July 2023 Google Search Observations

[superclown2]

Users don't seem to mind Google's increasingly cluttered SERPs, if we're to believe the publicly available statistics about Google's market share.

With the greatest respect - do you not think that Google's monopoly of search has something to do with that? They are the default on just about every major browser and device (something they pay billions of dollars for) and most people out there don't even know that real search engines exist, let alone how to change defaults.

It is easy to be top dog when you're the only one in town. Even if you're a very poor and greedy one.

[edited by: not2easy at 6:34 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2023]
[edit reason] End of month/New Month split cleanup [/edit]

[renatovieira]

Heavy traffic this moring. Has anyone else noticed any changes today?

[ichthyous]

I was checking GSC and saw that my top referring terms have fallen down the list for quite some time now. All of the semantically related terms which used to refer a huge amount of traffic to my site dropped off a cliff at the same time around April 10th:

[ibb.co ]
[ibb.co ]

The drop was 80-90% and has never recovered. I am still in the top five for these terms, but the traffic just vanished. Was there a major update around this time? I am wondering if this is just the effect of losing the image carousel.

[RedBar]

My global sites are where I would expect for a weekend heading towards the 70% mark at my new lower average level whereas our hotel function site is well ahead so far this month at 148% for July.

Did anyone else see a strange Wednesday 5th July 2023? On that day the hotel site saw a 50% drop, all other days this month have seen a minimum 100% day.

It's a focussed, local / regional site and a Wednesday is one of our local market days which makes it even more unusual

[EditorialGuy]

Our overall Google traffic is slightly up from the same days last week, but just barely.

I do see a lot of volatility for our most popular individual pages. One page might be up 30 or 40 percent one day while another is down by a similar amount. This isn't typical.

[RedBar]

Spam email ... I know I've asked this question before however it is far too coincidental for me that traffic is down and in the last two days only one, yes 1, piece of email spam. This level of spam I have not seen since the early 90s.

Have I really managed to block / unsubscibe / whatever so much of this junk? That I do not believe therefore what correlation does junk mail have to web traffic since it seemingly goes hand-in-hand for me.

Sunday so far is looking like my new norm at 50% however do bear in mind that 50% is 50% of what its was only a few months ago therefore by my "old average" I'm at 25%!

[Nutterum]

There is a big update rolling as we speak. Lots more FAQ and Snippets as well as youtube results are being pushed. Every third party reporting the SERP weather repeats what I am seeing as well. Currently monitoring several thousand keywords over 4 different niches with cumulative traffic volume in the millions.

What is interesting, where usually there were always 4 ads on several of the high traffic keywords now there are 2 or 3. Maybe that is seasonal, but I found it suspicious a bit.

To answer RedBar's question - spam mail usually goes hand in hand with "brand visibility" in the SERPS, esp for broad traffic keywords. Used to see this go hand in hand like clockwork in the B2B Business Travel niche I was heavily involved in. You seeing only 1 spam mail, maybe a symptom of loosing SERPS for more broad/generic keywords that used to funnel some traffic your way. If you have a decent regex where you can syphon away brand from non brand keywords and check their historical averages, you might be able to pinpoint whether my theory holds true for your specific case.

All in all biggest shift towards Google related search answers at the cost of organic listings since 2020. Brace yourselves.

[superclown2]

There is a big update rolling as we speak. Lots more FAQ and Snippets as well as youtube results are being pushed.

This may be a continuation of what I have been seeing in the UK on Chrome desktop for the last couple of weeks. It made search pretty well unusable, particularly since the snippets were scarcely related to the search term I put in. I haven't seen it on other browsers though, are you seeing it on FF, Android, Edge, Safari, Opera?

[Dooku]

First let me say, I know of a million ways to see the google captcha "we noticed some suspicious behavior..." within 5 seconds. However, the last several weeks, because of the absolute abysmal search results, I try to find the correct information using different queries and operators. And just because it takes several more attempts I am beginning to see this captcha more often......while in "normal" usage I would NEVER see this.

It's like google is saying "hey there fellow, that's enough for now, just click one of our g#@damn ads or sponsored links!"
Has anyone else noticed the same? Looks like google has stepped beyond the completely paranoia of being afraid to leave money on the table?

[ichthyous]

I am seeing a 75%+ drop in some of my most important terms...I checked and there is an entirely new layout which I have never seen before:

- 4 sponsored ads
- 30 large images (6 rows of 5 images) linking to how to articles, how to videos and a few sites (including mine)
- Related searches box with 4 images linking to articles for a commercial variant of the term
- Another box with a related search to well known people related to the search term - my picture is shown as the example and I am first on the list of these related people
- Another block of 4 related searches (with magnifying glass search icons)
-10 organic links to big ecommerce sites, articles, facebook pages
- One sponsored ad
- 40 organic links to more ecomm, more articles, more facebook

The overall effect is of making you feel disoriented, and of course where my site used to be in the top three as an organic link, it is now buried among a block of 30 images and not mentioned again. So a 75% drop in traffic for this term. I hope that this does not spread to more terms or it's going to be ugly. Google is strongly favoring how-to articles again, and that destroyed my business in 2022. I was just getting used to having a trickle of inquiries again...

