October 2023 Google Search Observations

[Cyril TechWebsites]

---

System: The following 3 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5093320.htm [webmasterworld.com] by not2easy - 11:10 am on Oct 1, 2023 (atl -4)

---

Seeing further drastical drop on Saturday. I stopped producing new content and updating the old content. There is no sense anymore for me, feeling awful to say that, but my website was fully destroyed with the "helpful" update.

[ghostofseo]

some good info in here, although it's a very long read.

search for "Google's Helpful Content Update Full Review, Analysis and Recovery" - Ironically searchenginelab has the first result - EVEN WHEN BE QUOTED with the EXACT article title which is actually the second listing the on-page url.

Just with the above, typing the exact name of an article title in Quotes and Google still can't figure out what I'm looking for? Sadly search is going to sh*t quickly...

[edited by: ghostofseo at 6:36 pm (utc) on Oct 12, 2023]

[EditorialGuy]

An ecommerce site is not in educational business the way to keep customers happy is price and quality not creating content for the sake of it!

To borrow an overused phrase, Google Search "is what it is." It indexes and serves up results for text, images, or video, a.k.a. "content." I don't think Google has ever claimed to be an authoritative rating service for e-commerce buyers, although it has made a halfhearted effort to publish reviews.

Maybe there's an opportunity for a clutch of billionaires to create an "e-commerce Google." The difficult part (besides coming up with an effective algorithm) would be in convincing buyers to use it instead of just relying on Amazon.

[BigKat]

I don't think Google has ever claimed to be an authoritative rating service for e-commerce buyers, although it has made a halfhearted effort to publish reviews.

But Google has claimed the importance and value of EEAT. When it comes to profiteering from the sale of unsafe goods, Google tosses all that EEAT nonsense out the window. Let the buyer beware, especially when using Google...

[superclown2]

It is possible that targeted action has been taken against affiliates since September.

Targeted action has been taken against affiliates for well over a decade. Google sees them as unnecessary and they claim to be only interested in the primary suppliers.

That's a bit rich when those same primary suppliers are buried under mega sites that spend heavily on Google but are still just affiliates themselves, forcing the real producers to buy back the business that is rightfully their own.

They used to have hordes of people checking sites manually, giving affiliates penalties for allegedly 'thin content' even though many of these sites had first class, in-depth reviews. Now they do the same thing algorithmically, much cheaper.

[Micha]

@BlueEyes82 will probably come in waves, now it's Germany's turn. In my area, the competition is once again making good gains, but I already know the pattern, next week it will probably be the other way round again.



<snip>

[edited by: not2easy at 12:38 pm (utc) on Oct 13, 2023]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[swright]

@ghostofseo, thanks for that. If what's in there is true, then it just confirms my impression that the HCU is the dumbest update G has done and that their idea of helpful content is completely divorced from reality. After years of favoring comprehensive topic coverage and well-written content, now penalizing pages for the same things and elevating pages that have neither? E-how style articles are again in.

[ghostofseo]

@swright

helpful content

To me that term is actually not helpful at all. Say you run a site about vegan recipes. People that are vegan might totally find the articles to be relevant, yet someone eating Big Macs on the regular won't find a vegan recipe helpful.

It's like someone at Google has unchecked power to decide what "type" of content and "categories" are no longer "helpful"

adjective for helpful "giving or ready to give help."

Yet Google or an algorithm now decides what's considering the definitions of giving help?

Is this any different than say Facebook censors, xyz political party is bad, so we shouldn't show there content....

[Martin Ice Web]

since 3 days google is in full zombie mode. Even sites with security risks are in top 10. google has become realy, realy, realy bad.

[Razorllama]

Conversions are at -73% compared to the last period; right now I have 10 articles going at -90% impressions (some are still at 0!) and a dozen more parachuted into low page 2 from position 2-4 beforehand.

9 years in this, the first time I've seen such mayhem on any of my sites.

[insideout]

@Martin_Ice_Web I strongly agree, last three days my main website lost more than 60% of its traffic. I lost all motivation to keep publishing new articles.

[morpheus83]

Seems its a rather big shuffle happening.

[Coldfaun]

Same here, I have my main website with about 400 articles that lost about 60% of the traffic.

I already started to update/rewrite all the articles, just to see if it will ever make a difference at some point.

[KaseyM]

Down 30%-50% this week (after a really, really good weekend, it must be said) - I'm in the entertainment news niche.

In fact, tools say that everyone in my niche has lost up to 70% over the past few weeks. Same for gaming news too.

Wild.

[RedBar]

I already started to update/rewrite all the articles, just to see if it will ever make a difference at some point.

At times of disruption the last thing to do is to change previously successful pages since you will not know if / whether it has any effect. I'm not criticising you for doing this just saving you unnecessary work when no one knows what is happening.

