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.

[javelin]

@Kickaxe I agree site age is not an issue. My research site that received a huge lift is only at 1 year 7 months and is making strong gains. The focus is around content as I have been updating it far more regularly and deeply than my older sites.

[Jori]

Site age is an issue because of netlinking profile.
Lots of "bad" links pointing to them will cause much arm.

[Martin Ice Web]

Wasn´t it that google changed to bad sites doesn´t hurt our site but this links are out of value?

[christianz]

I see absolutely stellar gains - search traffic is up 49%(450,000 visitors) over last month on an old site

That is encouraging to hear. I am not suggesting that Google is demoting older sites simply because they are older. There has to be some side effect of site age that makes them less favored. Like the accumulation of bad links - that's just one theoretical/speculative explanation.

The kind of links that I am seeing are extremely toxic - URL includes my keywords, page content is gibberish with links to my site (and some other sites in this vertical) and oftentimes these pages are placed in secret random letter subfolders of some legit older sites, like Wordpress blogs, which have been hacked (unknown to the site owners).

Can Google algo understand that I am not buying these links and that it is some malicious competitior doing this? I don't think so.

In one evening I added 1600 domains to my disavow file and that's not nearly all. Most are pure spam that gets completely ignored by Google I am sure, but is all of it ignored?

[christianz]

Wasn´t it that google changed to bad sites doesn´t hurt our site but this links are out of value?

This is a long story but I think the current understanding is that there is some kind of algorithmic "penalty" for sites with overwhelmingly terrible backlink profile / substantial amount of bad links. Which also opens door to negative SEO, intentional or unintentional.

I think this is terrible mistake because enabling negative manipulation is essentially the same as enabling positive manipulation - instead of building links to your site, you just have to build suspect links to your competitors.

[saladtosser]

>>>Can Google algo understand that I am not buying these links and that it is some malicious competitior doing this? I don't think so.<<<

With analytics installed on nearly every site out there, it wouldn't be too difficult to track you across other sites that didn't previously link to you then after you have visited the site a link appears a few days/weeks after. And they will know which site you own if you used analytics or webmaster tools and have validated yourself as the owner of the said site!

Don't use Chrome, and use a VPN when looking for backlinks if you want to build links with a smaller footprint, I would guess that's the best strategy, or wait for orgnic links to turn up on thier own which I do (have to say its not working though lol)!

[Samsam1978]

Google ranking is BROKEN - my 15 year old site 30% down since January. Some 8k articles hand written out ranked by auto generated spam.
THIS IS SO TRUE:
"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."

Google need to give credit to older sites that have served millions of people over the years who love the content. Not these new core vitals 100%, blackhat, AI written spam. The spammers must be making a fortune.

[ichthyous]

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.

Yes that's right. 1st quarter was extremely busy for me...traffic was good and even though my ranking was not what it was back in 2019 for example, it was still better than today. Starting end of March or early April I started to lose term after term as the searches switched all to informational sites only. This got even worse when image search also switched to ranking images from very large powerful news and media sites almost exclusively. At that time I had an idea that being an overtly commercial site was a death sentence in the new Google search. I have kept all e-commerce capabilities off this site, but started to remove most text referring to "purchase" or "buy", which was not very common on my site anyway because it's a high end product so I use terms like "Inquire".

Over the summer we started seeing the page layout changes and it really got bad. Then we saw traffic manipulation in differing patterns as if we were all being experimented on. I still see that...most apparently in the disappearing act that English language does every few days where it suddenly drops 25%-60% out of the blue.

So far this year my ranking has mysteriously recovered quite a bit...almost back to pre April 2021. But traffic is much lower now, and so are conversions. I blame both Google and fear over inflation and the war for that.

[javelin]

@ichthyous I believe more hits are coming with the word play. It may not impact you but news was recently released concerning "woke" terms. They will be suggesting search terms to users such as.... instead of entering the word man use person. Its insanity. Im curious as to how this may impact the broader seo community as well.

No doubt they have lost their minds. My sites are still doing well... but they are nuts lol.

[RedBar]

Initially Monday was not looking good for me yet finished at 103.3%, Tuesday started in a similar vein but ended with 113.7%, today seems to have started well and nearly at 50% already ... fingers crossed.

Traffic sources have been normal with the USA down a couple of points.

What I have seen is a bizarre 4 paid for clicks, 2 x USA, 1 x Belgium, 1 x UK.

I do not pay for any advertsing anywhere, never, ever have done, all these 4 clicks were supposedly using the MS Edge browswer.

Is it just me?

[saladtosser]

Reality check, you have most likely done nothing wrong with your sites!

Google would/will be hit in the next quarter by the earnings lost from Ukraine. It's probably not a coincidence they pulled the leaver around the same time the invasion started (24th, according to my data). They will need to reign in the money from somewhere once the war kicked off and 43 million people got taken offline. Since the invasion started, there seem to be more complaints of lost traffic than usual across the forums....

