Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

[Ryuzaki]

Continued from our Google Algorithm Updates - 2022 Ongoing Discussion...

While nothing official or big has happened yet, there were some small rumblings at the end of December and one at the start of January:

Semrush:

SERPmetrics:

Advanced Web Ranking:

Around December 26th, which is at the start of this most recent bump, perhaps the earliest, I saw a small uptick in organic traffic, which was definitely welcomed. Then on January 2nd I got another more sizeable, yet still small, uptick in traffic ranging between 15-25% daily gains over the same day of the previous week.

Let the 2023 SEO games begin!

 

[tyealia]

Big movement today, hearing alot of chatter of people down.

 

[Taq]

Down 40% yesterday. Seen a few more with similar hits. All seem to be in the 30-50% range

 

[ianovici]

Down 40% yesterday. Seen a few more with similar hits. All seem to be in the 30-50% range

I'm down 30% on 2 projects.

Noticed a few things:
1. My positions for longtails dropped significantly and the top 10 shifted a lot.
2. Lots of hacked sites with keyword stuffing appeared in the top 20.

It's weird...

 

[CaptainHustle]

Down 50%.

It’s wild out here.

 

[smithy]

The past couple of days, there's been a big decrease in traffic. I'm now 60% down from my peak in August.

Hard to say what the issue is when Google keeps overlapping updates. I don't think it's links, as my site has many very good, relevant backlinks when I check in ahrefs, though GSC shows some spammy links in the "top linking sites" section. I trust Google is smart enough to disregard these links, though.

There also seems to be no rhyme or reason to well performing and poorly performing content.

It just seems like there is a slow erosion of traffic with every recent update.

People say to wait it out, but it's hard not to be proactive when the decrease in traffic and hit to income has been so substantial.

 

[ianovici]

Did a little research and found out that some recent articles(3-4 days) were not getting indexed which it's strange as they usually get indexed in 1-2 hours. Checked if Googlebot was hitting the pages and it did.

Tried to index half of them manually from Search Console with no success. The articles were ok, passed all plagiarism, formatted, and so on. Asked the writer for new articles and they got indexed.

I'm gonna leave the other half to see when and if they get indexed.

Weird as f**k...

 

[JanLG]

Also noticed the indexing problem. Never had troubles with it. Now I have multiple articles that have not been indexed.

It really is the wild west out there currently.

 

[Zoro]

I have pages indexed for months now but doesnt show up in GSC pages so I can see positions or anything. =)

 

[janky]

I got a 20% boost around December 25-26 (same as @Ryuzaki mentioned in the journey thread I think). On January 6th, I started losing again all the boost that I got in December.
What I noticed is that mostly my best xyz/top X/listicle lost like 30% of their traffic on average. So that's dragging down the overall traffic (same as when I lost the ~20% traffic after the update started). Info pages are fine. So for my sites at least they are tinkering with my buyer traffic.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You several guys talking about indexing issues. It's very, very common for indexing to slow down or even stop during updates, even unannounced ones. It's one of the biggest giveaways for knowing something is coming down the pipeline. I think it helps Google not introduce new pages (variables) into their measurements so they can get a better read on the changes they're creating.

If it persists or if you want to look for other patterns, this thread might help you see if you're dealing with some of the crap I was noticing but not personally dealing with. I don't think it'll provide any answers but it'll at least give you a lead and let you know you're not alone: Indexing and Google's Core Updates, Product Review, Helpful Content, & Spam Updates - Look into the "serving" issue as much as the "indexing" issue.

-------​

One of the things I keep going back to in my head is "who are the winners?" when everyone else is nosediving. For instance, here's a bunch of sites I've been watching in various verticals and then my site on the top right. Most are all following the exact same pattern as my site over the years which is why I'm watching them, so I'm paying attention any time something goes down. What I can't find is anybody who's winning this traffic, and I'm not seeing any new SERP features either.

We all took that same 2022 September Core Update hit. Then all these smaller updates, named and unnamed, have hit us the same until very recently where I've managed to dodge the latest death spiraling. I don't have a good answer as to why, but now I have some comparisons I can try to make.

​

Everyone's taking the 60% shave in 3.5 months that many of us have been dealing with here on the forum. It's not any one vertical or any obvious pattern. If I can figure out why I dodged the continual and most recent decay, especially since December 26 and onward, I'll share.