FWIW my global rankings are as strong as ever yet I have also lost substantial traffic, the quality of my pages are not under question, the dilemma for most of us affected is whether this is instigated by Google's shenanigans or possibly global news events. Many in my widget industry are seeing very similar drops in traffic therefore making any alterations without knowledge or evidence is unwise.

[tom_010101]

I operate a German car magazine and have approximately 31,000 (!) blog posts online, which have been manually created over the past 10 years. Making any changes here is nearly impossible, and I wouldn't know what to change, as they are absolutely relevant to the topic and, aside from perhaps 1-2 structural issues, are quite standard blog articles. Moreover, these have consistently ranked over 10 years and have gradually fought for their places. One can only hope that everything will calm down on its own in the coming weeks. Currently, I am experiencing a -70% decrease in traffic, and in the long run, this would mean the end of the site!

[RedBar]

One can only hope that everything will calm down on its own in the coming weeks.

From the mid-noughties onwards Google used to cause chaos at this time of year with its Xmas algo promotion which was supposedly to assist those Xmas ecommerce sites however it also used to cause a massive flux amongst all other sites.

We know G is constantly incorporating tweaks that it never tells us about, my guessing is that at some point G will have to just leave major adjustments alone for awhile simply to ascertain if it is doing as intended ... I repeat, that's a guess, I know nothing and I haven't known that for very long :-)

[ichthyous]

Last two days a full recovery...but this morning USA is -53% again at 11:30am. Oddly, traffic from several other countries in Europe is -29%...exactly the same % for all of them. Fridays tend to be a low day, so perhaps will catch up.

[adman]

Same thing here, 46% down in last two weeks after three years being in top 5 rankings.
Last year in september after Core update same thing happened, it took 6 months to recover.
Not sure what is going on right now, but I must say that I don't expect anything to change soon.
My opinion is that Google is now testing/collecting new informations about sites and that will determine the future rankings for all sites.
My only conciliation, strange enough, is that I've only lost about 25% revenues, actually I am seeing CPC doubled or tripled actually, so less clicks and more money!
Heads up and have faith, give it a bit of time.

[RedBar]

USA traffic this afternoon / evening for me -33%. strange.

[renatovieira]

On my side, everything is going up. Today is the best performance since the useful, core and spam updates started.

[jxlarrea]

Same, huge recovery the last couple of days but today USA traffic is down at least 40% for us.

[christianz]

This is the sort of recovery that you know for sure will turn into huge drop in coming days weeks or months. There is nothing good or hopeful on the horizon for small publishers and web creators.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I have no idea where my traffic is right now. After GA3 was, unfortunately or fortunately, pulled down for UA4. I have never really been able to keep tabs on traffic, real time. Though, I say fortunately because looking at traffic numbers can and usually has a negative impact on mental health. As its often depressing to look at. With UA4 and how completely useless it is I find I only look at it occasionally. With GA3 I was always looking at it. Probably a bit too much even. So is UA4 a god send? Maybe, hence fortunately or unfortunately.

However, I do agree with other posters. If your traffic has increased significantly its usually never going to last. My traffic last Sunday was amazing. It also helped give me Youtube channel a surprising boost too. Which is another reason why I keep the site alive. Despite the huge amount of updates. My goal was for it to support each other. Last Sunday it did exactly that. Alas, it only lasted an amazing, incredible, a whooping, staggering, gobsmacking one... single... day. Yes, one day. I now call it fluke Sunday.

[adman]

Though, I say fortunately because looking at traffic numbers can and usually has a negative impact on mental health. As its often depressing to look at.

Because people are overoptimistic about traffic.
I advise people not to take it personally, Google doesn't hate you or has anything against any site for that matter.
It's the nature of the search engine that people that work at the Google has to deal with, it's a gigantic database of content that has to be sorted in a certain way they think it's an optimal balance for the content creators, content users and Google itself.
Everybody should be patient.

P.S. I don't work at Google. :)

[nova88]

I'm tired; despite my efforts, my articles appear and then disappear, and it's not fair when I see competing sites every day with poor-quality content ranked in the top 5 on Google. I've done a total redesign of the site at the theme level, installed a speed plugin to make the site faster, updated content, corrected errors with Grammarly, etc. Unfortunately, without results. Note that my site is 2 years old.

The problem is that everyone says Google prefers recent content, especially in my tech niche. However, in reality, even when writing a recent article with the latest updates, it is always the old articles of my competitors written in 2021-2022 that are consistently ranked in the top 1-3

[adman]

We can argue what's fair, certainly from your competitor view ranking is fair if they are in top 5.
Thing is, top 5 is so little space for ranking, considering there are billion sites, it's almost impossible to be the first.
I understand your anger, but you have to find a way to promote your site.
Certainly, you can invest in marketing, like Google Ads, online banners, but there are lots of other ways.
For example, I have printed 10.000 flyers and distributed them on the street to promote my new site.
I also payed local newspaper ad.
Ranking is not just about quality, but popularity.

