Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

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Steve Brownlie said:
You have to remember that a lot of people who are succeeding don't like to post too much on the forum every update (or at all about their sites specifically) - they might not even really notice the update/think it's a big one so you always get a lot more noise from people who went down. Don't assume 'many' is anywhere near the majority. If you're getting hit every time by every update though you're definitely doing something wrong:

* does your content suck/are you taking too many shortcuts/relying too much on tools + crappy writers just to hit some score?
* do your links suck - are you just buying the same links everyone else is being dumped while some of your competitors are getting stuff you'll never get from those vendors?
* is your site slow/ugly/weird (I see more of these than I could count...) so your bounceback to search is too high/you're sending all kinds of negative signals to google...
...... you could go on forever but there must be something if you're noticing most updates.
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Thanks for your thoughts.

My traffic skyrocketed, and every update was positive until September last year. Maybe I was punching above my weight for a while, and now I'm back where I belong.

In any case, I don't think those are issues I have. E-E-A-T was definitely something that I could have improved upon, which I have focused on recently.

Traffic has decreased by 50% since September. There's some seasonality involved, so I would probably put the real figure at 30-35%.

It was more a slow erosion of traffic that comes from keywords dropping a few places than anything drastic.
 
I lost 50% since yesterday on my main site. It is a German site that is now impacted by the product review update for the first time.

This is quite hard as I just spent the whole last year applying the kitchen sink method and recovering the site by publishing quality informational content (around 60 new posts) after it had been declining for 2 years before.

Now even more big authority sites and shops took the spots in the top 10s.

I will wait a bit until the update has rolled out, but I am skeptical it will come back.

Has anybody seen a rollback or quick recovery with previous product review updates?
 
Today I've lost all my positions for an English website. No products, clean.

Fucks sake.
 
ianovici said:
Today I've lost all my positions for an English website. No products, clean.

Fucks sake.
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Any idea why you got hit?

AI content? All Dutka blocklist links from cheap vendors? Very new site? (sometimes new sites grow really quickly then get hit randomly at some update - seen lots of people have that happen to them in case studies and stuff)?
 
axibert said:
I lost 50% since yesterday on my main site. It is a German site that is now impacted by the product review update for the first time.

This is quite hard as I just spent the whole last year applying the kitchen sink method and recovering the site by publishing quality informational content (around 60 new posts) after it had been declining for 2 years before.

Now even more big authority sites and shops took the spots in the top 10s.

I will wait a bit until the update has rolled out, but I am skeptical it will come back.

Has anybody seen a rollback or quick recovery with previous product review updates?
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I'm running an affiliate site in German and I have the impression that with the recent update the subdomains (.com/de) of big authority sites are ranking better than before. But I need to analyze a bit deeper.
 
So, until now I've only found some possible reasons that maybe, just maybe, triggered some kind of penalty. But it's weird.

If I was really, really picky, I would say my pages were more optimized than my competitors. But they are not spammy in any kind of way. Will modify them to be more SEO-unfriendly to be more like my competitors. Idk...

I've spent a lot of time looking at technical stuff and all is good. Does not seem to be a problem. The domain is well over 3 years and it's been stable with small variations of positions.

Prior to getting hit, I've been ranking #1. Now, I'm nowhere to be found. Sometimes the trackers find my site in the 1-20 position BUT it seems it's only for that particular instance.

Now to the weird stuff.

From February 24th, it seems the website has not been crawled anymore. But, in fact, it was. Edited 2 pages and Google crawls and indexes the changes and serves them. But, when inspecting a page, it displays Feb 24th as the last crawl. No spam message, no error, nothing.

The results have partially changed. Some local sites moved in. The results are just garbage and are not even on the topic.

For some keywords, the top 20 changed drastically. The new ranking pages were all written before 2020. Some of the pages have 150 words articles on a topic that requires way more.

It's not about EEAT, as some of the new sites are stuck in the past and have not been modified in any way since 2021.

Edit: No AI content. Some larger competitors also got hit in the same way.
 
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I had originally thought we got hit by the Dec 14 Link Spam update, which we probably did. ( https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...22-ongoing-discussion.6280/page-15#post-71661 )

But we got hit MUCH MUCH harder by something on Jan 20. We did literally nothing to that site during that time, and there is nothing listed here around that date. Does anyone know of something that updated at that time?

