Google Core Update September 2022

[ne0h]

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System: The following 11 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5071217.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 10:24 am on Sep 13, 2022 (utc +1)

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Another sudden update started rolling out for September core update.

[developers.google.com...]

Seriously...one after another...

[javelin]

They seem to do this a lot in summer/winter now. In between just minor stuff. This one looks like another 2 weeks of updates.

[ne0h]

Also there's a new search event on Sep 28. The tag line is Search outside the box.

Oh dear.

[searchon.withgoogle.com...]

[RedBar]

Another sudden update started rolling out for September core update.

Didn't this used to be the Xmas update?

I can't imagine what's being updated since I have 3 month old pages that have been indexed but have hardly moved anywhere and this is for low competition specialised widgets.

[Soulofmonk]

Seeing a massive drop in traffic, but no changes in ranking in SERP

[renatovieira]

Very huge drop today... wowwww

[Soulofmonk]

25 ~ 30% drop :(
[ibb.co...]

[OldFaces]

I want to thank whoever brought up Bing traffic representing a sizable portion of your organic search landings. I couldn't believe it...but BING is actually resulting in a sizable amount of visitors our way. About 1/3 of what Google brings us.

Kinda makes sense...Bing is still in the business of pointing visitors to websites as opposed to trying to keep people within their ecosystem at every turn (E.g. Google's answers they 'borrow' from websites and display on google.com, Youtube, etc.). So even though Bing has such a small share of the search market, they send a sizable amount of traffic our way.

[Martin Ice Web]

So this last updates are relay annoying. If you come across a page for a popular keyword and find a website ranking very, very high with content like this:

german:

Die Kaltgerätestecker 5M haben einen weiteren Vorteil gegenüber herkömmlichen Gerätesteckern: Sie sind viel einfacher zu handhaben. Denn herkömmliche Gerätestecker sind oft sehr klein und flach. So kann es sehr schwierig sein, sie in die Steckdose zu stecken. Auch sind sie oft sehr leicht, sodass sie aus der Steckdose fallen können. Die Kaltgerätestecker 5M sind dagegen perfekt für den Einsatz in Kühlsystemen geeignet. Sie sind größer und passen daher besser in die Steckdose. Auch sind sie schwerer, sodass sie nicht so leicht aus der Steckdose fallen können.

english:

The 5M iec plugs have another advantage over conventional appliance plugs: they are much easier to handle. Because conventional device plugs are often very small and flat. So it can be very difficult to plug them into the socket. Also, they are often very light, so they can fall out of the socket. The 5M cold appliance plugs, on the other hand, are perfectly suited for use in cooling systems. They are larger and therefore fit better in the socket. They are also heavier, so they cannot fall out of the socket so easily.

This is complete nonsens. The author doesn´t know anything about the item it descripes. It is spun text and false.
The problem is that google users trust the websites google defines as good content.
But sites like this can be very dangerous as the content is misleading. There are about 5 paragraphs like this on the same page. All stupid and silly.


Not to say that this site as thousands of pages like this with 10 best item of this and 16 best item of this.
All pages have 10 to 20 affiliate links to amazon.
It has a author named on top and a publishing date. This seems enough for google to give them EAT.

Since May 2022 update google did take a wrong turn. All updates resulted in serps clustered with autogenerated, spun text amazon affiliate sites.
Shops that a realy on top for their items get burried deep in serps. And get punished for having to much similar content. But this is just what a good Shop is made of. A great selection of items even if they are similar because of lenght, color, manufacturer.
It seems that having content for an item that is nowhere else to be found is a good signal for google to rank it high even if the content is misleading and /or false.

All this affiliate site have some things in common. They have a only two deep link site strukture and very small html code.
IMO a good only shop must have a deeper site structure to depict the different item classes. But google does crawl deep content only for big sites on a regular basis.

[robzilla]

Yes they're clearly still struggling with content that, to the human eye, is quite obviously auto-generated. Especially with smaller result sets, I frequently see pages ranking highly with content that's copied from other sources and then sloppily "reworded" (poorly chosen synonyms and such), which makes for awkward texts and unhelpful content.

