February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[mzb44]

@Jez123 I am seeing a few cases on Twitter of sites that were hit hard after the December HCU now experiencing full recoveries.
The dates are exactly the same as in my case - just movement in the opposite direction. :)

Perhaps the HCU was tweaked or reversed (in some cases, but clearly not all).

Perhaps the initial HCU was too aggressive and they dialled it back.

In my case, it went from 600 daily visits to over 12,000. :) Other sites decreased by over 80%-90%.

I always thought it was way too aggressive in both directions. Seems like - in some cases - the excesses were now corrected.

[RedBar]

Monday was poor for me even compared to weekend averages at 53.7% with today looking similar.

It is very noticeable that my email inbox is receiving many more global trade widget producers (B2B) offering their products. Things are starting to seriously bite.

[Nutterum]

OK. One of two things happen. Either the Quality update was very late to the party in my niche (unlikely but possible) or there was some weekly update that shook things up in the fashion and travel e-commerce space. Because I am seeing some big players, like Zalando and Aboutyou dropping in SERPs in many keyword clusters. Meanwhile the fashion e-commerce I am working with (though more niche) is going very strong against them. What is more some OG clothing companies that specialize in certain clothing like galla dresses or similar shot up dramatically in the SERPs over the weekend.

In the travel space there was a major shakeup between booking -- hotels -- and niche websites. Anyone monitoring these can lend an eye on my observations?

Current volume of keywords and the competition im monitoring is around 2000 for both sectors.

[EditorialGuy]

In the travel space there was a major shakeup between booking -- hotels -- and niche websites. Anyone monitoring these can lend an eye on my observations?

Beats me, but I have noticed a significant uptick in hotel affiliate bookings on our editorial travel site over the past week or two. Then again, this is the time of year when people are making vacation plans.

[ichthyous]

What I am seeing is a continuation of the same trend. USA / Canada traffic lag every day, while the rest of the world is strong. Traffic is now strong in the morning, and falls off a cliff every day during peak commercial hours. That can be 9/10am, 11am/12pm, or as late as 1pm. It stays down for hours in the USA and Canada, then bumps back up again and ends the day up overall, but with USA at even or negative by up to 10%. Yesterday USA was down 10%, Canada was -14%, and UK was -17%. Today USA is -22% and Canada is -28% at 1pm.

This is due to the heavier competition from ads and the placement of so many product ads, text ads, and widgets in the USA market that it's impossible to find a thing. They are probably all fighting for the prime hours of 10am-5pm so many more ads turned on at that time.

[anallawalla]

As of 29/1 and onwards I am seeing a huge spike in indexed pages - 100% to 1500%. This is in about half of the dozen sites I look after.

[superclown2]

I have just tried to use Google to find the coding for a particular form I want to build. I laid out exactly what I want but what a waste of time. Google is clearly ignoring most of the parameters I specified, both in the ads and the SERPs results.

Over to neeva and I've now got a whole wealth of information, all of it 100% relevant to what I specified. Guess who I'll be using and recommending from now on.

[superclown2]

Has anyone else noticed a huge decrease in the relevance of long tail search? Following my above post I did a lot of research into other search terms last night and the results were dreadful.

This fall in quality has of course been going on for a long time; long tail takes more processing power than plain vanilla so Google has been sacrificing it in favour of speed and economy. However I have never seen such a drop as I found last night.

It's logical. Google has gone into panic mode over the perceived threat from ChatGPT so they are rushing out their own version. AI consumes vast quantities of processing power but server farms are not cheap and you can't set them up overnight. Are Google further sacrificing the quality of their 'search' results to release power for their own AI offering? If so, what a massive gamble.

I'm in the UK, in London by the way. It would be interesting to see if others have the same result.

PS their share price dropped like a brick last night when an advert for Bard showed a wrong answer for a query.[bbc.co.uk ]

www.bbc.co.uk Google's Bard AI bot mistake wipes $100bn off shares An advert to promote the new Bard software shows it answering a query incorrectly.

[RedBar]

My last 5 days have seen dramatic drops in traffic v preceeding 10 days:

Global site - 25%, basically half of 2022 traffic for the same period
UK hotel site -32% this is 18% less than 2022

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop since last monday. Today it looks even worse :-|

[engine]

>Has anyone else noticed a huge decrease in the relevance of long tail search

Yes, same here.
I'd add that it appears to be coupled with link text or text with no link. The link text is winning.

[Dalnoon]

I'm also seeing a massive drop on my biggest website (20% week over week) - I've made a couple of changes and will let you know if any of them work, so far:

- I've disavowed a lot of domains referring to my website (I noticed some of the websites that are linking to me, have been hit by the spam update, so I figured maybe Google is taking me down as guilty by association)
- I added some more details to my about-us page + created a Facebook account (noticed so many Facebook pages ranking in my niche, so I thought maybe Google prefers FB backlinks)
- Removed anchor ads - adding anchor ads increased my bounce rate by 15% a couple of months ago, so I want to see if removing it will help in any way


By the way, Bing deindexed my website a year ago, and I found a weird solution to it, so I'm re-indexed now which is nice, not a lot of traffic, but still.

[RedBar]

Bing deindexed my website a year ago, and I found a weird solution to it, so I'm re-indexed now which is nice, not a lot of traffic, but still.

We are all intrigued ! :-)

[Dalnoon]

We are all intrigued ! :-)

Oh, didn't know people cared about Bing traffic! Anyway, what I did was, created a Bing ads campaign for my website, with all the details and payments and whatnot (didn't run it though) and my website was back on SERPs again. Tried it again for another website (2 websites total), same results.
Now, it might be coincidental, so you can try it too, and let us know the results. They also emailed me an ad voucher shortly after I got re-indexed.

