Google Update: September 2023

[Micha]

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5092521.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 7:25 pm on Sep 14, 2023 (cst -5)

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And the next update is running ... [status.search.google.com ]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:27 am (utc) on Sep 15, 2023]
[edit reason] Update deserved it's own thread [/edit]

[Soulofmonk]

In my niche, every website changes the date of articles to keep coming at the top. I hope they tank.

[ichthyous]

Big moves downward in USA / Canada traffic since the minute this was announced basically. It went from being +36% in the previous month to -50%-60% all day long with a mysterious pop of traffic in the eve making up the day's loss.

I have seen that pattern so many times in 2023, and it usually means your business is going bye-bye again. There are zero new inquiries, calls, sales, nothing. It went from several a day back to zero.

A lot of this could be window dressing...Google keeps switching which sites get big image carousels under them...without that you can kiss traffic goodbye. I am not finding that the number of ads at top really hurts traffic all that much...it's always about 3-4 now, but if your listing doesn't stand out on the page these days your traffic drops drastically.

This says it all...10am EST today:

The United Kingdom
+229%
The United States
-52%
India
+507%
The United Arab Emirates
+173%
Australia
+170%
France
+406%
Germany
+143%
The Netherlands
+203%
Canada
-35%
Italy
+128%

[Martin Ice Web]

Very, very slow weekend, like other said before. But today traffic was a little better. Some conversions and it seems that certain items that we put much effort in coming back. But that means nothing. Could be upside down tomorrow or in 10 minutes.

[RedBar]

Sunday's total traffic 45.5% with today after 16 hours at 32.5%, this is sub-Xmas / New Year / Easter Day levels for me. My global SERPs seem to be unaffected apart from USA localisation of half-a-dozen specific keywords.

[mhansen]

Two observations since the HCU announcement: Compared Aug 8-13 to Sept 14-23.

1) My site is not in direct product sales, but discusses a lot of products/things and tech-level information about them (Not a review site). Since the HCU rolled out, we lost all but a few product results and product snippets.

2) I've noticed a 15% or so drop in overall traffic, but impressions are up considerably - especially in non-USA traffic, even though we do not cater to them at all (and block many via CloudFlare). Russia, Seychelles, Netherlands etc are up more than 120% in impressions as are many other non-USA countries. USA impressions are up roughly 30%, though clicks are down.

[EditorialGuy]

Traffic for our informational travel site has been up slightly (most days, in the single digits) in week-over-week comparisons.Of the past seven days, all days but one were showing an improvement. Since these improvements have come at a time when we're normally in a downhill slide that lasts until at least mid-December, the boosts are better than the raw percentages might suggest.

Still, we have yet to regain the Google traffic that we lost in the previous HCU and "product review" update.

[renatovieira]

Very slow today..

[Fluff_Nutz]

I wonder if the ''spam'' update will trigger next month. The month that broke my site last year. This is when my opinion on Google changed. I used to support their products when I was younger. Telling people to use Chrome instead of Explorer. Now I regret everything. G if you are reading this I would appreciate a fix next month. Ha! There even used to be a time when people mentioned that G take traffic numbers away during updates and give back. Now I never seem to read messages about giving back any more. Google takes and never gives back.

[ichthyous]

@mhansen I was also seeing very high non-USA traffic from around August 26th onward. This latest update hasn't changed that, but USA/Canada have definitely declined. No conversions since the latest update either.

FYI, I was being hit by Netherlands and Seychelles IPs as well...it's all the same company, but I forget the name now. I blocked the hits by IP, by network name, and by country (seychelles) and it finally stopped. I don't block Russia (yet) but China is gone...I would add India to the list but most of the India traffic is real at least.

[Micha]

Also so far I can say that traffic has stabilized for me. During the core update they were pretty mixed, now they are back to the normal level. However, in the morning there is little going on at our shop, only from 2pm the traffic increases.

I looked at a friend's store yesterday, due to the core update there was a massive drop in sales, despite good visitor numbers. Now the visitor numbers have dropped massively, but the sales are back to normal.

[rustybrick]

This HCU update does not seem that big, am I wrong? I was expecting a lot more chatter.

