January 2024 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5098123.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 9:24 am on Jan 2, 2024 (utc 0)

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Happy New Year

I hope you survived New Year's Eve well and that your websites did too.

Apparently the upswing continues, I continue to see a slight improvement in the ranking and the number of readers. (on average +11.2 percent more per day at the moment).

It may be slow, but I hope it continues.

[superclown2]

The term 'Google Quality' is an oxymoron.

I have found another search term dominated by one site: 33 out of the first 40, including the top five.

What a complete waste of bandwidth this advertising agency has become.

[mhansen]

Something funky happening with search results today. (Feels like every day)

I have a very old 15-page site and it pretty much lost relevance roughly 3-4 years ago for the tightly focused primary audience it was built for. Hasn't seen conversions or much traffic in the last 3-4 years. While I do continue to update the site, not much other effort aside from keeping it active has been done. It pretty much stayed in the mid 20's of serp positioning.

This morning and afternoon it's been on fire and a quick look in SEMR shows thousands of percentage points of visibility gain across hundreds of terms. No noticeable change in link profile or anything else, and no, I did not add 2024 to the pages or titles at the new year. I have not updated any of the content since before the Sept 23 HCU.

[insideout]

Google destroyed my website. From 10K per day to less than 300 and still dropping. My only source of income is vanishing away in front of my eyes.:(
Damn you google

[renatovieira]

Big drop today... Here we go again...

[BlueEyes82]

Bing now accounts for 60% of traffic for some projects and Google only accounts for 30%. Before the HCU update, this accounted for 90% of Google's traffic and 10% of all other search engines. The rankings on Bing have remained stable, normally they were similar to those on Google, but since HCU there have been enormous shifts. Luckily, Bing doesn't seem to take the same (wrong) route as Google...

The good thing is that Google can hardly get much less traffic....The traffic on some pages is already "irrelevant"

[BigKat]

The good thing is that Google can hardly get much less traffic....The traffic on some pages is already "irrelevant"

Google itself became largely irrelevant to us early last year. And yes, traffic really can't get much worse from Google and if it does we won't notice it in our sales because Google's traffic quality has become that bad. Fortunately our Bing and other sources of traffic continue to improve but it's unfortunately slow. Still I'm pleased to see shoppers out there dissatisfied with Google and using other engines so that what we lost with Google gets partially offset with much better converting traffic.

[Micha]

Now I was curious: Bing has now seen a 40% increase in my total traffic since December, and the trend is still rising. In November, the share was still at 20 percent. For a news site, it's bad that Google has dropped so much, but who's surprised?

[BigKat]

For a news site, it's bad that Google has dropped so much, but who's surprised?

@Micha

Maybe problems identified in the story "Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles" [404media.co...] applies to you?

[christianz]

Big drop today... Here we go again...

Yes, today is looking rough..

Sunday was almost at prior week level.

[Micha]

@BigKat Yes, unfortunately that is absolutely true. I have also already found some articles that clearly use passages from my articles and were definitely written by an AI. So besides total trash, advertising etc. In my opinion, Google News is hardly usable anymore and I wonder why Google doesn't simply check news sources in advance again, as was the case before 2019, which would solve the problem.

Little fun fact: my website gets money from Google for being a source, but if this continues, the sum will run to almost 0 when a new contract is made in July.

[BlueEyes82]

@Micha

How high is your share of Bing's total search engine traffic?
On a site that is not affected by the HCU-update, Bing has 10% and Google 80%. Bing is up 3% here since December.

[BigKat]

@Micha

Sorry to hear some of your work is being used in AI generated articles. It's happening to a lot of big news sites too even the NY Post [nypost.com...] which references that 404 Media story in their own non-paywalled story titled "Google News searches ranked AI-generated ripoffs above real articles — including a Post exclusive."

The Post’s exclusive Jan. 8 story about Holyoak was listed lower in search results than a nearly identical ripoff – published by an outlet with the generic name “Business News” and the bizarre domain address “biz(dot)crast(dot)net” that seemingly cranks out troves of AI-generated articles.

I'm not seeing reports of these AI ripoffs overtaking Bing. I wonder why? Is it because Bing's marketshare is so low that few complain or is Bing dealing with AI content in a more responsible manner that protects publishers?

