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.

[Martin Ice Web]

another update yesterday? Sales went zero ( amazon sales still pick up). Lots of foreign and tor traffic again.

[christianz]

They definitely did something yesterday. From last few hours of Sunday till yesterday evening traffic flow was noticeably more natural. Maybe they had to temporarily turn off some of their filters - Priority Publisher Promotion (PPP) filter, EAT-based Discrimination Filter (EDF) or simply had to cut down on googlespam boxes for some technical reason. This was coinciding with spike in Semrush sensor.

As of now traffic is exactly as awful as last week.

[JesterMagic]

@Javelin
>> 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.
For every single page all the time yes that would be impossible. I see it more as ranking the quality of the site content as a whole and then the AI would take over and rank the individual pages taking the overall quality ranking into account. Every once in a while a human ranker would have to revisit the site to see if the content has improved or not.

It's by no means perfect and in a sense a step backwards but how else do you attempt to improve it? AI by itself has been failing to do a proper job for years.

Do I think this will happen. Most likely not as it would cost Google a fortune and search is Googles cash cow that they use to prop up their other services.

[RedBar]

@javelin

One major factor is that older sites should refresh their content more frequently.

Whilst this can be an issue in some subject areas in my own widget niche evergreen content is simply that, the actual raw basics of my widget never changes, the images and production methods do plus alternative look-a-like raw widgets may appear from different countries however when an architect / specifier says "I want example widget from country xx, that's what is quoted for.

Sure I tweak the odd page that does not rank #1-3 but overall when I upload a widget I ensure I include as much relevant info as needed for years to come. This all comes from pre-www days of requiring this essential info when requested.

I'm still not seeing any drastic SERPs movements, unless we get more specifics about general business sectors seeing these changes I can't see how anyone can suggest solution or possible reasons for volatility.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing that certain results have huge image carousels and subcategory links under the main link now. These glamorama serps are sucking up all the traffic...you can be right above or below with a standard single-image result and your eye goes right to the much more prominent listing.

My site never seems to get these image carousels even for top 3 results...clicking through I see that it is composed of the first few large images on each page. Since my pages all have a layout of equally sized medium images Google seems to not be able to choose which images are most important and no fancy listing for me.

Does anyone have any idea of how to improve chances of getting on of these more prominent image carousel listings?

[ichthyous]

Traffic is highly throttled all day long today...80% drops in traffic for some landing pages and 47% decline in direct traffic. Traffic has been capped at the same level since 8am...as soon as it hits that level it drops off a cliff. A totally natural pattern of course.

[RedBar]

An observation I have made in the last couple of hours checking my Google.co.uk SERPs for 20+ of my most popular keywords.

My example.com site outranks my example.uk for 75% of searches many of them on the first page.

The .uk site had 6 brand new widget pages added mid-Feb 2022, 3 months ago, only two rank, the other four are nowhere to be found since they have not yet been indexed.

Traffic to the .uk site is -66% since February 2022 whereas, as you already know, the .com has remained very consistent.

Obviously there has been an algo change to the G.co.uk SERPs however I also have to wonder why some pages have not been indexed after 3 months? Too much info and not enough grunt come to mind?

[samwest]

Just like is being proven out on Twitter, I think we can all see, hear and smell the rotten termite/zombie bots in this ridiculously manipulated Google AI traffic. Let's all celebrate Google's 12 years of ever-increasing financial success.

[RedBar]

12 years

12, why 12?

[ichthyous]

Google is definitely heavily manipulating all english language results now. I had a period where UK traffic vanished for days on end, then it returned and has been stable. Canada traffic has been on a downward stairstep pattern since May 3rd...today I had 0 (yes zero) visits from Canada. Australia was quite low for a month and many days with 1 visit...now it's back to normal. One thing is assured, you will never have any period anymore where USA, UK, AU and CA traffic are all firing on all cylinders.

[Neohippy]

SEMRush is 9.1 in UK today

[Neohippy]

Now US, too. Could it be starting?!

(No dramatic shift in real-time here yet; perhaps a little lower than usual, but nothing major)

[samwest]

12, why 12?

Because, that is when they began this massive profiteering push, exactly at the MayDay 2010 update, and subsequently became our competitor, rather than our partner. That was precisely when we went from going up every year to going down every year, and exactly when we started observing Zombie traffic. Coincidentally 2 years after 2008...I think the picture will be getting clearer soon.

