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.

[ichthyous]

It had recovered since Tuesday, but today both UK and USA traffic are -30%. I don't have any product reviews, only Google business reviews so I doubt the latest update had any effect on me. My guess is it's just spring break. We also have unseasonably warm summer-like weather here already...people are out

[ErrlyBird]

It had recovered since Tuesday, but today both UK and USA traffic are -30%. I don't have any product reviews, only Google business reviews so I doubt the latest update had any effect on me. My guess is it's just spring break. We also have unseasonably warm summer-like weather here already

The way they worded it, it seem like third party reviews are not even what it is looking for. It seems like they are looking for the blog/content writers to have reviews in your main content. First hand experience etc. Just a bit odd to me but that's how I took it, I could be wrong.


Edit: [developers.google.com...]

developers.google.com Google Search's Reviews System Google Search Central     What's new     Google Developers Learn more about how the reviews system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

[phranque]

It does not evaluate third-party reviews, such as those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page.

[RedBar]

As expected from historical data, a very poor week at about 50%. Let's see if it bounces back next week.

[Martin Ice Web]

Since last week amazonbot is crawling like crazy. Never seen this before.
Maybe amazon is going to get a piece of search ads revenue in future?

[BigKat]

Since last week amazonbot is crawling like crazy.

If you sell on Amazon, they are likely comparing product prices to make sure you are selling at the lowest price on Amazon. In the past we've had warnings for selling cheaper on our own website despite the fact Amazon's pro-consumer fraud policies and fees justified our higher pricing on Amazon. We haven't sold on Amazon in a while, and I see no Amazon bot activity - just the common compute.amazon junk.

Maybe amazon is going to get a piece of search ads revenue in future?

Would be nice if they went back to offering product ads that pointed to external sites. We did this back in the day and had good success without all of Amazon's ridiculous marketplace policies. This is the only way I could see my company spending a dime with Amazon in the future. But if it takes out of Google's wallet, that a plus in my view. I still hope to see an Apple search engine as I think Apple has the user base to quickly put Google in check.

Maybe between Bing's AI, external ads on Amazon and an Apple search engine we could see them all devour Google's breakfast, lunch and dinner?

[ichthyous]

There is a lot going on now...NY Times reports that Google is planning a second search engine and is frantically trying to incorporate AI into it's current search: [nytimes.com...]

The comments are golden...apparently people are noticing that ads have taken over and do not like it one bit. From the tone of this article Google is in imminent danger of losing the top spot in search...we all know that that will take a long time and a lot of upheaval, and that new AI search engines might actually be worse for us than the current situation.

By the way...my USA traffic is -59% this morning. I am still ranking quite well, and gaining new terms...but upon inspection this morning it seems to be that Google has removed the prominent multi-image carousels under my links and now those landing pages have a 60%-90% drop starting yesterday and this morning.

[engine]

@ichthyous FYI Google in Race For New AI-Powered Search in Project Magi [webmasterworld.com...]

[linkbuilder1]

I'm working on my client website there so many traffic visiting this site but normally 30% Down Sale

[ichthyous]

Huge traffic declines for USA, Canada and Germany today...-59% at 1pm. This is mostly concentrated in traffic drops of 85% for my two most important terms and pages. I checked last night and this morning and I am #1 for the same terms and still ranking highly for the rest. Where is this huge drop coming from? I do not see the page stuffed with ads...on the contrary there are fewer ads than I normally see. I did notice that now none of the results have image blocks underneath anymore...they have all been removed and some have one simple image at right or no images at all for the entire page of results. Anyone else noticing this?

[RedBar]

My global site's 50% reductiion has continued into today, my tenth day.

March into April 2021 began my 40% decline, with this reduction it would mean my traffic at 30% of only two years ago.

I can clearly see the finishing line directly in front of me and it's already full of seemingly willing, wealthy advertisers! I wonder if they'll have a market to sell to?

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google traffic was down about 17 percent today, and overall users and pageviews were off by 15+ percent. The biggest declines were in the most popular (and arguably the best) section of our long-established editorial travel site. Some of our top pages for that topic dropped 20 percent or more, but others were more stable or went up, so the drop wasn't the result of an across-the-board demotion. It's just weird, especially since we have a LOT of expertise for the affected section topic and page topics and we should be benefiting from the first "E" in "E-E-A-T."

