Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2022

[RedBar]

I am still seeing substantial movements in my widget SERPs, substantial equates to several pages for me.

Some pages, all of them big money keywords, are still MIA or so low they'll never see traffic BUT I have also seen some good money keywords returning to the first two pages in the past 48 hours however they have not driven any traffic whatsoever. Not only have I seen my pages returning I am also seeing other non-US business ones.

My new traffic levels are averaging even lower than expected and are now at 50% of just over a year ago.

Much of this I put down to G ads and type of device usage. Mobile users invariably view one page and gone and sometimes it amazes me they ever get to me even when on the first page with the huge volume of ads.

Fortunately my global site still has 50% desktop usage and this is because many trade industry users are desk-based and need lots more information and images than Joe Public does, in general these are my multiple page viewers.

[RedBar]

It changes upon each search.

This is especially extremely frustrating and annoying on desktop, it seems to be the supermarket move the product syndrome:-(

[malkhaldi]

could anyone please explain this to me
real time
https://i.postimg.cc/vZ0dCLt3/2022-06-28-000322.jpg

what exactly there
https://i.postimg.cc/VN5cwr71/2022-06-28-000331.jpg

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 11:36 am (utc) on Jun 28, 2022]
[edit reason] removed links [/edit]

[Neohippy]

Forgive me if you all know this already, but I think there might be a bug in GA location tracking, that started around the same time as the update. Check your locations vs language; seeing anything weird?

[christianz]

GA real time seems to be more glitchy than usual. By the way, it has never been glitch free for years. It is typical to have about 25-30% of live visitors not show up in the home screen and only show in "Traffic sources" or "Content" tabs. Curiously, its mostly US visitors from Google search who disappear. Special treatment? :D

[Brett_Tabke]

This happens EVERY update. Some sector is just convinced Google has targeted them personally,

There are 3 of these stories out there that are clearly (to me) by some agency who's client was smacked and the agency has no idea what happened. So they put out a blog post saying it was the entire sector.

https://www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2022/6/google-seo-changes-may-have-pushed-agency-websites-down-search-rankings--warning

[rustybrick]

100%

[Martin Ice Web]

i am so sick of it. Just want to buy a accessorie for my car. Searching for REAL information and a real good eshop.
google presents amazon and then lots of fake product test pages.
All with text like " the manufacturer says it is...." or "the product sheet says it will make x in 1 Minute"

If i read something like this i immediatly know, they never had this product in their hands. It is just spun text. google (and bing) are that silly that they rank hundreds of this fake product pages.

All of them have a silly product ranking. And all of them are only for pointing to amazon selling page.

There is not one realy good shop with clear informations or instructions.

[ichthyous]

Perhaps I haven't been too observant, but when did G start placing blocks of product ads at the very top of pages instead of text ads? Is this new or has it been going on for a while now? I feel like every search in my niche has suddenly been overtaken by a block of product ads followed by a block of organic product results. This alternates with a block of 4 large text ads at the top on some searches. I'm referring to desktop here.

It seems that slowly G is experimenting with allowing more commercial sites to float to the top ten for searches that were almost all how-to articles from April 2021 to May 2022.

I also see that one small independent site that kicked butt in 2021 is doing even better now and has taken over first place in addition to local searches. My own site is still on an upward trend in terms of recapturing lost searches, but it's mostly low volume searches.

The very competitive searches that brought in a lot of business and traffic before the update in March 2021 are still completely out of reach. Searches where I was top 3 or top 10, I've been at top 30 or worse and very few of those have recovered.

[RedBar]

My global overall traffic is still down and this is entirely due to former top-ranking pages most of which have disappeared completely from the top 100 meanwhile many other pages, in the thousands, using precisely the same tamplate and format, are happily ranking extremely well, many at #1.

It's the bizarre removal / demotion of the popular pages that concerns me, many of the newly promoted pages are very poor and thin, none of them are new, however they are ALL USA companies, realistically the foreign pages have all been removed for these specific widgets from at least the top 50.SERPs.

