May 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Here we go, will anything improve after a very poor April for many or will traffic continue to be hoovered-up by the G ad machine? No prizes for guessing correctly!

[Broaster]

All my traffic has been obliterated Ill post new articles and only get like 5 visits an hour if that. This been going on for the past 3 months. There is no use anymore. Ive also been penalized on google news search when I post a new article it shows up full title search on the very last page of google news search.

I noticed nothing matches the search term either just some obscure articles from the same news sites that have nothing to do with the topic. Google search is in shambles and they never cared to fix it.

[Broaster]

I noticed that when I see the Top Stories carousel its the same websites with multiple positions. Essentially Sports, Marca, Sports Keeda. How are they getting every single ranking, all the time? with even multiple positions for a keyword search it doesn't add up. I thought the Algorithm is random?

Maybe they have connections with some foreign google employees who entered them in the system to rank all the time in top stories?

[BigKat]

Its been 27 years and for the first time, I am lost and going to give up SEO. There really is no organic anymore

I've been grinding it out nearly as long and agree organic is essentially dead (for smaller stores in the USA anyway). What we sell we also produce and can't be purchased in marketplaces or found in Google Ads. Just like the marketplaces, Google has become a dumping ground for Chinese products. With low wages, and possibly slave labor, who else can feed Google's greed from margins they don't have? I get it, Amazon can afford Google's ads because they've received over $6 billion in tax subsidies here in the USA. We, as a manufacture and retailer, received not one dime in taxpayer support even during the pandemic. I'm sure Amazon, Walmart, etc. get special Google Ads pricing, perks and direct access to Google reps that can issue credits for some of the nonsense we've seen and don't get reimbursed for. Anyway, all who's left in Google's ads for our industry is marketplace ads for products made/sold by the Chinese.

I do hope consumers will wisen up to what Google is spoon feeding them and look elsewhere. Better yet, I hope something else fills the void to actually help consumers find products/services by providing them with choices/options instead of a page full of ads for China products.

[ichthyous]

I do hope consumers will wisen up to what Google is spoon feeding them and look elsewhere. Better yet, I hope something else fills the void to actually help consumers find products/services by providing them with choices/options instead of a page full of ads for China products.

They won't...most people want the cheapest price possible. That drowns out all the other products. More likely, those of us with products that don't fit this model will abandon Google search entirely. That is where I am headed, and it will free up my life to work on other things and not always web site and SEO. I am trying in-person trade fairs for the first time in 20 years...it's time to reach the $$$ buyers directly and forget the lowest common denominator crap from Google...it's a downward spiral that is going to suck us all down with it. For a long time now even the real inquiries from Google are not buying anything...they cannot distinguish quality from cheap crap and so they are not convertible into actual sales. That has been the case for all of 2022 and 2023 so far.

[headspace]

I think a lot of people are experiencing huge drops in traffic at the moment.
week on week I am looking at a 70% drop. I think G is just essentially at capacity with the search network and need to shed websites/publishers to preserve bandwidth. They need to get users off the network as quickly as possible hence a lot of the first positions are now just taken up with answering directly the same questions which people are asking over and over again.
What used to happen is that people would click on a website, get a partial answer come back to google and click on another website etc etc etc. All of this is very resource intensive.

If they are looking for product why not just point them to amazon?, why have them go to smaller websites with smaller inventories and have to come back to search?

It was managable at some point, but now every Government, business and organistion in the world has a website presence. They tried to free up resources with the AMP pages initiative but this hasn't worked. Mainly because trying to get a fully AMP compliant website was just too much hard work.

So they had to start shedding websites/publishers. Its virtually impossible to join the adsense network now as a new website and it takes ages to get any new website indexed in G.
They've also figured out that most small to medium-sized websites are now priced out of adwords so they need to make ad revenue from the big brands.
The only constant is change.

[Broaster]

Whats crazy is this search issue is a greater concern overall becuase people who dont even have websites and are searching for stuff say obscure articles come up or articles that have nothing to do with what they are looking for. They could be searching for a Tennis elbow solution and some Vogue article about fashion comes up or a Video game site.

The greatest years of Google I still remember were the mid 2000s those were the days when id search for stuff and LOVED finding random websites who had great information, now everything seems to be major corporation websites or websites that Google favors.

