February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[EditorialGuy]

Big increases for our editorial travel site in the last couple of days (Google traffic is up 30 percent today, compared to a week ago, with no obvious spikes from news- or trend-driven queries. Our average GSC rankings have also climbed several positions.) That could change tomorrow, of course, so I'm not breaking out the Champagne or even the sparkling grape juice just yet.

[ichthyous]

A continued increase in ranking, but a mysterious 70% drop in traffic to my home page today. All of it is USA traffic, which is down 30% today. Other parts of the site and other locations are steady...we are definitely guinea pigs here.

[RedBar]

Global site had very low traffic on Saturday at 51% of "old" average and today, Sunday, after 12+ hours of my Googleday it's at 14.7%.

For 2023 so far it's at 80.3%. Traditionally mid-Januay until end-March to a peak end-May / mid-June, sees rising traffic and enquiries, this is the first time in 25+ years-worth of data this has not (yet) occurred.

It is very evident the quantity of widget bulk offers I am receiving on a daily basis that my RealWorld widget industry is in "trouble"!

[Treud]

My US traffic is wonky as well, but I start to recover from the so called 14th update.

[ichthyous]

Yesterday ended only -1% for me on USA traffic...today every other country is higher except for USA, which is -30% again. Monday is a holiday so that may be a factor. Has anyone noticed that their Feb 12-17 traffic is clipped and flat at almost the exact same numbers every day? That is simply not statistically possible for 6 days in a row. My direct traffic from USA vanished, as did traffic to my home page, and also my most competitive landing pages.

Today I checked my site for a term I am hoping to rank on, but it will take a while since the content is new. On my mobile the amount of ambiguous sponsored ads, products and posts was astounding. It's no wonder that none of us are getting any traffic, and Google is basically trying to trick people to click on the ads by making it much less clear what is an ad, and moving you to related searches when you scroll.

[edited by: ichthyous at 7:20 pm (utc) on Feb 19, 2023]

[RedBar]

Honestly I thought my global site was down, it's traffic is almost non-existent yet the hotel site is buzzing for a Sunday, local traffic and business good, international, trashed.

[superclown2]

Google is basically trying to trick people to click on the ads by making it much less clear what is an ad, and moving you to related searches when you scroll.

To be fair, Google is nowhere near as bad as Bing, who make it almost impossible for anyone with normal vision to tell them apart.

However; I am surprised there hasn't been more fuss about Google's sudden downgrading of long tail searches, something I noticed (at least in my vertical, in London; your experiences may be different) round about the time of their Bart presentation fiasco. These are usually the most profitable visits, because people who really want to buy something are more likely to be specific about what they want.

By ignoring long tail terms unless people deliberately wrap inverted commas around words (and how many know about that?) the sufferers are specialist web sites, the winners are the plain vanilla mega sites that top most SERPs; and indeed Google themselves, since those who can't find what they really want are more likely to click on ads. This, as well as the mass of Googlespam and ad filled YouTube videos is giving them a short term advantage whilst further damaging their long term credibility.

[RedBar]

Sunday saw my global site's second-lowest ever traffic day and it seems to be continuing into Monday.

RealWorld business enquiries are at a standstill. Off to check my SERPs to see what, if anything, has happened.

[ErrlyBird]

We are starting to recover traffic as well. Volatility has been crazy. Hopefully can keep this up trend for at least a few day....

[Treud]

I checked both Bing & Google. It’s totally plastered with Ads everywhere.
Tbh, unless you know what to buy online you just end up in huge store like Amazon / Rakuten because the search engines just became garbage.

[ErrlyBird]

Seeing a massive amount of newly indexed pages on our site. It literally doubles from 22k indexed to 44k indexed. It appears it stopped respecting our robots.txt for customer login pages. There are also a TON of URLs with korean writing appended to them. No idea what's going on but I am lowkey freaking out.

[BigKat]

I checked both Bing & Google. It’s totally plastered with Ads everywhere.

I think Bing watches Google to see what they can get away with then they follow Google's lead. Even if there are many complaints from businesses and consumer watchdogs, these search engines can make a lot of money over the years it takes for a lawsuit to work its way through the courts up until the date of trial where a small settlement is reached.

Tbh, unless you know what to buy online you just end up in huge store like Amazon / Rakuten because the search engines just became garbage.

This is the problem for shoppers. Many go to places like Amazon first then go to a search engine and are seeing ads for what was on Amazon. Search engines lost sight of their value in shopping by making it extraordinarily difficult for shoppers to find items not available on Amazon. This of course hurts us businesses who have little choice but to accept the results even as our complaints to elected officials and regulatory agencies are ignored or responded to with cut & paste form letters.

