GSC now giving me warnings about validation errors from two weeks ago.
This pattern really is becoming tiresome.

@ichthyous Sorry my bad. In a previous post on the previous page you referred to it indirectly as a link service and I misread it was spread across multiple sites.

Wondering what the consensus is right now regarding the value of new links or aging links since the May update. I have a service which I pay monthly that costs me dearly...and I have about 750 inbound links from their site now

It sounds more like an Advertising arrangement maybe but it appears you are treating it almost like a link service especially since you talk about the backlinks and not how many sales it generates.

If you don't get your money back (or at least most of it) in sales generated thanks to your placement on the marketplace site I would maybe recommend either stop paying for it or dramatically reduce the amount of products you have on it (to reduce the cost).

Google cares about backlinks and most likely a few on the Market Place helps but 750 on the same site will not and may actually indicate some sort of bad behavior to Google. Remember Google doesn't want people to pay for backlinks and if they think that is going on, on the market place site they will just treat the links as advertisement and probably not count them at all in terms of ranking the page.

@JesterMagic This is exactly the issue, the platform does not generate sales at all, and is costing me every month...but now with so many aging links in place I don't want to rock the boat about closing the account and losing them all at the same time. You also never know when Google will tweak the algo and links will suddenly count for a lot more. The links were added slowly over time as the products were added, so I doubt that Google would see them as suspicious, especially from such a high-authority site...but the links are using targeted anchor text, which could be a problem. I certainly don't see them as increasing my traffic or boosting placement much since January of 2020. In 2019 they did.

Noticed something strange in the past few days. My new posts get indexed on Google and then all of a sudden they are deindexed. I can't find them anywhere on SERPs.

@rageboi "URL is on Google" but not visible is actually their bug. Started after canonical issue.

@MayankParmar Exactly the same problem. When I inspect my new post's URL, GSC says "URL is on Google", coverage - "submitted and indexed", the post appears on SERPs for 1-2 days and then disappears.

@rageboi
same here. My main traffic page appears for few weeks and disappears for few weeks since May

Strange thing again. Absolutely no conversions from Google traffic on Amazon's affiliate website for 5-7 days in a row. It again happens as "click", and the button turned off in an hour.

My weekend traffic was at the top end of its usual weekend average, i.e. 80%, my SERPs look unchanged other than some 7 year old pointless eBay listings, Pinterest back again and the occasional couple of listings from the same domain.

Today's started strongly for a holiday week with lots of international traffic and some unusual trade enquiries.

@AdrianRozic This is happening since November 12, 2020. My site is 5 years old and never ever faced this problem before.

Semrush sensors are online again and it's green in the US and blue in Europe. No movements, according to Semrush. The core update looks very unlikely... but whatever happened to their passage ranking update?

@MP - out of interest, how is your Discover traffic now?

Clicks from Discover/News/Chrome feed were zero for almost a week, but it looks like it was another glitch and they have started picking articles again. Discover is still 40% down, but it's better than zero :)

@MP

Expect a core update when least expected:-)

Xmas or New Year's Day would be awesome !.!.!

The core update looks very unlikely... but whatever happened to their passage ranking update?

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear it will not happen this year. It's almost December.

JM himself said that they don't want to disrupt Q4. Then people and sites started quoting him on this, then he backtracked with some vaguerries, probably because he's not supposed to reveal these kinds of stuff.

It will probably happen in January. Also, considering the pandemic is still ongoing, I would not expect any relaxing of whatever pro-mainstream authority site signals they boosted in May.

This weekend followed the new "normal" pattern of a few days of high traffic, followed by a few days of low traffic. Conversions were non-existent however. I did notice that GSC Core Web Vitals has now moved all my pages out of red and back to yellow / green after classifying them as red for most of the year. I did nothing other than updating to the latest theme and version of wordpress. It seems that perhaps Google may have updated the standards? Anyone else seeing this?

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear it will not happen this year. It's almost December.

There was update last year at this time, not a very big one. But it caused my traffic to go from the lowest since starting out to gradually reach the highest levels ever just before the May update that then halved it. There really is no way to know when the updates will come.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear it will not happen this year. It's almost December.

