Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2022

[goodroi]

---

System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5058707.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 5:58 am on Apr 1, 2022 (utc -5)

---

It's time for our April 2022 Google SEO discussion.

March SERPs changes appeared smaller, with no significant algorithm changes, and the fluctuations were noticed more locally by individual webmasters. Of course, Google continued to test and experiment throughout the month, with some announcements: See below.

For those of you that may have missed some of the announcements and changes, here are some of the stories from March.

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

Google confirmed the Page Experience update for Desktop [webmasterworld.com] was completed in March.
Google has released a Product Review in Search Update [webmasterworld.com]
Short video on Requesting Removal of Content Under "Right To Be Forgotten" [webmasterworld.com]
Learning learning how to connect, visualize, and analyze Search Console Data using Google Data Studio [webmasterworld.com]
Google's Android Rolls Out Deletion of Last 15 Minutes of Your Search [webmasterworld.com]
Google's John Mueller confirms it doesn't use the keywords meta tag for ranking. This is old news, of course, but it goes on to indicate what contributes to ranking. [webmasterworld.com]
An interesting discussion on SEO Tools for Web Developers [webmasterworld.com]
Google says, "we’ve decreased the number of irrelevant results by over 50pct" [webmasterworld.com]
There's now more context to Structured Data issues now in Search Console [webmasterworld.com]
Google Adds "Highly Cited" Labels for News Sources [webmasterworld.com]

Enough catching up, so let's get on with the latest SERPs observations for April.

[christianz]

How in the world does Google allow this site to rank? This is just madness.

Are you surprised?

Google's own blogging platform (blogger) hosts millions of fake blogs. And Google not just indexes them - they send traffic to some percentage of those fake blogs. And they give link juice and link penalties for links originating from that fake content.

This has been going on for 2 years at least and nobody at Google has bothered to stop this or even noticed it.

One of my sites has fake backlinks from 15000 fake blogspot blogs (and counting).

If you see this - inability to detect basic fake content - you understand that there is no hope of getting any kind of fair treatment for our websites.

[RedBar]

This has been going on for 2 years at least

Was this a typo? Don't you mean 12 years?

[JesterMagic]

FIFTY FOUR THOUSAND. Over 600 posts per day in the last 90 days. That's one new post every 2.4 minutes for the last 90 days.

You can thank all those Blog AI writing services for that which just steals snippets of content from all over the place and puts it together into a rambling incoherent mess.

Google AI still doesn't even have a simple understanding of content to catch this even though a website that adds 600 posts a day shouldn't be a big enough flag.

It is the same stupidity as Google ranking scrapers above the original content writers.

[samwest]

New record, lowest sales on a week in twenty years. Going hours now with no visits...yet still on page 1.
FUBAR...

[RedBar]

@samwest - What is just as surprising is when buyers feign shock when they learn prices have risen and ask why!

[longjohnbronze]

The other day I googled "american dad s02e05". The snippet returned shows information about not season 2, episode 5; but season 5, episode 2.

This may not seem like a big deal on the face of it. But it might be evidence of a badly trained AI. This kind of mistake would not happen with typical programming because there would be a regular expression for pattern matching that simply wouldn't allow for this kind of error.

As others pointed out before, a lot of the terrible search results we get these days may be the result of Google's long-term shift to AI-driven SERPs. This example is just one of the more obvious (I would say) instances of that.

[Samsam1978]

25% down today from yesterday's update, replaced by spam again

[christianz]

Was this a typo? Don't you mean 12 years?

2 years since I noticed this particular blogspot spammer and since number of domains and backlinks from his blogspot "farm" started to go parabolic.

It appears that blogspot has zero employees and its completely abandoned. Otherwise I can not explain how they can allow this level of vandalism to go on for so long.

[abcdefg]

Late December: Began of less crawling and slow indexing
Jan: G traffic trended down
Late Feb: G traffic halved
Late Mar: Another step down

FG

[engine]

Interesting: Google search for a specific term, page 1 returns the search as I might expect. When clicking "next" or page 2 it adds a parameter (an additional letter) to the search. Very strange.
I tried it with a few other search terms and it didn't act the same.

[bebopandrocksteady]

hmm, feels like things are heating up today. anyone else notice this?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I've been watching a pure script driven scraper site. The site even has spun content, iframes its source sites and several copies of itself on other domains AND EACH GETS OVER 2 MILLION GOOGLE VISITS PER MONTH. They are each 12-20 months in age with a quarter million pages of scraped content.

March results for them are in, up another 500k visits per month, each. It's nuts.