[Micha]

@BlueEyes82 Currently at 40 percent, the proportion has risen sharply in the last two weeks in particular.

@BigKat Yes, I can confirm what the website says. This is really annoying, but unfortunately it will continue and I suspect it will get worse. I'm worried about this development because good journalism costs money, and if the revenue decreases, the overall quality will also decrease.

As for Bing and AI, I think Microsoft simply has better control mechanisms. Google is trying to jump on the AI bandwagon by the skin of its teeth and, as usual, is being very rash. I wouldn't be surprised if some engineers at Google pointed out the problem and management ignored it because of the dollar signs in their eyes.

[BigKat]

@Micha

It seems Google is more focused on profits and cost cutting (all the layoffs), and I fear Google won't invest much if any money into solving the problem. Hopefully with the bigger media types getting outranked by AI articles stolen from them, Google will be prompted to take some action so you and other victimized publishers get some relief and the right to profit from your own work. Unfortunately Google profits either way, and money spent on solving this and other problems takes away from the revenue they report to shareholders. We don't have this problem in our ecommerce industry yet, but I suspect it will arrive soon enough. The only thing saving us from AI generated content, if you want to really call it saving, is there are four ads above the fold and a PAA box. Meaning there is little to no people even seeing organic results to produce any measurable amount of traffic. For example, we're still #1 for some searches and the low x,xxx daily visitors was saw just a year and a half ago produces a low xx number of daily visitors. It's definitely not worth our money/labor as humans to rank #1 and those producing AI content would have to pump out a lot, and I mean a lot, of pages to see a profit. Fortunately for them their cost is little, so they may try but will be disappointed there really isn't any organic traffic to product pages in Google anymore.

[renatovieira]

Something big is happening. This morning the drop is at -85%.

[ichthyous]

Something big is happening. This morning the drop is at -85%.

Yesterday I had a huge boost in traffic, but zero inquiries. I have noticed that's the new thing...high traffic days with no conversions at all. Today USA is -63% at 10:30am. That's the other new thing...poor USA traffic all the time, it's always sluggish even when the rest of the world is zooming. It seems that Google has placed all its eggs in the USA basket, taking advantage of what time it has left in manipulating the hell out of USA results to squeeze profits before the boobs in our Congress wake up and get a clue. If that even happens at all...

I do wish Bing referred more traffic, but it doesn't...still languishing at a negligible number for 15 years...

[Micha]

Something really seems to be going on, traffic from Google has plummeted since midday.

[jxlarrea]

Google traffic at an all time low this morning.

[mysitegothithard]

Just when I thought I was recovering, I took another beating from Google. Boy, I'm starting to think it's personal...

[londrum]

Been looking at my stats for the last few years trying to work out why I'm down 50%, and i was surprised to find my year on year stats are almost identical. dips and troughs are all in the same places (because of my niche’s season), CTR is the same, average position is the same. No signs of a penalty anywhere,

It just looks like google doesnt send as much traffic as it once did for the same position. You only have to go back one or two years to see the difference

I suppose if they continue to cram a load of extra gumph on the first page like ‘people also ask’ then you’re traffic is going to drop even if you’re actual ranking holds steady

[renatovieira]

Another day of massive drops here. It's so big, I went to check the seacrh console to see if there was any manual action. There is nothing, there is just a cliff in the data after January 23rd. Either I was penalized, or there was an update in progress...

[ichthyous]

I'm seeing the opposite so far today, a rise in traffic for the 2nd day, excluding USA + Canada, which ended yesterday -8%. Perhaps it will hit here later in the day. I have noticed that there have been ZERO new inquiries in a solid week now, despite some days with strong traffic. One week without a single person inquiring about purchasing anything...that's not normal.

[samwest]

Stopped in to verify the huge traffic loss... wasn't disappointed. It's real.
For twenty-plus years our seasonal peak lasted from Jan 1 to the end of April...and this year it's over already.
Break up the Google Ad engine.

[Markedd]

@renatovieira Yeah, the G Analytics did show a drop on Wednesday, but I think it's an error from their side because the search.google data shows otherwise, and Raptive is also weirdly lagging, kind of waiting for Google to get its #*$! together...
So I suspect it's a bug, error, or a new feature!

