November 2022 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Insofar as my global site is concerned my numbers are holding-up to average.

UK hotel site has seen a small decrease this week however realworld takings are ok, in fact better than anticipated.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Is search where most of your visitors come from? Several local hotels are booked solid for the next 3 years in my area, they are more a temporary home than hotel right now. Just curious if that's a trend.

Search introduced a spam site into my niche last spam update that has, as of yet, not lost it's pristine new rankings. 90% of the content is low quality AI. Only the first couple paragraphs of any page are hand-written but the rest will confuse anyone who understands the subject.

[EditorialGuy]

We had a fairly significant drop when Google's Product Reviews Update rolled out (even though our information site has few product reviews). Since then, week-over-week search traffic has mostly been in decline, but that's typical for our travel niche at this time of year. Inflation in much of the world and recession fears in Europe probably aren't helping matters, either.

For us, Google's Product Reviews Update and the state of the world economy have been a double whammy.

[tangor]

^ Fears of recession worldwide are probably an indicator for reduced traffic in hotel/travel niches.

So far, my search traffic is about the same, perhaps 1% year over year higher. Marginal.

[RedBar]

Is search where most of your visitors come from?

For the hotel this year 61.5% of all traffic has been from search with 95.6% from the UK of overall traffic.

At the moment there are no "long-terms" bookings, the visitors are its usual general mix of business, contractors and vacation.

[mhansen]

We have a content based leadgen site that has grown nicely over the last couple years. Hundreds of unique, long format pages that are constantly refreshed with updated content to keep the information fresh, add user generated data, etc. We're squarely in the middle of the YMYL topic, and have expert contributors we work with to verify and validate the information included in our content. One of those "Published by: Name Name, Reviewed and Verified by: Name Name", with both names linked to profiles, etc.

What I have noticed recently is quite a few new faces in the SERPs that have never been there much before, simply because of their YMYL authority. Things like Forbes Magazine or BankRate coming up for abstract queries that are related to money topics, but not at all what Forbes or Bankrate have traditionally published content around. It seems they too know they can exploit the YMYL topics and write about anything as it relates to money, rank extremely well and monetize through adsense with ad-laden pages that Google used to pull from the serps for pushing too many ads.

Our traffic is OK and continuing to grow steadily, but once these places see good content they merely need to write something of lower value and outplace you in serps with little to no effort.

[not2easy]

Forbes has been publishing UGC for a while now. Not the authority they once were.

[mosxu]

Personalisation of readiness to use a credit card still predominant in my industry…

But not made to work for everyone for some reason

[RareBit]

Anyone else seeing some movement today? (UK manufacturing/soft furnishings)

[EditorialGuy]

What I have noticed recently is quite a few new faces in the SERPs that have never been there much before, simply because of their YMYL authority.

i'm seeing a noticeable shift to e-commerce results in lieu of informational results. Someone searching for something like "elephant buses in Thailand" (okay, I made that one up) now has to wade through three ads and three organic e-commerce results before reaching an informational result (whether the latter is a Wikipedia article or an article from elephant-travel-in-thailand.com).

[RubicCubed]

Anyone else seeing some movement today?

Yes. Only way to describe it is a major crash in traffic early this morning. I'm down about 80%. Ecom/USA

[nova88]

Hello after October 19 many of my articles have disappeared from Google and I can not index the new article. I read on the internet that it may be because of the google spam update so my question is how to do to recover my traffic and that my site is indexed as before my site

Our site was last crawled on 19th October, and since then its just complete silence from Google. We're also having the same issue with the sitemap not being read or crawled. It only updates or reads it when we submit it separately, but we have to do that daily.

We have reset our server, validated all issues GSC was highlighting that may cause indexing issues, configured our Robots.txt and tested several URLs to see if nothing is being blocked. Our stats have dropped massively, and we're in a tough situation overall.

