Google Core Update September 2022

[ne0h]

---

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)

---

Another sudden update started rolling out for September core update.

[developers.google.com...]

Seriously...one after another...

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed all seemingly still going ok for me, yesterday was a 97.3% day with today looking even better. Interestingly a lot of single page views today which is usually a bot sign however these are almost all to a dedicated widget page from many different countries over many hours which usually denotes people researching their chosen widget selection in their country and checking-out information about it.

[sofie77]

Something big happend on tuesday. Non english websites and no product reviews.

There was no change in the course of the core update so far, but there is a big dump on tuesday. I hope it doesn't stay that way but the core update is almost done?

[malkhaldi]

something is going on but i can't get it
let us see

[ChokenBako]

@Sofie

Can confirm that too. - 15% drop.
Hopefully it will not stay like this.

[RedBar]

I do not know why however my Thursday ended at 133.33% with an exact round number of PVs nnn,000 !

No one knows what's happening with traffic, the west is a "mess" yet real stuff is happening on a global basis, anyone posting their opinions are simply that, their view(s), including me. Together we may try and string some things together however my feelings are that a few months down the line we'll be able to see what has happened but at the moment we haven't a clue how to connect it.

Honestly, YMWV, and for anyone getting any pressure from ^^^above^^^, tell them to do their own analysis etc. Do not feel obligated to give answers to stuff you have no solution nor answers to.

Yep, I'll come and back you up at any board meeting!

[javelin]

No one knows what's happening with traffic, the west is a "mess" yet real stuff is happening on a global basis, anyone posting their opinions are simply that, their view(s), including me.

Yep the whole thing is a mess. Im not sure if they know what they are doing LOL! Someone let the monkeys loose in the control room and Mr Ed is giving orders.

[Martin Ice Web]

Im not sure if they know what they are doing LOL!

Wait for the third quater revenue report. Then you know that they know what they are doing.

[marcus94]

You guys saying traffic is down 15% etc, how exactly are you looking at this? Are you looking hour by hour compared to yesterday?

Today in Nordic countries we are seeing a huge drop.

[MayankParmar]

Nasty update. I'm significantly down and I continue to have serious indexing issues since August (when they acknowledged and allegedly fixed it)

[Bright Ahead]

The update that is happening for last 3 days will be reverted. In my niche most of the SERPs occupying the first page for a year now got relegated to 2nd page.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Sure, you could stretch your definition of any editorial site to a "review site" (or even a "product review site") if you wanted to be clever

You mean like Google did with all the new youtube videos replacing the featured snippets? Saying "Well, throw that idea in the trash bin, lets try this instead" mid video triggers a "see products" affiliate link over the video for trash cans.

Anyway: Informational site w/ no affiliate links, traffic is up 22% overnight.

edit: and I'm happy to report that a spam site with over 5 million pageviews per month was nuked out of serps last night. It's not mine, I'm not sure if it's ranking for anything anymore as I don't care to check, but it's nowhere to be found. Good move Google, it was showing everyone else's content in iframes and should have been nuked a year ago.

[MayankParmar]

What are the odds of reversal within the next few days?

[BigKat]

The update that is happening for last 3 days will be reverted.

I'm doubtful. Google seems to derive its profits by confusing users to trap them within Google's walls. Having bad and/or difficult to find information/products in Google's search results is part of the consumer confusion that makes them money. The problem for us, as a manufacturer/retailer, the confusion Google uses to turn users into clickers results in a much higher rate of returns for those orders originating from Google. Just as we see Google's traffic as being low quality, as compared to other sources of traffic, we also see Google's users to be more costly and hence lower quality as well.

[JesterMagic]

With this new update we are down another 10%. A lot of our good keywords over this last year has been pushed to page 2. 20 year old site.

Meanwhile completely spammy sites rank above us now

[ChokenBako]

@Marcus Hour by Hour compared with the same day of the previous week.

