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Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2020

         

gatormark

1:43 pm on Jun 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

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The following 13 messages were cut out of the May, 2020 thread at:
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4994037.htm [webmasterworld.com]
by robert_charlton - 4:31 pm on Jun 1, 2020 (PDT -8)




I just don't know anymore. There is no rhyme to these rankings. I tested the speed of one of the top pages that replaced mine and it has a page speed of 3 for mobile and 23 for desktop. THREE FOR MOBILE! How the heck is that possible and they're in position #2? Google disregards all their recommendations. I am at a complete loss these days. Up is down, Right is wrong.


[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:44 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2020]
[edit reason] split thread to new month [/edit]

30K_a_month

2:49 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Webweeb+ great mate, just dont want you to fall into the negativity trap, its not nice. good stuff

RedBar

2:53 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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The website has 160 articles and about 250,000 words

I wonder how much of a concern this is to Google?

Are they even bothered about lengthy articles, with or without advertising, when they can far easily promote a video, with advertising?

Sheeple seem to prefer videos to text.

Sheeple In the USA, do more voice searches than typed.

Sheeple do not, in general, want to trawl through loads of "unnecessary" text when seeking answers / solutions.

Haven't you noticed all the arty farty website designs these days rather than sites with real meaty subjects?

Think like Google has to, think lowest common denominator if you are dealing with sheeple, educated trades people will find you regardless of Google.

Dooku

4:38 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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I think many of you already know this, but this small quote from an article in the Guardian is well stated:
"the amount of time we spend on the internet is changing the very structure of our brains – damaging our ability to think and to learn".

I catch myself sometimes caught inside a bubble of thought thinking "I know better", which is very dangerous. I see this a lot with people running a website and some of them are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they know their subject and their content is GREAT. While in fact only the visitors of our websites will determine that, and their behavior will trigger flags in google to either improve your website rankings or demote your website.

Some of the websites that are being judged to be of low quality or have #*$!e content actually provide purpose for a big part of their audience. You may not like it, but for a lot of people that "#*$!e" website and it's content is great. Instead we need to study that website and find out WHY it's doing great because obviously the webmaster of that website REALLY knows his audience. Not all listings in the top 10 serp results in google are spam or absolute #*$!e!

My previous post was misunderstood by a few, despite me mentioning a few times clearly I do NOT advise anyone to go out and use spam tactics. But there are many ways to improve rankings and get more pages indexed even if you use not so white tactics, WITHOUT spamming.

With the Bing deindexing: been there done that several times over. Usually check your backlinks and the links on your website and amount of content and the good old tags(no joke!). Then clean up whatever you think is toxic, check internal linking structure, change up some of the content. Then email them back with a list of ALL things you have done and improved. On average within 2 to 3 weeks your back in the index.

Webweeb

6:45 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)



Update is rolling out. Just checked rank ranger.

Not seeing any bug fixes so far. Pinterest is still ranking under every CCTLD under the sun in the serps. Some serps are 30%+ pinterest. Im even learning about CCTLDs I have never even seen before by simply looking at the serps :D .co.kr... never heard of that CCTLD but i guess it exists.

If they haven't even fixed the admitted bugs, they sure have not fixed anything else.

I think I found a bug in Google:
So for some niches keyword stuffing is working again. I bet they made some kind of condition that allows keyword stuffed content to rank for some special edge cases... and it seems its ranking the worst kind of spam in some niches. I see posts ranking that are 90% keyword stuffing and variations of search terms just simply listed. According to Matt Cutts that should not rank, so they must have implemented some kind of exception.

[edited by: Webweeb at 7:24 pm (utc) on Jun 10, 2020]

SteveWrz

6:53 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Showing a slight increase in traffic over the past 2 days after being killed by the May update. Today looks decently strong as well. I am still down significantly compared to pre update, but some traffic has returned.

gwarftron

6:55 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Dooku I think you are not getting what others are saying is spam and just complaints from webmasters with mediocre content. I get that not all of my content is the best out there. I think it's decent, but can improve.