[bebopandrocksteady]

@Sgt, didn't google mention that we can report these sites not long ago? I could swear I remember this

[blend27]

I added this code above the fold, all the way on top to our home page only:

<style>
.flag{height:220px;text-align:center;width:100%;margin: 0 auto;text-align:center;}
.blue{background-color:#215BBC;color:#F9D648;min-height:100px;padding-top: 30px;font-size:20pt}
.yellow{background-color:#F9D648;color:#215BBC;min-height:100px;padding-top: 8px;font-size:20pt}
</style>
<div class="flag">
<div class="blue">
<span>
We Stand United
</span>
</div>
<div class="yellow">
<span>
With Our Brothers and Sisters in Ukraine.
<br>
Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!
</span>
</div>
</div>

...and now searching for domaininquestion.tld is no where to be found when searched for it. So did several of my competitors, same story.

domaininquestion.tld is almost 20 years old US based ECom site, so are competitors sites.

And it is only on Google.

[ichthyous]

Traffic improved over the weekend, but UK traffic was way off on Sunday. Today traffic started normally but simply fell off a cliff at 11am sharp and has been very low all day. My home page is -54% today. USA -14%, Canada - 49%, Australia -63%. Referral traffic and social media traffic has been down for almost two weeks as well.

[Markedd]

Oh for fcks sake. Google has started bloating my websites. The traffic spiked very high for the last few days, but I am not celebrating because I have seen it in 2020. The same pattern. High rise of traffic followed by complete crash about a month later for at least a year. And it also happened in April 2020. Anyone seeing something similar?

[bebopandrocksteady]

@markedd, I'm not necessarily seeing what you're seeing, but I know what you mean. seems like every time I get crushed by an update, a month or two prior, I see great progress.

[Jori]

And the other way around it's not true : a huge deep in our web traffic doesn't mean that we'll go to the moon in the next update.

[Neohippy]

Anyone else getting weird numbers in GA realtime today? (Metric total looks right, but 'right now' is lower than it should be)

[DaniO]

@Neohippy Same here, the realtime stats of active users is def not working correctly at the moment.
Started this morning around 07:00 AM (CEST).
You probably already know this but if you go to Realtime > Content, you can view the "real" active users count.

I have not found anything online yet about this, if anyone finds anything I would appreciate it!
Or if anyone got a solution to this, I guess it's probably only temporary?

/DaniO

[Neohippy]

@DaniO Thanks for confirming! And yes, hooray for the metric total in content, or I'd have had a total panic attack, heh.

I've seen the error go the other way a lot (where 'right now' is higher than it should be), and it's always resolved itself before *shrug*

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today. US semrush sensor on fire. Here we go again :|

[McPheeSees]

There is some kind of update going on, but I've found something that I always see which makes me wonder where it comes from. Both Google and Bing seem to be running in tandem. In other words, the behavior on search is the same. How is that possible? Two separate companies but they seem to share in the same type of changes at the same time. It's something I've never understood. It's against the law to collude, price fix or anything like that, so why does this happen every time there is a major update?

[shadowlight]

Or if anyone got a solution to this, I guess it's probably only temporary?

Temporary? Ive lost count of how many posts are mad saying this happens frequently.

Solution? Switch to Matamo

[RedBar]

There is some kind of update going on

There is always something going on all the time. The beginning of May for many years used to have a major update and was very evident, really big updates do not seem to happen so much these days which is why so many experience nothing / very little and a specific set seem to get absolutely hammered.

[Neohippy]

I've never known realtime to be so borked for so long.

(Was normal for a very short while this morning, now showing crazy low figures again, though metric total & other reports still show fairly normal traffic).

[IamnotMattCutts]

realtime is messed up for me also. Has been since yesterday.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

@Sgt, didn't google mention that we can report these sites not long ago? I could swear I remember this

The group of spam sites have been reported many times, it makes no difference. They are obvious script/scraper sites but the sites have rediculous backlink profiles so it would take a human to look. I'll sticky a mod with the domain names if they wish to see for themselves. They'd make an interesting case study as most webmasters struggle while these get millions of views from search each month.

[goodroi]

Reporting sites is usually more to help Google figure out what common issues exist and which part of the algo they should address next & less about Google taking manual actions on individual sites.

Google is dealing with billions of web pages. It is impractical for them to do manual actions (except in extreme cases like adult stuff showing up for children's search terms). They strongly prefer responding with automated algorithms that can scale. The tricky part is developing an automated algo that will take out the spammers without triggering false positives that accidentally penalize innocent sites.

A smart spammer will be creative and exploit a weakness in the algo that is hard for Google to isolate without causing massive collateral damage. You can report the spam tactic to Google but remember they are in constant triage mode. If the spammer figured out a new technique that isn't widespread, Google will not make it a high priority to address. In the meantime, they might try some scare tactics. Google will claim they are going after it and you can be permanently banned, etc, etc to discourage people from that tactic. Once that spam tactic becomes common, then Google will work on it but that can take time to develop an acceptable solution with low enough rate of false positives. This is why a creative spam technique can work for months or years before the Google hammer bashes it.