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 :-)

[Cyril TechWebsites]

The further drastic drop in traffic, "IT how-to" niche. Neither updating, nor new content helps, it's just destroying my 10 year old website. After a year-by-year growth, suddenly Google identified my website as a bad one, and started killing it, and nothing helps. I don't know for what reason should we produce new content these days...

Here is how it looks like:
[imgur.com...]

Like in one moment my website became low-quality. How can this happen in real life? Not within Google Algo?

[RedBar]

Like in one moment my website became low-quality.

Furthermore does G even know it has done this to you since, for the vast majority of us, there is nowhere to query and complain?

Several years ago I had a site at #1 for several years. It was a widget I first created in about 1980, it was, and still is, one of the top selling widgets in my trade world. The site was all about this widget, information, facts and hundreds of images. Imagine my surprise one day when I saw I had been relegated to #2 by a USA importer with just a few words and images.

Within a few months my totally exclusive images started appearing on all kinds of widget sites and I lost 66% of my traffic. I closed the site completely 3 years ago even though I am still the widget industry #1 for this product, now the product information is listed on my general global site.

This is precisely where G gets some stuff incredibly wrong yet it has nowhere available to question why this has happened.

This occurrence actually had a dramatic effect on my global industry when many companies saw precisely what had happened. 90+% of them stopped their website developments etc since they rapidly realised that if the originator of the widget with a deicated site could not rank #1 for its own widget, then what chance would they have?

That was 2016, they now mostly have a single page splash site.

[ichthyous]

Just wondering if any of you have ever deleted your FB (Meta) business pages and the effect that it had on your Google ranking? I have a FB business page since 2010 that sits inert and I would like to zap it, but I am worried that the loss of the "social signal", link back to my site, address, etc will end up working against me with Google. Does anyone have any experience with deleting their social profiles?

[RedBar]

Does anyone have any experience with deleting their social profiles?

Yep, a couple of years ago I deleted all social media links across all my and customer sites with seemingly zero effect. My media sites were FB, Houzz, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, all other sites were solely FB and Twitter.

They were all ok until about 2016, what happened in 2016, that's the second time today I've mentioned that?

[ichthyous]

@redbar Did your clients permit you to delete all their profiles like that? Typically the business handles social or pays a social media marketing co to do it. I am only considering it because the reach of the FB posts is horrible and I don't need a zombie FB profile out there. Worried about the effect of losing such a long standing page might be...

[RedBar]

Did your clients permit you to delete all their profiles like that?

Good question and I had to think about that for about a couple of seconds to re-fresh how and why we did it and, quite simply, it was during the scamdemic lockdowns.

During those lockdowns not one of the "local" businesses had hardly any traffic from those sites which started to make me think that these were simply job justification / creatiion schemes and were these links needed rather than a new business promotion plan.

Insofar as my global site was concerned I had a major dummy out with all social networks since not only were they not driving me any worthwhile traffic I was effectively promoting them ... for free ... I was no longer their business data provider.

I do not know of anyone in my widget business who uses a media marketing company and I deal with several in the USD 1+bn turnover level, they all still do it in-house since, quite simply, they learned it from the very start and they've learned what it is that people ask and want to know.

I seem to remember a G video a "year or two" back when John M said it didn't have any ranking effect ... Perhaps someone can confirm this?

[mosxu]

Problem is the traffic is so badly manipulated if you start well with a keyword check the history how conversions do not occur anymore! The algo learns the value of the keyword and starts spreading it but the consumer lost out here because is not the best website showing!

[RedBar]

@mosxu - I agree therefore just how are they manipulating their results?

Simplistically, and I see no reason why not, is the algo skewed to the extent that no matter the search term for a specific widget, the algo automatically assumes it is a retail purchase enquiry above all other possible searches?

Is this why we see so many similar sites on the first page all stating Widget A for USD 000.00?

It is quite remarkable at times how just by adding another word or even a couple of letters what the SERPs displays. Do we assume that price comparison sites often get preference since it makes G's job so much easier? I also guess that with most of them carrying G ads helps too?

I've thought along these lines for many years otherwise why do so many high quality widget pages fail to be not only at the top of the SERPs but quite often fail to be on the first 2-3 pages?

