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.

[seomotionz]

What just happened? Since the last 24 hours or so, everything is spam. Huge blasts of spam traffic are thrown at sites.

[mosxu]

In the news:

“Google Jumps Despite Missing On Top & Bottom Line Thanks To Stronger Ad Sales“

Did you experience strong conversions as well?

[Martin Ice Web]

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 :-(

Juli 2022 Product Review Update has gone live - [Joke]well i am looking forward taht more high quality websites will show up in serps [/joke]

[JesterMagic]

I think a lot of people have just given up. No one has reigned in Google's behavior so a lot of webmasters have just left.

[BigKat]

Juli 2022 Product Review Update has gone live

This update is likely designed to push more sales to Amazon, which may explain a further decline in converting traffic from Google yesterday (fell off a cliff). I can't tell you how many times I've seen product reviews for totally irrelevant items on Amazon. And I just recovered a product, we once sold on Amazon, from a Chinese hijacker who changed the brand/product images/description to his product. Despite the changes this hijacker made, the product reviews and Q&A section remained. Trying to get this resolved took a half dozen contacts with offshore reps who didn't understand a word I said until they finally honored my request to escalate my case to a supervisor. Think the hijacking seller got banned? Of course not.

I honestly don't trust product reviews anymore. It seems the more Amazon and Google strangle businesses, the more willing they are to engage in dubious acts to make a buck just to feed their families. Meanwhile Bezos sails away on his $500 million yacht and Google's founders hide on islands....

[ichthyous]

Traffic is painfully sluggish this entire week...it's as if Google suddenly put the brakes on Monday morning. It coincides with a small drop in ranking and the loss of about ten top3 ranking terms all at once. USA and UK traffic are down 40% and 42% so far this morning and you can see the traffic dropping to zero from both countries...at prime business hours as usual. This is completely the contrary of the last two weeks, where traffic was steady throughout the day. My guess is, we got a short two week break from being squeezed to death and now Google is back to its old tactics.

[RedBar]

Sawtooth wave insofar as my global site is concerned however how much of this is Google induced? Recessions, or almost, in several countries, downturn in trade owing to those with disposable incomes having holidays, G's recent core update, shortages of all kinds of materials / products in many industries ... As much as I want to blame G for "everything" I can only go so far and wonder why well-ranked widgets are seeing little or no traffic?

I also wonder how much of G's increased ad revenue is from sellers trying anything to generate sales?

[ichthyous]

What I am seeing this week is all Google induced...from stable traffic with conversions for almost two weeks to reverting to the old pattern of having traffic drop through the floor on a regular basis. Today traffic has been a trickle since 8am...It's at zero now. Theres no way that USA, UK and CA traffic drops almost 50% in tandem out of the blue...this is pure manipulation. I would agree that many people are on vaca but that doesn't cause these kinds of drops.

[BigKat]

I'm seeing Google send a substantial amount of traffic from Bangladesh to one of our product support pages. Thought at first we were being targeted, but I see some of the keywords in the query from Apple users. Checking the IP addresses, they're legit. I wonder why this is occurring. Normally when Geo-filters get turned off we have a mix of foreign traffic and nothing like what I'm observing now.

[Broaster]

Google news search is screwed, they never bothered fixing it for a year. type in a title and see what pops up sometimes they just show the same website for irrelevant results I typed in a string of keywords and saw a title that matches them a bit on the topic, but then all the entire first page of google news search shows that same website with articles that have nothing to do wit the topic and many are from years ago or months ago not current news.

Sorry if I got a lot of grammar errors and typos, im using my ipad.

[lcfc80]

