April 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

I'll kick it off ... Early this morning I had a genuine trade visitor view 500+ pages on their phone ... I guess they were bored:-)

I know they were genuine since they actually sent me an enquiry and told me they'd spent 2 hours on the site.

[Tambran]

Seeing early signs of another ranking update on sites that we monitor travel and info sector.

[haramamba]

@ichthyous

Does anyone on here currently block traffic completely from certain countries, and if so why?

20+ countries including China, Vietnam, Angola, Seychelles. Also 300+ hosting providers like OVH and Amazon (I still accept smtp from them).
Anything producing spam, port scans, ssh attacks goes into firewall.

[mhansen]

Does anyone on here currently block traffic completely from certain countries, and if so why?

I do. Quite a few actually, and it usually begins with seeing them pop into analytics from Google search, with -1 second dwell time and 1 page view per visit. A few months ago, we saw a large spike in GA over 3-4 days for Google organic search referrals. By large, I mean 5,000+ daily visits, ALL from one country (Seychelles), and all less than 1 second before leaving.

[mhansen]

Whew - Don't mean to post twice, but I just ran a search on G of a phrase that we maintained the #1 organic on for the last few months. It's not a huge volume phrase, but SEMR has it around 500/month. It's a transactional query about the current price of something.

After the ads, ALL the organic results are Google book results. Literally, all results on page 1.

[Dalnoon]

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.

Alright, thanks for the info. I just submitted a report to Google and around 18 pages got approved as DMCA immediately, the rest of the 100-something pages are under review.

Regarding the country block, I also block India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and a couple of other countries, just because there were too many crawlers/bots that I didn't want around my website.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop this morning...my USA traffic is -61% at 10am. CA is -62% and UK is -10%. Traffic to my home page and some of my landing pages is down between 66%-75%. Something is definitely cooking today.

[ErrlyBird]

Picking up momentum. Dropped to lowest lows for the March update and now we are back where we left of a few days after it finished rolling out. Seems to be holding close to similar levels pre update. Trying not to make a bunch of changes currently just to see where things settle down at.

[RedBar]

Certainly something has changed / improved / altered for my global site. Yesterday, Monday, saw my busiest project enquiry day since pre-2020 even including one from the USA. Overall traffic visitor numbers and page views were up for March and seem to be continuing into April however what the Easter break will bring is altogether another guess.

[Treud]

I’m up since the last big update, but it’s mostly the CTR that somehow almost double. Maybe I’m above some ads !

[RedBar]

I'm concerned ! My global site is experiencing what I would call as "completely normal traffic levels" for almost two days now.

I've changed nothing whatsoever, as usual, therefore whatever it is has to be at G's end or a general pick-up in interest.

UK site still well ahead of expectations, the Easter holidays will be interesting to see how much of it turns into takings at the tills together with how much of it is cash v cards.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is sluggish at best again today...not massively down like yesterday but search is -13% and usa / UK traffic both down 22% at 11:30am. Canada is down 62%. I am not seeing big declines in my ranking though, so it appears that this is probably related to page layout and ad stuffing. It will be a train wreck if it continues as traffic to my main pages is way down.

[RareBit]

We have been getting really good traffic this week, but sales have been terrible (revenue is currently 5o% up YoY so I am not too concerned..yet) I can't see any issue when I dig into data but I am wondering if the April price hikes here in the UK are impacting sales..

[BigKat]

it’s mostly the CTR that somehow almost double. Maybe I’m above some ads !

There has been a change in the desktop ad layout for buyer queries. Google had a product ad block after results 2-4 which is now gone from the queries I checked. Now the #2 result is squished between the people also ask box and the first product ad block. Results 3-8 are grouped together before the next product ad block appears. With this layout, it may be better to rank within positions 3-8 since 1 and 2 would easily be overlooked by searchers avoiding ads. And that brings me to my next thought... I would expect Google to frequently change ad layouts to avoid giving searchers the opportunity to overlook ads that appear in static positions.

[Alex_1729]

Two of my informational sites that benefited from the latest update have dropped in impressions by 10%, starting yesterday. These are young sites, unrelated, that should be growing (and have been growing nicely), but it's been sluggish for the last 2 days. Something surely happened. Hopefully, this doesn't last.