We had an update in January 2020 and in May 2020...both hit me pretty hard. I expect something may emerge in January 2021

I feel that the August glitch was actually the core update they were supposed to roll out. God knows why they retracted it.

Definitely something is broiling here in Europe

Definitely something is broiling here in Europe

Looks stable for my widgets.

I have run a number of tests on different search phrases consisting of 3-4 words (in the U.S.) and I'm seeing very large numbers of fake search results that redirect to #*$! sites and/or different domains than the one displayed within the Google search results.

(I am defining a 'fake search result' as one in which the domain displayed on the Google search results page and the text associated with it appear to match the search phrase entered into Google, but that when the search result is clicked, a redirect takes place leading to a different domain unrelated to the original search phrase.)

Google's search results apparently are being 'gamed' by spammers/scammers to a significant degree. In some cases, I'm seeing up to 50% of the search results on a single page of Google search results being false results (redirecting to incorrect or grossly inappropriate websites).

Are other people seeing things like this?

I feel that the August glitch was actually the core update they were supposed to roll out. God knows why they retracted it.

Yeah I feel the same. And it was also right around the time the next core update was "supposed" to come. (I know there is no fixed schedule but the last 4 ones all happened within 112-113 days from each other). The glitch I think was almost exactly around that time frame. They probably were not satisfied with the results and rolled it back.

The lack of transparency is the problem. They should have explained what went wrong during the August glitch and what steps they're taking to prevent it from happening again in future. They should be also clear about the timeline for core updates and there should be a better medium to ping Googlers about the potential issues via the Search Console.

Google's search results apparently are being 'gamed' by spammers/scammers to a significant degree. In some cases, I'm seeing up to 50% of the search results on a single page of Google search results being false results (redirecting to incorrect or grossly inappropriate websites).

So, it's been a bit of a pattern for a while now. Every two weeks or so, there is a flux that results a dramatic shift in the 'recommended' content (we see this most notably in Google Discover with completely irrelevant and sometimes outright spam suggestions on personal account feeds).

That almost always goes alongside similarly poor search results. Often the infamous "Pinterest spam" creeping up or the results being completely outdated - for example, we will rank for a term with an article that is over a year old - and no longer relevant - despite having recent and up-to-date articles for the same query - which was ranking before.

IT almost always goes alongside a sudden slide in AMP pages in the SERPS (broadly speaking, not just from our site) and almost always coincides with GSC reporting being severely delayed.

As somebody else pointed out, the lack of transparency here is the biggest problem. Just communicate. Even more so after people were telling guys like Danny and John on Twitter FOR WEEKS that there is a serious canonical/mobile indexing issue. They either ignored those comments, said nothing was wrong or went 'well go to the forum where somebody can copy and paste an answer for you'.

Are other people seeing things like this?

Quite simply for my widgets, no, and I do not think I can recall ever seeing this done for my widgets in 25+ years. Maybe my specialised costruction products' buyers / specifiers wouldn't be conned?

To which general sector are you referring?

Semrush is reporting movements in the US and Europe. Something is happening? At least one page is now suddenly ranking better than ever. Weird

Edit: The page is now back to its original position.

Not seeing anything except for my biggest keyword witth Pinterest domain sclustering still ... in general for most of my keyword phrases Pinterest has all but gone.

Seeing some changes this morning in the UK. Seems to be holding over the past few hours. Relatively positive for a change.

The lack of transparency is the problem. They should have explained what went wrong during the August glitch and what steps they're taking to prevent it from happening again in future. They should be also clear about the timeline for core updates and there should be a better medium to ping Googlers about the potential issues via the Search Console.

Google became less transparent after Matt Cutts left, even though they have JM, Danny etc. now.

Back then at almost all of the big updates he usually tried his best to explain what each update did while not giving away too much and offered concrete solutions on how to fix an improve things. Unnatural links update, low-quality content, repeated keyword pages etc. Now the only communication is "it was a broad core update" and that it "affected several factors", as well ass "there is nothing you need to fix" and that's that.