February 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Anything exciting happening in your world?

[RedBar]

Is that due to loss in traffic from Google or from the declining post-Brexit economy?

Nothing to do with Brexit whatsoever, neither remainers nor leavers have definitive factual information as to whether the UK economy has to do with this since the one thing both sides will generally agree is that lockdowns plus the massive furlough giiven to millions of workers to stay at home, many of whom were public sector employees, meanwhile millions of others were expected to go to work and pay their taxes to support them.

We are still in the situation whereby many, many people have still not returned to their offices etc, we are talking about millions not a few thousand, plus since "normality" many have taken early retirement. Now bear in mind many people have not returned to previous levels of High Street shopping because they have gotten used to a different way of shopping, this has seen the decline of many tradittional High Street shops.

Without doubt there have been major winners and losers from the scamdemic with the public sector easily doing the better and we are now in the situation of personal taxation being at its highest level in 70 years. Our health service is the world's 5th largest employer and claims to have 100K vacancies yet getting a doctor's appointment is almost an impossibility.

We have food banks yet more coffee shops, barbers and nail bars than I have ever seen in my life. Millions of people who cannot afford to eat yet so many who don't think twice about paying USD 3/4/5 for a coffee several times a day.

Insofar as my customers are concerned this has nothing to do with the loss of Google traffic, this is a simple loss of footfall through the doors since lockdowns and economics. None of the major parties have a solution to this since THEY are the problem and they are all, but one party, intent upon creating even more financial burdens for the entire country wthout asking the electorate.

Honestly, if I were 20 years younger I would definitely be leaving the country, I'll not tell you to where since this may yet still happen :-)

[ichthyous]

@redbar there is plenty of definitive research to show that the UK economy has withered as a direct result of Brexit, which was the true scam perpetuated on the British people from the beginning...the Economist, Wall Street journal, NY times, World Bank, and many of the leading economic thinktanks have written on this, all one has to do is Google it ;).

I was in London for 18 days working in October and November...nothing was closed and nobody was taking any precautions at all, not even on the tube...pubs and restaurants were full. The amount of affluent tourists was enormous...still the economy shrinking.

All of the EU countries had lockdowns and they are all growing faster than the UK...the British per capita GDP will shrink to the same level as Slovenia this year. That is due to Brexit, not lockdowns.

USA also had lockdowns, Australian lockdowns were draconian...still their economies not shrinking like the UK. Very poor leadership and lots of lies perpetuated on the Brits regarding the true cost of Brexit there...now the country is reaping the results for years and years to come...a very serious self-inflicted wound. I do hope they rejoin the EU, or makes some sort of deal soon and get past this phase... I want my UK customers back. With the way things are going, Google will not be providing much US traffic moving forward so international traffic is becoming more important.

[mosxu]

Zombies are back in the game

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Facing with switches: one period Google gives traffic, and drops after a few hours. Then back again. Looks like testing or preparing to cut off another piece of the pie. I believe we can soon see a March Core Update?

[RedBar]

as a direct result of Brexit

I am not going to get into a political argument here other than to say do not believe much of the BS that is bandied about from both sides other than both sides agree that many, many people have either not gone back to work or do not intend working "as before" meanwhile there are job vacancies everywhere.

[ichthyous]

After a decent Saturday, a huge drop in USA traffic on Sunday. USA is down 40% from an average Sunday. CA also -22% and AU -17%. So...a couple of decent days after weeks of tepid traffic. And this is while my rank / visibility is the highest it's been since 2021.

[MayankParmar]

The lack of transparency is still frustrating, though. They should tell us when to expect an update, like a core update.

Search liaison has become a retweet feed of the search console handle.

[ichthyous]

Impressions vs. clicks says it all...GSC shows impressions trending slightly lower but basically holding steady...meanwhile clicks were much higher in January. Once February hit clicks dropped considerably and CTR is worse. This is not due to any update, it's due to page layout and the amount of content on the page. Landing pages on my site that were zooming in January have lost half their visits for the entire month of Feb, with perhaps only a few days where they snapped back.

[RedBar]

My global traffic is very spiky right now with either 20-40 page views or several 1 page view then another spike.

I am used to the single page views to specific widget pages by users researching that widget however the quantity of single page views has increased out of proportion to the multiple page views. By this I mean let's say page views used to be 50/50 single to multiple, now it's 75 to 25 ...

To me single page views mean a visitor who knows precisely what they want and are checking its full specification, multiple page views are shoppers and reseachers, that's a huge change in usage.

Interestingly realworld project enquiries are up!

[mhansen]

It's not everyday you find a glaring mistake in Google search results, but I stumbled upon a website this morning that is nearly an exact match domain to the search query I was researching. It ranked #5 for the query, but after reviewing further, ranks #1 for many others and even has a FS or three.

MANY sections of the website are nothing but lorem ipsum. The ENTIRE about-us page is a WordPress theme template, again, nothing but lorem ipsum text placeholder. Half of the links in the header and footer don't match. ALL social linksare "#" dead-end shortcuts, never having been completed. The content on the "articles" page is so obviously re-written or spun content, it's just unreal it's even there.SMH.

Google is broken.

[RedBar]

Google is broken.

