Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2021

[goodroi]

What has December got to offer us, I wonder. In an unusual move, Google announced a broad core update in November, just before Black Friday was due to hit. Many questioned this move, just before the start of a big online shopping season. Our November thread monitoring the reports indicated a mixed bag of results. As of this moment, the broad core update is almost complete.

In case you missed it, here's a quick round-up of some of the Google news.

Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2021 [webmasterworld.com]

Google Broad Core Update Released: "November 2021 Core Update" [webmasterworld.com]

SEO video about targeting by Intent [webmasterworld.com]

Google has announced some new features for local publishers, and tools for reporters. [webmasterworld.com]

Podcast: Google Talks About The Future of SEO [webmasterworld.com]

Best ways to hide a site or pages from search engines. [webmasterworld.com]

Take a look at the other Google search and SEO topics [webmasterworld.com], and recent discussion in other sectors on WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Let's start the conversation and observations for December's Google SERPs Changes.

[ichthyous]

I was having higher and more stable traffic for a month, until December 3rd. It dropped off and seems to remain at around -15% USA traffic since then, mostly concentrated on traffic to my home page. Both search and direct traffic are down and USA can start the day down 65-70% these days and struggles to recover all day. This coincides again with major swings on a daily basis in ranking...I can lose 10 top ten terms in one shot and recover them the next day. All of this has resulted in very few new inquiries and of course zero new sales. The only sales I have had are from return customers.

[Rndm]

One company that I work with is also experiencing major ranking swings on a daily basis. It is most noticeable in Search Console when you only select rankings. This seemed to start in April around the time of the Product Review Update. It isn't an affiliate site, but it does have a lot of in-depth informative content around their products and the situations in which they are used.

[NickMNS]

It is most noticeable in Search Console when you only select rankings.

Search Console doesn't report rankings. I assume you are referring to the "average position" metric. Be very careful with that metric because it does not represent what you think it does. It only shows the position that your page appeared in search if and only if the page appeared in the search results, or in other words if there was an impression. So if your page ranks on page 2, but when the user made the search, they found a suitable result on page 1, then your website didn't get an impression and the position is not counted.

You should only ever look at that metric while taking impressions into account.

It is common to see an improved "average position" after being negatively impacted by an update ie: a sudden drop in impressions.

[ichthyous]

I think this has something to do with tweaking the algo for link spam or link value. I am noticing that my pages with the most IBL are the ones hit the hardest in terms of traffic loss. The result is that I am getting traffic to old and less important pages for items that typically nobody ever requests or buys. Traffic looks highly suppressed or throttled across every hour of the day for the last two days...the curve is suspiciously flat all day long.

My competitors are also losing ranking and swinging on a daily basis, with the exception of one that just stays pegged at the top all year. They are accumulating a massive amount of real IBLs because they offer certain content for free and have managed to get their images used on hundreds of blogs and sites with a backlink to their site underneath.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:27 pm (utc) on Dec 16, 2021]

[Jez123]

@ichthyous - Do you think your theory could extend to internal linking? I fairly aggressively added lots of highly structured content all on similar themes with anchor text pointing at a specific page that I wanted to improve rankings on. I mean google have always maintained that internal linking is not an issue but they could have changed their stance maybe?

[Rndm]

@NickMNS - Thanks for that. I probably stated that wrong. However it went from extremely stable week to week to seeing wild swings on a daily basis. Something definitely changed.

[ichthyous]

@ichthyous - Do you think your theory could extend to internal linking? I fairly aggressively added lots of highly structured content all on similar themes with anchor text pointing at a specific page that I wanted to improve rankings on. I mean google have always maintained that internal linking is not an issue but they could have changed their stance maybe?

