Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

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Ryuzaki said:
What I've noticed as a user rather than an SEO is that Google is losing some of it's ability to understand questions in the way it used to. An example (that still works, mind you) that I always remembered was a query like this: "what is the movie with the guy in the rabbit suit" which, for anyone who's seen it, knows it's Donnie Darko. Google understands that too.

But it's failing otherwise for me to deal with long-tail queries. They largely keep resorting back to the short tail results or misunderstanding the question, causing me to have to rephrase my queries in different manners, hoping I can divine the magic incantation it'll understand. It's very much like trying to figure out the right prompt for these AI chats. And it did not used to be like this. It was like wizardry for a point in time where I was simply amazed at Google's natural language processing abilities on the query side.
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I know what you mean, I find I have to rephrase quite often with google. I can't give an example off the bat, but it's something I noticed for sure. I've begun to even feel like I can't be bothered googling, because I don't trust I'll find what I am looking for. Though I searched for some porn in the way you describe and Google found that, so there's that.

I'll maintain that a reason why Google is broken is because it's heavily censored. I've recently seen more people push the idea that virus don't exist, which is probably stupid and completely baseless, but I wanted to see which arguments they made and when I tried googling, I simply did not get results that matched what I searched for. I got results about fake news and fake science.

I asked ChatGPT about it:

  1. What is commonly called a virus is actually a harmless or beneficial exosome, a cellular component that facilitates intercellular communication and transports genetic material between cells.
  2. Viruses cannot be isolated or purified in a way that proves their existence as independent entities, and their supposed genetic material is actually part of the host's DNA or RNA.
  3. The symptoms commonly attributed to viral infections, such as fever, coughing, and fatigue, are actually caused by toxins or other environmental factors.
  4. The scientific methods and tools used to study viruses, such as electron microscopy and polymerase chain reaction, are unreliable or fraudulent and do not provide convincing evidence of viral existence.
  5. The entire concept of viruses is a fraud perpetuated by the pharmaceutical industry and other interests to sell vaccines and antiviral drugs, and to maintain control over people's health and lives.
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Seems pretty innocuous to me. Why won't Google let me read this?

Likewise, there is a conspiracy claim that nuclear weapons do not exist and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just firebombed and that the nuke was made up to discourage the Sovjet Union from proceeding further. Most likely also just a baseless claim, but this one a little more scientifically interesting, so I googled to find a website/paper I read 10 years ago (from Google). I could not find it. It was scrubbed. Only Quora answers even matched my intent.

Maybe Google manually scrubbed the virus claim, but that nukes don't exist? That must be the algo that does that.

I asked ChatGPT 3.5 and despite giving several warnings about it being unsubstantiated, it also right away told me this:

The theory that nuclear weapons do not actually exist is sometimes referred to as the "nuclear hoax" or the "nuclear myth." It suggests that the concept of nuclear bombs or reactors is a propaganda tool created by governments and media outlets to scare people into submission and justify their military and technological superiority. Some proponents of this theory claim that all footage, images, and testimonies related to nuclear tests, bombings, accidents, and treaties are fabricated or manipulated.

According to this theory, the effects commonly attributed to nuclear explosions, such as blast waves, radiation, heat, and electromagnetic pulses, can be explained by other phenomena such as conventional explosives, chemical reactions, lightning, or natural disasters. The theory also asserts that the nuclear arms race was a political and psychological game between superpowers rather than a genuine technological competition, and that the alleged nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, were either staged or caused by non-nuclear factors.
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In conclusion, this kind of censoring must take up a lot of computing power and it likely has a lot of unexpected results.
 
