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]

[puckparches]

My websites have been my primary source of income for years. I even quit my day job a long time ago to focus on them, relying on AdSense revenue to sustain myself. However, I always knew that someday Google might reduce my website traffic and AdSense earnings. Unfortunately, that day has arrived. I don’t blame Google—though I feel frustrated and disheartened by the situation—I understand they're maximizing their profits.

Reflecting on this, I regret not investing more time in developing my mobile app. Instead, I dedicated most of my efforts to creating website content. Had I balanced this with app development, I might not have been so reliant on Google search results today

[RubicCubed]

What I ask myself is, what does Google actually want?

The obvious - money.

In January, Google went from displaying two ads then to three ads. By February there were four ads above the fold, and it's been that way ever since. Refinements, such as the people also ask and people search for refinement boxes, climbed up the page and now hover right below a single organic result. Still, this was not enough to fill Google's coffers which is why we saw a spat of updates that resulted in somewhat accurate organic results being replaced by Google ranking nonsensical pages. The changes Google made do not to improve the user experience (actually made the UX horrendously bad), but drive all eyeballs and clicks to ads.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I'll admit G seem more desperate than ever and for me it started back in October 2022. But throughout this year they have been making so many changes. Even threatening to delete inactive Youtube channels and sacking a bunch of staff. Either they are in panic mode and are spending more than expected and having to cut costs or are just not reaching yearly targets. Probably both.

They are forever getting court cases and law suits against them and I'll be surprised they even know what they are doing half the time. After reading about their AI screwups. Though I'll admit I wish this nightmare would end as there is nothing more that I want right now but to build a website or two and get them to success. But alas another -30% drop for me.

[Micha]

@RubicCubed The decision makers at Google are pretty stupid if they think that companies are booking advertising on Google because their ranking is dropping. Mainly because advertising itself is no longer bringing in as much as it did a few months ago and the more websites give up, the less advertising G can play out overall. In the long term, search will not be able to compensate for this unless it only plays ads and no longer shows organic hits. Initially this may work because companies think they need to invest now, but in the long run it will weaken.

And as far as I know, Google doesn't have a product that brings in anywhere near as much, and AI search could yet prove to be a disaster, because AI may be the hot #*$! at the moment, but it's still a long way from working properly, and hardly any publishers are going to stand by and watch Google shamelessly help themselves to content. And G shouldn't forget the user factor either. Google may be the market leader, but there are alternatives, and if you don't find anything else, people will use these alternatives more and more, and Android won't change that much.

[EditorialGuy]

Google may be the market leader, but there are alternatives, and if you don't find anything else, people will use these alternatives more and more

What alternatives? (Seriously. I'm not being snide.) Google has no real competitors in general search. In theory, Google could be swept aside by something that's truly new and better, but its existing competitors seem happy to copy Google and live on the crumbs that Google leaves behind.

[Conro]

@EditorialGuy Replace the preselected search engine, which is Google, with another one, such as Bing, and 90% of people won’t notice the change because they still find what they’re looking for. Don’t believe me? Try it on someone’s phone you know. I did it secretly and no one noticed anything. I replaced Google with Bing for a few days, then back to Google. No one asked me what had happened.

[EricAN]

A thought... If G no longer values long text and picture content. Is it because they wan´t to keep people at search-page looking for information, so they can earn more in ads? Shorter content cannot cover a subject and then people have to search more to learn.

[BlueEyes82]

Since the HCU-Update in sptember - has anyone managed to stop the major downward trend or achieve growth again by making changes to their website?

I looked at a lot of websites in my area at Sistrix, almost all of them have lost visibility and the trend has been downwards since the HCU update. So far, no website has been able to break the trend when it has been affected.

In contrast to all updates in recent years, after 2-3 months at the latest there were many pages that managed to rise again. This hardly seems to be the case this time.

