Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2022

[goodroi]

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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)

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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.

[Rusbellmadrigal]

Lot of fluctuation in one of my Legal sites.

[javelin]

It is an interesting thing to see how seo plays out across different kinds of sites. I have several different kinds that really lets me see the insanity.

One side is pure information research and some education. It is the strongest I have from google with increasing and steady results.

Another site is also research driven but I only update it about once a month and is still really young. 0 hits from Google but Bing and Duck still send traffic daily. With less than 30 posts its obviously not much yet the consistency is there.

A third site is eCommerce driven. It exists to let people purchase when I cannot be there and is really used by local people to me. The funny part is I do not run ads and organic traffic is 0 from all engines.

It really shows you that anyone who has eCommerce must pay to play or be forgotten. All the nonsense about organic results for products died a long time ago but some still believe in it. If you are using referrals to make money you are really in the same boat.

News or medical you need to be an "approved brand name" or you are punished. If you are into movies or other media then you can be considered borderline spam. They really do not try to hide the intent behind the design any longer. Old search is dead, the question is, where is it really going?

Is what has happened due to our theories here being right as in greed driven? This is highly possible and can be likely. But....

Seeing what has taken place has something else changed? An example can be, has the algorithm really shifted to semantics more than link structure, page and domain auth, and other factors? I ask this because if you look at tools like Ahrefs the numbers can be telling.

There are many sites that can pull 30k to over 100k in traffic with lower DR and their link structures are not that great. Meanwhile it is easy to find sites that have the "proper stats" but have been sinking in traffic. Apparently the model places like Ahrefs use can no longer make sense of what Google has done either.

There is no longer a real baseline to measure what moves the pendulum in the right direction. I am experimenting some with this right now, the three sites I spoke of earlier are part of that experimentation. It is just a curiosity that I cant help but play with.

[RedBar]

In years gone past the week following the Easter weekend has seen a lowering of traffic. In the UK the actual holidays were completely changed and most were back at work on Tuesday, this has resulted in every day this week so far being an average of 128%.Whether any of these visitors turn into genuine project enquiries later on remains to be seen however an up-to-date international widget trade report does indicate a massive donwturn in trade and especially so across the lowest-cost products.

[Martin Ice Web]

So far april was the lowest sales month with google for 4 years now. But Amazon sales picked up in april about 200%.

We get a lot of tor - traffic what indicates that google is not able to recognize the user and route the query to their ads.

[RedBar]

We get a lot of tor

That's interesting, mostly German or spread around.

Plus is most of the Tor mobile? I find Tor desktop a bit of a pain to use however Tor on my Android is "normal".

[MayankParmar]

I am down 40%. Organic, Discover, Top Stories and Discover all are affected.

Google is favouring large publications (with several publications owned by the same company) in my niche. Even when those large publications give a link back to my article and rely on my reporting, I wouldn't rank. I have been sharing examples of unfair practices with Google for nearly two years now and nothing has changed. It has gotten worse this month.

[BigKat]

As we all should know by now, Google's ever expanding profits comes from taking more and more from our wallets. Considering how well Google did during the pandemic, expect this year to be quite painful as Google squeezes even tighter to maintain year over year increases in profits. Besides algo changes, I also expect more "optimization" to the SERP layout to drive search traffic into ad clicks.



What I am seeing at the present time is a complete culling of buyer intent keywords. Commercial intent queries are returning nonsensical information pages with buy options largely restricted to ads. I'll have to see how this all shakes out, but to maintain year over year profits I fully expected Google to continue their transformation from search engine to a choke engine where businesses must pay to be found. Not surprisingly, traffic is up slightly from other search engines which I attribute to the roadblocks Google has constructed between businesses and consumers in their organic offerings.

[ChokenBako]

Today -20% compared to last week... seems that the Google Update finally hits me?

[ichthyous]

Today -20% compared to last week... seems that the Google Update finally hits me?