[RubicCubed]

The algo learns the value of the keyword and starts spreading it but the consumer lost out here because is not the best website showing!

Yesterday we had a brief period of visibility in Google's SERPS between 9:30AM - 12:30PM which allowed a rush of orders from Google to come in. After that, we were nowhere to be found. To your point, I checked the path to sale on orders after 12:30PM and many came from different search engines after first hitting our site from Google between the hours of visibility. Even though Google wants to bury us, it's good to know people who have seen what we sell are willing to expend the effort to go to a different search engine to find us again so they can return and make their purchase.

[malkhaldi]

again
semrush
High range
6.0/10

[mosxu]

I think that for AdWords formula to work on up it is probably down to sending to top 3 advertisers always good keywords and searchers profiled and known to use the credit card quick.

The top 3 can spend anything because they get the sale and the rest have to up their bids to top 3.

But here the customer is the biggest loser because the best product was not necessarily in top 3 so it is against the logic to undermine a keyword of an advertiser doing well I think.

As for organic unless is a branded keyword or it is high street store nothing probably shows.

[RedBar]

Yesterday we had a brief period of visibility in Google's SERPS between 9:30AM - 12:30PM which allowed a rush of orders from Google to come in.

I assume you're in direct retail? What kind of sector is exposed to this kind of volatility and manipulation, education, domestic / white good? I'm used to enquiries that can start within 2-3 months to 3-4 years, I think my longest was almost 20 years !

Honestly, I'm not sure I could cope with such circumsatances.

[superclown2]

There's no such thing as a "truth as [you] see it"

Absolute nonsense. Truth is in the eye of the beholder and we may all see it differently. This is why debate, argument, and even war exists. I am entitled to my truth, as you are to yours.

It's just "noise"

Whether you can understand what is happening or not, search is going through unprecedented changes with even bigger ones in the pipeline, and it is vital that we all recognise this and prepare accordingly. You may well disagree with my opinions but ignoring the reasons why I have come to those conclusions is a different matter. Calling it 'just noise' on a public forum is an insult to others who may wish to have this information. They are all capable of making their own decisions over whether the opinions expressed are relevant to them or not.

[BigKat]

But here the customer is the biggest loser because the best product was not necessarily in top 3

Google places the highest bids at the top and those high bids are made by sellers with the highest margins. Who has the highest margins? Offshore sellers, and the marketplaces who peddle their products, of course. Google is all about the money and product quality (what may be best the best product) has no consideration in their profit formula.

What's even more concerning is the organic domain crowding Google is giving to the top Ad buyers. I'm seeing Google provide up to three top ten organic listings for the top advertisers. Mind you buyer searches are now so heavily diluted with ads, this domain crowding makes it much harder for shoppers to find alternatives to the products sold via the top ads. I know many believe there is no relationship between ads and organic, but the SERPS tell a different story. My guess is Google needs to utilize organic domain crowding for top ads because sales from those ads alone would not support the cost Google charges.

[mosxu]

Ok ok but profiling someone willingness to use the credit card combined with how many ads that person usually clicks before buying leaves some of us with really weird traffic.

There is no transparency on how personalisation works unfortunately!

[ichthyous]

What's even more concerning is the organic domain crowding Google is giving to the top Ad buyers. I'm seeing Google provide up to three top ten organic listings for the top advertisers. Mind you buyer searches are now so heavily diluted with ads, this domain crowding makes it much harder for shoppers to find alternatives to the products sold via the top ads. I know many believe there is no relationship between ads and organic, but the SERPS tell a different story. My guess is Google needs to utilize organic domain crowding for top ads because sales from those ads alone would not support the cost Google charges

Theories about this have been floating out there for years, with many people believing, like you, that Google rewards top ad buyers with higher organic placement. I personally have not seen that in my own space, but I also haven't performed any detailed research. Could it be that companies that have the funds to burn on Google ads are also spending on other marketing methods such as content creation, link building (or buying), etc that boost them organically too?
It wouldn't shock me if it were revealed that Google gave a boost to large ad buyers...it's been a downward spiral for years, and Google is showing more and more willingness to debase its own search results for increased profit, so that would be a logical next step. However, it would be rather easy to spot if this were widespread. I am seeing more and more ads in the page, but the top ranking sites don't correlate with the ads shown. Top ranking sites don't need to spend on ads for the most part.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:39 pm (utc) on Jan 11, 2023]

