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]

[ichthyous]

Traffic is truly awful today, search is -24%, direct traffic -53%, and USA is -38%. It could be the coming Thanksgiving holiday, but international traffic is down almost as much or more...down 15%-48%. I have seen my ranking drop recently, but not a huge amount.

[morpheus83]

Lily Ray has put up an interesting post on the drop in discover traffic that many have faced -
[amsive.com...]

[Micha]

@morpheus83 I read the article earlier, really interesting. Google has already said that they are looking into it, but that there is no reason to hope for an increase in traffic.

Well, and as far as my numbers are concerned, I've seen a further drop since Sunday, around -17 percent, although many of my keywords are ranking much better. A clear downward trend can also be observed for various other websites.

[engine]

I've spent a few hours comparing Google and Bing, running the same searches on each.
I'm sure it won't come as a surprise, Bing is way better.

I'd confirm, from my point of view in this test, Google is broken.

[tom_010101]

I have the impression that the final collapse of my site is imminent in Germany for the last 2-3 days. Visitors are down by a good 30% again and overall there have been around 80% fewer website visitors since August. Where can you get the motivation to continue after 22 years of self-employment? It is to despair.

[MarvinG]

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!

I have a blog / platform about health (fitness / nutrition) since 2014, doing 'good' in rankings and making money by ads and affiliate. Content is all hand-written and use my own pics in reviews etc. I also work as a nutritionist so I offer my services online. So it is not a webshop, but I do 'sell' my advice on there.

Since October I see websites with low authority, spammy ads and fake author profiles ranking above me. Not to mention AI generated content or scraped articles.

[superclown2]

I'd confirm, from my point of view in this test, Google is broken.

If it is indeed broken, then they have done it deliberately. Google are capable of creating excellent results but, as I'm sure you've read in the trial reports, they make more money if visitors have to search beyond the first page, and get exposed to more ads.

They have a balancing act between getting higher profits every quarter and annoying visitors so much that they go elsewhere.

I know that this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory but if you look at the released emails it's all there in black and white.

[RedBar]

@MarvinG

Oh dear, you're in the health sector, there is an acronym for this however I can't remember what! YML ?

This sector has had several poundings over the years with all SEs trying to flush-out all the scam sites with, as you note, unsuccessful purges. There used to be several posters here from valid health sites who've suffered similarly and I do know of a few who were totally wiped out as collateral damage.

Maybe someone else experienced in this sector could advise?

[RedBar]

however I can't remember what! YML ?

YMYL ? Your Money or Your Life ?

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today...

[christianz]

@renatovieira

Huge drop today...

I came here just to write exactly the same!

Huge drop today!

[christianz]

Past week has been flat, maybe tiny bit worse than week before.

But today is something else. Giant drop. I am sure there is bunch of garbage surfaced in the SERP again.

[adman]

My site is steady, no volatility.
Last 7 days is even 1-2% up.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop today...

And yesterday, and Saturday. My USA traffic is -45% at 2pm today. Sunday snapped back to normal. Funny thing is I am getting more inquiries now with less traffic than in the previous 9 days with higher traffic...

[RedBar]

Huge drop today...

And for the third day running I'm up again, Sunday 117%, Monday 128% and so far today 106%.

Obviously I have zero idea why!

[Fluff_Nutz]

Youtube: +116%
Site: -5%
Motivation: +30%

[christianz]

Youtube: +116%

Well, YouTube is awarded up to 20 of top 20 SERP placements. So naturally it will always go up. Worst content on YouTube will outrank best content outside of YouTube.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Yes, exactly. This is also why I am trying to take advantage of this opportunity. Especially when I feel like I may have missed out with the website side of things. I really don't want a repeat. Its also nice to see something increasing at least ha!

[oldog]

whatever you write one is sure, the results have not been finalized, google faces one of the longest core updates , it should had finished on the 16th of November but still its rolling out both core and reviews update for a third week instead of two as they said....does that means anything to you?
[status.search.google.com...]

[engine]

It has indexing issues, and, the November 2023 reviews update was announced as it is now an ongoing update.

[Martin Ice Web]

And for the third day running I'm up again, Sunday 117%, Monday 128% and so far today 106%.

Obviously I have zero idea why!

@redbar

is it engaged/good/converting traffic?
We are at +71% but conversions/inquiries have reached allmost Zero. Traffic is human related ( not bots ) but completly mismatched.

