SEO
Google Ranking Bug De-Ranks Sites On Weekends
Multiple Google support forum discussions call attention to a possible bug in Google’s algorithm that causes select generic top level domains (gTLDs) to disappear completely from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Multiple publishers with the same kind of gTLD are reporting the exact same Google Weekend Ranking Bug.
What they all have in common is the type of domain name and a complete disappearance from Google’s SERPs on the weekend, some unable to even rank for their site names.
This issue came to light in a tweet by Olesia Korobka (@Giridja):
The question is if all websites in .media, club, clinic etc experience the issue? Or could it be a mix of locality and tld or something else?https://t.co/kehMg3phLS
— 🐝 Olesia Korobka 💙💛🐝 (@Giridja) January 16, 2024
These issues are affecting a form of gTLDs that are also known as ICANN-era generic top-level domains. These are domains like .academy, .car, .care, etc.
The person who recently reported the issue shared a graph showing traffic to the site crashing approximately every weekend then returning on Monday. They reported that this pattern began in November.
Is This A Quality Issue?
In my opinion this does not resemble a quality issue. A quality issue affects rankings every day of the week, all month long.
The Google Weekend Ranking Bug is limited to certain kinds of domains and only on the weekends.
Is This A Cyclical Issue?
A reasonable assumption is that maybe traffic dries up on the weekend, that’s entirely normal, right?
But it’s not just traffic that’s declining on the weekends, it’s the actual rankings, including the name of the website. It seems like a complete de-indexing every weekend. Additionally, this appears to be happening to specific kinds of generic top level domains.
So no, this is not a normal weekend traffic phenomenon.
Google Weekend Ranking Bug
The person posting the support question for Google listed 14 URLs of other support threads related to gTLDs that were experiencing similar problems, of which nine out of the 14, 64%, were from January 2024 and the earliest listed was from 11/24/2023.
We can’t assume that’s a complete list of support threads on this topic but it does seem extraordinary that there are so many from this year that are experiencing the same odd pattern of weekend de-indexing and that it’s happening to these specific kinds of keyword gTLDs.
A Sample Of Ranking Anomaly Reports
From 1/3/2024, A publisher with a .consulting gTLD wrote:
“Our company website seems to be disappearing from Google search engine results every couple of days, resulting in a significant loss of traffic. None of our web pages are showing up on Google during these periods, and we’re struggling to understand the root cause of this recurrent issue.”
From late December, another publisher with a .club gTLD shared a screenshot from their Search Console showing a similar crash and rank cycle.
Screenshot Of De-indexing Pattern
From 12/15/2023:
“Traffic drops every weekend
Since 2 weeks our traffic started dropping down every weekend.
It’s not so much the drop – less traffic on the weekend is normal. It’s the context that is very strage: we noticed that pages from our site don’t show up for keywords they normally rank for very well. This includes our brand name; the site disappears from the SERPs around Friday and is back on Sunday/Monday.”
From January 5, 2024:
“My site loses its position on the Google results page several days on a week!
After November 22, 2023 this site: (redacted for privacy) lost it’s position on SERP for few days and came back to normal on November 22! This happened on December 7 and back to normal on December 11 again(!) and repeated 4 more time until now!
During this, I checked all probabilities like: There is no issues on manual actions and security issues report. There is no critical issues on any report on GSC.
Also in URL Inspection (Google index and live test) report, (redacted for privacy) is on Google and also available to Google. This site was performing good about 2 years before this problem and reached 60k click on 28 days!
Notice that when this problem happened, “sitemap read” list is get empty but I’m not sure this is the issue or not!”
From January 5, 2024 a publisher with a .care gTLD experiencing the same problem responded to a support thread about this issue:
“100% same problem – also other German and international cases.
As you said: experts are ignoring the fact of the site’s periodic return to its previous positions and that sites of no better quality replace the site that dropped out.”