[Micha]

@adman Unless you're a big publisher or Big A. In that case, you can forget everything Google says, because Google favours you. It's often denied, but there's no other way to explain the ranking of some news sites and Amazon.

And as for the balance of results, there are umpteen updates every year, so either the spirit level is broken or it's something else. Because as the last updates have shown, none of them have been useful, the search results are becoming more and more useless and the share of advertising more.

However, you are definitely right about one thing: one should be patient and remain calm, a hasty revision while the updates are still running is usually useless.

[christianz]

Recovery for my oldest biggest best site lasted about 5 days. Seems like they have "patched the leak" that allowed some traffic to flow into it.

[adman]

@Micha
I can only guess, as everybody, how PageRanking works.
Is it manipulated manually?
I don't like to think so, even though I know there were lawsuits against Google for alleged manipulation of ranking.
You know, Amazon was founded before Google existed.
Newspapers were established long before computers.
They have established position in society that Google can't ignore, people want them, that's why they are top ranking.

That's why I think sites that were established top ranking before Core and Spam update will restore their position in top 5.
People do not forget that easily their favorite sites, it's not like there is SSD in head that can be erased with a delete key.
I believe vast majority of sites will reclaim their ranking.

[RedBar]

I believe vast majority of sites will reclaim their ranking.

USA localistion of results affects probably my top 10 keyword phrases otherwise ranking for me, and several others here if I have understood them correctly, is not the issue, it is the dearth of ones traffic even when ranking extrememly well. Is it the page layout with all of G's addons that are distracting seachers? Without a doubt when all one sees is a block of 5 x 4 image ads at the top of the page with nothing but pricing, organics have little opportunity and don't even mention further blocks of image ads as one scrolls down the page.

The sheer quantity of ads these days is overkill for me however does G and Joe Public say otherwise?

[RedBar]

WooHoo ... I've just noticed this iteration of my postings (3rd) has lasted 10 years today, blimey that's 19+ years altogether!

[superclown2]

I am seeing a competitor dominate a reasonably competitive sector with pages containing less than 50 words. One word changes only each time but this site comes near top for each variation based on that word.

Content is king? Hundreds of pages, the same 50 words with just a single one changing? top positions for these pages? Is it me that's crazy or Google (hint: I don't think it's me)?

[chms]

Our main website since four days ago has disappeared from the first positions on Google news, however I find my results at the end of the list on page 28-30.

On regular result we are positioning best than before in the first 1-5, but in Google news block we doesn't as before and if we access to the list we only are at the end as I said before, how is this possible?

[StupidIntelligent]

@chms

You have been hit by a spam update.

[mosxu]

Gents / Ladies?

Zombies want to be perfect! They have the longest sessions as well to have webmasters believe their content is not helpful?

[mosxu]

And most importantly for webmasters to understand is that algorithm is in prescription mode which means your website will not show most of times organic or ads to fulfil the prediction ( prescription)

Most of us still believe we show according to tools! Not at all!

[adman]

That's a comfort.

[Micha]

You have to hand it to Google: When they get going, they really get going. My website has lost 52% of its visibility from January to now. Due to the recent updates, most of the articles have become practically invisible and have lost their actually good position partly to articles written by an AI and articles from news agencies. Until Thursday, Google News visibility was still reasonably good, but that changed abruptly on Friday. Cheers to the "spam update", nice that it obviously hits small players again ...

[Conro]

I thank Google for these trashy updates that pushed me to use ChatGPT and Bing. Now, with Google, I can't find anything anymore. The end of an era has come for them too

[kidekat]

My 15 year old site is so informational that it’s never really been affected by any of Google’s ‘show more ads’ updates before but not this time. Traffic has been all over the place for the last week and has seen massive drops for pages that have held top spots for years to be replaced by spammy domains and made for Adsense sites with spun, scraped, or AI-generated content.

Where Google’s not managed to find any spammy competing pages and I’m still holding the number one spot, it now shows snippets from my site under People Also Ask, so although impressions and rank remain the same, CTR has nose-dived as people don’t need to visit my site to find what they are looking for.

I have one main site wide competitor which is a highly authoritative site and when searching for ‘brand’ + ‘specific keyword’ which I know should return a page about that specific keyword now returns unrelated pages or forum pages from that site. They must be tearing their hair out.

GA4 is useless of course to find out what’s going on in real time. I’m having to look at Adsense stats to try and monitor things.

[adman]

GA4 realtime analytics is not working for me for a week.
Does anyone have same problem?