For a site that normally sees very little volatility in Google traffic and rankings, this is really strange.

[ichthyous]

What I think I am seeing is a reversion back to 2021 results for some terms which can return either informational or commercial results...the informational sites are all back at the top, as it was in 2021. This trend started at the end of March I believe and I have seen a steady drop in traffic since then. The issue for me is that a lot of my traffic has been juiced by just a couple of terms which are extremely competitive and highly searched. My results used to have a huge image carousel but now it's gone, and so nobody sees me buried among the widgets and competitors...images, videos, articles, suggested posts etc. Losing that image carousel has made my traffic for these terms drop 80% with little or no change in rank. Nothing on my site has changed at all, so why remove the image carousel?

[RedBar]

A continuation of the mediocrity with another 8 trade working days to go until the end of this month when I have have important meetings at our Indian HQ.

[Martin Ice Web]

Didn´t know that googl e is that silly bad but it is.

Had to help a friend with his wordpress site, since he has some errors. (i am not in wp !)

So searched bing for
"/themes/jupiter/framework/includes/phpquery/phpQuery.php curly"

and found only one entry. Not very helpfull as it was out of date.
Thought give google a try and found >1000 entries. But after take a deeper look it turns out that all this sites have the same wp error and google index that error!
I try to figure out what this means in regard of site indexing. This is a error message generated by php that is returned before any html code. I thought google is regarding content between body tags.

[RedBar]

Here we go Wednesday, 11 hours into my Googleday and my traffic is at 50% of my NEW 50% average ... In fact all sites, including many customers, are wayyyyy down this morning, some sites have zero traffic whatsoever.

Last night I have a quick examination of my SERPs, what an utter mess except for users of ebay, Amazon and Pinterest. Those "real" trade pages that were there, under the myriad of classified ads, were so thin they obviously had not E-A-T-en in months !

[shadowlight]

Losing that image carousel has made my traffic for these terms drop 80% with little or no change in rank. Nothing on my site has changed at all, so why remove the image carousel?

Probably because they want people clicking on the ADS that have images in order to see an image rather than an organic result that G don't make any money on.

Googles mission statement "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" should read "exploiting the worlds information to make as much profit as we possibly can".

[ErrlyBird]

SERPs were broken last night for me. Tried doing some searches for codes in a game I play, results were 3 videos and nothing else literally. Was like this for multiple queries so I ended up just using bing. Get it together G.

[ichthyous]

I am seeing more and more of my terms moving into the top 3 / 10 spots this week, but the traffic just isn't there. In checking GSC I see the culprit...on March 30th of this year clicks and impressions started to diverge widely, with one spike on April 10th: [ibb.co ]

Clicks and impressions had been tracking closely (on an upward trend together) since the end of August 2022, but this entire month of April impressions are quite a bit higher than clicks. The last period I see that is May 2022-August 2022. From March 30th, 2023 onward, Google has made some subtle (or not-so-subtle) change to the SERPS to dissuade people from clicking the organic results...like removing image carousels for organic results.

This has been the first period of clicks trending downward since my site started to take off at the end of last summer...it marched higher and higher in impressions / clicks / traffic until March 30th. That has been mostly the result of a lot of new content being added all the time, and a small facelift of the site which improved the design. Traffic improved considerably compared to 2022, and there have been more sales than 2022...but nowhere close to 2021.

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2023-04-19-at-8-19-26-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2023-04-19-at-8-19-26-AM hosted in ImgBB

[BigKat]

@ichthyous

We arrived at the party in late January, shortly before you. More ads and more features (boxes) gutted organic traffic and has remained that way for us since. Google does loosen the noose a bit here and there when they rotate different layouts in. But in general, organic in Google has been dead for us for about three solid months. I suspected when I first saw these new ad heavy layouts that Google would expand these organic killing layouts to other industries and info searches - which they have. Even the most simple "how to" type queries are now displaying ads for service providers. Imagine seeing ads for service providers on a query like "how to tie my shoes" which is similar in simplicity to some info pages we see in our sector.

It's really interesting to see how fast Google has fallen and how desperate they have become. Thankfully shoppers are using alternative search engines to find what we sell. Google may have misjudged their user's loyalty along with how long their gravy train would stay on the tracks...