[renatovieira]

@Markedd - I agree. Analyzing today, the drop does not coincide with the data from search console and AdSense. The drop happened to all my websites. Clearly this is a bug in Analytics. Strange...

[Mark_A]

One week without a single person inquiring about purchasing anything...that's not normal.

@ichthyous
It might also indicate an over dependence on Google.

[RedBar]

Insofar as my global site is concerned Google is not driving any genuine new business traffic.

Two interesting statistics for this site as of today;

Overall genuine (non Huawei) PVs for January 2024 v January 2023 are -25%, this is not at all normal, since the late 1960s January to March has always been our busiest enquiry time of the year.

Secondly, Huawei Cloud / PetalBot / Singapore situation. As of today 25% of ALL PVs have been from this nuisance in Statcounter. Basically the inability to block this thing has skewed its metrics beyond pointless. None of my other analysis programmes seem to have been affected as yet! I'm leaving it to run until the 31st simply for for my statistical purposes.

[ichthyous]

@Mark A+ You bet it does, but unfortunately in the type of niche retail I'm in, where you are dependent on a low number of sales of high priced items nothing else has worked. I've tried the costly retail partnerships and ended them all, a total black hole of time and money. Social media simply does not work to sell higher priced items ( and I've heard same from my competitors)
I closed my physical location during the pandemic and am in a location where rents are so astronomically high it no longer makes sense to open one. There is no place left to turn except for very high priced options that do not perform well. There are trade fairs, but in my field that is a $30,000-$50,000 expense and quite often you don't break even. It's not a viable option for independent operators like me. So...website and search is everything for the last 20 years and there has been no way around it.

[BigKat]

website and search is everything for the last 20 years and there has been no way around it.

The over-dependence on Google is structural and shared by most of us in the ecommerce space. No amount of money tossed at Bing, Facebook, X, etc. can offset the structural problem we face with Google's excessive marketshare. Getting our goods in front of buyer's eyes can be accomplished by selling in marketplaces, but isn't suitable for many items due to the fees marketplaces charge, marketplace policies that hold sellers over a barrel and of course a type of marketplace customer that tends to be very problematic (mostly Amazon). I quit beating myself up a long time ago about being too over-reliant on Google for new customer acquisition because Google's marketshare is outside my control and has been solidified with pro-big tech policies, subsidies and tax breaks at every level of Government over a period of many years. The "free market" hand we've been dealt came from a stacked deck, and I see no improvement in the future unless the dealer is replaced.

[ichthyous]

No amount of money tossed at Bing, Facebook, X, etc. can offset the structural problem we face with Google's excessive marketshare. Getting our goods in front of buyer's eyes can be accomplished by selling in marketplaces, but isn't suitable for many items due to the fees marketplaces charge, marketplace policies that hold sellers over a barrel and of course a type of marketplace customer that tends to be very problematic (mostly Amazon).

Social media ads do not work to sell high priced items. They do work to sell lower priced lifestyle related items like clothes, shoes and makeup. I use social media to reinforce my brand and show off the quality of items, for press, and basically to show off what a big shot I am. That doesn't bring in sales, but it does help customers to decide if they believe that your product is worth the amount you are charging. It also helps bring in press I find.

With regards to marketplace...I don't sell on Amazon and places like that. I'm operating in a more rarified world where people are parting with $10,000+ per item and Amazon doesn't operate in my niche, it just wouldn't work. However there are other marketplace type sites with powerful brands. I tried the most important one, and at $650 per month for the account, plus fees on top of that I had very little to show for it. I eventually parted ways after 4 years when they stopped even allowing me to embed links in my items on their site.

In my experience most marketplaces are just smoke and mirrors, they make a profit and you get almost nothing in return. Same for social media experts, which I have also tried...all just complete BS artists who could not deliver. Like it or not, Google search has delivered customers handsomely for 20 years now. There is simply nothing more powerful than people who are looking for exactly what you have, being able to find you online. That is clearly diminishing now, it has become totally unreliable...but, in the short periods where Google is sending decent traffic you can still make a lot of sales in a short period. It's feast or famine now...long stretches with nothing, then a ton of customers all at once.

