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]

[RedBar]

UK time 18.00 today, 2 hours ago, and traffic to my global site has actually stopped, yet another first for me!

[RedBar]

Cliff edge drop until 09.00 UK time this morning ... a trickle of visitors since.

[superclown2]

UK time 18.00 today, 2 hours ago, and traffic to my global site has actually stopped, yet another first for me!

I don't know if you can see the same results on Chrome that I do? There is so much clutter with the new huge PAA layout on desktop (along with usual Googlespam) that the organics are buried and the tools I used on Chrome (exact match search and image search) just don't work any more.

I've had to switch to Firefox, at least they don't have such cluttered Google SERPs (which I confess I only use for checking on the competition; I've used DDG for actual searches for months now).

For what it's worth my own clicks from Google are a small fraction of what I was getting only a year ago - my policy now is to go into relative hibernation until either things change or they are destroyed. I was in this business long before Google and I've seen many major changes since then, hopefully there will be more of them soon.

[BigKat]

my own clicks from Google are a small fraction of what I was getting only a year ago - my policy now is to go into relative hibernation until either things change or they are destroyed

Google has chewed all the meat off the bone and there's nothing left worthy of any of our time, effort and most certainly our money. This has created an environment where only those producing content with automation/AI can extract a small profit because it requires little to no effort. The Alphabet board would be smart to replace the current CEO ASAP before the current migration of users (shoppers in our case) picks up momentum and spirals out of control.

[Micha]

Cliff edge drop until 09.00 UK time this morning ... a trickle of visitors since.

I also observe the same and the problem that large websites with the same articles are even more favoured than yesterday.
Anyway, Google News looks funny, page 1 and 2 all completely the same topic from the same press release, occasionally just rephrased a little. At the moment I'm really glad that we have so many regular readers, only with Google we wouldn't survive.

[renatovieira]

Over here, very slow today...

[superclown2]

The Alphabet board would be smart to replace the current CEO ASAP before the current migration of users (shoppers in our case) picks up momentum and spirals out of control.

I'm reminded of the tale of the golden goose.

Back in the days when Google was a search engine it was a given that webmasters produced content; Google advertised that content and made money from ads on the back of it. Everyone was happy. Then they got greedy and stopped feeding the golden goose, which is now on the verge of expiring.

Symbiotic relationships either work for both parties or neither of them. If webmasters either stop producing new content (and by that I don't mean AI generated stuff, which is just a rehash) or find new ways of delivering it, Google could be laying off even more staff to stay afloat. That is where the death spiral starts. It may take a while but it is an inevitable process - which I have watched many times before, with other companies.

I wonder how the lawsuits about AI companies using copyright content created by others in their systems will pan out? A decision against them could upset Google's entire business plan, or at least the 'search' part of it (which their company depends on). Perhaps we should invest our money in popcorn futures.

[ichthyous]

I wonder how the lawsuits about AI companies using copyright content created by others in their systems will pan out? A decision against them could upset Google's entire business plan, or at least the 'search' part of it (which their company depends on).

The lawsuits over AI datasets scraping and using copyrighted works have already started. Getty Images is one of the first. Interestingly shutterstock has now announced a partnership with open ai to sell the images generated using the platform, so they are trying to play both sides of the argument.

The recent SCOTUS decision in Warhol Foundation vs. Goldsmith has clarified what is a valid Fair Use of copyrighted works, and AI won't be included. The only way forward will be to somehow come up with a licensing stream which pays creators each time one of their works is used as the basis of an AI image or text. That seems like it would be mind-bogglingly complex to implement. But these companies will be drowned in lawsuits soon enough...including myself at the first opportunity. Thousands of my own works have been scraped and included in datasets without my permission

[RedBar]

I wouldn't know where to start finding all my images created since 1993! Apart from Getty did anyone else chase G after their 2010 image theft? Sure, many of us tried watermarking them and all that did was get them demoted or removed plus the immediate and large reduction in AdSense earnings.

[RubicCubed]

these companies will be drowned in lawsuits soon enough...including myself at the first opportunity.

I just wish we all had the resources/skill/opportunity to do the same.

I think the theft of our content really picked up steam when Google started re-writing our meta titles and descriptions. It is at this time we lost control over, what we as content creators, wanted searchers to see as a summary of the pages we created. The failure to reign Google in when our titles and descriptions were re-written helped lead us to this point where Google feels they have the right to take our work and display it anyway they want without compensation to us. Yes, we are the victims though I fear very few of us will still be around to benefit from the outcome of such lawsuits when they are finalized many years from now. What we need now are regulations and a return to the standard where search engines may only display in their search results what we have placed in our meta title, descriptions along with certain schema that includes republishing parameters.

[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 >:(