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]

[Bloggerist]

Experienced another 50% drop from Dec 19th and still ongoing. Similar to HCU or worse. Who else is seeing such levels of traffic decline?

[RedBar]

Traffic levels as expected across several sites at between 20% to 50% of average depending upon the widget subject. I expect this much volatility until at least 3rd January. There are usually a couple of totally unpredictable up days, I would guess the 27/28/29th.

[christianz]

Drop today versus good traffic yesterday. Typical Google BS.

[onweb23]

Hi all, I'm a new user but a long-time reader of this forum. Like most of you, I'm affected by the downturn in traffic from Google on my 17+ year-old website. My website is a blog-like site that has about 20 tag pages. These tag pages never got traffic from search engines, only users on the site used them to navigate the page. But starting from Dec. 13, the tag pages started receiving a noticeable amount of search engine traffic from Google and now are even under the top traffic pages. Does anyone else notice such behavior? I wonder what the reason could be, is Google maybe evaluating internal links differently now and as these tag pages receive many internal links, they started ranking?

[jchiff]

Frequent lurker / seldom contributor here.

Just thought I would add my results from this no good very stange update.

We run a 25 year-old sports & entertainment info site. Hints of a very slow recovery have been consistent within the past two weeks. Morning hours begin very slowly until afternoon when visitor numbers begin to zoom -- only to fall off again by evening.

With that, strong seasonal pages continue to do relatively well while all else goes completely off the radar. And, overall, earnings have consistently dropped to - 47 percent under last year.

My two cents. (No pun intended.) Meanwhile, here's to the new year and to all the survivors who will recover from another stormy December. Cheers.

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Your huge drops always worry me. Lately some of my top terms have been recovering slightly. Today was stronger traffic than I expected for a Saturday on Christmas weekend. Hopefully not more huge drops. All of November and December were basically a write off for me in terms of business. There were some inquiries, but not like before Nov. 8th, and nobody purchased a thing...people are acting like a recession is here and it's not.

[RedBar]

So far not as low as expected with most sites averaging 50% with my global site seeing its usual Asian and ME visitors with the USA -66%. Altogether, for me, I feel it may be a week of "fluctuations".

[ichthyous]

Traffic seems on par with end of the year 2022, but that's actually a huge loss for me...I am continuing to lose all of my top 3 and top 10 terms in a relentless slow drip. I have more content and had much higher traffic in 2023 than I did in 2022, so not a great sign for 2024 to return to 2022 levels.

Is anyone else seeing a slow loss of all their top ranking terms starting around 8th November?

[ggpaul]

Hi all,

Well - I just got back from our 3-4 day vacation. And I saw on our end too, avg positions dropped by 2 (from 10 to 12) for our product listing pages.. Steep drop going to Dec 24th. This is a very large e-commerce site (high end fashion) by the way.

Sigh.

[ggpaul]

Looks like I regained some positions back (looking at most recent in GSC. GSC just updated).

[EditorialGuy]

Our UVs were up 5 percent today (compared to last Tuesday), and pageviews were up 13 percent.

Average positions also crept up, but I suspect that the main reason for our increase in traffic was the usual post-Christmas bounce. (Our topic is travel, and we always see a traffic boost toward the end of the year. We're still down more than 50 percent from the same time in 2022.)

[BlueEyes82]

So basically “things continue” like the last few weeks.

Anyone who has lost since the HCU update continues to lose...no website can reverse the trend through changes or no changes. Google also seems to be sticking to its new "recipe" despite the poor quality

[EditorialGuy]

Google also seems to be sticking to its new "recipe" despite the poor quality

Or maybe Googlers are off visiting relatives, skiing, or soaking up the sun in Hawaii. The last two weeks of the year are quiet time at a lot of companies.

[Broaster]

This is depressing, no matter how many articles I put up, I get no traffic. Ill get tops 8 visits an hour to my website its been like this for the last 3 months. No traffic from bing or yahoo either. It seems like all the same websites are getting the Top Stories spots too. I see the same sites like Marca, Sportskeeda and Essentially Sports and a few others and they even beat up some real well known news sites.

I wonder if they have connections with Indian google employees who hook them up with the placements?

[Micha]

Could it be that another update is in the works? Things have improved a bit for me over the holidays. It's still not great, but at least there has been an average of 15 percent more visitors in the last few days. However, Discover's traffic has been completely dead for days now.

@Broaster The fact that a handful of websites dominate in each area seems to be the norm at the moment. In my subject area, three websites now dominate the stock market websites, surpassing even the leading media outlets.

[RedBar]

On the 26h my global site ended up at a surprising 87% with the USA -12% but the UK +300%! For decades now the Xmas / New Year holidays deliver "interesting" metrics.

Could it be that another update is in the works?

Something has definitely changed for a couple of my sites, whether it's a re-ranking or yet another "update" I have no idea as yet.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Main Site:
December 25th: +12%
December 26th: -12%

Newer Site:
December 25th: +6%
December 26th: -25%

So as you can see December 25th was a great day for both my sites. With minor improvements in traffic. However, it also reverted and dropped yesterday (Dec 26th). So either people are going back to work now or, yes, another change is being made.