[ichthyous]

@redbar Nobody else has responded to my question about the impact that killing social media business pages might have on SEO. I disabled my FB page for now (not deleted)...I will see if there is any subtle effect on traffic. On the one hand there are arguments to be had for FB being it's own internal search engine and keeping a page for that reason, but it has referred zero traffic for so long what does it really matter? I might prefer not to have it show up in the serps at all...just more competition for my own website.

[superclown2]

Could it be that companies that have the funds to burn on Google ads are also spending on other marketing methods such as content creation, link building (or buying), etc that boost them organically too?

I have often wondered (and I have no evidence for this either way) if the personalisation cookies have an effect on the base SERPs (ie those we get, in our own locality, if we delete cookies). A lot of people click on the top listing regardless of whether or not it's an ad, or they are pushed towards it by Google ; that fact is recorded in Google's cookie which can give that site a gentle push up for other queries too. As we know, how you see the search results varies from one person (as well as one location) to another so someone who has clicked on topmegasite.com for green widgets might also to see that site higher up the SERPs for green flumbles and rainbow widgets too.

They are therefore more likely to click on topmegasite.com when looking for them; and that click itself will be recorded by google as a vote, and may result in the site appearing higher for those search term for other people too.

If this is correct, the answer to the question "does buying clicks lead to higher positions in the SERPs" is yes. And no.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous - Overall I feel that it all depemds on one's niche ant the intention of the social media channel

I had several thousand global widget trade Twitter followers and that worked semi-ok until about 2014/15 until it really seemed to get stuck in a shouty / poliitical / news channel. My followers became utterly disinterested in that channe. Outside of the shouty brigades Twitter seems to be mostly a helpline channel for many big companies.

FB for me never worked at all as a business channel. I'm not at all interested in talking to the public and discussing anything to do with my widgets outside of the info on the websites. My sister went crazy for FB and posted regular updates several times a week and they were really good posts with great images however 2-3 years ago she'd had enough of the effort required however I do know of several very large trade widget retail suppliers who get a lot of positive interaction.

Houzz and Pinterest drove almost zero traffic, Instagram I thought may do well however that too was a flop for me. I have a lot of images and I thought Inst may be a good channel to reach new people searching for new widgets, alas no.

At the end of the day it's all about chimney pots / valid audience size unless one's specific widget business relies on such a small and focussed client(s) and I can completely understand how and why this could be successful both financially and time wise.

[Atomic]

Looks like our friends Spam Update and HCU from December 2022 have finished their work for this round.
[developers.google.com...]

Hang onto your hats.

[MayankParmar]

Are we in for the core update now?

[StupidIntelligent]

@Atomic - Hang on for what... The updates are finished, so whatever new rankings are out there are it.

[Atomic]

Hang on for the next update. Whenever it arrives.

[ichthyous]

The second half of December was abysmal while these updates were rolling out on top of the holidays. But traffic is much higher now...+23% search and +46% direct traffic for the last two weeks compared to the previous two weeks. UK traffic is up 86% in that time and Brazil is up 150%. I was extremely worried there for a while but it seems to have boosted my traffic in the end.

[RubicCubed]

With the updates complete, I can say with certainty the very brief bursts of traffic we are seeing to our store/site is the direct result of Google rotating different layouts. One layout being displayed to users is almost all ads and during this time we get very little traffic. I feel Google will use this nearly all ads layout more frequently as time goes on to condition users to viewing just ads on page #1. This is a very sad day for small independent stores. :(

[RedBar]

Strange, Thursday saw my busiest genuine business enquiry day for at least 5-6 years with a 96% traffic rate however today my traffic across ALL sites has fallen off a cliff edge and after 13 hours of my Googleday no site has acheived 20% of its average ... WTF ?

[dolcevita]

Google analytics does not count any visitors for +/- 9 hours. Maybe it is the reason for 'low' traffic.