I couldn't say, you'll need to observe your traffic patterns and note the changes and see if anyone else comments on it. I add links to the footer that I want to send some extra juice to, it's common practice and I doubt it would be a problem unless the anchor text is stuffed. I have gotten a lot of new legit links to my site recently and they came in a short span of time, so I am wondering if Google has "put the brakes" on my traffic. They are all from high DA sites and one from each site, so not spammy at all. Just got a great writeup yesterday with links to my site from a very high DA .org. If Google sees that as spam so be it...

[samwest]

"The Grinch" update continues, as does zero traffic and sales. This looks like the last year for the site.

[yollo03]

I was also hit, pretty hard. I managed to attain global reach, initially google ranked me mostly in the US. The problem that I came with it is a huge drop in keywords. Now these keywords are coming back very slowly but ranked very poorly. If for example a keyword was ranked in 4 now it is at 94. And it's not improving. The new update they started rolling out today will hit me tomorrow so I am really hoping for some improvements.

If you are on the wrong end of the stick with the current core update (Im not buying the product review label) this will hurt.

[ichthyous]

Traffic down 35% today...both search and direct. USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia...all way down. I've never seen such a large single day drop in my 17 years of doing this so hopefully it's not some new and permanent terror Google is unleashing on us. One way or another Google is making sure to make all the traffic from organic search go bye bye at an accelerating pace.

[Neohippy]

Been fab for us since about 12th/13th; at least c. 20%+ uplift (informational site). Getting good traffic to newly published news pages, too (instead of just our evergreen stuff / UGC), though hard to tell how much of that is just 'cause we jumped on a good story early. Suspect News/Discover traffic, but GSC not updated in 77 hours(!)

(Sorry, don't mean to rub it in or anything, but just thought it might be interesting to know that there have been some winners. Won't be surprised if they take it all away from us once Christmas is over, heh)

[watesh]

For the past 12 months, I have been hit by each algorithm update. Today once again 15% down and now overall down 70% YoY

[RedBar]

Owing to many in my industry closing today until 4th Jan I expect today's traffic to be much lower however I have been quite surprised by Monday to Thursday's traffic:

75.7%, 78.7%, 90.3% and 105.3% !.!.!

I'll look at the data during the next 2 weeks purely out of interest. I'm still not seeing any unusual movements, I do hope that anyone who is are using cleared cache and history browsers.

[Neohippy]

Aha! Discover report finally updated, and turns out that's where a lot of our new traffic's coming from. A switch has been flipped, and we're suddenly eligible (had dribbles of traffic from there before, but nothing like this).

So don't forget to check Discover report, people!

[BigKat]

Ecommerce site:

Traffic is down by 22.15% and converting traffic is originating from everywhere else but Google. Both Google organic and paid are entirely dead with much of the traffic being one page wonders (visit one page and quickly leave).

For the last few days Google daily ad spend has dropped by about 30% without any changes. This is good news since I want to rid myself of managing Google's poor performing ads though have not received permission (yet) to halt all campaigns.

[christianz]

November update was a train wreck, so they scrambled like crazy to fix it in the December core update, which is not "reviews update" but huge 100% broad and wide general core update, and, while initially it looked like they might be moving in right direction (partial recovery), yesterday traffic reverted back to November levels.

They have no idea how to deal with the billions of auto-generated AI sites. They will have even less idea when they fire their best employees in few months time (so much inclusion & diversity!)

It is really amazing how little traffic they are directing to valuable independent websites these days and how much they feed to large priority sites and Google platforms (youtube etc). Most of what's left gets distributed between the trillions of auto generated sites.

It must be good to be spammer these days!

[EditorialGuy]

Things seem to be picking up for us in the last 48 hours, but that may be seasonal variation. Or it could be related to how people are reacting to the latest COVID news. (In our sector, travel, demand is strongly affected by the headlines and by conditions in source markets.)

[Alex_1729]

Informational site:

Interestingly @christianz (not sure how you guys quote on this forum), for my main blog the results are the other way around. It was going great in the 2nd half of November, even had some visits from Discover on 17-24th Nov, then since 3rd of December it tanked down. Today, it seems to be going back up again. We're like the opposites.

