February 2025 Google Search Observations

[mosxu]

Bros,

In the news G unveils quantum chip that confirms the existence of parallel universes…

Who is that stupid to buy their stock?

[edited by: not2easy at 5:28 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2025]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[ichthyous]

@mosxu I bought Goog shares and have done very well with it. You have to look at it rationally, they may be crushing small business but the stock is an investment like any other. It has not gone up as much as Meta though...that is almost $700 now. Crazy.

[gatormark]

Finished January 2025 up 7% in Adsense revenue over January 2024. I refined my AdWords ads and that resulted in more memberships and paid memberships. Also, I increased my Facebook activity and that helped traffic even though Google search traffic is dwindling slowly. Guest posts have also picked up. So, January was a good month. Let’s see if it continues.

[EditorialGuy]

We were on a roll from early in the November Core Update until about three days ago, with steadily improving week-over-week and year-over-year Google traffic. The last few days have not been good.

[Micha]

January was strange, starting with a lot of Discover traffic, which was then gone for a long time, and ending with a lot of Discover traffic. My news site just about reached its advertising revenue target. However, the ranking has completely collapsed since February 1.It's even stranger with the store. Traffic has increased over the last few days, but January was generally a very bad month in terms of sales. 79% less than in January 2024 hurts.

In general, I've seen a lot of movement on Google since yesterday, with more videos and also “shorts” being displayed in Germany (I also really want to see influencers when I search for something, oh boy). Many websites that I monitor have a sharp drop in ranking and the results have generally become even worse.

[ichthyous]

We were on a roll from early in the November Core Update until about three days ago, with steadily improving week-over-week and year-over-year Google traffic. The last few days have not been good.

November's updates made little difference for me until about the 26th, then the big decreases started. December updates caused a big drop in general which lasted the entire month, and January has been strong until the last few days. Hopefully it won't last too long as January has been feeling like the good old days.

[RedBar]

January 2025 v January 2024 for global site -25%

Interestingly the 1st February 2025 saw a 2024 average day which is way up were it to continue however today it's dropped again.

The traffic and searches for the first were completey normal and as pre-update ... How was this allowed to happen?

[christianz]

Traffic is noticeably weak yesterday and today.

In general, I've seen a lot of movement on Google since yesterday, with more videos and also “shorts” being displayed in Germany (I also really want to see influencers when I search for something, oh boy). Many websites that I monitor have a sharp drop in ranking and the results have generally become even worse.

Every pixel of SERP taken up by any kind of video (and especially worthless crap like YT Shorts or TickTock) is a pixel that could have been useful and valuable for the searcher but instead is wasted by useless, worthless junk.

But could it be even worse? Yes! If that pixel is used by Gemini AIOs. Just few days ago ChatGPT was trying to convince me (with a straight face) that, during oppositions, Venus looks bigger to the naked eye than the Moon!

[ichthyous]

Search is -15% today, worse than Fri and Sat. It seems to be hitting main category pages the hardest. My home page traffic is -53%

[Juniya]

@Ichthyous - I am experiencing basically the exact same traffic patterns starting from November to now, basically word for word. Very interesting...

Let's see if February starts to rebound like January, but I feel like another useless and greedy update approved and sponsored by the majority shareholders is looming. SMh...

[KaseyM]

Horrific traffic on Monday...

[RedBar]

I hesitate when I type this however I have just seen my 9th consecutive day of averages improvement.

My Jan 1-25 v Jan 26 to Feb 3 has seen +44% in both page views and visitors and this increase is being seen again today.

The most noticeable difference though is visitor engagement viewing and researching more pages like they used to especially from Eurasia.

Was a switch flicked recently? No doubt it will go off again soon!

[renatovieira]

On my side the opposite, every day with moderate drops and today massive drop in the morning.

[gatormark]

The traffic is status quo for me. However, the RPM jumped up yesterday, so it was a good day.

[Micha]

News page: Discover that traffic is back to 0, so it's business as usual. I'm getting more and more worried about the store: Traffic is there, but sales are still close to 0, we are now thinking about giving up. Adsense is turning out to be more and more of a scam in my eyes, because it can't be that no sales are being generated even through it.

[goodoldweb]

@micha

I hear yah. Expriancing the same over the last 4 days. Junk adsense traffic. Conversions are at about 5% of what they've used to be on the same number of clicks.

Feels like absolute scam but what other viable options do really have. We shut off all our ad campaigns again, till next week.

Thanks Google but no thanks. We are paying for this traffic and we expect to see sales. Keep the junk clickers to yourself.

[Micha]

@goodoldweb I'm also thinking about switching it off. It's no longer normal what Google sends to the store via advertising. It really can't be right that 1,000 visitors result in zero sales.
However, it's not just my customer's store, many are currently experiencing a slump in sales, I'm hearing from all directions that there are hardly any sales left.

