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]

[JesterMagic]

@Mayank and @StupidIntelligent - It also will not help the sale if you are the main writer of content.

@Mayank - Sorry about how it all turned out. My 20 year old site is suffering from similar problems.

[RubicCubed]

@MayankParmar

I wish you the best no matter what you decide. We too suffer because of Google, and I believe if history repeats itself Google will show no suffering themselves when Alphabet quarterly earnings are released in just three days. I just don't see things getting better and only worse. The internet has been monopolized and abused by a handful of big businesses that seek more profit and control then what they have and already abuse. And the scary part, at least for us, is these abusers seem to work together like Google filling up their search results with so many Amazon ads that all organic results are flushed down the toilet.

[renatovieira]

High traffic this morning and semrush sensor on fire yet...

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira As usual we are in sync...my traffic is very high today from everywhere outside of the US (-49%), CA (-100% 0 visits), and AU (-36%). This is deceiving because it's a lot of useless, one hit traffic to interior pages...meanwhile some of my most important category pages are -50% today. Google is sending irrelevant traffic with one hand and taking away the best referrals with the other it seems.

[RedBar]

|______________________________________________|

[ichthyous]

Extremely high traffic from everywhere yesterday, except USA which ended the day -11%. Search was up 19% and direct traffic up 73%. Today is a similar pattern, with the entire world going strong, but USA at -46% this morn...despite my ranking heading upwards in the USA market for both desktop and mobile. It seems that Google is focusing on the USA market to squeeze the hardest by far...

[renatovieira]

Extremely high traffic from everywhere yesterday and today...

[Nutterum]

I can confirm traffic is up across all main markets on the 22-nd and 23-d and there was a possitive movement on many long tail phrases. It's almost like the traffic before the most recent update.

[ichthyous]

Traffic was very high all weekend, except from USA, which ended both Sat and Sun very slightly down. Today USA traffic is -49% at 11am, so more of the same trend. This surge in non-USA traffic also produced one new inquiry this weekend...nothing more than that.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic all weekend was high and is high today but today no sales with google.

[Alex_1729]

Traffic is high for two of my main sites and continues. I am highly suspicious, because someone must be losing, and I'm not sure who it is...

[RedBar]

Low traffic levels across my global sites, localised hotel venue doing fine.

[Martin Ice Web]

"normal" traffic, no sales, no inqueries, no engagement

[ichthyous]

I have seen my ranking improve, adding back many top three terms this past two weeks. But if you look at some of the new page layouts I think this hardly matters. Rather than a single column of text results, the new layout is simply a field of images with links to pages from all kinds of sites...five columns across and I think 6 columns tall.

So, if you were ranking 1-10, that page is now buried by so many image boxes on the page that it is practically useless. It's a way of showing more results for any search but it's a terrible layout and very disorienting. I expect that the traffic from searches taken over with this new layout is going to vanish.

Meanwhile traffic continued average for usa and strong for the rest of the world, but no sales or even inquiries at all

[Dooku]

@ichthyous, do you use schema markup on your website? For example the "Creative Works" and "Product"?
I am curious if your traffic results going up and down like that are with or without using schema?

[ichthyous]

do you use schema markup on your website? For example the "Creative Works" and "Product"?
I am curious if your traffic results going up and down like that are with or without using schema?

@Dooku Yes I do, but different pages are classified differently. The individual pages are marked up as a specific type of creative work. A few of the older/cheaper items are marked up as 'Product' to see if it makes any difference. The category pages are marked as ItemList (website) and individual content pages as WebPage. I have tried playing with this over the years and didn't notice much of a difference. I have no idea whether classifying all my content as products would hurt my visibility but I suspect it would. I have no ecomm capability on the site and keep the terms like "buy" "for sale" etc to a minimum.

Honestly...from what I can see, the think that most affects traffic these days is having a large, pretty image carousel under your SERP result. Without it nobody clicks through.

[RedBar]

I was just checking my numbers and was actually very surprised, my daily average for the first 25 days of July is exactly 100% of my new, lower average, not 100.01% or 99.99%, precisely 100%.

How unusual is that?

[ichthyous]

Massive drops here starting overnight. It's the USA traffic that has vanished again, -47% at 11:30am. Traffic to my home page and all of my most competitive landing pages is down up to 81% today. Non-usa traffic is mostly hitting a lot of lower level pages, aka one hit and out. Anyone else seeing this today?

[RedBar]

Anyone else seeing this today?

I'm seeing a lot of single page views today at 78.5% which is way higher than this year's average of 47.1%.

[renatovieira]

I notice again my traffic is filtering at 10 clicks per minute. It's been very similar to what happened this past week. Then came a huge amount of traffic afterwards.