Regarding AI sites, there's one site that basically took at least 5 of my articles, re-written them in AI paragraph by paragraph, and it's ranking on the first page on Google for some of them. Eventually I'll just have to file a copyright notice to Google, see what they say.

[christianz]

@Alex_1729

How old is your site? Mine is very old with historical backlinks and bunch of fake AI generated site backlinks on top (tens of thousands). It is also information site but with somewhat thin (mostly non-textual) content.

[Alex_1729]

My site is a lot younger, a year and a half, with high quality content, packed with useful info. And I mean extremely useful and crafted to the best of my abilities, and a lot of on-page SEO. I have a lot of those backlinks as well. I did disavow about a 500 of those blogspot domains in May to see what will happen. Not much, or maybe a small improvement (though Ahrefs reported domain authority went down afterwards). Not sure what to think of it. Same with these Google changes. I don't hope either way as I can't affect anything unless I understand it. And I have no clue.

[ichthyous]

Today traffic returned to normal trend until 11am EST sharp, when it fell off a cliff and stayed down the rest of the day until now. I'm 28% lower on the day now so it was a sudden and dramatic drop again.

[Jmh90]

I know it’s only an estimate, but is anyone else experiencing huge spikes in keywords and traffic shown on Ahrefs and Semrush for the month of December? It couldn’t be further from the truth for us as impressions and clicks are massively down in GSC and analytics.

[Markedd]

@Alex_1729 Do it, contact Google, their ad platform and so on and their article will be taken down. I my case, it took a few months, but it seems that multiple webmasters complained as well and the website is now where it should be, at the bottom of the foodchain.

[yollo03]

It looks like the current weekend update is about backlinks. Sites with high authority that were pushed down earlier this week are now up again. Im quite confident this is what is being assessed now by the algos.

[RedBar]

I am still not seeing anything other than the normal daily shuffling. Are people seeing these "movements" in the 1-20 positions or further down?

[ichthyous]

Clicks reported at GSC have dropped by almost half since 12/3. I am seeing consistently lower traffic every day...it seems to be going fine and then suddenly drops off a cliff for the rest of the day. When I run searches for the terms SEMrush says I have lost I am still there, so it's not terribly accurate.

My ranking has subtly improved for many of my most important terms, but traffic is still much lower. Looking on my phone in recent days I find the page so loaded with options that it really is killing off traffic, even if you are ranking well.

I also think that people are not really shopping this season as much as pre-pandemic...the quiet extends to all of my social media channels so it could be that we here in this forum are underestimating the anxiety that surging omicron cases around the world are producing. People are pulling in the reins on spending.

[Markedd]

@ichthyous I had a somewhat different experience. The traffic did not change much (perhaps a few percents), but after each update this month, something happened with my affiliate websites. The one before the last one helped gain a lot of conversions (40-50 a day) and the last update immediately cut these conversions to less than 20. So, in my case at least, people are still buying as before, it's the traffic that's suddenly different and non-converting.

[samwest]

An interesting observation that shouldn't be a big surprise, but an insight as to why we see no traffic... Today, while running two FB ads and being on page one, position two on the Google SERPs, I am watching GART and it is showing zero visitors, yet seconds later, an active signup comes in. I have a cash register sound on my phone that lets me know when a sale is made. So, it's pretty clear the use of VPN's is really blinding us from actual traffic.
The only way I am getting any sales is by resorting to FB ads. Not a fan, but whatever works. At the end of the day though, I'll probably spend more on ads that I make in sales. SMH

[ichthyous]

Traffic turned off @ 11am sharp again, just like the previous few days

[bebopandrocksteady]

Some of the slowness we're seeing has to be from the holidays. Last week, and likely the week before, offices began becoming ghost towns and especially this upcoming week due to the holidays. This is probably why some of us see discrepancies with maintaining positions (somewhat) in semrush/ahrefs, but traffic is still dead.