Search traffic is down 48%, and direct traffic is down 52% today by 11:30am. All of that is concentrated in traffic from USA, UK, AU and CA...which are all down in tandem between 50%-70%. This is clearly an all out assault on traffic from these countries, and I have watched it start with USA/CA, then to include UK and now also AU traffic.
Some weeks this is happening 3-4X per week, although it has tended to tick upwards late in the day and recover some of that. The sudden surge in late day traffic is poor quality and doesn't usually result in any business. Expect this to get worse and worse. You can write off Google search for half the week at least if this sticks.

...a complete culling of buyer intent keywords. Commercial intent queries are returning nonsensical information pages with buy options largely restricted to ads. I'll have to see how this all shakes out, but to maintain year over year profits I fully expected Google to continue their transformation from search engine to a choke engine where businesses must pay to be found.

It's been that way since April 2021 and continues so. Any search that was deemed to have commercial intent switched to informational results only...hence ten 'how to' or 'best of' articles in a row. Those come after the 50 other items Google has inserted on the page. My ranking plummeted across the board for the entire year, but has been recovering slowly since Feb. 2022 so perhaps my site is not being seen as being strictly commercial. You can bet that this will not revert back to pre-2021 as it's all about forcing businesses to pay. As I have said here many times over the years...I would gladly pay Google for viable traffic, but at $5-$6 per click for complete garbage traffic that never converts no thanks. I'll just focus on other things than search.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:29 pm (utc) on Apr 22, 2022]

[ecommerceprofit]

I agree with you ichthyous and have been affected over the years too. However, I was just on similarweb and looked at all the competition in my new industry. Similarweb lists how companies are getting their traffic (I know not an exact science) but it looks like 80% plus traffic goes through Google and the rest is split between others like bing, pinterest, facebook, etc. Just like in the stock market TINA applies here.

[BigKat]

a complete culling of buyer intent keywords.

It's been that way since April 2021 and continues so.

I'm thinking we were late to the party on this one, likely because the industry we operate in is rather small. In this environment, where Google continues to optimize search traffic to benefit them and them alone, no industry will be safe. Previously, some of our buyer intent keywords were stripped from us and competitors as well. What's going on at this very moment appears to be an expansion of the same but on a much larger scale spanning most buyer intent keywords.

The lesson being taught here (in our industry at least) is if you are looking to buy something, don't even bother with Google because options are limited to ads.

[javelin]

Thus far this week I am up 36%. This is the research site.

[Broaster]

ChristianZ

yes Google has hurt small time news publishers, independent news and niche websites who cover certain topics.

I can't even find what im lookin for in google anymore before over 10 years ago Id type in a phrase or a term long tail sentence and find the exact article that had it, now they just post big name websites who have similar keywords. They are controlling what is shown and blocking any independent sites or news even non political sites.

Im putting in work only to not even get any traffic from google news anymore, last time I got traffic from google news was over a year and half ago.

Google doesn't care, I read sometimes the help forums and several publishers no longer get enough traffic to make a living and been in the news covering niche topics like automotive, sports, food etc

only for a site like Vogue to write an article mentioning a certain food once or twice and the article not even being about food ranking above them in search

When I first started blogging it was easy, i set up an adsense and was shocked how money was coming in and I was able to talk about and post about my favorite topic and subject in a specific niche, you will never see this again.

The saddest one is when someone from Canada posted his website story and help all the help forum could say was you are not guaranteed to receive traffic from google news, the guy was earning over six figures on adsense from his website which was on topics pertaining Canada news he was in google news for 13 years, and the last two years he only made 2 thousand dollars thats insane. He had several employees and was paying server fees for the traffic and then he had to fire his employees due to no money coming and and took out a loan after his personal funds were exhausted all trying to revive his traffic. They are hurting the little guy the most.

I can now see why most people focus on youtube instead of google, it seems its easier to make a living doing youtube videos for your niche, as opposed to a website and blogging.

[Samsam1978]

AI Google is the worst thing to ever hit the internet. It is too soon, it is not trained enough.