[capulkit]

Launched a site with a tool. Was first to launch it, had monopoly for 6 months. Big brands copied and now they rank on first page and first position. I am out of first 2 pages. Fk Google, its not only killing entrepreneurship but also punishing for it.

[RedBar]

Friday was easily my quietest day this week at 69% with a strangely flat period UK time between 22.00 until 04.00 this morning, at the moment it is looking like my "new normal".

Insofar as the UK is concerned, this week has seen a noticeable reduction in traffic from its previous highs.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Everyone needs to remember that traffic drops might not be Google's fault right now.

Recession, Depression, Lost Jobs, Closed Small Businesses, Lowest stock vaslue levels in years and more of the same is on the forecast.

That's not just going to affect advertising revenue, the number of people searching for goods of any kind is on a global decline.

My advice - focus on new content and try to remember everyone has a little less money and security than they did pre-pandemic.

Write with them in mind to help future-proof your site's value.

[EditorialGuy]

Everyone needs to remember that traffic drops might not be Google's fault right now.

I'm a big believer in not blaming everything bad on (or crediting everything good to) Google. Our traffic has been up quite a bit this year over last (though still lower than in 2019), and I've assumed that most of that increase was driven by demand in what a lot of people seem to think is the post-COVID era.

However: When Google traffic drops sharply during an update while Bing, Yahoo, etc. stay the same or increase, that does tend to suggest that the drop has something to do with the Google update.

[SteveWrz]

All of my sites are down around 25%.

How have ALL of them fallen basically the exact same percentage? Whatever this update is, it's the worst one yet for me.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If Google is going to replace more and more snippets with videos I'd like to see videos from more than just Youtube. I don't think I've ever seen one in the video box, but I don't really look anymore.

[mzb44]

We don't have a lot of product reviews, so it's hard to see why the new Product Review Update would be affecting us

It's already well-known that these updates do much more than what G public relations representatives officially say on Twitter while they are on vacation.

The so-called product review updates have affected a lot of sites that have nothing to do with product reviews. This is not new.

They give these updates specific names to steer the narrative into a desired direction.

[mzb44]

Google seems to derive its profits by confusing users to trap them within Google's walls. Having bad and/or difficult to find information/products in Google's search results is part of the consumer confusion that makes them money.

I think this is very accurate.

The G brand is so powerful that they can allow themselves to dilute organic serp quality somewhat, without this affecting user retention at all.

Then those users will be inclined to click on ads and/or get sucked into the G ecosystem (youtube, etc) instead of clicking on organic.

[RedBar]

For whatever reason I'm off the cliff edge today, after 13 hours I am at 13% of my 1-24 Sept average!

My first thought was the site was down or had been down, nope, we'll see what the rest of the day brings.

[RubicCubed]

Everyone needs to remember that traffic drops might not be Google's fault right now.

Unfortunately for us we can see more videos dominating the viewable part of the screen and more big box stores rising in ranks. Coupled with a global recession, this is bad news for us.

[EditorialGuy]

Unfortunately for us we can see more videos dominating the viewable part of the screen and more big box stores rising in ranks. Coupled with a global recession, this is bad news for us.

In the past few days, I've been seeing a rise in sites like TripAdvisor and TripSavvy, which are the travel information sector's equivalent of big box stores. I see that as an erosion of subject authority as a ranking factor.

The ranking difference isn't huge, but when you've been ranking at or near the top of the SERP for a bunch of important searches, a drop from the first position to the second--or from the second position to the third--can have a significant impact on Google traffic (especially if an answer box or a list of questions has been inserted after the first result).

[westcoast]

25 year old site, medium-large, well established, first mover in our niche back in mid 90s, 20,000+ referring domains backlinking to us. Not a major brand.

