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]

[gatormark]

I am curious, for those with traffic losses, is that lost traffic coming from countries other than your country of origin?

[ichthyous]

@gatormark Across the board...During the Nov update USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, and UAE fell off a cliff. My 2nd largest source of traffic is UK and that didn't drop much in Nov. Some days it snapped back to normal, and then would drop again. With this new December update, USA is down about 15%, today CA and AU are -77% and -80% respectively, and UK is -30%! India is also considerably down from what it used to be. So yes, it's international participation.

[ichthyous]

Google's update madness continues with a spam update.

[x.com ]

Oh thank god...I was very worried that I had been whacked by the last one. But as long as the updates keep rolling out there is hope that the recent traffic levels are not the new norm. It is close to Christmas though, so traffic is going to fade until about 2nd week of January now.

[sk7411]

Lol , We sailed through Dec core update somewhow but spam update looks bad for us :)

[EditorialGuy]

Google's update madness continues with a spam update.

Sounds good to me, if it works, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

[Treud]

For me the early morning results (I’m in Taiwan) are better than yesterday,
My main market is the US (traffic and sales) and I start to receive again some traffic (plummeted by 70% and more the last 2 days), it’s not as good as before but I’m served with more traffic from Europe (my site is multi-language).
What was weird is the GSC was telling me a massive drop of traffic the last 2 days, but my actual bandwitch usage and hits on the website remained pretty much the same (except some bot spikes at the beginning of the update).

[daniel1213]

Yesterday was a sad day. One of our websites that used to get 5000-6000 visits a day was reduced to just 2300 visits. Less than half. It's unbelievable. Most of our partners are complaining about Google's unfairness. I don't know anyone who is doing well during this time.

[Treud]

@jacobfox

Yes spikes are bot/AI , I’ve seen this since a year. When I have spike I try to see what are the offenders and they are not flag as bot in WP engine filters but their IP are in Google offices.

It’s bot ai because the bandwidth remain same. Sometimes I have some scrappers but it’s less and less (bandwidth spike).

Over the last few years I’ve seen any increase of traffic as trash, (no sales no leads) like they send traffic just to say « look you have traffic »

[headspace]

Many have mentioned the impact of localisation. But is everybody talking about the same thing? What is this localisation?
I have a global site but I am based in the UK, the site is hosted in the US. It is certainly true that when the UK goes to sleep all of my international traffic
seems to go to sleep with it. When the UK wakes up, all of my international traffic seems to wake up as well.
So its not that the traffic is localised, because I would expect there to be no international traffic at all.
It just seems more like time zone sectionalisation. My website is in English, and therefore traffic only seems
to flow when English speaking western nations are awake and this traffic could be from anywhere in the world. If I had an Arabic version of my website
would I start seeming traffic overnight from arab speaking countries - I suspect not because the site is hosted in the US.

[christianz]

This update is funny: it completely reverses the ranking and seems to put an even stronger focus on big brands.

November, December and December Spam are all the same. Unable to recognize best websites, industry leaders, real websites and applications that people want to use and provide real utility.

Instead they redirect traffic to random SEO junk from "brands" and few large social media sites.

As a result, there is no incentive to actually build good things on the web and ratio of genuine to fake websites deteriorates even further, leading to things like "dead Internet theory" and younger generations avoiding web altogether.

[saladtosser]

Based on Googles AI overviews I assume that if I can create an AI that trains off all YouTube video/data then created a YouTube competitor, that generated AI videos on the fly that perfectly answered any and all questions more efficiently and became the most popular video platform Google world be okay with this, or nah?

[Micha]

There is chaos in the Serps. So when Google wants to sort out spam, you currently tend to achieve the opposite. Even more websites in different languages in the German search results, even more financial junk dominating the news and so close to Christmas, many fake shops are also very visible again. My news site is no longer ranked under its main topic, as stock tickers are ranked above me.

Incidentally, the shop has been dead since yesterday, with a whopping 0 orders despite high visitor numbers (99% of which are probably spam).

Speaking of spam: Do dubious services now see a good business opportunity because Google is weeding out small publishers? I am currently receiving many offers for guest articles, voucher services, etc.

[universenet]

Spam update is because holiday time.
All need be covered by ads from google,
all other websites in Google search are just enemies and need be removed

[gatormark]

I am very curious to know what is causing this volatility within the SERP.

I have had very little movement in my rankings. I wish my rankings were higher, but they have been stable for about 10 months.

In the past, I have had significant movement, but it’s usually once a year and the last time was around February or March of last year.

I wonder is it industry specific?

[RedBar]

As expected global site traffic is very slow today and will be so until 2nd Jan at the earliest.

Our UK hotel venue is performing as in previous years reducing all month and all being well should bounce back after Xmas. Considering G's recent shenanigans I don't think that any version of normality may return until w/c 6th Jan for my sites if at all.

