I've just been looking at my global site's metrics so far this month and the US has been demoted to second place by India. Bear in mind my traffic is averaging 100%, the changes I am seeing so far are:

India +190%
US -22%
Canada +237%
UK +29%
China -54%

It'll be interesting to see how the rest of the month pans out however I do expect China to continue much lower since it is evident that many wholesale buyers are re-thinking their sourcing strategies.

A complete reversal of Saturday and Sunday...search is up 74% and direct is up 299% compared to yesterday. It appears to be one day of feast for every 2-3 days of famine. It is only on these surge days that I actually get conversions now.

I've seen increased visits to my site from India and other countries that are just not relevant to my site at all. Top positions on G yet looking at stats you would think that my site was on page 30, this is for transactional pages where there is money to be made. All my information pages are performing as expected and overall traffic for these pages is either the same or more than usual. So information pages are performing as normal or above normal whereas all 'money making' transactional pages may as well be non existent, yet are in top positions on page one. This is since the beginning of May.

Traffic extremely low. SERPS flooded with YouTube. Top Stories all YouTubes. Tall, massive YouTube blocks followed by PAA blocks.

It's like Google search is just a wrapper interface for YouTube.

It's like Google search is just a wrapper interface for YouTube

And ads….

"Google is going to destroy millions of small businesses online just to satiate their greed."

If they carry on with search as it is and Apple or Twitter come along with an alternative search engine then I think it might be game over as even the man off the street is wondering why he can't find decent info.

[twitter.com...]

@RedBar I completely understand. Yes their data is an estimation I believe. I am not sure if there is any tool that can process all the data properly, its a lot globally to pull off per day. What you said about how they are running us smaller "mom and pop" blogs and businesses is very very accurate. I believe it is an end game goal. Yet the game doesnt end there.

There will be at some point, somewhere, a someone that recognizes money can be made from us and our content. It may not be to the scale of past years. Nevertheless I believe we will persist through future alternatives. What that is and how I do not know. If I did I would not be here, I would be making millions.

@SteveWrz Yes I am seeing growth. Note that I am not unaffected by what is going on but it is minimized. I will not share what niche I am in but I will say this. To generate leads and traffic one needs to rethink how they target keywords. I really hate to sound cheesy but the statement is incredibly true in this case. Bruce Lee once stated, "Flow like water".

If they carry on with search as it is and Apple or Twitter come along with an alternative search engine then I think it might be game over as even the man off the street is wondering why he can't find decent info.

Yep their not the only ones [reddit.com ]

Hopefully upcoming legislation will prevent them paying apple billions to be the default search engine (amongst other things), this just might make apple decide to create their own.

@ichthyous I looked back over the thread and just saw your post. You said that you are getting surge days. Are you seeing any patterns to these days other than 2 to 3 days famine then a surge? Is it same days / time frame in the day / and locations each week?

This is a lost cause, they say fix your Core Web Vitals, but then websites have red vitals and still rank higher

They say no Ads above the fold, then sites with ads above the fold and few content and filled with google adsense ads are ranking high

Why even bother? Google is misleading, they tell you content is king you spend hour being honest and blogging on a topic you love only for you to get no traffic and without traffic you cant blog because you wont make money off ads or adsense or whatever service you use, so you will just go broke and it takes money to pay bills.

This all started changing after 2013 when they starting doing algorithm updates and got worse tot he point of no return after 2016.

No longer can you rank for a single keyword unless you are a mega corp or well known rich site who makes millions.

Its basically Spammers with inside connections like the workers in third world countries who learn the alogrithim while working as a google quality rater and tell their friends and family what to do or the mega corps who already have millions and have a name.

Those days of the blogger just randomly starting a website and getting traffic are long gone. I still have some old Entrepreneur and Fast Company magazines from 2009 to 2011 about mommy and travel bloggers being able to quit their job and work from home or travel making 100k a year or more blogging.

@Shadowlight I just read that link you posted wow! spot on I thought I was the only one who had an issue and noticed google search for exact term

What happened? why did they do this? When I was in college I used to be able to find what I needed for research in google by typing in exact terms, now the top search results for exact terms are obscure weird websites or big name sites that only have a string of the keywords

It sucks Google used to be great early on, this supposed algorithm stuff they are doing seems shady it makes no sense really, they also control search results and are TOO political. Search engines shouldn't be political because people have different views. The search engines should just show search results you request and information you need.

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5063665.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 10:55 am on May 10, 2022 (utc +1)

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On May 10, 2022, We have a tiny change in SERP ranking status. It may be for a while time. So let's work hard and smarter.

Examining my image search data in GSC for the first three months of 2021 (before the major updates of 2021) compared to the past 3 months of 2022, I found that impressions are lower by 17% but clicks are down by a whopping 30%. CTR is the same at 0.3%...pathetically low compared to the "good old days" of 0.6%, but still better than the 0.1% I was stuck at for most of 2021. Any idea why total clicks would be down so much if CTR is the same?

