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]

[christianz]

@Fluff_Nutz

That's because if you produce video content for their #*$!ty video site you are called "Creator" while if you develop/author your own websites or applications, you are something between annoyance and competitor.

[superclown2]

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.

This is what really bugs me - so many people say that Google is a free service and yet it is the public who eventually pay for their massive profits! Isn't there some way of educating them?

Sometimes I really wonder what has happened to common sense.

In the meanwhile many of our pages are high in the SERPs today for products we have never stocked and probably never will. Hardly surprisingly the bounce rate has increased enormously so goodness knows what effect this will have on our company's reputation. We will not be the only ones who will be affected by this.

Sites that do actually stock these products are way down on pages 2+. Masses of ads in between of course.

[tom_010101]

the last 3 days show the lowest traffic in 5 years. I still have something like that

[Micha]

@tom_010101 same here ... and the joke: Sitrix says my website is ranking much better again. It just has absolutely no effect.

[tom_010101]

For me, Sistrix says it's getting worse, and it's getting worse... And nobody knows why.

[Micha]

Well, I'm beginning to assume that you can forget about these figures anyway. What's the point of ranking well with a keyword if you have a lot of adverts, videos etc. in front of it?

[superclown2]

For me, Sistrix says it's getting worse, and it's getting worse... And nobody knows why.

Yes, we do know why. Google, sacrificing their usefulness as a one-time search engine, squeezing even more profit out of the pockets of the public.

[RubicCubed]

This is what really bugs me - so many people say that Google is a free service and yet it is the public who eventually pay for their massive profits! Isn't there some way of educating them?

Google definitely is not free and is actually quite expensive. The cost of organic SEO, before its death, and ads all get rolled into the cost of the products/services consumers purchase. I don't think there is any way to educate the public about this because even the mental wizards working in Government (regulators and politicians) are too dumb to see it or simply ignore it for whatever reason.

Sometimes I really wonder what has happened to common sense.

There is none. Amazon pulls in billions in taxpayer subsidies to help build more warehouses to distribute mostly Chinese seller's goods. Then people wonder why we can't compete with China and are somehow perplexed at what it will take to bring manufacturing back? The idiocy within Government, and the policies they promote, leaves me without much hope things will ever change.

[samwest]

@christianz - you hit the nail on the head. Ever since 2010, and just a year or two prior, we (webmasters) have been considered the enemy of Google, and treated as such. Put out a stupid video, and you rise to become an online millionaire.

[tom_010101]

@Micha you are from Germany? what percentage of traffic has your site lost since August/September? So overall? For me it's about 60%

Greetings Tom

[RedBar]

Insofar as my global site is concerned today, Sunday, is my fifth consecutive day of weekend traffic levels at -35% v 1-21 November 2023 furthermore this is -57% v November 2022 and -72.7% v November 2020.

Do you know what is really bewildering to me? My last 5 days USA% share of traffic is still precisely the same! Throughout all the garbage G does to us my country traffic sources remain extremely consistent. I say bewildering since if G were creaming-off the top with localisation etc then surely my actual overall USA traffic percentage would have gone down but no, all my most popular countries have consistently remained the same.

Of course this does mean that what they are manipulating they are doing so in a very consistent manner.

[Micha]

@tom_010101 Yes, I am, it's about 55 per cent. However, I always have short phases in between where traffic goes through the roof, usually for two to three days, then it goes downhill again (today seems to be the start of another such phase).

[adman]

@Micha Yes, I am, it's about 55 per cent.

How much is that in dollars? :) Just kidding...

I lost about 60% initially, but I recovered 10%, so total for now I am at a loss 50%.

[Micha]

How much is that in dollars?

If I ran a shop, you would have made me cry by now at the latest. But seriously: my website's revenue is not so dependent on Google because we market the advertising space ourselves, so no Adsense or anything like that. It's more complicated, but a few days ago we realised once again that we can react more flexibly to problems.

[superclown2]

In mobile I am now seeing advertisements scatted amongst the mobile SERPs labelled with the term 'ad' instead of the usual 'sponsored'. Both labels were in a smaller font than in the past.

