December 2024 Google Search Observations

[Whitey]

Huge 48 hrs of overall site traffic doubling on only 3 url's, then back to zero. Top slot's since replaced with G overviews. For a moment I got excited. Looks like an AI smash and grab raid to me.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:38 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[cooler29]

@Samsam1978: this aboout opinion of senior and explanation made me think. Anyway I don't have any conclusion, but I think it is very useful so thanks for sharing with us :)

[ichthyous]

I checked my international traffic trends for the last month. Every country is a downward trend from early December until now. It's normal to drop as Christmas approaches, but not from the first week of December, and in this case non-western countries are also dropping. I checked UK, CA, AU, DE, FR, UAE and HK...all the same. Anyone else seeing a reduction in international traffic?

[mosxu]

Elon ? When public funds will stop flowing to fact checkers?

[Treud]

@ichthyous

Same I have a drop between 50% to 30% everywhere in the globe, My biggest KW pool dropped by 80% all across the board. For now, it's hard to conclude, because since the last March core updates my traffic sent remained the same but the quality has dropped a lot.

I would rather have a few users that engage and order than zombies. Will need a few weeks to have a first idea of what it is really.

[Dooku]

Elon ? When public funds will stop flowing to fact checkers?

Elon? Where is James Bond when you REALLY need him? :-)

[christianz]

[reddit.com...]

Ha ha ha haaaaaa

[mosxu]

1999 indeed was a search engine without zombies!

All respect to Apple for example as a company for the product they sell and not selling gimmicks!

[RedBar]

Surprisingly my 25th was busier than 21/22/23 and today, 26th, I'm almost at -50% ... I just assume this rollercoaster will continue until 6th Jan before I can make any sense of it whatsoever.

[Micha]

The spam update is completed.
[status.search.google.com ]

My conclusion:
My ranking is completely shot, but at least I've had decent Discover traffic for the last three days.

[Shepherd]

The spam update is completed.

wikipedia back up at the top of our niche... almost comical at this point

[universenet]

wikipedia back up at the top of our niche... almost comical at this point

And what about Reddit? Quora?
They are orfans now?

[Treud]

traffic is a bit better after the spam update, but the key metric for me (E-commerce) is that the customer time online increased by 40%, which wasn't like this for months. Now they need to shop !

[ichthyous]

Traffic jumped up on Christmas day and was much higher than the prior days...which makes no sense. Today traffic is also a bit higher, except the UK is -36%, AU is -21%, and DE is -34%. So more of the same, but today is still really a holiday.

My traffic in 2024 was double that of 2023 until these last two updates...now right back down to 2023 levels. The higher levels in 2024 didn't seem to matter, it produced no very few customers and sales.

[Treud]

same conclusion, traffic volume means nothing if you don't have more sales or leads. It's just redirecting the bots to small shops/publisher and keeping the customers to Amazon and like

[renatovieira]

Very HUGE drop this morning...

[ichthyous]

Very HUGE drop this morning...

Traffic was +24% until 9am, then dropped to 5 visitors since then. I am also seeing that my articles are all bringing in many fewer visits since the recent Nov/Dec updates...it's downward since then with one spike on Dec. 26th.
[ibb.co ]

But the articles don't seem to have lost any rank / visibility in my region. I just checked one and it was at #1 for every search I tried. The traffic is -40% though. Anyone else seeing this trend for their informational articles?

[Micha]

Thanks to Discover, my traffic is going through the roof this day. It's the second time this month that one day has stood out.
I looked at my site's ranking today and, in addition to Wikipedia, crypto news in my niche in particular has increased, although the topic doesn't really play a role there. However, the ranking jumps back and forth as if the update is still ongoing.

About the shop: Well, it's dead as expected, but that's because it was Christmas and we're moving towards the turn of the year, which is usually very weak.

[seokees]

@ichthyous Yes, very much so here in The Netherlands. But especially no conversions for days. First in many years (other xmasses were a bit lower, but not 100% down).

[Treud]

Yes this season is really bad …
Last year was much more better

[flytomek]

My ecommerce website has been penalized. 3 months old domain, legitimate store (no dropshipping), invested over 15.000$ in shop, brand, and content (including building SM content).