There’s another one from January 8, 2024 that is on the .life gTLD:
“Randomly daily index/deindex our site + impact on Business profile
Hello,
From end of November we experience strange result in our Performances report, it’s not a seasonal drop.
We don’t have any issue in Manual actions nor in Security issues indexing looks normal.”
That person posted a screenshot:
Screenshot Of Weekend Ranking Losses
Why Are Websites Dropping Out On The Weekends?
There’s an old problem dating back to the earliest days of Google where a domain would get stuck in a ranking loop and get de-indexed for a month and then return for a week and then disappear all over again, not even ranking for its domain name. I first saw this around 2003 or 2004 and the cause of it was that the domain had a history of spam and for some reason that status wouldn’t go away. Google never acknowledged the problem until twenty years later. I was calling it a Legacy Domain Penalty.
Google’s John Mueller commented about the Legacy Domain Penalty:
“The other thing that I’ve very, very rarely seen, is that a site gets stuck in some kind of a weird in-between state in our systems in that…
…at some point our algorithms reviewed the website and found it to be absolutely terrible and uh for whatever reason those parts of the algorithms just took a very long time to be updated again.”
Although there’s a similarity between the ICANN-era gTLD rank and crash pattern and the legacy domain penalty, I suspect they are probably not the same issue. These are all fitting a pattern of specifically ICANN-era domains that are experiencing a de-indexing on the weekends. The legacy domain penalty was a de-indexing that happened all month long except for a few days once a month.
Whatever it is, it sounds like it could be a bug in Google’s systems due to something new that was introduced into their algorithms that is now having an unintended effect.
Read the original support thread here:
Intermittent Disappearance of Website from Google Search Results
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Jaaak
SEO
Why Building a Brand is Key to SEO
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We even shared actionable strategies for improving your visibility by weaving your brand into your SEO.
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SEO
How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere
Generating demand is about making people want stuff they had no desire to buy before encountering your marketing.
Sometimes, it’s a short-term play, like an ecommerce store creating buzz before launching a new product. Other times, like with B2B marketing, it’s a long-term play to engage out-of-market audiences.
In either situation, demand generation can quickly become an expensive marketing activity.
Here are some ways SEO can help you capture and retain the demand you’re generating so your marketing budget goes further.
There’s no right or wrong way to generate demand. Any marketing activity that generates a desire to buy something (where there wasn’t such a desire before) can be considered demand generation.
Common examples include using:
- Paid ads
- Word of mouth
- Social media
- Video marketing
- Email newsletters
- Content marketing
- Community marketing
For example, Pryshan is a small local brand in Australia that has created a new type of exfoliating stone from clay. They’ve been selling it offline since 2018, if not earlier.
It’s not a groundbreaking innovation, but it’s also not been done before.
To launch their product online, they started running a bunch of Facebook ads:
Because of their ads, this company is in the early stages of generating demand for its product. Sure, it’s not the type of marketing that will go viral, but it’s still a great example of demand gen.
Looking at search volume data, there are 40 searches per month for the keyword “clay stone exfoliator” in Australia and a handful of other related searches:
However, these same keywords get hardly any searches in the US:
This never happens.
Australia has a much smaller population than the US. For non-localized searches, Australian search volume is usually about 6-10% of US search volume for the same keywords.
Take a look at the most popular searches as an example:
Pryshan’s advertising efforts on other platforms directly create the search demand for exfoliating clay stones.
It doesn’t matter where or how you educate people about the product you sell. What matters is shifting their perceptions from cognitive awareness to emotional desire.
Emotions trigger actions, and usually, the first action people take once they become aware of a cool new thing is to Google it.
If you’re not including SEO as part of your marketing efforts, here are three things you can do to:
- minimize budget wastage
- capture interest when people search
- convert the audiences you’re already reaching
If you’re working hard to create demand for your product, make sure it’s easy for people to discover it when they search Google.
