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.

[Alex_1729]

I'm seeing some increase in organic traffic today as well, and expect about a 10% total increase compared to yesterday by the end of the day. Traffic seems regular. Since the majority of this site is informational, there aren't any direct conversions, but we'll see what affiliates have to say in the next few days or weeks.

This is still far from what it should be. Until I see a huge increase lasting for a couple of weeks at least, I'll remain reserved of this returned traffic. I published a lot of quality content, so I'm hopeful of a lot of quality traffic, including the traffic that I lost this month which I'm hoping will come back.

[edited by: Alex_1729 at 8:21 pm (utc) on Dec 27, 2021]

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Legitimate traffic. AdSense with high conversion. USA and Europe is the majority. This started this morning. As usual, it never lasts longer than 1 hour. Today it's been going on for the whole day. I hope it stays that way.

[renatovieira]

@BigKat - Yes, I won top positions on several terms. This usually appears for 1 hour when it happens. Today it spans all day. I hope this is permanent. If it wasn't an update, my site finally surpassed my competitors...

[samwest]

Just wanted to share some hope, however short-lived it may be.. after days of zip, this morning, pretty solid traffic, between 5 and 10 concurrent, which is low, but enough to produce sales, with regular conversions through the day, spaced nearly every hour. This is exactly how every day was for 10 years. Typically see this go right up to April 1st, where they will drop another April Fools joke on us. It's a Google tradition.

[mosxu]

@samwest

Happy New Year!

Today I see so much junk traffic it feels like buyers forgot Google exits all started they shopping at Amazon or something!

[yollo03]

sensors are up again, something new is being rolled out...

[engine]

Oh dear, Google: Scammer redirect appears in top ten SERPs.
I'd like to think this is just an aberration.

[mzb44]

Oh dear, Google: Scammer redirect appears in top ten SERPs.

They never really went away.

Amazing G still has so many problems detecting these.

Put every other algo/update's accuracy intro question.

[RedBar]

I continue to be surprised this Xmas / NYE with Monday's traffic at 95% and all seemingly genuine regular visitor viewing patterns and locations.

But what is different this year is that so far I have had several business enquiries and that is most unusual for this holiday period and 90% of those have come via WhatsApp.

[engine]

They never really went away.

That's true, but I hadn't seen one of these in such a prominent position.

Thinking back, this was some kind of cloaking, and it caught me out. I'm usually very careful so I would not have clicked if the SERPs were not genuine. BTW, it was nothing particularly strange, and was simply a search for information about a journalist.

[RedBar]

This afternoon's (my time) USA traffic has been ALL single page in-gone, very similar to bots, yet all visiting a different widget page.

[StupidIntelligent]

Barry,

I have started seeing this on top of GSC today. Can't seem to remove it. Have you seen this before?

[i.imgur.com...]

[rustybrick]

@Stupidintelligent, no, that is new, I covered it just 10 or so minutes ago at [searchengineland.com...]

[ichthyous]

Google has become a complete freakin' nightmare now. Search traffic keeps going lower and lower all month, and is down 61% today. USA down -60%, UK -13%, Canada -68%. I can only surmise that some sort of heavy duty penalty has been applied to my site as I have never seen anything like this. My ranking dropped all month and sits at a low that I haven't seen in perhaps a decade. The top image is my search for the last 28 days, while bottom is today's almost non-existent traffic. Something is very very wrong here:

[ibb.co ]
[ibb.co ]

[RedBar]

Tuesday was completely in the dumpster for me however today was steaming until mid-day with loads of Far and Middle East visitors, a steady afternoon and with 6+ hours to go I'm at 84%. Dare I assume Thursday may be similar with a sharp decline Friday?

No idea, nothing's predictable these days !

[RedBar]

UK -13%

My UK-focussed sites are all -50% since before Xmas, this is nothing new for me and normality, if there is such a thing nowadays, may / will not return until the middle of next week.

[ichthyous]

@Redbar Since the 13th I have seen UK drop as much as 60%. This is not at all normal for my business. A normal holiday decline is 15%. Factor in Omicron and ok, this isn't a normal year, but most of this is due to Google. It started dropping dramatically on the 13th and has been abnormally low all month.

[Alex_1729]

I had an increase for my informational site (also has some lists/reviews, both Amazon and non-Amazon, high-quality content, US-targeted; only 1.5 years old), so today about 5% more organic visits than yesterday (I'm in Europe so the day has ended). Two days before was a 14% organic increase over Christmas day, and yesterday 1% only.

Although it looks promising, this is still below what I was getting, and where it should have been, as I have a lot of new posts ranking well and growing in SERPs. Still, pretty good increase. Also, US and UK could have been better today.

[yollo03]

I am seeing movements in my niche. It appears certain long tail keywords are now interpreted differently by the algorithms, which provides different results from page 1 to page 4. I am assuming this is about user intent. There is really nothing that can be done about it aside extremely high authority sites that will probably benefit from it.

[Markedd]

Since a couple of days ago, I am experiencing an unholy amount of bot traffic. I think 90% of my traffic is fake at this point and it's all organic. Good job, Google. Eh, let's still finish this year on a more positive note, so happy new year to everyone!

[engine]

There's a regular search I perform, manually, once per week, and I suspect there have been changes going on, which I haven't yet confirmed. On the face of it, google looks to be providing less and less results of pages with just words, and more with media of some sort, such as videos, podcasts, and, of course, YouTube.

[RedBar]

I'll say it ... HAPPY NEW YEAR

New Years Eve 63% traffic
New Year's Day 85.3%

Never seen numbers like it and it all looks genuine!

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing a complete change in traffic since the 31st. It's far more regular through every hour again, with peaks and valleys...looks like the extreme throttling of the second half of December was lifted. The damage was done, I can't get back the month of December I sales and my ranking is still far below what it was this time one year ago. I also have no confidence that the extreme traffic throttling in December won't return. All I can say is that I accumulated a lot of links quickly in early December and November...it definitely felt like some sort of penalty being applied. I also found two sites that had scraped my content and posted it and were coming up in searches for my brand name. I demanded they remove it and filed content removal requests with Google. The requests were approved and one site deleted the entire page. Not sure if this had any impact, probably not.

[JesterMagic]

Through the holiday season traffic sitting between -40% to -50% every day when compared to last year. Oct and Nov was sitting at about -32%.

[RedBar]

So far today it has been quiet however yesterday was up at 85.7% on a holiday Sunday!

Overall for my last 10 days 24th Dec - 2nd Jan my global traffic has been 71.6% which is way up on previous years whereas 50% would have been considered good.

Rankings have not changed.

[ichthyous]

Rankings dropped again this morning...USA traffic back in the dumps, -67% at 11am. UK is higher, Europe and rest of the world are spotty.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5055161.htm [webmasterworld.com]
8:36 am on Jan 4, 2022 (utc -5)