Meanwhile my Youtube channel sees some nice growth which continues even through December 26th. This is basically a dead month for the channel so I'm happy and pleased to see any kind of growth for it. I'll also add that neither website has had any new articles since early December. I mainly focus on Youtube now with G and their instability. Even when new articles are being added the site still drops. As I witnessed during the HCU.

[EditorialGuy]

Our UVs today were up 26 percent over last Wednesday, and pageviews were up 30 percent. Still down about 50 percent from the same day last year, though.

[Conro]

Bing have remove from serp "people also ask". Google instead continues to move the paa higher and higher, in first place under the featured snippet. Out of 10 organic results on Google there are 1 paa among the top 3 positions and 2 related searches. Bing always better, while google is getting worse and worse

[superclown2]

Bing always better, while google is getting worse and worse

Sorry but I disagree about Bing being better. Their search results are a jumbled mess with hidden ads and many tactics copied from googlespam. I often wonder why legislators let them get away with those tiny, hardly visible 'ad' boxes.

My own results have shown a slight uptick in business from Bing when the their AI was first launched but they have fallen back month by month and are now, again, less than 2% of my total. Duck (which is a far better search engine than Google in my opinion) is still producing less than 1%. Default doesn't talk it swears.

Google's results are dreadful though, compared to what they used to be, thanks to their seemingly deliberate policy of degrading them in order to force more clicks on ads, which their results as we all know are packed with. They can do this thanks to their ownership of Chrome and Android, and stripping them of these (which Europe wants to do) would be the only way of taming them.

[Conro]

@superclown2 I am using Bing for Italian search and I do not see unclear or hidden ads, I recognize them quite clearly and the ads are much less than those of Google. Bing, however, should remove that gray from mobile that makes the interface look old, the background should be left all white in my opinion. Duck Duck Go has good results but is too focused on blocking anything for privacy, for example it has an active adblock that would not show the ads of blogs and without advertising revenue a site that lives on advertising dies. Duck Duck Go is too extreme and does not think about the life of a site.

[Treud]

I have a huge increase (20%, yes huge :D) since 2 days as well, the CTR is stable, but the impressions doubled. So Google must be changing something.

[Micha]

The upswing seems to be over again, but that won't surprise anyone.

What do you think things will look like in 2024?

[superclown2]

What do you think things will look like in 2024?

I think there will be big changes. Google is rumoured to be 're-assessing' some 30,000 jobs on the sales team (they haven't mentioned layoffs yet but if they do morale should hit rock bottom) and whilst I'm not convinced that American legislators will achieve much in taming Google in the medium term I've had a look at the UK CMA regulations which will affect them soon (no I didn't read all 400+ pages!) and if I was a Google employee I would be severely worried. Our regulators don't take prisoners and some of the practices that were exposed in the trial will get G into deep trouble if UK businesses are affected by them in the future. Also the European DMA will affect them and the Europeans have a track record of levying the sort of fines that make even Google executives take notice.

I also predict that AI will have little to no effect on search. After all, when Bing's foray into it has been so ineffective why should Google drop the present highly profitable results (read: ads) display?

It will be an interesting year.

[RubicCubed]

What do you think things will look like in 2024?

I see chat boxes on major SEs surrounded by ads with minuscule or well hidden organic (free) links to those sites where these SE chat boxes scraped some of their responses from. With little to no traffic going to websites, they will be starved of revenue to continue maintaining their sites and a barren wasteland will be left behind.

How's that for a positive view on the state of Google in 2024?

[Micha]

@superclown2 I don't think AI search will be relevant next year, but I do think AI will cause more problems for website owners. You can already see it now, Google's AI rating for the quality of websites doesn't work at all. I also believe that Google will continue like this and more and more websites, especially the small specialized ones, will disappear. Google will remain the dominant search engine in 2024.

I therefore fear that what we are currently experiencing will not change much next year.

[Shepherd]

rumoured to be 're-assessing' some 30,000 jobs on the sales team

There's no shortage of things google should be "re-assessing"...

[RedBar]

@Conro

Duck Duck Go is too extreme and does not think about the life of a site.

Please clarify, what do you mean by this statement? I've used DDG for many years and especially so on mobile and I believe it still takes most of its feed from Bing with a bit mixed-in from other engines.

Commercially I actually rank better on Google than DDG however DDG's layout / appearance, especially on mobile, wins hands down plus for factual searches, for which I do a lot, G / B / DDG deliver very similar results.

[Conro]

@RedBar I have already explained that Duck Duck Go is solely focused on the user, it blocks tracking and does not display advertisements from websites. A site that lives off advertising dies with Duck Duck Go, and it’s also not good for an ecommerce site. Duck Duck Go is fine if you are a user who wants to maximize privacy and doesn’t care if websites live or die. However, Duck Duck Go does sell its own advertising, and with that, I’ve said it all.

[RedBar]

@Conro ... Therefore is it your comtention that those who do not wish to see advertising should be forced into accepting adverts? That no one should have the right to blocks ads simply to commercialise The Net as an advertising medium, which G is already doing, that users have no freedom of choice?

Or have I misunderstood you?