Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2022

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: [webmasterworld.com...]

There's been a number of fluctuations in Google's SERPs during January, and Google was silent on any of these changes. We know there were changes because all the indicators, and the discussions showed that Google's ongoing tweaks continue. It may not have been a core update to report in January.

As usual, i'll start off with a quick round-up of some of the Google news and stories in January.

Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2022 [webmasterworld.com]

Google December Product Reviews Update rolls Out : "December 1 2021" [webmasterworld.com]

GSC Now Has Dedicated Desktop Section in Page Experience Report [webmasterworld.com]
Google Introduces New robots meta tag: indexifembedded [webmasterworld.com]
Google Video on Changing URLs to Enable Google Indexing [webmasterworld.com]
Video: Google on News Website Speed, Core Web Vitals, and Tools [webmasterworld.com]
Video: "Why are SEOs and Devs from different planets?" [webmasterworld.com]
New Google Search Console URL Inspection API [webmasterworld.com]
This story may have far reaching implications for Google Analytics users. Data Protection: Google Analytics in Breach of GDPR on Austria Website [webmasterworld.com]

Let's dive into the latest SERPs observations for February's Google SERPs Changes.

[MayankParmar]

This month is fairly stable, which also explains the silence on the forum.

Also, one of the scam sites made using government expired domain in the health niche is finally dropping [imgur.com...]

[bebopandrocksteady]

I'm starting to wonder if G has dropped an update within the past couple of hours. Traffic has fallen off a cliff.

[samsseo]

I'm also seeing some traffic changes. We had some decent gains starting the Sunday before last, but dropping back slightly since yesterday. The Semrush sensor was up slightly along with our personal score.

[christianz]

Traffic has fallen off a cliff.

My cliff happened on 14th. It didn't fall further on 15th and yesterday and today seems to be going even lower.

I hope its going down further, because otherwise it will be difficult to maintain that steady 35% YoY growth trajectory for Alphabet Inc. And who would want that?

[KaseyM]

Got a Google penalty in January and shook it off on Tuesday. Traffic is worse now with it lifted.

[mosxu]

Traffic gone only junk bots clicking my ads

[RedBar]

I have to say that I have seen strong, valid traffic all day and probably heading for my busiest day of the year so far.

I'm not too sure if there has been an update however, co-incidentally, yesterday I so happened to be checking my widget SERPs and all looked very good for me.

[Broaster]

Whats going on, my Traffic already got ruined with the Core update now when I publish new news articles I don't even get like 5 visits.

Google News I get zero traffic for the past several months, and like 5 visits organic, Google search has been ruined, I see spam articles and old articles from 5 months ago in google news search, and top stories is hogged by the same site for my niche an then some Indian spammy sites with spun content are getting major traffic

Maybe they have connections because Google outsources workers from India? so maybe the employees there are hooking their friends up because it makes no sense how these spammy spun content sites are ranking in top stories and even stealing content.

how exactly does this google algorithm work? is it humans rating the websites?

[abcdefg]

My sense is that G uses a very rudimentary algorithm, which is why they don't want to disclose it:

1st. They may or may not use NLP (e.g. a variation of BERT) to understand the content of each page. More likely, they use an Ngram-based approach to extract concepts. This is why some so-called "long-tailed keywords" could work. Perhaps for news, they will run NLP to understand it a little better and avoid promoting news they don't like.

2nd. Ranking is probably based on weighted link count + favoritism filter.

It is that simple. No "AI" is used for ranking; it is only selectively used to categorize the search KW and the indexed pages. Of course, AI is also used to generate G's widgets.

The best way to rank well is to get high on G's favorite list. This is why I'm seeing e.g. some car / electronics blogs publishing pro official US gov Op Eds for 1/3 of its new content.

The second best way is to get lots of links from G's favorite sites.

Or, you can create good content and grow, slowly, a loyal user base. Remember, a tyrant's favorite today could on be another tyrant's hate list tomorrow.

[rj87uk]

I don't post often but I had to come check and see if the February 14th update was a named / core update as our traffic dropped significantly and has persisted since.

Small local business targeting one city.

When searching for keywords the map comes up with local businesses I am getting pretty strange results and the map is switching between random points in the USA and my home city.

When I am searching for "Keyword Keyword City" the map is now showing for a different keyword.

I presume this update is still being rolled out anyone else notice anything similar?