[StupidIntelligent]

@Barry

A page that was deleted over a month ago, has now started ranking for many keywords during this update.

This means that Google extracts data on pages for ranking weeks before, launching the update. So, any quality changes you make will literally take months to take effect.

There isn't any synchronization between their crawling, indexing and ranking systems, else their algos wouldn't rank and display pages that haven't existed for weeks.

[renatovieira]

@rustybrick - In the first few days, it seemed like it was something intense. But it has stabilized for now. Slight movements so far, everything is warm...

[rustybrick]

Appreciate the feedback! Thank you.

[RedBar]

This means that Google extracts data on pages for ranking weeks before, launching the update. So, any quality changes you make will literally take months to take effect.

I completely agree and this has been on-going for probably at least 2-3 years now with G ranking non-existent pages. For localised rankings in the UK I have no issues whatsoever at the moment however for international I need to allow at least 6 months minimum and even then nothing may happen even though the current SERPs may be extremely poor.

[Dalnoon]

UK traffic is down ~40% for today. First day seeing changes since the update was announced, not sure if it's gonna stay or not.

[RedBar]

As of last Wednesday 13th Sept, my UK-focussed (97% UK) hotel events' site, has recovered all its losses and is now averaging higher PVs than previously. I'll wait until the end of the month to see if this sticks!

[Alex_1729]

The HCU is killing my 10-month old informational site. Yesterday -20% organic traffic compared to last week, today will end up being about -45%. I am hoping for a full recovery as with the August update, but this looks bad. Really bad. I tried my best with this site, I have proper topical authority, topical clusters, interlinking is excellent, and the blog posts are extremely helpful to the best of my abilities. This is ludicrous if it remains.

[watesh]

Well, this Helpful Content update reversed all the gains from the August Core Update.

[RedBar]

@Alex_1729

My main international site is 30 years old, yep seriously, and it is yo-yoing all over the place, just where will this manipulation end? I'm guessing possibly even pay to be indexed!

[Fluff_Nutz]

@Alex_1729
I hear you. I too have an informational site. Though slightly just over 2 years old now. For me yesterday was -13% compared to last week and today is looking to be worse than the previous few days. Sucks too as its generally this time of year when the site is at its best.

To be honest these updates don't seem to end. It started middle of August and never stopped and we are now closing in on October. Non-stop traffic reduction. Drops after drops. Probably since August I have probably lost around 60-70% traffic altogether. I'm almost questioning if this is even worth it any more.

I recently hired two writers for the site. They are very keen and are great to work with. Very consistent. So I'm forever having new articles posted. All of which are SEO, interlinked and everything else. Still cannot get any consistent spikes or growth though. It was never this inconsistent when I first started out.

Anyway long story short, I just let my writers focus on the website now. Whilst I work on my Youtube channel. The more I look at the reduced traffic for the site the more frustrating it gets. Plus I find Youtube to be more stable, consistent and way more fun too.

[Samsam1978]

For once, seeing an uplift in traffic since these last updates. It might go back down in a few days who knows.

[bonehead84]

@Fluff_Nutz, you said "Probably since August I have probably lost around 60-70% traffic altogether. I'm almost questioning if this is even worth it any more.".

I fired my team today and am moving my site to a cheaper server so it can live there and hopefully keep bringing in tiny bits of money and am halting all work on it. I'm down 80% with no sign of the trajectory changing. The site has almost 1,000 human written articles over the past few years. Went from between $12k - $15k per month to what will be $3k next month (if nothing gets worse). And that's right now.... just wait till Q1 halves the advertising budgets.

After 14 years, I'm probably about to quit SEO altogether finally and likely get a day job of some sort.

[ichthyous]

It seems that traffic is slowly bouncing back to the levels before this latest 'helpful' update. USA is up 19% by 5pm today. UK is up 157% and UAE is up 128%. Only Canada (-53%), Germany (-42%) and Australia (-38%) are down.

[edited by: ichthyous at 9:11 pm (utc) on Sep 19, 2023]

[christianz]

So far approx -15% for my 16 year old, niche authority, highly relevant and helpful information site. It tanks further every day, especially US traffic.