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​

What I noticed is that mostly my best xyz/top X/listicle lost like 30% of their traffic on average. So that's dragging down the overall traffic (same as when I lost the ~20% traffic after the update started). Info pages are fine. So for my sites at least they are tinkering with my buyer traffic.

Yeah, this is what I've been saying. The Helpful Content Update and the Link Spam Update are STILL rolling out, yet here we can assume they're messing with the Product Reviews Update at the same time. "We try not to update during holidays or overlap updates" and then immediately do that endlessly while obfuscating and not being transparent at all. It would seem, like so many other big institutions in the past few years, to have hit the point of not even bothering with the old vagueness and are now just into complete misdirection and outright lying.

 

[Prentzz]

You several guys talking about indexing issues. It's very, very common for indexing to slow down or even stop during updates, even unannounced ones. It's one of the biggest giveaways for knowing something is coming down the pipeline. I think it helps Google not introduce new pages (variables) into their measurements so they can get a better read on the changes they're creating.

If it persists or if you want to look for other patterns, this thread might help you see if you're dealing with some of the crap I was noticing but not personally dealing with. I don't think it'll provide any answers but it'll at least give you a lead and let you know you're not alone: Indexing and Google's Core Updates, Product Review, Helpful Content, & Spam Updates - Look into the "serving" issue as much as the "indexing" issue.

-------​

One of the things I keep going back to in my head is "who are the winners?" when everyone else is nosediving. For instance, here's a bunch of sites I've been watching in various verticals and then my site on the top right. Most are all following the exact same pattern as my site over the years which is why I'm watching them, so I'm paying attention any time something goes down. What I can't find is anybody who's winning this traffic, and I'm not seeing any new SERP features either.

We all took that same 2022 September Core Update hit. Then all these smaller updates, named and unnamed, have hit us the same until very recently where I've managed to dodge the latest death spiraling. I don't have a good answer as to why, but now I have some comparisons I can try to make.

​

Everyone's taking the 60% shave in 3.5 months that many of us have been dealing with here on the forum. It's not any one vertical or any obvious pattern. If I can figure out why I dodged the continual and most recent decay, especially since December 26 and onward, I'll share.

-------
​

Yeah, this is what I've been saying. The Helpful Content Update and the Link Spam Update are STILL rolling out, yet here we can assume they're messing with the Product Reviews Update at the same time. "We try not to update during holidays or overlap updates" and then immediately do that endlessly while obfuscating and not being transparent at all. It would seem, like so many other big institutions in the past few years, to have hit the point of not even bothering with the old vagueness and are now just into complete misdirection and outright lying.

When you're seeing no obvious winners, I think you're experiencing a winners bias. You only track sites in the serps. But for any set of competitive keywords in any industry, tens of thousands of pages could reasonably rank as they have okayish content.

With exponential content proliferation Google cannot even attempt to index or even consider indexed pages for new rankings. Too much compute. So when big updates happen and potentially they clear old user interaction data, they likely consider far more pages for ranking than they would usually.

It's one thing for their crawler to crawl a page and detect changes, it's another to actually process all of that and consider whether that page should now be ranked differently. Likely they just don't bother for the vast majority of pages in the index, day to day, and only rerank on large updates.

Hence new sites jumping in as the winners, which you don't see reflect in your data because we are biased to tracking the previous winners as those were the only ones with visibility. So, millions of small sites suddenly jump into the serps, none with any real size yet. Death by a million papercuts.

 

[ianovici]

This update is gonna take 2 more weeks, until then...we just wait.

 

[makoloko]

Since December 19, my traffic has fallen in both Google AND Bing by the same rate. Some of it is definitely seasonality (normal drop during holiday), but it's not bouncing back like usual.

They typically only move in tandem due to seasonality. Drops in Google while stable in Bing = due to an algo update.

Are people searching way less suddenly, and not due to seasonality? Here's some wild speculation: People are using ChatGPT instead of Google - and especially in my niche (coding).

 

[ianovici]

So, had a page that stopped getting impressions on July 27(update). On 14 Dec(update) dropped completely from the index.

The content was info, nothing promotional, okish article, not great but not terrible. Had some internal links to and from, removed all of them and the page completely.

Will see if something changes for those pages.

 

[Biggy]

Down around 50-70% i wonder if that's because of updates. Site is about reviews. Most of the time we get specific products delievered (european site - specific language) or is it just because it's January and not many people are searching for new products to buy. From 3000 views a day to 800-1200 views a day.