[Treud]

I'm having a loss but it's normal as we are during week days, the week-end was quite good though in traffic, but no conversion. Impression are stable, have to check that CTR thing. But like said before, if Google changes the ads layout to fool the audience that must shake the results.

[ichthyous]

Massive decline on Tuesday, Wednesday a full recovery plus some, today an even larger drop. Search is -29% and direct is -25% at 11:30 am. My home page is -70% and many landing pages are down 26%-78%. USA is -38% and UK -62% at 11am. These are big drops...could it be from Easter / Passover / Spring Break all starting? Anyone else seeing these kinds of huge drops? According to SEMrush my visibility increased and I am holding steady in ranking, so this is certainly odd unless Google cranked up the ads to the nth degree this week.

[Dalnoon]

@ichthyous Yeah, usually right before long weekends there's a drop

[ichthyous]

@Dalnoon Yes, but actually tomorrow starts the weekend and my drops are not usually this large for any holiday...perhaps will recover 2nd half of the day, we see

[RedBar]

My global site for the moment is continuing at its new, higher level, I expect it to drop from tomorrow.

The UK hotel / venue website is going ballistic today in all departments, here's to a good weekend ... Cheers :-)

[EditorialGuy]

After the March Core Update, our 21-year-old editorial travel site was about even with where it was before the update started. (The update period itself was a much more volatile two weeks than usual.)

In the last few days, though, I've seen daily increases. Google traffic was up nearly 23 percent today, compared to the same day last week. We did especially well for a couple of our major topics. It's possible, of course, that demand has simply been up in the last few days, and that Google rankings had nothing to do with the increases. I'm mystified but pleased, although I've been in this game long enough to know that the good times won't necessarily last.

[Micha]

Numbers have fortunately recovered, but everyone knows that when you rejoice, Google announces the next update

[Soulofmonk]

Massive ranking changes in my niche today.

[RedBar]

Friday was good for me across all sites, as expected today, Saturday, apart from the hotel venue, it is much quieter and if previous years are anything to go by it will stay this way until w/c 17th April.

[mosxu]

Traffic that is not traffic here.

We are paying for bots on our ads that copy the behavior of our previous human users

Stop it

[haramamba]

G continues to put spammy sites on the first place.
What I see in my niche today:

We are the leading manufacturer of XXXX
Here you will learn how to use XXXX
The XXXX specifications are available here
...

And more, and more, nearly 20 short keyword-stuffed phrases about XXXX.
Now we see a feedback quotation from some John Doe telling how happy is he with the XXXX.
But where are the examples/howtos/specs/pictures? Nothing on the page and the page itself is 10 year old.
So how G evaluates the damn "usefulness"? I don't know, I give up.

[ichthyous]

Very odd traffic lately...my traffic was very low Thursday and Friday, then Saturday rebounded and Sunday is normal to above average. Does this make sense? Who is sitting around on Easter Sunday looking at websites? I do realize now that my traffic tanked badly because of the concurrent Easter / Ramadan / Passover and spring break holidays. I get a huge amount of traffic from schools and universities and always have. But the traffic today seems unusually high for Easter Sunday...

[EditorialGuy]

Sunday is normal to above average. Does this make sense? Who is sitting around on Easter Sunday looking at websites?

Our Easter Sunday traffic is looking pretty normal (on a par with last Sunday and a pre-Core Update Sunday in March). Once the Easter Bunny has come and gone, our readers apparently go back to their computers and their phones.

[RedBar]

For my global site traffic was as expected at about 33% for both days, the big surprise was Monday at 91% with a nice spread of countries, so far for April I am pleasantly surprised to be at 100% however do bear in mind that this is still -40% v two years ago!

The hotel venue has had a storming holiday weekend with a lot of interest already being shown for the Coronation holiday weekend in 4 weeks time.

[ichthyous]

Post holiday traffic has recovered back to normal, but traffic to my most important landing pages is still down by up to 45%. I took a look and Google has removed the image carousel from many listings, so they are ranking the same but they have much less visibility. The number of ads shown on the page is also absurd. UK, AU, and CA traffic has also been declining steadily ~ March 31st...UK -38% today at noon, and AU is -42%. Has anyone noticed a shakeup in these regions?