Not really sure what is going on at the minute, but basically 1 of my sites got pretty much has been wiped out overnight, pretty much all of it. Now, it's a site in the UK sports betting sector, showing free bets and sportsbook reviews, that's all I'll say on that. I've been in this sector for ages (over 15 years) so watched it change and learnt with it, and I know it's a tough market. Let's say the site is targeting 'red widgets' as the main Hollywood keyword, with variations such as 'UK red widgets' etc. Each sportsbook then has their own review which are well over 1600 words each, fully researched etc and honest. The main keyword would be '[generic] red widget', with many pages ranking on page 1, for their terms.
For the homepage, and like I said, I know it's competitive, for a year I've floating between page 1 and 2 for UK variations and other long tails and came and went regular out of the index for main 'red widgets' keyword and usually hung around about page 7-9, which I wasn't bothered about as unlike most of the sites in that field, I don't bother buying links.
Now I've said all that, roll forward to this morning, wake up to find the site isn't ranking for anything, all keywords, and longtails completely gone, check the individual pages, gone as well, yesterday 1 page was in 4th spot on page 1, not anywhere in the first 12 pages now. Strangely though, the 'red widgets' rank is still there on page 8 where it was yesterday, the only result I can find in the SERPS. I've checked search console, and there is nothing in there, googled site:xxxxxxx and the results still show everything indexed for now. So all is very very strange to say the least.
I'm hoping this is just a glitch but I've had 2 strange incidents since the last core update so I'm questioning if there is something really leftfield going on. 1 of my theories is that google struggles to differentiate between my site which is red-widgets and another with is redwidgets. Sounds strange but for a long while, especially when my site was new, google often listed us like 1 was a sub of the other, although mine is quality written and the other is heavily on the content spam side and google struggles to tell the difference until both sites have been crawled with a new update. That is just 1 theory though and might be total nonsense. It could be a glitch, or just what happens with these roll outs
I'll keep you posted though if it helps people

[samwest]

Zero seasonal recovery from the historical low in June based on 22 years of traffic data. Google is a wasteland.

[RedBar]

Oh come on samwest the US is in recession, ooops my bad, transition to the WEF future !

[samwest]

The first week in 22 years under $100 bucks, recession? try depression.
It now costs more to maintain the website than it generates.
The position has not changed.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is soaring again today...highly unusual for a Friday. It coincides with a recovery of most of the top3 terms lost last week. A closer look shows relative weakness in USA and UK traffic since July 21st. But Canada and Australia seem to be much stronger than I have seen in months...Germany also.

It's only during these surges that I get any inquiries at all. Getting traffic hammered for the entire week and then surging for a day or two simply doesn't cut it. Sales are drastically down compared to 2021. That is also the mild recession at play, but it's mostly Google. You can adjust pricing downward during a recession...but if you have no traffic and no inquiries then it's just impossible.

[lcfc80]

Following my post above, all rankings gone this morning. Still nothing in search console, still looking normal as site:xxxxxx but absolutely nothing in the SERPS

[RedBar]

My traffic metrics are in and how do they compare?

July 2022 vs June 2022 were -14%
July 2022 vs July 2021 were -39%

Realworld business enquiries are down considerably and we have already started to cut back raw widget production, we shall not make the same mistakes as 2008!

[ichthyous]

It's Monday morning, and that means traffic has dropped through the floor of course! USA is -48% this morning after a decent weekend...UK is down 31%. The weekday mornings tend to be sluggish now, let's see if it recovers later in the day.

Overall my traffic is quite a bit higher than last summer, but with no inquiries and no sales. Interestingly, my CTR at Google Search Console keeps dropping. It was 0.6% earlier this year, now it has halved to 0.3%. Many more impressions, but same number of clicks. Anyone else seeing that?

@RedBar We have been in recession since January as far as I can see. USA has two quarters of declining GDP, and even worse in Europe. My sales have vanished entirely. The ones who do inquire aren't buying anything. While I mostly blame Google for the lack of inquiries, I do think the economic climate is inhibiting people from spending. The only ray of sunshine is that people seem to be in far better financial shape than in 2009 for example, so this could improve much more quickly. After the 2008 crash it took me 7 years to full recover to the same level of income as in 2007 before the crash. I don't see this recession being nearly that bad with unemployment at 3% now.

[RedBar]

We have been in recession since January as far as I can see.

Don't you mean transition :-) Take the koolaid !

Post 2008 in the UK alone 33% of my widget industry closed forever within the following 3 years.

It has never recovered.

[ichthyous]

Scary low start to the day...search is -30% and direct traffic is -40%. USA traffic is down 61% and UK -47%. Yesterday also started weak, but recovered by the end of the day and ended -7% on searches. I actually climbed slightly in ranking overnight, gaining 1 top3 and 5 top10 terms.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous,

traffic is nothing if it is not on target.
This last make-our-pockets-full update from google vanished all sales.

And it is scary how simple google can be tricked, while setting up a fake testpage with pure nonsen spun text and a link pointing to amazon.
If you search for an item you get plenty of this fake test sites and you don´t beliefe it, they all have a different test winner for the item you are looking for. And for sure all are pointing to different amazon pages.

[samwest]

Looks like WebmasterWorld traffic has dried up too. Crickets.

[RedBar]

Someone, not me, changed the topic subject:

[webmasterworld.com...]