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]

[Micha]

I (unfortunately) agree, since yesterday it is really very bad. It won't be long before Google has banished all small websites to absolute insignificance.

[l1fejosh]

Very slow day yesterday and this morning...

[ichthyous]

Some of you should drill down and check on a page by page basis...did you have a sitewide loss in traffic, or are some pages disproportionately affected? My traffic is recovering for most of the site, but my most trafficked page is down 80%. That is because the page has had the large image carousel removed completely and replaced by a small thumbnail, or with no image. In my experience if you lose your image carousel in google these days your traffic just vanishes entirely. Meanwhile, my rank has only changed slightly...down from 4 to 5 for one term and up from 3 to 2 for another. Yet all of the traffic is gone since November 10th.

[superclown2]

Google's head of advertising is stepping down. Nothing to do with the eye-popping admissions he had to make during the trial of course.

It will be very interesting to see what changes, if anything - after all the ads have far more effect on most of our earnings than the positions of our pages in the SERPs.

[Micha]

@Ichthyos completely lost, but that doesn't surprise me, Google doesn't trust small news sites anymore (at least here in Germany, I have no idea what it's like in the US). Google News is full of our "leading media", on some topic pages you can even find articles that are only days old, you can't find a single small news site anymore. And unfortunately it doesn't matter how good the content is, they are simply better known.

The ranking itself has leveled off to -20 percent compared to September, but that doesn't help when you consider that there are tons of ads etc. above it.
We've just had a team meeting and decided to look at it until the end of December and if it doesn't improve, we'll leave it alone. Advertising revenue or not, the time we all sacrifice for our articles can be put to better use and watching the content being copied and then ranking better is no longer fun. (Fortunately, the website is only a side project for all of us)

[christianz]

Google's head of advertising is stepping down.

Good. Now they need to fire however decided that 1 YouTube video is more valuable than 1000 websites and web apps. The head of googlespam that must be.

[BigKat]

after all the ads have far more effect on most of our earnings than the positions of our pages in the SERPs.

We hardly get any traffic from our #1 ranks anymore because they're buried under so many ads. And those ads don't allow us to convey much to users except a product name and price - nothing regarding our products meeting safety standards, which none of the products sold in the Amazon ads Google is running comply with. When it comes to products, Google making money always comes before consumer safety.

[renatovieira]

This afternoon I noticed a huge drop.

[RedBar]

Monday was awful however Tuesday, Wednesday and so far today I'm slightly ahead of my 2023 average plus it has driven some potential new customer project enquiries. Exasperation with G has to be my description right now.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@SuperClown

Is the head of Ads the same individual who makes a mess of the G SERPs? If so then he needed to go. If not, then whoever it is still needs to go. Online businesses are losing too much due to their greed. I recently read they smashed their 2022 yearly profits this year. Well there is a surprise. Meanwhile their lifeline, the ones who brought them success, the publishers, are dying. As we all know we talk about it enough.

Funnily enough, G also accepted a $74 million yearly deal with Canadian News publishers. After earlier this year, refusing not to. Are things finally turning around. One can only hope.

[ami3810]

@Micha, I can confirm that Google not trusting small news website is not only in Germany, as per our experience. May I ask if you suffered losses only in terms of ranking, or was your website also affected by being thrown out of Discover out of the blue?

One of our websites (one of our 2 biggest projects) actually got a really nice boost during the HCU but got thrown out of Discover during the November update after suffering hefty ranking damages. We were doing great even before the HCU, so being now practically at 0 has left us with a similiar choice to yours: See what happens by the end of December and if nothing improves, we will have to, very unfortunately, fire our writers and call it quits.

[Micha]

@ami3810 We were also kicked off Discover. There was one day in the last few weeks when we were back online, but since then the site has been dead again.
It's ridiculous, Google wants expertise and I only have writers who are absolute experts in their field and we only cover topics that the big boys wouldn't even touch, but even that doesn't matter.

I was talking to some owners of smaller news sites earlier and they see it the same way we do: If things don't finally improve, they're going to give up. Nobody understands the sense behind it, and Google is killing small businesses by the dozen.

[ami3810]

@Micha, I read on the Google Forums that (some sites) got kicked out of Discover in October, if I am not mistaken, and they are pretty big. Like big big. And at the same time, I am seeing one of our competitors ranking well with crap (posts that they not only change the date but the whole URL with a new name and they are still on Discover. Content is also just taken and paraphrased from other websites; they just have a paragraph summary on some posts; some are ours too). They actually used to be pretty good last year before they adopted the clickbait title and content approach. No quality content in the past year, in my eyes, just scrapping from others and paraphrasing. However, they aren't bigger than (the removed sites), so I am wondering: maybe it's just another bug? Or being hopeful that it is because hell, I don't know what needs to be changed or improved then on our end.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:05 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2023]
[edit reason] Please see Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Micha]

@ami3810 Unfortunately I don't think it's a mistake, the pattern is too noticeable for that and it's also very noticeable that the big well-known media outlets aren't affected.

As for OK magazine, they're not that big, but yes, it's been pretty devalued. (I don't know the other magazine)

Well, and unfortunately I can confirm what you write, I've noticed that too, plus a lot of AI articles that are utter garbage.

I also hope this changes again soon, but to be honest, it looks to me like Google is cleaning up its index and focusing on the sites that keep people on Google in general.

[System]

New month, new thread open now: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 11:35 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2023]
[edit reason] New month [/edit]