What has December got to offer us, I wonder. In an unusual move, Google announced a broad core update in November, just before Black Friday was due to hit. Many questioned this move, just before the start of a big online shopping season. Our November thread monitoring the reports indicated a mixed bag of results. As of this moment, the broad core update is almost complete.
In case you missed it, here's a quick round-up of some of the Google news.
@Stupidintelligent, no, that is new, I covered it just 10 or so minutes ago at [searchengineland.com...]
ichthyous
5:15 pm on Dec 29, 2021 (gmt 0)
Google has become a complete freakin' nightmare now. Search traffic keeps going lower and lower all month, and is down 61% today. USA down -60%, UK -13%, Canada -68%. I can only surmise that some sort of heavy duty penalty has been applied to my site as I have never seen anything like this. My ranking dropped all month and sits at a low that I haven't seen in perhaps a decade. The top image is my search for the last 28 days, while bottom is today's almost non-existent traffic. Something is very very wrong here:
Tuesday was completely in the dumpster for me however today was steaming until mid-day with loads of Far and Middle East visitors, a steady afternoon and with 6+ hours to go I'm at 84%. Dare I assume Thursday may be similar with a sharp decline Friday?
No idea, nothing's predictable these days !
RedBar
5:44 pm on Dec 29, 2021 (gmt 0)
UK -13%
My UK-focussed sites are all -50% since before Xmas, this is nothing new for me and normality, if there is such a thing nowadays, may / will not return until the middle of next week.
ichthyous
5:47 pm on Dec 29, 2021 (gmt 0)
@Redbar Since the 13th I have seen UK drop as much as 60%. This is not at all normal for my business. A normal holiday decline is 15%. Factor in Omicron and ok, this isn't a normal year, but most of this is due to Google. It started dropping dramatically on the 13th and has been abnormally low all month.
Alex_1729
11:58 pm on Dec 29, 2021 (gmt 0)
I had an increase for my informational site (also has some lists/reviews, both Amazon and non-Amazon, high-quality content, US-targeted; only 1.5 years old), so today about 5% more organic visits than yesterday (I'm in Europe so the day has ended). Two days before was a 14% organic increase over Christmas day, and yesterday 1% only.
Although it looks promising, this is still below what I was getting, and where it should have been, as I have a lot of new posts ranking well and growing in SERPs. Still, pretty good increase. Also, US and UK could have been better today.
yollo03
10:24 am on Dec 30, 2021 (gmt 0)
I am seeing movements in my niche. It appears certain long tail keywords are now interpreted differently by the algorithms, which provides different results from page 1 to page 4. I am assuming this is about user intent. There is really nothing that can be done about it aside extremely high authority sites that will probably benefit from it.
Markedd
11:58 am on Dec 31, 2021 (gmt 0)
Since a couple of days ago, I am experiencing an unholy amount of bot traffic. I think 90% of my traffic is fake at this point and it's all organic. Good job, Google. Eh, let's still finish this year on a more positive note, so happy new year to everyone!
engine
3:56 pm on Dec 31, 2021 (gmt 0)
There's a regular search I perform, manually, once per week, and I suspect there have been changes going on, which I haven't yet confirmed. On the face of it, google looks to be providing less and less results of pages with just words, and more with media of some sort, such as videos, podcasts, and, of course, YouTube.
RedBar
11:46 am on Jan 2, 2022 (gmt 0)
I'll say it ... HAPPY NEW YEAR
New Years Eve 63% traffic New Year's Day 85.3%
Never seen numbers like it and it all looks genuine!
ichthyous
8:24 pm on Jan 2, 2022 (gmt 0)
I'm seeing a complete change in traffic since the 31st. It's far more regular through every hour again, with peaks and valleys...looks like the extreme throttling of the second half of December was lifted. The damage was done, I can't get back the month of December I sales and my ranking is still far below what it was this time one year ago. I also have no confidence that the extreme traffic throttling in December won't return. All I can say is that I accumulated a lot of links quickly in early December and November...it definitely felt like some sort of penalty being applied. I also found two sites that had scraped my content and posted it and were coming up in searches for my brand name. I demanded they remove it and filed content removal requests with Google. The requests were approved and one site deleted the entire page. Not sure if this had any impact, probably not.
JesterMagic
12:29 pm on Jan 3, 2022 (gmt 0)
Through the holiday season traffic sitting between -40% to -50% every day when compared to last year. Oct and Nov was sitting at about -32%.
RedBar
2:37 pm on Jan 3, 2022 (gmt 0)
So far today it has been quiet however yesterday was up at 85.7% on a holiday Sunday!
Overall for my last 10 days 24th Dec - 2nd Jan my global traffic has been 71.6% which is way up on previous years whereas 50% would have been considered good.
Rankings have not changed.
ichthyous
4:08 pm on Jan 3, 2022 (gmt 0)
Rankings dropped again this morning...USA traffic back in the dumps, -67% at 11am. UK is higher, Europe and rest of the world are spotty.
System
1:35 pm on Jan 4, 2022 (gmt 0)
redhat
The following message was cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/5055161.htm [webmasterworld.com] 8:36 am on Jan 4, 2022 (utc -5)
Google Updates and SERP Changes - December 2021