[RedBar]

I don't use GA and am still seeing very low traffic levels :-(

[ichthyous]

Something definitely kicked in around 4pm EST yesterday, my traffic literally dropped off a cliff and stayed down the rest of the day. Today traffic seems back to normal but USA is starting the day -45%, but UK is unusually high. At 38% of my total traffic the level of UK traffic makes no sense and is far higher than the ~12%-15% which was the norm for years. I suspect it will crash and go bye bye at some point, but each time it does drop it seems to eventually come back higher.

[mhansen]

What I am seeing after this most recent helpful content update, is a twist of the EAT/YMYL screws, resulting in an influx of local business (B&M, but not local to the search user) websites taking the featured snippet and top positions from national informational websites. The exception to this is in the YMYL market, where national banking (+100m monthly visits, per SEMR) and stock analysis (+50m monthly visits, per SEMR) websites are gaming the crap out of Google results, with thin affiliate review pages leading to Amazon products and unrelated content to their traditional EAT/YMYL and user base. Think of these as high authority sites like Bank Of America suddenly publishing 500 pages of content with "best [product-type] 2023", etc. The landing page is nothing but a title, a small paragraph of text, then links to Amazon or other affiliate products with little editorial and actual user review data. They look like those thin affiliate sites Google has repeatedly told people not to expect to see in their index.

Whats most interesting to me, is that for one query I follow, there are 2 companies in my town with content pages that are geared to attract that EXACT user. They are not however shown in the FS box or the top 20 results for the query, and it's showing a company in California (I'm on the East Coast USA). Up though this week, it used to show a very popular national brand website that specialized in this exact topic. (They are showing -$25% in SEMR)

Google seems to be working a balance between blocking national websites with informational queries, to show B&M company websites (Assumable due to EAT) that deal in the same market - while NOT showing companies that are local, or best for the actual user. I ran a commercial query for a company that is literally 1 mile from my home, and they have a well-written page on their website with the exact title I searched for. Google showed the featured snippet from a company with the a similar title more than 1,000 miles away. In fact, the very popular company near me is not even in the top 20 results, unless I add the town name into the query.

[BigKat]

Anyone else having every page of your site crawled by Google 66.249.72.xx (Googlebot/2.1) every 1-1.5 hours? This started a few days ago and lasted for two days. Then there was a break of about 10 hours or so and Google is right back at it again. Seems like Gbot is broken. Gbot isn't bothering to hit robots.txt either, which I thought of using to limit crawling.

[mosxu]

One more algo update to take from the small business what they do not even have!

Sell your pants now!

[RubicCubed]

One more algo update to take from the small business what they do not even have!

Ain't that the truth! Now that Google has consumed commercial searches with ads, it's time to look beyond Google and let them cannibalize those who remain. Next up for Google - plaster ads all over info queries.

Looking at the bright side, our traffic and sales from other search engines has increased. I hope this trend continues and that new competition for Google emerges. Apple, where the hell are you?

[Atomic]

Mmmm Mmmm Mmmmm. Smells like something's come out of Aunt Google's oven. Is that a fresh-baked Core Update I smell? Semrush Sensor smells it. I sure smell it.

[ichthyous]

Yes, traffic is very low today and SEMrush sent notification that the SERPS seeing big changes. USA is -64%, UK -34%, CA - 56% compared to yesterday. Search is -52%, Direct is -53%. Saturdays tend to be low traffic days so let's see if it bounces back by end of day.

[StupidIntelligent]

RedBar did you bounce back?

[anubitez]

I think some people here may be correct (personal opinion), something is occurring I noticed the traffic going down more than normal. Interesting... I still see the same trash in the SERPs but!

[beaverman]

@anubitez how have you gone through the updates overall? Was there any recovery from the October Spam?

[anubitez]

@beaverman

Hiya, Nah I am still ruined by that update. Copycats are still hitting me; I've sent over 17k DMCA notices, luckily I can fit 1k onto each line, but even hitting the plague, those sites do not de-rank overall, just the posts, yet my site has a penalty I cannot overcome or be notified what it is about. Interesting, isn't it? LOL.