[gatormark]

@RedBar

I refer to this period as the dead zone. For me, starting this weekend, it will be the worst two weeks of the year. Of course, 35% of my traffic comes from students. That combined with the fact that advertisers won’t really pick back up their advertising until the beginning of January.

[ichthyous]

It's hard to gauge how much is seasonal and how much is the effect of all of these updates all the time. USA started out -60% this morning, so that is definitely abnormal even for the week before Christmas. I do see that the overall effect is to have zero (yes, zero) holiday sales this year. I define "holiday sales" as smaller, lower priced items that people are purchasing as gift items starting in october even. For me these kinds of sales are not essential, even a hassle at times since a lot of people want custom made items in a rush before the holidays...but they do add up if enough people order.

[jchiff]

Again, nothing we haven't sussed out for ourselves, but an interesting read from The Register:

[theregister.com...]

[not2easy]

That was posted here two days ago: [webmasterworld.com...]

[renatovieira]

Another update? WTF!

[Ingall]

These spam updates are actually authority updates. Currently, only pages with high domain authority are displayed. Content, language, user signals, relevance do not matter. These spam updates encourage spam in the SERPS because topic relevance no longer plays a role for Google. The winners are big brands, parasite pages and expired domains with high DA that are filled with spam. Spam updates always caused more spam in the search results.

This is how you can rank on Google:
- Buy an expired domain with a very high domain authority.
- Now you can publish any rubbish on any topic on this website.
- The keyword does not even have to be included.
- Language does not matter, if the DA is right, then you can also publish the content for the German market in Chinese.
You will rank for everything!

[cooler29]

@Ingall :at this point, what You said is pretty correct. I mean it works on that way for past 13-14 months, from Sep / 2023.

[sk7411]

Spam update is doing exactly what is supposed to do , rank the spam higher .

[RedBar]

Gordon Bennett!

"Gordon Bennett" is an English-language idiomatic phrase used to express surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, frustration or exasperation.

I'm at 66% of my Googleday with traffic at 50% of my lowest-ever day and we've not even got into Xmas or New Year weeks.

These are not simply low numbers, they are utterly pointless having a website numbers.

[cooler29]

@sk7411 "Spam update is doing exactly what is supposed to do , rank the spam higher .

Exactly! :) Good one! :)
"

[ichthyous]

I'm at 66% of my Googleday with traffic at 50% of my lowest-ever day and we've not even got into Xmas or New Year weeks.

These are not simply low numbers, they are utterly pointless having a website numbers.

Traffic was unusually low this entire week. I see two main drops in my own traffic: ~Nov. 13th, and again right after Thanksgiving ~Nov. 27th. Traffic is not recovering from these drops at all, but seems to be stabilizing around this lower lever for now.

This week is already holiday period so I wouldn't sweat the lower traffic, .but I had zero smaller holiday gift sales this year, and not even any inquiries for that. I have noticed that the period from Halloween to Xmas has been bringing fewer and fewer sales for years now, with January typically pulling in larger, higher budget sales. Not sure why that is...but this year seems to be the nail in the coffin for holiday traffic and sales.

Silver lining: I did have numerous corporate sales inquiries, which tend to be much higher value projects in general. I cannot really complain about the number of good inquiries which came in from corporate clients in Nov-Dec.

[RedBar]

This week is already holiday period so I wouldn't sweat the lower traffic

I had global traffic 50% of it WAS non-western, my Chinese, Indian etc clients mostly do not celebrate Xmas, that traffic has also disappeared.

I'm not sweating at all however I am making 25 year comparisons and these are never seen before levels of traffic ... I was going to make a decision come 31st December but have been persuaded to wait until Friday 10th January and see what happens that week before I hit my delete button!

[christianz]

I had global traffic 50% of it WAS non-western, my Chinese, Indian etc clients mostly do not celebrate Xmas, that traffic has also disappeared.

I'm not sweating at all however I am making 25 year comparisons and these are never seen before levels of traffic

No no. Nothing to do with coming Christmas. It is just Google introducing record amounts of spam during the Spam update.

[Micha]

The traffic was a bit higher again yesterday and today. However, the ranking of my news page is going crazy. And if I'm seeing it right, the update is going as usual: big brands win, spam increases and small publishers get even more problems.

About the shop: it remains dead. Although the number of visitors (and the ranking) is okay, there are still no sales.

[ichthyous]

I had global traffic 50% of it WAS non-western, my Chinese, Indian etc clients mostly do not celebrate Xmas, that traffic has also disappeared.

But Chinese don't use Google search anyway so how is lower Chinese traffic related to this? Indian traffic is quite a bit lower since these updates. I get no benefit from traffic from either country...just spam, infringements and wasted bandwidth so I don't mind.

I'm not sweating at all however I am making 25 year comparisons and these are never seen before levels of traffic ... I was going to make a decision come 31st December but have been persuaded to wait until Friday 10th January and see what happens that week before I hit my delete button!

Why delete your 25 year old site just because of Google's BS? You never know what's around the corner...perhaps some new source of business will materialize