December 2023 Google Search Observations

[Martin Ice Web]

After 3 very good weeks we see a 50% drop for all sites we manage started right at midnight. Seems google started Xmas shopping revenue season.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:39 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2023]
[edit reason] split cleanup - New month, new thread [/edit]

[Conro]

In my opinion, TikTok should add its own search engine for websites. TikTok has a vast user base, but it lacks its own search engine that caters to those seeking written information. This is the right time for them to outsmart Google. If this were to happen, the first thing I will do is block Google bots

[christianz]

@Conro

TickTok already has better web search than Google. I know it doesn't show any web results, but neither does Google.

[RedBar]

November metrics for my global site.

November 2023 v January to October average 83.7%
November 2023 v November 2022 63.5%

Congrats G!

[ichthyous]

I had one day which resembled normal traffic and whammo! another huge drop in traffic today starting at 11am. USA and UK traffic is down 28% by 4pm, Canada is down 58%. WTF is going on with Google? This has killed my business off completely for a month now. I suspect it's perfectly timed to do just that, siphon off any kind of real customer shopping for the holidays

[Micha]

I thought it couldn't get any worse, but Google unfortunately showed me today that I was wrong. G's traffic has completely collapsed.

[bebopandrocksteady]

After an upward trend the past couple of weeks, traffic has been concerningly low the past couple of days. They're up to shenanigans for sure. WTF GOOGLE. Work too hard to get screwed like this.

[Conro]

-22% today

[watesh]

Looks like another update rolling out. Traffic suddenly lower

[superclown2]

Looks like another update rolling out. Traffic suddenly lower

They don't need to have another update to slash your traffic. All it takes is a few more ads; people also ask; people also search for; even more ads; YouTube videos packed with ads, etc etc in Chrome and Android (which they control of course), and their profits rise as income for website creators drop. Simple really.

[RubicCubed]

All it takes is a few more ads; people also ask; people also search for; even more ads; YouTube videos packed with ads, etc

Going from two ads, above the fold in the serps, to three cut organic traffic in half. Now with four ads above the fold, traffic is cut by about 95%+. I don't see things improving and can imagine it getting much worse with a greedy company putting access to information in a lock box. How long will it be before Google starts re-writing information and altering facts to make more money?

[ichthyous]

Google doesn't appear to have updates in the old sense of the word, it's constant algo adjustments in order to best maximize their profits on the fly. In addition to ranking shifts, they also can demote any listing by stripping it of any images...results with no image thumb or no image carousel will lose all their traffic even when ranked highly. This is what happens to my site...the rank only shifts minimally for the last year, but traffic can plummet 80%+ for certain terms, and once it's gone it usually stays gone for a long time.

It's clear that Google intends to starve everyone of traffic all of the time now...the gaps are becoming almost constant. For example I had almost no new inquiries for 10 days from November 7th-18th. Now again from Nov. 27th - today. What I did receive I deleted immediately as the inquiries are not even viable.

[Fluff_Nutz]

If Google wants rid of the website publisher then they ought to hire their own section to write articles. The rest of us should stop. In this current situation, which is likely to never end. Its pointless to keep going. Why live under such rocky and unstable conditions. The effort, time and total investment is not worth it.
I can only hope with their ad manager being forced to resign that it will improve but who am I kidding? The ''new person'' is not even new. Likely have had some minor input behind the scenes. But then the lawsuits will also continue. Never ending spiral of pointlessness.

Might as well put the lottery on. You have more chance winning that than gaining anything good from Google.

[Micha]

Google will never change anything, although I still wonder why they are escalating like this at the moment. Well, we decided today to abandon our news section on the site and just focus on the things that G apparently thinks are great. There's no point in writing articles that don't even appear in the news/Discover anymore.

It's sad, but Google obviously wants to have a one-size-fits-all soup of news sites that all report the same thing.

[ichthyous]

Google is clearly imposing a much more intensive (or kleptocratic?) ad strategy on the US/Canada market, as has been the case for a while now. My USA traffic today remains stuck at exactly -45% all day...meanwhile:

The United Kingdom
+104%
India
+175%
The Netherlands
+818%
Germany
+53%
Canada
-27%
Australia
+84%
Belgium
+267%
Greece
+451%

Google is squeezing every last possible drop of traffic out of the North American market because there is zero regulation, or threat of any real regulation, in this market.

[superclown2]

Google will never change anything, although I still wonder why they are escalating like this at the moment

Google have no choice but to keep escalating. Their shares do not produce a dividend so the only way investors can make money is when the share price rises. That means constantly increasing profits which can only come from squeezing ever larger sums from search, since their 'other bets' have collectively been an economic disaster.

They can do this by manipulating the number of ads and googlespam in Chrome and Android (leaving aside of course their agreements with all other major browser and phone providers). Read the trial documents and this becomes much clearer.

Best get used to it for as long as Google control the world's most popular browsers for desktop and mobile. Only if they are stripped of these will there be a fairly level playing field - something that European regulators, at least, are keen on.

[Micha]

But even in the EU, nothing would change for us. It's not just the advertising, but also the devaluation. I mean, if my articles no longer appear in News, it doesn't help me if fewer ads are displayed in the normal search.

[RubicCubed]

Google have no choice but to keep escalating. Their shares do not produce a dividend so the only way investors can make money is when the share price rises. That means constantly increasing profits which can only come from squeezing ever larger sums from search, since their 'other bets' have collectively been an economic disaster.

