It appears that yet another unconfirmed Google algorithm update was released today, April 16, 2021.
Forum chatter and industry tools are off the charts, with many webmasters complaining about taking hits to their traffic and rankings.
Over on the WebmasterWorld.com forums, there’s been plenty of chatter amongst webmasters and SEO pros:
I had two days of recovery from the drop in English language traffic over the weekend, but Monday and Tuesday have been awful again. My USA traffic -22%, UK – 36%, and AU -39% over an average Tuesday by 7pm today. Is anyone else seeing this big drop in English language traffic since the Feb 13th and March 15th algo updates? This has not affected traffic outside of US/UK/AU/CA in general that I can see.
My SERPS did not improve over the weekend, but traffic was higher. I’m wondering if this is a penalty on my site of some sort, or if others are also seeing this.
I’m still seeing movement in the SERPs in my vertical with sites moving randomly a few places at a time. Today the massive use of youtube videos that I noticed two days ago has decreased. Instead of a mass of videos at the top there is now, for many of the search terms I checked, an organic result, the usual ‘people also ask’ garbage (which personally I find insulting; please answer my query google! I know what I’m looking for!) then a box with three youtube videos in it. No ads, but then these queries, being non-commercial, rarely had ads anyway.
March and the first 5 days of April were pretty good for my sales. I got more than I expected, to be honest. It wasn’t anything amazing, but there were one or a couple sales every day (which in these times is almost like a miracle). However, on April 5th there was a brief increase in traffic and then after that slow decrease (but again nothing too drastic) in traffic. But the sales were affected very negatively by whatever happened on Apr 5th… it’s as if the type and quality of traffic has changed since that date, but not so much the quantity.
Absolute decimation of traffic continues – yet rankings remain strong for most of our usual search terms that were reliable before.Makes no sense. So tired.
Did anyone else notice that it’s mainly informational sites that get massively hit during updates – especially core updates?
Maybe Google came to the conclusion that there’s just too many informational sites (usually made for affiliate or display ads) and most are just regurgitating the same stuff anyway.
So, why not just decide on a set of sites that should rank for most informational queries and nuke almost anyone else. Mainstream brands make a lot of sense here, as the chances of them posting shady stuff is lower than no-name sites.
I know a lot of here – me included – were negatively affected by these and we may think the above is unfair. But I think it actually makes sense.
The implementation is still clearly very crude and deeply flawed (press releases ranking, quality info sites nuked), but is the underlying principle really that bad? – I know it’s difficult to think in these terms but a lot of us need to eventually admit that perhaps the way we built and ran websites in the past is now outdated and won’t work anymore.
I’d say in the near future if you want to rank then you’re either a real brand with a product or service, or in cases of info sites a real registered publisher with regular organic (non-search) readership.
I feel that “made for Google traffic”-only sites will be completely nuked soon.
The Weekly Google Algorithm Updates Continue
As we continue further through April, it appears that for the time being Google’s weekly unconfirmed algorithm updates are here to stay.
That being said, they have not been quite as bad as in March. Maybe they are letting up a little?
We’ll continue to track the impact of these updates and report back to our readers here on iloveseo.
