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]

[muniz900]

Sorry but now Google does a core update every month? Or is it just a period and then they will go back to doing them every 5-6 months?

[Conro]

Have noticed websites recovery? I was previously looking at a continuously growing website that strangely doesn't even have an "about us" page, and it has invasive advertising. Also, the author's real name is unknown.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Another -20%. Despite saying I had lost -44%. It was actually 20%. UA4 was being slow. But if you count both Monday and Tuesday it now adds to a -44% drop in traffic. In just two days. The consistency of these drops and how big of a drop these usually are, really, it just smells of desperation. I think a post from a few days back nails it. G are dying and are just trying to milk it until that day comes.

I now spend most my days on Youtube. Which is more stable, does not go through this crap. Plus is heading in the opposite direction +40%. Long may it remain that way. Since the website business has no chance with Google and their greed.

It's funny I recently got two emails from companies stating that ''they can help my site reach rank #1''. ''Improve my overall traffic''. The only way this will even have any benefit to me is if Google Search changed drastically. No one can do anything to improve anything. We are all helpless. No updating of articles, improved SEO. Nothing will change anything until the ''elephant' learns its lesson. Preferably by a varying degree of deadly options. Axe? Rifle? C4? Nah, but seriously I really dislike Google and those around me know this all too well. You do NOT need a monopoly and you do NOT need to bleed other website businesses dry to stay alive. No way, not when other search companies are able to survive just fine. Its all nonsense and unnecessary. Not to mention sickeningly annoying.

I feel for everyone being hit with negative results. Especially those that avoid AI. The cheating method which is no different to essentially copy pasting other websites. Internet sucks and it does not need to be like this. Again, annoying.

[christianz]

Youtube. Which is more stable, does not go through this crap

Because its Google's own website and they boost it unfairly, all the time every time. Sometimes with up to 20 results on first page.

They are also pushing YouTube videos where video as a medium is inferior to web application. Web platform is much more powerful than video, it just so happens that Google is trying to suppress it for their financial gain.

[oldog]

Talking about "specialized knowledge" makes you laugh out loud when you see that garbage site Quora ranking on top search results from every web troll's Question and " Answers "
boo ha ha haaaaaaa :-))

[RareBit]

Promote YouTube > make more money from the ads..

[Treud]

For me YouTube it's done after having a channel on sex toys for 8 years, it gets bashed in 2 months, received tons of Strikes... Even I didn't updated stuff for long time.
Anyway, will create another one with some editing just to save my bandwidth on some useful videos for my customers (not the mass of YouTube)

[christianz]

@Treud

YT has super capricious, heavy handed and opinionated censorship policy. So unless you are reviewing iPhones, you will get banned after some x amount of time. Or if not banned outright, shadow-banned below all the Priority Publisher channels.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I personally enjoy Youtube and will limit myself to it if I cannot make use of the website aspect because of these updates. Every time I start getting anywhere I am immediately knocked back down once again. This is my life right now, as is same worldwide. To me its pointless. With Youtube there is better growth. Plus the stability too really does make me question my current motive regarding the site. Thus more reason to stick by it.

I'll admit, from a rather selfish point of view, I like the fact that Google are promoting Youtube. It helps us but ultimately I also know why they are doing it too and its not because they care about their creators. They don't. They don't care about anyone but themselves and their sheer SHEER greed. However promoting Youtube in search does not help web publishers so its a 50/50. Would these traffic numbers that I get on Youtube still be as good if it stopped? I believe a lot of people in my niche use Youtube for their primary source of search anyway. Or so I'm lead to believe. I'd like to think so as using Google really puts me off. In fact I'm seeing myself being turned off anything Google related with each passing day.

I do sort of agree on the copyright on Youtube. I have been on that platform for almost 20 yrs now. Far longer than owning a site. Back when I first started one of my channels got terminated in one day. Not sure if it was someone who really didn't enjoy my success, as the channel was growing, fast. Or if it was actually warranted. Regardless I found it super easy to get strikes back then. For the past 6-10 yrs though strikes are more seen as claims. Which can easily be disputed. So I like to think that their copyright system has been much improved over the years.