We conducted a complete technical SEO audit, everything turned out fine. We checked our content for plagiarism, duplication, everything is set perfectly. We use a multilingual plugin for displaying content in different regions; and the canonicals are also perfectly set

We've also obtained backlinks naturally and by sharing posts on social media and communities. In short, we cannot find any MAJOR issue that's caused us to be affected by either the Google Spam Update.

[beaverman]

@nova88 we have been suffering from the update since 21st Oct. What I can see: many sites relying too much on the FAQ format (People Also Ask keywords) and on how-to guides were butchered, especially new ones low on authority. A great load of black hat AI and automated PAA spammers were killed along the way. Can it be that you have overused FAQ/PAA?

[engine]

I've noticed wikipedia dropping from pretty much the top of most searches in favour of more video.

[christianz]

My miraculous October 28th recovery is still going. As of today I have almost completely reversed Spam Update, Product Reviews Update, September Core Update and Helpful Content Update.

Will it last? I highly doubt it. Interestingly, my drops, 40 day slide and sudden recovery mirror those of CNN, Bloomberg and other big mainstream sites which were affected. Even when my site has nothing in common with those type of sites (other than age).

but once these places see good content they merely need to write something of lower value and outplace you in serps with little to no effort.

This is why EAT is horrible idea. Turns Internet into cable TV.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Confirmed, sites using the People Also Ask questions as post topics and also using FAQ schema to try for special SERP entries were hit hard. Most of these sites were newer, which is not surprising since the features were also newer in search.

Some sites heavily using FAQ schema and PAA in their new content didn't lose traffic. The difference is that those sites were already more authoritative and established. A new unproven site is less likely to have all the answers so if all it's content is in that format it looks like "written for search" spam.

The GOOD news: You can remove the FAQ schema markup from the majority of pages and add new content that shows you know what you're talking about to recover.

edit: To be clear, I'm referring to sites where the FAQ was most of the content. An H tagged question followed by a single paragraph answer perfect for search features became more common to see.

[anubitez]

I started using FAQ on about 30 posts about a week before the 19th update, out of over three years of like 2k or close to posts. I removed these, I saw others doing it, and thought it was cool, I made mine unique though, but I did notice this trend as well. Most have been removed from the GSC but has not changed a thing regarding traffic.

Google crawls my site just as much as before the 19th, nothing new is being indexed, my social media posts about new content rank now, reddit for example tops it all.... Manual copycat gang ranks in 1st spot on new content when they steal, auto scrapers top 5 sometimes.

I removed tags as well, considered them as spammy, really investigating less than 2% of my real unique non-bot traffic comes from search engines to tags, given I manually submit each post, google finds them easy with sitemaps and categories, and site structure.

Guess some sites are recovering, others may take a while or need to wait for an update. What is really annoying is if you update content now, it is not even changed as well as new for sites that got flagged. If they seriously hit white hat sites for experimenting like mine with just a few FAQ schemas, that shows how broken their algo is especially when you got a high da and legit traffic visiting your site, I get if you post 100s to thousands and some of that daily for the auto scraper content farmers to be pinged.

Also, my keywords are bouncing around from rank 1 to rank 100 each day, literally, its musical chairs....

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Thanks for sharing that, anubitez. I'd love to hear what happens after the next core update.

You mentioned removing tags. Does the site have a related content area towards the bottom of pages? Or a recent posts area perhaps?

[beaverman]

Thanks Sgt. We have removed FAQ schema from all pages, both categories and reviews. We have deleted all FAQ blocks with H3 and a short answer. Also, we have changed titles, H2 and H3 to remove all PAA. Now we are generally lowering keyword inclusions in H2/3, breaking PAA in text and making our headings less template-like. Seems like we are crawled and indexed still, and the pages change in SERP, but for now those changes gave us nothing.

We feel that we were matched with spammers by Google AI based on some profiling + heavy PAA usage + some language style traits. And the fact that our articles are unique and were proofread by myself down to the last number and name mean little.

