January 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Happy New Year

What will G brings us, stability or even more mayhem?

Here's one for you, this will be my 30th year of web development, seriously, in 1993 I launched two websites and they both still exist today although they do look a lot different :-)

[rogrmartn]

Happy New Year

[RedBar]

My global site for December ended at 73.6% and for the year 75.1% v 2021. This site has never recovered from the March / April 2021 "whatever" hit ... Rankings have in general remained consistently good therefore it was most probably yet another G ad traffic grab.

My UK focussed hotel for December was 110.1% and 105.3% v 2021. Traffic has been amazingly consistent all year with December actually outperforming November. Traffic in the second half of 2021 after lockdowns was far higher than normal, more than 200+%, and this year has seen every month better than 2019, 2020 was almost a total write-off at 58.7% v 2022.

[Jez123]

My traffic has been appalling. It hit what I would say is reasonable for the time of year, i.e, low over Christmas break, on the 29th and declined over 50% since. Christmas and new year is always difficult to gauge but this is really, really low traffic.

Is it due to people not searching or should I look to the recent updates for some kind of penalty / demotion? I can't see any losses in ranking but it's even hard to tell that for sure these days, with google profiling, they show you what they want.

We are either in for the worst recession I have ever seen or google has penalised my site somehow. How to tell?

[edited by: not2easy at 5:38 pm (utc) on Jan 3, 2023]
[edit reason] Splice cleanup [/edit]

[ichthyous]

@Jez123 Google's last update on the 13th ("linkspam") really whalloped a lot of people. My traffic went off a cliff and has been quite low until now...especially my home page which is down 20-40%. Have you seen a decline across the board or just in traffic from specific regions?

I had huge daily losses in English language traffic...USA, UK. CA and AU. German traffic has inexplicablly surged to new highs. Jan 1st and 2nd have been heading back up slowly.

I think it's a combination of Google's vague and not well conceived updates and a global slowdown kicking in. My traffic is still higher than this period of 2021 though.

[Jez123]

@ichthyous I think my traffic started slowly declining in March 22 but larger drops from October 22 and still dropping. It's hard to tell with all the ups and downs of the covid periods as our traffic was quite a bit higher over those 2 years but we are way down on pre covid traffic as of now.

[christianz]

Sharp traffic drop since around 13:00 GMT. USA Semrush sensor rising.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

What will G brings us, stability or even more mayhem?

Depends, what will it take to keep your bank account the same, despite your efforts, while growing theirs every quarter to please investors?

[Nutterum]

Traffic is still very wobbely, but nothing out of the ordinary esp. in e-shop space. January is always notoriously slow both traffic and customer wise. Anyone who thinks receives zombie traffic or whatever need to realize that unless their website is niche enough to not be in sync with the general population's behavior is seeing a general seasonality affecting the vast majority of websites. What I can comment however is that during the holidays there was a big shift from long tail to general keyword searches, causing many keywords to appear as they are loosing SERP positions, where the reality is that many people search results are in their "personal search bubble" and when they stop searching for what you rank good for _to them_ it seems as if positions took a nose dive.

[rogrmartn]

Keywords Ranking Going down from 1st page to 4th page

- Can I refresh the blogs or pages content
- Can I change the website pages design
- Can I delete low-quality links
- Can I do do external and internal blogging

What can i do please suggest

[renatovieira]

Massive drop today. Semrush on high range... here we go again :-|

[RedBar]

As usual for my global sites the first few days after back to work tend to be yo-yo'ish, post 9th Jan will be much more indicative.

Our UK-focussed hotel site traffic is running at 50% BUT realword trade through the tills is definitely ahead of expectations / hopes ... Ok, we're only 4th Jan however it's a very good start to the month.

Question - For those of you who "develop" sites for others, do your clients keep you informed as to how they are actually doing or are you solely trying to drive more traffic regardless of its relevancy?

[ichthyous]

I have seen a marked improvement in traffic since the holidays are winding down. UK and AU traffic has returned, but USA is still sluggish, starting the day down 50%-60% every morning and struggling to catch up all day to break even.

Perhaps a bit of positive news...it seems that MS is building a version of Bing using ChatGPT:
[seekingalpha.com ]. Could this give Bing the lift that we have all been waiting for for years? Finally some real competition to the Google squid (game).

