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]

[samwest]

Still, after 25 years online and #1 in the faux SERPs, my live analytics never has more than 1 or 2 consecutive/simultaneous hits. It's the same on nearly all sites. Must have been blacklisted long ago.

[insideout]

Total annihilation ! my 18 years website lost more than 80% of its traffic and still going down. What the f** is going on with G !

[Razorllama]

Looking at my GSC, I see that some of my articles which disappeared from the SERPs before have started gaining impressions again.

However, the majority of these impressions are non-relevant, like 80-90% of them.

[renatovieira]

Big drop today... Here we go...

[Micha]

Down again yesterday, up again today. This rollercoaster is really annoying.

[Martin Ice Web]

still at +72% so far but all zombies. what was a good search engine is now a ad loaded spam engine. It is a joke.
It like buying a newspaper that is full of ads with only one report in it and this report also has been copied from another source.

[adman]

still at +72% so far but all zombies

What do you mean by "zombies"?

[ichthyous]

Looks like a big drop today, after a week of already poor USA traffic and zero new inquiries since the 9th. Today, Canada, Australia, Germany, France all down exactly 65%! Interesting how that works, a totally natural phenomenon, and not the result of Google manipulating the sh!t out of everyone's traffic of course.

[RedBar]

My visitors to lower page views has continued into Thursday, Weds ended with visitors 100% and page views 75%, strange for a working day.

[Martin Ice Web]

@adman,

zombies are one page visitors or visitors that do not buy anything just lurking around.
Mostly this appears when google mismatches the serps to query. E.g. looking for apples and getting oranges in serps.

[JesterMagic]

I saw a big drop yesterday as well... 20%... most likely related to the review update though the site in the last 3 months has been hit multiple times and has dropped a huge amount (site is 20 years old)

[mosxu]

It is broken,

Yesterday I was trying some research on a certain subject and I am not joking could not find any useful information!

Tried to read 10 articles and all said nothing all junk built for search engines!

[superclown2]

Yesterday I was trying some research on a certain subject and I am not joking could not find any useful information!

I always used to dismiss conspiracy theories. If you told me a year ago that Google would deliberately put out poor search results so that people would have to spend more time searching and so be more likely to click on ads I would have dismissed it out of hand.

Since then I've read a lot of the testimony in the trial. Mind blowing.

[swdcreative]

SERPs more volatile today and yesterday

[mosxu]

Today only zombies here!

For those who do not have the definition of a zombie:

“a user who pretends to be a real human”

[haramamba]

G is cheating with video descriptions now.
If I search for something with "brand" in quotes, G shows videos from competitors with the description text taken from the brand's website.

[superclown2]

Total annihilation ! my 18 years website lost more than 80% of its traffic and still going down. What the f** is going on with G !

What's going on is Google is working for higher profits again this month. Read the trial testimonies and all will become clear.

It's simple: when they want to squeeze more money out of the Web they pack Chrome and Android with Googlespam to push the organics ever lower. If you check their SERPs on other browsers you can see when this happens. It will continue for as long as they control the main desktop and mobile browsers.

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday I was trying some research on a certain subject and I am not joking could not find any useful information!

I agree and once again i have to add that all this fake test sites, e.g.

the 10 best [item],
ranking the best [item],
testing of the best 10 [item]
...


are a complete desaster for users. None of these site content producers ever have seen the item(s) in real life. Its all fake and beeing produced for amazon affiliate ads. So much to EAT. If google real cares about their users than it would banish this harmfull sites.

We are still way up ( what is good though ) but it is FZM (Full Zombie Mode)

[BigKat]

What's going on is Google is working for higher profits again this month. Read the trial testimonies and all will become clear.