[Conro]

@BlueEyes82 No site I see has recovered stably. Even my site has had a continuous up and down. Now it is at its lowest, however, starting from December 15th. Other sites, on the other hand, have not even obtained a slight increase in these months, but are in free fall. Other sites initially had a strong increase, then they collapsed. The defects of all these sites? Apparently none.

[Conro]

I am currently looking at two English-language technology sites. They are quite well made and both have the same trend in terms of traffic and keywords. Both have added a very brief summary at the top of the article with the solutions to follow to solve a problem, below there is the complete and detailed guide with the steps to follow. I notice for both sites a good stability with the keywords and traffic until November 31, then from December 1 a strong drop in keywords and visits. For me, Google is completely useless and is no longer able to recognize good content. Their AI has failed big time.

[adman]

After two weeks of total increase of 10%, yesterday my site traffic dropped by 20% (compared to last Sunday).
I really don't understand why.
And big drop always happens in Sunday, for some reason.
So far also 20% down compared to last Monday.

[Conro]

Soon only Google will remain with its SGE that summarizes our contents, but which was of too poor quality to rank.

[Micha]

@BlueEyes82 In addition to my direct competitors, I monitor almost 120 other websites, and all of them have lost ground. No website is recovering.

[BlueEyes82]

Thx @Conro & @Micha

So for almost 3 months there has been no way to “do justice” to the HCU update and following updates.

My observation so far has been that it makes no difference whether you completely redesign the website or do nothing at all. This is actually unique compared to all previous updates.

It seems as if Google has become a ghost driver.

[Micha]

This is the result of relying on AI to rank websites. For Google's AI, almost all websites are bad unless they are big names or spamming the internet. It's a blind faith in a flawed technology that makes its own product worse and worse.

[Conro]

@BlueEyes82 Towards mid-August, I had recovered almost all of the traffic. Initially, I thought it was because of something I had done, but then I looked at other sites that I monitored because they had lost traffic, and like me, traffic had returned to them in August. After about a month, at the end of September, traffic plummeted again for both me and the other sites I monitored. It’s impossible to find a solution

[superclown2]

In theory, Google could be swept aside by something that's truly new and better, but its existing competitors seem happy to copy Google and live on the crumbs that Google leaves behind.

They are not happy about this - they just find it impossible to get seen easily thanks to the billions (yes that's thousands of millions) of dollars that Google pay to stay the default on just about every way of accessing the Internet. Back in the early days it came as a surprise at first that people were typing search terms into a browser search bar rather that visiting a search engine but why type in duckduckgo.com then a search term when typing straight into the search bar is so much simpler?

Being a default search engine has massive value (and who ever dreamed of giving a search engine a long name like duckduckgo, or an easy to spell incorrectly one like quant, belongs in the same group as the ones who called theirs 'dogpile').

Replace the preselected search engine, which is Google, with another one, such as Bing, and 90% of people won’t notice the change because they still find what they’re looking for.

Absolutely right. Back in the days when Google first arrived many search engines were truly awful and many were packed with ads (sounds familiar?) but now things are different and there are far better ones out there that could quickly replace The Google Advertising Agency if they were not excluded by G's ownership of Chrome and Android, and massive 'financial encouragement' of other portals.

[samwest]

However, I always knew that someday Google might reduce my website traffic and AdSense earnings. Unfortunately, that day has arrived.

Why should we expect Google to reduce our traffic? In the first decade of Google, everything blossomed naturally, and we enjoyed year after year improvements. Once Google got a stranglehold on the SERPs, sometime between 2008 and the MayDay update of 2010 (about the time Dugan was there)...it's since been a continual decline for webmasters and a non-stop improvement for Google...this makes no sense other than that they are taking away from webmasters for their own enrichment and worse, total control...and unfortunately, it's not just in search.

[ichthyous]

Google is doing the rotation thing...as I have posted here it's a continual drip, drip, drip loss of top 3 and top 10 ranking terms until you lose about 20% in total...I'm almost at that point now after continually losing terms for more than a month. The results show the same few sites in top three spots now over and over. That should last a while...usually 6 months or so, until Google decides to rotate again and the opportunity to start gaining those terms back arises.