[RedBar]

@Dooku

Has anyone else noticed the same?

I use a VPN and if I ever use G I have to pause its use for 5 mins otherwise I have to go through 6-8 captcha tests! Tik Tok only does this the once with their jigsaw puzzle test.

Once I am in to G and my VPN re-starts I haven't had any issues up until now and this is on all my office PCs but when I do use G on mobile, very rarely, I do not have any issues whatsoever ... Go figure!

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

there is an entirely new layout which I have never seen before:

I posted seeing something very similar a week or so ago, it was simply a page full of classified ads with almost hidden organics with a visually diabolical experience on desktop.

[Martin Ice Web]

Something is going on. We had a good friday and a very good weekend (like in old days). On monday at about noon sales stopped immediatly till today. But traffic is at 396%. It is mostly mobil and all one-hit wonder :) from all over the world ( most Czech, US , AU, New Zealand ). So wasted traffic.

[Jez123]

Traffic is fairly normal but not had one order since Friday morning last week - and that was only one. I don't think I have ever gone that long without an order. No enquiries, no phone calls.

[RedBar]

@MIW

So wasted traffic.

So where are your focussed markets, solely Germany, Austria and Switzerland since you mention Czech as wasted?

Are you using a .com or .de?

Herein lies the problem that all SEs have and why I feel G pushes localisation more and more. DDG seems to cope with queries better than G since it gives the easy option of selected country and, for my queries, it seems to be reasonably good. OTOH G leaves it to their algo to presume one is generally making a retail / information enquiry from the country G has decided one is located.

Therefore when G receives a keyword search it automatically presumes one is a retail / information searcher within that specific country. Unfortunately this then creates a problem for my global sites since my products are directed at international buyers and they are outnumbered an average 100:1 in the UK, 60:1 in the USA and 40:1 in Germany. G's results reflect the majority of its search enquiries not the international bulk purchasers.

Therefore is your site too generic and not focussed enough on your target markets?

Just wondering:-)

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar,
it is a .de domain. And up to now there has been no problem with it.

But the problem has solved just now. We are back to no traffic.

To summarize the last half year: It was the worst traffic/sales ever but the best amazon/ebay sales ever.

There is a clear shifting going on from google to ebay/amazon. I myself start my searches right away at ebay or amazon instead of going to biased not relevant listings in a search engine. Next step is in most cases idealo. But i never use google for buying interests.

[ichthyous]

Big drop this morning, something is cooking. USA traffic is -60% at 11:30am. Most of my most important landing pages are once again -35% to -100% (0 visits). Australia and much of Europe also at 0 visits so far today. Could be an overnight blip and it bounces back during the day, we shall see

Traffic is fairly normal but not had one order since Friday morning last week - and that was only one. I don't think I have ever gone that long without an order. No enquiries, no phone calls.

I'm seeing this too, but it extends back to about the 10th. Inquiries dropped to one every 3 days and not very good ones. Meanwhile visits to individual pages on the site were much higher while visits to the most important category landing pages have dropped. The visits to individual pages tend to be one-hit-wonders as others have observed. My ranking suddenly tanked last night, so perhaps some sort of stealth algo change is at play.

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing USA traffic at a complete standstill this morning? USA was almost completely stopped until 1pm today with drops of up to 80% on category pages.

[RedBar]

@MIW
Are you solely in German or multiple languages? I do realise that you have a lot of guest workers etc and it would be crazy not to support them, just being nosey!

[renatovieira]

Huge drop this morning...

[RedBar]

It must be Wednesday, I have excellent old-style traffic levels already at 137.5% of my new average with 10.5 hours to go ... Now watch it fall off the cliff >:(

[ichthyous]

Very odd rotating traffic patterns...yesterday USA traffic was down -60% until 1:30pm...it was completely stalled. Then it suddenly turned and shot up in an upward stairstep pattern all day and ended +8%. Australia was at 0 visits for the day and much of Western Europe dropped up to 35%. Today Australia is +145%, Western Europe is strong, and UK is -35%.

In general I have been seeing very low early-day traffic with a surge in the afternoon for perhaps a month or more. I am also seeing more and more days with very big drops followed by a huge surge in the same day. Not sure if this has to do with a rotation of the type of page layout in each market several times a day

[Mestrick]

It is the new normal, that at every selected hour's gap, the SERP results change and you can check it on your own by searching the keywords manually. I don't know these results are not constant, morning 3rd position for 1 website, and after 3 hours or 4 it is out of the SERP, and then again in the evening it is at 7 or 9th, and this continues till midnight and again in the morning at 3rd position, I am bored by this patterns now, not sure what will work for me

[RedBar]

Whilst my global sites are not directly aimed at public supplies my information is there for educational purposes and this is the weekend I do expect traffic to reduce thanks to school holidays etc. until the last week of August.

