getting enquiries for standard stock widgets.

[webdev29]

The spam update is going perfectly as planned here !

All my "spammy" sites with low quality content gain competitive positions while my quality sites, tailored for users, lose big positions & traffic !
Definitely, something is broken at Google !

[RedBar]

With 5.5 hours to go I'm already at 113% of my average on a Monday BUT BUT BUT ... What is Classroom at Google?

[edu.google.com...]

Getting lost of visits from Greenville Pennsylvania !

[NickMNS]

Google Classrooms is a Google portal used by schools to manage communication, homework assignments, etc.... It got a huge boost in popularity during the pandemic with the rise of virtual schooling. But now, even after the return of kids to school, teachers and schools continue to use the service.

What you are likely seeing is the impact of a teacher sharing a link to your website from within the Google Classroom system.

[RedBar]

Ahhh ... Right, my brain was out, it's that time of year when a specific subject is being taught and I've been that source for several years BUT it didn't come from Google Classroom, I'm darned if I can remember the previous link.

If it goes the same as previous years that site will be busy for the next 2-3 weeks with students..

[Martin Ice Web]

So with this new spam update our vertical got a complete reorder ( beside the fact hat amazon and some big resellers didnīt move).
But what we see is that all midrange sellers or focused resellers got hit very hard.
And this could be because of this:
We are in a vertical very items are very similar. And we have a lot of items to sell.

productname - color - lenght - some other stuff

So this producing a lot of items that are very close. Although we put an canonical tag on each item to a summary page, it seems that google considers it as spam. But it isnīt and google seems not to be able to see the canonical tag in its spam detection.
So all (midrange) competitors have been hit very hard but very small sellers ( mostly cranftsmen shop that only sell one or two of this items) got a big jump.
google hits legit shops that only want to offer a bigger selection to its customers.

[RedBar]

At the moment I have to say that in my widget sector I am not seeing a lot of spam, the SERPs are pretty clean, obviously the annoying Pinterest type of site but I can understand their value for those seeking inspiration.

Some page listings are what I would define as thin but how much time does a visitor spend on such a page?

What is concerning though is the lack of traffic for my popular widgets whilst ranking extremely well and not deluged in ads. Are searchers no longer going past the first / second screen, maybe the average searchers have become numbed to so many "look-a-like" results and prefer to ask friends / FB for personal recommendations?

I ask this from the viewpoint of ranking #1 and 3 in G.uk for the most popular UK widget yet it drives realistically zero traffic whatsoever whereas not so many years ago it generated tens of thousands of PVs per day.

Opinions?

[ichthyous]

USA traffic dropping off a cliff every morning at ~9am and it takes the entire day to break even, if I break even at all.

My ranking is stuck in a dismally low level, except for local search. It seems that the more Google shows me in the local results, the more I drop in organic for that search. I am getting more traffic from my local area and much less from everywhere else in the country, and that is horrible for my business since I generally sell more outside my local area than in my local area for many years now.

[RedBar]

I am still very popular again today with school work in Greenvile PA ... :-))

[headspace]

The Digital Markets Act which is currently being considered by the EU and set to come into force in the next year or so, is the only kind of legislation which can tackle the type of wholesale abuse
which many are witnessing in the SERPs at present. The reality is that the internet is now as essential as the air that we breath, and it cannot be left up to those who supply the oxygen whether we live or die.

[RedBar]

the internet is now as essential as the air that we breath,

Tin foil hat on ...

Really? It can be useful, it can make some stuff faster but "essential"?

For sure there has always been a lot of hype about what it "could" do however in the realworld of manufacture and production that's all most of it is, hype.

Hat off :-)

[headspace]

Yes, essential if you have any grasp of what true democracy is.

[Dooku]

Really? It can be useful, it can make some stuff faster but "essential"?

@Redbar, I know you are not the youngest member on this forum, neither am I. Before my IT career I worked, amongst others, at a very large distributor of fasteners(many different kinds) with suppliers and customers all over the world. This sector has also relations to your building/construction sector. I also worked for a Japanese marine supply and engineering company. So I know how industry sectors like these work and operate.

But it looks like you may be overlooking the fact that at some point in the past the majority of all business relations between companies, suppliers and their customers has switched to online interactions mainly through the internet. Even your local fish and chips stand/shop now has a representation online through which a major part of their business runs and through which they can be hurt really bad by negative reviews or the whims of google.

So, in that respect the total influence of the internet and it's main gatekeeper google has passed the "can be useful" state and for the far majority of businesses it has become "essential". When we do something for a long time some of us tend to think "I know it all, seen it all" which can hurt you unexpectedly (I have learned this the hard way so now I always keep an open mind!)

[Rndm]

The internet is "essential" or Google (a search engine) is "essential"? I vote maybe to the first and a definite no to the second. Just because so many companies have decided to structure their company around Google's economy and therefore need Google it does not make Google "essential." Apologies for getting off topic.

[southernguy]

I'm gonna be a bit off-topic myself but Google search for me has been useless and just gets worse.