Data revealed in those court documents paints a picture of Google defrauding advertisers out of a lot of money, which I'm sure is a small sliver of what they've gotten away with. What was revealed outside of court, involving Youtube ads, was estimated to have defrauded advertisers out of billions of dollars itself. This helps explain the ever-worsening ROI with Google and Youtube ads, which has driven many advertisers off their ad platform and makes it even more difficult for Google to attain higher profits with fewer advertisers. Also, the excessive number of ads in the SERPS is turning off users, which we see ourselves with rising traffic/sales from other search engines. There's a serious lack of diversity for some specialized products in Google search, which essentially omits all organic results from view.

I just don't see where Google can go from here to achieve higher profits. Bing's ad revenue growth has exceeded Google's in multiple quarters, and I don't see that changing. Google will have to get even more creative, or arguably more criminal, in how they meet revenue goals without turning off more users and driving more advertisers away.

[christianz]

Very weak traffic today and since latter part of yesterday. Wednesday was ray of hope but it was gone the next day.

I am also getting record volume of bot activity - all kinds of bots. Scrapers, indexers etc.

[l1fejosh]

Moving further down SERPs for the past week after multiple weeks of increased traffic and growth.

[ichthyous]

I just don't see where Google can go from here to achieve higher profits. Bing's ad revenue growth has exceeded Google's in multiple quarters, and I don't see that changing. Google will have to get even more creative, or arguably more criminal, in how they meet revenue goals without turning off more users and driving more advertisers away.

@BigKat I think Google is pinning its hopes on AI and is probably working furiously behind the scenes to figure out how to transition to a business model where most of the profits are derived from AI. Google Search is more and more seen as an outmoded technology. Although realistically where else is there to turn...social media? That's a laugh. Basically for shopping people just go directly to Amazon, and now for content people will just ask whatever AI chatbot they use. Many will also use YouTube, but not everyone wants to watch an entire video just to find the answer to a question, it's very tedious.

[EditorialGuy]

Google Search is more and more seen as an outmoded technology.

By whom? The average user doesn't care how the work gets done behind the scenes. Besides, Google has been using artificial intelligence in its search engine for a long time.

[superclown2]

By whom?

I would say the 500 million or so who use Pinterest, and the millions that use ChatGPT for searches, are a good start. Particularly now the latter can search the Internet in real time to find answers.

[Razorllama]

OK, so that's a fun experiment that worked out.

On one of my sites, the posts thrown off the SERPs were 'best of' type articles - other posts stayed in the SERPs and didn't change their position much.
Those articles were off the SERPs for more than a month and over the past two days I completely de-SEO'd them. No phrases in the H2 or the body text AT ALL.
Since yesterday evening, literally every single one of these posts has bounced back in the SERPs at #3-#5 position.

I want to mention that neither of these articles was SEO overturned, keyword stuffed, or whatever. They featured original images, were written by me as I used the products etc.

I wonder if the edits were more in tune with the 'Don't write for search engines' mantra Google mentioned a month or so ago. I also wonder whether they'll stick around, hopefully yes.

These articles aside, I seem to have stabilized in terms of traffic over the past few days. The -20/25% earlier this week have climbed a bit and now I'm at -7% compared to past 3 weeks' performance. Considering the SERP volatility, I'd take it.

[ichthyous]

By whom?

Anyone under 40...[nbcnews.com ]. Just search for this topic there are 100 articles talking about how younger people are not using google anymore. I find the idea terrifying that they would use TikTok for searching for anything, but it's true. I think it's probably limited to specific types of searches as tiktok is very limited in its scope. Google sees the organic search model dying and they intend to replace it with an AI based platform in order to survive. I doubt that these shifts bode well for any website.

[oldog]

It makes me lough out loud :-) Poogle resurrected dead pages lost for years! outdated not mobile friendly, blacklisted for links etc etc....I bet the algo is stoned by the funny smoke of its engineer's joints -:))))
I had an old site that was penalized during the Penguin update! Real competitive market...now it ranks on top ten for each targeted keyword ...lol...Not mobile friendly, thin content, dozens of affiliate links haaaahahaa...Don't Bogart that joint my friend pass it over to me ....

