January 2025 Google Search Observations

[engine]

The end of 2024 was one of the busiest for Google's changes and updates. No doubt it'll be settling to a particular status in 2025.

Let's keep an eye on traffic and conversions, and the impact of the AI-based responses in SERPs.

Previous thread December 2024 Google Search Observations [webmasterworld.com]

[christianz]

2025 so far - all bad, everything is bad. Keywords keep dropping en masse like they did during the official rollout of "spam" update.

[Micha]

First of all: Happy New Year! I hope that 2025 will be the year that Google becomes less and less important for our websites.
So, I have to say honestly today: ranking has improved significantly from yesterday to today (in Sistrix, my news page has made a decent leap), traffic via Discover is also holding up.
The shop is at a standstill, but that's fine, it's 1 January, so I'm not surprised.

[Treud]

Yes kw are getting better, but dropped for position 2 to oblivion and now back in 26th …

That’s a rollercoaster !

[mauryapratibha]

Happy new year to all!

I believe from 2025, SEOs prime focus will shift from search engines to ask-engines like ChatGPT. So its time to 'sharpen our axe'. Best of luck for future organic growth to our projects. Happy analyzing. :)

[ichthyous]

A happy new year to all...

I checked one high volume term today and noticed that the page layout now includes four ads for the top at top, then another three ads in the middle of the page. So anyone ~spot 4 or below gets pushed down to practically the bottom of the page. They have also shrunk down the image block next to the results considerably so the results are less noticeable. The result is a confused jumble of ads and my traffic to the related landing page is -60% today. USA traffic is -48% at 11:30am and still dropping. Perhaps that is Google's big 2025 announcement, that it is loading page one up to the top with ads?

[EditorialGuy]

I hope that 2025 will be the year that Google becomes less and less important for our websites.g

I think it's more likely that our Web sites will become less and less important to Google (except possibly as training grist for Generative AI.)

[universenet]

I think it's more likely that our Web sites will become less and less important to Google (except possibly as training grist for Generative AI.)

One man (E.M.) said that AI can become dangerous over time,
it's kind of useful now, but in what direction could it go?
What if it gives incorrect information, but for a specific purpose?
We are very close to possibility.
People will not find out about other sources or over time other sources will disappear
Only 1" true " source will remain on the network
What if we start getting the wrong Daily News?
Who will be responsible? Google?

[Treud]

@universenet

I fear more that people will use the IA for auto-medication or something like this. It’s too easy to seek advice with a chat bot.

With traditional website you can at least have diverse sources. IA is only one.

I tried the searchgpt for shopping, and it’s probably good for local shops near user, but for e-commerce it only serve the big ones, like Google is already doing.

IA won’t replace the traditional search engine for a few years, we have to wait the next generation. Same as latest using Tik Tok as search a lot (30% of young North American for example).

But sure in 15 years / 20 years all our website and 2000´s E-business models will be long gone.

I Hope to be retire by then :)

[Martin Ice Web]

The last Spam Update was more harmfull thant the algo update before. And what has been rated as quality before is now pure Spam and reverse.

[caine]

Seen a decline across the board for both our and competitors sites.

[ichthyous]

The last Spam Update was more harmfull thant the algo update before. And what has been rated as quality before is now pure Spam and reverse

Absolutely...the big declines came for me during the month of December. I have lost a huge amount of USA, UK, CA, AU traffic since then (UK traffic losses shown below). I see no signs of this reverting yet...today my UK traffic is -44% at 11am -
[ibb.co ]

Big losses in the number of top 3 and top 10 ranking terms as well, which seem to flip flop from day to day. Some days you can lose 10-15 in a day, then gain it back, then lose again...

[Micha]

Big losses in the number of top 3 and top 10 ranking terms as well, which seem to flip flop from day to day. Some days you can lose 10-15 in a day, then gain it back, then lose again...

Oh yes, it really is a rollercoaster ride at the moment. It rose sharply yesterday and fell sharply today. There seems to be no longer any consistent development.

[ichthyous]

UK down -35% at almost 2pm, Canada is -86%, my home page traffic is at -66%. Overall search is at -14% so they are visiting other pages other than the home page. By end of day this might all reverse and shoot upward...I have noticed that traffic tends to rise sharply later in the day now. Google is simply experimenting with us, and the traffic is always poor now since the begin of Nov with a few exceptions...

[RedBar]

UK down -35% at almost 2pm

As a pure observation from my UK market town this afternoon. My other half went to Aldi and could not even get into its huge car park, the town centre was dead.

Many UK businesses are not fully-back until Monday 6th Jan, just saying.

[ichthyous]

As a pure observation from my UK market town this afternoon. My other half went to Aldi and could not even get into its huge car park, the town centre was dead.

Many UK businesses are not fully-back until Monday 6th Jan, just saying.

