February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[christianz]

Traffic is going down in a steep nosedive since Monday (including).

[RedBar]

I'm well above average today with "Western" Europe especially busy for the first time in ages.

[mosxu]

Same here traffic going down and lots of zombies on brand searches.

[muniz900]

From Monday to today I've had a drop of about 10/15k users per day, I don't know if it's a sign of a possible core update

[RedBar]

Global site traffic continued firm all day Thursday for me and ended at 140.3%. Today has started ok for a Friday.

Our UK-focussed hotel site is still performing well with Thursday at 142%, rooms, food and bars are all very busy for this time of year plus enquiries for the next 2-3 months are running well-ahead of expectations. Excellent website reviews are helping and our recent Booking dot com award must have helped :-)

[Martin Ice Web]

we are still way up ( ~ 185% ). But as others say there are more zombies the last 3 days. There are short windows of good converting traffic. Last week it was the other way ( short windows of zombie traffic ).

[seomotionz]

Global site traffic continued firm all day Thursday for me and ended at 140.3%. Today has started ok for a Friday.

Our UK-focussed hotel site is still performing well with Thursday at 142%, rooms, food and bars are all very busy for this time of year plus enquiries for the next 2-3 months are running well-ahead of expectations. Excellent website reviews are helping and our recent Booking dot com award must have helped :-)

Seeing some sharp increase in traffic as well. Tech based sites are performing really well. Around 40% increase overall. Although a good share of Chinese bot like traffic is also present.

And also this.

[seroundtable.com...]

What do you guys think?

[christianz]

What do you guys think?

It is great. Hopefully Google fully removes all organic listings and comes clean about not being a web search engine anymore. Web searchers will then migrate to better search engine that does web search.

From Monday to today I've had a drop of about 10/15k users per day, I don't know if it's a sign of a possible core update

Traffic declines do feel somewhat like core update, but Semrush sensor is relatively calm. I think what we are seeing is their AI "choking" on certain types of websites. Like I wrote previously - today it's all about making content and delivery that is pleasing their AI filters.

[RedBar]

The hotel site had a sharp spike this afternoon and can be attributed to a French bot (Scaleway) hitting many pages. It's been quite some time since I was last hit by any French bots but I do get a lot of French email spam from some household name companies and invariably they do not comply with EU unsubscribe laws. When they do this I usually reply with a large "interesting" images ... That always seems to work :-)

[Jez123]

So, my site got a lovely boost a couple of weeks ago. Keywords I hadn't ranked for in years plus some I had never ranked for particularly well were appearing. Two weeks later and google have yanked the rug out from under me again. A keywod I was on page 1 for is now bottom of page 4. Another that I was page 1 for - page 8 now.

What could have happened? We didn't seem to have any significant updates during this time.

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing ranking hold relatively steady, but traffic has been much worse this week. The previous two weeks were unusually high though. Yesterday search was down 17% and the day before that it was flat, but traffic to my home page has dropped considerably again. Most of the decline is USA traffic.

[Soulofmonk]

This ChatGPT feature in Google will undoubtedly kill my niche....forever.

[Soulofmonk]

Did anyone notice ChatGPT Chrome Extension ads in the FB feed? I gave it a try, but the answers are not that great and inaccurate sometimes.
[ibb.co...]
[ibb.co...]

[anubitez]

ChatGPT is so inaccurate in my niche, plus it has no idea of style and troubleshooting, just generic answers. For quick answers, it's excellent to scope what to do and which site to visit when testing perplexity.ai if that is how Google will use it. I do not see Bing or Google screwing websites over totally; it's so easy to block Microsoft ASN 8075 and Google ASN 15169, or webmasters putting free sign-up walls and only showing the introduction, etc. It could backfire long term, and do not get started about potential lawsuits from businesses, enterprise organizations, media outlets, and of course, Governments going after them too.

Overall my traffic is steady for February, still regaining traffic lost in Oct update, slowly going up around 5% each month slowly but steadily.

[Dalnoon]

Feels like Google released another update on Saturday 4th, no?
I noticed big changes on all my websites around 4 pm GMT onwards.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google results are now more unstable than the results from any other search engine.

[superclown2]

This ChatGPT feature in Google will undoubtedly kill my niche....forever.

Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. Wait until it arrives, analyse it and see if you can benefit from it instead. If you can hit on a way of avoiding the worst effects of it perhaps it will wipe out your competitors, but not you.

[SnakeyFFM]

Feels like Google released another update on Saturday 4th, no?
I noticed big changes on all my websites around 4 pm GMT onwards.

I somehow already expected something like this after the disappointing quartrly results last week. And here you are.

On commercial keywords, I lost around -40% traffic since Saturday. On information keywords, I also lost traffic around that value when they are a mix of informational/commerical kind of.

I got hit by actually all last updates, either hidden or not. I realized that I need to work on my information vs. commercial keyword's ratio, which was around 45% and gets closer to 50%. I hope if I can make it to 75% or higher, Google might stop to kill my traffic every time business figures are disappointing.

Likewise, I see the same pattern for my competitors with high density of commercial keywords, whereas domains with information content were close to not affected at all.

So to your question: Yes, there must have been a hidden update, especially targeting commerical keywords based on my observation.

[nickZ]

Don't you guys worry about chatGPT as it won't do much harm in the long run.

Many people using ChatGPT to produce a lot of content? They come from the same source, which makes it highly likely to be dual content. ChatGPT will collect a fee and the harm is done for, i.e emails.

Most people hyping that prerecognition script are content creators. Automatic pages are already penalized. Lastly its is hard to break habits. People will use a search engine.

[RedBar]

Very low traffic across all sites for me today, after 14 hours at about 30% ... Someone please kick the starter motor ... I still use petrol / gas :-)

[ichthyous]

Saturday was extremely low, then Sunday snapped right back to much higher traffic levels...today is also strong so far. We are seeing what looks like temporary 1 day drops in traffic periodically...almost once a week. So it seems that one day a week is sacrificed, but traffic has been much stronger otherwise. I am not seeing a lot of new inquiries from the higher traffic though...it could just be seasonal.

[Soulofmonk]

Google CEO posted a blog post explaining the integration of BARD into Google Search, [blog.google...]

It will drastically reduce CTR or result in zero clicks in my niche.

[christianz]

CTRs are already catastrophically bad across pretty much all niches. How much worse can it possibly get?

To at least try to avoid lawsuits, Google should clearly communicate a way of blocking or "opting out" of using your site content for training this AI.

[superclown2]

It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.

Whatever happened to copyright?

[christianz]

Whatever happened to copyright?

Webmasters let featured snippets "slide", in exchange for attribution to website and link. It was net loss for webmasters however - greatly diminished traffic for non-featured snippet placements.

This will not be tolerated. There is nothing in it for website owners. And it is not even technically possible to add clear attribution to fuzzy, synthesized AI output.

And it goes even beyond copyright. Some websites provide non-copyright-able data. They will still be ripped off by this scraper bot and won't even be able to litigate based on copyright grounds.

[EditorialGuy]

Some websites provide non-copyright-able data. They will still be ripped off by this scraper bot and won't even be able to litigate based on copyright grounds.

Makes sense. After all, facts aren't subject to copyright. Just because you have a site that lists the 50 state capitals in the U.S. or tells how to get your Windows PC to recognize your Bluetooth mouse doesn't mean you own that data.You own only your presentation of that information. Whether the facts on your site are being scraped by Wikipedia, John Doe, or ChatGPT is beside the point.

I once attended a copyright seminar at a major tech company where the head IP lawyer's advice was something like "When in doubt, rewrite."

[christianz]

Makes sense.

Makes no moral sense. Stealing someone's work is stealing someone's work. The only difference is that stealing non-copyrightable work is perfectly legal.

Producing non-copyrightable work can be just as hard and can require just as much creativity as producing copyrightable work.

Going back to the subject of this topic:

I am not witnessing any signs of any recent update. Ranking and traffic trajectories for my sites are the same as they have been since around 20ish of January. No real spikes on SemSensor either.

[mzb44]

Something big is happening.

Since yesterday got a major -80% hit on a site. All featured snippets nuked and completely disappeared, not even on page 10+.
Most page 1 keywords completely purged, not to be found even on page 10+.

Happened from one hour to the next.

The site got MASSIVELY boosted after the December HCU, now all was completely reversed. It's back where it was before the update.

[Jez123]

@mzb44 That's what I am seeing too. Do you think the reversal of December HCU was a foreshadow (that it will come back like that)? I hope so.