It is not doing humanity any good.

Humans are here for a reason and that is that we do things better than AI. As a regular search Google user, I cannot find things anymore, all the lovely mum and pop sites are gone. Sometimes I have to search 3-4 times just to get what I am looking for or go over to Yahoo.

I run a site that gets millions of people a year; it is my full-time job, my traffic has halved since January and it remains a complete mystery as to why - I am being outranked by sites that have nothing to do with my topic area, say if my topic is wool I got sites about beer talking about wool, it is a right mess, dating sites talking about how to make jam, just messed up.

Give credit for our Niche Google. You can surely see this for the age of the URL?

News sites should be about daily/weekly/monthly news not about how to wallpaper for example. These are extreme examples but sites have now carried out this "catch-all" strategy. Hey, our site is strong let's just write about anything to get traffic, resulting in poor user performance.

Just news sites, psychology websites, anything that is authoritative just thrown me off my niche. As well as the load of foreign websites that pretend to be English, some have even started youtube videos to support the sites but the problem with youtube is that you can tell if you are not English.

1) Allow the webmaster to submit a site for review if the traffic has dropped to be reviewed by a human being if that webmaster is reaching over 10 million people a year or has been in the past.
1) Old domains should matter - we have history.
2) Stop ranking the spam/scraping websites
3) Give credit for good written English articles
5) Core vitals ranking - get rid of this - these are almost impossible to reach because of the adverts (unless anyone can shine a light on this)

We all probably have some of the largest websites in the world we are running but they don't listen to us.

Finally, my question to you Google is why is there this veil of mystery around the results of the search. Why not actually work with your publishers so you know who we are so we can all create the best thing for the internet.

[javelin]

@Broaster the answer is that freedom of speech is an illusion. Freedom itself is now an illusion. We have entered the bread and circuses state of our civilization while Rome burns. The evidence is all around us but no one wants to believe it. Drinking the coolaid is easier to deal with.

Within SEO it is easier to see the evidence and how it impacts our lives. Likewise we can see how controlling information can direct the sheep or cattle in directions of choice. For anyone to think that those such as Google can have that much power and things be honest... they are crazy.

Putting the social and political issues aside, the only thing we can look at is what we can do, and then what we cannot do. There still are niches which remain unaffected or where less focus is given. Meanwhile other niches are literally walled and people will never break through.

This is why I am smiling so big right now at Elon Musk due to Twitter. I dont care if you like him or not, its the principle of the matter.

[Samsam1978]

Look how quite the forum is now webmasters have given up. You just need to read Reddit to see the number of users saying the search rankings are rubbish since they launched the AI. It is a mess. Before long, someone will come into the marketplace and provide an alternative.

[ichthyous]

Traffic has "recovered" from yesterday's massive plunge. Except that today's traffic is all just nonsense. My home page is still down 73% today, my main (read: money making) pages are mostly down 30%-60%.
Meanwhile random and obscure bottom level pages are having a high number of visits from places like Bangladesh, Burma, Seychelles, Aruba etc. I think that this junk traffic is just a way to obscure the fact that Google is stealing the viable USA UK CA AU traffic with any commercial intent and leaving us all with the remainders.

This while my ranking is remaining stable and trending much higher than last year. It means nothing now because even if you're top three, you're still far far down the page.

[longjohnbronze]

there is a window of opportunity opening for some new company to do web search again.

I fear that view is far too optimistic. Google has ruined the web by incentivising the creation of useless crap content galore. The web may be at a point where a new market entrant probably couldn't deliver better results.

[Markedd]

Exactly a month after the traffic spiked, it now fell back to the previous levels (I assume it's going to go lower). So, as I anticipated, it was just Google's way of persuading me (us) that this is what we could see if we pay for ads. Also, I hope nobody ever doubts about traffic manipulation, not when this sort of fixed periods occur. Google is so lazy that it actually wrote 30 days in its algorithm. Just make it 27 days or 33 or something, they don't even try to hide it.