[Martin Ice Web]

yesterday was a good day. traffic "normal", lots of sales. But in the late evening it slowly vanished again and this lasts till today.
bing is picking up and is going to overtake google traffic. amazon sales are going strong and keep growing.
Maybe google should stop tricking users into clicking useless ads and treturn to old values.

[RedBar]

Tuesday was another more positive day with traffic +12.8% v Jan to Oct 2024 and +52.8% v Jan 2025!

But in the late evening it slowly vanished again and this lasts till today.

Whilst I am seeing improvements I am also experiencing varying 6-7 hour periods of low activity from regions where we currently do a lot of business. It would be interesting to hear from webmasters in the Far East what they are experiencing at the moment if anything different at all.

[MayankParmar]

Happy to see the familiar names still around :) Hope the next core update is a nice ride for everyone!

[christianz]

Steep drop in US traffic, according to GA Realtime.

Feels like absolute scam but what other viable options do really have. We shut off all our ad campaigns again, till next week.

You can keep them shut down for at least the next 4 years. I think Google has got the clearance from government to operate in the "most efficient way" as far as the ad market and search. In return for things like this: [yahoo.com...] or this [edition.cnn.com...]

[Mariska]

3 of my website was removed from Google search results on the 4th of February, it is websites for repair services.

2 of the websites I used a content creator tool and then used a rephrased tool to rephrase all the paragraphs.

These are new websites, which ranked on the 1st page.

What are the chances of recovery for these website if I change the content to human content and how long will it take to recover if possible?

Should one wait for a recovery or should I delete these URLS and build a new one?

[edited by: Mariska at 3:40 pm (utc) on Feb 5, 2025]

[renatovieira]

Drop after drop... This year is sh!t...

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Mariska

2 of the websites I used a content creator tool and then used a rephrased tool to rephrase all the paragraphs.

Ouch! Crazy question, do the phrases look natural language or are they confusing to read and stuffed with keywords?

These are new websites, which ranked on the 1st page.

How new? 1 month, 6 months, 1 year? I find getting almost any new site very difficult to rank for several months now across ALL search engines.

What are the chances of recovery for these website if I change the content to human content and how long will it take to recover if possible?

No idea, possibly months if at all. One thing is certain, these days G does not like sites being dramatically changed soon after launching, it raises a suspicion flag and may have a manual review (this is a guess on my part) which may or may not pass its smell test.

Sometomes G seemingly does not want to rank sites. I have a couple of those therefore I took one of them and using the same template, text and images etc, put it on a new, unused domain with only 20% of the content.

This site now ranks well, it has 5X the traffic the original site had and is increasing nicely every month meanwhile the original decreases..

Honestly nothing was changed except the name and logo, it's even on the same server!

[goodoldweb]

We run a number of ecom sites, we also have an ebay shop. Sales seem to have tanked on ebay too, just the same.

Paid ebay ads on Google serps seem to be getting the same treatment. Many junk clicks, hardly any ebay sales.

Whatever google are doing (again) affects both channels.

[Treud]

They definitely did something the 20th ! Super stable since then ! Like suspiciously too stable !

[ibb.co...]

[Martin Ice Web]

Next big hit started yesterday. Again -50% so far.

@goodoldweb,
yes ebay is down to. But amazon is going up since this mess started.

And let me add: i personally hate the AI answers at the very top of the serps ( google and bing ). This is the next step to bound users to their system. When i search something ( not transactional searches ) i tend to get websites i can learn from, so that i can solve a problem myself in the future. AI is just like the intruduction of the calculator. Poeple are not able to calculate anymore. Or like the smartphone. Poeple don´t try to keep numbers in their memory. We are slowly become stupid....

[Micha]

Adsene for the store was switched off yesterday, visitor numbers remain the same, sales are still almost 0. I simply don't understand this slump, especially as more and more store operators are complaining about a complete collapse. So it's not a phenomenon that affects this small grocery store. The ranking is fine, but apparently only zombies come via Google. Bing doesn't matter at all, FB, Insta etc is almost dead too. If that doesn't change quickly, the store will be history in a few days.

Well, and as for the news site: traffic is as bad as ever. Once again, stock market and crypto news dominate my niche.

What I've also noticed: More and more English Reddit forums are popping up in German search results. Someone at Google seems to think this is important for Germany. At least I'm spared the AI nonsense here.

[gatormark]

My traffic is steady. Maybe a 2000 page view variation from day today.

[Treud]

Issue with AI is you need to ask something you already know. I’m using it to save me time on research on topics I know and there are many many mistakes.

I’m not sure they can fix that, as the IA is be probably fed with non reliable websites.

And if #*$! in, it’s #*$! out !