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]

[Juniya]

So I was checking my traffic for the month and for sure the drop also started exactly on February 6th. So something happened. It can't be a coincidence. If the likes of Apple etc can be found guilty of manipulating their products, from batteries to whatever, and Google being found guilty of favoring their own companies and allies in the EU, we can for sure say that Google is STILL manipulating their search engine results(traffic) in favor of whom or whatever greedy partners they are aligned with.

[Micha]

Less and less traffic (Discover is down to 0 again), but lots of spam trying to sell me AI as the hot #*$!. The store isn't recovering either. Instead, I now see X profiles in my Discover feed (not even text) and more and more sites publishing AI-generated articles.
Oh, and more and more English language sites for German search terms. No wonder traffic has reached an extremely low level.

[Chris travel 30]

There is def something cooking in german serps. Our site was doing well since after christmas holidays were over. Today on saturdays, when we normaly have like 25-40 users per 30 min, it is only 5! What the h.ll

[Micha]

@chris travel has the number of indexed pages in the search console dropped for you by any chance? For my store, they have dropped from 17,000 in January to 6,000 now and my other website is showing similar results.

[universenet]

@chris travel has the number of indexed pages in the search console dropped for you by any chance? For my store, they have dropped from 17,000 in January to 6,000 now and my other website is showing similar results.

For me it was not dropped in GSC but I see it is dropped in google search live, GSC still ok
I think google all time doing that, it is like will put minimum number of pages of websites search in google in favor to using resources for AI

[Chris travel 30]

@micha yes - since the beginning of Feb we noticed that somehow 7-8 % of our indexed pages went to "crawled, not indexed". The strange thing is, they are indexed. I find the with "site: url" an in the serps for my keywords.
Besides: Google Core Web Vitals failed for mobile around that date. Might be coincident, maybe not.

On your side this sounds like bigger thing. How are you going to handle this?
Let the sitemaps be crawled again? Or manually submit an index request? That would be a years work :D ... just kidding.
But srsly, what are you going to do about it?

[Micha]

The question is rather whether the measures will achieve anything at all. I'm still thinking about it at the moment as I have no idea what the cause could be.

[RedBar]

An utterly bizarre Saturday for me with 95.4% of my global traffic from Hetzner Online, Germany, coming in as single page visits from thousands of completely different IP addresses and user agents etc.

Any helpful suggestions at all ?

[RubicCubed]

We're not international, so we block all Hetzner traffic because they are nothing but scraper bots. Same goes for Digital Ocean and the other junk networks that host spammers, scrapers and scammers. When traffic from Google drops, as it has, traffic from smaller networks with Hetzner type values become more apparent so we deal with those in the same way.

[Micha]

I host my servers at Hetzner, so don't be so hard on the company. But seriously, I'm getting tons of problem messages from my servers today, so something seems to be going on at Hetzner.

[RedBar]

so we block all Hetzner traffic

I thought I had too but just like the Huawei Signaporean bot they seem to break all rules and are unstoppable for me.

[goodoldweb]

Seeing increased "china based" bots while local traffic is almost at a standstill, mainly one page zoombis. We're in Australia.

0 sales.

[mosxu]

@goodoldweb

Block China and still one will have zero sales.
Don’t get confused it was never that bad real humans see nothing of you!

[goodoldweb]

@mosxu

Here's the kicker, we still appear in great positions for many of our keyphrases, (checked in incognito from several devices, not necessarily mine, friends and family devices), so "humans" still see our listings, BUT their behaviour seem to be strange. One page hits, like they've landed on that page accidentally.

We have never exprianced china based bot activity on this particular website (live aquarium supplies). We're getting a flood of china based bots in the last 48 hours.

Quite confused by what's going on really. Never exprianced 0 sales days. It's ridiculous.

[mosxu]

@goodoldweb

Try logged in other users not family or friends and your locations off your phone off!

Think of where personalisation could not reach

[renatovieira]

Heavy traffic this morning. Anyone else?

[christianz]

If by "heavy traffic" you mean huge drops and record low traffic - yes.