[ichthyous]

They've also figured out that most small to medium-sized websites are now priced out of adwords so they need to make ad revenue from the big brands

Yes, that is exactly what I am seeing. Only large companies can afford to pay for adwords so why bother about the little guys...let them eat cake! We are getting disappeared by Google so that people will be forced and tricked into clicking ads that only very large companies can afford anymore.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Have a bad feeling that all these insane fluctuations that were happening from Friday till now are preparation. I believe we will see some kind of big update on Memorial Day.

[superclown2]

I think G is just essentially at capacity with the search network and need to shed websites/publishers to preserve bandwidth

They are not just doing that, they are simplifying search terms too. Ask for red square widgets and you'll get a long list of high 'authority' sites selling widgets with no mention of 'red' or 'square'. It cuts down on the processing power necessary to produce results of sorts but it means that small specialised sites that actually write about the subject don't get a look in.

In my humble opinion Google are deliberately making their results poorer in the interests of their profit margin: they feel that they are 'just about good enough' rather than the excellent results they used to provide, before they got their monopoly.

I doubt very much that they will change, which is why I use Duck or Neeva. Most members of the public don't even know that they exist, but they will eventually.

[Mestrick]

@superclown2 Neeva is going to shut down on June 2. One more was killed by google.

[Treud]

Open AI is paying nearly 700k USD a day to maintain the infrastructure. The AI upgrade is coming at a price and we will have more ads in each and every service of Google.

[superclown2]

@superclown2 Neeva is going to shut down on June 2. One more was killed by google.

Yes that was sudden but all isn't lost yet, they've joined Snowflake (who I confess I know nothing about) who seem to want to develop AI assisted search. Sad to see them go though, they were a breath of fresh air.

Google must have killed hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide with their tax on products bought online so Neeva is just a drop in the ocean.

Open AI is paying nearly 700k USD a day to maintain the infrastructure. The AI upgrade is coming at a price and we will have more ads in each and every service of Google.

Just imagine what it will cost Google then if they really do use it for all searches.

I've seen nothing here in the UK google.co.uk search page yet, has it been tested elsewhere yet?

[edited by: superclown2 at 12:49 pm (utc) on May 26, 2023]

[Dalnoon]

The crawl rate of my website dropped by 40% on April 4th/5th, even though the traffic was increasing back then, it hasn't recovered yet. Has anyone noticed the same?

[RedBar]

@headspace

You've pointed out some very relevant and pertinent basic things that have been happening and hopefully G will identify more "duplicated" sites. In my trade I find it frustrating that not only have non-US businesses been de-ranked even though they are the original producer of the product, but I then see #1 result being the largest importer / wholesaler, I then see their biggest customer at #2, next customer at 3, then 4, 5, 6 etc with precisely the same product, precisely the same description and precisely the same image(s).

Not a lot of retail consumer choice there!

[christianz]

@Dalnoon, consider yourself lucky, because you now have 40% less useless bandwidth lost to Googlebot.

[KaseyM]

Further declines this week. Looking very unstable.

[RedBar]

Just who is flicking the on-off switch?

Thursday night UK 20.00 Off
Friday morning UK 07.00 On

And no it wasn't the UK starting, it was Shanghai, Phoenix, Zurich, Abu Dhabi

[EditorialGuy]

After a week of noticeable improvements in Google traffic, our editorial travel site has had a couple of days (week over week) of slight declines, which I attribute to two things:

1) Something that was happening last week in one of our key travel destinations isn't happening this week, so people aren't searching on the term (which was driving extra traffic to our site); and...

3) We're entering a three-day holiday weekend (Memorial Day) in the U.S., when lots of people are traveling instead of making plans for future vacations.

On the whole, it's business as usual.

[ichthyous]

It's insanity that I have returned to ranking #1 for several terms that still are seeing 65%+ less traffic than the norm. Every day a new set of categories drops 25%-70% and then it can be right back up to normal the next day. I am seeing search traffic down around 10% and USA down 8%-12% every day, but Direct traffic has been dropping steadily for a month and was -48% today. That's because all of my top ranking image searches have been destroyed and once again, only images from powerful publications and big corp sites are all ranking at the top. The last time I saw that happen was 2021.

[yollo03]

Another update is or was being rolled out, personal score over 9.0 on semrush. gsc stopped updating for me. We are all just guina pigs with these experimental updates.

[haramamba]

@Dalnoon, consider yourself lucky, because you now have 40% less useless bandwidth lost to Googlebot.

