February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[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.

[StupidIntelligent]

For news sites, are you facing issues where a URL shows indexed in GSC but you can't find it in SERP even with the site: operator?

[RedBar]

Global site crash today, after 75% of its Googleday traffic is at 30%.

UK hotel site picked-up and was 127% yesterday and so far 132% today with 6 hours to run.

I'm beginning to see trends.

[ichthyous]

After a solid week of tepid, slightly lower traffic today is zooming from just about every area. My GSC shows much much higher clicks and impressions for my site for both web and images since August of last year, with regular peaks and valleys. Obviously something major happened...was it that the prevalence of informational sites across all the serps stopped and a balance of commerce and info sites was restored? This new, old balance certainly helped the situation for me, but as we all know...it can be yanked away at any moment.

For those of you seeing steep declines...it seems that at least one day a week gets sacrificed now while Google seems to shuffle the deck. For me the traffic seems to snap back the next day. What is worse is an extended period of mediocre traffic like this last week. It produced almost no new inquiries.

[RedBar]

Something is definitely going on, for the first time in years in the last 24 hours I have not received ONE piece of email spam, not one, zero spam ... Considering the usual volume of garbage I get this is very significant.

Saturday global site at 41.3%, hotel 194%

[RubicCubed]

Are there any politicians or regulators in the world even slightly concerned about this rush to market with AI? Global ecommerce for 2022 was forecast to be $5.7 trillion dollars. I would think someone of authority and somewhere would want to see how AI will impact consumers, businesses and their workers before AI is allowed to wreak havoc across the world. I fear what we are seeing now, with high volatility and a lack of sales coming from Google, is only a preview of what's to come for many, many businesses.

What our business is experiencing from Google is steady and expected traffic, but a major lack in sales. While all the ads Google has placed in the SERPS may be responsible for a large portion of the lacking sales, I fear their integration of AI is adding to the damage. For how long can businesses survive if these search engines make it impossible for consumers to find us? We are holding our own (for now) without Google, but as this AI expands I fear that may not be possible.

[ichthyous]

What our business is experiencing from Google is steady and expected traffic, but a major lack in sales. While all the ads Google has placed in the SERPS may be responsible for a large portion of the lacking sales, I fear their integration of AI is adding to the damage. For how long can businesses survive if these search engines make it impossible for consumers to find us? We are holding our own (for now) without Google, but as this AI expands I fear that may not be possible.

Some of what you said is what I was going to post today. I am seeing steadier traffic than in 2022 certainly, and January seemed like old times...more steady inquiries than I have seen in a while. But Google turns it off at the flip of a switch, so it's simply not a viable long-term plan. My sales dropped 85% in 2022 due to Google's year-long assault...and this year it is no better. I've been effectively pushed out of business after 20 successful and profitable years.

Now with AI this is going to impact a massive swath of small business...the tech providers will make billions (or trillions) and it is going to be nearly impossible to stay in business unless you provide a physical service like plumber or contractor. Even medicine and law will be heavily impacted. Wait until the cumulative impact of all those small businesses stopping spending and then laying off and closing up shop occurs...then you will finally see the large corporations squeal about their profits declining...and it will be far too late.

[mosxu]

“What our business is experiencing from Google is steady and expected traffic, but a major lack in sales.”

The real story is very sad and politicians probably have enough intel on what happened for so many years and it is still happening

Chat GPT is a all distraction to justify more wrong doing to come

[Mestrick]

"Google traffic is going down week by week in UAE anyone facing the same issue, Is any UAE member here?

[Jez123]

What our business is experiencing from Google is steady and expected traffic, but a major lack in sales. While all the ads Google has placed in the SERPS may be responsible for a large portion of the lacking sales, I fear their integration of AI is adding to the damage. For how long can businesses survive if these search engines make it impossible for consumers to find us? We are holding our own (for now) without Google, but as this AI expands I fear that may not be possible.

The past week and a bit - nearly 2 weeks we had higher traffic and loads of conversions. We took around 3 weeks worth of orders in this space of time. Then last Tuesday / Wednesday google closed down that traffic and we have not had a single order since.

It proved to me that our sole problem is google. I thought economy was at play but it showed me that the customers are still there and want to buy from us.

The worst part was that we had to allow overtime to clear the large amount of orders that flooded in so didn't really gain much by the influx.

I don't understand where the converting traffic is going as it's certainly not to our ads.

We are fu*ked.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Mestrick

Google traffic is going down week by week in UAE

Have a good read through the various postings, the vast majority of posters are seeing similar on a global basis.

