Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2022

[goodroi]

---

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)

---

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.

[RedBar]

@juvenile seo ... Welcome to WebmasterWorld

[not2easy]

@juvenile seo - Not to go too far off topic here, Google AMP pages started dying a few years ago, I would not be concerned about their performance.
From 2020: [webmasterworld.com...]

[ichthyous]

Traffic is like a rollercoaster. Up, down, full stop, up , down ....

I'm seeing the same thing...wild swings in traffic from day to day and hour to hour...but not in rank.

My sales are non-existant since the beginning of the year...the worst crash in business that I have ever had and worse than the 2008 crash. That's because back then I still had great traffic...now traffic is perhaps one third of what it was then and my items are higher price point.

Add on the current market crash, the war, inflation, and looming recession and it's game over for a while in terms of sales.

[Samsam1978]

I'm seeing 10% drop month on month on my 14-year-old website. Shaved about 1 million uniques a month so far since January. Decided I am not going to bother losing sleep over it (and I have worried a great deal), I by far have the best content but brand new sites (less than 3 years old) with AI content outrank me.

Another thing, youtube does not rank my videos. Had someone read my content on Youtube and they were getting millions of views, got it taken down for infringement - and now I don't rank for similar videos.

On a personal search note - I also cannot find anything on Google search anymore. Large sites or non-relevant sites come up in the search or just weird results, Ive had to go to bing in order to find a few things lately. Can we come up with some of these results as examples.

[edited by: Samsam1978 at 6:51 am (utc) on May 13, 2022]

[Samsam1978]

@juvenile seo ...welcome to webmaster world

[Martin Ice Web]

@SamSam,

a i wrote before in germany big food companies just pushed the excel lists from manufactures into their shop system and ranking very well. They don´t know what they are selling. They can´t even give you help or answer questions.
Well informed niche sites are pushed back to page 3.
google was getting big because it ranked good niche content sites.

[juvenile seo]

Thanks @Samsam1978 +

[juvenile seo]

Thanks @RedBar

[christianz]

Traffic very low and sliding lower every day for the past 3-4 weeks.

Another thing, youtube does not rank my videos. Had someone read my content on Youtube and they were getting millions of views, got it taken down for infringement - and now I don't rank for similar videos.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. It used to be that you did not have to produce content on YouTube - you could just publish it on your website and people would be able to find it.

Now only YouTube is allowed to rank, so you have to put everything on YouTube. That includes those of us who develop data driven, interactive apps.

If we build a weather app, we have to sit down in front of camera and record a new video per each city in the world per each day (thousands of videos per day), or better yet - hire army of video presenters and do this for each city multiplied by each hour of day. How about a cool YouTube video per each square mile, per each hour per each day in the year? Sounds like a plan!

If you built a flight tracker, for example, you would make a YouTube video for each departing airplane. Thousands of videos per day - yes a lot of work, but, if you don't put in the work, you're not gonna reap the rewards!

[mosxu]

Lots of fake traffic to my ads… G announced the security issues have been fixed.

Who is creating the fake traffic?

[samwest]

Who is creating the fake traffic?

IMHO, criminals.

Funny to think, they used to be so worried about people gaming the system, now they have become the de-facto professionals in rigging and gaming the systems. SMH

[mosxu]

So obvious the traffic is fake…

Elon was talking about getting rid of bots on Twitter can someone get rid of bots on my ads?

[KaseyM]

The spam sites are out of control and ranking really well. That's the only thing keeping me going knowing that it's Google's fault and not mine.

[samwest]

@mos - and they all thought we were nuts suggesting Zombie traffic was a thing...lol

[mosxu]

@sam

We all know it…

Elon buy a search engine too!

[Samsam1978]

Logged in and worse traffic in all history of my site. Why can't they just not rank sites that are less than 2 years old. When I go to the results I see the same thing, Wordpress white pages tons of content that is clearly AI driven. It's a joke.

[christianz]

Why can't they just not rank sites that are less than 2 years old.

That would work only as temporary (emergency) solution. If they completely banned all sites created less than 2 years ago, 60% of spam would be gone, and it would be great for a while.

But what happens next? After 2 years most of that filtered spam would be "aged" and return to SERPs. Eventually all it would do is introduce prohibitive time barrier-of-entry for all new legitimate sites (not that there are many these days).