[saladtosser]

My YouTube channel has taken over my website now, my YouTube channel gets 36.8k views per month and my website gets 37K sessions per month. YouTube makes me £100 per month with zero overhead (excluding time) and website make £100 from adsense with £70 Azure hosting per month! I put 90% effort into website and 10% on YouTube, I think the web is dying because of search engines and I should put 90% of my time into YouTube rather than beating a dead horse with my website going forward!

[Fluff_Nutz]

@saladtosser

Those are exactly my thoughts. For me I also have to pay for writers for the site too. On top of server cost. So much expense and where is it getting me? With Google search, its easy to say, nowhere. Worked my @ss off last year for my site. Working in humid weather throughout the year. Just to see it dropped by 80% by the end of the year. Never really felt motivated after that. Even with hired writers. G killed my motivation and everything.

[Micha]

Even with hired writers. G killed my motivation and everything.

This also applies to me and my team. Today again the best example: We were the first to report on two topics, traffic from Google = 0, but a page that copied our text ranks at the top. That is incredibly frustrating.


Coupled with the feeling of helplessness because there's absolutely nothing you can do, the thought of just quitting is very tempting. But somewhere the website is your own baby (and unfortunately I can't go on YT).

^{Link removed}

[edited by: Micha at 6:22 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2023]

[christianz]

@Fluff and @saladtosser

I would suggest you also nurture your channels on other video upload platforms (Rumble etc). If alternative platforms flourish, it empowers creators and gives them more safety.

I can't turn into video producer even if I wanted to because my content doesn't make sense as videos. That doesn't stop Google from spamming YT for my keywords, of course. For obvious greed reasons.

[adman]

By the way, the core update is complete and we continue with the review update

No, it's not.
Reviews update is ongoing in parallel with core update.

[Micha]

Reviews update is ongoing in parallel with core update.

According to Google, it has been finalised and the review update has started, see link

[BlueEyes82]

The downward trend has continued since the September update. Some of my pages have now lost 75% visibility.

In the past, the search engine Bing usually had similar rankings to Google (+/- 2-3 positions). I still have top positions on Bing and, thanks to the crash, I get almost the same amount of traffic as from Google.

I have now asked many people what is better about the pages in front of me - none of them have a clue. Except you are not an expert and have more authority.

For some keywords, websites consisting of (1-2 pages) with Google sitelinks rank ahead of me - last updated in 2013 and not optimized for mobile.

But I have a suspicion that we use a lot of clear tables to compare content. Google has viewed this very positively in the past. Many passing websites often only have large, confusing text blogs. Perhaps Google currently only wants to reward pages that provide "enough fodder" for Google Bard - regardless of whether the content is of any use to the user or not. In the past, we usually had the best conversion rate per click compared to competitors - targeted traffic is now a "problem" for Google.

[Razorllama]

Micha, the core hasn't completed yet, you can see it on the status page: [status.search.google.com...]

I gotta say, these simultaneously running algo updates make things even harder.

[Micha]

Oh .. that's right, I misread my mistake.

[samwest]

Hey strangers...it's been over 6 months since my last post. Figured I'd stop by to see that nothing has changed. Happy Holidays!

[christianz]

@samwest

Cheers! lol

[mhansen]

SGE now going global to labs users (labs.google.com)...

Link to Google blog [blog.google]

[seomotionz]

G has started rolling out review update of Nov as well.

Anyway, anybody experiencing indexing issues? Some of our urls are now 48-72 hours old still haven't been indexed, extremely odd.

[Nutterum]

A few things on my end. An algo update definitely swept the Google Rankings. I came out unscathed with Greece, Hungary and Czech Republic being very positive, something I did not expect. What actually made me scrath my head is an experiment of 10 Landing Pages where I personally created the content for. It is hefty 3000 words deep explanations and from the kitchen tips, proper 10/10 unique content . All 10 of these test categories tanked. And Im talking from 6-7-8th position to below 200 (I dont check below 200) . One of the pages actually got deindexed. It's like some bot thought its AI content or something (it was not, didnt even open up GPT for this, on purpose) . Technically the pages do not differ from the other categories. So whatever core update Google did, it dialed its "over-optimization" penalty to 11.

[RedBar]

I'm having one of those very low page views to unique visitor ratios today especially so from the USA.

