Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2022

[RedBar]

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System: Continued from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5066671.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I am well-aware that it is a US holiday weekend however 20.00 hrs Friday UK time and my global site went into hibernation ... and I mean a traffic level whereby I could completely remove the site since it would be utterly pointless it being there.

As such I shall let it run until Wednesday to see if traffic does return by Tuesday evening US time.

[BigKat]

Anyone else seeing keywords bouncing around (also completely disappearing) in the SERPS right now? Looks like another update going on with another round of long periods of dead/no traffic from Google.

[RedBar]

FWIW I don't feel it's another update rather a dialling-up of the constant state of flux outside of the top 1-3 incumbents.

[Martin Ice Web]

Big losses since sunday. Nearly 50% again after recovering last week.
Could be holidays but last week were holidays, too. So it seems another update started on sunday.
And i have the feeling that it has something to do with click depth of pages.
So we have a unattended site (nearly no extra information beside manufacturer information). It is a plain site. 2-3 categories and then the item pages -> click depth max. 3
This site went up!
Our main site is muich more integrated. Lots of information, pictures and further links. Much more categories ( better for users ). Better readable ....
But click depth of items are mainly 5-7.
This site went down.

And if i look at current serps. All the sites are very plain. Little categories. Little information. Only some items. Click depth 1-2
In most cases this sites are for amazon affiliate programms. Mainly fake testamonial sites with links to amazon.

[cr1m]

Blessed be the day! Seeing our pages come back to top positions where they previously were 5 days ago. Hourly traffic over last 4 hours seems also to be back to our previous levels. I guess Google fixed something on their end?
How is everyone else who lost traffic doing today?

[jaybusa]

On 7th July traffic was down nearly 50% for single day now again from last three traffic is decreasing, can't figure out what's happening. Is it due to google update or any glitch from Google side as few days back someone from Google team tweeted about glitch.

[Neohippy]

FWIW, we're down about 20% since around the May 25th update; been pretty consistent since.

[samwest]

Still #1 on page one, below all the 'googage', and yet traffic just keeps slowly dropping.

[EditorialGuy]

Still #1 on page one, below all the 'googage', and yet traffic just keeps slowly dropping.

There are a lot of things going on besides Google updates. For example, there's a PhoCusWire travel news story out today that says:

"Last-minute reservations for flights within Europe were down 44% from 2019 levels as of July 10, according to new research by travel intelligence specialist ForwardKeys. Summer bookings from Amsterdam decreased 59% from prepandemic levels and those from London dropped 41%."

Now, that's a very specific market (air travel, and specifically last-minute air travel), but the numbers are still dramatic, and they do suggest that consumer confidence may be shakier today than it was even a few weeks ago. Which wouldn't be surprising, given issues with inflation, the falling euro, etc.

[samwest]

@EG - this has been ongoing for over a decade. Googage is defined as 'ads blocks', 'image blocks', 'Shop for [term] blocks', 'People also searched for blocks', etc, etc, etc... Gorg spams their own search page.

[EditorialGuy]

@EG - this has been ongoing for over a decade.

My point exactly. SERP clutter with ads, answer boxes, etc. is nothing new, so if your Google traffic is steadily dropping despite a #1 ranking, it's a reasonable guess that Google isn't the only factor (or maybe not even a contributing factor) in your current decline.

[mosxu]

If there is such decline personalisation makes it worse for almost 70% of businesses as same buyer traffic goes to 30% to hold the formula and the cost per click!

It is a miracle that one competitor makes millions and another one with same prices has to pay in ads more than even can sell for.

[MayankParmar]

indexing issues, anyone? Discovered but not indexed

[malkhaldi]

everything went so badly after GCU , ranking issues , indexing issue .
rubbish result on there search engine
no one have a clue about what needed from that update .

[BigKat]

It is a miracle that one competitor makes millions and another one with same prices has to pay in ads more than even can sell for.

The real miracle is small businesses are somehow hanging on despite the oppressive environment you speak of that Google helped create.

I'm currently seeing another round of severely limited Google traffic where Google has stripped us from appearing in the SERPS for the products we produce and retail directly to consumers. Instead, Google's SERPS are directing shoppers in our industry to Amazon, with Amazon crowded SERPS, for product queries. Just as in previous days, we may get a few hours of visibility in the SERPS but those hours will likely be when our North American market customers are mostly in bed and sleeping.

[ichthyous]

From July 16th to now traffic has been much stronger and more consistent. It's the first time I have seen anything like a stable predictable pattern in months. I have also seen a steadier stream of conversions. This may be due to the fact that I am finally recapturing 1st and 2nd place spots...lingering at 3 and 4 gets you no traffic at all. My ranking keeps heading higher all summer. All I can say is that my website was weak on text. I started beefing up and writing unique text for each category on my site and I think it has helped. I am also publishing new content more regularly and updating pages across the site on a more regular basis.

[mosxu]

The harassment algorithms are at work for my business, I did pay for protection but it seems it is not enough.