Only solution is to actually introduce some intelligence to their ranking system so that it does not value specialist sites that are niche leaders (and have been for years) on same level as AI generated nonsense.

Also it would help if they didn't have 4 top ads in a row, 800 px high YouTube widgets and blatant favoritism of large publishers for all terms which they put in their "made for Google ranking" articles which are designed to milk their high EAT precisely to steal traffic from small publishers who actually know what their writing about.

[RedBar]

Insofar as my global site is concerned this month I am seeing more traffic to the UK than its average to the extent it has already had 89.2% of April's PVs and doubled its normal volume so far after 13.5 days.

This is to a .com site and at the same time I am also seeing traffic to my .uk reduced considerably even though the pages rank well.

"Something's" not right however I can't get a handle on it as yet.

[javelin]

I looked online at places like Jasper which is an AI writing tool. It is just one of many. So here is whats insane. They are listed with many corporations and some have also been featured in news media. Apparently since 2020 with the advances in GPT-3 tech there has been an unprecedented explosion.

Well we all know this here... but what does Google actually say? Also what does Google actually do?

Google states that AI writing is against its policy. Also Mueller stated “I can’t claim that. But for us, if we see that something is automatically generated, then the webspam team can definitely take action on that. And I don’t know how the future will evolve there, but I imagine like with any other of these technologies, there will be a little bit of a cat and mouse game, where sometimes people will do something and they get away with it, and then the webspam team catches up and solves that issue on a broader scale."

The point is that they have absolutely no way of automatically doing anything right now... at all. It appears that any action that is taken would be due to a human review. When these things can push thousands of web pages the rest of us are getting "swamped" and pushed out of existence little by little.

It appears that Google is doing nothing because they cannot do anything and ultimately it will destroy the brand. AI is cool and all that but ultimately no machine can ever replace real expertise.

[JesterMagic]

Google should take age of site and frequency of updates of the actual page content into account.

Unfortunately the popularity of writing content using AI has created another difficulty for search engines to rank pages and the website as a whole properly.

Google needs to take the billions they earn and start manually ranking domains based on the quality of content it has. If it is content that clearly has been generated by and AI then penalize it.

Google's Search algorithm AI is good at some things but not deciding if content is quality or not as it cannot actually understand it.

[christianz]

@JesterMagic

You are assuming that Google actually cares about this. It increasingly looks like they simply don't. They are effectively "retiring" organic results entirely, so why invest in getting rid of the spam.

If this spam will start to sabotage their direct answers, featured snippets and widgets, only then it will be problem. And maybe some advancements in spam detection will trickle down to the list of "blue links" somewhere down below.

Web desperately needs a real search engine. Not this pile of garbage.

[javelin]

@christianz @jestermagic
Manual rating of content would be impossible, although it would be nice for there to be more human eyes on whats actually happening out here.

I believe search is undergoing a transformation process. The problem is that they cannot keep up with that is happening nor figure out how to create proper countermeasures fast enough.

When technology advances both sides gain advantages to each side of the coin. Manipulation and correction both become limited to the degree of said technology. The problem in this case is that their systems cannot validate what is human and what is machine. What basis can realistically be used to qualify this?

If they look at the volume of content created then the bots will slow its creation to mask itself. The semantics and context will only improve with time so that too will become an irrelevant benchmark. Nerfing sites younger than 2 years creates a mass headache after that period of time.

The only thing I can think of is to use additional code within their analytics perhaps through an api. Its purpose is to sense or detect any tool which is using third party tools such as AI for creating content. It really is a difficult problem and that I understand, but we are within a slow and painful death.

They cannot maintain an authentic brand without authentic and original creators. If they do not fix this problem fast wherever they intend to go will not matter as they will become less relevant to users.

Present day AI is not a thinking mind. It merely recognizes and anticipates patterns. While humans are naturally predictable, we are also frequently and habitually unpredictable. The user must always have content catered to them by human creators. If they do not fix it I am willing to bet someone will beat them to it.

[javelin]

Heads up on Bing, Ive had a 4x increase through them with impressions and traffic.

[Samsam1978]

Yes Bing seems to be better these days when I search for personal things. I noticed my company name is being used by users trying to find my site now. This has shot up! Maybe this is telling you something Google? If a user has to resort to searching the name of the site itself then it shows they are not being shown what they need.