One other point...I am slowly tiptoeing into Youtube. If there is one social media platform I think might actually deliver it's youtube. But the amount of time and effort required is huge. If you are just posting clips and shorts you aren't going to get anywhere. I post shorts for each product showing the quality, etc. and embed it on my website. The views from within YT itself are very low...after a few hours nobody sees it anymore. If you want to excel on YT better have full-fledged (read: F/T) video production going on.

[edited by: ichthyous at 3:59 pm (utc) on Jan 26, 2024]

[ichthyous]

Huge -34% drop in search this morning...back to -60% on the home page and main landing pages all falling in tandem, while interior pages are getting unusual amounts of hits. Something is cooking, maybe it hit my site later than the rest of you. Fridays tend to be tumultuous these days...every Friday I get whacked now, and then suddenly Saturday is back to normal again...

[StoneSolid]

Maybe I can't understand the rank algos.. but I wish I would understand any logic in serps whatsoever.

My site is stable in top 5 on bing and duckduckgo for main keywords.
Now, completely vanished for those same terms in google for longer than a month now (used to be in stable top 10 for years).

Isn't that like google admitting that ranking my site at all was a 100% mistake?
I didn't get demoted 3-5-50 spots down but gone all together.

Also, what is the deal with countless results some get on one search page?
It is usually some big news portal kind of site that barely brushes off the search query, yet they get rank spots like:

bigsite.com
bigsite.com/category/blabla
bigsite.com/tag/blabla
bigsite.com/article/blabla
bigsite.com/anotherarticle/blabla

Isn't it like one line of code to exclude multiple results for same site and another line of code in special cases to include it if needed?
(example, if query got a site name in it or something like that)

[MrSnuts]

Hey all,
I've been following this thread for a long time, so, take I'm aware of what you all reported during the repeated updates of last fall and its effects.

From what I read, I seem to belong to the quite small group of people who have not been hit by any of those recent updates.
My project (community/UGC) took a devastating hit some years ago, so, trust me, I feel your pain.
With just about 400 daily clicks from google organic per day, maybe the project is simply too small to appear on the updates radar, I do not know. Maybe brand recognition saved us this time, we do get a good share of people googling the projects name.
Our traffic is following the usual seasonal pattern so far, but one thing is interesting, that's why I'm posting here to ask if anyone else has observed something similar:
We are tracking with Matomo, and there you have a stat on "bounce rate", meaning the % of visitors who leave after viewing one page.
I can set a filter to check the bounce rate of people coming from google organic, and to my surprise, the bounce rate has dropped by almost 10% YoY and is now @24%.
A 5% drop happened around the beginning of November.
So, is google actually sending better-matched traffic our way?
I could not see proof of that in the revenue stats or anywhere else,
but as the change in bounces reveals something about what the update changed, I felt like sharing it with you.
I'd be interested if you can report similar or opposite changes in that metric.

[christianz]

I don't know what my bounce rate is because stopped looking at it years ago. Extremely overrated metric, almost meaningless. Different type of sites have intrinsically different bounce rates. Bounce rate comparison is almost always apples to oranges comparison.

Therefore it most likely also has zero impact on ranking, just like core web vitals and site speed scores.

Back to observations: Yesterday and today traffic is weak. Overall week over week is 1% green. Traffic pattern is identical and weekdays overlay each other with incredible precision (no more than +/- 1% difference week over week). It has been flat like this for several weeks. I would prefer it stay that way, because I am up substantially YoY after all these updates.

So far whenever I see weakness in traffic, it creeps back up over next few days. Not sure if I will continue to be as lucky. The long tail relevance of Google AND Bing/Duck is absolutely awful lately.

[Micha]

Comparing the bounce rate is not very helpful. My news site, for example, has a very high bounce rate by nature. Experience shows that it is lower for a store.

As far as traffic is concerned: I can really set the clock by that. Right on time at 12:30 pm on Friday, the Google traffic collapsed again, Saturday is extremely weak as usual and on Sunday it should rise again. the same procedure as every weekend

[abcdefg]

Now I think general information sites can be mostly replaced by ChatGPT or COPILOT on Bing. The latter, while not perfect, seems to be much better than pure search engines in finding the results that I need. Only sites with deep information that these tools refer to will get meaningful traffic.

