Starting around Friday, April 30th but really spiking a lot on Saturday, May 1st, we are seeing signs of another big Google search ranking algorithm update. There are signs that this update had a big impact on the Product Reviews update as well. It is hard to say if they are separate or maybe Google rolled out something, unconfirmed, that impacted product reviews and other categories of sites?
Right now, I am seeing significant signs that those impacted by the product reviews update saw a change this past Friday, Saturday and so on. Maybe Google made a tweak to the product reviews update? Google said it would not confirm. all changes to this specific update. But also, this update is very similar to a core update, to how it acts and maybe something larger was rolled out that impacted both product reviews and other categories. This is all a guess but all I know is that I am seeing signs from both the tracking tools and the community of big changes this past weekend - and it is bigger than last weekend.
The chatter in the SEO community is pretty heavy, here is a summary of that chatter at both WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World:
Anyone else seeing a massive drop in traffic to their home page, while internal page traffic is increasing? My traffic is trending higher, but traffic to my home page is down 37% yesterday and 50% so far today. Yesterday much higher direct traffic, today it dropped like a stone. My SERPS are dropping again and none of it is converting at all.
It was as I expected. After two days with very high traffic and excellent conversions, the huge drop comes today. On my side, not only on the home page, but on the whole site.
Based on today I can see that some of my top competitors in my niche were severely punched down. My suspicion is that it may be related to the core web vitals, neither of them pass. It is only a guess. Usually after semrush shows high volatility it hits me the following day so I really hope nothing major will happen.
Anyone noticing any shifts? Not seen much movement on our sites, but I am in the process of doing some database housekeeping on some sites - so need to sometimes just cross-reference with a google search for some tables....and yet....despite quite obviously being very very very interested in WordPress......the search results have utterly abysmal for some of the most basic queries....so thought I'd ask if anyone is being hammered.
Finally, today my traffic dropped off a cliff at 9am and is still lower.
Something started brewing yesterday.
Here we go again...it took about 6 months to fall right back into the punitive sandbox Gorg started on May 10th 2010. No doubt encouraged to cheat webmasters out of revenue by their new partners in Washington who turn a blind eye to any of their corrupt practices. Site income has dropped by 80% in the past week.
Did anyone notice a big drop this afternoon?
I don't know if it was specifically this afternoon, but the 30% increase I saw last weekend has fizzled. I'm back to close to where I was two weeks ago, but a little below and that was already a little below a normal Saturday. The day is not done.
Mine in the last few hours has had its ranking bomb big time.I hope they bounce back over the next few days.
Just had some backings done so maybe its a bit of a dance?
It's been happening 2 days ago.What's strange is one of my new site got bombed big time 2-3 days ago. But came back the next day.
But today, perhaps just around your time when you got affected I was hit again. One of my old site got bombed big time.
This whole erratic behaviour of G has made me become nonchalent. Since the product review update was rolled out until now, everything has been erratic and crazy.
one of my affliate site was brought to its knees with this update. It still is. We're fighting. Trying to update the content as best we can.But we cant actually buy the products and then review them. Its simply not economical even if we get ranked again. Lets see how it works out. If anyone has any strategies that worked with content updation please do share...
Just had something similar with my affiliate site in the last 24 hours. Huge drops again like the initial affiliate update.
I think many of these comments are specific to affiliate and product review sites but not all.
Glenn Gabe shared some interesting tweets with charts of product review sites he has been following and make sure to see his analysis of that update:
Heads-up, seeing some big visibility changes across sites impacted by the Product Reviews Update. Some have recovered visibility, some have dropped after surging, some have surged more, etc. I'll be digging in more, but definitely stay tuned if you're interested in that update: pic.twitter.com/iA1YOdRWrC
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 30, 2021
Also, and I mentioned this in my posts about broad core updates, but Google's Paul Haahr explained that Google could always decouple algorithms from broad core updates and run them separately. That very well could have happened here. More info: https://t.co/qQqmRh6KLw https://t.co/zjHcYYYVeJ
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 2, 2021
And here are a few more. Also see my tweets from this weekend about some sites surging back after being hit hard by the December core update and how that could be a decoupling of algorithms (like Paul Haahr said they could always do). Very interesting to see the changes there... pic.twitter.com/QIrEBS4liH
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 3, 2021
There is some chatter of indexing issues also, which seems to be more frequent in the past several days - maybe that is why Google released this tool?
Now let's look at the tracking tools...
So check your traffic, rankings and all things Googlely and I hope you did well with this unconfirmed update.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
