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?

[mhansen]

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

Since Monday, we've seen a considerable increase in Google referred search traffic, roughly 25% up from the previous week and our floating 30-day average.

Our leads however, have dropped by a bit higher amount, and conversions are down 30%.

Google knows exactly what they are doing.

[BigKat]

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

@RedBar

What Google is displaying for product ads in our industry, and often Amazon as the #1 organic listing, fails to meet current safety standards. Undoubtedly we are losing a lot of B2C sales as a result of the unsafe product ads Google is displaying. This is where having diversity in the search results would be beneficial to the consumer since the companies selling these unsafe products will not list that as a selling point. :) Fortunately B2B customers are more knowledgeable when it comes to safety standards, their exposed liability when using unsafe products and new B2B customers are finding our products outside Google along with more shall I say "educated" B2C shoppers.

[KaseyM]

Drops continuing...

[Dalnoon]

I see some big changes starting at 11am GMT - Maybe it's the last leg of March core update?

[EditorialGuy]

Yes, the March Core Update is complete. Here's RustyBrick's report:

[searchengineland.com...]

searchengineland.com Google March 2023 broad core update done rolling out This March 2023 core update took 13 days to roll out. This was a fairly impactful update compared to previous core updates.

[skynet84]

The last day of the core update I was penalized and especially a website that copied me rose above me. Even websites that copied my images as well, my face my internal links, with a google search they are ahead of me in the first position and I in the fifth position. My domain have an authority of 53 and website with 0 authority and 12 authority are above me. I have been working 4 Years everyday with top notch quality articles and I never copied anything from anywhere. Do you want the icing on the cake? Do you want the icing on the cake? The guy who copied half my site sent me an email bragging about his positive google results after this core update. I'm so demoralized that you don't get the idea.

[christianz]

@skynet

This is totally normal for the completely broken Google ranking algo.

However, I would not look at third party "authority scores". They have zero relevance and zero usefulness. Any random computer generated spam site can achieve 53 DR within relatively short time.

[Nutterum]

@skynet84 - you can report the site to Google and on their Webmaster forums. Yes its a long shot but I have seen manual checks being made on Google's part to manually punish such sites. The best route is to basically pay though. With more than 5k daily spend on Ads you are assigned a Google success manager that can quickly call up manual check on shady sites copying content. Personally did that several times in the past with my Google Reps. They tell you they can't influence that but in reality they do. I feel your pain though. I have experienced this in the past and it sucks major *** .

On the Google update rollout completion. There was some big hickup in the SERPs in the 22 - 25 March period where all the verticals I operate on saw jump in traffic followed by steep decline and in to back to normality. Some big competitors (talking in the hunders of thousands to millions of organic hits a day) took a nose dive in that period and got quickly rolled back and that was visible on all third party trackers so it could not have been some random error by the tracking tools.

[Alex_1729]

@skynet84 definitely report to their host. You can easily find the host by many of the services out there. Do not let them get away with this.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

As I understand the situation — there is no reason to wait until Google is repaired and the SERPs will be back to relevant results. Googlers are slaves of their shareholders and they don't really care about the quality of the SERPs. Those of us who are continuing to produce content are just wasting our own time. On this step, I don't believe something will change in the future (until the final crap of Google).

[skynet84]

Finally I see a reverse. I got hit on 28 march but 29 and 30 march everything is working again as expected. Hope this is the final results.

[RubicCubed]

Google's core update did nothing for us because good ranks still produces zombie traffic.

[ErrlyBird]

Have taken a huge swing back into the right direction. Been seeing our lowest lows since this update dropped, as soon as it finished rolling out, everything started flooding back in. I don't know if it will hold, but for now I can take a breath.

[CommandDork]

@ErrlyBird

I've seen something similar. It didn't "all" come back but numbers are certainly better than the lowest-lows of earlier this week.

[BigKat]

good ranks still produces zombie traffic

@RubicCubed

As I posted in the core update thread, this is the breakdown of the type of traffic Google is sending us:

28.36% Genuine ISP IP addresses
34.75% Googlezip IP addresses
36.89% VPN/Cloud/Host/Bot IP addresses

The hits from Googlezip IP addresses are pre-fetches generated by searchers. The problem is these Googlezip hits don't result in much traffic because searchers rarely get beyond the ads. Roughly 1/4 of the traffic Google sends us is worthwhile whereas Bing's is 90%+. I suspect the traffic Google is sending to you, and many others, is similar to ours and why many define it as "zombie traffic."