The rules for ecommerce is probably changing, too.

Also when it comes to news, search engines will only refer to a small set of their friends. Small sites need to rely on opinions and a strong fan following to survive.

As technology evolves, it seems that while G retains its dominance in traditional search, its relevance is decreasing by the day.

[christianz]

Now I think general information sites can be mostly replaced by ChatGPT or COPILOT on Bing.

Where will they get the information from if those sites disappear? ChatGPT is not information source, it is info scraper.

[MrSnuts]

Comparing the bounce rate is not very helpful.

I agree that is it useless to compare a news sites bounce rate with a store, I'd even say it does not make much sense to compare two news sites, bounce rates will vary, and that is not a quality signal.

What I was trying to point at is that change in bounce rate on one and the same site does reveal something about the referred traffic (if there are no changes on the site, as in our case).

[EditorialGuy]

Where will they get the information from if those sites disappear? ChatGPT is not information source, it is info scraper.

Also, ChatGPT output tends to be bland and boring, both textually and visually. (And it's frequently outdated, since there's an obvious lag between updates of the source material and updates of the ChatGPT derivatives.)

[insideout]

Another big drop in traffic today. Anyone else experiencing the same or is it just me watching my only income vanishing in front of my eyes :(

[superclown2]

Where will they get the information from if those sites disappear? ChatGPT is not information source, it is info scraper.

Absolutely.

the term 'AI' is of course meaningless. These systems are simply data crunchers that sort and regurgitate information that humans have prepared, in a way that other humans have programmed them to. Certainly, they have many uses and will no doubt cause considerable disruption but although they can copy they cannot innovate.

Despite Microsoft's much trumpeted launch of their AI assisted search and chatbot their share of search is actually lower than it was a year ago. Similarly ChatGPT is losing, not gaining, users.

Some of this may of course be due to Google's stranglehold on the major browsers but as others have pointed out the results from both Bing and DDG have got worse, not better. long tail results are particularly poor (as of course they are on Google).

All the main so-called search engines are there to make money, not provide a public service, so this is perhaps understandable.

[RedBar]

Fingers crossed!

My Singaporean Huawei Cloud bot hasn't been seen for 10+ hours and PVs have gone back to normal at 2.2%.

Anyone else who's been having this problem seen the same?

[ichthyous]

Despite Microsoft's much trumpeted launch of their AI assisted search and chatbot their share of search is actually lower than it was a year ago. Similarly ChatGPT is losing, not gaining, users.

The bloom is already off the rose. Has anyone used ChatGPT to generate content? I mean it comes up with some great ideas that gives you some ideas on what you can include, but you have to end up rewriting the entire text because it's all ridiculous sounding hyperbole. People have already caught on to that. In terms of gen AI images and video...also half baked. But I am sure it's all going to get a lot better from here...that is the real threat.

And some of the AI tools in some apps now like Adobe are actually huge productivity boosters...others don't really work as well as intended because Adobe is limited to scraping it's own stock photo archive so it can't get sued like the rest.

Google search not going away any time soon, but what has gone away is USA traffic. I have never seen such a huge imbalance where so much of my traffic from the rest of the world is flowing, but USA is crimped hard every day now. Google is taking advantage of a decrepit US system and the total paralysis of US govt to stop it.

[mhansen]

Where will they get the information from if those sites disappear? ChatGPT is not information source, it is info scraper.

Quite simple, they already have exabytes of our content and they'll just continue to repurpose it over and over again, present it as their own and wrap it in ads. Even if you block Googlebot and all search engines from a site today, they'll keep the content they already have, continue to train their AI to match answers to queries, wrap it in ads and live on much longer than any of us.

Then of course, there is the Forbes and Newsweek type sites that are being greatly rewarded by the current Google algo, who will continue to generate fresh content for every possible query, get tons of Google traffic to click their Google ads and the machine will feed itself in perpetuity.

Google search not going away any time soon, but what has gone away is USA traffic.

Whats gone are quality results. Now you get YouTube, answers, etc - nothing but more Googlespam.