RJ

[JesterMagic]

Traffic is down another 10% or so again this past few months. It's amazing how sculpted the traffic is now. The last 2 weeks there is a max of only 50 visitor difference from day to day (from a site with a few thousand visitors a day). Our site has been operating since 2003 and until about last year, Fridays was our slowest days with Sunday being the busiest with around 25% more traffic and it slowly each day reducing until the next Saturday where it would bounce back up. This original weekly traffic pattern make sense for our business niche.

Google is constantly skimming more and more traffic from websites. If the FTC ever gets to audit how Google distributes visitors I bet you it will be much worse than everyone thinks.

[christianz]

I don't post often but I had to come check and see if the February 14th update was a named / core update as our traffic dropped significantly and has persisted since.

Same. February 14th was the kind of drop you expect from "core updates" and its still sliding lower. There was no corresponding spike in volatility meters and no announcement from Google.

Kudos for G for rolling out this penalty on 14th - we know how much they love us and the love is mutual :)

By the way - this is not affecting just one of my sites. It has affected all of my sites - also like a core update would.

[KaseyM]

Just had a look at Google Discover and someone who is using a default AMP theme has scraped my article and spun it and is right at the top.

It's also using a variation of our title which got us a Google manual action just a month ago.

Am I wasting my time.

[RedBar]

Insofar as PVs are concerned yet another very good Friday for me so far at 140% of average BUT the realworld business enquiries are not being generated as yet, we'll see what the next few weeks brings.

[rj87uk]

On further investigation into our rankings from the 14th seem to show that most keywords have remained in the same position although the results are bouncing still for me. It is definitely linked to the local and map results as our Insights in My Business Profile Manager shows map listings and search listings bouncing between our normal amount and zero. So that tells me that something is still in progress.

[Dooku]

No "AI" is used for ranking

The second best way is to get lots of links from G's favorite sites.

using a default AMP theme has scraped my article and spun it and is right at the top.

I always start laughing when the word AI pops up. As an amateur photographer I see there is now also an "AI photo editor" software.
It's all completely nonsense. If you know more about the math needed for AI like for example Bayesian networks, stats, decision trees, vector calculus....etc...etc... than you will see it's nothing more then a list of glorified "IF then Else" statements.

Regarding ranking, I have tested this many times in the past and with the more recent updates also: YES, build a bunch of backlinks and your rankings will go up, YES, it's that simple!

Check that website that scraped your content and is ranking at the top, I will bet you that guy has a good bunch of backlinks pointing to his website. That is a standard mode of operation for scrappers because it would not make any sense for them to wait for their website to organically grow and start ranking higher. But the most insulting thing that you will find is that most of their backlinks are quite garbage also! So, what does that say about G's algo and it's "AI"?

When needed, I build backlinks to boost my rankings......and it NEVER fails to work. Just make sure the backlinks have a mix of high quality and some lesser quality. But do NOT create backlinks that come from websites that have a domain rating(not official I know!) that is really bad, or are obviously spam websites. This way you will NOT get slapped by G.

[abcdefg]

There is a misunderstanding in Dooku's post:

AI exists, and it's not only if/else statements. What happens is that you vectorize the inputs, put it through an architecture that you design, and get the numeric outputs. AI training is about fitting the parameters in the architecture until the outputs and the expected outcomes have a relationship that you like (e.g. small variance).

For the most part, AIs don't work. G's AI is absolutely used to generate the widgets. It works somewhat (they've open-sourced it), and I use it to generate some texts, too.

G's algo is as simple as I mentioned above.

Your biggest misconception is that G prefers to have "high quality" pages ranked higher than "spams". Why? Surely people search more and click on more ads otherwise.

[Broaster]

I was reading some other comments on another website and article and one website owner who was in google news for 8 years said the past year and half has been horrendous, he has no penalties, no manual ones either, has followed all rules, original content and also gets major press releases from sports teams, etc

yet starting last year he received zero traffic from Google discover, and this year and onward all his traffic just died, he has a counter on his website that shows visitors at the moment and he went from getting a total of 10 thousand visits a day on average to 100 visits or less mostly returning readers but no organic traffic.

wow, I feel for this guy, he also said his adsense earnings have dropped badly where he doesn't know what to do since he has to pay for server and service fees.

Whats going on at google? a lot of people are getting screwed why do they constantly change the algorithm.

Is this just employees trying to keep their jobs, saying hey we gotta keep changing this so we are employed even though we don't need to often, they get to keep their livelihood at the expensive of website owners who suffer and rely on traffic to survive.