The only thing which comes to my mind is wrong implementation of the company rating widget (global) in the footer. The schema with the rating is identical on every subpage. Every indexed subpage displays the same star rating. Could such implementation be considered spam (in light of the recent December Spam Update)?

[edited by: not2easy at 1:08 am (utc) on Dec 29, 2024]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[christianz]

@flytomek

You are overthinking it. If it makes you feel better you can remove those ratings from all (but one) page. But in reality Google December Spam update is completely random and there is no correlation with content spaminess and which sites have been hit and which not.

[Treud]

If it’s a shop rating I don’t see the issue. If it’s a product rating spread on every page lightly possible.

I feel that all small shops get demoted, they have to put more space to platform they have deal with.

Plus the rest the double ads display (maybe a way to deplete your ads budget twice faster)

IA revolution is coming soon, they need to bank as much as possible to prevent a failure.

But organic website (if you are not Reddit etc etc) we will be page 3 for the first 1 !

[Micha]

But in reality Google December Spam update is completely random and there is no correlation with content spaminess and which sites have been hit and which not.

That's the right point. We have to stop thinking that we can do something to make Google like our website again. All the updates so far have shown that no matter what you do, your site can always fall by the wayside. The only ones who benefit from believing that you just have to optimise a few things for Google are SEO people who use this argument to get money out of website owners' pockets.

The only thing you can really do is create your website for your customers, provide them with a good service, build a reputation and grow your business that way, without relying on Google. Simply putting a shop online and hoping that Google will bring you a lot of customers doesn't work anymore.

[RedBar]

The only thing you can really do is create your website for your customers, provide them with a good service, build a reputation and grow your business that way, without relying on Google. Simply putting a shop online and hoping that Google will bring you a lot of customers doesn't work anymore.

Absolutely however this creates a Catch 22 situation whereby the only guarantee to have search exposure is by advertising since we now "know" that G has removed this feature from its SERPs to nearly all but its favoured few.

The conclusion that many site owners now have to contend with is "Is my profit margin enough for me to be able to afford the cost of advertising since until I try this I have no idea what my ROI may possibly be?"

This is the horrible dilemma many, many site owners now find themselves.

[Micha]

@Redbar That's right, that's added to it. However, this is definitely a case for the competition authorities (at least here in Germany), because this is illegal behaviour. What's more, advertising is an idea for shops, but it doesn't make sense for blogs and news sites. In its mania to generate more and more money, Google has launched a sweeping blow that is destroying the web. But foresight is not exactly one of the Google people's characteristics anyway.

[gatormark]

The only thing you can really do is create your website for your customers, provide them with a good service, build a reputation and grow your business that way, without relying on Google. Simply putting a shop online and hoping that Google will bring you a lot of customers doesn't work anymore.

Amen!

[EditorialGuy]

But in reality Google December Spam update is completely random and there is no correlation with content spaminess and which sites have been hit and which not.

Has anyone done an objective analysis of the spam update's impact, with examples of specific cases? The reports that I've seen have been pretty vague, but I'm not really plugged into the search community.

[RedBar]

All I see are guesses EG ... IMHO no one knows what the heck is going on least of all G itself ... It seems to me that they've created an utter mess and are trying to extricate themselves but seemingly only making things worse and worse.

And that's my guess which is probably about as accurate as anyone else's so far :-)

[webdev29]

I don't know if it's the December core update (let's call it the grinch update!) or the spam update, but it's all the craziest on the e-commerce front. I'm seeing dozens of totally legitimate sites, well known in their fields literally going down in flames! It's mind-boggling. The average I see is a -40% to 50% loss of organic traffic and a sharp drop in the number of indexed pages.

Since everything is managed by AI,there's no longer any “human” P.O.V on the consequences of, When updates are made and their impact on the trade of small and medium-sized businesses.
Let's not forget that a poor-quality SERP forces Internet users to spend more time on Google, fall back on sponsored links (ads) or even head for AI search tools like Gemini .

If your CTR is plummeting, stop wondering WHERE your traffic is disappearing to. This has nothing to do with the quality of your content or your Offsite profile, it's simply the Google machine optimizing Alphabet's revenues. just check the stock market and you'll be set.

[gatormark]

I’m curious, do you guys with e-commerce websites also sell on Amazon?

[christianz]

Has anyone done an objective analysis of the spam update's impact, with examples of specific cases?