This has killed my holiday season completely, and the war in Gaza hasn't helped at all. That, and the current political situation in the US is adding to a sense of instability that doesn't put people at ease with spending on items that aren't absolutely necessary. That's despite the stock market and the economy doing really well in the US and the dollar is finally dropping.

[renatovieira]

Second day of recovery after infinite updates. Consistent traffic and high earnings (Christmas).... I'm not sure if it will stabilize. Just waiting for what will happen...

[Conro]

@renatovieira you have a ecommerce?

[renatovieira]

@Conro - I have 2 weather websites. Earnings come from AdSense.

[Conro]

@renatovieira good 👍

[Razorllama]

Brutal past few 5 days. -60% from the previous November levels, and a cumulative -86% since how things were going in late August-early September before the updates hit.

For some queries, I'm seeing even more Google features, misguided UGC ranking just because UGC (without matching the search query!), and parasite SEO stuff.

Is it one of those silent review updates after the previous one ended in late November? I guess so.

Happy holidays from Google..

[Micha]

And it continues to go downhill, quite early for December, usually not before Christmas. A few days ago an article made it into Discover, well, but that was a day with good traffic, since then it's been a dance of death. I'm also noticing that the nonsense in the search results has increased yet again. In Google News you see more and more links to spam sites. I'm a little surprised that Google doesn't seem to care.

[BlueEyes82]

After the updates, there are now brands in Germany that, when searching for “brand + keyword”, first display 20 (!) subpages of the brand and then the first content website. This has nothing to do with a functioning search engine anymore...

Google's quality has become subterranean...

[ichthyous]

I don't have a lot of traffic from Google News, but I did notice recently that Google is ranking articles in the #1 spot that are pure spam...you click on them and it redirects to another website trying to sell you something. Never seen spam in the news feed before.

On another note...I keep dropping top 3 and top 10 ranking terms every day. A slow drip of top terms for the last six weeks or so. Is anyone else seeing this? If it keeps up it's going to be an ugly 2024.

[mysitegothithard]

I don't know whether to sell my site now, while it still has some value, or hope for a miracle and it recovers somehow. I lost all hope to the point that my despair became resilience. I think I've accepted that it's over.

[mysitegothithard]

@BlueEyes82 in Brazil its the same sh1t.

[Micha]

@Ichthyos Do you also see that Yahoo, MSN and other sites just copy the news? Google News is full of it for me, I can hardly find any original articles.

[RedBar]

Utter unpredictability seems to be the norm these days for me. Sunday's global traffic for me was 270%, Monday's 257.5% and so far today after 15 hours at 83% ... That'll make up for next week's reduction :-)

[notabot]

@BlueEyes82 It's not just Germany. It's also in US. A good example pointed out elsewhere: "john deer tractor". I'm getting similar with other searches as well across all different types of brands and products.

[ichthyous]

Big drop again today...across UK (-41%), Canada (-72%), Australia (-76%), and much of Europe is way down. USA is holding up better than the others at -12% so it may break even by end of day. UK has been low since last week and this appears in line with last year's traffic for Christmas week.

[insideout]

My 15-year-old website is going to the abyss :( I'm expecting zero traffic in the coming days :(
BIG F******* You, Evil google

[Razorllama]

OK, what in the world is happening, even the HCU wasn't that brutal. I see multiple PAGE drops worth of positions on a lot of my keywords, even those matching a query in terms of content/intent way better than half of page 1.

We're talking position 3-5 to position 35-40 or so.

Roughly speaking -75% week over week now, with the past two days being a further -25% compared to the previous days of decline.

I've never seen so many average position 35+ pages on a site of mine in GSC.