These newly promoted sites do not rank for any other widget pages except these top keyword searches which is what makes it so bizarre, there seems to be no logical pattern to the demotions / penalties. It would be easier to understand and cope with were an entire site penalised but to have so many pages ranking well and yet others simply go MIA surely indicates some sort of error / glitch in the algo?

Has anyone seen any improvement?

[christianz]

Has anyone seen any improvement?

No

[BigKat]

Has anyone seen any improvement?

If anything, it's getting worse. Looking at our sales history from Google traffic, what I'm seeing is current total revenue generated from Google traffic coming close to that of 2015. Our product line, which we manufacture ourselves, is nearly double that of 2015. It's pretty ugly but to be expected when a large number of buyer intent keywords we were ranking for have simply vanished. Who replaced us are the usual suspects (Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.). Some of the items we produce are so unique that no comparable options exist, yet Google is intent on not even ranking our most unique products and instead ranks irrelevant Amazon category pages, Pinterest, affiliate pages that lead to irrelevant Amazon products, etc.

It would appear these updates are designed to reduce our visibility in organic search so substantially that we will be starved into paying for ads. However, we were already paying for ads and the dramatic fall in sales from these updates prompted us to stop all paid campaigns on Google. We were seeing a significant rise in paid clicks and at the same time a drop in total conversions, producing a negative ROI on those campaigns. Looking at the shopping ad blocks in Google now, we see our Chinese competitor's products being advertised (as they were before) under a variety of brands. We were the only American manufacturer/B2C retailer advertising with shopping campaigns. I believe diversified search results, and consumer product options, definitely take a back seat to Google's greed.

[RedBar]

If anything, it's getting worse.

That's what I am seeing too. Pinterest is definitely back in a big way for me with a minimum 1 double-link per page (2 links) and quite often 2 double-links (4 links) and they are invariably several years old. Home Depot has had a big boost for very thin pages of usually one small image and a brief widget description.

China is my biggest B2B widget player in the USA yet it has almost been wiped out and been replaced by seemingly random and very poor US sites but I am now starting to wonder what the US visitor see who has a cache-full of cookies and Google tracking?

When I check my SERPs I have an ultra clean browser, no cache, history, cookies and I specifically set the search settings to the USA, but what does anyone see in the USA whose browser is full of garbage? I'm pretty confident that it's nothing like I see and if a USA searcher has local content targetted by Google I wonder if I am ever seen .?.?.?

Am I ACTUALLY only #1 in my SERPs for my specific widget searches even though they may be top-selling widgets?

Am I only seeing Google's USA SERPs for ultra clean foreigner browsers and no one else EVER sees these results?

In reality is this what is happening to us all? We're ranking well in the pseudo SERPs that we see but in reality we're being totally fooled?

[ichthyous]

Has anyone seen improvement?

I lost approx. 60% of the terms I ranked on after the March 2021 update. The slow decline lasted all through the summer of 2021. It didn't recover until Jan 2022, and climbed slowly back. The problem is that many of the high volume terms never recovered to anywhere close to their previous rank. A few are climbing now but there is just too much loaded on the page now....both desktop and mobile. So even if you're top three again it's not the same traffic as one year ago. In spot #4 you get almost nothing.

- I am seeing that the strong shift in 2021 to how-to articles and listicles being returned for every search seems to be waning. It's more of a mix now, but the same huge ecomm sites now dominate every search. It appears that size has become very important again.

- Since the May 25th update I am seeing a lot of individual product pages bringing in traffic, but not my most important landing pages. Those higher-volume searches are now served with so many ads and widgets that organic results can't be found. This has resulted in big daily loses in traffic to my most important converting pages. It changes every 12-24 hours or so, and it's easy to see. Two days ago my traffic was stunningly low until about 11am, then suddenly surged upward in a stair-step pattern the rest of the day, culminating in a surge at 11pm. Yesterday, traffic started strong and slowly died toward the end of the day. This morning...a massive 60%+ drop in traffic to my home page. Search is down 34%. This will last maybe half the day, or the entire day...then revert again.
- Traffic is definitely being hit harder from English language countries. USA is perpetually lower since the 5/25 update. UK vanishes for a while, and is now strong. Canada and Australia take turns vanishing completely...today both have vanished. I gather that this is just from the widget and ads layouts being tested on the fly.