I don't want to relate this to these recent updates, though, as I've been seeing this for a bit longer.

[Martin Ice Web]

I hope that they get this things on track.
In our niche, sites with keywords clouds on page bottom ranking very well. I thought this kind of content would be punished right away but it seems to work great again.
There current serps say go straight after google guidelines and we will punish you, if you try to cheat us we will reward you.

[ne0h]

The things when I use Google for my own research in topics as a search engine, I am getting better results on page 2 end or page 3... That's after 16th results maybe. Just think about an average user who has no idea or doesn't care about SEO. They keep clicking on the auto generated, scraped content and thinking its the actual info.

Every month Google pushes update, everyone hoping that eventually it would fix something. But I think years passes by, Google keep breaking things....and you get older while doing so. It's really a sad state of a actually Seo situation in Google.

The managers, leaders, teams in Google search who is responsible for giving a green signal to an algo, probably just doing something for their own career benefits to show how much profit they drive after an update. That's all matters. And then they leave Google for better pay within 1, 2 years. Then new managers comes in, changes algo again.

Larry and Sergey are no longer care about the actual philosophy pf search anymore. Not even the current leadership.

We are the fools who put efforts honestly, hoping to rank higher for better conversation, better ads earnings.

In reality, the game is rigged already. No value or returns on the efforts or your honestly created content.

It's sad to see G search first page today. Its a mess and its continue to stay. To win this game, you need to play according to how its rigged.

[BushyTop]

Has anyone in the UK started to see ranking (not traffic) changes yet?

[RubicCubed]

Every month Google pushes update

Seems more like weekly updates to me. I suspect Google is monitoring their daily/weekly revenue targets and are having a tough time meeting profit goals after bleeding everyone dry.

[RedBar]

Seems more like weekly updates to me.

IIRC there are 350+ updates / adjustments every year making it a daily event. I believe they have only advised the more significant ones for several years now.

[mzb44]

Seems like they are back at the "original" schedule of doing these every 111-112 (or ~30% of the year) days and on Mondays.

In the first few years I remember these always happened every 111 or 112 days (whichever ended up being s Monday).

Then it all changed with covid and everyone working from home.

Now it seems to be back on track, which means next one is early January? :)

[RedBar]

Then it all changed with covid and everyone working from home.

Maybe a daft question?

Why would covid make any difference? Are you suggesting many Plexers worked from home?

Another daft question? Is the algo stuff all still done at The Plex?

Honestly I have no idea, I was invited there 20 years ago but have no knowledge of what happens and where these days, maybe everything's done online by collaboration / zoom'ish ?

[mzb44]

Why would covid make any difference? Are you suggesting many Plexers worked from home?

I believe most were working from home during covid.

People were annoyed when it ultimately ended and had to come back, so I heard.

Is the algo stuff all still done at The Plex?

Allegedly, yes, it is.

Also, the 111-112 days thing was just an observation I made, as it's not the first time they did this.
However, that doesn't mean that next time it will be the same, obviously.

[javelin]

..but BING is actually resulting in a sizable amount of visitors our way. About 1/3 of what Google brings us.

Absolutely! Stick with Bing and let it work. Right now it produces x2 at minimum of what G brings me. Seriously G has its head up its... anyway.

G still works well for me nevertheless it is like fighting yourself. You put everything in that you can to get pushed into a black box that seems to be measured by fairness ratings... or whatever new gen idea they have today. Performance can still be had there but for me its now a smaller focus due to how impossible it is to work with them.

In Bing you will get far fewer impression rates but you do not need high rates. From what I have experienced the impressions are targeted for you to land and have a serious chance at gaining a visit. If you do not rank, there is no impression, unless the person keeps clicking to the next page.

Seriously I never believed that they would surpass my Google traffic by a minimum of x2 daily, but they have. It blew my mind.

[peter griffin]

For me that update is like ... going back in time. SERPs look likes in 2019. My traffic is 40% up. Google threw the 2020 & 2021 updates in the trash?

