I am actively working towards a complete break from Google, which is incredibly hard (borderline impossible in some niches)

Yes, it is difficult and probably not 100% possible, but it does not need to be. As long as enough people wean off google it will make an impact. A while ago I mentioned I do not accept customers that enter a Gmail email in the order form on one of my websites. They just see a popup with a message to use one of the listed alternative email services.

Recently I started doing this also on two more of my websites and it works well. Some customers complain, but after I email them this article they quickly turn around (some even closed their Gmail account):
[theverge.com...]
or this one
[gbhackers.com...]

So the claim from google that they do not use Gmail any more to collect data for their Serp is just total BS.
Now, just imagine the almost limitless possibilities of all that data from Gmail accounts filled with invoices and purchase history from people and how google can use that to tweak the serps and their algo. Did you really think they would leave all that data alone and do nothing with it?

Worst January in over 15 years. Low traffic and no sales. Usually, January is one of the best months of the year for me.

Sunday was the worst day I've ever seen for the few e-commerces i'm following. It was usually the best day of the week but in this case, the turnover was divided by 10x (litterally, no joke) for one of them but with a traffic increase of 13% on average ... really weird. Conversion rate is abnormally low (-70% average). I also see small blogs (publishing sponsored articles) being positioned on a SERP with 100% commercial intent. It's really nonsense, the quality of the results in the SERP has really become ridiculous with an increasingly invasive place of google products placement

I think Google released an update yesterday, even if no sensor has signaled it. Every competitor's keywords position has suddenly changed and my own as well. Curious that everything is so quiet.

@ Markedd I think you might be right. It's been eerily quiet(er). That would make sense.

Google releases updates every day (6 per day iirc from their documentation). I would expect those to be minor updates. Wouldn't then any conclusion based on a daily Search update be meaningless?

My usa traffic dropped considerably again yesterday, but International remained very strong. Today USA is also down, while international traffic is very strong. Sunday just looks like a reversion back to the previous throttling of USA traffic.

I also see small blogs (publishing sponsored articles) being positioned on a SERP with 100% commercial intent.

This is nothing new at all, it's been going on since March of 2021 and is what has destroyed my traffic and caused me to lose over 50% of top ranking terms since then. My niche is tricky because the terms could have either commercial or informational intent. Where that is the case the results switched to 100% informational sites long ago and it has never changed since then. I watched this spread like a cancer, search after search until they were all gone. The only exceptions have been very large e-comm competitors who now get most of top spots if e-commerce is included at all. The same few sites over and over.

If you were lucky enough to have a lot of articles and formerly high ranking e-commerce pages on your site, then the traffic switched to the articles. I have seen it with a couple of my smaller independent competitors...only their articles rank now.

In my sector (travel), traffic--including Google traffic--has been growing nicely since Christmas, although there was a period of a few days when growth slowed down because of the Omicron panic. The pattern of what people are looking at (and when they're booking hotel stays) suggests that short-term travel is taking a hit because of Omicron but trip planning for late spring and summer is less affected.

I worry far less about Google these days than I do about the continuing impact of Covid on our traffic and revenue.

Heavy bot traffic this morning, Google crawling and few real humans in-between. Constant shuffling in the SERPS, but Amazon crowded listings remain a permanent fixture at the top which is a huge help to our Chinese competitors I'm sure.

@Samwest

One site in my niche still gets away with over a dozen G Ads on every page. Oh the irony of having a webspam team. lol

I ran some research a while back and noticed several sites using the "ads everywhere" (above the fold, new ad every scroll, stickied sidebar ads, etc) were also using Google Preferred Ad partners like AdThrive, etc. There was a leak of an xml file showing all the websites on their network and many of them were doing very well in organic search as well.

As a personal anecdote, a close friend using the same service told me his 14 year aged website that was suffering in organic after several years of being on top with self-managed ads, moved to their preferred ad partner system and saw a 100% reversal in traffic, ranking and earnings.

