Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2022

[goodroi]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5060824.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 3:51 pm on May 1, 2022 (utc -5)

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Here's our May 2022 Google SEO discussion.

Google's tests are constant, and it seems to have found a way to iron out the huge SERPs changes we've often seen. Throughout April we've seen the winners and losers in the ranking and traffic roundabouts and swings.

Just keeping you up-to-date, here are some of the announcements and changes we've seen in April.

Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2022 [webmasterworld.com]
Google Webspam Report 2021 Published [webmasterworld.com]
New Options For Removal of Personally-Identifiable Information From Search [webmasterworld.com]
Using Google Trends to Help With Planning New Content [webmasterworld.com]
Podcast: The Importance of Structured Data [webmasterworld.com]
Google Introduces Multisearch Lens [webmasterworld.com]

Let's try and work out what is causing the shift in ranking and traffic, so it's time to dig into the latest SERPs observations for May.

[Samsam1978]

I am a published author and run a 15 year old website.

Since January, due to Google updates and almost 40% traffic loss - I have reduced my writing time on my site and focused on writing traditional books, the main reason is my rankings are being overtaken by spammers or poorly written articles by news/magazine outlets who employ foreign writers for SEO purposes.

In time, if this carries on, the writers and high-quality independent websites will be pushed out of the marketplace - and only spam or news/magazine sites left.

I have just been looking at a few sites that are now doing REALLY well and the new Google AI loves them. They all seem to have the following:

1. Created in last 18 months
2. Wordpress/ simple design
3. Author profile
4. Long - AI generated text fails to write in first person, or any long words, complex metaphors etc
5. SPAM SPAM and thousands of pages created in short space of time
6. AMAZING core vitals that I cannot even beat as my users love my images too much

One in particular, since January 2022 this site (I have found) has managed to post 62,000 articles. Surely, Google should know that this must be automated no human (even with large team) can create that many articles. And, guess what! 1 million to 500k people a month already in just 3 months. All this while I - a published author for Penguin is no-where. I can just manage 1-10 articles a day on my 15 year old website.


Come-on Google sort it out, it's not hard...

1. Give credit to old established websites
2. Realize that slowly updating/uploading articles means humans are writing them
3. If a site used to get 1 million + users before AI search - it deserves to be seen as people loved these sites
4. News or magazine websites are not the holy grail many of the articles that are non-news related are badly written.
5. In December 2019 (I keep a diary) Google search was awesome since then it has just been a downhill spiral of spam.
6. Any sites adding 1000s pages every month needs to be flagged as spam.

[javelin]

@Sam while I am not experiencing your pain I do understand it. For those of us not yet feeling the blows from Google, we will eventually. This is why we need to focus where we can now on what is still working.

Bing, Yahoo, and others still function to the degree they do with smaller market share. I know SEO is SEO but each will have a slight variation in what they are looking for.

I really do not think things will get better, but rather worse. Why? Pay attention to what has taken place since 2020. We are literally in the middle of an information revolution. Controlling information is where its at from elections to medical advice, masks or vaccines, you name it. No opinion can be allowed that is not an official narrative.

Do we really think they will stop there? While the rest of the world sleeps or watches Netflix the SEO community can see how things are shaping up. This is why Elon Musk buying Twitter is so radical and necessary. Power only wants more power and to break the real monopoly controlling us will require more than chanting in the streets.

[longjohnbronze]

Come-on Google sort it out, it's not hard...

Most people on here would agree with you, but: If it's hardER and does not increase profits, why would they bother? We're only seeing a monopolist do what monopolists have always done - milk the cash cow.

[vivektank]

Our web design website in SG experiencing dropped sales and organic traffic after recent updates. Rankings are being overtaken by spammers or poorly written articles by other websites that employ foreign writers for SEO purposes. I think Google gives credit to older websites.

[RedBar]

What has happened today Monday 1st May? Traditionally for years G had major algo updates at the begining of May, the most notorious for me being 05/05/05 ... Easy to remember eh?

It's been a completely normal and average weekend for me however today, after 12 hours, my traffic is at 14-15% across global and UK sites ... Anyone else?

A quick review of my SERPs look normal.

[samwest]

Sam this is just my opinion but if you see that happen they are treating you like a new website. I think... and I state again that I think sites can pages can rank for keywords in any top position but in the end it doesnt matter. I believe the system is a tier where groups of sites or pages compete at that same level.