[EditorialGuy]

Follow up to my post of 2/17:

On February 15, RustyBrick (Barry Schwarz) wrote a Search Engine Roundtable article about an unconfirmed February 14 Google update. We've certainly benefited from that, at least for the time being: Thanks largely to Google, our traffic today was up about 42 percent from the same day two weeks ago and 27 percent from the same day last week. Looking at a graph in Google Analytics, I see modest increases on February 13 -15 and a more sharply rising curve from February 16 onward. The biggest increases occurred yesterday and today.

The site is an editorial travel-planning site that has been at its current domain since 2001.

[Atomic]

@ErrlyBird

Sounds like a hack. You'll want to get them removed ASAP.

[Treud]

@ErrlyBird

If you don’t see the new pages. Try to rollback your site.
I had an issue like this that valued me a penalty but it was a mistake of mine where I accidentally indexed pages that should not !

[RedBar]

I checked both Bing & Google. It’s totally plastered with Ads everywhere.

Yep, I went to check my SERPs and the Google Classified Ads Machine has about 90% of the screen real estate. In actual fact my positions were excellent however, as we all know, they cannot be seen since a SERP result surrounded by blocks of 20-24 image ads several times on an ever-scrolling results page, IMHO, has actually a negative visual response simply because it does not conform with the successful Google ads.

[RedBar]

This aftternoon I've been checking my UK widget trade SERPs on G.co.uk since its traffic has also dropped ... What a mess it is with very poor UK links and far too many US company links and bear in mind none of these US companies are able to supply.

Altogether an extremely poor experience at a national level however at local / regional level it is totally the opposite experience with good, clean and accurate results.

G really needs to critically review itself.

[rustybrick]

Google product reviews update, now for more languages [twitter.com...]

[ichthyous]

Still seeing low USA traffic here, although most of the rest of the world is higher today. USA traffic is -21% from an average Tuesday so far at 6:30pm. Traffic dropped off a cliff at 2pm and stayed down. Most likely an overabundance of ads in the US market, but I have noticed that my traffic is mostly down on days when the stock market takes a steep dive.

[KaseyM]

Very low traffic this morning after one of our best weekends in ages.

Google Discover seems to be like a tap that's either fully on or completely off.

[Micha]

@KaseyM We have exactly the same situation at the moment. Over the weekend we had the best number of visitors in 10 years. Most of the visitors came from Google News or Discover. Amazingly, our articles even beat out the big media sites over the weekend. Since Tuesday, we are now back to business as usual and the numbers have dropped significantly.

[ichthyous]

I'm also seeing a big drop in traffic today...search is -32% and my home page is -50% from an average Wednesday at this hour. USA, UK, CA, and most EU country traffic are all down. My ranking has been steady, no drops at all.

[RedBar]

Further dramatic falls for my global site today, after 18 hours it was at 38% and compared to two years ago average at 23%.

This is going to end up very messy.

[Treud]

Yes today same for me. It’s a real rollercoaster.
I’ll dig into this after a week or two.

[BigKat]

We aren't seeing any change in traffic or sales from Google whatsoever - it's a steady dead from Google. Our really good organic ranks being crushed under ads does have its advantages in terms of stability I guess.

What Google continues to promote in ads, many #1 organic positions (Amazon) and via review sites are products in our industry that fail to meet current safety standards. We're doing fine though as the more educated shoppers are finding us by other means.

[RedBar]

WTH is going on?

Global site Wednesday traffic 48.7%.

Today UK time nothing until 02.00 then until 11.59 traffic completely normal at 60.7% ... since 12.00 dead, completely switched off.

G's ad receipts must be going through the roof, again.

[ErrlyBird]

Yayyyyyy more drops in traffic *dramatically rolls eyes*

[ichthyous]

This is the new, old, normal. It was this way for me from January-August 2022...much lower traffic and no conversions whatsoever. That was after an already poor 2020 and 2021 in terms of Google's constant page layout, ad-stuffing experiments and the total degradation of its organic SERPs.

We had a temporary reprieve from ~August 2022-January 30th but the writing is on the wall...Google intends to force people to click ads one way or another in its glorified linkspam directory, and they know that people will do it because they are a monopoly. I have been without any meaningful business from Google for the entire month of February, and I doubt it will go back. I do think that Google had better start innovating because when Wall Street realizes that the company has nothing new to offer other than cannibalizing its own reputation for temporarily higher profit margins investors are going to pull their money.

[RedBar]

I've had two more small local businesses today advise me they've had enough and are closing and then will try and sell their properties. No one is interested in taking-on their businesses!

[ichthyous]

@RedBar Is that due to loss in traffic from Google or from the declining post-Brexit economy? I haven't had an order from UK in some years, and it used to be a big source of sales for me. My traffic from UK is higher than ever though.