Google Algorithm Updates - 2019 Ongoing Discussion

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Ryuzaki said:
@bernard, those pretty links can result in blank pages being indexed, which is what happened to me. Definitely nofollow them to control crawling (though Google has said they're now going to crawl them to decide how to use them, but should learn they're affiliate links and stop crawling them). One thing you do NOT want to do is block crawling of those in the robots.txt or they'll index the blank redirects as pages.

Everything else that's noindexed, blocked by robots.txt, 404, etc... you'll want to update the links pointing to them to be nofollow in hopes to stop them from crawling those links. You're probably not seeing crawl budget issues but I think being efficient for Google's sake is a great idea, something they'll reward more and more in the future as crawling and indexing costs keep skyrocketing exponentially. They may already as some small ranking factor.
Click to expand...

The strange thing is that Google keeps indexing some custom posts, that is from feeds, which have been noindex, nofollow for months if not years. Just won't let them go.

Anyway, now it seems all custom posts redirect to the front page, after turning of "public queryable", which I suppose should fix most of this.
 
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Be on the look out, some slipping and sliding going on. Looks like sites hit during the Nov 8th update might be in for a tumble. Already 3 days of drops.
 
What the f... is going on?

This is either because Google thinks the recent update was a smashing success and wants more of it or they're not satisfied, but trying to fix it and in the process doing more of the same?
 
More images of what's going on:

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Remember Google is a zero sum game - when one side loses another side wins:

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I'm not seeing any noticeable difference in Google Analytics for my sites. KW trackers seem to be a bit more volatile though.
 
With this update (Nov 8) I saw a site that hasn't been ranking top 10 in 2 years, suddenly jump into top 5. An older site with outdated content. Pretty interesting. It's a major revaluation.
 
Possible Update: 12/12/19

Been seeing some large up and down spikes in my organic traffic, expecting an update any day now. CCarter pointed out some pre-cursor movements too. People now think the update is rolling out.

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Seeing a reversal trend going on, but not for all, which makes me thing a lot of it is about Intent.
I've been working on fixing speed and then working on making it clear which pages are product reviews and which are commercial intent and so on.
 
Possible Update: December 25th, 2019
Probably the last of the year!

I'm not entirely sure that this is the case, but I'm seeing over a 15% boost in organic traffic spread across tons of posts, as opposed to one or two gaining rankings. This is compared to the day before, and the same day of the week before. If you go back about a month it's normal numbers.

But considering yesterday was Christmas, the day organic traffic should have been the lowest, it looks like a reasonable conclusion.

I actually just looked around and there's people around the nets saying they tanked, recovered, moved a bit, had huge drops, 7.5x the amount of traffic as normal, and other phrases to describe their movements.

It doesn't seem like something Google would do, honestly, unless it was an update they'd 100% know the outcome of, like undoing some commercial SERP changes they toss in during the holidays. Then again I'm seeing it across all content types.
 
@Ryuzaki something strange happened to one of my sites. It looks like it was "somehow" hit on 19.12.2019. The week prior, traffic went up 24%. I don't know yet what happened...
 
After further investigation... I'm still completely blind. The "hit" took place on 15-16, not on 19 as I've previously believed. This project was tracked with ahrefs's tracker, they picked the movement later.

I've found lots of people talking about it on different groups but no conclusion yet. The theory is content or 301's/expired domains. This particular project had no 301's but a "debatable quality" article. I have projects with 301's set on them and they are ranking just fine.

Does anyone have any idea what this targets?
 
Looking at SearchConsole I've noticed my main site's CTR dropped noticeably after the November 8 thing... has this happened to anyone else?
 
Click through drops when rankings drop. Lots of low rankings long tails will distort things.

Amusingly -
It bounces back up when you get down to just brand keywords. Not really a good thing though.
 
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