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.

[Dalnoon]

@Redbar, can you explain what do you mean by "Realworld business enquiries"?

I also had a rather small drop since this week - last week I had one of my best weeks in the year, which was expected since we're getting closer to the end of the year, but the traffic is down around 14% both daily and WoW for this week.

[anubitez]

ok, i got a weird thing happening.

Unlike others that were hit with spam updates, Google does crawl my site and compared to other months, its crawling it 50% more oddly enough, this time last year and the past 3 months from the stats. From my understanding, pure flagged spam sites cannot even get Googlebot to visit hardly ever, I do not have this problem, infact the opposite.

Now, what is super interesting, new posts do not get indexed or disappear after seeming to rank, sometimes in #1st spot like it was before the spam update. We have Reddit, twitter, and facebook accounts which we interact with users, soon as we post mostly to Reddit about a new post, it will either take us out and insert itself in our position, even at number #1 if there is low competition, or if high competition sends itself to the 2nd, 3rd page.

Do I seriously need to remove these communities to start deindexing them? I also tested with two posts that have not been posted on social media the past few days; they are still ranking.... this could explain a lot of why the previous posts have been hidden and some old ones were not affected since these communities are 6months old.

Has anyone seen anything similar? This is beyond bizarre to almost trolling by Google; if I was an outright spammer, nothing would be ranked or even crawled, then social media comes along and blows the link. Should I disavow reddit, facebook, twitter?

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Danoon

@Redbar, can you explain what do you mean by "Realworld business enquiries"?

Online World - Where a website may get tens of thousands of visitors per day looking at millions of pages and images searching for information of many different kinds and for all sorts of reasons ... For free.

RealWorld - The actual genuine business enquiries a website generates but is not an eCommerce site because of the type of product(s) and / or buyers' requirements. I suppose one could call it the Bespoke World.

eCommerce World - Trying to combine both Online and Real to generate enough business to justify the website. This is the most competitive and most difficult sector to be in relying on many websmaster skills UNLESS one pays for the advertisements to guarantee a high placement in the SERPs. Then that site has to get a myriad of things right including availabilty, pricing, delivery, returns, site usability ... Loads of seemingly small things that create an acceptable user package.

Does that help?

[Nutterum]

My observations so far :

1) B2B travel website - performing cautiously well, traffic wise, and bookings are coming in with higher frequency. The latter is not due to Google doing anything, more like, people spending now, as they fear inflation will force them to spend more next year.

2) big e-commerce apparel website - traffic is going strong with 5% incremental increase week over week and that is a continued trends for 6 consecutive weeks now. Still traffic is 20% lower compared to last year, but Europe is in the gutter right now, so people spend less and by proxy search less. I do want to note that some small markets like Greece and Hungary did improve quite in a broad cloud of organic terms, which is nice.

3) The third website sees an overinflated traffic but again its more of the products they sell and the prices they sell at more so than SERPs moving. I did see a moderate drop in long tail hits though, which is something worth investigating.

4) My observations in general Search for Europe are and this is important - websites with non transliterated URL structure perform worse on average compared to the pure English based URLs . Something to take note for people doing e-commerce in the old continent on more than one market.

[JesterMagic]

Our main site continues to see a slow drop every month since last year, pretty much have lost 50% of traffic. It's death by a thousand cuts. Sites with broad authority taking over niches where they do not belong along with other sites using backlink schemes.

[RedBar]

I have to report that traffic to my global site has been extremely consistent and stable this week so far.

Why I have no idea, this is like a couple of years ago, therefore I'm off to check my G US SERPs to see if there have been any siginiificant changes.

[anubitez]

hmmm, I was not impacted by those unconfirmed updates on the 3 or 4th whenever they were, but going back I was on the 19th or 22nd whenever that spam update was, and my site is recovering now I am pretty happy, probably take another 1 to 3 weeks at this rate, maybe sooner if they drop another core update and revert more or actually filter spam better.

the scrapers are losing rank, automated boys end of page going far back, and the manual copycats have dropped a bit too, interestingly enough, more posts are coming forward too that they stole, it is like each day it is recalculating, I maybe wrong, just seems they are still re-evaluating changes and crunching the data which will take a bit given the site of the web.

