Google releasing a large update today

My guess is that on 1st May 2020 Google heavily implemented AI on search. Most SERPs are still garbage because the AI is still learning.

I am not sure since when but "googleresearch.blogspot.com" redirects to "ai.googleblog.com".

The war is now between us and AI. SERPs are still changing. So wait till you make some drastic changes.

The AI likes something today doesn't mean it will like it one month later. It's uncertain and unpredictable.

I receive plenty of traffic from social media, mostly pinterest. They like it, they share my content and their share gets reshared.

It's only the dumb bot from google who thinks my site is irrelevant.

--
 
As I said before, I am not surprised that so many websites have lost traffic.

The two sites http://whfoods.com/ and https://www.news-medical.net/
according to Ahrefs and Serush have received more visitors. As also @Kash007 has recognized correctly.

I compared 50 websites (in my niche) and found out that the loser sites
have these deficiencies...


On-page:

Too much advertising.
Page structure not optimal
Little to no external links
Article quality sufficient but not great.

Basically these are 0815 affiliate sites, and mine is somehow part of them.

I have fixed most of these errors. With success my traffic increased by 80% yesterday and by 8% today according to Google Analytics.
My website lost 30% of traffic in the beginning, this refers to 4 pages where I bought the articles on Fiverr for 5$ (1000W)

What I often read here is that Google prefers websites which place ads on Google.
This is not true, there is no correlation between the ranking of a site and the placement of advertisements.

For interest: Tell me one or more keywords where you think that the sites are not relevant in the top10.

I dont agree with you. The serp is still volatile...the same way you increased today and recovered you may lose tomorrow and go back.
There are 1000 of sites that have none of the problem you mention below and they have lost 50% of the traffic. With everyones conspiracy...I still say, Google f*cked up with this update and I don't think there is anyone yet who has a fix for it YET.
Let Google play around and try to fix this problem...and take it from there.
 
the same way you increased today and recovered you may lose tomorrow and go back
My traffic loss refers to a total of 5 subpages out of 120 which were in my opinion poorly or not optimized at all.
If I exclude these five pages from my analysis, my rankings before and after the update have not changed.

There are 1000 of sites that have none of the problem you mention
The examples I have mentioned refer to my own site and to the specific niche do not necessarily apply to all niches. Everyone has to find out for themselves.

To all: Show me the sites that have lost traffic but do everything right in your opinion.
Or sites that don't deserve to be ranked well
 
With the page structure, I mean the menu navigation. Most of the time it doesn't make sense

For example:
jrviIcj
I am happy that it works for you. My website that got hit had zero ads and I have to go ahead and add about 7-8 ads, so it remains worth it to keep it alive. I also didn't do the keyword stuffing in the sidebar which makes this update so weird and random. Who knows, maybe doing the opposite will work for my website.
 
I dont agree with you. The serp is still volatile...the same way you increased today and recovered you may lose tomorrow and go back.
There are 1000 of sites that have none of the problem you mention below and they have lost 50% of the traffic. With everyones conspiracy...I still say, Google f*cked up with this update and I don't think there is anyone yet who has a fix for it YET.
Let Google play around and try to fix this problem...and take it from there.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2020-core-update-mess-up-29508.html
 
I dont agree with you. The serp is still volatile...the same way you increased today and recovered you may lose tomorrow and go back.
There are 1000 of sites that have none of the problem you mention below and they have lost 50% of the traffic. With everyones conspiracy...I still say, Google f*cked up with this update and I don't think there is anyone yet who has a fix for it YET.
Let Google play around and try to fix this problem...and take it from there.
Agree with you. I follow all these "seo pros" on twitter and a lot of good SEOs are pissed. Most of them tag daily John and Danny regarding the stupid Pinterest and other stupid SERPs, which doesnt make any sense. There is a lof of complaints out there...
 
Agree with you. I follow all these "seo pros" on twitter and a lot of good SEOs are pissed. Most of them tag daily John and Danny regarding the stupid Pinterest and other stupid SERPs, which doesnt make any sense. There is a lof of complaints out there...
Someone asked Google's employee on Twitter why new content is not getting indexed properly and he replied something like, "it means Google doesn't see it worthy of getting indexed, not enough quality", instead of acknowledging that they've screwed up their update in major way.

A classic case of victim blaming!

Yeah, sure, a fresh well-researched 3K word article that covers things never covered before is surely lower quality than a 5-year old spun 100-word parasite not relevant to the search key phrase and intent.
 
So when I search for something on Google everything looks normal.
For example, if I type in "cake recipes without eggs" and so on
I don't see Pinterest sites

Also niche keywords like
"best true wireless earbuds under 100" etc

Everything looks good on my side
Which search queries do you use?
 
So when I search for something on Google everything looks normal.
For example, if I type in "cake recipes without eggs" and so on
I don't see Pinterest sites

Also niche keywords like
"best true wireless earbuds under 100" etc

Everything looks good on my side
Which search queries do you use?

The SERP seems to be stuck in time and not updating, I search for 'backlinks', the SERP for gotchseo is showing title:
'How to Build Backlinks in 2020 (NEW Guide) - Gotch SEO'
but when you go to that page the term 'How to Build Backlinks' is not there ( I even did 'view page source' and 'How to Build Backlinks' is not there)
It looks like the page was modified on May 5th and most probably gotchseo has changed the title but google is not updating it.

11.jpg
 
@bahus I'm not sure but maybe he runs some A/B Tests. That could explain why you can't see anything in his source code.
You can also set the title on Google and on your own site separately. That's what I do on my sites sometimes.
 
@bahus I'm not sure but maybe he runs some A/B Tests. That could explain why you can't see anything in his source code.
You can also set the title on Google and on your own site separately. That's what I do on my sites sometimes.