Only 30 crawl requests from G yesterday.
And now I see only this:
GET /
GET /
GET /

[Nutterum]

Did an interesting experiment over the weekend where I dedicated 6+ hours talking to Bing's chat GPT on search. 316 questions asked and only 11 links shown. If this is an indicator of things to come, we are in deep trouble. Especially in the e-commerce space where organic+paid traffic makes around 50% of total traffic (niche dependent numbers) .

With organic traffic steadily declining despite of keeping N.1 positions, I am a bit scared how bard and the announcements for search in the latest IO will impact us in the next 12-16 months.

Anyone thinking of optimising for conversational/ generative AI for their websites?

[RubicCubed]

316 questions asked and only 11 links shown
Especially in the e-commerce space where organic+paid traffic makes around 50% of total traffic
Anyone thinking of optimising for conversational/ generative AI for their websites?

11 links shown out of 316 questions gives us the opportunity for traffic from those questions a paltry 3.48% of the time. As those of us cited in Wikipedia understand, being cited as a source produces very little traffic. Though I expect being cited in AI responses to be higher than Wikipedia, traffic from citations will likely be very low for informational queries.

Historically Bing seemed to follow Google's lead, but I think in the case of AI Google will follow Bing because Google is so far behind. I would expect Google to provide external links to informational sources at a rate equal to or less than Bing in the near future. As it relates to ecommerce, I would expect in the future for AI responses to prioritize product sources for their owner's offerings in Bing or Google Shopping instead of linking out to external sites. What I forecast are "organic" results leading to Bing or Google Shopping where they earn a commission from each sale and the only links to external sites being paid ads.

I use AI to ask questions on "where can I buy..." and the results are Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, etc. To AI small businesses do not exist. Even for those obscure products which are not sold at any of the big marketplaces, AI is reluctant to cite a small business. I believe what we see in these early days of AI is mediocrity where shopping responses are tailored to favor large marketplaces/big brands much in the same way an algorithm does.

Getting to your question about optimizing for conversational/generative AI, I don't think many small ecommerce businesses will benefit from it as your test of seeing an external link 3.48% of the time clearly demonstrates. As it is now, AI is directing shoppers to marketplaces/big brands which is likely the easiest thing for AI to do. I think for small ecommerce businesses to survive, they will have no choice but to sell highly unique products that aren't sold in the marketplaces/by big brands. Those with products that are sold in marketplaces/by big brands, or with suitable alternatives existing in marketplaces/sold by big brands, may be best to increase their prices 20% and sell on those marketplaces. For businesses to survive in these marketplaces, the base commission (15% Amazon as an example) + 5% for policy compliance (returns, buyer fraud, etc.) should be factored in to the retail cost of each product for a good starting point to not go broke.

Sorry for the long response, but I don't see anything positive for us smaller sellers coming down the road. We've been herded like cattle and put out to pasture by algorithms, and now it's AI's turn to try to squeeze even more money out of every sale we make. This is not a free market but a market controlled by dystopian rulers.

[ichthyous]

There is a huge increase in traffic this morning...search and direct, and from every country. Google has once again opened the floodgates, just like last Monday, and it should last about 8-18 hours before the door gets slammed hard on all our traffic and conversions again.

Anyone thinking of optimising for conversational/ generative AI for their websites?

My site, including thousands of images, have already been scraped and included in the datasets used by OpenAI and of course by Google Bard. I was not asked, nor did I consent. I am not looking at playing ball with AI firms, I am looking at opportunities to join lawsuits against these firms...which are already arising and which will now explode after the recent SCOTUS decision Warhol Foundation vs. Goldsmith. The bogus "Fair Use" argument made by AI firms has already been lost, and that was a huge milestone and a huge support for rights holders against these large tech firms.

I already make far more money from suing infringers who are stealing my IP than I do from licensing the IP to ones who want to pay for it legitimately. I see AI as an even bigger opportunity to recover damages from infringement of my works. Each infringement is up to 150K in the USA, multiply that by thousands of images.

If you all are not registering your work at the copyright office you don't have a leg to stand on...you'll just continue to get ripped off. By the way, in terms of audio-visual and text based work that is generated by AI, there is no copyright. Copyright requires a human creator...work generated by AI cannot be copyrighted, only the underlying works that the AI based the generative work on.

[emperor2]

US traffic significantly affected. Position did not change much, it doesn't match with CTR.
Not clear about Google's plan. Small level content marketers will not survive long. Sooner or later only big publishers and ads will occupy 1st page of google.
Even if you have the best content, it will not be ranked due to other qualifiers like BL profile, authority etc...