All the while these weird spam sites are getting ranked high, I just saw yesterday when I typed up a top story trend and an EDU college website that had a computer spun bot article with 15 backlinks to a gambling site on it in Top Stories.and likely getting thousands of visits that day.

This is just bad.

[Broaster]

abcdefg good post!

Google is misleading they tell people Content is King, we all know its backlinks that rank, before like the early days it was content but they had to change the algorithm because of those foreign spun content or content thieves who had spam blogs made for adsense gaming the system.

those bad apples ruined it for the honest website owners

[christianz]

Google is misleading they tell people Content is King, we all know its backlinks that rank

And fake backlinks from spun autogenerated sties work also (with degree of risk). Because Google can't (or choose not to) tell a fake autogenerated site that was created yesterday from a 20 year old niche site that the owner invested his whole life into.

Links were much better tool for ranking 10 years ago when 99.9% of them were not fake. Today I can estimate that only 0.1% of links are created by real visitors and real visitors in general link much less. Where would they post those links anyway, if most WWW forums etc are dead?

So if its not links, its certainly not on-page stuff that can determine ranking. On-page you can have text generators with AI just as good as Googles and google will never tell if content is high quality human generated or spun garbage.

EAT is worst of all, its just excuse for excluding all content that is not produced by mainstream large media companies.

So how can Google figure out real niche sites from autogenerated spam?

[Dooku]

@abcdefg, the misunderstanding is not of the concept of AI, but my post not explaining it well enough.
I do know that AI's exist, many companies use it with their big data, just like G is using it for their algo and predictions.

However, what most people seem to think what an AI is, is actually a far cry of what it actually means and consists of.
Virtually no G user will read scientific research papers on AI, let alone fully understand the mathematical concepts.......instead I notice that the Hollywood version seems to prevail :-)

I am willing to bet that the G algo is actually very simple but because G has an incredibly humungous big data set their predictions are more accurate because of that.

Your biggest misconception is that G prefers to have "high quality" pages ranked higher than "spams"

You certainly misunderstood that part of my post. This is EXACTLY why the G algo is simple and can be manipulated easily because many spammers can rank higher very easily than "quality" content. And I also mentioned I can very easily influence my rankings with backlinks.......and I have tested and confirmed this also for really BAD content just because I am curious.

[abcdefg]

@Dooku, so we agree :)

[RedBar]

Insofar as PVs are concerned Saturday was a completely normal weekend day at 75% and for the month 111.3% but this is lower than previous Februarys and potential new buyer enquiries are still extremely low.

There are multiple factors influencing things therefore we'll simply have to consolidate for the moment rather than make any rash decisions but I can foresee major global production alterations occurring within the next 2-3 years.

[rj87uk]

I still keep seeing out-of-region sites in the desktop SERPs, so there's work for Google to do to tidy that up.
The out-of-region sites may be relevant in terms of content, but they are not relevant from a geographic point of view.

Clearly not a core update rather than a local / Geo / map refresh which would be consistent with the Insight data and the flux in the reports. No actual SERP results have changed for me.

So in the UK it has been a Geo / Map update this week and I will say this: Data consistency.

Your Welcome.

[samwest]

How sophisticated is Google's AI? Just look at their net income report graph...if/then statements, lol.
Their profits are growing expiDENTially. They use it everywhere. It's so good, it's "spooky".

[macrotrends.net...]

[christianz]

@samwest

If you flip that chart upside down, it shows the overall quality and vitality of the WWW and small/medium online businesses.

[RedBar]

How sophisticated is Google's AI? Just look at their net income report graph

I have no idea if this breakdown analysis is available however is it possible to found out just who the big spenders are?

Most people here report a poor / decreasing ROI hwoever someone is obviously spending ad revenue and a serious amount of it.

[Broaster]

ChristianZ

Yes E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) is basically them saying only the big million dollar news corps will get ranking.

Basically if you want to be an authority you gotta be from a mega corp news site, or you gotta buy ads on google and spend money.

There is no way for an honest smaller blog or website who doesn't do illegal tactics to get major traffic, its pretty much a lost cause.

[japsec]

Both SERP and traffic seem frozen today, there is no movement.

[abcdefg]

@Broaster

I agree. EAT is just a "Patriot Act" way of saying that you don't have E, A, or T unless we think you do. It is telling their friends that they'll be taken care of.

Lots of bogus "SEO experts" make ludicrous suggestions, as if there is really a way for G to tell if one has EAT.

I follow some great blogs. You have to make an effort to discover them. Without exception they cannot be found on any search engine.