[haramamba]

28.36% Genuine ISP IP addresses
34.75% Googlezip IP addresses
36.89% VPN/Cloud/Host/Bot IP addresses

And a huge amount of iPhone zombies that do only "GET /" and never try to pass a captcha.

[ErrlyBird]

I've seen something similar. It didn't "all" come back but numbers are certainly better than the lowest-lows of earlier this week.

We are almost right back where we started. I have no idea what's going on but its very weird.

I have noticed the SERPs are just completely messed up though. I run a gaming community for a game called Ark. I use admin commands on a daily basis and finding the ones I need has become an issue. Before, the SERP would have the web page with the most info and codes on it as number 1. They have since dropped that same site to second page and none of the first page is even remotely close to helpful on my queries. This update was a huge mistake by Google. I mean just reading the comments and concerns of 90% of the SEO world should be telling enough. But then actually using G for personal use and noticing how bad things are, they have to know what they did was bad. I'm so confused by what is happening and I think everyone else seems just as confused as me.

[BigKat]

And a huge amount of iPhone zombies that do only "GET /" and never try to pass a captcha.

Google sends an incredible amount of useless and highly questionable traffic. Needless to say, our Bing traffic substantially outperforms Google's. And what's the deal with Google crawling our product pages sometimes up to two times per hour? More wasted bandwidth as if the questionable traffic Google sends isn't enough of a waste...

[haramamba]

And what's the deal with Google crawling our product pages sometimes up to two times per hour?

And what is the point to ping the pages that return 410 (gone) 20 times per day, 24x7?

[BigKat]

And what is the point to ping the pages that return 410 (gone) 20 times per day, 24x7?

With nearly 3/4 of the traffic Google sending being highly suspect, crawling pages sometimes 50 times a day, pinging 410 pages 20 times a day, etc. is all designed to greatly inflate Google's status in the eyes of the public IMO.

For a number of years Bing has produced more daily sales then Google with only a small fraction of the traffic. At the end of the day, conversions are what pays the bills. Google's declining role in delivering sales is why we are seeing all this useless site activity IMO. Many using GA will never see what you and I have described, which is why relying on a Google product to evaluate Google traffic isn't the smartest thing for webmasters to do.

Imagine the resources Google is using to produce all this smoke and erect these mirrors. Doesn't much matter to them because all of these datacenters are heavily subsidized by taxpayers/ratepayers (in the USA at least). Maybe if we all weren't paying higher electric bills to subsidize these datacenters, then they would utilize their resources in a more constructive manner. Regardless, it would be nice to see some transparency from Google and answers to why so much of the traffic they send from search is questionable and their other bizarre crawling/ping activity is necessary. One thing is certain, I don't see this type of activity from any other search engine.

[ichthyous]

Many using GA will never see what you and I have described, which is why relying on a Google product to evaluate Google traffic isn't the smartest thing for webmasters to do.

I agree with this...uninstalled GA two years ago. Just slows down your site and provides Google with data while they return none back. Haven't missed it at all.

I am not seeing the volume of odd / bot traffic from Google search. Direct traffic is however suspect. I blocked all Chinese visits direct to the files and placed challenges on traffic from Bangladesh, Pakistan etc...countries that send a considerable amount of form spam and just copy my images but aren't viable as customers. Sorry, don't need the dead weight

[Dalnoon]

Well, I just realized someone has been copying literally every page/article of my website. I just tried sending some DMCA notices but I don't think that would go anywhere. I also submitted it to Google's "Report Content" thing - anyone has been through this before? Any tips or tricks?
The guy is copying the title, bullet points, and headers but the images are his/her own, and the content is very mildly changed (I'm guessing they're using some kind of a content spinner)

[ichthyous]

Indian spam traffic seems to be increasing lately. Does anyone on here currently block traffic completely from certain countries, and if so why?

I have all traffic from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam and a few other countries presented with a "managed challenge" from cloudflare. This traffic is useless to me as they just steal my images and spam my forms and are never going to convert to customers. I do not like the idea of blocking all the traffic from any country entirely, but this may be coming as this managed challenge isn't really working.

@Dalnoon I have used the Google DMCA takedown request many times over the years when sites are infringing on my images, which are 100% proprietary. Mostly this is for pages in countries where there is no way to pursue the infringement. The page vanishes from the index once Google approves it. That is your only recourse, but it is effective since that page is no longer competing with your own. Not sure how easy will be to verify the text is yours though, images are much easier to prove.

[RedBar]

April 2023 started here:

[webmasterworld.com...]