March 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Are we having another shake-up or have ads taken-over the SERPs almost completely?

It is a Wednesday, I have some sites flatlining and some 50% down today, how bad are your sites?

[Martin Ice Web]

50% drop this morning. Seems another quality ad update is on the road.

And, as i don´t use google, i yesterday realized that google switched from yellow ad sign to simple text gesponsert (sponsored) design in germany. And the "sponsored text" is so far away from the link, that a users don´t even realize that they belong together.
it seems that users are more willing to click on a sponsored link as on an ad link.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Facing a slow recovery since yesterday morning. Right now it's +7%. Realized, that after 8+ years in the industry, I can't even find a place for happiness because of recovery — because you never know if it sticks or not. And you can't be sure that in a month another update won't kill your website again...

[Dooku]

How much is our reduction in "traffic" actually the greater usage by Joe Public of "Do not track me" settings and of VPNs not being recorded by some analytical programmes / apps?

I check raw Nginx server logs on all my Digital Ocean droplets. Most webmasters have never seen a raw server log file. And I doubt most members here have either. On any shared hosting account you do not have the option for raw server log files. Even most webmasters using a VPS or dedicated server do not check the raw log files.......all those analytical trackers are way easier of course.

However, there is BIG difference in what you will see between raw server log files and ANY other kind of tracker/apps. Especially if you connect your website to Cloudflare and use their WAF, and also use the Digitial Ocean firewall BESIDES the normal UFW firewall of Ubuntu on a droplet.

The amount of hacking attempts these days is just INSANE. Every Tom, Dick and Harry trying to ransomware you or something else, from the sh|t they learned from all the youtube "ethical hacking courses".......yea right!

None of the analytical apps or services are correct in what they show as "normal" traffic. And the error margin is actually larger then you think. But who wants to sift through raw server log files? However I find the raw server log files in combination with the cloudflare and digital ocean logs more useful and when used right you can improve your SEO considerably.

[ichthyous]

I check raw Nginx server logs on all my Digital Ocean droplets. Most webmasters have never seen a raw server log file. And I doubt most members here have either.
However, there is BIG difference in what you will see between raw server log files and ANY other kind of tracker/apps. Especially if you connect your website to Cloudflare and use their WAF, and also use the Digitial Ocean firewall BESIDES the normal UFW firewall of Ubuntu on a droplet. The amount of hacking attempts these days is just INSANE. None of the analytical apps or services are correct in what they show as "normal" traffic. And the error margin is actually larger then you think.

I don't know about most, but I check my raw log files and CF and I see the attempts coming in all day long from all over the world. It helps to block the attempts at the WAF level before ever hitting your server, but some will always get through. I have blocked searches for all kinds of filename endings and URL patterns as well as directories. I serve images from a subdomain so it becomes more complex, but I did catch that the images were being directly accessed from a directory where they never should be accessed and it was all coming from China. I still don't understand why that's the case but I had to block all Chinese hits for this reason. I get very few visits to my actual pages from mainland China, yet thousands of hits each day to my images from the root folder just slowing my server down. Similarly, other countries that send nothing but form spam bots or real humans looking over the site to send me solicitations are issued challenges...

[ichthyous]

Traffic dropped overnight and starts the day with USA -60% and search is -20%. Is anyone else seeing a big drop in visits starting ~March 6-8? Every day after that my traffic search declined in a straight line with almost every country participating. This time it did coincide with a drop in visibility but no major loss of terms.

[dolcevita]

@Sgt_Kickaxe

Google's share of search traffic continues to decline as well.

Unfortunately, it is not true. Google continued in 2023, still, with a dominant position:
[statista.com...]

[RedBar]

@Dooku & ichthyous

I must admit I have a perverse enjoyment of going through raw logs :-)

The amount of hacking attempts these days is just INSANE.

Insofar as my sites are concerned it is 90+% WordPress hacking attempts which are all doomed to failure since I do not use WP.

[mosxu]

We do look into raw server logs! Absolutely!

[mosxu]

But it would be misleading to say that just because there are hacking attempts the traffic we get is real!

[Emmaalin]

I think might be a new update is on its ways. As GPT 4 will be on the toes so this time it is taking the time for new algorithm update.

[insideout]

Again, something is brewing right now. I feel google is about to push another update !

[Treud]

I’m not sure they push update. I think they try to maximize the ADS revenues, so organic results are pushed to oblivion.

[Mestrick]

today morning 4 ads were showing on mobile.

[RedBar]

So far today 90% single page views direct to selected widget page, country sources as normal.