That is, yes, I have a big reduction in traffic today.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is very poor this week. I'm seeing sudden and very large declines in traffic within the same day...for example UAE and Australia started yesterday normally and then traffic just stopped cold, so they ended the day -32%. USA is down a lot every day until about noon, when it suddenly shoots up. Today that hasn't happened and I'm at -35% at 2:30pm. Major losses in traffic to my home page and many of my top landing pages...so the traffic coming is hitting lower level pages and isn't very good quality.

[renatovieira]

"I'm seeing sudden and very large declines in traffic within the same day"

Same here.

[anubitez]

Same old stuff here, I have never recovered for a main website from Oct 22 spam update. Funny enough, my traffic now does not fluctuate at all, its like google only allows x amount of traffic, so when people moan about no traffic or traffic increased for me, its zilch locked in. I swear they say sandbox isn't real, but it looks that way for one of my main websites, even though it now has even better backlinks naturally from actual companies google is in bed with, and more backlinks from their silver, gold and platnimum members from google search community forums recommending my pages to users to fix their issues or do research upon and lastly, some pages google use in their intranet oddly enough as a recommendation to dev staff, its the same pages and normally get 10 to 20 minutes on, but yeah insane right?

if you are classed as a spammer with those backlinks and recommendations (good list my site in their own intranet for resources/research), what hope do you have unless i move to India and change my last name from english to something like singh i heard this is a good way to increase serp ranking ;) aka sundar signal in google search ;)

[Treud]

Traffic dead since the 24th around…. No inquiry, no order, nothing…. Just emails of people selling guest post and other crap…

[mosxu]

Amazing G earnings are up but buyers are less and less for advertisers!

How do they do it?

And we have made the biggest loss advertising with these “people”

[superclown2]

How do they do it?

Simple really. They have a monopoly so can charge whatever they like, whilst destroying as many businesses as they wish to. Another Standard Oil.

Like Standard Oil, one day they will be stopped.

[renatovieira]

Very slow today...

[EditorialGuy]

Our editorial travel-planning site's Google traffic had been trending upward (week over week) until several days ago, when it took a modest dip.

Today the dip is looking deeper, although our most popular pages (which happen to be on our most popular and authoritative topics) seem to be doing okay.

On the brighter side (call it a consolation prize), our ad revenues have been rising even as our traffic has taken a dip.

[mosxu]

We are happy for you EG

[anubitez]

It will be even more fun with the Google link preview, making websites just visitable without leaving Google search, saw some SEO's talking about it, literally just a preview, so if you monetize with ads your doomed, google will be ok since it spams the serps without people leaving it (win for google).

Then you got this:

[arstechnica.com...]

Then we see ad spam taking first 10 spots, Indian new sites ranking in all niches with the sundar indian bonus, then we see GSE search on its way mainstream? then more google a.i and stuff.

From the looks of it, we ain't seen anything yet.

[RedBar]

Considering the quantity of people who are supposed to be financially struggling there seems to be a heck of a lot of them in Europe going away on much more expensive holidays / flights!

My global traffic has been flat on its back the last couple of days, this years has been like a bad movie that never ends or a continual garbage so-called reality show.

[christianz]

Google link preview

Ha ha ha. It's like they have gone full psycho and there is nobody to tell them to stop and think.

[Dooku]

Many articles on this "lawyer get's fined for using non existing precedents made up by chatgpt" already, but this one is more relevant also to google besides Chatgpt, and the way multinational monopolists think:
[theguardian.com...]

Employees of such tech companies can not say "ich habe es nicht gewusst", we are way past that point now. As member Chritianz already said....they are completely psychotic now and will stop at nothing to destroy millions of small businesses just to fulfill shareholder value.

[RedBar]

For me global sites are dead, not yet in their death throes however if September were to be like this then I would say the genera public interest in my products will be negligible. Genuine real-world specifying / purchasing businesses are still using the sites for their informational purposes.

UK localised sites are mostly doing ok and surviving however higher-priced ticket items in the UK STG 1-5K range have slowed considerably. Socialising is evidently still a priority which is a bonus..

[ichthyous]

And another huge 54% drop in USA traffic this morning...you can watch it dropping in a straight line down hour by hour and see exactly at what time the change took place. Only USA and Canada which is at 0 visits today.

From what I see this is due to the new 6x9 page layout expanding to more searches. Using 54 image links to throw such a huge array of results at people that nobody will get any traffic. Wherever it is being used my traffic has dropped 70-80%. For example, where I was ranking in the top five "one-column" text results previously, now my site is just one of 54 image links...and what is worse, the new results don't actually reflect the text link rank very closely, with some unranked sites on the top row and the ranked sites shifting around.