[RedBar]

Extremely low number across all sites for me today almost as though my analytical programme is broken / not working ... Need to investigate.

[javelin]

RedBar indeed lower numbers today. This is an inverse from my typical Sunday. Existing user interaction has increased though. New users are far fewer than it should be.

Does anyone remember last year about this time? Did they not start something in April, then May had a big hit? I think really the whole summer was like a core nightmare with the exception of July. This is what happens when Skynet takes over LOL!

[Samsam1978]

Im totally down I thought it was Easter but seems to be getting worse with spammy short articles above me. I just don't get it. So many updates, thanks for stress over Easter, why can they not just leave it be, every update the old sites loose traffic and just get replaced by new sites who then slowly fall later as not good enough. Give some old 15 year sites some credit.

[RedBar]

Global site with 6 consecutive days averaging 126.3%, lowest day 110%.

Saturdays and Sundays I usually expect about 66% of my weekday average, yesterday I was 38%, the last date I had a similar number was 25th December 2021 at 37%. Yes, my quietest day of the year.

So far today, after 10.5 hrs, I'm at 28.3% ... Something's happened / changed / been "manipulated", again.

[javelin]

Non commerce research site had a rank increase. 3x impression rate with added traffic. Increase of keyword base. Near 200 keyword sets at position 10 and above now.

Other sites are the same.

[Samsam1978]

@javelin what did you do to get a rank increase? My ranks are declining but not as bad as other times and traffic is 14k people a day from last month. Not good.

[javelin]

@samsam people will think im crazy but this specific site has been an experiment/hobby. It is just a topic I am an expert in and I write extensively on it. For this site I have never used advertising, obviously as no product is there to sell. Also I have never built any links, with the exception of two friends in like fields and our work crossed over.

Thus with that said, only two crossing links have ever been used. Rather I research keywords and build content. I do my best to use variations of said keywords to create "sets" within documents. I use strong internal linking and also link out always as a follow to authoritative sources by topic not seo numbers.

Thats it. It is enlightening to say the least.

[MayankParmar]

I thought it was Easter effect too, but traffic did not return to old levels.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redBar, it is traffic from tor desktop.

@ichthyous, i can confirm the traffic from foreign countries. Just one hit and gone.

Today we see a new dropt of -50% so far the biggest drop since panda algo launched years ago.
It is creasy because we do have a lot of #1-#3 spots but it seems to mean nothing.
We see our descriptions coming up in a lot of featured snippets ( so it should be a trusted source).
What we are missing is business traffic. So before this quality update we had a lot of business traffic. It seems that all traffic from those source are completely directed to google ads.

[christianz]

this quality update

"Quality update" - I can't help but smile.

With this "quality update" (Sunday, Monday, Today and ongoing?) my highest quality, oldest, biggest site got hit again (it had not nearly even recovered from Feb 24 massacre).
My lesser quality, smaller and younger site was +/- unaffected WoW.
My least quality, smallest and youngest site was up WoW.

This is repeating pattern in most updates. Auto generated gibberish sites have highest quality (right word count, author names, pictures, linked in profiles etc) and best site speed / vitals (no ads). So naturally these spam sites should be rewarded with these Google updates and they are.

I am also changing my strategy regarding disavow. I used to not file any disavow but seeing how brain-dead Google has become, I have lost confidence in their ability to filter out fake site backlinks and backlinks from hacked subpages on real websites. Their brain-dead algo may filter out most of them most of the time but with changes in the algo there is always risk of some of those links slipping through (that were previously ignored) and triggering some algorithmic unnatural links penalty.

The older the site the more these bad (intentional negative SEO or unintentional spam farms) links it will have. May be factor in why Google seems to hate older sites so much.

I am just trying to come up with rational explanations to why Googles ranking is so broken.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I see absolutely stellar gains - search traffic is up 49%(450,000 visitors) over last month on an old site but it's the newer content doing the heavy lifting. This site has remained unaffected by updates since 2009 so site age alone is not likely a problem.