One only has to see the sheer volume of ads for popular products to realise the issue ... Organic results are very, very difficult to actually be seen or discerned as non-ad placements, not that Joe Public gives a damn about that!

[mhansen]

The past week and a bit - nearly 2 weeks we had higher traffic and loads of conversions. We took around 3 weeks worth of orders in this space of time. Then last Tuesday / Wednesday google closed down that traffic and we have not had a single order since.

I'm in a different market, lead generation, but the timeline sounds remarkably similar. For 2-3 weeks we saw higher volume, steady, quality traffic to our services. Around the 4th of Feb it all seemed to have steadied out, but now the quality traffic arrives in short bursts. Meaning, we may be slow for the first 6 hours of our business day, then at some point in the afternoon we'll see a flurry of lead activity for 1-2 hours, before it all turns back off again. It's not related to a single service, a single area, or a specific thing. At one point, I thought it was ad-related, but I'm no longer sure since the hour or three of activity might come at 9am today, or 2pm tomorrow.

Definitely not normal traffic trends.

[RedBar]

Well, I haven't see this in quite some time, so far today one visitor 2hrs and 4 mins with 254 page views and still on the site !

[ichthyous]

Interesting that so many of us have noticed a huge drop in sales recently. My visibility is at a high point going back as far as I can see, but today my search traffic is -25%. USA / Canada are -43% and -40% this morning at 11am. Traffic to my landing pages is down dramatically...almost all of them simultaneously.

[BigKat]

experiencing from Google is steady and expected traffic, but a major lack in sales.

Similar for us (we sell products). Sales from Google flat lined in December. Though there have been numerous updates since, we've seen no sign of a pulse from Google.

[EditorialGuy]

Some things never change:

Our travel information site's traffic, including Google traffic, was up significantly (week over week) during the Super Bowl. This happens every year. My hypothesis: There are a lot of non-sports people who are married to football fans and like to plan or fantasize international vacations while their other family members are yelling at the TV.

[muniz900]

Hi guys, I'm new to this world and I don't have all your experience, I see here very knowledgeable people with SEO.
I wanted to ask one thing, how is it possible that sometimes receiving more visits from google you have less conversions (such as the traffic sent is not good) and instead other times when the traffic is less you have much more conversions? Sorry for my broken English, it's not my native language.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Generally, my website's traffic is stagnating. But my Bing traffic increased by around 40% for the 2 last two weeks, and Google’s traffic keeps decreasing daily. I believe we are the witnesses of the Google's falling. One more creepier and absolutely idiotic update for G and they will be smashed fully. That's the cost of Google's own fault — they forgot they depend on webmasters and searchers that are looking for the needed information. And when your search becomes spammy ad listings and lists of useless websites — know that your finish is at next door.

[superclown2]

But my Bing traffic increased by around 40% for the 2 last two weeks, and Google’s traffic keeps decreasing daily.

This is pretty much what I've found. So far this month I've had double the business from Bing that I had last month, whilst the business I am now getting from Google makes me wonder if it's time to block them completely - I don't want them using my data for their own purposes any more.

The drop of Google business that happened since they released a video which gave incorrect results - a sign of mind boggling incompetence - makes me wonder if the public is finally waking up to just what they have become. Bing isn't whiter than white though. At least G label their ads as 'sponsored' (although many don't know that that is the same as 'ads') but Bing show the tiniest box possible, that you need to search for, and have excellent vision, to see.

Microsoft: we are not stupid. Don't you realise that this ruins trust, which is vital in a search engine, and is the reason why many of us have seen your search engine as a joke in the past?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

The drop of Google business that happened since they released a video which gave incorrect results - a sign of mind boggling incompetence - makes me wonder if the public is finally waking up to just what they have become. Bing isn't whiter than white though. At least G label their ads as 'sponsored' (although many don't know that that is the same as 'ads') but Bing show the tiniest box possible, that you need to search for, and have excellent vision, to see.

Excellent words, absolutely agree. The goal of Bing right now is not to get involved in the same trap. I believe that Bard or whatever shouldn't be the answer from Google. Right now they are acting reactively — they are not the leaders anymore. I believe that in future the things that are happening right now will give some positive moves from the point of view of competition. Google won't die because of this, but it will have to compete again, and not steal everyone's traffic and revenue.

[Nutterum]

Observation from the past week.

1) Long tail SERPS are complete trash . Searching for long tail brand terms got me #*$! website results, 5 year old reddit comments, its absolutely dumpsterfire tier.