[BigKat]

Unfortunately, it is not true. Google continued in 2023, still, with a dominant position

Dominant in terms of total traffic, but at the back of the pack when compared with other major search engines for us in terms of total daily conversions. It's those sales, and successful sales at that, which ultimately pay the bills. By "successful sales" I'm referring to post-sale issues such as returns, claims of not receiving their orders (losses), etc. Google leads the pack in post-sale problems of all major search engines. This all factors into traffic quality, and with the least daily conversions and more problems then other search engines, Google is dead last. If I had a choice to double traffic from either DDG, Yahoo or Bing, I'd take one of those over doubling our traffic from Google.

I’m not sure they push update. I think they try to maximize the ADS revenues, so organic results are pushed to oblivion

Oddly enough on desktop I see Google removed the top sidebar product ad block for some product searches. This might be temporary, but I don't see any change in traffic whether it be more visits and/or conversions. Organic results remain buried deep under ads. I am seeing Google sending us traffic from other countries that we don't serve, but this has been a continual problem with Google and further diminishes Google's traffic quality.

[RedBar]

today morning 4 ads were showing on mobile

Is that new for you? I've seen this for ages and usually a lot more.

[Micha]

Let's go to the next round, Google plays out the next core update.: [twitter.com...]

[RedBar]

Good catch Micha ... More garbage to come :-(

[BigKat]

Google plays out the next core update

I think these non-stop updates are designed to make us focus on something other than all the ads. To keep us chasing our tails so to speak.

I see no movement and no change in Google's depressed traffic. And with all the ads, I don't expect this core update to even be noticeable from our side regardless of the outcome.

[Dalnoon]

No changes so far for me.

[ichthyous]

I think these non-stop updates are designed to make us focus on something other than all the ads. To keep us chasing our tails so to speak.

Yes! The fact is that you can see your traffic just drop off a cliff as soon as the ads are loaded up for any particular term and local. This is particularly true for the USA market, and I suspect Canada as well. USA is the only perpetual laggard in traffic, and Canada is more than a laggard, the traffic has just vanished completely since around the 8th. Core updates tend to push through much more dramatic changes, such as ranking informational pages higher vs. ecomm pages (as we saw in 2021) and/or pushing large corporate sites up compared to small and medium sized businesses.

[KaseyM]

Big drop over the past week - entertainment news space.

That with the depressed RPMs is just the icing on the cake.

[not2easy]

News showing up now as Google Releases March 2023 Core Update: [webmasterworld.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

I think these non-stop updates are designed to make us focus on something other than all the ads.

Or maybe they're designed to make us focus less on reverse-engineering the algorithm. At some point, it becomes a waste of time to chase a moving target.

[Micha]

It will be the same as always anyway: the big sites win, even more nonsense on the first page of search results and we all can't do anything about it. So we better enjoy a tea or coffee :-)

[Dalnoon]

I'm seeing a bit of a traffic boost since this morning for some of my websites - around 30% up hourly compared to last week. Interestingly, only the websites that were hit in the December update are getting the boost.

[Mestrick]

may be it can be a reversal of previous updates.

[BigKat]

Or maybe they're designed to make us focus less on reverse-engineering the algorithm.

Considering #1 positions in Google only produce 5-10% of the traffic they once did, because of excessive ads, it's not worth our time/money to focus on it. For the little traffic Google organic now brings, those in low wage countries and/or those who produce automated content may find it worth their time to fight over traffic crumbs. Instead, our efforts and money are being used outside Google where we see positive results.

In other observations, Google's traffic shaping continues to evolve. Much of the traffic Google is sending is from VPNs, the cloud and vanilla hosts. Needless to say, this is some of the worst converting traffic I've seen from Google as if burying us under a mountain of ads in the SERPS wasn't harmful enough. This garbage traffic from Google also risks triggering our own algo which is designed to calculate risk and to reject those orders with a high probability of fraud. But since this garbage traffic doesn't convert anyway, I haven't seen any orders rejected on our side yet.

I'm also seeing bizarre storebot crawls coming from outside Google IP ranges. Still haven't figured out what's going on with this....

[superclown2]

may be it can be a reversal of previous updates.

You may be right. The SERPs positions here in London look the same as they were at the start of the last update. At the end of that update, though, they were very different and I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see further major changes before this one is over and done with.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is extremely low the entire day...I'm at -44% at 1pm my time. This was also the case yesterday, but it turned on a dime and shot upward after a certain hour. It seems to be the effect of the number of ads on the page, but perhaps the update has something to do with it. My ranking has been fairly stable for months.