Another attempt to get visitors to click on ads, whilst thinking that they were generic results? If so I'm not sure how much lower Google can sink.

[renatovieira]

Search Console is down... Somebody else?

[RedBar]

We're nearly at the end of November with our quietest month ahead and overall traffic levels for 2023 at 72.85% v 2022 for our main global site.

We're going to let this run until the end of December simply so that we can compare many year-on-year site data. Millions of visitors per month disappeared in 2010 with G's massive image theft nonetheless genuine business traffic was still generated however I (personally) / we (the company) feel that this classified ads scheme has not been working for us since the scamdemic, now there's yet another coincidence.

The reality at the momet is that a local hotel site is generating more traffic than a large (7.500 employees) manufacturing global exporter of many years, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" one may wonder?

[christianz]

Search Console is down... Somebody else?

Same. But there is little to no utility to search console anyway.

[christianz]

Last two weeks are constant decline. Especially worse in the last week. AI Spam and SEO content is winning (again) and Google is sabotaging what they achieved in early November.

[Conro]

@renatovieira error 500 for me. Google have only problems

[MarvinG]

@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?

I know niches like health and finance are being hit hard (your money or your life indeed). I have not been hit like this in the past, because I post genuine content. Also real author profile / about me page, where I see a lot of sites with fake 'team members' etc ranking high still.

Currently working on changing the lay out of the website to make it look more like a brand / business than a personal blog. Maybe that helps to get some trust back from Google. I think I am put into the blog / affiliate blogs box by Google.

[tom_010101]

I am very sure that it will not work. I do have a blog, but with over 30,000 blog posts, it's a very large one that is essentially perceived as a magazine. However, for the first time in the history of my website, after over 10 years, I was affected by an update and almost daily the visitors are decreasing.

[RedBar]

@MarvinG

Maybe that helps to get some trust back from Google.

IMO this is not a trust issue since as tom_010101 says above he has 30K professional post over 10 years. My global site has been online since 1993, it has 10+K of images and 5+K pages.

It is an international repository of information for my industry widgets available on a global basis and there is only one other site like it on The Net from China. For 90+% of keyword enquiries either they or us rank #1 or 2. The only time we do not is when the search is for several top paying keyword phrases in the USA.

I see and talk with the Chinese regularly at international trade fairs and only this last week in Poland they admitted that they too had been hit hard the last few months.

This is a Google-derived manipulation but for what reason? Ad money we know about however many I speak to have seen such a drop in their ROI even that seems questionable.

I wish someone else would throw in some other possible reasons.

[samwest]

A bit OT, but proof that Google heavily manipulates results data. Been saying it for over a decade, and now solid proof at : <snip>

[edited by: not2easy at 6:07 pm (utc) on Nov 27, 2023]
[edit reason] Please see Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Micha]

@samwest this website is nonsense and proves nothing.

[l1fejosh]

Had great keyword improvement before this update, has 1.4k on Semrush, dwindled down -20% to 988...pretty scared for how many we may lose this week.

[mhansen]

Google has jumped the shark!

I spotted an odd #1 result in a completely random query about automotive scratch repair and who did I find? Synchrony. Yes, the credit finance banking company for large retailers. SEMR shows they've grown from 300k monthly visitors in Aug 2023 to nearly 3m in less than 90 days, and in topics that have absolutely nothing to do with credit, banking, retail finance, etc. They are killing it on scratch repair, best of lists, etc. Want to know about auto repair, like the lifespan of brake lines or the cost of radiator repair? They're the source of the best information according to Google. Not the mechanic down the street. Not the auto specialty shops on the web, etc. No, synchrony bank, the place for credit cards.

Google is being played by these super-large brands as they get away with writing content specifically for search engines - where us who lack the uber-eeat authority but have years of real-world experience in our chosen fields are buried in the washout.

It's a joke.