[MariahHola]

Hello dear specialists, I need your help. There is a website (services of a master at home) that is 5 months old, at first the positions began to grow, but after 2 months they fell for 10 Google pages. Some pages with low-frequency queries on 2-3 pages. Tell me, could it be a sandbox?

[beaverman]

@anubitez, happy to hear good news from you. Keep sharing as you recover, as this offers hope to all white hats who were hit too.

[seomark]

I'm seeing lots of movement in our niche all week this week. Sites dropping in and out of top 10 on rotation. Started last Friday 4th.

[anubitez]

@beaverman thanks, I mean I could bomb out like the October spam update; things may return to what they were when the spam update hit; I am trying to stay positive. 2/3 of posts posted yesterday rank 1s .... the fightback is coming, Friday is historically the slowest day for weekdays, today even though it is lower than normal, obviously it is up almost 10% to last Friday too ;)

I did do some things; if I can fully regain them, I will write a list of what I did; while it may do zero for others, it is decent to know, maybe... I will update Tuesday/Wednesday.... unless JohnM feels like trolling and releases an update to smash legit sites again.

[RedBar]

After an above average first 10 days of the month today is extremely quiet across all sites from all regions.

[RedBar]

'Tis early Saturday afternoon for me and it is very noticeable that something has been "changed" to my global site in the past 48 hours with a return to mostly single page views per visitor. I have seen this pattern several times before when G has done something therefore it will be interesting to see for how long it continues.

Is anyone else seeing a similar pattern?

[Tomwlsh]

My site was murdered by the October spam update, but I have been noticing something strange. While my impressions are way down, my click thru rate and average position has never been better. They are soaring. The average time on the page is also very high (So the views are sticking around).

It seems like google very rarely ranks my pages, but on the rare occasion, they do it is nearly always a very high position.

I am continuing to publish new content, and refresh old content, but keeping my absolute best new articles back until discover traffic starts up again.

[rdscx]

After a good spike in August, I got hit in Sept & Oct (Useful content update and Spam or another update, whatever). Looking at the sites that did not got hit and look just like mine, I can say Google simply prefers authority and age (yes, same old story). Now I am back to at the traffic of Nov 1st, 2021 (so I was sent back one year). Not great, not terrible.

What is strange: I began to receive traffic for harder keywords, while losing traffic for easier keywords. However, my "commercial" keywords have not changed much (one went from #1 to #2) - the rest of long tail "commercial" kws are #1 or #1-5.

Here, "commercial" means keywords where very expensive digital products are sold or given for free (as weird as it sounds, its true). Most of them are given away for free for branding, while others are selling somehow better alternatives at really high prices.

There are two hypotheses here:

1. My "commercial" keywords stuck because the products (sold or freeware) are good and people use them. Which is true, they are indeed very good and helpful. My other content, like 99,999% of the total pages, is mediocre, so it tanked to a level corresponding to its value at this time (almost 2 years old site).

2. Google is doing some sort of chaotic mumbo-jumbo in order to deceive us all, and their algos are broken (some of them are, but I don't see a way to fix certain issues, ie "authority spam" or "authority hacks"). Anyway, all sorts of other reasons can be put here.

Applying Occam's razor on these two hypotheses, it's fairly clear that option #1 is most likely what happened. So what I need to do is to make the rest of the content better. I know it sounds silly and simple, but in fact is really hard to improve content.

Anyway, this is what happened to me, it's the first tank of my 2 years old (whitehat) site :)

[RedBar]

On Saturday my global site was at the lower end of average page views at just under 61%, today it is looking much more normal with many muliple page views, actual metrics right now show -25% fewer uniques but +20% page views, much closer to average.