The only other country traffic down today (so far) is Germany, which interestingly has been sending a much higher than normal amount of traffic for the last 7-10 days.

[ddogg]

Seems like whatever gains I made from the Dec 2022 'helpful content update' were lost in this update. I'm hoping they just have that algo turned off right now.

[Mestrick]

I don't know What is happening previous google updates confirms that my website was helpful and ranked it on the 1st page and this update tells me that website is not beneficial and my rank changed. I don't know whether google was right before or now

[EditorialGuy]

It's early days yet. What goes down could go up (or vice versa) over the next three weeks or so.

[RedBar]

I don't know whether google was right before or now

Don't tale it personally ... It's an infinitely adjustable algorithm that affects every site differently, sometimes you gain, sometimes you fall, the only constant factor is that Google is the perpetual winner and our sites are the continual losers.

If you have a good site simply leave it alone, don't go chasing tweaks and unknown changes. If you can improve a page, do so, otherwise you will drive yourself insane.

[superclown2]

If you have a good site simply leave it alone, don't go chasing tweaks and unknown changes. If you can improve a page, do so, otherwise you will drive yourself insane.

Excellent advice.

[Mestrick]

@RedBar Thanks for the advice, I am not doing any changes now till this update is finished.

[ichthyous]

Interesting...I've had a big jump up in rank, but as GSC shows the higher impressions are not helping much as the CTR is quite a bit lower. Anyone else seeing that? I searched in my local market and then using a VPN and the number of ads on desktop were minimal for both location searches. First time I have seen results with so few ads in a long time. I am at the top or close to the top for both searches in my own region and in the European location I checked, but no conversions. Perhaps we all have to factor in the war, inflation, bank collapses and general mood. People are not spending

[Cyril TechWebsites]

A little story.

When using browser, I'm always typing "anal" in my address window. This helps me to make Analytics appear in my fast browsing list and to open Google Analytics.

Today I forgot to switch my language from Ukrainian to English and accidentally typed "фтфд" instead of "anal" (it's the same letters in Ukrainian keyboard, and it's just a bunch of letters without any meaning). And pressed Enter.

After that, I received a list of serps with pron and links to #*$!hub and so on. Google even didn't show me a notification that the safe search is turned off. Is it OK?

[Nutterum]

@BigKat - You are not alone. I have seen massive recrawling efforts. I have several million product pages (big apparel e-commerce) and I have been re-crawled on at least 30% of them, something that rarely happens. Also some new Google bots from previously unknown IP ranges popped up, which might be something to do with Bard maybe? In any case this new algo update might be a big one for e-commerce websites. Too early to tell tho but I guess we will find out after Easter because the data will be skewed due to change in user behavior during these holidays.

[RedBar]

@Cyril TechWebsites

Is it OK?

Whatever floats your boat :-)

You have safe search switched off I assume by your question? Why would G notify you of this? It would be extremely annoying to see that message everytime when looking for p0rn.

[BigKat]

@Nutterum

Google (Gbot) is crawling each of our product pages sometimes over 30 times per day. Our last 7 visits from Google were from googlezip.net. Storebot will crawl us then immediately after crawls from a half dozen IP ranges that don't belong to Google yet identify as storebot. Once I filter out these hits, the bulk of what Google sends is traffic originating from VPN, cloud and host IP addresses. There's a noticeable absence of Google sending traffic from real ISPs and presumably real people. For us, these conditions existed before the core update and have not changed since the core update. This type of activity started after Google added a lot of ads to the SERPS. At this point I'm leaning toward the belief these odd hits, crawls and traffic Google is sending is an attempt to obfuscate the impact (loss of real traffic) from all the ads Google now displays in the SERPS.

[mosxu]

Slow kill tactic if you ask me,

Updates will come with less and less buyers and one day one update will come with no buyers at all!

Every improvement we have made with the website and prices proved to be absolut waste of time.

[RedBar]

Just coming up to 19 hours of my Goggleday and US traffic is 50% of its usual level.

Nearly all non-US companies in my widget sector have been pushed down to a minimum 30+ for the top selling widgets but I wonder what the actual organic traffic levels are since there are so many ads and images it's nearly impossible to find them.

How much of this saturation is turning people away from using search?

[Dalnoon]

This new core update has been quite a roller coaster for me - I initially went up around 35% week over week, then went down, and then back up again. Overall, I'm back to my early Jan rankings/traffic levels, so no biggies.

@Redbar, are images replacing the top positions for your queries? I wonder if Google is misidentifying the nature of your queries, are users looking to buy a service/product when they search for your website?