[RubicCubed]

Heavy traffic this morning. Anyone else?

Not here in the US, unless you mean heavy bot traffic.

[renatovieira]

If it was bot traffic, I would know by the low conversion. That's not the case. AdSense is sky high today. My traffic is 89% coming from the U.S.

It's either an update or some recovery after feb was way below average.

Usually, those who have high traffic don't come here to share on the forum. So it's not common to see a post like this here on the forum ;-)

[ichthyous]

Heavy traffic this morning. Anyone else?

Traffic shot up at 2pm sharp yesterday and stayed very high for the rest of the day. Today it's not as strong, but also not lagging as much as for the last 10 days...especially for a holiday weekend.

The truly fascinating thing about when Google works its magic and makes all the traffic vanish is how the inquiries immediately revert to the lowest possible quality. I am back to clueless people with low budgets inquiring about things they can't afford at all. That had stopped in January at least, but they're baaaaaack

[goodoldweb]

Think of where personalisation could not reach

That was the first thing i tried before trying incognito. More or less the same results. We have unique products with littel competition.

The weirdness continues.

[RubicCubed]

Usually, those who have high traffic don't come here to share on the forum. So it's not common to see a post like this here on the forum ;-)

I've seen good days myself, but they never last. I think many, including myself, have grown accustomed to a good day in traffic/earnings followed by days or weeks of bad days. Unfortunately those very rare good days I see just aren't enough to pay the bills by themselves. Hope the boost holds for you.

[mosxu]

@goodolderb

Incognito is outside personalisation it proofs nothing!

Get a guy phone in a train kind of thing provided your locations are off :))

The date gathering and profiling is very deep and it is going on for years!

[delorean]

"page not indexed, crawled – currently not indexed"

this started in Feb 15

anyone having same issue?

[not2easy]

anyone having same issue?

Scroll up a few lines to Feb. 15and you'll see others have noticed the same issue.

[Chris travel 30]

@delorean i've had the same. I just let the sitemaps re-crawl, that were effected, now 90 % of the "not indexed" pages are back in status "indexed" might also be a bug, but I don't think so

Besides that:

I noticed that my rankings were dropping, but: The conversions in affiliate sales (nearly 80 % of my revenue is affiliate) went up. So to my mind, google is sending "other" visitors to my sites at the moment. I've seen this patterns before: It was the same from mid August to end of December: The total visits went down to 50 % but the revenue increased. From 1st January the traffic went up again and now its dropping since 6 Feb. All seems a bit fragile to me at the moment, but as long as I have an eye on everything and do notice, if something acts weird, I keep going with it. As long as the money comes in, to be honest.
By the last months I became more and more an observer of what happens and accepted that my options to "react" on googles shifts are very limited and below.

[RubicCubed]

The date gathering and profiling is very deep and it is going on for years!

It got much worse yesterday with Google starting to use digital fingerprinting. See the story: Experts Expose Google’s Silent Privacy Rollback, Calling Fingerprinting a Gateway to Mass Surveillance [digitalinformationworld.com]

I wonder how this fingerprinting will be used to adjust the search results? As it is now, Google traffic is near dead so it probably won't have much of an impact on me. Still it's another data point for Google to evaluate, and I'm sure they will use it for more than just ads.

[Dooku]

Google starting to use digital fingerprinting

A few years back G vowed to NOT use digital fingerprinting any more......yeah right!
My 2cnts is that chrome web browser market share is now declining.
I am seeing a slew of posts everywhere on how to degoogle and ditch chrome for a different browser.
Most probably G will know more then us and is predicting a larger decline in chrome browser usage in the near future.
So digital fingerprinting is their LAST resort to ID each and every user that goes online and profile them as detailed as possible.

[Micha]

Ranking drops on the news page, traffic is poor, Discover traffic is still dead. But the store has been making some sales again since Saturday.

@dokku as I also want to switch, which browser would you recommend?

[ichthyous]

Traffic is atrocious today. It's a holiday in US but traffic is also low internationally. I smell a rat.