- Give it a simple name that’s easy to remember
- Label it according to how people naturally search
- Avoid any terms that create ambiguities with an existing thing
For example, the concept of a clay exfoliating stone is easy for people to remember.
Even if they don’t remember what Pryshan calls their product, they’ll remember the videos and images they saw of the product being used to exfoliate people’s skin. They’ll remember it’s made from clay instead of a more common material like pumice.
It makes sense for Pryshan to call its product something similar to what people will be inclined to search for.
In this example, however, the context of exfoliation is important.
If Pryshan chooses to call its product “clay stones,” it will have a harder time disambiguating itself from gardening products in search results. It’s already the odd one out in SERPs for such keywords:
When you go through your branding exercises to decide what to call your product or innovation, it helps to search your ideas on Google.
This way, you’ll easily see what phrases to avoid so that your product isn’t being grouped with unrelated things.
Imagine being part of a company that invested a lot of money in re-branding itself. New logo, new slogan, new marketing materials… the lot.
On the back of their new business cards, the designers thought inviting people to search for the new slogan on Google would be clever.
The only problem was that this company didn’t rank for the slogan.
They weren’t showing up at all! (Yes, it’s a true story, no I can’t share the brand’s name).
This tactic isn’t new. Many businesses leverage the fact that people will Google things to convert offline audiences into online audiences through their printed, radio, and TV ads.
Don’t do this if you don’t already own the search results page.
It’s not only a very expensive mistake to make, but it gives the conversions you’ve worked hard for directly to your competitors.
Instead, use SEO to become the only brand people see when they search for your brand, product, or something that you’ve created.
Let’s use Pryshan as an example.
They’re the first brand to create exfoliating clay stones. Their audience has created a few new keywords to find Pryshan’s products on Google, with “clay stone exfoliator” being the most popular variation.
Yet even though it’s a product they’ve brought to market, competitors and retailers are already encroaching on their SERP real estate for this keyword:
Sure, Pryshan holds four of the organic spots, but it’s not enough.
Many competitors are showing up in the paid product carousel before Pryshan’s website can be seen by searchers:
They’re already paying for Facebook ads, why not consider some paid Google placements too?
Not to mention, stockists and competitors are ranking for three of the other organic positions.
Having stockists show up for your product may not seem so bad, but if you’re not careful, they may undercut your prices or completely edge you out of the SERPs.
This is also a common tactic used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions from brands that are not SEO-savvy.
In short, SEO can help you protect your brand presence on Google.
If you’re working hard to generate demand for a cool new thing that’s never been done before, it can be hard to know if it’s working.
Sure, you can measure sales. But a lot of the time, demand generation doesn’t turn into immediate sales.
B2B marketing is a prominent example. Educating and converting out-of-market audiences into in-market prospects can take a long time.
That’s where SEO data can help close the gap and give you data to get more buy-in from decision-makers.
Measure increases in branded searches
A natural byproduct of demand generation activities is that people search more for your brand (or they should if you’re doing it right).
Tracking if your branded keywords improve over time can help you gauge how your demand generation efforts are going.
In Ahrefs, you can use Rank Tracker to monitor how many people discover your website from your branded searches and whether these are trending up:
If your brand is big enough and gets hundreds of searches a month, you can also check out this nifty graph that forecasts search potential in Keywords Explorer:
Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations
If, as part of your demand generation strategy, you’re encouraging people to search for new keywords relating to your product, service, or innovation, set up alerts to monitor your presence for those terms.
This method will also help you uncover the keywords your audience naturally uses anyway.
Start by going to Ahrefs Alerts and setting up a new keyword alert.
Add your website.
Leave the volume setting untouched (you want to include low search volume keywords so you discover the new searches people make).
Set your preferred email frequency, and voila, you’re done.
Monitor visibility against competitors
If you’re worried other brands may steal your spotlight in Google’s search results, you can also use Ahrefs to monitor your share of the traffic compared to them.