Yesterday's traffic was 196% of my new average with several solid project enquiries however once again none of them from the "West". Whilst the main business operates through .coms I am trialling with .asia / .cn / .in in the local G.tlds to see if they can rank well and drive any new enquiries.

[RareBit]

I have noticed in SEMRush that my keyword positions are currently wrong, obviously based on what I can see in incognito mode (they usually match up or are very close)

[Nutterum]

SEMRush / Ahrefs are having big disparities with what Google is showing since 25-th. I use SERProbot and basically get clusters of keywords via incognito VPNs to measure the "closest to the truth" SERPs . Using that service (which is actually very reasonably priced even at volumes) I can see shifts in SERPs due to google updates "faster" . I assume there are quite a few similar services to the one I'm using, just pointing out that the generic ones are out of whach big time.

[renatovieira]

Another day of massive drop around here. Signs of something big coming our way...

[BigKat]

Signs of something big coming our way...

Probably more drops, more ads, more silence from Google and a big increase in the number of businesses holding meetings to plot a path forward without Google.

[ichthyous]

Another day of massive drop around here. Signs of something big coming our way...

Same here...but only USA traffic is down...-65% at 11am. I have seen huge intraday swings these days though...it starts off extremely low and then suddenly surges. So by the end of the day you can be at break even or higher. The odd thing to me is that our dearest Google seems to know exactly where to apply pressure on traffic. It is always my most important geographic territories that see traffic completely vanish. This week I have seen USA drop like a stone and then recover, UK drop like a stone and recover, AU and CA vanish completely one day and high the next, and UAE is down every day now (summer?). It's like Google analyzes what traffic is most important to you and removes that in order to force people to buy ads.

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed because traffic levels seem to be much more normal. Almost 17 hours so far of my Googleday and I'm at 106% plus I've even had a project enquiry from the USA ... Whatever next .?.?.?

[Micha]

Another day of massive drop around here. Signs of something big coming our way...

Since John already says to start the countdown music, you are probably right.

[twitter.com ]

[BigKat]

Since John already says to start the countdown music

I'm actually surprised anyone still listens to him since he doesn't really communicate much of anything and is often flat out wrong. His response to the question of having any updates this summer was "I'm sure we'll have some" which set my DUH meter off the charts.

[Micha]

ha ha ha, yes okay, you are right

[BigKat]

@Micha

What I find interesting is we have a company that talks about providing useful/helpful/great content yet JM picks the silliest questions to reply to and responds with the shallowest of answers. Oh the irony....

[EditorialGuy]

We've seen modest but welcome week-over-week increases every day this week. We're still down quite a bit from the same days last year, though.

One trend that I've noticed for our site is an improvement in pages on our core topics. Subject expertise or authority seems to be getting a boost for our major bread-and-butter pages, at least right now.

[ichthyous]

Huge drops in both USA and UK traffic today...-39% and -32% compared to last 4 recent Thursdays. My ranking went up today, but upon checking GSC my backlink count dropped by almost a third...has anyone else seen that?

[Micha]

@bigkat
That's right and his answers are general and often pretty meaningless. As far as updates are concerned, however, we can assume that even though he doesn't mention a date, it will be coming soon.

@ichthyos
This is the case with some website owners (including me).

[guarriman3]

+20% yesterday, compared to the past Thursday. +15% in GSC's total impressions on Wednesday, compared to the last Wednesday.

And it's a good difference, since in July my pages suffer a week-over-week traffic drop, due to the summer vacations.

Not sure if this is the already-expected Google Algorithm Update for this summer announced by John Müller [twitter.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

@ichthyous, same on our site. gain and loss. gain and loss. Seems like the give you a candy that you still feed them and have some hope. Next day no candy, no hope.

Fingers crossed because traffic levels seem to be much more normal.

Yesterday, totaly normal traffic with lots of sales. It lasted till evening. Today. NO CANDY.

I hope so much, that apple will lunch a user oriented SE.

[superclown2]

Speaking as a searcher, Google's new layout on Chrome that I am seeing on desktop is unusable. I've had to switch to FF, using Chrome just when I need to use one of their addons.

The results I get for anything other than plain vanilla searches are pathetic, any attempt at getting meaningful results for long tail searches are a waste of time since it defaults to the lowest common denominator which is dominated by high ad spenders. The huge PAA is full of results that are completely irrelevant to the search terms I entered.

