After our report Friday discussing the Google algorithm update released Thursday May 13, 2021 there were multiple updates rolled out over the weekend.
One key point to note is that this activity isn’t related to the page experience update, which was pushed back to sometime mid-June through August for the completion of the entire rollout.
Industry tools have been off the charts, including industry discussions.
Below are some of the comments over on WebmasterWorld:
There is clearly something going on.
I am surging significantly while almost all non-news site competitors are falling. Every single site in my niche (all legit industry sites) was brutally hit by the last core update and mostly replaced by news sites with thin content affiliate pages.
Most of these competitors are bigger (and older with better links and much more content) than me but they are falling, I am increasing. I do not expect this to stick. Even if it benefits me and it’s great, objectively it does not make sense.
Of course the news sites still dominate and continue to exclusively go upwards. – All of us are still a shadow of what we were before the December update and still buried beep below the news site spam.
My home page is down 66% from a normal Saturday at noon, while overall USA traffic is down 44%. Some of that will recover my end of the day, but it’s been a pretty steady daily reduction of 20% – 25% in USA traffic since the end of April. This is ridiculous…all of my inquiries are now coming from outside of the USA, very few inquiries (and no sales) from my own country!
I have noticed very strong UK and EU traffic, but Canada and Australia are alternating…one day one surges and the other vanishes, then the opposite. Anyone else seeing this?
Oh boy. Definitely something badly wrong. Just been running the personal Discover Feed checks and the issue with it being cluttered with old and irrelevant content is back again.
Horrible traffic and sales this week, which I suspect this is the result of the cyber attack on the pipeline, as users are more interested in surviving rather than browsing and buying online. The world is in a digital war.
Wow, my UK focused (90% UK traffic) sites are so far today, Sunday, exceeding my global sites for PVs … WTF have they done apart from destroy non-USA company sites?
I know that may not make sense to US members here however there must surely be a correlation as to why G’s SERPs is so dire and full of popular social and shoppong sites for so many queries.
Has G really hit the lowest common denominator button, quality and accuracy no longer exists?
Utterly bizarre!
Based on these sensors, it looks like they’re doing/testing something almost every weekend
From April 28th 2021 there is so much fluctuations in the Average positions and other metrics in Google Search console performance reports of one of my website.
Is these because of Google updates?
The average positions prior to April 28th 2021 was in between 35 to 36, post April 28th 2021 there is so much fluctuations, some days it will be in between 45 to 50 and another day 37 to 40.
Some very easy to understand numbers here from the last 7 days compared to long-term averages:
Monday to Friday 66.6% that’s an interesting number!
Long-term weekends are usually 60-80% of weekday
Saturday 44.2%
Sunday 37.0%
There we go, one week and down 33.33% across the board for my global site.
Absolutely nothing’s been changed has it G?
I’ve been doing some research into why some of my sites, and those of my competitors, have risen for certain search terms but not others. My conclusion is that the domain name and back link anchor text are really important again in my niche.
Wow this is how we used to optimise sites 20 years ago. This Google algo is primitive, looking for the easiest signals and ignoring the ones that really matter.
I was reading that Google has more staff selling ads than looking after search. It figures.
Our SEO Insights
It’s true: there appears to have been multiple massive algorithm updates over the past few days, with everything spiking off the charts.
We know it’s not the page experience update, because Google has confirmed that update was pushed back to mid-June through August.
There have been reports of Google researchers proposing a complete redesign of Google search based on AI like BERT and GPT-3, which would create a similar effect to how some of these updates have been going, as noted by some of the SEO professionals in the updates above.
As always, we will continue to report the latest SEO news stories as they develop!