My advice to anyone with a content project from now on is to get away from any kind of templateness when it comes to articles' structure, balance the language of instruction with more casual language (which is still well out of AI reach), use minimum direct PAA keywords/FAQ schema, plus think on breaking SEO powerpages into separate pieces.

Seems that Google doesn't like a big article answering all the queries around the given topic now, even good ones, as it may be hard for a person to find each separate answer.

[ichthyous]

i'm seeing a noticeable shift to e-commerce results in lieu of informational results

Oh yes, a very strong shift back to e-commerce and away from the catastrophe that was 2021 where only listicles and how to articles predominated. Google is simply experimenting on us with each new update and testing which kinds of results drive the most revenue to them. It could easily shift back again, but for now I am enjoying actually getting customer inquiries again since the last update...or is it two updates ago? I haven't been paying attention.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The only viable long term strategy is visitor pleasing content. It works for Google because it works for visitors. Please don't make too many SEO changes too quickly without solid data from your specific site, 3-6 months of data at a minimum, or a couple of core updates. Too many SEO changes too quickly can wreck any site.

Improving your writing skills is equally important and what better opportunity is there than to review an underperforming page to see if you can improve the text.

- Spelling and grammar are easy gains

- Removing untrue statements and improving copy is slightly more difficult but worthwhile. Untrue statements are often unnoticed by the author, stuff like "everyone loves a good joke" is always going to be untrue, just one person who doesn't like jokes makes it untrue. "Everyone I know loves a good joke" can be true though.

"people prefer being rich". Which people? Rich how? Money? Security? Knowledge? Don't put out a general statement without answering any questions it might create. "Happy people prefer being rich in good friendships" is better but still try and demonstrate how you came to that conclusion with a chart or study, or even a simple survey. It's the "more" google craves and people appreciate.

- More challenging still is taking a deep dive into the tone of the content itself. Does your page contain salesperson speak? example: Assuming the sale. Do your words imply an action will happen? "What color seats are you putting in your widget?" on a page selling widgets is assuming the sale and I believe Google is paying more attention to this type of verbiage. They don't want to send you somewhere unhelpful that may convince you to do something through words, not facts.

Invest in yourself by taking a writing or journalism class. Not everything on a website is SEO related.

Personally I would prefer top notch articles on a horribly SEO'd site than mediocre content on the best SEO'd site online. Just don't let it be slow loading!

[Atomic]

I agree completely. In the long run, high-quality content wins. Out of all the sites I track, the ones with the best content weathered the latest updates fine and dandy. Every other site has seen significant losses. These sites write about things of interest to readers. They aren't looking solely for volume opportunities. They have those, too, of course. The niche is rife with them.

I absolutely believe the algorithm is ferreting out salesy type sites. And it's not hard is it? They signal crap to Google in so many ways. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And keyword density won't help you (right?). But salesy sites have high keyword density for certain words. Sites merely trying to inform people and make a little money rather than making a little money and maybe helping people won't have a prevalence of these keywords. How stupid do you think this AI is?

But there's still a lot of work to do. Query squatters are still crowding good content from page one for many important commercial products. I remember searching for one particular widget recently and had to give up by page 10 because there were no "real" websites with anything more than regurgitated marketing copy from the original manufacturer. I am dying to see them go so we can get back to meaningful SERPs.

[christianz]

It works for Google because it works for visitors.

I wish it was true.

Out of all the sites I track, the ones with the best content weathered the latest updates fine and dandy. Every other site has seen significant losses.

You don't track enough websites, because there were loads of high quality ones that become collateral damage with these latest updates. Thankfully Google seems to have noticed and (for the most part) fixed it on October 28ish.

Confirmed, sites using the People Also Ask questions as post topics and also using FAQ schema to try for special SERP entries were hit hard.

It was definitely getting too far with the FAQ/PAA spam. Q&A blocks that clearly were not indented for any human being to read, subtitles which were all FAQ type questions etc.

