Rankings and traffic began shifting on Thursday May 13, 2021 with the release of yet another Google algorithm update to end the week.
We’re seeing significant shifts in both rankings and traffic for many industries.
SEO traffic tools and industry chatter are also up, indicating that we aren’t just fooling ourselves.
This is the chatter on WebmasterWorld.com:
Last time we see a loss like today it was just one day before last december core update. WTF Google?
On the credit side: google is spotting updates to most of my sites within hours now. A short while ago some of them hadn’t been updated for a fortnight. Some changes I made yesterday are visible already.
On the debit side: that ‘People Also search For’ popup is driving me mad. I’m just about to click on a link and everything moves. Then underneath is ‘People Also Ask’! What next? ‘People also look at’? ‘People like to see this as well’? Google please. Give me results for the search term I’ve entered. Real results too, not the lowest common denominator authorityspam I have to wade through.
Thank heavens for DDG.
Wow….. the results for some phrases are BAD right now. Was looking up a TV show (not my niche, just interested) – search not that far down was from a forum discussion and the title for the serp was: persons-name-tv-show-title
Just like that – with the hyphens to boot.
Moving the Cheese game is back
Something happening today
-50% in just one day. 😳
More news sites ranking above me today with just one sentence on my keyword. My article is 3,000 words about the keyword -30% worse ever in the 15 years of running my site. Don’t mind losing ranking to an article that is better and more informative to the user but its newspaper click bate with about 10 lines. Gosh.
Same situation for me Samsam (11 years or running our site)
I am continuing to recover at a turtle pace. More keywords are being re-added, which is a good sign. I wish it will be faster though. Traffic is still generally low.
No recovery…. damage from featured snippets continue as I’ve just seen some of the ones we rank for have gotten longer (ie bigger paragraph of text lifted and displayed).
And yet still not good enough for Discover since whatever it was they did in March. Yet content that literally has SPONSORED CONTENT in the title shows up in Discover. Well done, excellent UX!
SEO Insights
What’s especially interesting to us are the comments discussing drops of 50 percent or more, that these SEOs liken to the effects of a core update.
In addition, longer, supposedly higher-quality articles are taking hits and being replaced by news results that maybe have only one line of relevancy to the topic at hand.
If both are true, this is not good. It’s likely these are edge cases in terms of this algorithm, however it may still be cause for concern.
It remains to be seen exactly what’s going on because for one, we don’t know the exact sites being discussed, and two, there is literally no way to tell if they’re on the good side of Google or not, because of crappy link-building techniques.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens.
Still, What’s Going on, Google?
When we see shifts like this happening we wonder if Google is going back on their guidelines when it comes to quality content.
So far, this update is unconfirmed. Google normally confirms actual core updates before they begin rolling out, so we don’t think it’s that.
As always, we’ll continue to report regularly on these updates as they occur.
