February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[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.

[dsherstiuk]

Sounds like some kind of update, my traffic drops for about 20%, Google.de, ecommerce niche.

[longjohnbronze]

We're seeing a decline of ca 10% in comparison to last week. I'm sure it will resolve itself if we focus on more and better content, what else could it be of course.

[anubitez]

My leading white hat site has been dumped since the October spam update and has received a 50% recovery. The recovery started when these unconfirmed updates also occurred on February 14th.

It seems everyone else is getting crapped on; it looks like a reversal is going on for me, I believe I am still in some sin bin, and they are still testing. Then again, a week later, I could lose 75%.

[superclown2]

I tried Google this morning for some long tail searches (I switched to Neeva a while ago as my main search engine) hoping for some improvement. Again a waste of time; I specified exactly what I was looking for as part of a research project and all I got was web sites selling a product that was only mentioned as part of the search term. As an example, if I looked for red, left handed widgets suitable for manipulating a digeridoo I just got sites selling didgeridoos. Honestly, these are the type of results I expected from sites like Dogpile 20 years ago.

What on Earth is going on at Google?

[Treud]

Me i had 2 increases. One in December and one in January.
This one I’m back in December traffic maybe less, but since 3 months even traffic increases the conversion stayed the same.
What I’m curious is traffic from Google tanked but the billed traffic in my host remain pretty much the same.
Let’s wait a few days this “update” to settle.

[Micha]

As usual, it ran well for a few days, the traffic from Google increased neatly and since the day before yesterday it crashed again. At some point, I'd like to understand the logic behind Google's update rage.

[Dalnoon]

I'd like to understand the logic behind Google's update rage.

It is very confusing to me as well, how is it that a website can be boosted massively by an update and then get crushed by the next one? If Google marks a website as "helpful" how come it suddenly falls from grace in a matter of days?

[Treud]

yes the logic behind this is really weird. Without doing anything a website can go up & down following the updates. Google mostly doing random up & down if you don't pay. (Well even if you pay :) )

[ichthyous]

I think that perhaps this is not so much the result of ranking changing, but of page layout changing. I checked one high-traffic term that I have ranked highly on for years. I was in 3rd position for most of 2022. Since January 2023 I am #1. According to GSC, impressions have trended down while my ranking went up and clicks remained the same. According to my own stats, visits to the page trended up sharply in January, breaking the 2022 pattern. Then dropped right back down to the lowest levels of 2022...while I was ranking #1. If you are actually seeing wide swings in ranking, i.e. losing and gaining a lot of terms, then losing them again...that seems to be another matter. I saw a big loss of top 10 rank terms in the 1st half of 2022, then it went into reverse from June 2022-Dec 2022 and gained most of it back. Then started losing some very slowly again and it has remained remarkably stable since the beginning of the year in terms of rank.

[BigKat]

I think that perhaps this is not so much the result of ranking changing, but of page layout changing.

When people start seeing sudden drops in traffic, they need to take a quick peak at what the layout looks like and compare that to the layout being served when normal traffic patterns are present. Only then will they understand how impactful some of these ad heavy layouts have on traffic.

[RedBar]

My global site is having an "unusual" week with Page Views way above average, as of 18.00 of my Googleday I'm at 150% for this week.

The thing is I've been having the many single visitor single page users but I've also been having several single visitor multiple page viewers of anywhere between 100-500 page views and many widget image downloads. These multiple page views are not all from the same country, in fact they are all different, plus they are from locations where I usually expect projects etc.

Overall nothing untowards, maybe specifiers are catching-up on their December/January lack of activity?

[Treud]

My daily visits seems solid according my billed hits. Bing stay pretty much the same, but GSC doing a huge drop. Not sure if it’s a glitch or something else… I had in the past some traffic loss then reverted to normal few days after. Since then I usually trust more my host hits count.

[Treud]

Today's metrics seems to be more stable, some KW demoted since the 14th update (?) though.
For me maybe the surge I had the last few weeks turned my website speed into red as I was already under water with my bandwidth ... And get slammed by Google.
But all these traffic surge didn't convert into anything (Mail or Order). The order I usually receive are when the visits are in low tide.

[RedBar]

@Treud ... What do these mean?

My daily visits seems solid according my billed hits

The order I usually receive are when the visits are in low tide.

[tangor]

I read the monthly search observations threads at least once a month. Relieved to know that things micro managed (daily/hourly) remain as downbeat as usual, the common complaints are repeated with vigor, and nothing has changed. G remains the mainstay and we all play, some of us more intense than others.

Sometimes it is the world economy that is more in control than whatever is perceived in g's power. We are headed into tough times!

Just an opinion from a fellow who takes a much longer view (YEARS) of trends and realities.

[Treud]

@RedBar
According GSC the traffic drop is like 30/40%, but the hits on the website only went down 15% and now are stable.

Also the traffic boost I had since 2 months from Google, didn’t converted. All the extra visits are just visits, no email inquiry or product orders (it’s a E-commerce site with niche products).

Early January I had quite some orders in a short time, but nothing related with any traffic boost. It was a period were the traffic was quite low.

[RedBar]

@Treud ... Ok, thanks, understood now:-)

[ichthyous]

Ranking increased for both local and search. Traffic is improving somewhat since yesterday, but major landing pages are still really down. Whenever traffic drops by a huge amount to the landing pages associated with the most competitive terms it's always that google is loading the page with more crap. I know we should all be checking to verify endlessly, but what's the point? It won't help and it won't change the situation. New inquiries are at a trickle since the last week of January...as I mentioned then, I knew the decent converting traffic wouldn't last. I would point out that services like SEM are useless at this point...the ranking info needs to take into account what is actually on the page, not just the organic SERPs.

[BigKat]

It's the end of another week and Google's impact on sales is next to none. Just too many ads in Google's SERPS for our great ranks to make any difference in traffic or sales. On the bright side, our sales from other search engines and sources continues rising.

Have a good weekend!

[ichthyous]

In analyzing traffic to my landing pages I am finding that the drop in traffic occurred on a rolling basis from Jan 25th-30th. One by one the traffic fell for most of my landing pages and for the home page.

Are others seeing a drop in traffic around that time? If so, was it your entire site, or did it seem to roll out slowly? Did your ranking change at this time as well?