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]

[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.