I believe you are allowed to have chances at impressions in that bracket until you graduate to the next and find tougher competitors. Think of it like baseball with minor and major leagues. Ranking above position 5 is not always equal to everyone depending on overall site rank and competitive bracket.... if all that makes sense.

The problem with this is...the site is nearly as old as Google itself. 20 years old.
The site jockeys between the first and second organic result...the other problem is the ridiculous top loading.
Regardless, you'd think it would at least get SOME traffic...but it performs as if it is on page 1000.

[Samsam1978]

@samwest I think the problem is that in order to rank you have to have a site that is white, no images, bare and does not look that pleasing. I am not willing to reduce my site to this as I believe that I would rather keep the design nice and pleasing for the user, but this comes at a cost of poor core vitals. Do you mean Google in terms of ridiculous top loading?

[christianz]

@Samsam1978

You seem to be convinced that CWW are very influential on ranking. I don't think they are very influential. The problem with our human made, human written, but not corporate owned and not blue checkmark / priority publisher sites is that Google think fake AI generated websites are real websites and our real websites have to compete with them, because they are assigned somewhat similar EAT (no EAT basically).

Add to that "toploading" of the priority stuff and toploading of googlespam (widgets, youtube), you find yourself getting less traffic for your 15 year old site where you invested your whole life into, than some vertical TickTocky viral lol video that took 2 minutes to create and provided exactly zero value to anyone, save for some entertainment (if you're 12 and not very bright).

CWW is the least of our problems.

[Jori]

What Google want to achieve : independents beeing not independent. We have now to work for huge corporations.

Maybe it's a sign of times, but I receive a lot of proposals, corporations wanting to buy my website. Of course, not for a fair value.

I'm beeing paranoid, but could we think that they are doing nseo on target websites, just to "force" the sell ? If you can kill the last remnants of competition...

[samwest]

@ Jori - that started exactly on May 10th 2010 during the aptly named MAYDAY update. It's been downhill ever since.

[Samsam1978]

In my niche, I don't have the problem with top-loading, if I did I bet it would be even worse traffic than it is. What do you mean by CWW?

[RedBar]

the aptly named MAYDAY update

Wasn't that the great image theft update too?

Insofar as today is concerned with 6 hours of my Googleday remaining, my global site is at 30%. Interestingly checking my most popular pages today only two of them are in my regualr top 10 !.!.! Obviously not normal even though I do rank well for those pages.

Something is defintely happening.

[javelin]

My sites are running above average for a Monday.

@Jori the nseo matter can definitely be real. It does not have to be a corporate big boy picking on us either. Part of the whole "Google will ignore xyz links, oh and you dont have to use disavow any longer" was supposed to take care of that.

Still the truth of that impact can be hard to know. I treat different sites in different ways. Oddly enough the one I do literally no linking with and ignore the backlink profile is doing best. It also has a very large amount of written content... still.

[vivektank]

I think traffic goes down due to possible Google search algorithm updates all week. All across my websites, I'm experiencing very, very low traffic. Keyword ranking is all the same, which made me even more confused. I also heard about KG (Knowledge Graph) update is also ongoing. Has anyone seen Knowledge Panel changes yesterday or today?

[javelin]

The thing is everyone can see where search is going. Discover is a prime example. They want to deliver content to people before they ever search for it. Generating this feed via apps is just the beginning. It becomes just like the Netflix "because you watched" category or Youtube suggested videos.

This is in part why they began to hit referring sites for products and refocusing organic search more for research based material. By the time we begin using augmented reality as a daily tool in our lives the old fashioned search engines will be near prehistoric by comparison. It will definitely get harder for the small guys as corporate brands can buy into the right placement for their products.

[MayankParmar]

Google Discover:
November = -47.4104%
December = +58.8018%
January = -37.3626%
February = +36.3958%
March = -36.6048%
April = -29.0398

Organic:
November = -22.2222%
December = -33.5404%
January = +6.70194%
February = -1.89036%
March = -25.3763%
April = -6.54206%

It got worse in the last two months.

