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!

[Martin Ice Web]

@cyril,

sounds kind of conclusive. But in our niche there is not a single site with helpful content (except amazon)
Our niche is more like as less content and as less quality the site has, the better it ranks.
+ if a site is not connected to the niche the site has 100% the opportunity to rank.

[Rlilly]

I dont think its trust with Big Brands, they just have scales of economy so large, smaller sites cannot compete. From direct referrals in browsers, citations, in the news, links, blog posts, reviews, global presence. More bookmarking and on and on

[RedBar]

After a very low traffic weekend, at 05.00 UK time this morning traffic returned to normal levels and has remained there all day ... for the moment!

Our UK hotel venue site continues to do extremely well in all departments, especially food at the moment, hence, considering the state of the UK economy, it continues to surprise and please all involved in its success.

Obviously we're pleased with it although I can't help wondering whether the website has reached its maximum traffic potential. How would one estimate this considering it is not a large venue in a highly populated area? Anyone with any ideas?

[mosxu]

Most of sales/leads disappear after 3-4 searcher clicks! 80% of us are not seen in this 3-4 move but we still pay a lot and create the most useful content!

I have created a great product that no one else has and still not getting displayed!

This is hate!

[Dooku]

Google, which laid off some 12,000 employees earlier this year, filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to the United States

Wow....you don't need any enemies with companies like that in your country. But than again, lack of ANY real regulation is the reason companies like google can operate the way they do. We are only seeing the symptoms of their greed entitled by mentality of it's society.
Until the core cause of this not solved by legislation, like in Europe, nothing will change.
Maybe it's really a good idea as someone mentioned in this thread to just block google from crawling and indexing your website and abusing your work for their own gain.

Currently even an old style "Yahoo" index is even better than what google pushes in their serps

[Treud]

Went on YouTube to check some metrics of the videos I carelessly put online since years, and to put a new one with better tags and quality. And I see that my views are increasing since a few days. So probably more videos are pushed in the SERP making everything going low.

[ichthyous]

Here we go again...USA traffic is starting the morning at -74%. Search is -30%, direct -34%, home page -53%. Traffic in general is just at a new lower level from any place that counts. Meanwhile, plenty of traffic from Botswana!

[mosxu]

It is so bad,

To still try to make the money from the 80% who do not even get views ?

Reality check coming

[Treud]

US traffic is dead today. Like almost nothing… Pretty much same as you @ichthyous They must prepare something big again.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Drop continuing, nothing helps. Just can't do anything like watching they are destroying all I was doing for more than 10 years. Insanity.

[RedBar]

My global site is back to its new daily average, i.e. -33% which is -26% v May 2022 and -33.3% v May 2021 ... Obviously this is only going one way therefore I am seriously considering that from 1st June I shall be removing 90% of all my exclusive information and images from public viewing.

G, go scrape someone else's site for poor images plus mal / dis-information.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is shifting in all kinds of ways:

1) Top performing categories vanished for weeks, now returned to the top
2) traffic to home page is -30 to -50% again
3) All kinds of obscure categories on my site are getting much more attention, and it seems to rotate on an almost daily basis. One day one category gets flooded with traffic then drops right back down...next day a different one.
4) Search is down -17% over the last month, -7% over last two weeks...so improving
5) Direct was flat for the last month, but -30% for last two weeks...so strongly declining Google Image traffic
6) USA, Canada, UK traffic are -20%, -32%, -8% over the last 30 days.
7) Europe was higher, now almost all western euro countries are dropping fast
8) Only higher traffic is India (+60%), China (+78%), UAE (+35%), Australia (+60%), New Zealand (+80%) and Russia (+18%)
9) traffic from schools and non-converting sources is much higher. I couldn't possibly have more traffic from 'Janet University Network' in the UK...it's every day all day now.
10) Commercial inquiries are almost null again...the inquiries that are coming are low budget types

[Mestrick]

@ichthyous I am in UAE, I can't see higher traffic. from where you got this report. 4 ads above organic and then ikea on top then our website, how we can get higher traffic.

[Martin Ice Web]

it is getting worse every day. google is targeting our best sites down to zero. What left is traffic to shelf warmer items.
Clearly google is on the way to kill all organic traffic to items that are included in their shopping ad system.

On the other side, sales on amazon are amazing high and rising every day.

[Rlilly]

I consider my self one of the pioneers in SEO, launching a site selling office labels in 1996, ended up with over 100 million free visitors from Google. Even got sued by a major international Brand company in EU because our listings came up first for their brand name - using fair legal comparisons.

Its been 27 years and for the first time, I am lost and going to give up SEO. There really is no organic anymore, its all getting lost in the SERPS surrounded by a lot of shopping ads and image haze. And the power to drive business is diminishing faster than ever.

[ichthyous]

@Mestrick UAE is -70% this morning, so perhaps it's hitting me now. USA is -62%, and search is down 40%.

@Rlilly I've been at it since 2004, and I have come to the same conclusion. There is just nothing to stop Google from killing organic outright and no complaints from the consumer, who really doesn't see the difference or doesn't care. With these kinds of numbers I basically am left with bots and students...once again I am going a full week without a single new customer inquiry.

[yollo03]

I believe it is as a result of the recent update. I am hit as well apparently, no idea where the traffic is routed to now.

[superclown2]

There really is no organic anymore, its all getting lost in the SERPS surrounded by a lot of shopping ads and image haze.

I wonder if a lot of it is the result of 'authority' sites discovering that they can put up an unlimited number of pages for every subject under the sun using ChatGPT .For many years now Google has preferred 'authority' over speciality or expertise.

You can be the greatest expert in the world on your chosen subject but you'll be beaten by the big ad spenders all the way.

[Rlilly]

"unlimited number of pages for every subject under the sun using ChatGPT "

I think that will be a mistake for websites using AI developed content going forward because Google will be smart enough to distinguish between Human written content and AI content. And penalize AI content as duplication.

[mhansen]

For many years now Google has preferred 'authority' over specialty or expertise.

I'm definitely seeing the opposite effect of this right now in the niche I cater to, looking through SEMR data. Some very well connected, authoritative, publicly traded sites that are uber-high authority for 20+ years, are now seeing their own organic traffic decimated over the last 6-9 months. One competitor that saw +8M visits a few months ago is now down to -500k. Another, who saw +2M visits 6 months ago, down to -100k. Very big well known brands with TV ads, sports sponsorships, etc.

Coincidentally, this is in line with Google adding it's own ad related services to local PPC markets, and many local sites now rank well for the terms these national sites used to consume.

[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.