[jccsyd1]

Yes something really strange going on which I cannot explain. Have been an ecomm player for past 12 years. We rank well and is the leader in our industry. We rank #1 for our most important keywords. Positions have remain stable. However, in the past month we had two consecutive Saturdays with no sales. We have not had a day without sales for 8 years. Then came last Sunday and Monday, we did not have a sale for 48 hours which has not happened since we started some 12 years ago. There was traffic but they didnt convert and for half a day, I watched and not a single person added an item to cart. I am in Hong Kong. Anyone experiencing similar?

[seokees]

@ jccsyd1
Yes, no conversions over the weekend. Although my visitors need to fill out a form (no direct sales), but the kind of the same issue. Normal amount of visitors.

[RedBar]

@MIW

is it engaged/good/converting traffic?

It was until 01.00 UK time this morning and then it fell off the cliff edge, just as I expected I must add.

[Martin Ice Web]

@ redbar, yes it seems that google realy started in may to get full control over free information and sales.

[Micha]

A question for the shop owners here, do you use the Merchant Centre? I would be interested to know whether sales also go down when you use it.

[superclown2]

A completely dead morning. Reason: as well as all the usual Googlespam junk there are now two blocks of local ads right at the top. Problem is, these are plain vanilla merchants who don't stock, and have no expertise in, the products I promote, and some of them are not even still in business. I wonder if Google are in a panic to boost income again?

[ichthyous]

Yes something really strange going on which I cannot explain. Have been an ecomm player for past 12 years. We rank well and is the leader in our industry. We rank #1 for our most important keywords. Positions have remain stable. However, in the past month we had two consecutive Saturdays with no sales. We have not had a day without sales for 8 years. Then came last Sunday and Monday, we did not have a sale for 48 hours which has not happened since we started some 12 years ago. There was traffic but they didnt convert and for half a day, I watched and not a single person added an item to cart. I am in Hong Kong. Anyone experiencing similar?

Read the posts and you will see how many of us are reporting the same. This has been the case with Google for years now, it's amazing that it hasn't hit you sooner. ALL of my conversions come in bursts now...I just had a burst in early Nov through the 9th and then NOTHING, NOT ONE for nine days. Then a sudden burst which lasts about 12 hours or so, then back down again. Google has made it so that I am effectively able to sell for only a small portion of any month now...perhaps about 10 days of each month. The rest of the month the conversions vanish even though my ranking is the same. Read the posts here, it's very common now and there are various theories proposed on how they are doing it.

[ichthyous]

This is my November so far:
[ibb.co ]

Declining United States traffic the entire month. Other locals took a hit this month too, but not nearly as bad and they are recovering already. Only USA keeps declining...

[allhearts]

Thanks for the info.

[nova88]

we all have to go to bing even if i don't like it too, but with google it's dead

[morpheus83]

A lot of websites are reporting increased visibility on Google News and Discover -
[twitter.com...]

[seomotionz]

A lot of websites are reporting increased visibility on Google News and Discover -
[twitter.com...]

Don't fall for it. They do these stunts. So, people wouldn't leave them all at once. It's very low time of them. Even small and mid level advertisers are unhappy.

[Conro]

Google continues to be a failure with its search engine. In August, with the mid-month update, many websites recovered a huge amount of keywords. Then comes the new September update, and since then, many sites that had recovered and were quite authoritative are losing thousands of keywords every day. Google's search is literally terrible; I search for something, and the first thing I find is the PAA (People Also Ask) that never answers what I need. Moreover, the average user is known to click on the first thing they find on the screen, and these endless PAAs are taking away a lot of traffic from websites.

Even SEOs, who initially blamed the content of the sites, are now think back, perhaps because their clients continue to complain that they are losing traffic every day. I am increasingly doubtful that the geniuses working for Google, knowing they will probably be replaced by artificial intelligence, are sabotaging the search system.

[superclown2]

Here, On Android mobile, with the continuous scroll, instead of the usual 4 ads at the top then organics plus Googlespam they have mixed ads either singly or in blocks with multiple local results (most of which are useless for the searches I have tried), PAA, People Also search For, etc etc. Some of the ads have multiple paragraphs and telling them from real organic results is not easy.