As for this week, a new low. Thursday and two measly sales for the week.
That used to happen in the first hour of the day on Sunday.

[Brett_Tabke]

Seeing a bit of a bump in traffic on another site. hmmm - site has been dormant for years.

[shadowlight]

Because, that is when they began this massive profiteering push, exactly at the MayDay 2010 update, and subsequently became our competitor, rather than our partner.

Although they will have been doing this for quite some time, it was during lockdown (2020) that it began to have a big effect for me. What better time to push the monetary extraction to the maximum from the SERPS than during a worldwide crisis with lots of uncertainty, unpredictability and loss of income for many. For a while I actually thought it may have been down to the pandemic, however it hasn't recovered and has just got worse, while Gorges revenue continually increases.

Coincidentally?, I think not, the year before (2019) was the last time that G used the 'double irish' tax avoidance scheme before legislation came in that would make it impossible for them to continue using it and it was a year they seen their profits decline by 23%.

I have also seen conversions dramatically reduced, some days I am seeing conversions on 'normal' days that are way below the amount I have seen on days such as Christmas day in the past.

[RedBar]

I've been trying to post this for the past 24 hours!

MayDay 2010 update

Ah yes, the great image theft update !

became our competitor, rather than our partner.

Absolutely, I lost 90+% of my traffic within 3 months subsequently settling at about -95% over the ensuing 5-6 months and the most annoying thing about it was that WE did all the work for them to steal ... I suppose there are some here wondering what the heck I am writing about?

All I will say is that was the day I lost all my faith in G and stopped using all of their products except for AdSense until that died on me. I've never trusted a single word from them ever since.

[christianz]

What better time to push the monetary extraction to the maximum from the SERPS than during a worldwide crisis with lots of uncertainty, unpredictability and loss of income for many. For a while I actually thought it may have been down to the pandemic, however it hasn't recovered and has just got worse, while Gorges revenue continually increases.

I have same suspicion about February 24th. They had this googlespam update (more top ads, more PAA and in more prominent positions, more "knowledge graph", more YouTubes etc) ready to go and just waited for the right moment when everyone would be distracted with something else.

They want to push out these greed updates when there is smallest probability that someone will notice and publish something like this:

[washingtonpost.com...]

[shadowlight]

Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act has been introduced.

“The online advertising market is monopolized, opaque, and rigged in favor of just two companies: Google and Facebook,” said Congressman Cicilline. “In the case of Google, it controls both sides of the market for buying and selling advertisements online, and routinely exploits this conflict of interest to favor its own services or extract higher prices from other companies."

“The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act (CTDA) provides for an integral mechanism to prevent Big Tech from continuing to exploit the digital advertising marketplace. As giant Big Tech companies, such as Google, continue to simultaneously own the supply and demand side of advertising transactions, thus steering bids to their own services at the detriment of everyone else, CTDA would immediately put an end to this. CTDA would prohibit large digital advertising companies from owning more than one side of the digital advertising system and require the largest companies to provide transparency to their customers. It’s time to put an end to the circular system in digital advertising exploited by Big Tech,”

[buck.house.gov ]

This and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act if passed, will hopefully prevent G doing what they are doing? Or perhaps it may make matters worse as they become even more aggressive with monetization to make up for lost revenue. Lets hope its the former.

[Broaster]

Wow I give up guys, this is messed up. This past few days ZERO traffic, I posted up 7 articles in one day yesterday and only received 15 visits. I searched my article using title search in google and sometimes they dont appear or appear on the bottom of the first page, when I do exact title search after posting article in google news my article doesn't appear only shows if I put sort by date

What is going on? Why is google doing this the search is garbage now, obsolete articles from major news corps or some spammy weird sites are showing for exact search terms instead of showing the articles that have the exact term, cant find anything.

Why even bother? I spend hours on end writing articles but get no traffic, I might as well give up.

[RedBar]

I posted up 7 articles in one day yesterday and only received 15 visits.

Do I have to assume you are a news outlet / blogger expecting articles to appear almost immediately?

WP users always seemto get stuff published faster however for non-news within 24 hours?