Actually, when I looked at the source code it looks like it was modified today

<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2020-05-26T14:56:00

So it's too early to say, bad example. None the less I'll keep an eye on it to see if the new title will improve his ranking for backlinks.
 
Someone asked Google's employee on Twitter why new content is not getting indexed properly and he replied something like, "it means Google doesn't see it worthy of getting indexed, not enough quality", instead of acknowledging that they've screwed up their update in major way.

A classic case of victim blaming!

Yeah, sure, a fresh well-researched 3K word article that covers things never covered before is surely lower quality than a 5-year old spun 100-word parasite not relevant to the search key phrase and intent.

So what am I suppose to do? Fire my staff and tell them spun articles are better LMAO. I have no idea what's going, everything I read from SEO gurus are debunked as the search result is complete trash. You said PBN's are working?
 
Actually, when I looked at the source code it looks like it was modified today

<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2020-05-26T14:56:00

So it's too early to say, bad example. None the less I'll keep an eye on it to see if the new title will improve his ranking for backlinks.


for what is worth, i have made updates to description on my sites and had google reindex it. it got updated in serp in 30 min.

however another page on the same domain, has not had its description updated in serp because i did not have google do its reindexing in gsc.

by the way, gotch website now reflects his updated title and description.

from the IP you were searching before, what was its ranking? what is it right now?
 
Someone asked Google's employee on Twitter why new content is not getting indexed properly and he replied something like, "it means Google doesn't see it worthy of getting indexed, not enough quality", instead of acknowledging that they've screwed up their update in major way.

A classic case of victim blaming!

Yeah, sure, a fresh well-researched 3K word article that covers things never covered before is surely lower quality than a 5-year old spun 100-word parasite not relevant to the search key phrase and intent.

Its called 'Imperialism'!!!
 
So what am I suppose to do? Fire my staff and tell them spun articles are better LMAO. I have no idea what's going, everything I read from SEO gurus are debunked as the search result is complete trash. You said PBN's are working?
Yes, absolutely, in a large number of my keywords, even those with very high MS volume, the top 2 positions are taken by 2 low auth affiliate sites (below 20 DA) with short articles (1.5K words) with content written through Google Translate and spun.

For example, they have an article "10 best widgets", and each review in the article is the same as the reviews of other 9 products but with the order of words changed.

So each review in the article is a spun version of the 9 other reviews. It looks so funny, I can't even!

And there is no addional info, no FAQs in those articles.

However, they both have PBN with even more spun content, which look trashy as hell, and all other links in their profiles are spammy, but Google doesn't give a shit.

So these sites are outranking huge media outlets.

All sites have volatility and are moving back and forth, but these two spun sites haven't moved a bit, standing rock solid on top 2 places for months.

So this is a backlink-related update which favors PBN and absolutely hates content.
 
upload_2020-5-27_18-26-33.png


I Just noticed an updated on GSC, called Core Web Vitals which looks at these two components

1) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
2) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

These just got added today, and the majority of our sites have been smashed during the updates, but these scores are very bad for the current platforms.

- Is this related? Is anyone who has been affected can confirm this?
- We need to understand what the correlations of the sites being affected are, so we can find out what the core trends are and resolve? ....if your interested lets get a thread, but have to be open!

Just a note, there is no point moaning and saying that Google got it wrong. Its very unlikely that this is the case and the winners will not be saying this. This is a core update to the algo and there has obviously been a significant change that has affected *some* websites and not all. There is no point waiting for a report to come out from one of the general SEO blogs, because it wont be indepth and will be a high level overview based on very little. The way to recapture our positions is through knowledge sharing in a structured way, analysing the trends of sites that have dropped (not been hit or dancing but a gradual lowering in traffic and rankings) and work out as a community what the resolve is.

If anyone who is heavily invested in the sucess of search, lets put this platform to good use and work together to setup a working group that can define the answers. Sounds far fetched.......but this is possibe.

Just to give some credentials, we run multiple sites across all niches in South East Asia, some have around 20M Monthly Users etc.....so were heavily reliant on maintaining a good search strategy
 
for what is worth, i have made updates to description on my sites and had google reindex it. it got updated in serp in 30 min.

however another page on the same domain, has not had its description updated in serp because i did not have google do its reindexing in gsc.

by the way, gotch website now reflects his updated title and description.

from the IP you were searching before, what was its ranking? what is it right now?

It was 11 now it's 12, sitechecker jumped over gotch
 
View attachment 135912

I Just noticed an updated on GSC, called Core Web Vitals which looks at these two components

1) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
2) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

These just got added today, and the majority of our sites have been smashed during the updates, but these scores are very bad for the current platforms.

- Is this related? Is anyone who has been affected can confirm this?
- We need to understand what the correlations of the sites being affected are, so we can find out what the core trends are and resolve? ....if your interested lets get a thread, but have to be open!

Just a note, there is no point moaning and saying that Google got it wrong. Its very unlikely that this is the case and the winners will not be saying this. This is a core update to the algo and there has obviously been a significant change that has affected *some* websites and not all. There is no point waiting for a report to come out from one of the general SEO blogs, because it wont be indepth and will be a high level overview based on very little. The way to recapture our positions is through knowledge sharing in a structured way, analysing the trends of sites that have dropped (not been hit or dancing but a gradual lowering in traffic and rankings) and work out as a community what the resolve is.

If anyone who is heavily invested in the sucess of search, lets put this platform to good use and work together to setup a working group that can define the answers. Sounds far fetched.......but this is possibe.

Just to give some credentials, we run multiple sites across all niches in South East Asia, some have around 20M Monthly Users etc.....so were heavily reliant on maintaining a good search strategy


I'm also a victim of this update.
70% of URLs including homepage are displayed as slow
 
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