[Martin Ice Web]

Meanwhile google is going down the drain.
Now even supermarket shops are at top 10 for technical supplies.
EAT? No
Know How? No
Description? Not at all
Do they know what they are selling? No
Support? No

This is stuppid.
I guess to copy and past manufacture text and adding NO extra portion of know how or pics is the best way to compete these days.

[RedBar]

'Tis very quiet here ... Everybody flatlining or just middlin' around with no sense of any direction whatsoever?

FWIW my realworld business enquiries, and many of my global competitors, are experiencing extremely low levels of traffic and interest.

[Jori]

Flat line here, trying to know what to do next.

* If I move, I'm dead *

That because even "good" actions can lead you to hell nowadays. Nonsense, indeed.

[christianz]

I would gladly take the flat line. I am seeing big drop yesterday/today. Across multiple sites. From already low levels, of course.

[shadowlight]

'Tis very quiet here ... Everybody flatlining or just middlin' around with no sense of any direction whatsoever?

Yes. Im beginning to feel like its not worth it anymore. I have a really good authoritative site that has performed well over the years, until the last few years when Google have been hell bent on decreasing organic visits (that make any kind of money) and increasing their own revenue with what seems like constant updates, then having to deal with the impact of covid, lots of ups and downs over the past few years. Was steady(ish) over the last few months and was finally beginning to stress less, however something definitely happened beginning of Apr that has just resulted in poor non converting traffic....again!

No doubt whatever changes they made will be good for Gorges revenue stream.

[Markedd]

In my case, they increased the traffic for exactly one month (exactly 30 days!) and then it's slowly going down, first it's the keywords bleed, which has started to show its teeth and then the traffic will reach about half of what I currently get. This is the pattern that they have been using the last 2 years with the group of sites that I am part of. I say group because it's painfully obvious that I no longer rise or fall by myself. It's now a group of sites, all in the same niche that follow the same pattern.

[KaseyM]

I've been dropping traffic for what seems like every week this year. This week is by far the lowest (slightly above 2019 levels).

Nothing seems to get traction.

[SteveWrz]

@KaseyM -- same here. On 4 of my 5 sites it has just been a steady decrease week over week over week since February. Every week another 5% gets chipped away and there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. I don't understand anymore.

[javelin]

Leading up to May 2 something definitely did happen with Google. Across the board I had not only position changes, not all bad for there were improvements, but also changes in keyword groupings used for impressions.

While impression rates are on par with previous weeks it appears that the serps are trying to rank these new keyword sets. It is almost as if they flipped a switch and reset something. Maybe its like shuffling a deck of cards before a new deal if I had to try and describe what Im seeing.

Traffic is slightly down but not horrible since Monday and has been gaining back to normal through today. It really does make you wonder what they are up to at Google. Why keep screwing with things on nearly a weekly basis?

[Samsam1978]

@KaseyM -- same here. On 4 of my 5 sites it has just been a steady decrease week over week over week since February. Every week another 5% gets chipped away and there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. I don't understand anymore.

I am seeing my site loose about 5-10% every day. Not normal. Rankings seem steady but some are falling and being outranked by spam. Def something I just cannot work out. No logic ranking poor websites in places 1-4 actually wondering if the stress and lack of sleep is worth it when the searches change weekly, how do they expect us to keep creating amazing content when they just give our rankings over to SPAM which goes in months to come anyway, by then were be out of business. Bad days.

[surnames]

In my opinion Google is broken as a reputable search engine and unlikely to be fixed with the current ownership.

It was a great ride pouring my heart and soul into developing useful, meaningful websites over the past 25 years and being financially and personally rewarded.

I feel it's over and time spent now on my sites is wasted and only benefits Google. Time to open a new chapter in the book of my life.

[Samsam1978]

@Surname - ditto, I still get people writing daily thanking me for my content and amazing look - 15 years here. I don't have multiple websites just the one as I actually write my content. Google in my view it is totally broken. Pitty we can't all raise this with them but they don't listen and don't care about the independent webmaster. By the time they fix it (if they ever do which is doubtful) older sites will be out of business and the web full of spam.

Google = by de-ranking the long-serving internet publisher you are on your way to ruining the internet and the lives of people that no longer read the right information.

[MayankParmar]

On a steady decline here as others. In my niche, Google continues to favour large publishers owned by a British media company (starts with F) and then we have videos pushing us down further.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 8:59 am (utc) on May 6, 2022]