So far in November our hotel site is -15.4% v 2023 average which we expected and is ok for this time of the year and +9.5% v 2022 for the same dates.

[Martin Ice Web]

first time since the update marathon started in may, we see positive results. We are now at +71% with waves up and down especially when it comes to conversions.
Wierd is that our main (and best) pages that we put a lot of work in are not seeing big movements up jet.

[swdcreative]

SERPs still very volatile. I wouldn't make any changes until these updates are done rolling out.

[oldog]

@Martin ice web...."So far in November our hotel site is -15.4% v 2023 "
If you are not running booking, tripadvr, hotels dot com trivago or expedia....

IMHO either you are talking about porky pies or you are webmaster of the above websites.....
Sorry mate but this is my opinion....because those mentioned above websites haven't loose an inch for decades in google serps

[RedBar]

@oldog ... You were referring to my post not MIW

I'm not too sure what you do not comprehend about my post, Sure we run Booking, TA and Kayak and insofar as the UK SERPs are concerned we do see regular shuffling and we are also on the first page for many terms. Outside of large UK cities we do expect a reduction in room bookings at this time of year however we are ahead of last year plus December accommodation and restaurant reservations are well-ahead.

Where are the porky pies in that?

[oldog]

@Red bar Sorry it wasn't for MIW , I mean that even if you are on the top ten results in hotels in Meopham..... or East Grinstead.... you can't bit the 5 giants out there, those five ones cover every inch of the UK , so I don't even know why you are running an a,b,c or d hotel website ....
I would never touch the hotel niche if I am not a millionaire ...
But even millionaires are disappearing ...I don't know if you know the case of www get your guide ..dot 50 languages ( german startup company with a really goofy idea ....to hire local guides for tourists ) after a year of spending billions in adwords they are dead as a dodo

[mosxu]

@samwest

Nice to hear from you! I hope you are well!

The boat is sinking and more webmasters are thrown overboard for the boat to keep going!

A trillion is very heavy!

[RedBar]

@oldog
So far this has been an 18 year project! We took over a very run-down however quite large and very central hotel and over the years have spent a considerable amount of time, effort and money on it, a full restoration was the only option since it was in such a poor state of repair.

Actually we have had the luxury of time since we had no other investors looking for an early return consequently we've done it right using many local trade companies with their staff interested in what we were creating and many of the locals too. This has also meant that the website has been allowed to grow steadilyand feature much of what's been done. It's won many awards from the various hotel review sites which, I assume, keeps us right up there on the first page.

I can't imagine what it would be like to have to take on such a project over a much shorter timescale, we have had the luxury of time and relatively very little pressure.

[oldog]

@Red Bar
Ten years ago I bought a domain with thousands of links, in the hotel niche of a very well known destination for 5.000 £ , it was ranking at #1 for xxx hotels xxx hotel or hotels in xxx etc, for the next couple of years it gave me back 30 times my investment ! Somehow I knew that it wasArkwright not going to go like that for ever so it was the right time to sale it !
Guess what ....within three months I sold it, the page went .. MIA...I don't know what those guys did or google did ...but that was my best investment in the hotel niche.

[Conro]

Google has once again filled many search queries with irrelevant content, Google Shopping boxes, and 'People also ask' sections. For instance, if I search for 'best mirrors,' I have to scroll four times with the mouse before finding an article discussing the best mirrors; everything else is unrelated to what I'm looking for. Essentially, in an invasive manner, they are eager to get you to make a purchase. Google search has become so terrible that any other search engine seems better overall. Considering the increase in clicks I'm getting from Bing, it seems that even users are realizing it.

[Micha]

There seems to be a lot of movement on Google today. According to my SEO tools, many of my most important keywords have literally shot up in the rankings.

[mosxu]

Last 4 days full of zombies,

[superclown2]

Google has once again filled many search queries with irrelevant content.

Take a look at some of the evidence that has been released during the current case and you will see why, and how, quality and relevance have been of little importance since the same person was given the jobs of overseeing both advertising and search quality.