I continue to be surprised by the UK hotel site, it is way, way up on previous years for a November with only beer sales down a little, food and accommodation are still going well with Xmas meal bookings ahead of previous years!

[vivektank]

Last week 4th & 5th Oct when Google came with it's unconfirmed Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update. We saw huge drop in our main keyword. We saw wired results on Google SERP. For the one keyword, one listing website & low domain authority website overtake us. For the 2nd keyword, Google, Square space, Wix etc websites overtake us. May I know what's going on. In Oct month we also noticed 12-13% drop in Organic traffic. I've confirmed that we didn't hit by spam/ any othe Google update.

Looking for an expert advice to restore my organic traffic & keywords position.

[anubitez]

Not much you can do besides fixing things obvious things such as design structure, broken links, page speed, quality control of posts, duplicate content etc. I found Reddit was hurting me since these updates when we alerted our community, so we made it private... I do not understand how reddit replaces our spot in the serps, and if it does, it is lowered to even worse; my posts are indexing fine now and getting rank 1s to 3s in high keyword targets, I just do not use social media alerts anymore, which is fine by me since I hate Social Media personally.

Traffic-wise, another few % on average up, probably take a good 3 weeks, not a week, to recover.

Also, John M's website had 60 posts de-indexed when the spam update hit, I remember when John M said on Twitter to stop spamming to users; he should take his own advice or admit the Google search team Algo is broken... I need to find the post that tracks his website, was a pretty funny read, and if he has issues, no wonder why so many legit whitehat sites do, too, besides the scum they were targeting in scrapers, thieves, and spammers.

[beaverman]

@anubitez you may be referring to this post about Mu's posts getting de-indexed, which covers if the recent spam update was about indexing. I've found it on BHW: [onely.com...]

[anubitez]

Yeah, that's it from memory that article.

Also, at 75% of normal traffic its going great tonight, its coming back quickly its a big change same trends, user locations.... hot diggity... if this continues should be back to normal by end of the week, fingers crossed.

The things I have done so far.

made social media posts account hidden, invite-only, kept public ones that can have noindex option on.

i removed every single one of my tags, i think i went a little too crazy over the years on these, 410 these to remove quickly.

i removed all faq schema that i just started adding.

Content is fine, I have started improving some older posts, but that was on my schedule so nothing major, new posts index fine.

Google crawling as per normal. I would add, what i listed above is not a guide for others to do, might of achieved nothing.

[RedBar]

Bots, bots everywhere today for my global sites seemingly from the US however since all of the "tech info" is spoofed who really knows? All they seem to do is read my top navigation line with a different IP for each url and then go. Why?

[malkhaldi]

new update regarding to seroundtable November 11th - 12th
i cant understand what they are doing

[Broaster]

This is sad, so many of us rely on adsense or PPC and advertising and don't know to do anymore. They are fiddling with the algorithim like a rollercoaster, they tease a recover only for 3 days later for your traffic to be obliterated and no more.

Its been like this every since 2021. In 2020 after many years in limbo since those algorithims came out in 2012-2013 when all my traffic was wiped out including google news, I had a resurgence tht started late 2019 and continued on in 2020 I was getting picked up by google discover and getting lots of organic traffic

then in 2021 the summer my site was hit, it was around the time of the Core Web Vitals, ill see occassional spikes in traffic but its mostly from bing, but now Im barely getting 10 visits an hour if that.

My last great month was March I had 20k visitors in one day due to bing news article but then some spammers and scrapers stole my news and were posting my articles word for word and backlinking to my website via a bing news link. These scrapers the month or so were out ranking me in google search but not in bing

I notice yahoo and bing have better ability to tell spam from original, the only downside is NOBODY uses yahoo, I barely get traffic from there. This google algo team are just useless people who want to continue working there so they dont get laid off they create issues aka fiddling with algorithms so they seem busy so they can maintain a salary, if there is no issue they down size the department. This the only thing Im thinking because google search is messed up period. Try searching terms and you get irrelevant crap in search it doesnt help the person searching for important info when they just throw up a big name site that has some of the keywords but they have more name value and backlinks.