I have some searches where my site appears 4-5x out of 54 results and all of the traffic is still gone for these searches. It is clearly being rotated, judging from the massive day-to-day (or intraday) swings in traffic for each result. Google's AI is testing and comparing layouts. If it drives higher revenue for Google it will become the new norm and spread to more results very soon.

The question is, how does this really help Google? My hunch is that Google prefers to randomize the results rather than having the same sites dominate due to their content, link profile, age, or quality. If some of those top sites aren't running adsense (like my site) then it's just a loss for google if people click out to them. Better to trick and confuse people into clicking randomly and eventually more sites running ads will just percolate to the top of these results. Google doesn't care which site is actually getting the traffic, only that it's running ads.

[ichthyous]

they are completely psychotic now and will stop at nothing to destroy millions of small businesses just to fulfill shareholder value.

AI has been a dream for generations and is now here. It is going to displace a lot of jobs and a lot of people will lose out because of it, but there is no way to stop progress. What is going to happen for sure is that the US government is going to crack down hard and start regulating the tech giants. It's a long time in coming, but even their hordes of lobbyists and flood of campaign contributions won't be able to stop that. The public is very quickly beginning to see these companies as a threat, and that's about to get a lot worse when the jobs dry up due to AI.

As for the content creators...the soon to be a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, Google et al over their outright theft of copyrighted work for generative AI may result in some form of solution, but in my experience these solutions are usually just a fraction of the former revenue. It's ironic that Getty images is one of the first to sue OpenAI and MS here, since Getty singlehandedly destroyed a very profitable stock photo industry due to its own greed.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

I'm going to link to a post I made this morning and wondering what has happened. Look at the date where this suddenly happened, the end of November 2022 ... What happened about then? ChatGPT, is this one of the reasons for USA interaction?

[webmasterworld.com...]

Something happened, ChatGPT, consumer confidence, why such a huge change in the USA?

[superclown2]

I'm getting initial clicks on 'page 2 - 3' minor pages now; and they are converting well. Has the Great British Public realised at last that Page 1 with all it's googlespam is a mess and a waste of time?

[ichthyous]

I'm going to link to a post I made this morning and wondering what has happened. Look at the date where this suddenly happened, the end of November 2022 ... What happened about then? ChatGPT, is this one of the reasons for USA interaction?

@Redbar I just checked my stats for the last year. It's stable at 65% desktop 35% mobile the entire time. Desktop traffic has dropped since May while mobile is steady...that's just summer I believe. I have no idea why you are seeing what you're seeing, but it seems impossible to me. Maybe statcounter is not tracking correctly?

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday was a complete off day. Today lots of mobil traffic from all over the world. All one-hit-wonders.

[Priyank Shah]

Hi, I am also seeing my website impressions going down literally 50% from July 26 to July 29. Can anyone tell me if this is still happening with any of you?

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

I have no idea why you are seeing what you're seeing, but it seems impossible to me.

These are Statcounter's overall, combined global metrics, not mine, if you check back on their previous USA yearly stats you will see that desktop and mobile tracked each other around the 48% mark, sometimes more destop sometimes more mobile, until the end of November 2022 when desktop surges into its now more than double lead in June 2023.

The most significant computing "event" I can think of at that time was ChatGPT.

[Dooku]

The most significant computing "event" I can think of at that time was ChatGPT

Maybe that increase is due to the use of many chatgpt plugins that are used to go online and perform all kinds of tasks on web pages?

[RedBar]

@Dooku ... My initial thoughts too but why only the USA? All other countries have continued within their normal ranges including next door neighbour Canada ... I am truly perplexed at the moment.

[rogrmartn]

Friends

Google Not Showing All the keywords for my website Since 31st July 2023

[RubicCubed]

What is going to happen for sure is that the US government is going to crack down hard and start regulating the tech giants.

American politicians are too old to understand technology. The average age in the House of Representatives is 57.9 and 64 in the Senate. Imagine calling on Senator Feinstein to lead a committee on AI and what a mess that would be. These career politicians haven't done anything for themselves in years with some likely requiring help getting dressed. Considering how wealthy many of these career politicians became after entering public service, I think they will do what they do best - position themselves to get rich at the expense of everyone else.

[superclown2]

What is going to happen for sure is that the US government is going to crack down hard and start regulating the tech giants.

Unfortunately I'm not convinced of that, the power of USA 'lobbyists' is great and their pockets are deep.

However the EU Digital Markets Act comes into force later this year and no amount of 'campaign contributions' and future job promises will stop it.

[not2easy]

New thread for August is open: [webmasterworld.com...]