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zelch said:
We did literally nothing to that site during that time, and there is nothing listed here around that date.
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That might be the problem! You need figure out what they hit you with and fix it. Leaving it unfixed will just make it worse and worse.

And as per SER, there were 2 unconfirmed Google updates around Jan 20, which you definitely get hit by.
 
wikibum said:
That might be the problem! You need figure out what they hit you with and fix it. Leaving it unfixed will just make it worse and worse.

And as per SER, there were 2 unconfirmed Google updates around Jan 20, which you definitely get hit by.
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Yeah after 14 years of this 'game' I'm convinced now that the 'abandoned site after update' metric is a big factor in google just dumping your site in a death spiral. If you stop work, you're done most of the time. I think a lot of it can probably be attributed to machine learning. Real businesses that got hit by an update half the time don't even notice - they continue blog posting, making social media content, promoting their business etc, spammers stop and reevaluate. It's obvious then who the spammers are after an update, right?
 
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zelch said:
I had originally thought we got hit by the Dec 14 Link Spam update, which we probably did. ( https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...22-ongoing-discussion.6280/page-15#post-71661 )

But we got hit MUCH MUCH harder by something on Jan 20. We did literally nothing to that site during that time, and there is nothing listed here around that date. Does anyone know of something that updated at that time?

YSVGliu.png
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A site will not get hit only on updates. Any kind of change can trigger a filter that can penalize you. It depends a lot on how Google is gonna interpret that.

Sometimes, your site may fall into a false-positive action, where they interpret your actions as something bad. We tend to ignore the false-positive because we assume that we've done something wrong and don't know what happens in the background.

The serps are really volatile right now.

I have a site that is hit, I'll keep posting on it on a smaller scale, make small changes, and maybe, just maybe, it will be back again. If not, I'm gonna move on. For me, this seems like the most appropriate action. People will tell you "keep posting, it will be back", but rarely it happens to be back at 70%. If it gets to 50%, for me it's a win as I can milk it for some extra time.

On rare occasions, sites get back to 100% and new posts gain traction. These sites tend to be "frail". They will get hit again, sooner or later.

Hope your site gets back and you'll have no more issues in the future.

@Steve Brownlie I think is the opposite, legit businesses stop early on. I don't talk about big sites. Average sites for normal businesses. Even e-commerce sites slow down really early. You've inserted your products, 10.000 of them, then maybe you'll add a few more each week.

Maybe that's the problem. We keep going at a steady pace when we should slow down. That's why maybe we don't get traction for new posts. I have 60 posts posted in the two last months, they barely get any traction. Maybe for average sites, that don't have a huge amount of power and are not classified as news, user-generated content, and stuff like that, maybe there is a soft limit to how much you can achive.
 
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ianovici said:
Even e-commerce sites slow down really early. You've inserted your products, 10.000 of them, then maybe you'll add a few more each week.
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What? This is only looking at "new" products being listed and isn't representative of what a search engine like Google sees from a large eCommerce brand at all.

To give you some context, on a brand with ~8,000 SKUs at least 50 pages would materially change every single day of the year, enough where Google would re-crawl and process the information, reflected in the SERPs. Even with all of these changes, we would still have to make efforts to force Google to crawl as much as possible, because the frequency of changes on an eCommerce site is so immense.

For example, many products go out of stock each day. They either get marked as OOS or if you're smart you do a temporary redirect automatically to a similar product, forcing Google to rank the new page in the SERP instead. Then, products come back in-stock, you do the inverse, Google re-crawls and indexes it again. If you run a promotion over the weekend, you could have upwards of 1-2% of your SKUs go out of stock, because typically you're using promotions to actively try to clear bins where you only have a few items left so that you can optimize your warehousing better.

New products are added regularly. Old products are de-listed very frequently (permanently) with redirects or at least heavy content changes, such that Google re-crawls.

Then, you have likely over 200 categories. When the above changes happen in any real size, the category page changes meaningfully. Typically our largest categories were getting crawled many times per day and actively processed by Google, because the meta data in the SERP would change (which only happens on crawl, index and processing of data by Google). Smaller categories would get this treatment by Google once a week, roughly.

What about when a user leaves a review? Same thing, meaningful content change on the page, particularly if there is very few, or zero, reviews on the product prior.