[christianz]

This new core update has been quite a roller coaster for me - I initially went up around 35% week over week, then went down, and then back up again.

It seems like they re-run this update twice and this is the second attempt playing out. Overall it has been pointless update, judging by which sites went up and which went down.

They could have achieved similar result by using random number generator as ranking decider. It might even work better.

[RedBar]

Just coming up to 19 hours of my Goggleday and US traffic is 50% of its usual level

My Thursday ended with the USA -40%, all other countries at a cursory glance appear to be normal. This morning after 12 hours would seem to be further down for the USA however it is far too early to tell.

@Dainoon

@Redbar, are images replacing the top positions for your queries?

No, simply that traditional classified text ads are now being replaced by images and for popular widgets I am seeing them in blocks:

1 row x 4 sales ad images
2 rows x 4/5 sales ad images
3 rows x 4/ 5 sales ad images
4 rows x 4/ 5 sales ad images

And I'm pretty sure I've seen 5 x 5.

The density of the ads becomes more the further down the page I go with the first orgain results being way below the fold on a big screen. I'm pretty sure many are seeing similar.

I wonder if Google is misidentifying the nature of your queries, are users looking to buy a service/product when they search for your website?

Nope, they are getting the query correct since the results are pretty good EXCEPT for the fact that they are all US sales companies with very few having unique text, images and genuine extensive product information. This is very similar to many widget product sites like white goods for instance, the SERPs is totally revolving around direct sales sites therefore it can be extremely difficult to find any in-depth information.

I supply specialised construction products for every sector of my trade including office blocks, malls, hotels, housing, groundworls etc, my global site is designed specifically for those requiring in-depth information since this is what they require to do their job competently.

[BigKat]

Updates will come with less and less buyers and one day one update will come with no buyers at all!

For buyer intent searches in the USA, I think we're already at the point of no buyers. As I pointed out in the March core update thread, the layout Google is using in the USA is so ad-filled that our #1 ranks aren't producing much traffic anymore. This leads me to believe there is little growth left for Google in buyer intent searches without having to resort to confusing searchers to make them click more ads and/or pushing the USA layout to other countries. Since regulators in other countries aren't nearly as complacent as they are in the USA, those outside North America may be somewhat safe for now. Google isn't spamming info searches as bad, but I expect that to change soon as there is little left in buyer searches for Google to monetize.

I truly believe we're seeing Google peak. The next step for Google could quite possibly be to crash and burn.

[ichthyous]

Updates will come with less and less buyers and one day one update will come with no buyers at all!

My traffic is fairly strong, my ranking is higher than it has been in maybe 2-3 years. I have worked and worked to improve my site and add a lot of new content and unique text which has brought in new traffic. NO SALES, and very few new inquiries at all. I have never seen anything like it in the 20 years I have been online. Of course Google loading up on ads is probably the biggest factor, but I also think there is a lot of unease out there which is contributing to people not spending. Markets are down, a new cold war brewing, war in Europe, and now perhaps a global banking crisis...Google is mostly to blame for loss of US/Canada sales I think, but my traffic from everywhere else is stronger...why no UK, Europe, Australia sales?

[EditorialGuy]

I truly believe we're seeing Google peak. The next step for Google could quite possibly be to crash and burn.

The Yellow Pages phone directories did pretty well back in the day.Maybe Google e-commerce SERPs are meant to evolve into the new Yellow Pages. How many typical searchers care about "10 blue links"? Today's commercial Google SERPs may look like a mess to us, but to the user who's looking for widgets and doesn't care much about page layouts, ad-laden SERPs may work just fine.

[RedBar]

the layout Google is using in the USA is so ad-filled that our #1 ranks aren't producing much traffic anymore.

Undoubtedly this is true, what can be seen in the SERPs v the deluge of ads makes the organics almost irrelevant however serious searchers in my widget sector are still finding us since they are not one-off retail purchasers looking for a supposed bargain, when my trade widgets are specified a lot of regulatory and legal hoops have to be jumped through before approval.

Having written that it is obvious that for my sector of my industry Google is not relying upon us for income, they actually want the retail advertising sector of my trade and this is what they are doing, and doing extremely well, hence all the ad blocks.

Markets are down,

I've been trading globally for 50+ years, the "West" is substantially down, exports to South America I've never cracked since they are pretty self-sufficient, all other markets are normal or increasing nicely. Their economies have not been destroyed by sanctions.

Google e-commerce SERPs are meant to evolve into the new Yellow Pages.

To be honest I though this has been the case for several years.