[Treud]

I have same results. My KW position seems to remain the same. The impressions are slightly up, but the CTR is just tanking every day.

[BigKat]

What a terrible weekend for Google traffic and sales. Did Google have an outage or are shoppers just running to other places to search for products? Our weekend sales were solid, no thanks to Google. I did some searches on Google this morning and the full page of marketplace ads is the same as when I checked on Friday. Odd. I wonder if Google added more ads in the ever-scroll feature this weekend that pushed organic results down even further?

[ichthyous]

@BigKat I had unusually strong traffic all day yesterday, both search and direct. My ranking surged upward this weekend strongly, but this morning...reversion to the same old pattern. USA is -45%, UK - 28%, Canada is so perpetually low that it's almost negligible these days. One new inquiry this weekend for a low-priced item that I no longer actually sell. I wish I had other options like Amazon, unfortunately Amazon doesn't move high-ticket unique items.

[BigKat]

@ichthyous

I'm now seeing some USA layout changes which may explain the highs and lows we both see. For the first time ever, I'm seeing a product ad block with 32 total products. I'm also seeing a cluster of YouTube videos appearing in some searches ranked beyond 10 once the ever-scroll kicks in. This is insane, but would explain why traffic/sales from Google were terrible this weekend. When I checked earlier, I didn't see this layout so it must be in the rotation for some reason (likely to meet revenue targets).

[Markedd]

I added a screenshot of a curious behavior from Google. The article was and still is the first organic search which doesn't mean much nowadays. But the interesting thing was the vast amount of traffic that I got when the article was in the featured snippet. It was 100 times more than when it was just the first organic result (2000 visits vs 20 visits that it gets now), even when there was no featured snippet above it. What's even more fascinating is that while using a VPN, there were no ads above it (yet) and I need to mention that I only searched on PC browser, not mobile.
[imgur.com ]

[ichthyous]

My traffic is all over the place...it soared once again yesterday, coinciding with recovering the top spots for multiple terms over the past two days. The higher traffic is resulting in the first new viable inquiries in almost two weeks. But it is looking like that is already fading...USA traffic is -60% this morning, Canada is at zero visits, direct traffic (from Google Images) is -46%. Traffic to my home page is -70% this morning. This is following a pattern this week of very low morning traffic followed by a huge surge and staying high the rest of the day...

[Martin Ice Web]

Today i realized that i have been looking very often on amazon for buying items in the last 3 month. And i have to admit that i bought more on amazon in this time than the last 15 years together. This matches perfect with goomoneys silly updates this year. There is nearly no way to find a good and trusthworth reseller on goomoney.
Even refine the search doens´t help anymore. google just ignores all for me important keywords.

[Treud]

I’ve been filling products in the merchant center for a friend. He is a blacksmith and doing handcraft. After checking some fields there is one where you can see your direct competitors with the same products. I was expecting other small crafter like him, no it was only huge shopping plateforme.

I’m « ok » with huge shopping plateformes, it’s convenient and as a shopper that’s what we want. But when you look for KW or products and you see them all over the place and after clicking it’s just a redirect to a product category that totally irrelevant (organic results), it’s for me just a deal between them and the search engines.

Guess I’ll need to transition to B2B with the good old printed catalog ! At least it stays on the desk a few hours/days.

[ichthyous]

I am currently adding ecomm capability to my site via Shopify. My thinking was for my items to show up in Google shopping where they do not currently appear, but I am wondering if this will be seen as duplicate content as the shop will have a page for each product that matches my site's page, they will jump from page A to page B. I am also wondering if it will actually hurt my site to be classified as ecomm vs. informational. Any opinions on this?

[Treud]

@ichthyous
If B is just a copy of A only to be able to shop, why not just make it no-index as customers will anyway come from A?

[ichthyous]

@ Treud

If B is just a copy of A only to be able to shop, why not just make it no-index as customers will anyway come from A?

Because I need the pages to be indexed to show up in Google shopping results. I was also thinking that I could change the urls and product text enough that the pages might end up ranking for searches that I am not ranking for now.

[Treud]

The way I feed the merchant center not sure we need to have the page indexed (You either ask Google to pull from your website or you manually add). As I’m quite new with this maybe someone here will have a better answer than me.
What I have found driving me sales for my blacksmith friend is adding product on his Google company profile!

[not2easy]

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