Without a doubt, insofar as my global widget industry is concerned, we're heading for a serious downturn ... I am being contacted by many companies, some of whom I have not heard from in years, all looking for standard and project orders. This could make 2008 look mild.

Without a doubt, insofar as my global widget industry is concerned, we're heading for a serious downturn ... This could make 2008 look mild.

The stock market is in free-fall mode. I finally got out of some real dogs at a big (big) loss but they just keep falling. This is going to be the unwinding of the mother of all asset bubbles across equities, crypto and eventually property too. As far as my business goes this is the worst start to the year that I can remember...worse than 2020, and worse than 2009. Probably mostly to do with Google screwing my business but not only that. I do not believe the recession will be worse than 2008...the labor market is much tighter now so it won't go on for years this time. But people might be a lot poorer by the end of this.

Why would Apple not want a 200 billion pound search engine company! My guess is that it is already built:

[ft.com...]

I do not believe the recession will be worse than 2008

I lived and worled through the 70s recession, this is nothing like that, QE (Quantative Easing) did not exist, so many business in many countries have been created on the back of QE that once Joe Public stops spending a recession will surely be inevitable? How deep, at the moent I do not know, however most of it will depend on the current RU/UA conflict plus the availability of many, many different products supplied from there. This was not the case in the 70s and completely different to 08.

Has anyone here who uses AdSense had a significant drop (-20%) during april? And it extends to may too...

I know it has nothing to do with the forum thread, but I had this crash in april and still got the same traffic. Very strange...

Renato : yes. Significant drop also.

@Jori - Good to know it's not just me. I thought it was a seasonal thing, but it already extends through the month of may.

Catastrophic Sunday traffic followed by a huge surge on Monday and Tuesday right back down all day. My USA traffic is -42% today

I had a nice pop up from Google. Increase in all respects and the second shift up within 30 days. Will it stick? Who knows. The deck is shuffled a lot lately.

I do have a heads up for anyone running a wordpress site. A friend had some issues with a security add on. Part of it was his fault for not having the right settings. He inadvertently was blocking some crawls that needed to happen and it was hindering growth.

I suggested to disable the non essential stuff and relax some settings. Within a week the performance is already improving. I know this is a technical issue and most who have been around a while will already be aware of things like this. But for others, keep issues in mind that you might be affecting without realizing it.

@Renato Ive had a drop in adsense earning as well, but also something strange I have auto ads in my website and they stopped displaying ads on my homepage for some reason, I have manual placed ads in the article and those two ads show up when clicking the articles but they aren't showing the auto ads that google randomly places in your webstie. very strange.

Tuesday was within normal weekday range at 91% however today, Wednesday, so far it has been extremely busy from all areas BUT very quiet insofar as realworld business enquiries are concerned. No change in my SERPs.

Been flat for the past week (don't even get the jumps on weekends like I used to) - looks down again today.

I've just been looking through some data for my widget .uk site and traffic is down dramatically this month so far and especially so when compared to Feb / Mar time. Its rankings seem to be unchanged, no evident spam therefore this site seems to be down like many others here are seeing in various countries.

However the UK hotel / pub site is doing surprisingly well at 118% because we did expect a drop-off in trade after recent large price increases across every aspect of the business ... Strange times.

Hi Everyone,

In the past 24 hours we can see a drop in our traffic for all the platforms (4-5 websites with 10 million + monthly traffic).

But one thing is very weird is that the fall is only on the "Amp Pages" and there is literally no impact on "Non Amp Pages". In fact a few of the "Non Amp Pages" show growth.

Does anyone see such a behavior. Is this an issue from Google?

We have Universal and GA4 profile. We do not see any change in GA4 traffic but Universal Analytics profile shows a dip.

Any thoughts?

Well this is new... GA real time has changed from 'right now' to 'in the last 5 minutes'. Numbers look a little lower than I'd usually expect at this time of day. What fresh hell is this?

We see a rising number of errors in GSC for "pages send but is marked as noindex". And that is not true. The errors are discovered months ago. And we allready checked it and started a error proofing in GSC.
I think g has some big internal problems.

Meanwhile we see conversions coming back. But not as big as it used before Update on 26.feb.
Traffic is like a rollercoaster. Up, down, full stop, up , down ....

For me global traffic is still ok however, as mentioned before, new realworld enquiries are not only low they've almost come to a grinding halt.

Regular bulk wholesale buyers are continuing for now and no projects have yet been put on hold, this is a very rare occurence anyway, but I have heard through my widget trade that already some very low-margin producers are in financial trouble both in China and India which are my widgets #1 and #3 volume producers.

Website traffic is nice, real business is better:-)