Fellow old timer :) Not sure if it's helpful, but you are familiar with the 'honeymoon' period Google gives new pages right? New pages/sites will get ranked and appear fairly high then after a while simply disappear.

As a special thank you to for replying, so you think it is just that. Ive literally never seen anything like it ---- all competitors are from 1-2 million per month to 0! It's crazy, since Jan 2023

It's odd it's all of your competitors.
I assume there are no known penalties, and you've checked that you're still getting crawled.

How are new pages looking compared to existing pages?

Out of about 50 competitors, there are just 3 websites that appear to be accelerating some sites from 1992 have almost lost all traffic, It is hard to know if there are any penalties. Mine is dropping each day I am waiting for it to stabilize hopefully will do, I am back to 2016 levels traffic wise. Very worrying as cannot work out what is going on, it's since Jan 2023

There are two sides to this struggle. For most here it seems to be about getting hits from search results to get paid for showing ads. But for some like myself it is about the opposite side of the coin... paying for ads to get traffic to sell merchandise.

I have little to no experience with ad revenue, but lots with paying for ads that do not justify their cost and could write a book about its shortcomings. But for now will touch on our most recent findings.

I have been logging hits, referers and more importantly, referrals from ad clicks, their user-agents and IP addresses for a few months. The reason for this research has been because unique visitors has been up but enquiries and sales way down. What I did find was hundreds of click throughs from ads by the same devices using a variety of IP addresses... hitting the same ads over and over again. These hits were not random enough to be normal and I can see a pattern or grouping as if each device was rotating IP addresses periodically.

The question I asked was why would anyone bother to do this? Could it be a competitor trying to send me broke by hiking my ad bill? Well I wouldn't put that past some of them. Or could it be the ad provider and I wouldn't put it past them either.

So I decided to check stats from the advertiser's control panel. I hadn't checked in there for a while because a) they complain about not using Chrome, b) require two factor authentication to login,and c) I don't get the SMS for up to 3 hours (times out) because either poor phone reception inside our house or because their SMS service is congested/on the blink.

When I logged in the first thing I noticed was that my spend was more than it should be, in fact double. So I then tried to adjust the daily spend only to find that my daily limit had been removed. Well that was no surprise considering past experiences like being advised that the minimum recommend cost for click-throughs on some keywords will cost several dollars... when there were no ads even appearing for that keyword at all, and that they still billed for as low as 10 cents/click!

They used to have ad managers, but now there is no way to contact them even though they are siphoning money out of our account each month. So I decided to suspend the account. The web form reported that billing would be suspended for 2 months... after which they would start billing again no doubt without any further notice. Ok, then I tried to remove my card details but that is not possible without replacing it with another credit card and yes they test bill it to prove its validity. In the end the only way that I could suspend that account properly was to change account payment to Paypal. Then I had to do was go to Paypal and cancel that open billing agreement.

I was getting about 1800 unique visitors daily and that is now down to about 1200.

But I still see double hits... the same device/IP hitting the same page in succession. I searched this phenomenon and found similar reports from others and that it was Chrome doing the double taps.

Mind boggling stuff hey what?

I have read that about a million households in Britain have given up having broadband because of the financial difficulties many people have found themselves in through inflation and the jump in the costs of fuel and mortgages. Could this be a contributing factor to the drop in business that many of us have seen?

But I still see double hits... the same device/IP hitting the same page in succession. I searched this phenomenon and found similar reports from others and that it was Chrome doing the double taps.

I stopped paying Google for ads years ago after I noticed that a large proportion of the 'visits' I paid for were charged for at least twice. I actually managed to talk to a member of Google's staff in London who explained that many people double click a link; and that I was charged per click, and not per visit. If the site didn't load quickly enough many visitors made multiple clicks, every one of which I had to pay for. He also (perhaps unwisely) told me that most advertisers pay for ads because they want to stop competitors from getting those top spots, and that I was 'mistaken' if I expected to actually make money from their ads.

I closed the account the same day and I will never deal with them again.

I have read that about a million households in Britain have given up having broadband because of the financial difficulties

I think you can be fairly sure that is not unique to the UK.

It could help contribute to traffic loss, and is bound to affect some forms of ecommerce.

I noticed that a large proportion of the 'visits' I paid for were charged for at least twice.

Yes, that's a thing, and it should not be more than two clicks charged. I'm not defending Google, and I believe they should not be charging for those duplicate clicks if, as experience has shown, users click twice.

Customers may be clicking more than one link within your ad. You won’t be charged for more than 2 clicks per ad impression and Google Ads filters out any invalid clicks that we detect.

[support.google.com...]

Yes I mentioned double taps and ALL Chrome hits appear to double taps, not just some from UK.

