May 2026 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

Things are really up and down right now. Traffic is suddenly back, and so are sales (even though yesterday was a holiday here). Sistrix says our rankings are improving nicely again. Let's see how long it lasts this time.

The only thing that’s been stable for days: less spam.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:19 am (utc) on May 2, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[ichthyous]

I'm finding that traffic is dwindling and sales are non-existant. Even inquiries are almost zero, and the ones I am getting are submitting budgets of $20-$100 for items that cost $1000. They get deleted without response. The only viable traffic from Google anymore comes during the 24 hours before an update starts through about 24 hours after it has started. Then it snaps back to comatose. I do believe that this is not only Google at work though, but people are not spending because they do not feel secure right now.

On another note, I used Claude to rewrite a plugin I used for years on my site and I did not check carefully enough after implementing...many of my categories on my site were not accessible beyond page 1 (so page 2 and beyond were all 404 errors). I only caught it a full week later. Google removed some categories almost entirely from the index except for the first page. I have re-submitted everything Google removed through GSC and nothing...still not indexed. Is it taking Google a long time to index requested pages these days? I have never had this issue before.