It would appear these updates are designed to reduce our visibility in organic search so substantially that we will be starved into paying for ads. However, we were already paying for ads and the dramatic fall in sales from these updates prompted us to stop all paid campaigns on Google.

Yes of course that's the goal...many of us have been saying that for years on here. This all really kicked into high gear in 2020. 2021 was very bad after the March update, but 2022 seems to be gloves-off bold faced declaration by Google that organic is going to be strangled to death. They aren't bothering to hide anything anymore. The new norm is huge daily swings, totally unreliable traffic, and lower quality traffic which does not convert.

This isn't coming back ever, Google is determined to kill it in the pursuit of higher revenue. My sales have plunged drastically this year. Almost all of that is due to Google, not world events or a slower economy. This is forcing me to not just revisit my site design and search strategy around the edges, but change the entire business model top to bottom so that I am no longer dependent on organic search. I don't know if it will even be possible.

[BigKat]

Considering there is no communication from Google regarding potential bugs, and the quick update that started a couple days ago reduced our visibility in search further, I'm moving forward with the mindset this will be the way it is. It can't really get much worse since the other search engines are producing more sales than Google. There's really no need for GA4 to be wasting bandwidth/load times if we aren't running ads, so I definitely am pushing to remove that from our site since our own analytics are just fine and used in the reports we generate. Other "data mining" matters were also brought up including removing all API calls to Google and even prohibiting Google owned/managed email addresses from being used to place orders. With that in mind, I'm not the only one within our company that interprets Google's recent updates as a "hostile action."

[ichthyous]

With that in mind, I'm not the only one within our company that interprets Google's recent updates as a "hostile action."

@BigKat It's not a bug, its been getting worse for years...we were the proverbial frogs in the pot and now the water is at full boil.

Google is maximizing its profit any way it can. There has been speculation that this is actually an act of desperation by a company with an old technology and declining use of search. I see it as the inevitable outcome from the day the company went public. It's capitalism without restraint, which has been allowed to morph into a monopoly. They originated and control the platform and don't have to share anything. Whether that will result in an eventual decline in the company through degraded search results remains to be seen. We will all be out of business or have moved on by then.

With regards to GA - removed it from my site last year entirely. Also removed all Google fonts. My site started getting better scores in CWB. I miss the in depth analytics that GA provided, but as you said, Google is a hostile party now and I don't provide enemies with info about my business.

With regards to Google ads...boy do I wish it were otherwise. I would have spent so much less time and energy on this if Google ads actually worked. But they don't....they bring in tons of questionable traffic, do not honor exclusions, and only bring one hit wonders from mobile that never convert. I set my campaign to -100% bids for mobile it was so bad. Guess what I got? More mobile crap at the price they set. When I complained they said I would have to delete my entire campaign and start from the beginning if I actually wanted to control my ads like that. They also offer refunds for clearly fraudulent clicks and then you never see the refund. Its happened to me 3x now. This is just a mafia...I won't give them my money.

[RedBar]

and only bring one hit wonders from mobile that never convert.

For those who do not know I am a global specialist widget B2B supplier with zero ecommerce sites.

What I experience is that my traffic is 50/50 desktop/mobile with desktop visitors nearly always viewing more than 1 single page whereas mobile users are invariably a single page learn about my widget and disappear. I do not have a problem with this, the more Joe learns and understands about my widgets quite possibly the less garbage he will buy!

Google is maximizing its profit any way it can.

It has to, that is one of its jobs, BUT the issue that many here have, plus Joe P, is the sheer quantity of ads it is throwing at everyone all the time and, I'm fairly sure, this has driven a lot of their advertisers away plus many possible purchasers.

I very rarely use G to search for or buy anything however when I do and G displays the image carousel with pricing at the top of the page I'll scroll / surf along to see if what I want is there at a more favourable price than the site I would normall buy from ... I don't think the carousel has won one of those comparisons!