I miss the old google search where everyone had a fighting chance if they wrote good content or had the info you were searching for, I used to be able to finish my college reports easy with google search instead of going to the library Id type in some sentence and find an exact article that speaks on that sentence and topic, not anymore.

[RedBar]

Another day of average PVs at 50% to Uniques for my global site.

[ichthyous]

Participation in this forum seems to have declined considerably. Whatever Google did, my traffic became more consistent and started converting better after the major update in June...it's a bit like the old days now with much more consistent traffic patterns on an hourly and daily basis that follow the norms i have observed for years. I'm not seeing much if any of the insane traffic throttling from 2021 and early 2022 anymore. All that while I have lost a huge number of IBLs and my DA has taken a sharp drop...but many more new inquiries...go figure.

While this is a relief, my traffic was so badly affected for so long (18+ months) and my business was so hammered by the loss of quality traffic that I will never again believe that Google can be relied upon as a source of consistent traffic. The throttling and constant experimentation will be back soon enough i fear...this is only a temporary reprieve.

[RedBar]

Oh ... and there ya goes, the first 3 hours of today for me were ALL single page views and then, as if by magic, my multiple page viewers came back and have been there for the past 8+ hours with traffic already surpassing Monday's ... Not much manipulation there.

Participation in this forum seems to have declined considerably.

It's hardly surprising since no one can do anything because there is seemingly no rationale for what is happening. Long-established webmasters realise there is only one option, do not change anything and wait it out and test ideas with a totally separate and unconnected site

But there is another aspect and that is many site "updaters" these days, especially large corporates, are told what and how to do it by their book. They want cheap, updating monkeys who conform to their policies and are prepared to pay for ads, this is in their costings, ranking means very little or anything whatsoever to these bean counters, advertising spend and dominance is in their college learning and Google complies, even recommends, how to do it.

Of course local SEO can work extremely well and effectively but the days of "independent experts" are almost finished since the bean counters do not want anything outside of their control.

[JesterMagic]

@ichthyous Yeah these past few years have seen a drastic decline in users on this forum. I blame this in part of the rise of the major media websites taking over all the niches that use to be held by single owners. If the SERP position is not held by a major media website, then it is held by some low-quality spam website that uses more blackhat techniques. So basically, everyone missing most likely has gone out of business.

Google also has moved away from ranking user generated content on mid-size and small websites so forums and pages with comments, etc. do not rank the same anymore. This is in part due to social media, YouTube, Google Reviews, and Reddit.

[ichthyous]

I'm not sure if the number of users has declined or just the participation rate. Google changed so many things so drastically from 2019 to now that it seems futile to fight against the tide. This last two years in particular have shown us that even if you do rank, you won't get the traffic since Google has loaded the page with so many ads and widgets and pushed organic further and further down. Once the reward for ranking top ten was removed then the point of this forum and SEO in general becomes moot.

[RedBar]

This last two years in particular have shown us that even if you do rank, you won't get the traffic

However it's not just the past two years, the really first big change for many was the image theft of 2010 followed by many iterations whereby ads became much more prominent and organic ranking much more difficult, in fact I feel that 2022 will be shown to be the year of new sites, unless they are extremely unique in all respects, will have found ranking an almost impossibility, furthermore for non-USA business sites to rank in the G US SERPs for keyword phrases almost pointless.

Ok, I am viewing this from a specific viewpoint but along with millions of other non-US business site owners, we have to consider the US as a closed marketplace for our products unless we open branches there. Is that what our potential clients really want, their suppliers opening up in competition to them?

OTOH being realistic that after 29 years of the www and the last 20 years of GloboCorps creating and establishing their new sourcing structures, maybe G US users simply have zero interest what happens in the rest of the business world ?

[RedBar]

Here we go again, for the last 4 hours nothing but single page views.