 

[convbelt]

Main site is down 30-50%.
Abandoned site (2+ years) is up 25%. Go figure.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Semrush and Advanced Web Ranking are picking up "high" volatility today. Every other weather forecast has not, to be fair, but I find Semrush to most closely correlate with reality.

The question is then, what are we looking at here? Is this still the Helpful Content Update (HCU) and the Link Spam Update (LSU), both of which are still not done after a month plus? Google has not announced any new named updates.

If you ask me, all of this sporadic volatility that's stretching on well over twice as long as usual is indicative of these updates not giving Google the results they wanted, and I'm sure the issue is compounded by having two updates going at the same time.

 

[tomo8900]

A few observations of mine I thought you might find interesting:

- Similar to the post by @Ryuzaki in the Algorithms thread, I track a whole host of sites across the portfolios of a few major digital publishers (a few of these sites are now my nearest competitors) and almost every single one (with a few exceptions) has seen some downturn in traffic. Almost every site in my niche seems to have lost a lot of traffic (not just 'content' sites) including charities, national authorities etc. What surprises me is the near-universal drop for almost every site I've checked.

- One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned here is the impact of Covid. Search volumes for 2 years+ were massively inflated. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs are estimates of traffic - they do reflect changes in search volumes over time but they take a while to update and reflect this in their traffic estimates. I have access to a SEMRush Guru account so I'm able to see historical search volumes - nearly every keyword I've checked has lost volume compared with last year. When we look at traffic estimates in these tools, we always tend to assume that these numbers are driven solely by visibility, but obviously the number of searches is also going to impact these numbers too. I'd also assume that this huge increase in searches during Covid would also have increased the number of viable keywords that were registering high enough volumes to be tracked by these tools (which would also explain equivalent drops in the number of ranking keywords over time). Maybe some of what we're seeing is inflated search volumes across all keywords dropping back to normal levels again?

- Separately my site was also affected by the September Core Update. I have a number of theories which are difficult to talk through without a full breakdown of my site. But something I noticed which some of you might find interesting - Google dropped traffic to my site to the exact levels of the previous year. No single week in Sep-Oct 2021/2022 was more than 3% out YoY (in a highly seasonal niche where traffic varies significantly from one week to the next).

I couldn't figure out how to embed but here's the traffic graph:

Something happened in the update which caused Google to revert my site exactly back to its previous state/authority level - with traffic throttled to 2021 levels.

 

[MrMedia]

I’m up another 8% feels like rocket fuel has been added. Haven’t published anything new in a couple of months. Seeing most gains from improved ranking for existing rather than new kws.

 

[Darth]

Yeah a site I had written off and not published anything on for 2 years is pumping. Just asked my guy to go back and update the articles

 

[Boy]

Up 13% in the last seven days & last 28 days. Highest organic days ever this week. No content is being added for now. Fortunately, there are disgusting discrepancies between actual traffic and estimated traffic on the keyword tools. Ahrefs is like 55%, Semrush is like 10%.

 

[smithy]

Does anyone have any thoughts/noticed anything regarding Q/A and PAA style sites/articles with the recent updates?

Such as plugging your keyword into google and then generating the outline of your article from the PAA and Related Searches sections, and then answering those questions.

I know it's been a popular method for a while that has probably been taken too far, and it's possible that using these questions as headings to make up the bulk of an article can be some sort of indication of AI content.

I'm not suggesting that it isn't useful to answer these questions, but including them word for word instead of paraphrasing or perhaps not even posing them as questions as such may cause some sites to be caught in the crossfire of how google is trying to spot and eliminate AI content.

Google stated that HCU was designed to tackle "content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines."

 

[eliquid]

Semrush and Advanced Web Ranking are picking up "high" volatility today. Every other weather forecast has not, to be fair, but I find Semrush to most closely correlate with reality.

You sure about that?

Anytime we are at 17 or above, there is volatility for SERPWoo. Normal is about 14/15

Yesterday we were at 19

 

[makoloko]

But something I noticed which some of you might find interesting - Google dropped traffic to my site to the exact levels of the previous year. No single week in Sep-Oct 2021/2022 was more than 3% out YoY (in a highly seasonal niche where traffic varies significantly from one week to the next).

Others, including me, have noticed this too - traffic is where it was last Jan. I think it was mentioned in the HCU thread.

Status update: up 25% last 7 days. Wild volatility