But my bigger complaint is about the same device hitting the same ad 10 or more times within a few seconds while rotating IP address.

But my bigger complaint is about the same device hitting the same ad 10 or more times within a few seconds while rotating IP address.

It's easy for a competitor to do that, using proxies and a suitable script. Ever since Google first started advertising it was their biggest weakness.

I shouldn't think they bother too much. They still get paid for the click and there is a ready supply of hopefuls who will pay them money in the (usually forlorn) hope of making a profit from it.

What the hell is going on here guys anyone know what happened Jan 2023 that has impacted so many of these websites (including mine)?

I can only say what has impacted my site and that is so many ads. Google has made it impossible to see organic results. Even top number one organic positions produce little traffic. Ranking #1 or #100 in Google is about the same in traffic. Google is dead and no longer contributes to our sales.

The snake devouring its tail has finally reached the head.

So is it "over"? What kind of strategies are people thinking about to beat this BS?

My experience is quite similar. And Google always calls to tell me to use their new "feature" which usually just sucks down the dollars even faster.

Some of their customer service was first rate, back in the day. Of course it is all mostly gone these days.

Must be desperate if Google is cold-calling people.

Thank you for your insight xx

What kind of strategies are people thinking about to beat this BS?

They are probably hiring SEO consultants who will get paid for a couple of months until it becomes obvious that they do not know better. The consultant will advise that it takes time for results to show, but in the end you might end up with the last thing that you need... a lot of spammy backlinks.

In any case if these "SEO experts" did know what they doing, they would be keeping it to themselves and concentrating on their own web for a regular income.

Can anyone tell me why new sites get all the rankings then fall off a cliff after a while?

I gave up chasing Google's games. For the first time in 2-3 years I checked my Analytics and did a comparison to 2018 same period. Down 73% I did well in the heyday (6-7K visits per day) until Panda relying on Adsense and other third party income. I had to get off that dying train and reinvent my presence or I would go broke. It was a big leap, but I new it would work. I got into private labeling a high quality American made product (I have extensive experience in the underlying business model) made to my specifications with many visits to the mill and so forth. It's worked extremely well.

Naturally one has to spend more on Adwords to make more. Same with a brick and mortar.

As far as pre Panda compared to today, my traffic, which I don't obsess over anymore is down 93%. Income? I could not be more satisfied:)

@Samsam1978 I feel you. Auto content scraping sites scraped my girlfriend's news articles and this site outranked her site while her site has seriously more authority over this niche then this scraper that launched his site this year.

You might think, sooner or later they vanish from Search engines. But here's the thing, the damage has already been done. Especially for news publishers.

When filing a DMCA to search engines, it is Bing only that is not cooperating removing them.

My site lost 99% of traffic overnight yesterday (June 2-3). Ranked for 300+ keywords, including a bunch top 3. No idea what happened, no seo issues or indexing issues in search console.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:42 pm (utc) on Jun 4, 2023]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

Hi gamer3037 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

We hope you'll read some of our related discussions and find helpful ideas to find the causes of such a drop.

@samsam1978

This is spam website traffic pumped with PBNs behavious 101. Most of these websites are made in the following way :

4-6 months of gradually linking from PBNs with restricted bot access from their robots.txt file so they do not easily appear on third party platforms.
1-2 months of heavy link-building to get them to top spots.
1-2 months of heavy promotion of link selling across platforms and link brokers to get their ROAS.
After the Google Brain threshold of spammy outlinking is reached the automated penalty is applied and the site gets deranked.

This process is now hastened with the latest linkspam algo updates being live since the early 2023. So with that in mind I theorize your niche is being targeted by the churn-and-burn site builders that sell links mainly to casino/medical/NSFW websites then goes down just as quickly.

As to why your traffic is gradually going down :

1) Over time people stop searching and just convert to direct traffic to one or few websites for information, reason being is that Google is getting poorer and poorer at displaying the proper links for their questions, so they skip that step more and more.
2) Google is deprecating informational websites slowly as the Google themselves are scraping that information and displaying it as quick answers within search or through other means (Google media carousel, Google knowledge resources, Youtube is also syphoning clicks depending on niche) and so your traffic gets eaten that way.
3) Google ads. Having 4 ads where previously you had 1 or 2 is a major loss of organic traffic. Up to 30% only from these sources alone.

Hope I helped.

Apple and Firefox ought to buy or create search engines and use their browsers to start the marketing. Google is not the internet and it's about time they realized that.

Zero clicks, featured snippets and Google ongoing SERP experiments are eating up the search traffic.

Can anyone tell me why new sites get all the rankings then fall off a cliff after a while?

New sites haven't been evaluated by all the various algorithms. So, nothing's holding them down until a core or a spam or helpful content update puts them in their place.