Also Bing's ad revenue growth continues to outperform Google so Google must increase the ad spam anyway they can just to try to keep up with their competition. By the looks of Google's SERPS, and their difficulties keeping up with Bing, I think Google plateaued late last year and is going down now. A search engine like Google can't repeatedly rip off advertisers, and serve users garbage, and expect that to be a sustainable business model. Advertisers and people will leave, and they have and continue to do so.

[christianz]

But even in the EU, nothing would change for us. It's not just the advertising, but also the devaluation. I mean, if my articles no longer appear in News, it doesn't help me if fewer ads are displayed in the normal search.

EU actually loves this kind of devaluation. Because it will be a lot easier to achieve full "online safety" with 3 or 5 huge news websites, than 1000 small ones. So don't count on EU for help. At best they are just as bad as US. At worst they are actually pushing the "state of the art" in censorship and small business oppression.

[Markedd]

Oh boy, this is a big one. I was knocked out for a couple of days and when I came back to life, and checked the metrics, I had to make sure that the website wasn't hacked. I am actually curious to see where this is all going since the first ten results (and more) are currently just Google's properties for almost everything I search. This happened a bit sooner than expected so I guess I should stop writing articles and pause any research, completely moving to something else.

[ichthyous]

What the hell is going on with Google? Today my home page is -83%. Most of my highest traffic landing pages are also down hugely ...-48%, -66%, -71%, -80% etc.

My overall search traffic is only down 8% though. That's because there is a surge in traffic to the lowest level content pages...an over 700% increase in visits to specific pages in some cases. So basically all the real traffic is gone, and replaced with a huge surge in useless, nonsensical traffic that probably isn't even real. In anyone else seeing the same?

[Micha]

I spoke to a few other German website owners today and they are all seeing the same thing. Since Thursday, the numbers have dropped dramatically and you can clearly see this drop in all the performance reports in Search Console. In some cases between 70 and 90pc. Those who run news sites can also see that the impressions in Google News have increased, but at the same time there are always no clicks on the website. It is completely incomprehensible what this crap is all about. Even Amazon has lost a lot of ground in the visibility index. Is Google about to drive its search engine completely into the wall?

[ichthyous]

Even Amazon has lost a lot of ground in the visibility index

@Micha I have increased in visibility for the last two days and I have no traffic from Google news, never did. This seems like a huge shakeup lasting almost two days now. Traffic to category/landing pages has vanished, while all the traffic is being pushed to the lowest level pages. Hopefully it will settle down and revert quickly, but I have rarely seen these types of shifts in traffic and I have been at this for 20 years.

[Micha]

@ichthyos I have just checked three websites that I manage and my own four. I see exactly the same as you. The ranking has also improved for all but one website. I've been doing this for over 18 years now and have never experienced such a shift, at least I don't remember it

[Chris travel 30]

Just created an account here to have a look if we are the only ones seeing what is happening with google algo driving our sites down to insignificance. "Glad" that we are not the only ones...
Our german sites are nearly without traffic today after devastating losses over the last few day. Todays traffic is down nearly 90 % whilst sundays are usually our best days. This is crazy.

[Razorllama]

Past 3 days, absolute slaughterhouse. Sudden -30% just like that.

[Markedd]

I think I got an idea about what happened, at least for some of the websites (Google usually runs multiple types of perverted techniques at the same time just for confusion-sake). I saw that I started to lose SERP positions in September, but the traffic remained steady which was strange. I checked the Discover traffic and it was raising. So basically, they did some sort of balance. Take the article out from the first 5 positions, but add traffic to it through Discover. This balance became about 40 to 60%, the latter for the Discover traffic somewhere near the last month. Then, exactly at the beginning of December, the traffic was sliced by 60%. Guess how that happened? Discover traffic is gone. I know it's pointless to discuss how Google does stuff nowadays, but it's interesting to see the strategies that they come up with.

[v008370]

For my two main sites on November 14th my rankings plummeted, as did my impressions but my average CTR spiked massively resulting in no changes to my overall traffic. It was a weird coincidence as they are very different to one another in polar opposite niches.

Both of them gradually improved in ranking over the next couple of weeks and traffic was rising. I did nothing to the sites structurally to merit the drop or subsequent rise.

Then the traffic on both crashed on December 1st. Approx 25% and 18%. Traffic is now at its lowest level for many years - and I am writing for the user, high-quality well-researched authoritative articles. It's pretty obvious where the traffic has gone - just do a Google search for a widget.

I've just searched for a widget. This is the mobile search result structure:

- Google Comparison Shopping/Products Carousel
- Ad
- People also ask
- 3 organic search results
- People also search for
- 12 product "Buy Now" widgets
- 5 organic search results
- 4 Product "Buy Now" widgets
- People also search for
- 1 organic search result
- 4 Product "Buy Now" widgets
- 1 organic search result

For this particular search my site sites a resectable 5th in the organic search results. It's buried. Organic search traffic is utterly pointless in this environment Even the once-covetted number one slot is buried under 3 sets of widgets. Number 4 onwards is pointless with so many product widgets.

[edited by: v008370 at 11:33 am (utc) on Dec 4, 2023]

[Markedd]

@v008370 Did you check the Discover traffic? It's something that I kind of saw too. The loss in SERP positions wasn't to some competitor website, but to Google's properties. So, while the site went lower, the Discover went higher. If you see this behavior, but the Discover hasn't been sliced yet, you may need to prepare for the inevitable..

[v008370]

@Markedd My Discover traffic tanked on the 19th September. Since the 19th September my impressions have dropped 70% and my traffic 50%. My average positions do not reflect any of this madness. As I said, a quick search shows where the traffic has gone.