Google's AI is working great!

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Facing with a big drop again, through majority of the articles. Everything is dying, you can't do nothing with it. There is no hope for anyone, these criminals are just destroying the internet. Hope that the time will come when we will see those bandits in the court. I don't know what to do more, there is no way to stop the falling. It seems they will just destroy "unhelpful" websites to absolute zero.

[headspace]

This helpful content update and the draconian sanction of removing your site from the index is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. The cowards say it's not a manual action in order to prevent you from having any means of challenging the decision to de-index you.

They appear to be targetting sites that aggregate information from across the internet which is the very foundation of how the internet has evolved. Too many companies seem to think the internet is there own private space to behave how they would want it to. It is a public space designed to legally disseminate information in all of its forms.

If I am looking for work and I come across a job aggregator site that does nothing but aggregate content from thousands of other job sites why would that not be helpful to me? The aggregator site has no relation to the sites it scraped the data from but it doesn't make the site any less helpful to me looking for work.

The fact of the matter is that all aggregators sites by default are 'search engine first' because they make it easy to find information spread across the internet.

But most aggregators would fall foul of this helpful content nonense and be de-indexed simply because there is no relationship between the source sites and the aggregator. The aggregator needs no direct expertise on the subject matter other than how to pull the data together, but what's wrong with that?, even if it is AI generated?
If the day ever arrives where you need expertise in a subject matter to put a website together that would be a very sad day!

[Conro]

I believe Google has been left in the hands of an intern or there's a saboteur on their team. The search engine has become poor and can't find what you're looking for anymore, Google AdSense no longer counts clicks, and despite complaints in the community, there's no response. It seems like Google is about to fail and is firing its last shots

[ayberk]

I became a member to write a comment on this thread.

As of yesterday, our website, which we have been weaving like an embroidery for 1 year, was DESTROYED. Nearly 1000 original articles. All extremely comprehensive (even NASA had referenced it) and "HELPFUL."

And our 1-year work and source of revenue collapsed in an instant. I hope this is a fluctuation. Because my brother and I have worked very hard.

[Dalnoon]

@ayberk, sad to hear dude. I hope you find a way to reverse it.
Are you publishing on Wordpress?

I was wondering if too many tag/category/feed pages are the reason why our website is tanking. Since these pages are mostly "thin" content by nature.
My feed/tag pages are enabled by default since I'm using WordPress and I just realized I have more than 5k not indexed pages (mostly feed pages).

also, what is more weird is that we have had 3 Google HCUs, (August 2022, Dec 2022 and now Sep 2023) and my website pumped heavily on the first one (almost 50% added to the traffic) but then lost 50% on the 2nd one and now around 35% on this one. So idk, Google can't decide if my content is helpful or what.

[Soulofmonk]

My 7-year-old site is 15-20% down since Monday. I'm tired of this grind—one week up, next week down. Traffic does not increase at all. On top of it, lower ad revenue.

[renatovieira]

Huge drop yesterday...

[RareBit]

We are finally seeing some stability today and have gone back to our top positions for quite a few keywords.

[ayberk]

@dalnoon

We use WordPress. The only things indexed are posts. Tags, categories, archives and subpages are not indexed. In fact, we have been growing 25–35% every month since the day we opened the site. In the last month, the growth stopped, and this month came the big crash.

The more I see the sites brought to our place, the more depressed I get. Most of them have "thin content". Also, Quora was brought to first place instead of our top articles.

[Shepherd]

Since the update, been seeing a lot of this for new content:
Page is not indexed: Discovered - currently not indexed

Could be we hit the sitewide trigger for (non)HC or it could be a crawl issue, no way to know with google.

[MayankParmar]

Indexing issues, anyone? It started with "Page is not indexed: Discovered - currently not indexed" for new posts, and now the console page is indexed, but it is not in the SERP.

[Soulofmonk]

Many people on Reddit and FB groups are reporting massive drops since yesterday: 20%, 40%, and even 60%. This is ridiculous.
[twitter.com ]
[twitter.com ]
[reddit.com ]
[reddit.com ]

[KaseyM]

Had indexing issues yesterday.