For me Europe woke up from its Xmas / New Year yesterday along with a torrent of USA single page visitors. The single page visitors all went to individual widget pages which, for me, is most un-botlike.

Traffic was at 308.3%.

@RedBar My traffic was also up yesterday and looks quite perky today too, so far. Mine much more in line with what I would expect this time of year

Huge drop today. Semrush again on fire now... Another coincidence? :-)

Quiet comfortably the worst January in a long time.

This time last year my ecom site was doing £500-£750 every day, sometimes up to £1200/day.

This year it’s not going to do more than ~£2000 in the entire month. Nothing is converting right now, and I have a historical conversion rate of over 2%.

Seriously considering putting all of my stock on Amazon and leaving it at that.

I should also say that even my shopping ads aren’t converting and my main competitor has gone awol so I think that there’s a good chance (certainly here in the UK) that there’s more at play than Google.

For example, people are realising that inflation is much higher than official figures (and they’d be correct) and are simply tightening their belts.

I should add that whilst my traffic is up that conversions are not. It's tricky to get a true feeling this time of year though as conversions are often more quiet after Christmas.

Something was definitely rolled out. All competitors in my niche are up (semrush). Some +10, +5. +3, +7 etc. Me? +0.05.

Something was definitely rolled out. All competitors in my niche are up (semrush). Some +10, +5. +3, +7 etc. Me? +0.05.

SEM says my domain has near 8% more visibility and nearly 9% more traffic. That does seem about right - if not a bit more. No conversions today though

Traffic was at 308.3%.

Wow, how did that 3 get in there? It should have read 108.3% :-)

Is real-time GA data working properly for you guys?

@Zgaga, real time GA seems off...

Yeah, every freakin time when GA looks weird, there's also some weird semrush sensor movements and I get a mini heart attack.

Thanks for checking!

Clobbered again, zero-day.

International Traffic has been far better since the beginning of January, with USA stable. At the same time I have lost almost 30 top 20 ranking terms. This new traffic seems to consist mostly of direct hits to my lower level content pages. Conversions up slightly but still way off last year this time. Jan to March of 2021 was extremely strong, then the March 2021 Google update changes started to roll out and it's been awful ever since.

@ichthyous - here is the recent surge I experienced, and now it's right back to totally throttled. What happened to cause the surge?
It's a mystery.

[ibb.co...]

Ha! I saw that Semrush has displayed that there was a small update indeed. The bot traffic that was plaguing me for weeks is pretty much gone, the traffic went down quite a bit (10-15 percent for now) and the conversions went up. And you people were wondering whether it's the pandemic that screws with your market. There is one, just not Covid, it's called Google.

real time GA seems off...

Does anyone else ever see GA go into a locked refresh state where the number goes cumulative and never resets? The Right Now number just keeps climbing with every new visit...it will show 150 "Right Now" visits when there are only one or two actual visitors. I always cross-check with Matomo.

I can bang on F5, open and close the page and it does not reset.

Samwest - yup! When that happens, if I go to realtime > content, I find that the accurate number is there as the 'Metric Total' (above the list of pages, to the left of the search box)

@samwest - It happens constantly to me. Yesterday I had a cumulative of more than 300 users at the same time. Then updated to 30.

It has been happening since dec with more frequency.

To confirm what a lot have mentioned on here, we too have seen some changes. Significant. All of our decent competitors have seen a bump too. Whatever's rolled out has improved our vertical. Our quality competitors have seen a bump. The other smaller, gamey sites have washed away. Feels more like pre June 2019 before EAT ruined search for our industry

I noticed the delay in indexing in my site from Googlebot. This is unusually (210 mins - 240 mins) high for us including my competition websites (30 mins - 90 mins). Being a news publisher this loss is too high in millions.

I reported this via a Twitter thread too. Also, this started 6-7 Jan 2022 (4-5 days before this unconfirmed update). Hope someone at Google looks into this.

SEMRush's sensor showing very high volatile results for more than 30 days: [semrush.com ]

Twitter thread 3/3: [twitter.com ]