[Dalnoon]

To add to my last comment, I also deleted all of my websites from Bing webmasters a couple of weeks before creating the campaign + deleted my webmaster account afterward. not sure if it was necessary, but did it just in case.

[mosxu]

90% zombified traffic here,

Attack on brand terms especially

[mzb44]

> Cries in Helpful Content

Thanks Google. :)

[ibb.co...]

:D

ibb.co Screenshot-2023-02-09-at-21-14-39 hosted at ImgBB Image Screenshot-2023-02-09-at-21-14-39 hosted in ImgBB

[christianz]

> Cries in Helpful Content

Anyone who claims that Google knows what they are doing should be shown that chart.

[mzb44]

Anyone who claims that Google knows what they are doing should be shown that chart.

The site is legit good, though. (yeah, I know everyone will say that about their own site...)

Everything is created by an actual expert who personally writes everything from real experience.

While everyone else ranking is the usual SEO content marketing stuff, freelance writers who just copy and rewrite other sites, fluff, etc.

Meh.

Honestly I'm not even *that* upset at this point. It's not my first rodeo. I've been through these before.

Soon, the AI direct answers will eat our lunch anyway, so makes no difference.

[Atomic]

Am I the only one seeing a bunch of Polish, Italian, and German domains that redirect to infected websites ranking well for things they shouldn't in a million years rank at all for? And it's not just one, or two, or even three.

[Dalnoon]

Try searching for "craigslist tampa" or generally any "brand name" + "city name"? For most, the 2nd - 10th SERPs send you to infected pages. It shows you how well Google identifies helpful content.

[christianz]

The site is legit good, though.

Regardless if it's good or bad. Looking at that chart you just can't claim that Google is in control of rankings. They can change their "AI opinion" about your site in blink of an eye. Go from "everything is great" to "omg this is toxic low quality spam" for no reason.

I am assuming you didn't do anything blackhat. If you did - that chart suddenly makes sense.

Maybe this is good time for you do comb out spammy backlinks with disavow tool. Nothing to lose anyway...

[Atomic]

The date of that drop does not align with known HCU dates.

[KaseyM]

Big decline in traffic so far in February 2023 but had highs in December 2022. Biggest decline started happening early this week.

[RedBar]

Traffic across all sites still well down and on my global site overnight I have seen the occasional full hour period of zero traffic whatsoever. Apart from Xmas Day I do not remember experiencing this before.

Checking the US SERPs and it is very noticeable that for my most popular widgets that non-US companies are in general from position 20+ and downwards. Most of the listed results are very mediocre and mostly using a very similar template. Overall there is very little spam but in my wodget trade opinion the results are of a very low quality and very light on solid information.

Google's seeming obsession with localisation is making my global sites less and less justifiable, in other words I am coming to the same conclusion most of my global trade did in 2015/16 when so many removed or stopped updating their sites altogether ... hmmm

[ichthyous]

Traffic is sluggish at best, and in the case of USA / Canada it's about 2%-10% lower most days compared to previous weeks. Add to that the inexplicable days where traffic vanishes across the board for an entire day. The zooming traffic of January is gone, and so are all the new customer inquiries. My ranking is still stable, and at a much higher level than January and certainly than 2022, so ranking is not correlating with traffic. This is simply the increased amount of options on the page.

[ErrlyBird]

Am I the only one seeing a bunch of Polish, Italian, and German domains that redirect to infected websites ranking well for things they shouldn't in a million years rank at all for? And it's not just one, or two, or even three.

No you are not. I have been seeing this myself and even getting baited by a couple while looking up information for my personal use. Seeing this on several different queries on several different niches.

[Atomic]

No you are not. I have been seeing this myself and even getting baited by a couple while looking up information for my personal use. Seeing this on several different queries on several different niches.

What I have trouble wrapping my head around is that these should be low hanging fruit as far as discovery and removal go. Or so I would think. It's just a basic, simple policy violation and a danger to users. There are more every day. It's crazy how many there are in 10 pages of links now. Alta Vista anyone?

[mzb44]

I am assuming you didn't do anything blackhat. If you did - that chart suddenly makes sense.

Zero of that!

In fact, the site has a bunch of 100% natural and organic links from sites such as Bloomberg, Forbes, TechRadar etc. - these are from real news and journalism pieces from these sites. Added organically by the respective journalists themselves, without even emailing them.

Like I said, this happened before to me on other sites, also all 100% totally legit zero shady stuff done. - In most cases, it always simply just reversed by itself without me doing anything at all different. This obviously doesn't imply it will happen again here, Google is very capricious.

[anubitez]

so many having issues, my traffic has bumped up since the 8th or the 9th when that so called hidden update occured, as many know i was smashed with october 2022 spam update.

each month i have gone up about 5%, but this month with the stats stay the same should increase another 15 to 20% which is much larger increase of traffic than previous months giving the past few days of data. all legit traffic too, and high quality from america, u.k, canada, au etc as my site is designed globally but for english since i removed my spanish section given i was worried about translations being a issue.

its amazing how up and down this ride is, i do hope google looses market share this is just not fair for most. also, bing has always had me rank 1 to 3, now on nearly all queries i rank 1 and seen a decent boost from traffic from its search engine and everyone else that uses it mainly yahoo etc. Its not Google numbers, but its good to get a major increase even if the numbers are small if that makes sense.