[not2easy]

That news was shared here earlier, in the bing forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

Microsoft Corp is in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing, using the artificial intelligence behind OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT

[ichthyous]

Thanks @not2easy, I don't check the Bing forum too often, since Bing sends about 2% of my search traffic currently. It would be nice if that would change, but nobody really knows what will happen if Bing now relies on OpenAI for its search engine. MS is a major investor though, and it seems that the company may have been thinking about this move all along. Apple, where are you?

[RedBar]

since Bing sends about 2% of my search traffic

Likewise for me. My Bing Serps rankings are good, its results for my widget trade are pretty good too, in fact quite often it is a lot better than G since it doesn't seem to suffer some of the garbage that G always seems to promote.

[dolcevita]

@ichthyous
It would be nice if that would change, but nobody really knows what will happen if Bing now relies on OpenAI for its search engine.

I know. Nothing will change. Google will remain the largest, as it has been so far.

Bing isn't bad with results either, but Google has made and established a name for internet search, although I would like Bing to take at least 10% of internet search.

He deserved at least that little bit.

Google has been predominant for years and it is unlikely that anything will change in the foreseeable future.

[superclown2]

The SERPs I watch in the UK are near chaotic. Apart from high spending price comparison sites that dominate everything in my niche (why are they considered to know more about the services they are middlemen for than those that actually create them?) results are still fluctuating madly, weeks after these 'updates' first began. It makes little difference though since googlespam makes the organic results virtually invisible anyway.

Google has been predominant for years and it is unlikely that anything will change in the foreseeable future.

Consider the following:
Google's share price has dropped by more than a third over the last year. Perhaps the market knows something you don't?

American legislators have been unable to reign them in thanks to hundreds of millions spent on 'lobbying' (some of us have a different word for that) but legal issues are piling up through the rest of the world;

ChatGPT may well take away a huge chunk of non-commercial queries - it has taken the Internet by storm and I couldn't even get on the site yesterday;

Google are laying off staff; a figure of 6% has been mentioned for this year;

Well financed rivals are circling; Neeva in particular give search results that are at least as good as Google for non commercial queries, but far better for commercial ones;

Despite all G's attempts they remain a one-trick pony. The other bets, taken together, are still loss making. Take away advertising and Google will collapse;

AI is poised to be the major disruptor and it is still in it's infancy yet. Changes are hard to predict but they will come.

I have been in business for more than half a century and I have watched commercial empires rise and then crash with monotonous regularity. Perhaps you are right and Google will manage to retain their monopoly; but history is against that. 2023 will be an interesting year.

[dolcevita]

superclown2
Google's share price has dropped by more than a third over the last year. Perhaps the market knows something you don't?

Yep, the market knows:
1)
[kinsta.com...]
"As of June 2022, Google's global search engine market share was at 91.88%, with Bing following at 3.19%, Yandex at 1.52%, Yahoo at 1.33%, Baidu at 0.76%, and DuckDuckGo at 0.64%."

2)
Statscounter shows an even fatter impact where Google started 2022 with 91.94% and finished with 92.58%
[gs.statcounter.com...]

[mosxu]

They try to sell the shrinking buyer traffic more expensive via whatever means necessary!

The day of reckoning is near!

[christianz]

Since my last post about sharp traffic drop, my traffic had returned for about 8 hours, disappeared again this morning and now seems to be (somewhat) back again. Crazy swings!

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google traffic (and traffic in general) has shot up spectacularly in the last couple of weeks. Some of this may be seasonal: Over the last 20+ years, our traffic has always shot up in early January, and in the last few years the upward movement has started around Christmas Day instead of New Year's.

I'm actually a little surprised. Our information site's topic is European leisure travel (with primarily English-speaking source markets), and given all the economic and political uncertainty that's about, I wouldn't have expected to see such enthusiasm among potential travelers.

[Atomic]

Some AI scrapers in my niche are down significantly the bast few days. What was a slow, steady decline became a plunge. These SERPs aren't perfect, but they're much-improved over how they looked last Fall.

[Martin Ice Web]

@dolcevita, this stats mena nothing.
You can read it also in this way: google has become so bad, that you need more than 4, 5, 6 ... queries to get to your goal. While bing is on the point :)

Try to use bing for one week or two. You will see that they realy have the better results. If you swtich back to google after a week you will be astonished on how messy and confusing the result pages from google are.