The second the core update started running on the 13th we started dropping like a rock. Down 20% sitewide now, and continuing to drop. We were clearly hit by some invisible sitewide penalty, as EVERY SERP listing dropped for us by at least a spot, in many case many spots. We do not use any black hat SEO, keyword manipulation, unhelpful content, etc. We trimmed out our thin pages to improve quality indexing significantly over a year ago, and updated a good chunk of our content.

For one of our main terms we are #2 in bing, #65 now in Google. This is the case for a score other major terms. Across all other search engines we are listed accurately -- top 10 for everything obvious. Google's simply broken and can't rank us properly. I think it has to do with the fact that we are 25 years old, and their algorithms just can't cope with the masses of noisy data that our site has built up over 25 years. We have a ton of 301s, thousands upon thousands of spam backlinks from malicious / malware / crap / spam websites, and likely GBs of click and bounce and other data going back over 2 decades. Whatever the case, Google is broken and can no longer rank us correctly. A few of us ancient site owners have noticed this trend over the past few core updates, but this core update broke the camel's back.

We are not alone here either - it appears a bunch of other 20 year old site owners I have spoken to have also seen this issue, and also got hit hard in this update. Perhaps because Google's ML isn't dealing with legacy data correctly they are unintendedly burying older established businesses like us deeper and deeper, while new sites with clean data profiles are flying up above us all.

Something I am seeing over our entire vertical is major generic brands ranking above us, even though we clearly have better content in the niche (it's not close, both in quantity and quality). So, take TODAY.COM for example. The TV show. Large brand. Anyway, they have a giant spammy page that hits all the keywords for our niche. And even though their show has NOTHING to do with our niche, they are outranking us and other big niche players. Same goes with BUZZFEED. Buzzfeed is now ranking in our niche by creating a single targeted page per topic, and because the are large they dominate that term. Being a household name now DWARFS by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE all other signals. Don't even worry about site speed or quality content, or anything else. It's ALL about whether or not you are a nationally known brand or not. It's a joke.

ALSO: the section of our site that dropped the most (30%+) is a section where users typically will get an answer to their question instantly. The dwell time on those pages is typically very low, because we answer them directly, accurately, and succinctly. I suspect the new Helpful Content or Core updates are using CTR and dwell time a ton more than in the past, because our low engagement time pages are getting hammered. The pages on competing websites that are outranking them now are pages where the answer they seek is buried deep in a massive amount of text.... requiring people to sift through huge rambling pages to find their answer. It gives a greater dwell time, doesn't it... so, some really upside-down things added in this new update. But if my hunch is correct, CTR / dwell / bounce data appear to be having some crazy unintended consequences.

[RedBar]

For my first 13 hours on Sunday I was almost flatlining and then traffic kicked-in resulting with an almost average Sunday plus the traffic has continued into tuday so far.

What I am noticing in my realworld business is that we are getting legitimate enquiries for specialised widgets that we have never, ever had requests before. Yes we have in-deptj information about them on the site purely for specifiers' usage purposes but they are not something we are traditionally known for supplying.

I need to find out why this is happening.

[christianz]

@westcoast you are spot on about oldest and best websites being abused most by Google, and you are absolutely not alone in this. Overall this September update is as awful as it can get (checking all the boxes of typical terrible Google update), unless you are Google itself or you have a contract with Google.

As for bounce rate and dwell time - I don't think Google uses those yet. They would be better at filtering out fake AI generated sites with zero direct traffic, if they did that.

On the other hand - most of those spam sites probably don't use GA for this very reason.

[EditorialGuy]

I think it has to do with the fact that we are 25 years old,...

We are not alone here either - it appears a bunch of other 20 year old site owners I have spoken to have also seen this issue, and also got hit hard in this update.

Our site has been at its current domain for 21 years (and on the Web for 25+ years), and we're in the same boat.

Is it possible that age, a.k.a. being an established site, used to be a ranking signal but has been deprecated or dialed back?

I'm also wondering if subject expertise or authority has been de-emphasized a bit in the latest update(s).