[RedBar]

I hesitate to type this however I am seeing a small recovery in traffic as follows:

Week 40 traffic was -33.2% v 2023 average and my lowest week of the year
Week 41 was +11.7% v week 40
Week 42 so far is +8.5% v week 41 BUT still -19% v 2023 average

It's looking a bit better however do bear in mind that my 2023 average so far is -18% v 2022 and -37.2% v 2021

The more USA localisation I see the lower my USA traffic and also to a noticeable extent in the UK too.

[superclown2]

Certainly, you can invest in marketing, like Google Ads, online banners, but there are lots of other ways.
For example, I have printed 10.000 flyers and distributed them on the street to promote my new site.
I also payed local newspaper ad.

The worst marketing I've ever seen for the web was a series of Bing TV ads here in the UK which were excruciatingly, embarrassingly bad, on a par with the Strand TV ads. They may be good technologically but with their confusing layout and attempts to hide ads amongst genuine search results they show an amazing lack of knowledge of salesmanship. However, as far as advertising a site goes:

Google ads: if you have deep pockets you can use these to buy market share and exclude competitors. For the vast majority of websites the cost would far outweigh any benefit.

Online banners? Most of us gave that up a decade or two ago. They don't convert at anywhere near a worthwhile level.

Leafletting: seriously? They can be good for a local builder/odd job firm but for advertising a website they would be as near ineffective as makes no difference.

I've seen people try press ads but no attempt I've seen has continued for long, no doubt owing to poor ROI.

Once the mantra was to create better content than the opposition but looking at current Google search results that is clearly a waste of time. Authority (helped by how much is spent on Google ads) will always trump quality and expertise. Indeed some of the junk that is succeeding right now is scarcely believable.

Google's business plan consists of squeezing ever more sums of money out of search until the whole lot implodes. For this to succeed things, for webmasters, can only get worse. So: my advice to anyone thinking of coming into this business is don't bother unless you are prepared to sit it out until Google loses its monopoly; which no matter which way the current court case goes, would be at least two or three years off. Then who know what the next 'search engines' that come along will do? It may be a case of "out of the frying pan into the fire".

Alternatively, find a product or service which is totally unique to promote, but accept that as soon as you start to make some money 'authority' sites with little or no expertise in it will jump on the bandwagon and steal your lunch.

Like it or not, this is the reality of the situation at the moment. I am speaking, incidentally, with the benefit of over half a century of successful sales and marketing experience.

Google is well on the way to destroying the whole original purpose of The Internet.

[EditorialGuy]

GA4 is useless of course to find out what’s going on in real time. I’m having to look at Adsense stats to try and monitor things.

Try Plausible Analytics. It isn't as comprehensive as Google Universal Analytics, but it isn't bad.

[mosxu]

Can you ask for your money back?

[superclown2]

I'm seeing a lot of domain crowding - I thought that ended ages ago?

Worse than that - I'm seeing auto generated pages rising to the top. These have exactly the same extremely thin content ( less than 50 words), with just the search term changing and appearing three or four times, along with the title and heading. There is no meta description! They have obviously been generated using a level of database skill that even a kid at elementary school could handle. Hey, this was common more than 20 years ago! Google was able to filter this junk out then, why can't they do it now?

Either they are running some sort of tests, or their system is in one big mess.

In mobile I'm seeing multiple PAA and PASF blocks shoving the organics down to oblivion. It seems that the more valuable the click, the more of this Googlespam. This really puts the evidence released during the current trial into perspective.

[Juniya]

@Superclown2 - I think they are still fine tuning their search engine since the spam updates, I am seeing some really really bad results on common searches I highly doubt they would leave it the way it is, they are not that stupid, are they?

There is no way they can leave the search platform the way it is today, it is a mess no doubt but if the average person doesn't notice it, maybe they won't care.

[Razorllama]

The past week has been the worst in my site's 2.5 years of history. Traffic decline and disappearing/briefly re-appearing on the SERPs articles put aside, my conversions have been half of what they should be at my current session threshold.

[christianz]

My junior sites have been hit yesterday and biggest/oldest got boosted proportionally. Seems like just another wave of the same algo logic.

[superclown2]

@Superclown2 - I think they are still fine tuning their search engine since the spam updates, I am seeing some really really bad results on common searches I highly doubt they would leave it the way it is, they are not that stupid, are they?

Yes that's possible. On earlier anti-spam updates the rubbish bubbled to the top so that human reviewers could skim it off. Nowadays of course their algo should see to it automatically so I wonder why results are so awful now that they've had so much time to get it right.

Are they that stupid? It wouldn't surprise me much if these results stuck. The general quality of search results has declined dramatically over the last few years and I've been predicting for ages now that Google would go for broke before the axe fell. Their priority is income, not the best search results, and we are only just finding out for sure, thanks to the documents released during their trial, that what many of us suspected for years was pretty well correct.