It certainly seems to be rapidly going that way. Earlier today I did a little consumer research for a popular kitchen product that has been around in the UK since 1964.

Google.co.uk gave nothing but US results 80% of which are not available in the UK, DDG / Bing were slightly better giving a couple of UK product reults.

How can this be? It is not a rarely bought product, it is one that I bet 80-90% of kitchens will have, why is G filtering out all the UK companies? The UK leading product is a household name yet not ranked for a generic product search. Changing one word in my three keyword search brought up loads of UK supermarket offers.

Since I knew the actual product manufacturer, a huge company, I went to their website where I was shocked to find not ONE page about this product, a few thumbnail images however not one page where I could actually find out the product information I was researching.

So ... G gave me bad UK results however the manufacturer failed 100% by not having any details anywhere.

[Rlilly]

When you search and go to settings, there used to be an option which gave you 20, 30, 50 or 100 results to be shown. Now it has this:
Results per page
(In regions where continuous scrolling is available, this setting will have no effect, even if continuous scrolling is off).

I used to choice 100 and use a filter: &filter=0 and the results would show all the duplicate pages from a site google left out, basically to see how many pages a competitor had you could gauge the power of the other website vs your own. Bless him, Tedster gave me this tip RIP

Is there a workaround to get the 100 results showing only?

[Dalnoon]

I'm down another 30% after the Feb 24th update, YIKES. The weird thing is, my website isn't even a product review website, and absolutely no affiliate links can be found anywhere on my website.
The rankings are replaced with giant websites that have very little relevant info on the niche. RPMs are down badly in the UK, and traffic is down badly, sad times are ahead for my business.

[Martin Ice Web]

Big drop today (-40%), conversions picked up yesterday in evening and vanished over night.
Most zombies again.
And it is such a bad experience when you are looking for a real test site and all your are getting is fake test sites that are only made for amazon ads or click trough. And since the last update google give much more power to old media websites ( but these do the same fake tests ). Shame on google to take part in this sad story..

[Cyril TechWebsites]

The same thing - another drop, the most irrelevant traffic from all sources I have:

Google 0:33 s, 1.08 pages per session
Bing 1:02, 1.22 pages per session

The absolute assassination of my website entirely. All my pages are dropping - as those that are recently updated, as TOP10, TOP100 - everything drops...

[christianz]

Also substantial drop around that same time, like everyone else.

[superclown2]

For a spell this morning I was getting completely irrelevant results on Google (which I only use now to check my SERPs positions) from all over the world for some searches - I'm in London. It seems to have settled down for now.

[ErrlyBird]

This update has somehow killed our traffic, and I'm not even in a product review niche. I don't understand how that's even possible. My niche is firearms, which to my knowledge does not gain product review juice at all, but here we are, keywords tanking, traffic tanking, after a long period of nice gains. Baffled.

[RareBit]

My results are still all over the place, I am 4th for 1 term now, but will go back to 1st overnight and in the morning...then back to 4th. it has been like this for nearly 2 weeks now.

[Mestrick]

My websites are dancing in serp 1 day i am in 1st page next day 3rd page after 2 days 1st and then again 3rd, 4th

[insideout]

Massive volatility is going on right now
Semrush Sensor
Hello,
Semrush Sensor is indicating a lot of changes in the rankings. This may be a sign of a Google Update.
You may want to check it out in Semrush.
Go to Sensor
________________________________________
Databases activity

Spain 6.8
+4.0

Spain

7.1
+3.9

United States

8.4
+4.0

United Kingdom

6.8
+4.5

Germany

6.2
+3.9

United Kingdom

6.9
+4.3

Germany

6.1
+3.6

France

6.6
+4.1

United States

8.0
+4.0

Japan

5.7
+1.2

Japan

5.6
+1.2

France

6.5
+3.7

Italy

6.1
+3.8

Italy

6.4
+3.6
________________________________________
Top 5 categories activity (ES Mobile)

Finance

6.6
+5.3

Health

6.5
+4.8

Reference

6.5
+4.6

Online Communities

8.5
+4.5

Jobs & Education

6.0
+4.5

[ichthyous]

Yesterday traffic was strong the entire day from every region for the first time since the end of January. Let's see how long that lasts. A few days of decent traffic with no conversions doesn't compensate for a month of crap traffic, which is more often the case these days. I have noticed that the SERPs are being broken up by ads at top, middle and bottom now...so it's very disorienting to search for something and suddenly get a big block of unrelated ads in the middle of the organic results. It's basically a game of Gotcha! at this point, with Google trying to get people to mistakenly click on ads to generate more revenue. It appears that confusion might pay more as people click around mistakenly instead of avoiding the ads altogether. That's also why the ads don't produce conversions for the advertisers. I saw already years ago that 85% of traffic from Google hit one page and left in a few seconds

[Soulofmonk]

10% traffic drop today :(

[BigKat]

If I hadn't visited this forum, I would have not known Google was updating yet again. The volume/weight of Google's ads in the SERPS has killed off organic, so we really don't notice a change in traffic or sales when positions change. Only a layout change, which would allow organic to breathe a bit, is noticeable to us. Hopefully those outside the ecommerce industry do well, but for us Google has quickly become and remains irrelevant.

[not2easy]

The March 2023 discussion is open now: [webmasterworld.com...]