February 2024 Google Search Observations

[borishar]

---

System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5099651.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 9:30 am on Feb 1, 2024 (utc 0)

---

Well it all makes sense if you think about it. The US traffic is lower, overseas traffic higher probably because the ads business isn't as big overseas as it is in US, so they've been jamming ads at the top for US search results but not so much so in other countries. I can also confirm very abnormal drops in traffic starting around 12pm. I am not going off of google analytics, which is horrible nowadays, instead using my locally installed analytics based on nginx data.

[Nutterum]

My Observation from the last 24 hours. Many websites that were considered leaders in their respective niches by the users or general public got a massive boost up. Also more schema markup tags are visible than before. I have not seen so many "in stock / out of stock" image carousel, etc. markups on search results in a while.

[RedBar]

My Statcounter January metrics after removing the ridiculous effects of the Huawei Cloud visits accounting for 21.0% of all visits were:

Janury 2024 v January 2023 at 89%

Interestingly my overall PVs were very much as the last few months with January +2.7% v December.

My Awstats and Webalizer are, as always, showing completely different views with metrics looking steady!

Our hotel site saw a 17% increase v Jan 2023.

[christianz]

Poor traffic and lots of bot traffic.

[Micha]

Overall, the figures for 1 January are slightly worse than 2023, but what makes me optimistic is that although less comes via Google, more comes via our new app.

[mosxu]

“Poor traffic and lots of bot traffic.”

Same here, all we can do is to stop our ads.

[Markedd]

It didn't really take long to get an idea about how forums rank anything nowadays, so I created a dedicated community on Reddit to post the latest articles links. This way, I would not have to deal with admins and you would expect that Google would rank only the popular stuff. But no, I can find the Reddit articles already in the SERPs and they do rank above most other articles. So there you have it, do what you please with this info.

Additionally, I did some experiments in December, when the first huge drop happened and I found out that Google reacted to me adjusting the schema, raising the articles a bit higher, even if not really at the previous level as before. That didn't really stick because I am now underneath the early December level with this website. For the record, it was a 200K users per month website that now barely pulls 50K. And it continues to drop.

I do think that it's still something to do with schema as Google perhaps is trying to make every small website to fit within an easy-to-digest pattern, but it's not like they offer any guidance. So, as it was already stated many times before, very big websites + forums are the absolute winners, the rest are absolute losers. Absolute in the sense that there is no coming back. My suggestion is to make new websites, if you have this option, start a YouTube channel (although that's another huge can of worms since it's still Google) or just get out of this pathetic environment for now.

[Markedd]

Oh, and if you have a similar drop, check your Discover traffic. It's most likely zero.

[Micha]

@Markedd He is, once again. I'd really like to know what Google is actually thinking with all this nonsense. They must have realized that the results are terrible.

[Markedd]

I think it's something like this:
[tenor.com ]

[l1fejosh]

Happy Groundhog Day, folks! In a surprising turn of events, it seems our furry friend, the groundhog, isn't the only one trying to predict the future today. Google is leaving us wondering: Will we see our shadow in the search results, or are we in for six more weeks of scrolling?

[superclown2]

They must have realized that the results are terrible.

That's far less important to Google than Wall Street's demand that they keep increasing profits. They have managed that again thanks mainly to their Cloud Services (a lot of startups in there that may or may not make it with AI so long term success is not guaranteed) but profits from advertising (sorry, 'search') look to be slipping so expect the SERPs to get worse.

There's a lot of movement over here as they try to convince Europe that they are complying with the DMA (no comment) whilst they experiment with different tactics to maximise income. As long as they retain their monopoly search quality is a minor concern.

[christianz]

Big drop this morning. First two days of February were also worse than last week but only marginally, compared to what I am seeing right now.

[Micha]

Is the drop perhaps related to the indexing problem at Google? Would at least be an explanation [status.search.google.com ]

[not2easy]

Maybe dropping their cache [webmasterworld.com] will mean more crawling?

[ichthyous]

Huge drop here too, both searches and direct traffic -60%. It's early though

[christianz]

Is the drop perhaps related to the indexing problem at Google?

No, my traffic doesn't depend on new pages being indexed and my site has never been in Discover or Google News in all of its million years of existence.

If I had to guess it would say its the usual Google doubling down on its genius strategies at fighting spam and ranking things like whitehouse.gov for "how to bake a cake" etc.

[KaseyM]

Used to dread core updates. Desperately want one now - either to finish me off or start something resembling a recovery.

[jchiff]

[reddit.com...]

If you suspect we're all talking in a vacuum, check out this Reddit thread with a growing number of comments that appear to be from both developers and everyday search users.

[RedBar]

Today I am seeing completely normal traffic levels across all my main sites, it's been quite some time since I saw such a steady consistency ... It's bizarre when having to report normality!

[ichthyous]

@RedBar. Me too...much higher usa traffic. But this is after restoring a mass of links from expired accounts at high DA sites and also...I unblocked the AI bots. I'm seeing traffic from sites like perplexity which link directly out to your pages. This kind of AI I don't mind...it's the generative ai scraping my images and using them without permission or without sending any traffic that bothers me

[christianz]

Sunday traffic was only tiny bit lower than week prior. But due to "hole" on Feb 1st and 2nd the WoW number is lower.

[MayankParmar]

Logged in after a long time. It's good to see the old familiar names :)

As for traffic, it has been low lately and I haven't seen any recovery from the November 3rd update, despite having original and user-friendly content. However, I'm still running the site and writing articles because I love writing.

[samwest]

Looks like we're not alone...February 1st traffic dropped off a cliff with a -70% loss. 20-year-old evergreen content site. Oddly enough, it still "appears: as the #1 result. More smoke and mirrors. No soup for you!

[RedBar]

This is my third day of "normal" traffic with the USA for February so far at +35.7% !.!.!

[Mark_A]

Am getting about the same engaged sessions from G ads and G organic, organic visitors are staying longer though.

[ichthyous]

@redbar Very high traffic here also for three days. Mostly non-usa traffic, usa is just at break even. No new sales though, only spam

[EditorialGuy]

Our UVs and pageviews have been climbing gradually over the past several weeks (using week-over-week and year-over-year comparisons each day), but yesterday was down a bit from last week and today is looking about the same.

After averaging about 50 percent below last year, we've had several days when paveviews were down only 38 or 39 percent from last year. Talk about an era of diminished expectations!

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Something has changed because this week I have already received more genuine business enquiries than the whole of January, none from the USA which is not unusual, however more encouraging than recent months. What is significant is that all the enquiries are for widgets for which we are very strong and well-known.

[l1fejosh]

We're hitting all time highs today! I hope this momentum keeps up!