I reported a similar way of hiding organics on Chrome (it wasn't happening on other desktop browsers carrying Google ads) some time ago. It then became clear thanks to the release of emails during the trial that this was a deliberate result of negotiations between the various Google departments running the browsers, search and advertising. They needed to boost profits before the end of the financial quarter, despite concerns that this was degrading search results and threatening Chrome's popularity.

This is the problem when an advertising agency (claiming to be a search engine) controls the major browsers on both desktop and mobile, and is allowed to pay huge 'commissions' to those that run all the other browsers. The money for this comes, of course, from advertisers who pay inflated prices for ads to maintain their market shares, but ultimately by the public who in turn suffer the higher prices those advertisers have to charge.

Yes Google used to be (and still could be) a superb search engine but it won't be as long as the priority is maximising income.

[Conro]

I found this image on Seroundtable, and if I were to invest my money in Google Ads, I would be very angry to see this. Essentially, it's very difficult to distinguish between images, e-commerce content, and sponsored content, even though they have the 'Sponsored' label. In my opinion, this is a waste of money.

[imgur.com...]

Please kill me if this is the best experience for user and the best investment for shops

[imgur.com...]

[adman]

A lot of websites are reporting increased visibility on Google News and Discover -
[twitter.com...]

Don't fall for it. They do these stunts. So, people wouldn't leave them all at once. It's very low time of them. Even small and mid level advertisers are unhappy.

I can tell you that my website yesterday got +5% traffic, and today seems it will remain like that.

[christianz]

Down 6.6% yesterday and today looks to be worse still. Meanwhile ahrefs is showing constant gain in all kinds of keywords. Alternative reality...

Or extreme rush of googlespam and ads where top organic positions are useless (to cash in on Black Friday etc).

[ichthyous]

Search was down 31% for me yesterday, and direct traffic was down 15%. USA was -53%, we have a holiday...but why did the UK drop 12%? And UAE now is perpetually much lower than before, -14% yesterday. Traffic from Germany was unusually high for weeks, now it vanished completely...not one visit from Germany yesterday! That is impossible without a huge amount of manipulation. Now we are mostly getting traffic from all the places that can never produce a sale of any kind:

India + 6%
The Philippines
+400%
Russian Federation
+67%
Spain
+150%
The Netherlands
+25%
Austria
+200%
Poland
+200%
Republic Of Korea
0%
South Africa
0%
Turkey
0%
Romania
+100%
Kenya
+100%
Thailand
+100%
Belgium
0%
Pakistan
+100%
Jordan
0%
Egypt
−50%
Azerbaijan
0%
Morocco
0%
El Salvador
0%
Uganda
0%
Libya
0%
Greece
0%
Hong Kong
0%
Mexico
0%
Brazil
−50%
Israel
0%
Indonesia
0%
Viet Nam
0%
Iran
0%
Norway
0%
Ireland
−67%
Estonia

Let's see if this turns around next week after the holiday is over...a good Thanksgiving to all in USA and Canada

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:09 pm (utc) on Nov 23, 2023]

[RubicCubed]

A question for the shop owners here, do you use the Merchant Centre? I would be interested to know whether sales also go down when you use it.

@Micha
We had a merchant center account with product feeds for over a decade. But the ROI became so bad we switched to free only which does not generate much daily traffic or any traffic some days. I think Google entices us with "free" traffic to products, to get our product data, and gives us nothing in return. Due to the ease of maintaining product feeds, our feeds have remained in Google. But since this year Google is being viewed as a very hostile company by our team. I believe soon we will revoke those product feeds from Google because all they really do is invite StoreBot to produce a bunch of abandoned carts.

I found this image on Seroundtable, and if I were to invest my money in Google Ads, I would be very angry to see this.

@Conro
An overly excessive/aggressive number of ads in Google's SERPS, and their placement to cover the full screen, has severely damaged the ROI for advertisers. Only those with the ability to pass the poor ROI of Google Ads onto consumers will remain. In our niche, it's just marketplace ads (90% Amazon) that remain in ads because Google drove all small businesses far away.

[Conro]

@RubicCubed But indeed, how long can this thing last of Google? I wouldn't invest a single cent in it right now. It would be money wasted

[RubicCubed]

@Conro

Google is now sitting on a three-legged stool. I believe it will last as long as users, advertisers and regulators tolerate it. Once Google loses one of these legs, then Google will lose their balance and fall. Better sales for us from other search engines and sources makes me optimistic users will ultimately decide Google is no longer worth their time. But users leaving Google will be a very slow process and where these users go will likely be met with similar tactics Google has normalized for their own self-enrichment. To say these are challenging times would be a gross understatement.