Overall, Core vitals are good. I had some SEO peeps review my site they now cannot find many issues, I had some slight duplicate content issues, but they were so small it was picking that last possible 5% sort of thing, but I cleaned that up since it was so little. I had Spanish auto-translated but reviewed by a real Spanish person and a good friend; I had better stats on Spanish sometimes than English, but we removed this in case Google had an issue with it. This was all de-indexed a month ago. I continue to get backlinks of 90+ from articles I write about, like nivida community forums, for example, people suggesting they visit my site for more information, new Wikipedia links, and comments that continue to grow where most of my copycat competitors turn them off.

Oh, and one more funny thing, my top keyword is GSC is my website name since NO ONE CAN FIND IT. I want to slap the Google search team so hard; if I were a spammer, I would not have 50k queries a month with my website name alone, you #*$! Idiots. Gee, that John M, I wish I could get on his hookup instead of these dumb webmasters asking dumb questions. If I had a dollar for everyone asking me where my website has gone, I would be super rich for the past few months.

Okay, sorry, my rant is over. One last point, most of my good competitors in my niche are surprisingly ranking slowly down the chain, and sites are super thin with huge adsense ads, or worse yet, manual copycats are ranking ahead of them, and they do not have a penalty like I do. It makes zero sense now; if they crumble, I think Google should finish my site soon. I do not understand most of the top SERP results in my niche violate google adsense and google search but continue to be rewarded each month, its beyond shocking now.

[RedBar]

@StupidIntelligent

RedBar did you bounce back?

For Fri 13th ? It was very slow untill 15-17.00 then slow again until 22-24.00 hrs endling at 96.7%, altogether a very different traffic pattern.

Meanwhile the hotel site is defying us all at 116.3% for the first 14 days ... Late night drinking is out 18.00-21.00 evening dining is definitely in !.!.! We didn't even have a live band playing last night yet both the restaurant and bistro were full all night.

This is traditionally our quiet period. Yes the food is very good, no it's not rip-off expensive, this is what we aimed and planned for after lockdowns BUT we are still amazed at our success.

Here's a specific anecdote, the amount of people who know what they're ordering immediately is "a surprise" however the quantity of people ordering whilst reading the menu off the website on their phones is remarkable. When I created these menus etc I made sure mobile legibility was ultra important, it seems to have paid off.

[swright]

Someone mentioned that G ramped up local importance in results - I'm seeing the same thing. A site I'm tracking fell in the US after the HCU, and the fall was due to some of its top pages being overtaken by pages from local businesses. I get that for some queries local is important (auto insurance, tax services, etc.), but this is for informational, non-location-specific queries. The same site has retained its top positions in other English speaking countries like Australia, UK, Canada, perhaps because there are less local businesses that have put up pages on these topics due to the smaller size of these countries. Some of these local results that were pushed up are pretty mediocre, worse than the pages that were demoted. I'm sorry, but the fact that I'm in the US doesn't mean that I'd rather read a crap article on some general topic just because the site has a US address over a much better article from a site in the UK or Australia or wherever.

If you read Google's advice on what to do about your site if you were hit by the HCU, it's about figuring out which pages fell and how they may be unhelpful to the user. This would be pretty misleading in this case if your site fell just because it wasn't deemed local enough, not because there is something wrong with its content. Not to mention Google overlapping its updates to make it harder to figure out which one you were hit by. They have published advice on what these updates are about, ostensibly to help you make your content better, but they are actually doing everything they can to prevent you from figuring out why your site was demoted. Was it the HCU or the spam update that was launched a bit later but ran in parallel? Is there something wrong with your content or is it just the spam links that every site has? "Just keep creating great content!" That's what my top competitors have been doing for years, and almost all of them are now bleeding traffic after the last few updates.

[RubicCubed]

if you were hit by the HCU, it's about figuring out which pages fell and how they may be unhelpful to the user.

What if your pages didn't fall but were instead pushed down by all the new ads Google introduced into the serps? Are ads even content, subject to ones knowledge and expertise (EEAT comes to mind)? I personally don't consider ads content but instead a monetization technique that supplements content.