I predicted months ago that Google would go for broke. I may be wrong but these results look very much like a desparate attempt to wring the last drops out money out of the Internet before the axe falls.

[ichthyous]

Has anyone checked their backlink count at GSC? Mine has dropped by a third. USA and UK traffic also way down again today...

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:58 pm (utc) on Jul 21, 2023]

[BigKat]

I may be wrong but these results look very much like a desparate attempt to wring the last drops out money out of the Internet before the axe falls.

I'm sure some searchers see this as well which explains our slow and steady increase in traffic/orders coming from other search engines. I think Pichai is building up the bank account for some big legal settlements and also so that when his golden parachute deploys there will be plenty of money to cushion his landing. IMO, Pichai is all washed up just like Google's search results.

[ichthyous]

I'm sure some searchers see this as well which explains our slow and steady increase in traffic/orders coming from other search engines.

Ha, that's a joke...I see almost nothing from Bing. It's inert...useless. All of the non-Google search engines combined are about 11% of my search traffic.

[RedBar]

USA and UK traffic also way down again today...

Supposedly today in the UK it is one of the highest road traffic days of the year with most schools closing and the traditional summer break starting, supposedly, I have no idea!

[BigKat]

I see almost nothing from Bing. It's inert...useless.

Our company is both a manufacturer and retailer. We have a good grip on our distribution channel and what we sell can't be purchased in a marketplace or from a Google ad. Some of our products are need based, and if shoppers can't find them in marketplaces, Google, etc. some are going to other search engines to find us. In the current environment, having unique and compelling content is not enough to survive in ecommerce. Having unique products that marketplaces don't sell, and Google can't serve alternative ads for, is greatly helpful in the current environment. I would expect more SEOs and store owners of general merchandise to make the shift to selling unique items that have a greater chance of ranking -vs- the same products that are sold in marketplaces and by dozens of other sellers.

[mhansen]

@ichthyous

Has anyone checked their backlink count at GSC? Mine has dropped by a third. USA and UK traffic also way down again today.

I personally have not noticed it, but Barry posted about it on twice on Twitter. Once yesterday, and again this morning after asking JM about it.
Yesterday [twitter.com]
Today [twitter.com]

[ichthyous]

@Mhansen thanks for the heads up...apparently I'm not the only one seeing this. It doesn't seem to have affected ranking...yet.

[superclown2]

I hope so much, that apple will lunch a user oriented SE

The deal that makes Google the default on so many browsers and operating systems (in exchange for massive payments) is under fire from numerous legislators who claim it creates an illegal monopoly. Despite Google's 'lobbying' sooner or later it will have to end and since billions of dollars are involved companies like Apple may well have a few ideas up their sleeves.

One way or another, though, whether from governmental action (more likely from Europe or Asia than the USA; Google's variety of 'lobbying' is pretty much illegal in many jurisdictions outside the States), competition from AI or their own recklessness in abandoning quality in favour of short term financial gain, that monopoly's days are numbered, in my humble opinion.

[MayankParmar]

I have stopped posting on the forum, but I wanted to jot down my final thoughts before I quit the industry.

Google always favours big companies, no matter how original or well-cited my content is. Your SEO, authority, and original work won't make any difference. Trust me, I have done everything I could, but to no avail. I've been in this industry for 8 years, producing original reports that have been referred to by top-tier publications. Yet, despite all the backlinks and recognition, Google still doesn't rank me fairly.

Every week my work is referred by top publications. Every single week. They refer my work, link back to me and rank in Top Stories, SERP, News, and Discover. And I don't. I don't even get traffic in three figures.

To any Googler reading this post, can you still justify "content is everything, people first" PR statements?

The issue got worse after the 2022 core update. There's been no recovery, and my traffic continues declining with every unannounced update (it has worsened this week). There's been no luck even after sharing examples of this seemingly unfair ranking with Googlers.

Google does not rank me appropriately for my original work. I fail to achieve high rankings on Google, even when my work is cited, referred to, or backlinked by top-tier publications globally. Despite being linked by multiple top-tier publishers, Google fails to rank my content while continuing to rank those big publishers. It's audacious that Google maintains that original content matters under these circumstances.

I'm at a crossroads now, debating whether to hang in there or sell the site before things get worse. Any advice or shared experiences would be much appreciated.

Thanks to everyone here at WebmasterWorld. I have been here since 2017 and made a lot of good friends <3

[edited by: MayankParmar at 11:16 am (utc) on Jul 22, 2023]

[StupidIntelligent]

@Mayank - I know the name of your site, but I can't figure out, who would want to buy it at what revenue-multiple. If you start now, it might take weeks, before you can get - probably - a media company to show interest. During that time, there are chances you will lose more traffic, and this is what kills the deals during the due-diligence process done by the potential buyers.

[superclown2]

Google does not rank me appropriately for my original work.

If it's any consolation - we are all in that same boat :-(