Maybe if PAA block was not inserted in prominent position for almost any query, this wouldn't be such a big problem.

[Atomic]

There's always collateral damage.

[longjohnbronze]

It was definitely getting too far with the FAQ/PAA spam. Q&A blocks that clearly were not indented for any human being to read, subtitles which were all FAQ type questions etc.

We followed the Q&A recipe for most of our articles and frankly, there is nothing wrong with that approach when it's high quality. We worked with subject matter experts (and not rando freelancers or even AI) who we found on Linkedin (some of whom have an extensive publishing history in our sector), authors are profiled on the pages, little repetition of content between Q&A blocks, pages are free of any affiliate crap etc. - Yet we were hit hard to the benefit of some competitors who have a longer history and higher DA but bland content with little tangible value written by authors where it literally says "SEO Manager". The kicker is that the whole site has been hit, even pages that follow a completely different pattern.

Google's AI can't distinguish between those two approaches or if it can, it's not what they go for, because it would cost more resources and not increase revenues. I therefore don't see a point for us to continue working hard on quality content like we used to.

[EditorialGuy]

Out of all the sites I track, the ones with the best content weathered the latest updates fine and dandy. Every other site has seen significant losses.

For us, what got hit or didn't get hit seems almost random. Within any major topic area of our 20+-year-old editorial site, some pages are up noticeably on any given day, while others are down. A few days later, the order may be reversed. (And I'm not talking about pages with a dozen visits--I'm referring to our established bread-and-butter information pages, which have always had reasonable to good traffic, aren't template-based, aren't written to a formula, aren't driven by SEO or keyword research, and are authored by people with bylines--mostly me--who have been writing about those topics for several decades.) It's mystifying.

[christianz]

We followed the Q&A recipe for most of our articles and frankly, there is nothing wrong with that approach when it's high quality. We worked with subject matter experts (and not rando freelancers or even AI) who we found on Linkedin (some of whom have an extensive publishing history in our sector), authors are profiled on the pages, little repetition of content between Q&A blocks, pages are free of any affiliate crap etc. - Yet we were hit hard

My complaint was about articles where you search for (this is fictional example) "how to replace a headlight bulb in 2020 Mercedes E Class" and what you get is long essay with 75 H2 subtitles like:

1 What is car?
2 Who created the first car?
3 Brief history of lightbulbs
4 Who invented light bulb?
5 ...

75 How to replace a headlight bulb in 2020 Mercedes E Class

You get the idea... And also, sites which should not have any FAQ content but add FAQ schema simply for SEO and, to comply with Google guidelines, add these same schema questions to the body of the page, but in small print and lower down where they don't scare the visitors who obviously don't need that kind of content (it makes no sense for that particular type of page).

[Martin Ice Web]

Another big drop since friday. We are down to 40%.
And we are now replaced with websites that are not even related to our niche, like Hardware Stores.
It would be like we would sell sausages in your tech. related shop and would rank for it.
All our competitors are down, too.
it seems that google has to compensate the lost revenue from last quater.

[EditorialGuy]

it seems that google has to compensate the lost revenue from last quater.

Or maybe perfection (or even a high level of competence) is simply hard to achieve.

[RedBar]

Interestingly my global site's first weekday of November average was completely normal, my weekends are usually 50-75% but this weekend it was 76.3% and 81.7%. My most popular widget pages are still the same with only minor movements +/-1 positions.

However Realworld business enquiries have dropped dramatically this past couple of weeks or so especially from the West. I do expect "Western" enquiries to drop at this time of year since, basically, retail Xmas demand needs to have been shipped by now but I usually do get enquiries for Jan-Mar despatch but these have not, as yet, started happening.

International shipping rates are nearly back to normal therefore that is not the issue, I am suspecting recession / stock not moving is the cause, the next few weeks running up to Xmas will be much more telling since Easter sales for many Western retailers is their busiest time of year.