Post Your May 2020 Core Update SERP Movements

Anybody noticing any ranking fluctuations? I see the results are quite stable now and not much dancing at the moment.

I noticed the KWs are slowly going up or down but not drastically as they were going before.

Its been almost a week now and I'm afraid the results are now settling up or what?

john-benjamin said:

Anybody noticing any ranking fluctuations? I see the results are quite stable now and not much dancing at the moment.

I noticed the KWs are slowly going up or down but not drastically as they were going before.

Its been almost a week now and I'm afraid the results are now settling up or what?

Click to expand...

Not drastic, but the traffic is down, then up, then down again. Weird.

The most unpleasant thing is that new content doesn't index well, and doesn't show up in top 100 even for very long tail keywords. It's as if they have stopped accepting new content into the search before the update has finished.

My website has recovered already from the update. Most of my keywords are slowly going up.

But there's still some movement.
https://cognitiveseo.com/signals/

Shopllc said:

Not drastic, but the traffic is down, then up, then down again. Weird.

The most unpleasant thing is that new content doesn't index well, and doesn't show up in top 100 even for very long tail keywords. It's as if they have stopped accepting new content into the search before the update has finished.

Click to expand...

I guess it will take another 1 week for this update to be rolled out completely. Traffic has been down for me so far. From 500 UVs I'm at 250 visitors :/

dawid007 said:

My website has recovered already from the update. Most of my keywords are slowly going up.

But there's still some movement.
https://cognitiveseo.com/signals/

Click to expand...

What niche? How would you rate your recovery? Can you explain more?

Here's mine. Google is really crazzzy....

it was down on 6th, then slightly back up almost back to normal..

and yes, new post are very hard to index... well actually no new post were indexed since may 7th..

anyone experiencing same problem ?

attacheds said:

it was down on 6th, then slightly back up almost back to normal..

and yes, new post are very hard to index... well actually no new post were indexed since may 7th..

anyone experiencing same problem ?

Click to expand...

I have the exact same problem!

On my site still down. At around 40% of the original traffic.

For all who ask

I'm in the Home & Kitchen niche.

attacheds said:

it was down on 6th, then slightly back up almost back to normal..

and yes, new post are very hard to index... well actually no new post were indexed since may 7th..

anyone experiencing same problem ?

Click to expand...

Same here..
I can't index my post since may 4th

site 1
expired domain, no backlink last 4 months




site 2
expired domain, no backlink and no posts last 4 months

I think many sites that are built on expired domains or that used 301 redirects got hit, but maybe I could be wrong. I would like to hear more from owners whose sites are not affected by this update at all or ones that got traffic boost. Did you build sites on exp domains and did you use any redirects to help you rank earlier?

it looks like going up. But i think thats bs. it wont go up. it tanked permanently. another weird thing is that all links i made had zero power thus my traffic is low. so even before tanking i wouldnt be able to rank. Ffs lol

My traffic and rankings still haven't recovered, in fact, it looks like it's still slipping. I'm now seeing only high authority websites overtake the top 5-6 spots such as reddit, Quora, medium, and even some totally unrelated websites with high domains. From what I'm seeing, it seems only websites that have really high domain authority are getting rewarded regardless of how good their content is.

luc1fer said:

I think many sites that are built on expired domains or that used 301 redirects got hit, but maybe I could be wrong. I would like to hear more from owners whose sites are not affected by this update at all or ones that got traffic boost. Did you build sites on exp domains and did you use any redirects to help you rank earlier?

Click to expand...

all my domains are old domains from 6 years to 18 years yes all dropped. especially more droppings for the sites which has 301 redirections too. damn. I was just thinking of the same and started to think same with you after seeing your message.

has still no one figured what his update favores and discriminates?

Traffic down around 40% - 50%.

Anyone seeing correlation between dropped rankings and amazon affiliate links on your site?

Update: Results are again dancing for me but my main KWs are slowly going up again and traffic is also kind of coming back but some KWs went down...

PS: 2 of my competitors are standing ROCK solid on their positions and throughout all this update I didn't see them dancing.

1 of them has fewer contents but the site is selling XXX stuff (Seller website not aff)
Second is a blog like mine but double the number of posts than me. Kind of authority but it has bunch of ads and links from some really good websites.

My Traffic Stats

A bit further information from my site. I like to share and think about this so maybe others can also provide some insights. Its no good just saying "my traffic is down X%", or "why is my traffic dropping". I think we need to look at what has happened to piece together an answer. Here is something interesting I noticed and it might be a clue.

This is a snapshot of 1 page on a niche site has the following 3 months for Impressions + Rank :



Notice the rank has increased to an average Rank of 3. But my traffic has dropped more than 50%. Lets compare click through and impressions:



The impressions have dropped and my click through has increased above 16%. Lets compare Click through and Rank which should mirror each other:



And they do.

So if I am ranking better why am I not getting the impressions. Well lets look at the number of queries I ranked for between 29th April and 3rd May compared to the 4th May through to the 8th May:

Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 110 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 52 queries.

Hmmm Interesting ..... I checked another page

Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 380 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 317 queries.

Checked another page:

Period 1 (29 Apr - 3 May): 702 queries.
Period 2 (4 May - 8 May) : 549 queries.

My traffic drops mirror what I am seeing above.

Can anyone else confirm they are seeing the same things. We are losing long tail queries. Google has better targeted sites to keywords, so where in these 3 pages I was appearing on 1192 queries before I am now only appearing in 918 queries which is a decline of 23% in appearances. This has turned into about a 30% traffic loss though as I am showing higher ranked on more specific targetted queries and nor appearing on the more higher competition, higher traffic keywords.

The good news is this opens up a lot more articles to be written for the queries which I lost. The bad news is this takes time to write and post and it sucks.

Let me know if you are seeing the same.