[Micha]

It's getting more and more idiotic, people are already boasting that they've flattened the competition. They analysed the site and used an AI to churn out 1,800 articles. And Google rewards this kind of thing with good rankings. [twitter.com ]

[christianz]

I spotted an odd #1 result in a completely random query about automotive scratch repair and who did I find? Synchrony. Yes, the credit finance banking company for large retailers. SEMR shows they've grown from 300k monthly visitors in Aug 2023 to nearly 3m in less than 90 days

Relying on off-site factors and off-Internet "authority" was always going to end up in a disaster. You could be the biggest brand or organization off-Internet but on the Internet and in specific niche you can still be nobody. An obscure site with zero physical presence and zero authorship info can be the biggest niche authority by far.

As a search engine, how do you detect these "Internet authorities"? There is no good solution and that is the root of these problems. Having AI writing tools like ChatGPT widely available makes this problem 10 times worse than it already is.

[superclown2]

As a search engine, how do you detect these "Internet authorities"?

It should be fairly simple and I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already capable of solving this. They already know who, and what, these companies are and an analysis of what the website has specialised in in the past, compared to the thousands of new pages on a completely unrelated topic, should raise a few red flags.

Mind you I suspect that G has other more urgent matters to think about right now. And would they want to upset those that perhaps spend megabucks on advertising, at a time when they are using all kinds of tricks to squeeze out the maximum income?

[EditorialGuy]

Interesting story about fake authors and AI-generated content at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET. (So much for "authority."):

[futurism.com...]

[Shepherd]

Investigative reporters used to know, or at least thoroughly research, the topics they reported on. Today the talking heads read words prepared by others (people or AI). They may as well be an AI generated headshot.

If brands like SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET want to serve that garbage to their audience, that's on them.
If google wants to serve SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET content to their audience, that's on google

There's no practical "fix", SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET have no incentive to stop serving revenue generating garbage and google has no real incentive to stop using that garbage to generate AERPs (Ad Engine Results Pages).

[Conro]

Artificial intelligence websites publish thousands of articles in a short period, but Google still doesn't know how to distinguish them from real sites that may have been around for many years, and creating only 1 post or a few dozen posts a day... or 50 for the largest news sites. It seems that, for Google, publishing 100 to 1000 articles a day, perhaps rather elaborate guides, is considered normal, making them suitable for Adsense use. Really for Google is normal write 1000 article every day? Bah... If a site create 1000 article in one day i don't index this articles, but Google is Google, not me.
What's interesting is that Google now penalizes sites that have been active for years, making it even easier for AI-generated junk sites to quickly surface. Meanwhile, the old site with thousands of articles written year after year is swept away without understanding why. I believe that Google currently needs capable individuals rather than intern people and pathological liars who spend their days on Twitter. There should also be a change in CEO, someone who focuses less on money and more on what is beneficial for the use of Google for people.
Let's not forget that Google is a search engine, and without websites, it would never have existed. Even SGE owes everything to our hard work. However, it seems that Google has now lost all ethics

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today.... Here we go....

[adman]

@Conro

Google can distinguish AI junk.
For example, many people will create same AI articles using ChatGPT, but so can Google and they can easily know that's ChatGPT source.
But, I think you are right, AI junk will for sure flood the internet in exponential way.

[christianz]

they can easily know that's ChatGPT source.

I actually don't think they can. I know there are tons of AI content detection services and they claim (and do) function with decent accuracy. But if you do AI spam right, you can use many filters to postprocess and reshuffle this text, even introduce special human like imperfections, to make detection next to impossible.

There is no "mathematical" reason why LLM output text should be recognizable as such. It is just text. There are subtle "signatures" in the text structure that may point to LLM origin, but these can be muffled with further processing or specialized "stealthy" LLM generators.

[christianz]

Interesting story about fake authors and AI-generated content at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and THE STREET. (So much for "authority."):

Great find. I think this is a classic textbook case of EAT farming. Milking this stupid EAT priority publisher status with blatant spam, pure worthless AI generated material.

For any non-priority publisher this could potentially pose danger of permanent sitewide demotion in search, but not if you are big enough. Same rules don't apply and you can happily spam away until this spam stops working (and you have made ton of money) and then just make wide puppy eyes and pretend you didn't know you were doing anything wrong.