In general most of us here are conflicted by G's ads display but it has a commercial duty to survive and therein lies the rub, if you / we want a quality ad free search engine then who is going to pay for it and who is going to administer it because Wikipedia will tell you, it costs money, and lots of it.

[BigKat]

@ichthyous
We joined Buy on Google early to give it a try. It wasn't long before we quit selling our lowest priced items this way by excluding Buy on Google in our product feeds. Google ignored our exclusion on one of our cheapest and most unique products. Google claimed there was an artifact in the feed, such as a space or erroneous character. Nonsense - the feed contained no such errors. I made sure this would never happen again by disabling Buy on Google on the campaign level. Needless to say, I don't trust Google and really never have.

@RedBar

In general most of us here are conflicted by G's ads display but it has a commercial duty to survive and therein lies the rub

I'm not sure if Google (Alphabet) can make it with the 1/4+ of a trillion dollars in revenue they reported in 2021. :) I know what you meant though - every business has a duty to maximize profits. In my industry, and likely many others, most consumers get trapped within the walls of a joint Amazon/Google prison. These prison walls are getting taller by the day...

[RedBar]

I totally agree BigKat and the problem is how to bring down those walls since Joe Public, with our help, has managed to build them over the past 20 years and getting Joe to change his cushty life would be a very, very difficult task. MS with all its power and influence hasn't managed to make a dent in G and many Amazon sellers simply have nowhere else to sell their products other than eBay, certainly at the prices some sell at they could not even afford a shop's rent but that's another issue.

Fortunately I live in a prosperous market town with very few empty shops but do you know what has seen the biggest increase in shop take-up in the last 5 years? Men's haidressers, nail bars and chain coffee shops! Arghhh ... All those people at home shopping online all day who then go out for a coffee, not so many years ago it was the complete opposite.

[BigKat]

@RedBar

I don't see the walls coming down. I see a choice of either joining these consumers inside those walls, being subject to Amazon and Google's fraud friendly shipping/return policies, or having a very difficult time reaching consumers if we don't. Thankfully our B2C sales pale in comparison to our B2G and B2B sales so we're not as heavily reliant on Google as others may be. Still, what is occurring is not healthy for "free markets" when so few businesses control which businesses can and can't reach consumers. Adapting to a more controlling sales environment will be critical, which also includes knowing when to cut your losses and run. That's where I feel I'm at with Google.

[javelin]

I'm not sure if Google (Alphabet) can make it with the 1/4+ of a trillion dollars in revenue they reported in 2021. :) I know what you meant though - every business has a duty to maximize profits. In my industry, and likely many others, most consumers get trapped within the walls of a joint Amazon/Google prison. These prison walls are getting taller by the day...

The interesting part to all of this is in the end Google revenue will decline rather than increase. Inadvertently by attempting to maximize profits they are becoming isolationists to the preferred platforms of choice. The reality is that many small players will go out of business.

Small companies cannot compete in the same pool with those like Amazon. I have seen this before first hand through close acquaintances. For them Amazon handmade and Etsy were the sandboxes of choice. When Google began their shift two things took place.

Amazon and Etsy and others loosened their policies on what products were allowed and a flood of larger corporate widgets came into the sphere. Many products were from overseas as cheaper knockoffs and the vendor had a much higher marketing budget. The home based businesses were wiped out first, then the smaller more corporate businesses began to go.

What is taking place with Google is similar in many ways with how they are now pooling or funneling the traffic with buying intent to compete via said sandboxes. When isolationism forces many dogs to compete for kennel space in the end as there are fewer dogs the revenue will dwindle. Its complete stupidity.

In my opinion Google is dead. There is nothing we can do about it nor anywhere we can presently turn to. Google will get exactly what it wants in the end but it will begin its downfall at the same time. These kinds of policies do not promote growth.

[renatovieira]

Big drop today...