[Micha]

On sunday the traffic increased, because News and Discover have brought a lot again, since noon today the traffic has collapsed again and has reached a dimension that I just wonder if the Internet has noticed worldwide.

@RubicCubed
Thanks for the insight, I had wondered about this as two of my clients get such different customers from Google. One uses the Merchant Centre for the free listings and can't complain, the other doesn't use it and hardly gets any customers from Google.

I don't think that's the reason, but at the moment I'm looking for clues.

[saladtosser]

As an internet user, I used to use Google for everything, hundreds of times a day. But they have trained me to go straight to Amazon or eBay when looking to buy anything (bypassing search 100%), go straight to YouTube when looking for a tutorial, and if I have a general question or coding problem, straight to ChatGPT! The only thing I now use Google search for is checking my rankings... And that's only because I own a website. Searching for anything on Google is now too time-consuming to find what I am looking for. I don't think that was their plan, but they have made their search engine irrelevant to my daily life (and that goes for Bing as well). I just don't need search engines anymore, thanks to their years of training me to always go to a few sites!

[edited by: saladtosser at 3:34 pm (utc) on Nov 24, 2023]

[oldog]

@saladtosser You are 100% right mate, same here, I have my Amazon prime account and I don't have to search googlefor the things I can buy from Amazon .....If I want to buy a car I will go around my county and check car handlers , if I want groceries I will go to my local supermarkets or department stores and if I want to book accommodation I'll go straight to booking dot com or airbnb......
I don't need to go to freakadvisor to read fake reviews or any other review/affiliate site....
Plus with chat Gpt I can find answers without asking every Tom Dick and Harry of the quora trolls...

[mhansen]

@Saladtosser - As someone who has good visibility over SEM efforts for a few enterprise SaaS clients and local home service clients, it's not just users leaving Google right now, it's advertisers as well, who are seeing benefits in putting their ads at destinations with highly targeted users, rather than Google who has broad-matched everything under the sun to show more ads, more often. (At least a few of those I deal with or have exposure regularly)

[Dooku]

After seeing those two screenshots from seroundtable, G has finally reached the limit of stuffing the serp results with crap.
I am willing to bet this was the last quarter showing a small increase of profits.....which were declining already.
Advertisers leaving G just needs to reach a tipping point after which the decline will increase rapidly.
I foresee a big increase in usage of mental health medications with employees at G......

[superclown2]

Google who has broad-matched everything under the sun to show more ads, more often.

I was doing serious research on Google this morning to look for competitors for search terms I am thinking of promoting. It became obvious that this would be a waste of time because no matter how well crafted I made the queries the SERPs on the first page, and often the second one, too, were full of ads and irrelevant 'authority' sites that just happen to be big ad spenders. I remain convinced, especially after seeing the evidence in their trial, that this is a deliberate ploy by Google to degrade the search results to increase ad clicks.

Those companies that claim that they make Google the default because they are "the best" need to come up to date, and think about what effect these rubbish search results will be having on their visitors. The advertisers need to think about how many of the clicks they pay for are wasted because the visitor is looking for something more targeted than what they offer; and what effect it will have on their brand's credibility.

[RubicCubed]

But they have trained me to go straight to Amazon or eBay when looking to buy anything (bypassing search 100%)

This training defeats the purpose of using Google to find something different. As a seller, I'm not thrilled with the quality of customers on Amazon and all the stunts they pull to get free products. As a shopper, Amazon can be invaluable to browse product options but I see limited value in shopping there. Outside of daily household items/consumables, which I get elsewhere, most other items sold on Amazon are way overpriced. For example, I recently purchased a small electronic item for a total cost of $117.89. On Amazon, this same product sells for $178.99 ($61.10 more). Had I relied solely on Amazon, or searched Google to get their Amazon ad results, I would have wasted a significant amount of money. But someone has to pay for Google's overpriced ads, and I'm glad in my example it wasn't me being gouged.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Wow. Just searching Reddit, randomly. Came across the Youtube silver plaque for those who reach 100k subscribers. Never even knew they existed. Whilst Youtubers are rewarded with plaques. Website creators are rewarded with monthly traffic drops. Amazing rewards, makes it difficult to choose which one I want to earn and grind for! This also makes the G search look even more embarrassing.