Those who have tried have not published their findings because there is no logic or pattern to be found. Whatever gains Google made in fighting spam during the first half of 2024 have largely been lost since November.

It is NOT entirely Google's fault. Large part of it is incredible acceleration in spam production. Increasingly "sophisticated" and increasingly published under domains of "trusted" organizations.

It may be just coincidence but SERPs started their downhill trajectory right after Prabhakar Raghavan was replaced by Nick Fox and right after US elections. In effort to eradicate obvious spam they appear to reverting to boosting "authority" over actual usefulness, relevance and quality (defined mostly by user signals).

This approach has already been tried and already failed. It lead to "authority abuse" farming, "guest posting" and lots of negative publicity about "SEO sites" and "niche sites" invading search, not getting any real human content etc. Knee jerk reaction was HCU, which actually worked (a working Google update, wow!) but had some nasty side effects like insane boosting of Reddit and false positives - sites that are not "unhelpful" or "made for SEO" but lost all their rankings anyway.

Where does Google go from here? It is critical that they improve their system of identifying genuine websites with real value and purpose. Not websites owned by large companies or operated by major institutions, but simply genuine websites - large or small. Without that search is just sea of spam.

[flytomek]

Has anyone done an objective analysis of the spam update's impact, with examples of specific cases?

I found about ~10-15 examples of Spam Update penalized sites online. In most cases, the owners suggested a low domain age and low domain "authority". That was the common part.

[EditorialGuy]

Let's not forget that a poor-quality SERP forces Internet users to spend more time on Google, fall back on sponsored links (ads) or even head for AI search tools like Gemini .

Or maybe those searchers just bail.

I can't see Google's honchos being dumb enough to believe that crippling one's product is a wise move.

[ichthyous]

No idea what Google is doing, but the supposed updates don't seem over yet, there are wild swings from day to day and even hour to hour now. Saturday was -24% with traffic low all day. Sunday shot up with traffic high all day until late in the eve. Today traffic is right back down with USA traffic at -25% at 1pm. My articles are down by as much as 72% today. I also received an unusually high number of inquiries this weekend. Unfortunately, most of them were so delusional in their price expectations that I deleted them as they came in without responding. I have a field in my forms where people can state their budget if they choose to...it's a real time saver!

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google traffic has been up significantly in the last few days (as has our non-Google traffic). But I think this has more to do with seasonal demand than with Google updates, since we always see the curve head upwards in late December.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Traffic over here is good. It tends to increase during holiday periods. However, revenue and RPM is terrible. I have had better RPM with less traffic.

[Micha]

Since Christmas, there has been an extremely high amount of discover traffic every day. The last few days have been the best days for my news page all year, but unfortunately the ranking is still completely mixed up. If the news traffic decreases, it will look very bad.

[Chris travel 30]

We were expecting an uptrend for the end of december for our travel site. That actually came, which is good. BUT: The volatillity is still high and way higher than I expected.
Moreover, in one hour there are for example 80 visits and in the next our its just 20. First I was thinking that maybe the realtime tracking in GA has a bug. But the cycles come and go. Is anyone else observing something like this?

To you all: Have a great start in the new year!

[EditorialGuy]

We were expecting an uptrend for the end of december for our travel site. That actually came, which is good. BUT: The volatillity is still high and way higher than I expected.

Our editorial travel-planning site's annual low point came on December 12, which has been pretty typical for more than two decades. Traffic shot up after that (as expected), except for a short and predictable dip on Christmas Eve. Since Christmas, our Google traffic has been climbing at a lively pace. (Yesterday was our busiest day in a month.) It's hard to know how much of that to ascribe to seasonality and how much is the result of Google's updates. I can say that the November update gave us a real boost.

As for volatility, I haven't really noticed much of that for our Google traffic as a whole, since the upward curve has been pretty steady over the last week. Still, I have seen more variety in our top 10 pages than usual, which suggests that rankings may be bouncing around a bit for our less popular queries and pages.

[RedBar]

Monday saw my global site's second busiest day of the month with today, as expected, dead. Overall for the month traffic is about -40% with the last couple of weeks -50%

Will it get any worse? I have absolutely no doubt it very easily could do.

[engine]

New month, new year, new thread https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5116307.htm [webmasterworld.com]