[ichthyous]

@BigKat The additional ads have been there for quite some time, but my impressions and clicks kept rising until exactly March 30th. Then slowly declining and the gap between impressions and clicks is getting wider. This week USA and Canada traffic are atrocious...all other traffic is going full tilt. That is simply due to the huge drop in traffic from my top ranking three or four terms, which have always brought in a disproportionate amount of traffic. I am ranking the same (or higher) but the traffic is gone. I am not seeing more ads, in fact less. The issue for me is that having the image carousel drew people to my site link and now those have been stripped. Other sites do show it for some results...they are getting the traffic now. For other searches, none of the sites had image carousels anymore. I hope that is temporary, but it's been a week now.

[BigKat]

@ichthyous
Those features appear to come and go as needed so Google can likely meet their profit targets as shadowlight noted up thread. Hopefully the carousel will come back for you, even if it's just for 20% of the time because that's better then the near nothing I've seen from Google over the last few months.

[samsseo]

Anyone else noticed video clicks in GSC (Search results > Search appearance > Videos) drop off a cliff after Google made the change where videos only appear when the video is considered the main content of a page? I have access to 3 sites hosting videos and all had the same drop... all the way to zero 😳

[rustybrick]

@samsseo - see [developers.google.com...]

developers.google.com Simplifying video presentation on Google Search Results     Google Search Central Blog     Google Developers

[yollo03]

Something is happening, it looks like another update is being rolled out...

[superclown2]

Something is happening, it looks like another update is being rolled out...

Yes I'll second that, a fair bit of movement here in the UK - in my vertical at least.

[RareBit]

We saw a bit of movement yesterday but today nearly all positions are back to where they were before the core update..

[samsseo]

@rustybrick yeah this is what I was referring to. I was getting a few thousand clicks a day showing in this report which fell to zero. No change to the number of indexed videos showing up, although I know that this doesn't mean they necessarily will show up, it just means they are eligible to. All videos are after the first paragraph, so I hoped they were seen as prominent enough.

[samsseo]

Regarding a possible update today, I'm also seeing movement. Plus the Semrush Sensor has spiked

[renatovieira]

Huge drop since yesterday. The december update ranked several keywords on my site. I have nothing to complain about. There were 4 months of very high traffic. But since april 19th, everything is going down. Something big is going on...

[samsseo]

@renatovieira I also had some of my best performing months before the core update last month. It's always frustrating to see the core updates demote our content one month, then favour it the following update, only to demote it again in the next update and so on. I know this sounds like a textbook case of a site being "on the edge" of Google's quality threshold, but imo there's no reason why this would be the case for the site in question.

[Dalnoon]

I'm also seeing a drop since last night. Can't really see any similarities between the pages that have dropped but my guess is the "people also asked" segment in the SERPs has gotten a boost, which means lower traffic for text links.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Another big drop since yesterday. It seems it won't stop until demote the entire website.

[RedBar]

Yesterday evening UK time I did a couple of hours of USA SERPs checking for about 100 keywords using Win 10, a squeaky clean Chrome and SurfShark VPN. What did I find and I obviously realise that Joe Public does not have a clean, geek set-up.

A big proportion of my keywords ranked #1-3 BUT what was very noticeable was that about 30% of keyword pages did not rank at all, absolutely nowhere to be found even though they were there not so long ago and under this site's latest build have been there since 2014.

So, just where the heck are they, where have they gone, why have they gone?

Has G made an absolute "horlicks" of something and is in panic retrieval mode?

I have no idea, any suggestions?

[not2easy]

@RedBar - We have seen a few new discussions around here that follow your description of findings recently. At least one of them has some years of history prior to recent keywords drops.

A big proportion of my keywords ranked #1-3 BUT what was very noticeable was that about 30% of keyword pages did not rank at all, absolutely nowhere to be found even though they were there not so long ago and under this site's latest build have been there since 2014.

See these:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ichthyous]

According to the SEO apps I use to track ranking I am gaining a lot of new top 3 and top 10 terms all week, yet traffic to my most important and rock solid landing pages is down as much as 80% all week. I first saw traffic to one recover, then another one recovered today...but the final few are still down drastically in terms of traffic with no change in ranking. Traffic to my home page, which was down for almost three weeks, is now higher. Some change has happened and it isn't due to the number of ads. Clickthrough has dropped steadily since March 30th, while impressions are steadily higher.