I'm an RV owner for many years and my wife and I love to camp. This weekend, in prepping the camper for the coming season, I found I needed to repair a bit of something inside the camper and head over to Google to lookup how to remove a specific thing. In the past, Google was great for this and the sites uncovered were RV technicians, mechanics, etc. My search results this weekend were not great or detailed enough or they wanted to force me to watch a video, which I really didn't care to do, so I moved to GPT and asked it for the step by step to do what I need and to cite it's sources.

I got a nearly exact step by step for my model camper from 4 tech sites focused on my RV manufacturer. The cited sources were the great sites I have visited many times over the years of owning an RV but never had bookmarked. ALL of the sites were what I would consider the strongest type of EEAT you could have. Legitimate RV repair shops with images, video and written instruction. They did have adsense on them as well.

ALL of the cited sources from GPT experienced crushing blows in the HCU/Core update changes of Sept/Oct 2023 and have lost nearly all of their Google traffic. What replaced them are YouTube channels or YT videos.

Fire up your favorite KW tool like SEMRush and look at the growth YT has seen over the last 4 months. It's pretty staggering.

Sept 2023 > +/- 650m organic keyword exposure in Google SERP's.
Jan 2024 > +/- 2.3B organic keyword exposure in Google SERP's.

Google is narrowing the content, text-based web to itself and those it wants to reward. Everyone else in the text based content world is going to end up as part of it's AI system, whether we like it or not. The biggest question floating around in my mind today, is how soon to just block search completely from my expert, service-based text content and require a login to access.

[christianz]

Quite simple, they already have exabytes of our content and they'll just continue to repurpose it over and over again, present it as their own and wrap it in ads. Even if you block Googlebot and all search engines from a site today, they'll keep the content they already have, continue to train their AI to match answers to queries, wrap it in ads and live on much longer than any of us.

It will be stale content. And the stale-ness will only get worse as more publishers quit or block Googlebot.

On more fun note - here is entertaining read about things we already know (very well). I like the term "en#*$!ification". I think I will use it from now on.

doctorow.medium.com/googles-en****tification-memos-2d6d57306072

Replace the stars (*) with appropriate word to complete this URL.

[BigKat]

Google is narrowing the content, text-based web to itself and those it wants to reward. Everyone else in the text based content world is going to end up as part of it's AI system, whether we like it or not. The biggest question floating around in my mind today, is how soon to just block search completely from my expert, service-based text content and require a login to access.

Requiring a paid login, may be the only hope some have from AI consuming and profiting from their work. Unless one can block all scrapers, Google will simply scrape the scraper. Call me a pessimist, but I don't see anything getting better. Google is like a fast spreading cancer consuming all the healthy tissue that makes up the internet. When Google has consumed all that is good, who will be left to feed Google money?

[Micha]

And the stale-ness will only get worse as more publishers quit or block Googlebot.

That's right, more and more small publishers will have to give up. The big publishers will use their position to make money, see ChatGPT and Bild-Verlag. But before that happens, more and more publishers will hide their content behind paywalls, making the web even poorer. The question is, what will happen sooner: will politicians finally intervene or will Google destroy all the small companies first?

And Bigcat has written the rest appropriately: Google is a spreading cancer and has now thrown all inhibitions overboard. "don't be evil" has become "we don't care about anyone else, you work, we make money"

[EditorialGuy]

Requiring a paid login, may be the only hope some have from AI consuming and profiting from their work.

That won't work for many sites and users. If I want to look up "Widgetville Cathedral" or "pedicab fare in Whatsitburg," I want to see results from a broad range of sites, not just the handful of sites that I subscribe to.

Years ago, there was talk of "micropayments" being the next big thing. In the 1990s, the Microsoft Network (where I was a paid forum manager at the time) had a plan to bring in revenue by charging small amounts for downloads. If, say, you wanted to know about Bernese Mountain Dogs, you'd be able to go to the MSN Pets Forum and download the forum manager's guide to that breed for a dime or a quarter or whatever. The concept never caught on (and, at MSN, was never implemented), and it seems even less likely to work after more than a quarter of a century of Web content mostly being free.

[mhansen]

Requiring a paid login

Personally, I would not require a paid subscription model, just a login to see the protected content. I'll take care of the monetization of that content myself, versus fee-based.

[Razorllama]

Traffic hit by a sledgehammer since yesterday, severe loss of keywords too. Something hit me, continuing today.