I like to use the Share of Voice graph in Site Explorer to do this. It looks like this:
This graph is a great bird’s eye view of how you stack up against competitors and if you’re at risk of losing visibility to any of them.
Final thoughts
As SEO professionals, it’s easy to forget how hard some businesses work to generate demand for their products or services.
Demand always comes first, and it’s our job to capture it.
It’s not a chicken or egg scenario. The savviest marketers use this to their advantage by creating their own SEO opportunities long before competitors figure out what they’re doing.
If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Google Explains How Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Is Measured
Google’s Web Performance Developer Advocate, Barry Pollard, has clarified how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is measured.
CLS quantifies how much unexpected layout shift occurs when a person browses your site.
This metric matters to SEO as it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Pages with low CLS scores provide a more stable experience, potentially leading to better search visibility.
How is it measured? Pollard addressed this question in a thread on X.
For Core Web Vitals what is CLS measured in? Why is 0.1 considered not good and 0.25 bad, and what do those numbers represent?
I’ve had 3 separate conversations on this with various people in last 24 hours so figured it’s time for another deep dive thread to explain…
🧵 1/12 pic.twitter.com/zZoTur6Ad4
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) October 10, 2024
Understanding CLS Measurement
Pollard began by explaining the nature of CLS measurement:
“CLS is ‘unitless’ unlike LCP and INP which are measured in seconds/milliseconds.”
He further clarified:
“Each layout shift is calculated by multipyling two percentages or fractions together: What moved (impact fraction) How much it moved (distance fraction).”
This calculation method helps quantify the severity of layout shifts.
As Pollard explained:
“The whole viewport moves all the way down – that’s worse than just half the view port moving all the way down. The whole viewport moving down a little? That’s not as bad as the whole viewport moving down a lot.”
Worse Case Scenario
Pollard described the worst-case scenario for a single layout shift:
“The maximum layout shift is if 100% of the viewport (impact fraction = 1.0) is moved one full viewport down (distance fraction = 1.0).
This gives a layout shift score of 1.0 and is basically the worst type of shift.”
However, he reminds us of the cumulative nature of CLS:
“CLS is Cumulative Layout Shift, and that first word (cumulative) matters. We take all the individual shifts that happen within a short space of time (max 5 seconds) and sum them up to get the CLS score.”
Pollard explained the reasoning behind the 5-second measurement window:
“Originally we cumulated ALL the shifts, but that didn’t really measure the UX—especially for pages opened for a long time (think SPAs or email). Measuring all shifts meant, given enough, time even the best pages would fail!”
He also noted the theoretical maximum CLS score:
“Since each element can only shift when a frame is drawn and we have a 5 second cap and most devices run at 60fps, that gives a theoretical cap on CLS of 5 secs * 60 fps * 1.0 max shift = 300.”
Interpreting CLS Scores
Pollard addressed how to interpret CLS scores:
“… it helps to think of CLS as a percentage of movement. The good threshold of 0.1 means about the page moved 10%—which could mean the whole page moved 10%, or half the page moved 20%, or lots of little movements were equivalent to either of those.”
Regarding the specific threshold values, Pollard explained:
“So why is 0.1 ‘good’ and 0.25 ‘poor’? That’s explained here as was a combination of what we’d want (CLS = 0!) and what is achievable … 0.05 was actually achievable at the median, but for many sites it wouldn’t be, so went slightly higher.”
See also: How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals
Why This Matters
Pollard’s insights provide web developers and SEO professionals with a clearer understanding of measuring and optimizing for CLS.
As you work with CLS, keep these points in mind:
- CLS is unitless and calculated from impact and distance fractions.
- It’s cumulative, measuring shifts over a 5-second window.
- The “good” threshold of 0.1 roughly equates to 10% of viewport movement.
- CLS scores can exceed 1.0 due to multiple shifts adding up.
- The thresholds (0.1 for “good”, 0.25 for “poor”) balance ideal performance with achievable goals.
With this insight, you can make adjustments to achieve Google’s threshold.
Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
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