Google's reliance on 'authority' is now coming back to bite them since AI made it so easy for sites with large numbers of visitors to put up pages for every subject under the sun. First their 'authority' pushes them higher up in the SERPs than they should be, with such abysmal content; people click on them because they recognize the name of the companies (I shan't mention the names, you know who they are) and this pushes them even further up. The system is self perpetuating so it will get far worse unless Google change this ranking method. Do they have an alternative one? And will Wall Street allow them to use it if it demotes the very brands that pay them the huge sums they extract?

[Conro]

@superclown2 The fact is, they are also not very clever, as they are in a legal process and are now demonstrating their abuse of dominant position

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today... Here We Go Again

[ami3810]

Our most developed and oldest projects (websites) have been heavily hit by this update. Traffic is down by good 90%, I want to say even 100% as they got thrown out of Discover.

Funny enough: 2 other projects that we have not touched or updated in more than 6 months with new content are taking a leap. They are increasing in ranking and one is even consistently being shown on Discover since the update started. Again, no new content has been put on there for the past 6 months. Both of them haven't really been optimized for SEO.

Our newest page (3 weeks old now)? Doing great!

So I am asking myself: eh... what and why?

[cfiila]

like here.

I do not understand why.
The oldest project, with the most content, which had the most impressions on discover, fell hard. Today he is almost dying.
on the other hand, 2 new projects, with little content and that barely appeared on Discover, gained visibility and are at the top of visits.
I keep questioning why this is.

[Micha]

Since you mentioned it, I looked at the data on my second website, which I haven't updated in years. It consists of very little, very thin text and a contact form, no articles etc as I just created the site quickly so the domain wasn't empty and my agency at least had a business card. Since Monday, the visibility of this page has increased and the statistics show an increase in the number of visitors via Google, which was previously 0.

This is absolutely illogical.

On the other hand, the visibility of my main page has risen again, so I'm curious to see how it evolves this week.

[Razorllama]

Traffic is staying the same as before, so no drastic drops or gains. However, conversions over the past 3 days have been absolutely awful. We're talking 3x less than usual. No drops in clicks/landing page engagements, just total conversion annihilation. Is this zombie traffic or what?

[adman]

Google search is really messed up somehow drastically, because I noticed it doesn't return any results for some phrases, even though it should. It reminds me of search issues on the beginning of the search engines when they lacked sophisticated systems.
My website is now steady on -65% lost traffic since the update.
No further drops, but no gains either.
Funny enough, money is better, CPC is higher!

[RedBar]

Realistically I now have a new, lower weekend traffic volume and yesterday, Saturday, was consistent within this new range for the past 10 weeks' average.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is staying the same as before, so no drastic drops or gains. However, conversions over the past 3 days have been absolutely awful. We're talking 3x less than usual. No drops in clicks/landing page engagements, just total conversion annihilation. Is this zombie traffic or what?

Same here...traffic was high for a Saturday but no new inquiries or conversions for several days. It's crazy how Google can just make it all vanish. Earlier in the week had new inquiries on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th and 9th...then from the 10th until today zippo. Today looks like traffic may be way down though

[christianz]

I am noticing weaker US traffic today.

Funny enough, money is better, CPC is higher!

Nothing to be happy about. It is the guaranteed rise of CPM/CPC due to Black Friday and approaching holiday season.

[Conro]

Google continues to de-index pages. Now they have removed my review of a console that I had also disassembled to show a problem I had fixed. Everything was photographed in the review, but surely for that dumpster of Google, it was a fake review without evidence that I had tested the console. Probably now G is in the hands of interns, otherwise I can't explain this huge change for the worse.

[christianz]

Absolutely NOTHING has been done to address the EAT renting / parasite SEO / authority farming that allegedly was promised to be "fixed" or at least addressed.

[twitter.com...]

[Conro]

In the end, even the SEOs are waking up, albeit a bit late. So, it's not the websites that are terrible, but Google has become rubbish. How unreliable they are

[ami3810]

You couldn't be more right, Conro. I have observed that a content-scrapping website has been ranking higher for OUR content since this update started.

Additionally, our direct competitor who quite often just rewrite our articles, seems to be doing good with this update. They were previously changing their posts' publication dates constantly. However, they went a step further and since more than a month have been republishing their articles with a new name and new URL on a daily basis. Content stays the same. Maybe that's the new strategy for success? Or whatever it is Google is looking for.