November 2023 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

Global site Monday and Tuesday USA traffic -40%

So far today, Wednesday, 40% of my traffic is from the Russian Federation, not bots.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:49 pm (utc) on Nov 1, 2023]
[edit reason] split cleanup - New month, new thread [/edit]

[EditorialGuy]

Interesting story about fake authors and AI-generated content at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET. (So much for "authority."):

[futurism.com...]

[Shepherd]

Investigative reporters used to know, or at least thoroughly research, the topics they reported on. Today the talking heads read words prepared by others (people or AI). They may as well be an AI generated headshot.

If brands like SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET want to serve that garbage to their audience, that's on them.
If google wants to serve SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET content to their audience, that's on google

There's no practical "fix", SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET have no incentive to stop serving revenue generating garbage and google has no real incentive to stop using that garbage to generate AERPs (Ad Engine Results Pages).

[Conro]

Artificial intelligence websites publish thousands of articles in a short period, but Google still doesn't know how to distinguish them from real sites that may have been around for many years, and creating only 1 post or a few dozen posts a day... or 50 for the largest news sites. It seems that, for Google, publishing 100 to 1000 articles a day, perhaps rather elaborate guides, is considered normal, making them suitable for Adsense use. Really for Google is normal write 1000 article every day? Bah... If a site create 1000 article in one day i don't index this articles, but Google is Google, not me.
What's interesting is that Google now penalizes sites that have been active for years, making it even easier for AI-generated junk sites to quickly surface. Meanwhile, the old site with thousands of articles written year after year is swept away without understanding why. I believe that Google currently needs capable individuals rather than intern people and pathological liars who spend their days on Twitter. There should also be a change in CEO, someone who focuses less on money and more on what is beneficial for the use of Google for people.
Let's not forget that Google is a search engine, and without websites, it would never have existed. Even SGE owes everything to our hard work. However, it seems that Google has now lost all ethics

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today.... Here we go....

[adman]

@Conro

Google can distinguish AI junk.
For example, many people will create same AI articles using ChatGPT, but so can Google and they can easily know that's ChatGPT source.
But, I think you are right, AI junk will for sure flood the internet in exponential way.

[christianz]

they can easily know that's ChatGPT source.

I actually don't think they can. I know there are tons of AI content detection services and they claim (and do) function with decent accuracy. But if you do AI spam right, you can use many filters to postprocess and reshuffle this text, even introduce special human like imperfections, to make detection next to impossible.

There is no "mathematical" reason why LLM output text should be recognizable as such. It is just text. There are subtle "signatures" in the text structure that may point to LLM origin, but these can be muffled with further processing or specialized "stealthy" LLM generators.

[christianz]

Interesting story about fake authors and AI-generated content at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET. (So much for "authority."):

Great find. I think this is a classic textbook case of EAT farming. Milking this stupid EAT priority publisher status with blatant spam, pure worthless AI generated material.

For any non-priority publisher this could potentially pose danger of permanent sitewide demotion in search, but not if you are big enough. Same rules don't apply and you can happily spam away until this spam stops working (and you have made ton of money) and then just make wide puppy eyes and pretend you didn't know you were doing anything wrong.

[Ingall]

It's bad that content and relevance no longer have any meaning for Google and only authority counts.

For example, if you search for a rare dog breed and the authority sites only have articles about elephants, you will only see articles about elephants, even though there are many valuable articles about this dog breed on smaller portals.

Google probably thinks...as long as the content is about an animal, the rest doesn't matter.

In my niche I almost only find link spam with parasites. Parasite SEO is booming like never before.

[ichthyous]

@renatoviera I saw the huge drop starting yesterday with English language traffic from UK, Australia and Canada...down 27%, 12%, and 50%...USA was down 10%. Today USA traffic is starting the day -70% again.

Traffic has been very low for the last week, but GSC shows sharp drops in impressions and clicks and a loss of top-10 ranking terms. My site even dropped to #5 for terms I was #1-#2 for years. Meanwhile, the same site that was dominating on and off for the last two years is back at #1 for every search again, in every location where we compete. It's just basically a cookie-cutter page for every location. It had dropped down for a good part of 2023 until around October 5th...that's when it looks like Google's updates started preferring service provider type sites for any search that contained a place name again.

Whatever Google is doing with all these updates, it has totally killed my November sales. It has been very quiet and hardly any new sales inquiries in one of the busiest periods of the year.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:31 pm (utc) on Nov 28, 2023]

[NeapTide]

I was not active on this forum for a long time now because traffic was pretty much stable. In october I saw huge increase in traffic for several days and then traffic started dropping and today its at lowest.
SERPs are pathetic. 3 or 4 results then "people also search for" box, then 3 or 4 results again and then "people also search for" box appears pushing relevant results very low.

I have also not "purchased" authority backlinks for my websites since past 3 or 4 years. But it seems like I need to do it as google search only cares about having good backlinks.