Next I might need to sell my pants.

[samwest]

Gorgs throttling AI must have gone offline last night between 10 pm and 3 am...I had four anomalous sales in that window, today, nothing. Nothing all week so far, besides that one short window. That's empirical evidence enough for me.

[BigKat]

Gorgs throttling AI must have gone offline last night between 10 pm and 3 am...

This is the same trend I have been seeing for days as noted above, but our visibility window starts later. For example, right now Google has essentially booted us out of the SERPS for product queries. During this time we see a rise in bot/host/cdn traffic as well as a lot of visits from tunnel.googlezip which were quite rare before the core update. I can only conclude Google wants to direct all B2B and B2C sales to the limited few big box retailers who appear in the SERPS which is Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot. What's comical is I've seen Home Depot Pro Desks scouring our website for products their Chinese suppliers don't produce and/or are known to quickly fail because of poor quality.

[ichthyous]

Something is up with USA traffic this morn, its down 56% so far today. Visits fell off a cliff at 6am and now at a complete halt at 11:30am. At 1am I had 11 visits though...totally normal of course, no manipulation here, keep moving.

This entire week I had more normal traffic patterns...i.e. more traffic during business hours and steady from every location, no mysterious outages per country. It resulted in many more new inquiries than I have had in months.

[RedBar]

I've been away on business for a few days with no time to look in-depth at anything that may be happening therefore it was a pleasant surprise this morning to see much more consistent numbers across all sites. I've changed nothing therefore I've done nothing to affect "whatever" so it was a surprise to see considering, apart from the Xmas period, from now until the end of August is my trade's quietest time of the year.

There has been a good spread of PVs, countries, downloads etc and, dare I say it, looking "normal" ... There, that's the ki$$ of death :-)

[Broaster]

Still no traffic at all, none from google news, none from google search, its been 4 months total, they really wiped me out. Only traffic I get is if I repost an article I recently published to facebook or twitter and thats still only like a 50 to 100 visits tops.

They claimed they finished the update but its the same thing, its not fixed at all, how come google changed it before it was much better when you typed in exact term and you could find aqn article that had the exact term in the title or in the article, now you type in long tail keywords and the search is off, especially google news type in a sentence and you will see like ten articles from one news source and many of the articles dont even relate to the search term.

[ichthyous]

This forum has grown very quiet...either people are on vaca or things have improved so no more complaints...or it's total capitulation. I saw a noticeable slowdown today, this time in both UK and Australia traffic... down 47% and 43% respectively. That's an unusually steep one day drop. USA is sluggish but right at break even

[cr1m]

For me it's mostly capitulation, everything points to an issue with the algo. We saw a 1-day recovery on July 20, but everything dropped back down the next day, traffic is -50%, crawl requests also -50%, our 1st page content is on the bottom of page 2 below autogenerated crap, facebook posts, and random youtube videos, everything else just dropped to pages 3-4+ or out of the SERPs completely, so yeah...

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous, i can confirm the slow down yesterday and at 1pm sales have been shut down, too.

And as this last update yields towards complete destruction of smaller business we are looking for new ways besides g.
This company is lying whenever they say anything. I am sick of seeing our hard work is used by google to sell their ads.
And meanwhile i donīt trust any of the results google is presenting. Most of the website are made for amazon affiliate. Most of the website have spun text only made for SE.
The old small business and mom and pop pages were more trustable than this bull**t that they are presenting now.
And i do not wonder that poeple buy from amazon or ebay. googles choices are small, worse and for nearly every query the same.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - I haven't posted anything else here because my traffic has stabilized. This latest update recovery my main site. But today I see a huge drop.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Me too...my USA traffic is down 76% at 11am! Yesterday it started with huge drops in UK and AU traffic, but those appear to be back today. I lost ten top-3 terms, and seven top-10 terms on desktop SERPS on Sunday, and they have not returned. So far mobile doesn't seem affected.

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google traffic continues to be pretty consistent: up a bit some days, down a bit on other days, with a mildly positive overall trend. No big swings or surprises.

It does seem that, over the long term, we've seen decent growth for the topics where we have the most content and expertise and less growth (or "negative growth") for topics that are less well represented on the site.

[rustybrick]

Things do seem more calmer here and in general...

[RedBar]

Not any calmer here for my global site with massive daily swings and today. for July, I have hit one of those significant milestones, -33% for the month on average. Realworld international trade is a "mess" with continued extremely high seafreight rates affecting many industry sectors plus some quite unbelievable shortages of raw materials and I am not solely referring to imported raw materials, I am seeing a dearth of indigenous materials within India ... in 50+ years I have never experienced this except during some monsoon periods for a short while.

On the other hand our hotel / pub UK site is +14% and this is being reflected in its realworld earnings. It is very noticeable the increased volume of staycations for many different reasons.

[RedBar]

Oh dear, need a few beers, with a little time to go so far today is my lowest weekday of the year ... This will also mean my lowest weekday ever :-(