[No5needinput]

I'm Non news, Non WordPress. 90% of the time published articles are spidered and indexed in minutes - often seconds. Many times by the time I publish the article, then immediately check the exact title in Google Search, it's listed in the serps.

[Samsam1978]

Had enough today, my 15 year old site with my own beautifully written articles outranked by garbage spam. I don't mind so much if they were decent results with well-researched content. Not even an author on the articles. Absolute joke.

[Samsam1978]

@shadowlight

Hard to know what they will do to stop the monopoly - they will probably rule that they are not able to show Google ads on the search results pages, and then they will have to drive traffic to sites that use their ads - which is every website anyway. It has got ridicules I don't really have that problem in my niche as its not e-commerce but I can imagine it is very hard to rank, take "buy T shirts" that will be very difficult to rank for.

[vphoner]

I also notice a dramatic reduction in organic clicks over the years., but October was a big hit, and big differences this year too, and just recently. Almost no clicks now and site is 15 years old. Now I will admit that I neglected it with minimal updates for quite a few months. I have put a lot of work in over the last few weeks, hoping that will help recover my rankings. Do regular additions of content help a lot, or are these updates just destroying smaller sites regardless of content fresh or not?

[Broaster]

@redbar

yes I have news blog for a niche, not general news or politics, been in google news for over 10 years, this past year my traffic vanished, they did something strange to search

also I use wordpress but whats strange is the past several months my articles are not indexing quickly like they used too, sometimes articles dont get picked up, some get posted instantly when I search the link after I publish it. On the help forums they told me this could be the new algorithm adjusting and analyzing content before approving or something

its just odd, what are they trying to do the google news search tab doesn't even have up to date articles they will have two fresh articles but then some articles from 2012 or 2018, strange stuff.

I remember out of curiosity typing up some topics that were not in my news niche and I typed in a title from another news site that I visit but in a different niche and their article appeared but not in top stories, but whats strange is in google search 20 articles from some competitor appears and none of the articles have anything to do with the title exact term


Whatever is going on I hope they fix it.

[Samsam1978]

This might help someone maybe, I noticed on my adsense there is an advert that pulled down the whole page and I could not close it on mobile. I have checked my average session time which is down by about 20 seconds compared to 2021, I am wondering if this particular advert (which removes the content of the site) and is difficult to close might be why you are having these issues. If you are running Google ads I would check your session time - see if it's reduced. I have as a test for next two weeks - turned off these types of ads. It was "by chance" that I saw this ad so just posting here in case anyone wants to check if you run ads on your site. Ive emailed Google adsense about the issue so should hear back but they are very slow and replying.

[JesterMagic]

Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act has been introduced.

[buck.house.gov...]

@shadowlight So what is this saying? For example Youtube can display ads but not sell them?

If passed into law, this legislation would restore and protect competition in digital advertising markets by preventing companies that generate more than $20 billion in digital ad revenue from participating in both sides of the digital advertising markets. This bill takes direct aim at Google and Facebook’s ad market duopoly by preventing them from acting as both buyers and sellers.

[RedBar]

@No5needinput

I'm Non news, Non WordPress. 90% of the time published articles are spidered and indexed in minutes - often seconds.

How? Sure 20 years ago Google did that however for the past 6-8 years spidering and indexing new pages for my evergreen sites can take several months, in fact I mentioned earlier this week 6 pages uploaded 3 months ago of which two are now #1 the other 4 are not even indexed!

Granted once they're there I'm pretty difficult to budge since they are the de facto widget pages however almost immediate ranking is something I have not seem in a long, long time for non-news.

Is this simply an evergreen site "standard"?

I'm actually constructing 60 brand new widget pages which will be uploaded later this week, I'll be keeping an extra special eye on how long they take to index and rank.

FWIW sometimetimes Bing and DDG are faster at indexing and ranking for me.

[KaseyM]

Is real-time busted again or has my traffic just halved?

[javelin]

I agree with RedBar on the indexing issue. Indexing new pages can take some time. Additionally they will at times index, play with it in the lineup, and then kick it out of the index to pick up a few months later. I have had G pick up a page immediately and it rank right away but its rare, never the standard.

Bing will index quickly. You can also pick up some initial traffic with bing but it will cycle it around playing with it as well.

It can take a year for a page to have a solid ranking. It can take 2 to 3 years for impression rates for that page to be given so it has any real value if its a competitive topic.