[Conro]

But when will the November update and the reviews end? Two weeks have passed, and maybe they don't know how to add more 'ADS,' 'people also ask,' 'YouTube videos,' and 'Related posts.' Perhaps Google needs real workers, not bunglers.

[Senechal]

@adman

Google has already said they don't care about AI content as long as it's "helpful" and not "spam".

Needless to say, those two words are extremely subjective and everyone has a different idea of what they mean. At this point, one thing is for sure: It doesn't look like Google thinks most AI content is spam, as it's currently at the top of results everywhere.

[Micha]

And the core update has been completed, but the review update is still running. [status.search.google.com ]

[christianz]

@Senechal

AI content is second tier content. It is regurgitation of works that some human already did or (worse) some AI already regurgitated.

AI content should always be ranked below all human content. And I don't see any good reason why it should rank at all.

[RedBar]

And the core update has been completed, but the review update is still running.

UK 09.00 this morning my global site was switched back on with completely normal traffic levels and visitor profiles.

How long will it last this time?

Obviously I have done absolutely nothing to the site.

[mysitegothithard]

BR 17:00 - Still nothing. Maybe my site wont recover. I am working in two side projets and thinking about go back to work in "real life"...

[RedBar]

Maybe my site wont recover

All I can go by with Google experience is that a few years ago it used to run a Xmas algorithm to "help" online ecommerce site, this was usually Sept/Oct time. If one was unlucky and got caught up in this that was game over until post Xmas / New Year and then the SERPs went back to "normal".

I'm not saying similar is happening now however it sure feels like it and unless things do improve this week I'm guessing that January 2024 will be the next best indicator of what's really happening.

Then again I could be talking out of my a$$ !

[adman]

Maybe my site wont recover. I am working in two side projects and thinking about go back to work in "real life"...

Don't give up yet.
My site started to recover, last two weeks it's up 10%.
I can see positive trend every day, it's about 1-2%.

[Micha]

Nice to hear that your websites are recovering. Unfortunately, things are still looking very bad for small news sites. All the sites I monitor (including mine) unfortunately suffered another big drop yesterday.

[Conro]

@Micha I'm noticing that when a Google update concludes, if a website was stable or even growing during the update, after the update it then starts to lose traffic

[Micha]

@corno Well, my website didn't gain any ground during the update. There have been good days here and there, but on the whole it has lost ground and it won't stop.

[Conro]

I was looking at a website just now; all the content is copied and automatically translated, including the images. There is no page about the author, only the first and last name. There is a page about guest posts for sale. This site is 2 years old, has almost 1 million keywords, and has remained stable during the recent updates. It still generates very high visitor numbers. It seems like we've completely gone the wrong way; perhaps it's better to focus solely on spam. Once a site dies, another one can be created. Today, I'm spending three hours writing an article, and I see my keywords decreasing instead. Maybe it's better to focus on spam.

[renatovieira]

Very slow today...

[Conro]

Google have add in serp "people search also".
The SERP now
1 people also ask
2 site
3 site
4 people search also
5 video youtube (2)
6 site
7 site
8 site
9 people search also

This is The reason why the traffic drop

[Micha]

@Conro And not to forget: Google has once again devalued all small pages in the news

[Conro]

"People have also search" is also present in commercial searches, and now seeing and clicking on ads is even easier. Now throwing your money away with Google advertising is even easier

[edited by: Conro at 12:34 pm (utc) on Nov 29, 2023]

[Fluff_Nutz]

Sheesh. Why can't G just sort out their search. Organize it and then leave it alone. Why add even more crap and swap everything around and make more mess? Its like me when I'm going through a major anxiety and panic attack over something. Can never be happy with anything. OCD and ADHD also springs to mind. Is G an adolescent invalid?

I'm enjoying my Youtube life still. No regrets. But I have since my last post branched into even more platforms. All of which are stable. Never known anything like G and their search. But their mess has taught me a lot over the past year. Never rely on income from their ads and divert when possible. Thanks G, for that at least.

[Conro]

I'm considering a way to drive traffic from TikTok. I've noticed there would be little competition

[ichthyous]

Looking at my traffic more in depth I can see that the huge loss in USA traffic is due to a 76% drop in traffic to the most visited landing page on my site. As usual, Google has taken out a targeted hit on this page. The traffic dropped off a cliff on November 10th and just kept falling. No sign of recovery, and it's not going to recover in my experience. I might have to wait 6-12 months before Google decides to favor this page again. The odd thing is that it has not dropped down the ranks much...in fact it climbed one spot to #2 for one high-volume term and dropped from #3 to #5 for another. I suspect it has to do with all of the SERPS losing their image carousels for this search. They now only show basic links without any associated image at all, not even a small thumbnail.

[christianz]

There is new broad update going on (as per vol sensors) and traffic is looking bad across all my sites. Including the one that benefited from updates in early November.

None of my sites are reviews, ecom or affiliate.

Ones that were hit in October/November have been declining and losing keywords in beautiful straight line for 2 months so for them it doesn't really matter.