2) On the plus side one of the main properties I work on got ranked on almost 1k more longtail keywords and indexted almost 500k pages (its an apparel e-commerce platform) .

3) Ads with extentions , FAQs and suggested answers from google started creeping in heavily in the travel niche I am monitoring eating roughly 30% more from the remaining organic traffic in that space. Bookings down ~40% compared to 2022 , though still relatively good numbers businesswise.

Some internal update really messed up Google and I am not sure what is right and what is wrong, especially in the longtail and very longtail search terms.

[Mestrick]

Google ads cover the first screen of the device organic traffic dropped.

[RareBit]

My SERPs are all over the place today. If I get the layout with the favicons I am always 1st, if I get the layout without favicons then the top 4 seem to just be shuffling about, I can go from 1st to 3rd to 4th & back to 1st again just by opening new incognito tabs..

[Mestrick]

Daily my 2 websites are shuffling their position front and back no stability.

[ichthyous]

Interesting observations about ad saturation and layout. Something was definitely up yesterday, my search traffic was -18%, with dramatic declines for many of my landing pages. Most of the remaining traffic was one-hit-wonder visits to individual content pages. Today it seems better, but USA traffic is -60% from an average Tuesday...it will be nearly impossible to break even.

Generally, my website's traffic is stagnating. But my Bing traffic increased by around 40% for the 2 last two weeks

Wish I could say the same...I am still getting a negligible amount of traffic from Bing. No change there at all.

I think those predicting the demise of Google are a bit premature...Bing is still tiny in comparison and Google's own AI will catch up no question. People are not concerned in the slightest with whether Bing is integrating AI into search...Google IS search for 95+% of the market and that kind of position takes years to erode. I do hope Bing makes some gains...any competition will be better than current monopoly.

[BigKat]

Interesting observations about ad saturation and layout

Google had initially rotated through three different layouts for most of our buyer intent keywords and ultimately settled on the most ad heavy layout. It's stayed this way since, and our top ranks now produce very little traffic/sales. The ads look ridiculous because they're nearly all marketplace product ads (Amazon, Walmart and so on) with the same Chinese branded products sold under different names. My guess is the ad heavy layout in our industry will expand to other industries/searches as Google finds the need to boost profits by devouring even more organic results with their ads. Combined with additional layoffs, this could help Google meet profit targets in the short term but at the cost of marketshare. Our sales are rising from other search engines, which is filling the hole left by Google, so I'm fine with the way shoppers are adjusting by searching outside of Google.

[ichthyous]

@BigKat I am also seeing that the first page is heavily loaded with product ads now, and I sell higher priced items. This is definitely having an impact on traffic, especially USA traffic.

Our sales are rising from other search engines, which is filling the hole left by Google, so I'm fine with the way shoppers are adjusting by searching outside of Google.

Lucky you...I'm not seeing any increase from any other search engine...combined they have a negligible impact on my business and refer very little traffic.

[christianz]

I am approaching 30 day "anniversary" of nonstop, constant ranking and traffic loss. Perfect straight line with little bit of lost rankings every day.

Could be one of several reasons (all Google related) but if I had to guess one I would say it's HCU rolling out. HCU is notoriously broken.

[superclown2]

I continually search for product information, which is why I switched to real search engines ages ago. I tried Google today and all I got; once I'd ignored the ads; was sites with products for sale sites which are invariably those which pay heavily for ads. Unbiased opinions? No. Real information? forget it. In depth analysis? No way. Long tail search? Don't even try.

Google use to be far away the best search engine on the Internet - it is now arguably the worst.

No wonder they have to be the biggest spenders on 'lobbying' (as some people call it) to keep their monopoly. What a sad state the Internet - which held so much promise - has come to.

[mhansen]

Rant about SPAM - Sites Positioned Above Mine due to EAT/YMYL.

The most frustrating thing for us right now is how the "authority" screws (YMYL/EAT) have been tuned-up so much over the last update or two. We have a fairly popular website that was built on years of experience, both my own and others in the industries we cater to. That expert knowledge/experience is prominent and easily validated through LinkedIn profile links, other websites, citations, etc. Over the last +7 years we have put together a great place for our visitors to learn about our wheelhouse topics, and the content is well linked and cited often. We have a pending trademark for the word used to represent what people can find on our site, and it is widely used when we are referenced in links, etc. People actively search for [topic + our trademark].

