SEARCHENGINES
Volatility For The March 2022 Google Product Reviews Update
Earlier this week I reported that we were not seeing huge changes yet for the March 2022 Google Products Reviews update. Well, it seems like some of the tools and a number of SEOs are now noticing larger changes specific to sites that would match the product reviews categories.
I am seeing some more chatter and some SEOs, like Glenn Gabe and also Lily Ray, are posting screenshots of sites they track in the sector seeing larger changes. Also, the tracking tools, some of them, are starting to show a larger upswing in volatility.
Charts Of Specific Sites
Here are some charts from Glenn Gabe, Lily Ray and Marie Haynes of specific sites they track in the product reviews sector showing changes – likely from the product reviews update:
I mentioned yesterday the March 2022 Product Reviews Update was mild so far. Well, I’m seeing more movement now (with some seeing initial movement this week). Still not like the previous two PRUs volatility-wise (yet), but more movement for sure. Just a heads-up. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/fBhBlNi1me
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 30, 2022
And here is more movement I’m seeing across sites with reviews content. Some sites are surging after dropping with previous Product Reviews Updates, or vice versa. And like I saw with the December PRU, there are dueling machine learning systems at play (core updates vs. PRU). pic.twitter.com/p3t2IfP3LB
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 31, 2022
And remember, just because a site surges doesn’t mean it’s back to where it once was. Here’s an example of a nice surge, but it’s only a partial recovery. The drop from the December Product Reviews Update was huge… We’ll see where it ends up once the March PRU is done. pic.twitter.com/kLPepIxnlJ
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 31, 2022
More examples of Product Review sites starting to make a comeback, after being hit by the December PRU.
I actually think most of these sites do go above and beyond to meet Google’s product review content quality guidelines, so I think the new update is “working” pic.twitter.com/Qa9s93Sc7L
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) March 30, 2022
What’s interesting is that with the December Product Review update, many transactional, head-term rankings shifted in favor of major ecommerce retailers
That trend seems to be reverting back to top rankings for many Product Review sites with this recent update pic.twitter.com/vV2mqAkVHY
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) March 29, 2022
Another affiliate site.
They are also seeing increases for searches containing “best”.
Content speaks of personal expertise…”We tested these and analyzed them for comfort, durability, strength, etc.” pic.twitter.com/ACZPpmoi3I
— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) March 29, 2022
The Tracking Tools
Like I said above, some of the tracking tools are starting to show some more widespread changes in the Google search results. I suspect many of the tools that have not shown the swings yet, will do so soon.
Here are some screenshots from the tools showing the volatility and I’ll update this story throughout the day as the other tools update.
The last two should update later today with new data – I’ll be updating them as I see them change.
SEO Chatter
So the ongoing WebmasterWorld has had some chatter since the update, he is the chatter specific to the product reviews update:
Very big drop (-40% to 50%) since 2 weeks now. Serps itself doesn´t seem to have changed so it could be some super AI that is going wild.
Wow today for some of my searches im seeing position 1-6 all YouTube, I had to triple check i wasn’t in the video section! Website traffic continues to decline and according to my YouTube analytics traffic from google to my channel has improved by 46% since this time last year!
I am seeing continuing increases in top 3 ranking, but English language traffic is weak. USA is consistently weak every day for about 10 days now, UK also lower most days but not as much. Today Canada is also off by 37%. The theory about the war in Ukraine having an impact might be true, but if so why not lower traffic from continental Europe? Also, why the sudden shift and decline…if it were news related it would be more gradual, not overnight.
The sudden declines in traffic following the same patterns indicates to me that it’s all manipulation on the part of Google. They are once again experimenting with page layout and other ways to ensure that website don’t get any traffic and they keep it all. I see some sites that were major competitors reduced to running ads for everything now…which is exactly what Google wants of course. They won’t make any profit at $5 per click with all the fraudulent clicks too. I tried it last year…Google’s traffic from adwords is pure crap.
According to SEMrush I had a very large boost in visibility today, now passing or on part with my top competitor. Yet my home page traffic is down 71% and my USA traffic is down 56% so far this morning. Ranking really is not correlating with traffic. I wish I had the time and skills to analyze why, but I can’t afford to hand Google more of my time, I’m busy looking for ways to diversify away from search. I have to say, social isn’t much better. If you aren’t paying FB or Instagram you will get nothing from those platforms either.
Something happened on Saturday 26th March for me:
Global site 1-25 March 100%
The last 4 days 83.6% and today looking lower however enquiries stil good.UK site 1-25 March 112%
The last 4 days 81% and, as above, today looking lower.
Today it’s even lower and still dropping…home page -61%, USA – 40%, UK -27%. Many of my landing pages are down exactly 17% at the same time, others down 45%, and the most highly trafficked -60%+. This has been getting worse for ~10 days now and business has vanished completely.
So it seems like this update may be finding its legs? What are you all noticing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
SPONSOR: Wix Studio lets digital marketing agencies get all of the benefits Wix has to offer from best-in-class SEO capabilities to 99% up-time with the added value of an extensive client and team management system baked right into the platform.
Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast player to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:
Search Topics of Discussion:
Please do subscribe on YouTube or subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don’t forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!
-
PPC5 days ago
19 Best SEO Tools in 2024 (For Every Use Case)
-
MARKETING7 days ago
Streamlining Processes for Increased Efficiency and Results
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 17, 2024
-
PPC7 days ago
97 Marvelous May Content Ideas for Blog Posts, Videos, & More
-
SEO7 days ago
An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 18, 2024
-
MARKETING6 days ago
Ecommerce evolution: Blurring the lines between B2B and B2C
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 19, 2024
You must be logged in to post a comment Login