[morpheus83]

Close to 20 years in the trade and have seen a variety of devastating updates. My two cents are -
-) If your traffic has dropped there is a possibility to get some of it back but you will never be 100%.
-) Google assigns authority to your website and that directly affects the ranking of all your pages. Authority goes up and so does visibility if it goes down everything goes into the toilet.
-) The silver lining is google is extremely dynamic. As cliched as it may sound work on your content, if your content delivers value the rankings will follow. The days of keyword stuffing are long gone and G is extremely smart now.

[Martin Ice Web]

After having a quiet good week, yesterday something rolled through again.

GWT insists of finding several errors. All pages are fixed a year ago. But they still reported as failed.
It says it cant find some pages that we have submitted with the sitemap. That is false. This pages have never been in sitemap. We donīt know where google gets this pages from but not from us.

In my opinion Google is dead. There is nothing we can do about it nor anywhere we can presently turn to. Google will get exactly what it wants in the end but it will begin its downfall at the same time. These kinds of policies do not promote growth.

I donīt know how old are you but did you watch the youth finding things or getting information? Handy -> google -> search results
They donīt even take the results into question!
google made big efforts to come to this point. Removing trusted sources from serps and showing its own (stolen) answer.
Poeple donīt even know that google get this information from other webpages. They donīt know that webmasters put hours of work into the answer. They only know google is smart.

[malkhaldi]

After having a quiet good week, yesterday something rolled through again.

same happen to me , some of my traffic get back then everything gone yesterday

[RedBar]

Handy -> google -> search results

For those maybe wondering Handy = Mobile :-)

MIW - Your other observations regarding blind acceptance of the results is so true and usually the errors are not actually Google's but the sites from where it is scraping its info.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar :) Handy :) yes its Mobile. I am so used to it

[Martin Ice Web]

usually the errors are not actually Google's but the sites from where it is scraping its info.

can you explain this?

[ne0h]

Since the update, I have tried all possible options in the new articles. Even similar way when it used to be published before 25th May.

Nothing worked to be featured in Google News or discover. Seems only the large media houses are preferred. Even those articles featured in discover and news from those media houses have nothing in terms of SEO.

Upon further checking some of the articles, they don't have proper cover image with preferred dimensions, only have like 200 words, that too quotes of someone, entire page is full of Taboola ads, and probably failing in page experience metrics.

Now, I have started doing couple of things for a hope to recover, here are some of them if it helps anyone:

1. Bought a CDN monthly plan to boost page exp (which is in amber due to AdSense hope to make it green)

2. Reduce newsworthy story publishing to one per week. (I was publishing thrice a week).
3. Increase publishing 2 to 3 genuine niche articles daily like tutorial and stuffs. Earlier was only 1 article per day.
4. Stop using proof reading via tool (Grammerly) as much as possible. Because I think, it is probably making Google feel that its AI generated article. I am not a native English speaker, but still it's better to keep the authentic tone as much as possible.
5. Keywords those are down , lost ranking daily - find those pages from semrush and republish (not update) them so that published date gets freshed for search results.this is going to be a daily activity.

So, more hours to fight the Google's greed and to regain/increase authority. Those hours could have been spent on actual research and create so many articles which I know have possibilities.
Lets see what happens in a month or two. This is disappointing. And this can't sustain for a long term.

[RedBar]

@MIW

can you explain this?

Google is a scraper and tries to give the most pertinent / accurate information however if the information is incorrect from where Google is scraping that information then its search result will display this incorrect info. I see this every day within my global industry with companies incorrectly displaying the incorrect country of origin of the raw widget material. This is very prevalent in my industry on US sites simply because they may import a widget from China / India / Italy and quite often they assume that is the raw product origin and say so when it actually is not.

I know this happens in other global widget industries and, to supposedly comply with government regulations / sanctions, it can lead to some embarrassing conflicts and legal action plus it is the supplier's responsibility to ensure that the supply complies with current legal specifications.

[RedBar]

What happened yesterday at 12.00 UK time?

I have had 24 hours of completely normal traffic every hour with the usual single PV and multiple PVs from all my regular countries with no massive peaks, the way traffic was before this core's shenanigans ... How long wil it last or is G reading this forum to see if anyone notices?