[JesterMagic]

Wow that was quick. The fallout from the last update hasn't finished yet.

Any idea what this update is tackling? I didn't see an official blog post about it.

[RedBar]

I believe most were working from home during covid.

Contrary to the percived narrative "most" were not, I have seen variations varying between 10% to 30% maximum and certainly in many countries "most" were working "as normal".

Sure certain shops / businesses were forced to close however in realworld manufacturing and services, production actually continued almost unchanged and much of it much smoother. Has anyone noticed the correlation between the "return to work" and the mess stuff is in now ? :-)

Me going off-topic again!

[shadowlight]

Now it seems to be back on track, which means next one is early January? :)

My money is on an update just before xmas / thanksgiving, online shopping will be at a peak.

[westcoast]

Crappy results in my vertical too. The top 10 positions are mostly large domains that threw up keyword heavy / content-light pages totally unrelated to their business or target niche, which increasingly dominates our niche.

Google has seemingly given up on the whole concept of niche experts. If you are a large player like Buzzfeed, you can just create pages on thousands of topics and rank high for all of them. The end result is that you have absolutely awful results.

Google needs to demote large sites that are playing "out of their niche", and promote those sites that are focused on the topic at hand and also have good content.

Contrary to Google's claims, content simply doesn't matter. Ever since the pandemic core update, the "domain size / authority" signal just totally dominates everything else by an order of magnitude. This is another reason why the HCU didn't really do much. It is dominated by the "large domain" problem.

[Atomic]

Contrary to Google's claims, content simply doesn't matter. Ever since the pandemic core update, the "domain size / authority" signal just totally dominates everything else by an order of magnitude. This is another reason why the HCU didn't really do much. It is dominated by the "large domain" problem.

If Google doesn't get this fixed, they're going to be useless. I know some if you think that moment has already arrived.

[capulkit]

My site example.com was launched in November 21. Almost a year and struggling to get it indexed. Just 4 results with site:example.com search. Google wants me to pay for ads to get visitors.

[edited by: not2easy at 3:57 am (utc) on Sep 14, 2022]
[edit reason] Tos #13 [/edit]

[Athedian]

No wonder I'm seeing my site's ranking dropping each day since two days ago. Not only is this core update being horrible as usual, oddly enough, Google Ads also seems to have 500 server error today as well.

The sad thing out of all this, is that my site has been revamped and conformed to everything that Google demanded. Speed, URL, sitemap, RWD, H1,H2 etc. and insightful content, every. single. one has been followed. And yet the ranking got worse. Not only is Core Vital showing all URLs as good for days, suddenly today it's spewing out this nonsense saying that 500+ of my URLs are "slow" (which is just not true). It's just pointless to do anything.

[cr1m]

I guess Core updates are now a bad thing for my main website, just recovered last week from the one in mid-July aaand it's -60% once again since yesterday. Fun times...

[mzb44]

Contrary to Google's claims, content simply doesn't matter. Ever since the pandemic core update, the "domain size / authority" signal just totally dominates everything else by an order of magnitude.

The issue is Google can't determine which content is great or not, in the same sense a human would.

Therefore, they decided to go with the premise that if a site is very authoritative, usually it means they have good content, or at least content that's not outright trash.

I completely agree that most of the content of these mega sites is "meh" at best. But usually it's not outright pure trash or even scammy.

Ranking smaller niche sites instead could potentially result in amazing content ranking, but at the same time risk accidentally ranking absolute garbage or even scams.

Ranking the mega-authority sites does indeed result in "meh" content ranking, but this path is safer, as the content is almost never pure trash or scam.

So, they compromised on quality somewhat to ensure consistency and to prevent the outright trash from ranking (most of the time :) ).

Unfortunately, lower authority but amazing sites are the collateral damage.

[Martin Ice Web]

Ranking smaller niche sites instead could potentially result in amazing content ranking, but at the same time risk accidentally ranking absolute garbage or even scams.

And you say that the serps right now are of quality? I remeber times where i found niche sites within one query that had very great content. Now I find 10 mega sites and still cant find what i´m looking for.