[MarkizSEO]

I'm seeing a big drop in crawl requests from April 9 till today.

[prnt.sc...]

Anybody else?

prnt.sc Screenshot Captured with Lightshot

[Dalnoon]

@MarkizSEO
I also noticed a drop in crawl requests, but mine started on April 4th.

[Dalnoon]

@RedBar have you tried updating the last-modified-date for those pages? I've noticed Google sometimes removes my pages if I don't keep them updated (even if it means I only change a couple of words on the page)

[BigKat]

@MarkizSEO

I often see deviations in crawling when major updates are rolled out. Since another review update was pushed on the 12th, I wouldn't worry too much. I too see a large drop in crawling and also a large drop in Google pre-fetches (googlezip). These pre-fetches are starting to return in spurts, and I'd say Google is close to finishing the review update.

As it relates to crawling, I question why Google hasn't dialed back the crawling after increasing the number of ads in the SERPS. For example, why would Google crawl our product pages 20+ times per day with Gbot when ads have stripped away 80% of the organic traffic to some products? Why would Google also waste resources pre-fetching info pages where once again ads have stripped away over half of the organic traffic? I'd look for Google to balance crawling to the new reality that organic listings aren't getting much traffic for some queries anymore.

[renatovieira]

Today I notice high traffic. Looks like it's getting back to normal. Anyone else notice anything different today?

[ichthyous]

Today I notice high traffic. Looks like it's getting back to normal. Anyone else notice anything different today?

I am seeing non-USA traffic back to normal. USA traffic has been unusually low since the Easter weekend and has never reverted. That is due to a large loss in traffic to some of my most important landing pages, despite no change in rank. Upon closer inspection of the SERPS I am finding that the results are returning a block of images, three ads, local results, a block of videos, and then the first organic site link. The 1st and 2nd place results are the same two sites over and over, one of which had dropped off the map for months but now is at #1 again for every search...there is definitely some sort of manipulation going on there. These are all searches which include a place name like "New York XYZ" "London XYZ" and "Dubai XYZ". My ranking is still strong, but for most of these searches the image carousel has been stripped from all of the links, so it's hard to stand out. These apparently slight changes have resulted in massive losses of traffic...up to 80% less traffic for each of the landing pages.

[ichthyous]

Absolutely massive drop in USA / Canada traffic starting 7am sharp today (April 21st)...-35% at 2:30. Anyone else seeing this?

[bebopandrocksteady]

Yes, unfortunately, I've taken a beating today.

[bebopandrocksteady]

I'm not sure I've ever seen so much shuffling. So much so that my semrush isn't as reliable (although it's showing a nosedive, which is correct).

[ichthyous]

Google has taken a targetted hit out on exactly one of my site's most trafficked landing pages...a 92% loss in traffic, despite no drop in rank over the last three months. The traffic for all of the similar/associated search terms has vanished in tandem, in some cases the clicks reported from GSC for a term went from 20 per day to zero and has stayed there since April 14th. The traffic to this page and these terms increased steadily for the last 9 months, and then just vanished all at once....the image below says it all.

This can't be a penalty or I wouldn't be ranking so highly...it's simply more items loaded on the page for this entire set of of semantically similar terms and the loss of features like prominent image carousels under the organic listings. Has anyone else seen this? If it spreads to other sets of terms I am cooked.

[ibb.co ]

ibb.co Screen-Shot-2023-04-22-at-10-03-19-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screen-Shot-2023-04-22-at-10-03-19-AM hosted in ImgBB

[intersect]

60% loss on a huge website. Lost #1 positions to page 3. No clue what is going on.
Don't see any penalties in search console. Freaking out right now.

[mosxu]

We are back to full traffic of zombies, lawless #*$!s

[RedBar]

@ichthyous - As much as many of us are "blaming" G's ad placements, I find it difficult to accept that this is the answer to recent massive traffic drops.

For instance I do know there is a massive decline in both my trade widget enquiries and international shipments and especially so to the West.

Over the next few weeks I have several international trade fairs to visit. I have important company board meetings to attend and these are with hands-on people of 40-60 years trade experience each, it's going to be an interestng April and May without a doubt.

Freaking out right now.

As we Brits are fond of saying "Keep Calm & Carry On" :-)

[mosxu]

The chance of making any money with this search engine it is zero!