[Conro]

I too am still experiencing a slow and steady loss of keywords, but even those in the first position that used to bring me hundreds of visits every day, now even if they are still in the first position, they bring me half the traffic. I think it’s clear to everyone that Google wants our sites to be closed. At the moment, I haven’t seen any of the sites I monitor recover, maybe it goes up a little, then it gets worse than before.

[renatovieira]

Rollercoaster in activated mode. After 2 days of increase in traffic, today a huge drop. And so we go... :-|

[RedBar]

UK has been low since last week

Our UK hotel site has seen its expected downturn in web traffic as follows:

Week 46 was 105.6%
Week 47 was 93.2%
Week 48 was 96.3%
Week 49 was 73.1%
Week 50 was 68.0%
Week 51 this week so far 16.3%

For my global site for the past 7 days I have seen 150% with this continuing into today and at the moment can see no reason why. The good thing is that it is genuine traffic with USA traffic -29%, all other areas are up especially Germany and Slovakia ... Go figure!

[saladtosser]

I always see a lot of people on here say they have lost 70% (or thereabouts) of traffic with mostly all updates, surly you must be at -100% traffic by now? Its odd its pretty much always "I lost 70% of traffic". Anyway ditched my website and doing YouTube full time now, much less stress and hassle with much less overheads!

[BlueEyes82]

@Saladtosser
You can always halve the traffic from a current status until you finally reach a visitor. This means in practice 1,000 visitors a day.

500
250
125
62....

In addition, you can write several times that traffic has halved or even more.

[ichthyous]

I always see a lot of people on here say they have lost 70% (or thereabouts) of traffic with mostly all updates, surly you must be at -100% traffic by now? Its odd its pretty much always "I lost 70% of traffic".

Good point...I base my percentages on the difference from the last four of the same day of the week. So for example the difference between this Tuesday compared to the previous four Tuesdays.

Having said that, I am losing 2-3 top 3 and top 10 terms per day now like clockwork. I have had almost six months of gains wiped away, and from the current trend, it will very soon be one year of gains wiped away. It's not time for panic yet though, the same thing happened in reverse starting six months ago when my site started to push upward gaining terms for months without stopping. That is just the new normal...

Glad some of you are finding success with Youtube...I have been posting more YouTube shorts but haven't dived into long form content yet...it's a lot of work.

[l1fejosh]

Gained some of our positions back but traffic is nearly non-existent.

[ichthyous]

Search traffic is down 36% today...USA is -48% and UK is -23%. This is far below a typical Wed traffic, but on par with the same day last year. The only problem there is that I have a lot more content on the site than I did last year at this time, so in actuality this level of traffic is far worse than last year. Or is that not a valid comparison?

[EditorialGuy]

Our week-over-week traffic is continuing to climb, but I suspect this has more to do with seasonal variations than anything Google is doing. (We usually reach our lowest point of the year in early to mid-December or thereabouts).

One thing that always leaves me confused is the "average position" number in Google Search Console. Does it have any practical meaning if most of your traffic comes from a few major subtopics rather than from topics and positions across the board?

[l1fejosh]

One thing that always leaves me confused is the "average position" number in Google Search Console. Does it have any practical meaning if most of your traffic comes from a few major subtopics rather than from topics and positions across the board?

The average positioning on GSC is where you land on the SERPs each time your website appears on the user screen.

For example, if 3 users searched for keywords and you came up on position 4, 10 and 5 - your average position would be: 6.33.

[Conro]

Today I don’t read complaints so either everything is fine or someone has given up.

[Soulofmonk]

People are on Holidays

[RubicCubed]

Today I don’t read complaints so either everything is fine or someone has given up.

More likely people are entering holiday mode and spending less time working in front of a computer screen.

[Micha]

Everything is fine, definitely not. I've decided to end the year in peace now, too much stress isn't good and nothing will change anyway. The problems will definitely still be there in the new year.

[oldog]

New Update folks
Google is investigating reports about delayed indexing in Google Search that's affecting a small number of sites. We're working on identifying the root cause. Next update will be within 12 hours.

[status.search.google.com...]