On November 17, 2021, Google announced, via the Google Search Central Twitter account, the launch of a new core update called “November 2021”.
Google has released a new update to its algorithm and it seems to be negatively affecting ecommerce sites.
As is usual with the release of so-called “broad core updates,” the full rollout of the update will take a few days or even weeks to complete, depending on the changes you apply. On the other hand, as it is also usual in this type of updates, Google has not explained what has changed (as they don’t make “specific” changes, but are designed to improve Google’s systems in general), so the information usually comes from websites noticing changes in their rankings.
When introducing these “broad” updates it is common to notice a lot of volatility in rankings for the first few days, until the update is fully rolled out and the changes integrated. However, on this occasion webmasters report that they are not noticing major changes in their rankings and that the search results pages (SERPs) have remained very stable.
On the other hand, some volatility around some keywords has been noted, as well as in terms of the websites with integrated stores which, in some cases, have even reported crashing, as we can see in the following tweet:
I’m also seeing surges/drops with e-commerce retailers (right before Thanksgiving weekend). For this *giant* e-commerce retailer, this initial drop could signal a big, big problem for them. They dropped w/the Dec 2020 core update, surged w/July 2021 core update & now is dropping pic.twitter.com/cvuH4WWD5X
– Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 19, 2021
In the tweet, user Glenn Gabe points out that the November update has caused a drop in traffic to an ecommerce “giant,” which could become a problem.
The most negative point is that many users have noticed that spam traffic, which had all but disappeared after the implementation of the anti-spam algorithm update, has recovered and even increased. In this regard, some sites have reported an increase of up to 130% increase in spam trafficwhile organic traffic has dropped.