On top of that, you have writers creating blog content. HR updating the careers pages. Marketing changing the homepage and other material for new promotions. SEO guy changing at least a few pages, lightly but still, per day.

A successful eCommerce store is making an enormous amount of changes per day, from Googles perspective. Most of it is automated, because there's a lot of UGC and template content (categories, homepages, product pages), but that's still updates that Google recognizes and needs to crawl and reflect.

ianovici said:
Maybe for average sites, that don't have a huge amount of power and are not classified as news, user-generated content, and stuff like that, maybe there is a soft limit to how much you can achive.
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Replying to this separately because it's completely different to my above reply.

This was happening through mid 2022. You could see this fairly clearly because when you did a site operator search the number of pages Google was returning was a tiny fraction of the true site structure. For example; sites with upwards of 10,000 pages were showing only a few hundred pages in Google when using the site operator to search. But, GSC would show all of the pages were crawled and indexed.

I'm not sure when this changed, but this is no longer the case. Broadly speaking, the same search will now show the vast majority, if not all, of the pages that are truly indexed.

Rather than capping the amount of traffic you could get, Google was simply refusing to show more than a set number of pages for a website. That obviously results in a situation where any incremental pages added to a site don't drive any meaningful traffic.

When I was doing some testing around this I found something fairly interesting, but it's hard to reproduce so I'm not sure how accurate this really is. But basically, if we had one site which was the industry leader in the niche we could post a new page with super thin content for a high volume keyword that tens of thousands of websites target and it would get indexed and rank somewhere in the top 100 very quickly. We could take another site in the same niche which ranks fairly well, but gets 1% of the traffic of the former, and an objectively deeper, better optimized page would get crawled but wouldn't show in the SERP at all.

Okay.

Then, you do the same but for a keyword that has very few pages actively targeting it, BUT still has good search volume. I mean, it's not a fake test keyword. So maybe it has like a couple hundred exact searches per month but only like 10-15 pages really mentioning the phrase on the page.

In that case, the industry leading site has the same treatment as before. But the smaller sites page now gets crawled, indexed and ranked on the 1st page within a couple of days.

The only real difference there was the depth of Googles index for a keyword, the search volume and the "authority" of the same publishing the page. So, it felt as if Google was only letting the smaller site get pages indexed when Google was truly desperate for content to fill that search query. When Google already had 100+ pages that mentioned the search phrase, are topically relevant etc, it refused to index and serve the lower authority sites page, but the huge industry leading site could bypass that filter.

I only replicated this maybe twice, because it wasn't really relevant to me at the time and the smaller site drove almost none of our revenue. So take it with a grain of salt. But I think it's fairly interesting and has some parallels to what I'm seeing people share lately. Plus, it just logically makes sense to me as a cheap and easy way for Google to try and get around their index scaling issues.
 
@Prentzz You frustrate me. I wrote an answer, deleted it, and will move on from now on.

We are talking about different things as usual.
 
The February 2023 Product Reviews Update has officially finished rolling out. Any tremors from here out are corrections and/or tests for the next update, most likely, barring any unrelated small updates that they'll inevitably push.
 
March 2023 Core Update

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The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.

Here we gooooo. I've been waiting for this one for just over 6 months. Let's see how it plays out.
 
Finally. This should really help with your rankings. Hoping the same things I implemented work as well.
 
Hold tight - the rocket is warming up for blast off. I used to fear these updates like most people but everytime it pushes me higher. I noticed an uptick already week on week - does seem like something is stirring and gathering pace as of last night UK time.
 
MrMedia said:
Hold tight - the rocket is warming up for blast off. I used to fear these updates like most people but everytime it pushes me higher. I noticed an uptick already week on week - does seem like something is stirring and gathering pace as of last night UK time.
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I'm pretty optimistic about this update for most of us - the Google rankings were noticeably downgraded after the last one - they made some mistakes and it was getting harder and harder to actually get what you wanted in search. I know that's been a slow decline for years now but I've not seen an update as bad as the last one roll out - I'm sure many of us will benefit from the fixes that come.
 
It's popping off!

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I saw zero effect yesterday (I only check analytics after Midnight, once a day).
 
Looking at +3-4% week on week. Feels like something big is about to pop off.
 
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