[christianz]

From the NBC aritcle:

"People want to hear from people — and there’s no place better for that than on TikTok," wrote one Twitter user.

Exactly. Nobody wants to see EAT / made-for-SEO / made-for-affiliate / made-for-ads junk, that is increasingly auto generated.

As long Google ranks only based on EAT and Priority Publisher status ("quality sources", "trusted sources"), they will NEVER fix this. They will keep loosing younger searchers.

YouTube will lose users too, because it is already impossible to find first hand experience of events / locations that are also covered by mainstream media.

[Conro]

I doubt people are looking for something serious on TikTok

[adman]

Young people use TikTok a lot, and they tend to search by inertia everything there, because they hate to open the browser and type in Google search.
Why do you think USA is banning TikTok?
I

[christianz]

Apparently businesses are appending "Reddit" to their company names in GBP...

How long before we find brick & mortar mom & pop stores with the word "Reddit" included on the actual street sign?

[ember]

I say ban it all and let's go back to three TV channels and a major newspaper in every city. We got all the news we needed. Seriously.

[adman]

I was buying the newsparers the other day, and I ask the seller "Are they today's?".
She said "It doesn't matter, they just change dates." :)

[Conro]

Google search in 2023:
Ads ads ads ads
Paa
YouTube
Search correlate
Reddit
Quora
Forum
Paa
You site (with every day Lost keywords"

"why i Lost traffic? I don't understand. Maybe is my eeat or the content"

[Micha]

@Conro

You site (with every day Lost keywords"

Google is already working on getting .... our annoying websites even further down the list :)

[Conro]

@Micha Exactly

[christianz]

Last 3 days traffic has been weak and getting weaker.

[mysitegothithard]

My traffic is going down day by day. Do you guys think it's worth adding more content and editing more than 900 posts to see if anything changes?

[tom_010101]

I can't imagine that this will do anything. Countless pages are affected with different content, structure, topics, etc. I believe it is NOT our websites but ***-Google's fault.

[oldog]

The core and review update hasn't finished yet....why it takes so long ?
[status.search.google.com...]

[Micha]

@myitegothithard Save yourself the work, it wouldn't change anything. There is absolutely no indication of what you should change to improve your ranking. And the problem that search now shows ads, videos and, thanks to the "hidden gem", forums and social media posts at the top and only then websites remains, because there's nothing you can do about it.

The same applies to the slump in Discover and news traffic, which practically all small news websites are currently experiencing.

It's up to Google and its automatic evaluation of websites, not you.

@oldog November still has a few days to go. But it will definitely be ready before the December core update.starts

[Razorllama]

Some crazy volatility over the weekend on a big portion of my articles. Google dances from position 2 to position 20 and back from Friday right into Monday morning, like a clockwork.

Might be a signal that at least the core update is going to end within 2-3 days?

[seokees]

It is getting ridiculous now. I have got Dutch (Netherlands) websites with stable growth (no AI) since 2018 with some hickups
along the way. But since the August etc. updates it is slowly declining. Lost 50% or so, that is not the worst. The worst is the days without conversions. 50% of traffic what is left converted at least in the October. Now in November days pass by without one conversion with a hundred people or so on the dedicated landing pages (lead gen). Conversion rates were normally 1 in 4. I changed nothing.

I am not into conspiracies, it brings you nowhere. But this is really weird, also the rankings are stabilized, but the pages above me are bad. Searches with sites without https, non-responsive, really thin info and not up-to-date. And also the authority website from wellknown brands are ranking with anything, not within their expertise.

I am really scratching my head, what to do. A bit angry and powerless.

I avoided coming to forums about the algo updates because I wanted to stay positive in the past. After every little
hickup, things went fine in the past within a few days. This time it feels different. And in Europe we do not even have SGE yet
to really spoil it.

[RedBar]

I have not and will not alter anything on my global site unless I deem it an improvement or if I have some better images, my product information was refined way before the www was created by my industry in conjunction with the specifiers and many governments who require those details.