Also looks like more queries are getting "keyword here" count totals and "in title" completely removed from the index.
Distribution appears to include word lists with anything even a little controversial and brand names commonly affiliated with highly spammy niches. (smells like machine learning extending rules in kinda wonky ways scrolling through the spread sheets)

I know this isn't the rankings itself but I've always leaned heavily on these metrics for understanding whats qualifying for indexing. Google appears to be doing some very interesting control changes to classifiers. I'm guessing this is just an early response to chat gpt content flooding niches or something. I don't have the cleanest dataset outside of my own niches or I'd post some before and afters comparing last months data to this months. Maybe @CCarter or @eliquid feel like sharing some datasets with us plebs to try and pull some usable conclusions out of. There's some good smoke signals here, maybe somebody can come up with a useful interpretation we can make some useable directional advice with.
 
@secretagentdad I have the same feeling that they are doing something to the classifiers. When you look at a main keyword, the top 20 seems stable enough but when you go further down, things change. There are main keywords where the results change completely and I don't mean shuffle.

As part of my research, I've compared bing results with googles results for "best x". Predominantly google serves older posts, while in bing you can find lots of newer articles. The sites in bing ranked well in google also but not for newer articles, they were nowhere to be found.

In bing top 100, on the keywords that I have checked(over 70), the results are well over 75% populated with articles on topic while in Google, the percentages drop to 30-40% depending on the keyword but well below 50%. So content is being published on those keywords but they are not considered at all as results. Instead, other pages with completely irrelevant content are being considered.

EEAT or juice/topic relevance/age can not be a factor as the results are mixed with examples on the good and bad side, and for that reason, I can not make a correlation.

As I am in multiple niches, I notice more out of pattern stuff.
 
Is Google doing something again?
Indexing my articles takes over 40 hours again. Any ideas what's up?
 
Zoro said:
Is Google doing something again?
Indexing my articles takes over 40 hours again. Any ideas what's up?
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I just published one this morning at 9:14 AM and it was indexed on 10:17 AM. Still seems the same at least for me.
 
I wasn't really checking this before so I dunno if it's normal or not (or even important regardless) tbh...

But I published a new page...decade+ old site. Genuinely well written and optimized, plenty of media, etc...

On 04/11 around 3 pm

I was doing a site: on the url to see when it got indexed...and the first I noticed that showing up was this morning around 8am on 4/13...could have been sooner, but I checked it yesterday afternoon for sure.

But I checked the cache date out of curiosity, as I had made some tweaks since the initial post...

And G is saying they cached it on:

It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Apr 11, 2023 20:04 GMT.

Which unless I screwed up the conversion time (possible) = 4:04pm eastern on 4/11?

Which would be about an hour after I published it.

Why the discrepancy between the intial crawl/cache and the indexing?
 
Has anyone been affected by this update yet?

I've been hit by every update since September, but I'm 10% up over the past few days with this one.

I also deleted 12% of my content a couple of weeks ago, which inevitably resulted in some short-term traffic loss.

Still a long, long way to go for full recovery, but slightly promising signs. I'll take anything I can get at this point.
 
I was up a lot some days before the update supposedly rolled out. Could be seasonality, but could be the update. Seems to have regressed a little bit today.
 
The Google April 2023 Reviews Update has finished rolling out.

The update started on April 12th and has finished on April 25th, and targets not just products but all "reviews" including: services and businesses, destinations, and media (like games and movies).
 
One of my projects started ranking well before the update, and after the update ranked even better, but now it has started to decline for some reason. Several of my competitors also, even CNN and NYTimes dropped for that niche.

The results don't match the queries at all. For "best widget", I see some local sites that sell products in that category. It does not make any kind of sense.

I've seen switches like that but only for 2-3 days, and those look like A/B testing. But nothing to this magnitude, so many keywords in one niche and this level.
 
Unconfirmed Update:
May 3rd - 5th (& Beyond?)

Something seems to be cooking in the SERPs. I'm not noticing it personally this time but all the "weather forecasts" are showing action at varying levels of agreement:

Advanced Web Ranking:
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Mozcast:
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Semrush:
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makoloko said:
Since December 19, my traffic has fallen in both Google AND Bing by the same rate. Some of it is definitely seasonality (normal drop during holiday), but it's not bouncing back like usual.