Once you make inroads to a space they want, the super-high authority / we-can-do-anything domains, can write a 150 word brief, closely resembling your expertly written, well sourced and thorough page, even citing you as their source - and you find yourself down in the ashes of Googles' basement results, ie: 2-3rd position of organic results, which is on page 2 of the SERP or 5 swipes down a mobile screen, and that's not even a product query - which of course, you won't be found easily.

When high finance-authority sites like Forbes or Synchronicity Bank are outranking publishers outside of their EAT/YMYL genre, those with years of verified and cited industry experience, the algo is missing something to keep this in check. When someone searches for "[topic] Reddit" for example, you expect to find Reddit, not a Forbes page that shows a snippet of "According to Reddit... [this is the answer to the topic]" now come click OUR made-for-ads page.

I've spent way too much time trying to figure out they WHY they are so popular for countless queries completely unrelated to their authority, and the only answer I come up with is their YMYL/EAT, Google must have them positioned as THE authority of the entire web, higher than almost all others. Of course, they also spend millions of $$ every year on PPC ads and many pages of their site look like they were made for ads, so maybe Google is just feeding its' own machine.

Bing has got this figured out for the most part - why doesn't Google?

[ichthyous]

Whatever is going on, traffic is very low today...USA is -30% at 4:30pm and most of my major landing pages are way down. Canada is -66%, Australia is at zero today. This is while my visibility is higher than at any time in the last two years according to SEM. I checked and for the first time I am coming in 1st place in searches that I have been at 2 or 3 for years now...but the traffic just isn't there.

[superclown2]

Of course, they also spend millions of $$ every year on PPC ads and many pages of their site look like they were made for ads, so maybe Google is just feeding its' own machine.

Bing has got this figured out for the most part - why doesn't Google?

I think perhaps you answered your own question.

[superclown2]

I checked and for the first time I am coming in 1st place in searches that I have been at 2 or 3 for years now...but the traffic just isn't there.

When I first started working online 20+ years ago the Internet was seen as a source of information. Now it's a source of advertisements (mainly thanks to Google of course). It will get worse soon in Europe since major service providers have been given the green light to use targeted advertising themselves (which will further eat into Google's business, but that's by the by).

Given that Google is hard wired into the Internet, could it be that people are sick of adverts, adverts and more adverts, and have lost faith in the WWW?

[MayankParmar]

Desperately waiting for the core update. It's taking longer than usual. The only way I could recover is a core update :(

[Jez123]

I am just about done. I am getting nothing but crap from google. Apart from the obligatory weekly phone call wanting me to increase my ads payment, obviously.

[Treud]

Huge drop the last 3 days, but metrics on website backend are consistant.
More emails from possible customers, maybe the end of my zombie traffic increase I’m having since 2 months..

[christianz]

Tried google search for how to replace auxiliary battery on specific car model. I was expecting a lot of YouTube spam (video is good for how-tos), but even I was surprised when I saw that entire SERP is ONLY YouTube. Super tall (so tall it doesn't fit in my large/tall phone screen) YouTube widget, after that PAA type box and "see more results" page. Nothing else.

That's ZERO organic results for that query. And ZERO non-Google results.

I click on show more button and what I was presented with was truly shocking. About 10 organic results, 8 of which were hacked .de websites (I am not even in Germany or speak German) with auto generated text that redirect to gambling affiliate link.

That's right - 8 out of 10 organic results - hacked pages.

I think this is direct result of throwing away all common sense that Google had in ranking and replacing it with EAT and AI analysis.

[Mestrick]

For the last 2 days, we are also getting zombie traffic in analytics. the count is consistent but low conversion value

[ichthyous]

Massive drops this morning. USA starting day at -70%, UK -34%, DE -59%, CA is at zero. Another lost week

[ErrlyBird]

Whatever is going on, traffic is very low today...USA is -30% at 4:30pm and most of my major landing pages are way down. Canada is -66%, Australia is at zero today. This is while my visibility is higher than at any time in the last two years according to SEM. I checked and for the first time I am coming in 1st place in searches that I have been at 2 or 3 for years now...but the traffic just isn't there.

It's good to see someone else mention this. SEM is showing high traffic and the best visibility and keyword rankings in my 2 years at this company. But GSC is showing the opposite with site traffic dropping every day. I am just at a loss here as I don't know what is up or down at this point.

[BigKat]

Lucky you...I'm not seeing any increase from any other search engine..

Traffic from other search engines/sources is not filling the entire hole left by Google, but it has helped and continues to increase. I can only hope this change in searcher behavior will expand to other industries, including yours, so that we can all break free from Google.