[BigKat]

Yep, the market knows

Unfortunately the data they and other sources provide is too broad. For us in ecommerce, 2022 reports have search engines capturing just 30% of initial product searches. Marketplaces in total capture 57% of initial product searches, while retailer websites capture the remainder of product searches. Why are search engines, and Google in particular, lagging and losing influence in initial product searches? Search engines lack the diversity and choice consumers want. Additionally, years of Google crowding the SERPS with Amazon product and category pages has and continues to train shoppers to bypass Google entirely.

The fundamental concept of "search" is to present users with information/products they didn't previously know about to satisfy their query. Google fails miserably in this regard by presenting shoppers with so many ads of the same products, sold under different names, available for purchase on the same marketplaces everyone knows about.

In our small industry, Google's recent algo updates have not produced dramatic changes in how pages rank for buyer queries. The largest impact we've seen is from Google doubling the number of ads displayed and hiding organic results between blocks of ads. Being in a small industry, the ads Google displays are largely rebranded Chinese products which is commonplace for specialized products with limited competition. Once again we see Google doubling down on maximizing profits with more ads while reducing the choice/options shoppers want. Getting to mosxu's post above, I too believe Google is squeezing the udder to milk product queries for every last drop they can.

[dolcevita]

@Martin Ice Web
I did not say that Bing is not good compared to Google, but that the statistics for 2022 show the undiminished dominance of Google and that it will almost certainly remain so in 2023.

If I look at the logs then I can say that the statistics match what I see there. Google is the most important for making money on my websites, and I believe it is the same for others.

If the positions for the most wanted words have a better position on Google, then my earnings are also higher. If they are worse, my earnings are also lower.

[ichthyous]

I have seen a complete recovery of traffic to the pre-holiday levels. UK traffic in particular is strong. Let's see how long before Google throws something else at us.

[RubicCubed]

Google is the most important for making money on my websites, and I believe it is the same for others.

Thankfully this is not the case for us. Since Google squished our #1 keywords between ads, traffic for being ranked #1 has dropped 50-75%. Those residing in high wage countries (USA for us) can't pay bills and employees with such low and unproductive traffic from Google alone. Yesterday we received more sales from Facebook then Google, and we aren't advertising on Facebook nor have we made a post on Facebook for over a year. Regardless, if Google is most important for a business then they need to diversify before Google turns the 1st page of the serps into just ads.

[dolcevita]

@RubicCubed
I'm glad to hear that someone has better traffic sales through Facebook than Google, but I have to say that I don't hear that very often.
The clients I worked for always had two wishes: higher sales and a better organic position exclusively on Google.
They are not interested in Bing or any other search engine. They just want a better position on Google.

On the other hand, my own projects that essentially generate income based on Adsense advertisements are, in terms of traffic, 99% based on SERP position on Google.

For the facts...When I lost 35% of my SERP on Google with the core update in May 2020, my revenue also decreased by 35%.

For me, one thing is clear, and that is that Google as a search engine is important just as the statistics show, and that winning better ones, as well as keeping the existing organic positions on Google, is unquestionable in terms of revenue.

I wish it were different and that Bing or any other search engine was better in terms of traffic, but being the first, say on Bing, is flattering, but I would rather be in the top 15 on Google than number 1 on Bing .

[superclown2]

@Dolcevita
Many of us have read the writing on the wall. Back in the days when Google was a search engine we made a fair living but now that they are an advertising company masquerading as a search engine the majority of webmasters I used to keep in touch with have gone broke; and I suspect that many of us are only hanging on in case they finally bow to regulation or something else comes along, which may be sooner than we expect.

In the meanwhile; what was good in Google's eyes is now bad. After this algo change I see sites similar to ones that were once labelled as 'spam' by manual reviewers (the sites went really deep into the products and services they were written about but then they were affiliate sites, taking business away from Google) are now riding high in the SERPs. this shows the unpredictability of Google and the pointlessness of relying on them rather than looking for, and perhaps even promoting, alternatives.

You may well be getting a lot of business from Google at the moment but but that could change in the blink of an eye. However they will not be there for ever and if it wasn't for the fact that they can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on 'lobbying' in order to keep their monopoly position their end would come even quicker, because there are far better real search engines out there.