But I've seen lots of cases with websites that look like they were built in the early 2000s. Horrible content, mustard colour backgrounds, etc, etc. I mean the obvious spam that everyone knows is dog#*$!e.

worker

8:00 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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I've seen people posting about various bad search results and I've seen my fair share, but yesterday was absurd.

I wasn't even testing different phrases, I was trying to use Google to find results for personal searches.

The results were 100% wrong. There were websites in other countries that have nothing to do with the search phrase, but mainly there were pages and pages of Google Books listed, and none of them were related to the search phrase.

I ended up trying duckduckgo and bing and found answers on both. Something is really broken in Google Search and I don't understand why they haven't been able to fix it.

Skape7

8:04 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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I noticed a substantial drop in Google traffic for two of my sites starting yesterday and seem to be holding same pattern today as well, however when I actually do manual searches for some of the top keywords they ranked for, the positions seem the same as they were before. Could they be dropping randomly, or showing for some people differently than they do for me? I thought maybe it was a GA tracking issue because I'm not seeing the ranking positions actually change that much, not even in AHREFs.

But then I stumbled upon a June Core update being a thing, now I wonder if its testing my sites. The May update crushed one site, but not the other.

Between Google and Amazon, they seem hellbent on crushing online entrepreneurs in the midst of a pandemic and looming economic recession. WTF.

christianz

8:07 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I am also seeing improvement over past couple days and today. Let's see if it lasts.

Regarding bing - who cares if bing delists. They have 0% market share. People are too stupid to use anything else other than G.

Skape7

8:12 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Regarding Bing, it depends on the niche I think... One of my sites killed it on Bing until it was delisted.

Skape7

8:36 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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What I don't quite understand is that for one of my sites the clicks and impressions in GSC are actually up yesterday, but the organic traffic was way down. That is why I thought perhaps it was some kind of GA issue.

Portland79

9:27 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



This was interesting and EXTREMELY CONCERNING.

I got a receipt for my domains.google renewal today in my Gmail account.

But guess where?
In the SPAM folder.

Now surely Google did not mark domains-noreply@google.com as a SPAMMER in Gmail.

Meaning my legit domain, which is mentioned in the renewal receipt, is what triggered the SPAM filter.

WTF?

gatormark

9:37 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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@Skape7

looming economic recession


Too late, the US economy is already officially in recession.

koan

10:19 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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the US economy is already officially in recession


You wouldn't know it while checking stock market charts though, the rebound has been dramatic, it seems almost disconnected from reality.

gatormark

11:11 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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@koan

You wouldn't know it while checking stock market charts though, the rebound has been dramatic, it seems almost disconnected from reality.


So true, but the stock market’s performance is not connected to the definition of a recession.

samwest

11:37 pm on Jun 10, 2020 (gmt 0)

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The whole world is in a "voluntary recession"...not just the US...and WTH does this have to do with SERP changes?
BTW my 401k is right back to where it was...almost.

Athedian

5:35 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Something's definitely brewing right now. Analytics showing massive drop in sessions and this corresponds to previous updates when analytics would go haywire when there's a change in algo going on.

christianz

6:43 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Stock market right now is just about the only thing more corny than Google's Pinterest and YouTube filled search results.

Many of those Robinhood geniuses buying Tesla at 1000 weren't even born in 2000 so can't really blame them. Especially when state is literally doping money from the sky.

But your 401k should be measured in real wealth terms and purchasing power. If its back where it was in dollar terms, it means it lost value. There is 10-12% yearly inflation in US, Europe and pretty much globally. Don't believe me? Just check prices for anything that is not bare minimum survival supplies. Anything bigger and anything desirable.

30K_a_month

8:04 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Quick reply ref bing indexing

to get in DUCKDUCKGO you need to be in BING. If you are deindexed from bing you wont be on Duckduckgo!

newbies

markseo

9:03 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Total change in traffic quality from Sunday through to Wednesday. Same volume, but not transacting. Feels very clear that I am now getting traffic from a non-transactional segment - no change in impressions, slight dip in traffic, and big dip in conversions to less than 20% of last week.