I'm not reading much into what Google says because it doesn't apply to my situation. Google's excessive over-monetization of the serps have left some search results producing just one organic result that is surrounded by ads. It's so bad that scrolling is needed to see the second result, and in some cases a lot of scrolling is needed. The amount of traffic Google is siphoning off into ads is exceptionally high making efforts to rank high for some searches a complete waste of time.

[ichthyous]

After what seemed to be a sharp drop on Friday eve and Saturday, traffic returned stronger on Sunday. Search is up 92% so far today compared to yesterday at this hour, and direct is up 76%. This coincides with a sudden return of top 3 / 10 ranking terms on mobile and desktop over the last two days. I had been losing top ranking terms steadily since last June.

Someone mentioned that G ramped up local importance in results - I'm seeing the same thing.

I am not seeing that...my strongest traffic these days is outside of my local market. USA traffic is up compared to the holidays, but stable and not unusually high. UK traffic is very high, and W. Europe is also quite a bit higher. It seems to me that the December updates probably wiped out a lot of traffic while analysis of "useful content" and link quality was being performed across the internet. It seemed to take almost three weeks...since that coincided with a normal decline in traffic it's hard to know exactly how much was new post-pandemic norms for traffic and how much was Google. I am beginning to see that lots of demand was "pulled forward" during the pandemic and people just were not spending in 2022. That has spilled over into the auto market now, homes and Bloomberg reported this morning that even rents in the US are set to head down. Strange times we are living in.

I should say...I am seeing a lot more inquiries from new customers. However most of that is international, so it's a hard sell. Most people in these countries have no clue what my high price-point items cost, so there is no hope of converting them to an actual sale. More is not always better.

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed my global traffic seems to be back to just above average. Last week saw above average business enquiries including some from the West for a change especially from popular tourist destinations.

[malkhaldi]

another spike today semrush 5.4
my main keywords not stable up/down

[RubicCubed]

another spike today semrush 5.4

Our ranks are stable but Google is using the almost all ad serp layout that has stopped traffic dead in its tracks. Even top ranked keywords get little to no traffic because all of the ads. Does Semrush go haywire when these layouts change?

[mhansen]

Google is using the almost all ad serp layout that has stopped traffic dead in its tracks.

For the last 2-3 months, I worked on improving a 15yo site that had lost relevance for specific queries over the last year or two. It used to be in the top FS answer as well as 1-3 for several high volume commercial queries, that returned great leads for us. The site work was mostly as an experiment to see what worked and what didn't in bringing the site back to relevance from 15-20 position where it gradually fell to.

The site came back strong with this latest set of updates that began in December and continued into this past week. While it did not retake the FS spot from a world leading financial magazine website that rhymes with "orbs", it's back in top 1-3 positions for the exact same queries as before. It may as well not even be there... there is little to no traffic or leads coming in from it. The SERPs are nothing but ads everywhere. Local ads, product ads, PAA, youtube video's, etc.

Edit to add: I just ran a search for a high value query. While we do not come in at position zero, we are the #1 result. The featured snippet is nothing but a reference to our content. "According to [ourwebsite].... then the rest of the featured snippet". Haha.

[BigKat]

back in top 1-3 positions for the exact same queries as before. It may as well not even be there... there is little to no traffic or leads coming in from it. The SERPs are nothing but ads everywhere.

Ditto. Our ranks are great but the ad saturation is just so huge we are getting very little traffic. I'm just glad we jumped out of G Ads before this mess hit. My hunch is only those who have special ad pricing with Google, or have a possible affiliate earnings arrangement with Google, will survive this bloodbath in ads. The lack of free traffic will also starve many businesses out of existence.

Our sales outside of Google are very strong, so I am thankful some are using other search engines for shopping related searches.

[RedBar]

Global traffic today was unusually high to one specific widget which is popular but not that popular! Checking my logs I found a common referrral from a specialist US designer magazine, unsoliceted links still work.

[ichthyous]

Traffic has been much weaker since Tuesday, and today is very low. Search is down 15% and direct down 32% at noon. USA is off 30%, Canada -70%, Australia has not had one visit yet today. Continential Europe also dropping like a stone. Only UK remains strong. Meanwhile, my ranking is stable and even slightly higher.