I think working on these would help improve the search experience:

1. Provide a boost for older sites with positive viewer time on page
2. Monitor how many pages are created - it is unlikely a human can create 10,000 pages in a month, if many pages are added then derank.
3. Allow the webmasters a way to report sites including evidence of AI paragraphs, I noticed the AI writing tools do not use stories, or sophisticated language.
4. Where is the site hosted? Many AI sites are hosted in 3rd world countries. For example there is a blog in my niche with an American women but the site is hosted in Romaina - very unlikely to be English
5. Sites that reach historically 1 million users a month for a number of years should be given credit. These are the sites people like.
6. Are people in Google actually searching the site name? If so, it goes to show it is an authoritative site.
7. Stop this stupid large publishers writing anything to gain traffic as most of time the articles are just for SEO purposes. Just because they are a news outlet does not mean they know everything about everything. Derank these pages.
8. Start a program for the webmaster - to encourage transparency. Why is everything in secret. We provide traffic for ad revenue after all. Once the spam is solved we will be long gone and it will be a complete mess.
9. Rewind - December 2019 results seemed stable - this AI is not ready for the world, Google search is a mess right now. Does not know how to handle AI content. Have you thought this has been done on purpose as the head of AI is now at Apple? Maybe it was intended to provide a poor experience so Apple can create something better?
10. Value us - established webmasters and have appreciation of the content and time and effort we put in to serve millions of people a month instead of de-rank our sites with spam.

That is my 2p anyway.

[ichthyous]

I would concur that Google has all but retired organic search. It's now pay to play or go away.

Unlike some of you, u have not seen any increase in traffic from Bing...Google is still bringing in about 85% of my search traffic...the rest is Bing/yahoo, yandex, Baidu, and duckduckgo

[Jori]

... but !

If AI brings a better answer than us ?

Someday, we will be there. Not for all topics, of course. What are we creating that is so unique, that no one (or robot) can beat us at it ?
My real concern, is not even AI generated pages. Is Google hiding more and more organic results.

Because Google knows it all, even better than you. How many months before we'll see AI generated content from Google ?

[Samsam1978]

@Jori - Yes, I think that is where it is headed. AI is only based on the information that it is fed which is why I think Elon Musk bought twitter - to feed his AI with the data.

I also don't see how a human being would want to read robot content, I certainly would not unless it can create the stories, metaphors and human touch which will be quite unlikely. At the moment I am writing a book and it is 100% unique and never written before, there is no way the robot is able to even create that content as it does not exist. That is our only hope - creating something unique that does not exist but then I suppose once it exists they can just copy it. The question here then is:

What can a webmaster do to make their content be more superior than AI-generated content?

[RedBar]

I though I'd give my metrics a different perspective this morning by showing them on a weekly basis for the year so far with the overall average being 100%.

Lowest week of the year week 15 with 78.79% - This was Easter week
Highest has been week 13 with 123.4%
Easily the vast majority of weeks have been between 90-110%
Last week, 19, was 99.03%

Clearly there are some / many here who have been affected by "whatever" however IF there are some / many others like myself who have not been so adversely affected, what are the prime differences?

Are those of you affected mostly in highly contested / topical / chased after / money subjects? Surely there is a similarity / common denominator ?

[SteveWrz]

semrush showing me huge gains in keywords for 2 of my 5 sites. One was up 20% every day last week, the other has remained flat. Somethings up.

[javelin]

@RedBar I see no one has given you an answer to your question yet, maybe they are still coming. Unfortunately I do not have an answer as I have only seen gains across my platforms.

How this has directly impacted others I do not know but I certainly do recognize that potential. I will say that AI writing does exist within my niche but I am able to navigate around it. The volume of AI writing in my niche is low when compared to others like gaming or media.

What I will say for those who are having huge losses of traffic is that while AI may be a contributing factor I believe there are a lot of other issues due to algorithm changes. One major factor is that older sites should refresh their content more frequently. This is a problem when there is a LOT of content and few people to do the work.

In the past I have outright deleted older posts which no longer performed or could not perform and used a 301. With the re-targeted content and keyword structure it nearly always ranked and performed much better. People freak out at doing this because of links. Trust me they are not worth as much as they used to be.