"Google May 2020 Core Update" affecting your xF Forum?

[djbaxter]

A number of different sites have reported the same thing (not only forums, not only Xenforo).

 

[AzzidReign]

I lost 90% from May to December. December update gave me 3x the clicks I was getting, and now resulting in having 50% reduction since the first 2020 update.

Mind you, I haven't changed a damn thing since December 2019. In fact, with losing 90% + covid killing my other business = left me extremely depressed and I stopped visiting my site for a couple months, so I for sure didn't touch anything to try to improve these stats.

 

[Wesker]

I lost 50% of google search impressions/clicks with the May 2020 Google Core Update

The December Google 2020 Core Update update gave me back the 50% clicks I had lost

Thank god

December one helped us as well a bit. About a 15% growth.

 

[lightspeed]

Wow, I'm also seeing a recovery starting in December in Google Search Console. Total Clicks grew 50% from Dec 02 - Dec 06 and holding up around that level.

 

[dash]

I got hit in May but recovered in December. Didn't realize it hit many other forums as well.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Something nice seemed to happen on Dec 4th

 

[AzzidReign]

Something nice seemed to happen on Dec 4th

Google core update. Many of us bounced back...I'm still about 50% lower than I was pre-May update sadly...but I'll take the 100% increase to what it was at post-May update. Still sucks.

 

[Anomandaris]

I completely recovered also, but I lost $25,000 last year because of this BS


The december update was just the reversion of the change they made in May, all because they wanted to stop election/covid misinformation, ridiculous

 

[djbaxter]

Well brace yourself. There's another update happening now but mostly affecting Local Search rather than organic:

https://www.brightlocal.com/free-local-seo-tools/local-rankflux/

But there's a big one coming up in May which will likely have an effect across the board:

Core Web Vitals & Page Experience for Local Businesses

We look at how the update will work and provide some clear and actionable steps to help you optimize your local business website for it.

www.brightlocal.com

Google is currently putting together the final changes for a search algorithm update that they’ve announced will land in May 2021.

The update is being called the Page Experience update because of its focus on usability rather than things like keywords or search relevance. Google has already provided some information on the update, which aims to measure and potentially rank the experience that a user encounters when visiting a page.

The fact that Google have given so much warning about the update says all you need to know about how seriously to take it. We know it’ll impact organic search results but as of yet, there’s no word on whether there will be any specific impact on Google My Business rankings.

At the very highest level, the update will for the first time implement the Core Web Vitals that Google defined in 2020 into the search algorithm. The aim of those metrics is that users should have a web experience that is straightforward, reliable, safe, and works great on any device.

The Page Experience update is ultimately the leveling up of those metrics from a ‘request’ to a ‘demand’, in that, theoretically at least, your local business site will perform worse in search if a comparable competitor is performing better in Core Web Vitals.

 

[eva2000]

But there's a big one coming up in May which will likely have an effect across the board:

Bring it on

 

[Anomandaris]

Thankfully I score a 100% perfect on web core vitals and am not local

 

[djbaxter]

Thankfully I score a 100% perfect on web core vitals and am not local

To clarify, that's on a Xenforo forum site?

 

[Anomandaris]

To clarify, that's on a Xenforo forum site?

Yes, but I just checked and starting on February 6th of this year, I'm now getting this:



funny it went from 100% perfect to 99% needs improvement, guess I have some work to do

 

[djbaxter]

Google loves changing things and not formally informing site owners about what has changed. I see that they are making some efforts to improve this but they have a long way to go.

I believe I saw something about some recent changes to Core Web Vitals but I can't remember where or what the changes were. However, I think it's safe to say that going forward there will continue to be updates to that since it's linked to their ever-changing User Experience data.

 

[dash]

Biggest culprit for poor Web Core Vitals is Google Ads. On my site, pages without Google Ads get a great score while ones with Google Ads get a poor score. If anyone can show me a page with Google Ads that gets a green mobile score (90-100), I would be shocked.

If this actually becomes a ranking factor then Youtube, which dominates many of the Search results, should get penalized. Not holding my breath on that. Unfortunately Google essentially has monopoly power in search and no longer follows the "Don't be evil" motto (actually was removed in 2018).

 

[djbaxter]

Biggest culprit for poor Web Core Vitals is Google Ads. On my site, pages without Google Ads get a great score while ones with Google Ads get a poor score. If anyone can show me a page with Google Ads that gets a green mobile score (90-100), I would be shocked.

If this actually becomes a ranking factor then Youtube, which dominates many of the Search results, should get penalized. Not holding my breath on that. Unfortunately Google essentially has monopoly power in search and no longer follows the "Don't be evil" motto (actually was removed in 2018).

Totally agree.

It's all part of the new Google motto. It used to be, "Do no evil". They changed it a couple of years ago when they formed ABC Corp to, "Do as we say. Not as we do."

 

[Harvey]

You can do quite a lot of forum curating to help SEO.

• Encourage on-topic posting (discourage or move off topic posts from within important threads)
• Merge threads that are about basically the same things (similar threads addon is good)
• Encourage people not to start a new thread about the same topic as an existing one.
• Get rid of trolls.
• Encourage meaningful thread titles that include words that are right on topic.
• Have easy navigation so that people who find your forum are encouraged to stay there (engaged) and look around.
• Search for old threads that only have one post. I just delete them because usually it's a question that nobody answered, so it's useless to Google.
• Not just threads, post some useful well written articles on pages or resources., structure them like proper articles with headings and subheadings, articulate writing, good original clear images, internal and external linking.
• Look at the competition and work out why they do better in Google.
• Think about search questions.

Would you allow me to reuse this somewhere?

 

[Mr Lucky]

Would you allow me to reuse this somewhere?

Yes, thank you for asking (many wouldn't!)