Traffic way way down. Been flat for nearly a year but first dip from an update here.

Seeing on SEMRush some sites tanking by up to 70%!

[jatin]

My 7 year old website was ranking for multiple competative keyphrases in top stories and Google news above legacy websites but its down to absolute 0 now. But our Discover coverage has been which is a bit weird. So it is all from Discover only right now.

[RedBar]

The last couple of days I have seen some huge spikes from individual users, one Oz visitor alone was 500+ pages with several more in the 100-200 page range, consequently this has pushed-up my levels to 224% of its average, however as yet this has not driven any new business enquiries from those areas. Not so far in the past I would see multiple page view visitors and then within a few days a valid enquiry ... we'll see what the next week brings.

[DeMalip]

I am down 50%, 20% on Monday and 30% yesterday. Its crazy out here.

[BlueEyes82]

Hello from Germany,

Our website also had its biggest crash in years (-50%). Initial analyzes have shown that all of our direct specialist competitors also lost in this way. But who won then? It seems as if only large authoritarian sites have been able to win everywhere, but here no "specialist sites" with real expertise have been able to win. An example is large newspapers with subdomains on the topic of streaming.

From our point of view, it doesn't seem to have been a "helpful content" but rather an "authoritarian content" update. The benefit for visitors is extremely questionable.

[Micha]

@BlueEyes -45 percent yesterday and today, my direct competitors are in the same situation, but Amazon has gained strongly and unfortunately it is again noticeable that in my area mainly the big news sites are gaining, for example "Tagesschau" has gained significantly. But you can't really tell at the moment who the winners and losers are, the next few days will show that when Google is done (apart from the small sites that have been constantly losing lately).

From our point of view, it seems that this was not a "helpful content" update, but rather an "authoritative content" update. The benefit to visitors is highly questionable.

I can only agree with that by the way

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld both DeMalip and BlueEyes82

As a matter of interest in which general sector(s) are you?

Ecommerce, local / national / international
Informational, evergreen / news
Specialist evergreen trade

I'm trying to get a grip on who has been hit and who has benefitted the most.

[BlueEyes82]

Hey RedBar+

in German affiliate marketing with comparisons (cellphones, streaming, pay-tv). I have now checked around 20 competitors, all the “small” ones lost, only the really big ones (with many different topics - no specialized sites) saw growth. I use Sistrix for the check, my competitors and I are at 1-4 points, the "big ones" at 40+x. - Here there were usually 1-5% increases, which fits the ratio compared to the "small ones".

[ichthyous]

Sorry to hear these stories...my site took a big dip over the weekend and now has bounced back but perhaps not quite as strong as early September. Every local is up today, including USA...a rarity. Only Australia (-66%) and Canada (-41%) are down. Those are still unusually large drops but both of those countries tend to swing a lot.

[christianz]

How are product comparison pages "unhelpful content", especially specialized and with uniquely large set of data? Does that mean Google's own product aggregations, flight comparison pages etc. are "unhelpful content" too?

[penitentman]

In the traffic is down camp... After surviving the Aug Core unscathed I was a happy man. Until yesterday. The HCU pounded 8 of my 12 informational websites. Still analyzing and waiting for data to come in but I'm probably looking at a 35% drop in traffic. What's curious is that I usually feel affects right away on the first day of the update. This time it took 4 days. So now I'm worried that my 4 remaining website will get dinged before this thing is over... Briefly looking at ranking changes Google has simply rewarded existing competitor websites with more pages being ranked along with some fb and irrelevant websites. Doesn't seem more helpful to me.

[Shepherd]

I wonder if he thinks he's being cute OR if they are really that tone deaf at google...

@JohnMu x(Twitter) handle: "Page indexing issues detected in johnmu.com"

[puckparches]

Last year, around this time, our traffic and revenue both declined by approximately 25%. Although our traffic has since recovered this year, our revenue has not. Unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks, both our traffic and revenue have decreased by another 25%, resulting in a nearly 50% decrease in revenue. It's incredibly frustrating because no matter how many hours you invest in adding more content, if Google makes even a single change, all your hard work can go to waste.