Results have been irrelevant in the sense that it no longer delivers unbiased results, the same spammy sites are ranking using expired domains, its pretty much the same old churn and burn crap which I classify as useless for any sort of serious research. Most of the other stuff that ranks are popular sites that are pegged at the top of search no matter what the user searches for.

Google has obviously created a noticeable demand for better search alternatives because new ones keep popping up, are they better? in some instances, yes, most of us are probably aware of the recent release of Brave search and I just noticed a new one called You. No, they are far from perfect but they offer more options, and hopefully, some of them will eventually outperform Google.

While many of us prided ourselves with producing great content and a website we could be proud of, I believe ranking on Google will become less and less relevant and we will end up going back to the old days when we used multiple search search engines to find what we needed.

Google's AI and biased search results IMHO are soon headed for the ditch.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing continued suppression of USA traffic...At noon I'm -30%. Only USA affected, and it's every single day now. By the end of the day it will end up flat or sometimes slightly negative. My traffic has been at almost exactly the same number for four days in a row...so clearly you get a certain allotment of mostly lower quality USA traffic and then OFF again.

Google continues to boost the same few sites higher and higher for every search, while my site drops lower for months. I think some are buying backlinks from blogs, but it's very hard to tell.

[southernguy]

@ichthyous For me, it has been the same for weeks, my traffic has dropped 80% USA traffic has been non-existent, at one point I would check my sites to make sure they were up and running.

My sites are diversified in different niches and have different topics but all of them experience the same patterns. I won't even go into discussing how bad conversions have been for months.

[RedBar]

But it looks like you may be overlooking the fact that at some point in the past the majority of all business relations between companies, suppliers and their customers has switched to online interactions mainly through the internet.

Hahaha ... Ok, first site lainched 1993, one of the first 1,000 on the www, of course I know The Net has been useful for specific areas of business making them more efficient and faster BUT there are many, many businesses worldwide that do not find it essential to their overall activities.

For companies that have outsourced all their production to "other" countries, sure, it's essential, but for those actually producing these "lower cost" products, it may not be.

i remember posting on here more than 10 years ago about using WhatsApp for nusiness purposes, no one had a clue what I was talking about however these days it is the most used app in my industry but specifically only in one area, sales efficiency and communication with clients.

None of our factories are connected to The Net apart from security cameras, certainly no production machinery and we have a LOT of machines and production.

Efficiency I'll go with, essential for many industries is very debatable.

For those trying to make a living competing head-to-head with box shifters, it must be soul destroying.

[rustybrick]

November spam update is done rolling out [twitter.com...]

[bebopandrocksteady]

When do we think the core update will follow? Any guesses?

[rustybrick]

I say December, after black friday / cyber monday shopping sales.

[not2easy]

They have announced another Core Web Vitals -Page Experience update starting in February 2022 - this one for desktop: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

It seems just another (friday(google.makes.more.money)) update is in progress. .

[mzb44]

When do we think the core update will follow? Any guesses?

Late November / early December is my guess.

Will probably be big.

Many sites have loaded up on inventory so if they get hit they will need to run PPC ads now to clear their inventory.

[christianz]

It seems just another (friday(google.makes.more.money)) update is in progress.

Seeing the same.

[headspace]

For what its worth.... We have never undertaken any linking building activities since the inception of our website 7 years ago. Followed all the Google guidelines about not paying for links etc. We had just 96 referring domains to the site built up over a 7 year period. But from March we lost 75% of the traffic to our site YoY.

So my hunch was that it could only be the lack of backlinks that caused such a severe downturn, and since september we have undertaken an unashamedly urgent effort to buy as many high DA, TF backlinks as we possibly can. The net result has been a steady rise back up of internet traffic and revenue since september. We now have 500+ referring domains and rising. Still not back to pre-march levels but heading in the right direction.

Like the advice about not panic buying in the supermarkets over Covid-19, its always the decent people that find there is nothing left on the shelves.

Whatever changes G made to their algorithms in March, surviving without good backlinks and referring domains is no longer possible.
Just ignore the warnings about being penalised and buy as many backlinks as you can, they'll penalise you without them anyway.

[BigKat]

Many sites have loaded up on inventory so if they get hit they will need to run PPC ads now to clear their inventory.

Unless their inventory is money they want to unload quickly, Google is the last place I'd spend money at to clear inventory. Google's PPC ads perform terribly and are a waste of money IMO.

Judging by the big winner of this "spam" update, I'd say those businesses should just sell on Amazon for the fixed costs and better sales predictability. We've lost more converting traffic from Google though are not involved with spam. Yes, we do have some .gov links but we also have direct traffic/sales from .gov IP addresses because we do sell to the Government and many very large companies. Fortunately Google can't interfere with our direct B2G and B2B sales as they are doing with B2C sales by burying us in the SERPS to favor our Chinese competitors selling on Amazon.

[ichthyous]

@headspace Unfortunately I am seeing the same with many competitors in my niche. I sent you a DM