[Ingall]

It's bad that content and relevance no longer have any meaning for Google and only authority counts.

For example, if you search for a rare dog breed and the authority sites only have articles about elephants, you will only see articles about elephants, even though there are many valuable articles about this dog breed on smaller portals.

Google probably thinks...as long as the content is about an animal, the rest doesn't matter.

In my niche I almost only find link spam with parasites. Parasite SEO is booming like never before.

[ichthyous]

@renatoviera I saw the huge drop starting yesterday with English language traffic from UK, Australia and Canada...down 27%, 12%, and 50%...USA was down 10%. Today USA traffic is starting the day -70% again.

Traffic has been very low for the last week, but GSC shows sharp drops in impressions and clicks and a loss of top-10 ranking terms. My site even dropped to #5 for terms I was #1-#2 for years. Meanwhile, the same site that was dominating on and off for the last two years is back at #1 for every search again, in every location where we compete. It's just basically a cookie-cutter page for every location. It had dropped down for a good part of 2023 until around October 5th...that's when it looks like Google's updates started preferring service provider type sites for any search that contained a place name again.

Whatever Google is doing with all these updates, it has totally killed my November sales. It has been very quiet and hardly any new sales inquiries in one of the busiest periods of the year.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:31 pm (utc) on Nov 28, 2023]

[NeapTide]

I was not active on this forum for a long time now because traffic was pretty much stable. In october I saw huge increase in traffic for several days and then traffic started dropping and today its at lowest.
SERPs are pathetic. 3 or 4 results then "people also search for" box, then 3 or 4 results again and then "people also search for" box appears pushing relevant results very low.

I have also not "purchased" authority backlinks for my websites since past 3 or 4 years. But it seems like I need to do it as google search only cares about having good backlinks.

[Conro]

But when will the November update and the reviews end? Two weeks have passed, and maybe they don't know how to add more 'ADS,' 'people also ask,' 'YouTube videos,' and 'Related posts.' Perhaps Google needs real workers, not bunglers.

[Senechal]

@adman

Google has already said they don't care about AI content as long as it's "helpful" and not "spam".

Needless to say, those two words are extremely subjective and everyone has a different idea of what they mean. At this point, one thing is for sure: It doesn't look like Google thinks most AI content is spam, as it's currently at the top of results everywhere.

[Micha]

And the core update has been completed, but the review update is still running. [status.search.google.com ]

[christianz]

@Senechal

AI content is second tier content. It is regurgitation of works that some human already did or (worse) some AI already regurgitated.

AI content should always be ranked below all human content. And I don't see any good reason why it should rank at all.

[RedBar]

And the core update has been completed, but the review update is still running.

UK 09.00 this morning my global site was switched back on with completely normal traffic levels and visitor profiles.

How long will it last this time?

Obviously I have done absolutely nothing to the site.

[mysitegothithard]

BR 17:00 - Still nothing. Maybe my site wont recover. I am working in two side projets and thinking about go back to work in "real life"...

[RedBar]

Maybe my site wont recover

All I can go by with Google experience is that a few years ago it used to run a Xmas algorithm to "help" online ecommerce site, this was usually Sept/Oct time. If one was unlucky and got caught up in this that was game over until post Xmas / New Year and then the SERPs went back to "normal".

I'm not saying similar is happening now however it sure feels like it and unless things do improve this week I'm guessing that January 2024 will be the next best indicator of what's really happening.

Then again I could be talking out of my a$$ !

[adman]

Maybe my site wont recover. I am working in two side projects and thinking about go back to work in "real life"...

Don't give up yet.
My site started to recover, last two weeks it's up 10%.
I can see positive trend every day, it's about 1-2%.

[Micha]

Nice to hear that your websites are recovering. Unfortunately, things are still looking very bad for small news sites. All the sites I monitor (including mine) unfortunately suffered another big drop yesterday.

[Conro]

@Micha I'm noticing that when a Google update concludes, if a website was stable or even growing during the update, after the update it then starts to lose traffic