If Ukraine was one of your significant traffic sources, then traffic loss makes sense, of course.

Other than that, it's just business making up for lost coin where they can, and the rest of the world's traffic is up for grabs to the highest bidder, literally.....

[RedBar]

the war kicked off and 43 million people got taken offline.

Errr, no, the vast majority are still online, The Net infrastrucure has so far not been targetted by either side, it's useful to them both.

[MayankParmar]

The next core update should be released in May or June.. and fix our traffic (hopefully :))

[edited by: MayankParmar at 11:08 am (utc) on Apr 28, 2022]

[Neohippy]

Well this is a weird one... average position has vanished from GSC :o

[rustybrick]

It seems like a bug

[renatovieira]

woww... huge drop today... all right, let's go again :-|

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira My drops tend to come a day or two after yours. I have noticed that usa traffic is poor, starting the day at -50% yesterday and today. It catches up only very late in the day. Meanwhile lots of traffic from Vietnam, China, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, etc. This masks the fact that valuable usa traffic is much lower in reality than it used to be. I'll have entire days where Australia vanishes now, whereas for a period in 2020 it suddenly became ~15% of my daily traffic. Almost all of my business comes from USA, AU, CA and UK...pretty much everything else is irrelevant...and those are countries with highly manipulated traffic flow by google. The overall number of visits to my site never breaks out of a tight range these days, even though my ranking has improved so far this year.

[KaseyM]

@RedBar You seem to report gains whenever I lose! We're not in the same niche are we haha!

[javelin]

Overall 35% increase this week from previous. But guess what... May is almost here. Anyone taking bets on a massive core update this weekend? lol

[Broaster]

I wasn't getting any traffic so I stopped wasting my time to post articles and put in hard work for hours on end only to earn a few pennies on adsense and no traffic to my decades old blog

Then I post two articles two days ago and I got like 30 visits in the hour I posted it, but then today and yesterday I posted 4 more articles and no traffic like 3 or 5 visits per hour

this sucks. Im probably hit with some penalty but Google doesn't tell you, and trying to toy with your site is like playing russian roulette, ive read stories of people who never tampered with their sites and then 3 years later their traffic started booming again, its because Google constantly plays around and one year something is safe and legal to do in terms of SEO and then a few years later Google says it illegal and punishes you.

Reminds me of the disavow tool people had to go through thousands of even hundreds of thousands of bad spammy backlinks to their site and disavow them later, Google says be careful dont use disavow wrongly or else your site will suffer, and then a few years after they say you dont need to use the disavow tool anymore.

Why do they make it so difficult? I think its the people working there they want to keep a job so they constantly change up the algo so they stay in employed and it makes them look busy

The other search engines like yahoo keep it simple, Why cant google just let people focus on posting articles and content instead of doing all this technical stuff that most writers or bloggers have no clue about?

[Broaster]

@sgt kickaxe what type of website do you have thats impressive to get 450,000 visitors a month

[Martin Ice Web]

woww... huge drop today... all right, let's go again :-|

pretty big this time, yes. One of the biggest drops we have ever seen so far.

[KaseyM]

Can confirm a big drop this end (entertainment news niche). Lots of spam in the results which always gives me hope that it reverses.

Also in entertainment, Google themselves now take up a huge portion of the results with their "What to watch" banners. Can the EU go after that next please?

[christianz]

On my end traffic is also pretty terrible today.

[EditorialGuy]

Reminds me of the disavow tool people had to go through thousands of even hundreds of thousands of bad spammy backlinks to their site and disavow them later, Google says be careful dont use disavow wrongly or else your site will suffer, and then a few years after they say you dont need to use the disavow tool anymore.

The disavow tool was intended to help site owners and SEOs clean up spammy llnks that they had control over. This was always made clear, but--as always--too many people didn't listen.

[renatovieira]

Yesterday the drop was big. Today I can already see that it will be even bigger. Something big coming? :-|

[javelin]

Something must have happened over with Bing. Its really showing me some love.

[RedBar]

No spikes nor troughs for me this week, Monday to Friday has average 101.7%. Traffic sources seem normal.

Question, what are www.bing.com/ ***Encrypted Search*** paid for results using MS Edge?

[ichthyous]

Yesterday somewhat of a drop, today a massive drop in traffic looks like. But my ranking is higher today. Perhaps this is new for some of you, but I've been seeing these days where traffic drops off a cliff on a regular basis now. IF this is a way of rotating traffic so that more sites get seen instead of always the same sites on top I could accept that, but I doubt Google is being that generous. It's more about the experiments with page layout and loading the pages with other Google widgets.

Google's stock has dropped a bit due to lower ad performance on YouTube. Unrelated but we may see videos take over even more now.

Also...my pinterest traffic has dropped off to a fraction of what it used to be. Seems like Google has mostly removed the pinterest results from search and image search?

[ichthyous]

I am seeing backlink counts reported in GSC dropping for the last two months or so. Just wondering if anyone else is seeing this?