They typically only move in tandem due to seasonality. Drops in Google while stable in Bing = due to an algo update.

Are people searching way less suddenly, and not due to seasonality? Here's some wild speculation: People are using ChatGPT instead of Google - and especially in my niche (coding).
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How did this play out eventually?
Did your traffic in both google and bing improve back simultaneously?
Or improved in one and reduced in the other?
 
So a little counter example, something more positive to balance out the discussion. It's an affiliate site, nothing too special about it. 3 years old. I estimate they're at $30-$50K/mo, might very well be double that though because the products are expensive.

JoZ1SXV.png


You can see from the graph that:
  • Took ~14 months for the traffic to recover from a plateau despite constant publishing
  • Went from 200 posts to 800 posts in 2 years, kept publishing through the dip
  • Probably some redirects done (RD spikes)
  • DR built up to 54
  • Dialed in their EAT, author profiles, social media, YouTube, etc.
  • PR linkbuilding
So the guys got hit, they just kept grinding regardless. With the last update it paid off. It's not a YMYL niche, but they're competing with proper big boys for main keywords, CNET, etc.

What's my point?

The reality of this SEO game these days is that it might take you anywhere from 8 to 14 months to recover from an algo hit. Even if you're doing everything right.

My take is that if your site is quality, it will bounce back sooner or later. And it's much better to bounce back with 800 posts vs. 200.

The only other condition to this is that you're not in a YMYL niche, or a super-competitive where the odds are stacked against you (e.g. VPN, hosting, etc.). Different rules apply there.

Their "Organic Pages" line is what we all should be aiming for.
 
It's dollar cost averaging but for SEO.
 
@Ryuzaki one of my sites was affected by the April Reviews update, experiencing an almost exact 40% traffic loss. Starting May 3 traffic is up approximately 60%. Something is happening.
 
I had some rankings increase across significantly the board yesterday, then drop a bit, so something seems to be happening yes.
 
Poplanu said:
So the guys got hit, they just kept grinding regardless. With the last update it paid off. It's not a YMYL niche, but they're competing with proper big boys for main keywords, CNET, etc.
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Almost all my sites were hit with the recent updates and still haven't recovered. If you stop working - you have no chance for recovery.

bernard said:
I had some rankings increase across significantly the board yesterday, then drop a bit, so something seems to be happening yes.
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A lot of websites are seeing fluctuations. Def an update.
 
My main site started dropping hard on May 1st and I thought for sure it's a goner, even though I could swear that my top articles that were tanking are some of the best in their niche.

2 days ago it started picking back up surprisingly. I'm not back at 100% but it's acceptable after the scare I had.
 
Execute said:
How did this play out eventually?
Did your traffic in both google and bing improve back simultaneously?
Or improved in one and reduced in the other?
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It popped 25% for a few weeks then crashed back down.
 
Is anyone noticing something rolling out right now? June 7 onwards I'm seeing big traffic changes.

kefSZ4R.jpg
 
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illmasterj said:
Is anyone noticing something rolling out right now? June 7 onwards I'm seeing big traffic changes.
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It impacted this site of mine on June 10th. Definitely seeing it. It's not just Ahref's adding a bunch of more keywords (which is what the little 'a' means on June 11th) because I'm actually seeing higher traffic and revenue in my analytics and network dashboards.
 
illmasterj said:
Is anyone noticing something rolling out right now? June 7 onwards I'm seeing big traffic changes.

kefSZ4R.jpg
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Yes for sure. After being down for the 4 weeks or so prior to June 7, I am back to where I was. I think this is SERP feature stuff.
 
illmasterj said:
Is anyone noticing something rolling out right now? June 7 onwards I'm seeing big traffic changes.

kefSZ4R.jpg
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I saw a slight boost with all the unofficial updates over the past few weeks. Over the past couple of days, there's been an even bigger boost (15% compared to last week).

I'm almost back to before the March update as it stands.
 
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