My UK traffic never tanks this much though, not even during the holidays...but as expected it's jumping up as the day progresses.

[EditorialGuy]

Our information (editorial travel-planning) site has seen a nice jump in Google traffic (and other traffic) since around Christmas.That's pretty typical. I assume that, with the holiday season largely behind them, Web users are thinking ahead to their vacations in 2025.

Whatever the reason, this has been our traffic pattern for more than 25 years: A nice increase in traffic just before January, building to a summer peak and then sloping off until the doldrums of November and early to mid-December. Google Search has a huge influence on how many visitors and pageviews we get, but seasonal variations in demand can't be ignored.

[Chris travel 30]

@EditorialGuy thats pretty much the same pattern as we see on our german speaking travel site. Which is also good to hear for me from someone like you with a lot more years of experience as I see. I was beginning to worry because since the peak in mid august our travel site had to struggle with less and less visitors until the end of December. Besides that, I still believe that we were hit by the update in August when looking at the drop in rankings in that months.

Now, since the 27.12. traffic and rankings are up, just like in the same time the year before. Interesting for us was, that despite the decreasing traffic since mid august our sales have been better in total in the second half of the year 2024.

I did not want to believe in seasonal effects as we cover destinations that have their high season from September to December, but it seems that there effects that can't be fully covered.

[Treud]

There was a huge spike of bots yesterday (the 3rd), never been so high for me for a long long time !

[RedBar]

To ascertain just how much G's "adjustments" have affected my global site I've just made a direct comparison for the last 5 weeks, i.e the 1st December 2024 until 3rd January 2025, the result being -43.9%

Comparing to previous Januarys I am going to assume that if the first couple of weeks of Jan 2025 is -33% v 2024 then the "adjustments" will have stabilised, if it's any more than -40+% then action will be taken since this will mean -66% traffic loss in the past 4 years.

[webdev29]

This update is a disaster for e-commerce. The number of indexed pages is plummeting, traffic has divided by 2x since November, -60% fewer sales compared with last year and the quality of the SERP makes me want to go back to SearchGPT!

[Micha]

The ranking is still jumping around, so the traffic to my news page is very good one day and extremely poor the next. There is definitely no such thing as consistency on Google.

Things are particularly bad in the shop, where there are hardly any sales, even though Google sends a lot of visitors. However, I suspect that 90% of them are zombies. It has never been this bad at the beginning of a year.

[christianz]

There was a huge spike of bots yesterday (the 3rd), never been so high for me for a long long time !

Same, but building up for few days and culminating yesterday. Possibly record high amount of bot/scraping traffic.

[RedBar]

Insofar as my global .com is concerned this is crunch week. It needs to achieve 75% of my January to November 2024 average otherwise the site will be split-up.

It has had the most appalling start to a week and it has to be borne in mind that more than 50% of my realworld business is based in Eurasia / Far East / Australasia, obviously things are not looking good at this early stage.

[Treud]

Today in Bing I was checking for some KW, and saw the same sites showing 8 times in a row, on the second page, the 1st one is full of ads mostly so it appeared just twice. All different pages (product, category), and also in 3 different languages.

It was a sort of Alibaba ....

[puckparches]

It’s unreal what’s happening. I used to check the traffic and AdSense every other hour, but now it’s so sad that I prefer not to even look at the stats. Google gave my websites life, but it also killed them—and with that, all my hopes and dreams of becoming something big.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic is a little down ( 20%) but the remaining traffic lacks 100% quality.
We see a strong move from sales from online-shop away to amazon again.

To see some quality organic results you have to shift direct to bottom of page 2. All results on page 1 and page 2 (top) are entries to keep users in google universe. While page 1 has only 3-4 organics left.

[Micha]

@Martin Ice Web I can confirm that. Also, Amazon simply places ads for all products in my shop, even if they don't even carry them. I've noticed this with other products as well. Amazon places ads for many products that are not in their catalogue.

It's no better with the news page. After a few days with Discover, traffic is back to a historic low. But that doesn't surprise me anymore; you can hardly generate any traffic through the normal search engine anymore.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

I know amazon is everywhere. Unfortunatelly google and bing killed all secure and quality shops while gaining profit and lower quality in search results. So poeple do go directly to amazon instead of using google. Our products will for sure not be advertized by amazon directly but users search for them on amazon. Before this gone wild update, there were more sales from online-shop than from amazon.

[Micha]

Unfortunately, this is true, and not to forget the fake shops that you now see at the top. I'd rather not know how many people fall for it because they think that Google only shows good results.

But even worse is the incredibly stupid advertising that Google displays. I just saw an advert for a firearm that is advertised as a must-have for every German and that won't be noticed during checks. Right at the top, so prominently displayed when searching for wasabi. That's illegal in our country, but hey, the main thing is that Google makes money.