Nothing new though - happens regularly.

jediviper

9:19 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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For anyone noticing some SERP volatility recently, the biggest impact after the May Update was on the 2nd of June for some countries.
Nothing else recently.

RedBar

9:30 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Regarding bing - who cares if bing delists. They have 0% market share.

Obviously this is a personal viewpoint however getting real figures is extremely difficult simply because the metrics are skewed towards "western" economies taking no account of what is happening in other huge markets simply because they do not have the information.

For instance I have seen figures for Bing at 0.2% rising to almost 13%. likewise with Baidu from 0.2% to 11%. If one only believed Statcounter's charts then everyone else may as well close shop however Statcounter is heavily influenced by its customer markets and locations.

In my 27th year of site construction what I have always found perplexing about people claiming to SEO for XYZ search engine is "Why"? I rank across them all using the same techniques / methods / whatever, sure I've had the occasional blip as SEs have fundamentally changed things however those iterations were soon learnt.

Yes, for some unfathomable reason stuff does disappear and I very much doubt even the algo creators know why, therefore if this happens to you and you're not back within 3-4 months, then it's time to re-evaluate. If it's one single page and all others are doing ok then it has to be presented differently, if it's an entire site then, in high probability, it's been killed, period, time to move on.

samwest

11:13 am on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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10-12% iinflation...lmao - turn off CNN.
[images.app.goo.gl...]

RedBar

12:43 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hmmm ... Email spam definitely up!

Plus I'm getting specialist widget product enquiries for widgets that not only do I not have but have never heard of before and, insofar as I am aware, do not exist.

samwest

1:47 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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@Redbar - seeing the same thing here. Also getting a lot of page hits for extremely old, outdated pages and media that hasn't existed for over a decade. None of these are related to existing back links, which I could believe, but rather these are "probes" or "sniffing" by Googlebot, perhaps from a very old data set. This always seem to happen just before another shakeup. I still say the 'Google Dance' never really went away.

Right now, my biggest sources of traffic are social media, so every day I'm less and less concerned with what Google keeps doing...over and over.

JaneSEO

2:55 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



We are seeing crazy changes in SERPs for supplements. Before (around the May 4th update) queries were product based. Now they are authoritative sites or amazon. Anyone else in the supplement industry feeling the burn of this?

seomotionz

2:59 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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@JaneSEO Welcome to the forum. Yup, that's the new Google. Small businesses doesn't have any chance.

ichthyous

2:59 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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Looks like big drops in my already low traffic both yesterday and today. If this keeps up I will have to declare Google officially dead as a source of business and stop wasting my time worrying about the serps. Too bad there isn't anything nearly as effective as organic traffic to replace it.

Another increase in Pinterest backlinks and spammy links reported in GSC. Google cannot decide what to do with Pinterest... I used to have a ton of links, then they all vanished, and now coming back. With regards to scraper sites... Google is more effective at catching and reporting the massive amount of links from scraped and spam sites than it is in finding legitimate links. I've disavowed these sites for months, but still increasing spam links!

Skape7

3:36 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)

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The pinterest thing is maddening... I see some SERPs with multiple Pinterest TLDs ranking for the same query. How does that make any sense?

pinterest.com, pinterest.es, etc. all ranking on front page.

Webweeb

4:51 pm on Jun 11, 2020 (gmt 0)



@Skape7

The pinterest thing is an admitted bug. not sure who admitted it, danny sullivan or someone...

There are results where pinterest is 30-70% of the page 1 and 2 results.... not sure if the CCTLD thing is a bug or the amount of rankings or both.

Pinterest is a very mixed bag... while in some niches it can be useful... image related search...in some others its mostly spam.

Also seems to me that the same algo that is ranking pinterest is ranking other thin content keyword stuffed spam... like bad spam.

[edited by: Webweeb at 5:07 pm (utc) on Jun 11, 2020]

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