Yesterday, Sunday, saw my site with a late 2022 traffic level of 117% v 2023 average which is almost double an average recent Suday plus this traffic level has continued into today. Coincidence, improvement, something has changed? I have no idea other than waiting it out to see "whatever happens next"!

[Fluff_Nutz]

After neglecting the site for almost an entire month now, really was going to bin it altogether. I even stopped looking at the traffic figures. Only to notice that it increased. Was about to tell my writers that its Game Over. I really dislike this journey. Its too volatile. Can we not just stay down or steady? Ridiculous. I swear it was -55% when I almost binned everything.

Anyway. I still prefer Youtube. Which is at +119% over last month. Site is -5% over the start of the month. Maybe these fluctuations are normal. For me anyway. This is twice I have lost traffic during an update and been given it all back again. Just the uncertainty and instability AGAIN.

[RedBar]

Just the uncertainty and instability AGAIN.

However hasn't this been the case for 20+ years as G et al have "improved" their algos? My biggest damage hit apart from the image theft, was 05/05/05. It took me and tedster a couple of months to analyse and discover the answer to 05/05/05. Unfortunately ever since 2010 the updates are, shall I say, more intense.

Whilst it is very evident that G is successfully maximising their earnings from updates I also have no doubt that their attention to all types of scam issues must have increased dramatically too the result of which we see branded names and advertisers as its preferred focus.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Perhaps. But I have only had this website for 2 years, so what is normal and what is not is all unknown to me, as a somewhat beginner still. What I do know is that the platform should not be ran like this. To maximise profits. To practically destroy its uses as a genuine search engine. I still don't know if going back to it all after almost a month away is a good idea. I should not be left with this negative feeling. For pure greed, for something that should be against all laws. Google need content and yet they are incapable of providing us with a stable platform. I'm beginning to wonder if we are all idiots continuing to play their games. I keep hoping it will improve and the negativity of it all will go away.. alas.. From what you are saying, by it being like this since 2010 and now getting worse. That is most likely wishful thinking on my part. In truth, blogging and the website business does, indeed, seem to be over. The feeling of joining the party bus too late is becoming somewhat evident.

[Dooku]

their attention to all types of scam issues must have increased dramatically too the result of which we see branded names and advertisers as its preferred focus.

Indeed! I also classify all the "10 best......" affiliate sites as a scam because it's at the least false info without ANY actual testing or anything and ONLY geared towards which items return the best affiliate commission. And then there are the more hard core scam/criminal operations with websites redirecting to shady stuff, non-existing products, chinese payment gateways(good luck doing a chargeback or asking a refund), hit and run services and products, fake items sold as genuine....etc....etc...etc....the list is endless.

Are the above shady practices only a recent issue? No, of course not, but in recent years this definitely has become so much that the imbeciles at G don't know or don't care at all(taking the easy route) how to fight that spam without doing damage to websites that try and make an honest living.

[MarvinG]

@seokees I feel exactly the same. Also active with a Dutch website with high authority and eloborated content (no AI) and selfmade pictures. Lost a lot of traffic since October. Can't see the reason why, so I lost my motivation.... it's a shame.

[RedBar]

Lost a lot of traffic since October. Can't see the reason why, so I lost my motivation

Maybe a crazy question however I have no idea of your business / website.

Have you lost realworld sales or are you a blogger with advertising income derived from clicks / impressions?

Everyone's traffic loss has a different effect since many of us deem a successful site's traffic in completely different ways. Someone's small business 100 page views per day may seem like nothing compared to a blogger expecting 100K per day and, of course, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook absorb many people's attention when users have limited time.

Many people are at worl, many people are doing hosework, many people are in the pub, many people are in restaurants, many people are doing sports, many people are watch tv / films, many people have different interests rather than constantly looking at screens.

Controversial ? The www is no longer seen as innovative or something to be understood, it's now an expected essential service like electricity, water, gas etc, people are using it completely differently compared to 2015/10/05/00/95. I know I do and I've been using it since 1993!