Another day of massive drops here.

They are at it again, huge gaps in orders but same volume of traffic! With other words zombies!

My global traffic this month so far has been consistently steady at about 60% of my 2024 average, in fact I have not had ONE day so far achieving my 2024 average which I find utterly unbelievable.

However I have had a couple of genuine bulk enquiries from possible new clients, neither of them in the West, but what I have experienced this week especially is a massive increase in spam email, has anyone else?.

a massive increase in spam email, has anyone else?

Yes, the same...ranging from "New Electric Bike" to "Do you need a Personal VA Assistant" and anything in between you can think of!
These patterns are the same every time G is shuffling things around.

Since the festive holiday is now over every single day has been a slow but consistent drop in traffic. Yesterday was a -13% drop. Day before -14%. Yet during the holiday it was nice and steady and at +50%. What is going on? So tired of the inconsistent traffic. Soon it will be back to August levels once again.

bad day... high volatility today...

Google is not blocking aio detection tools. Google updated their Serp code for AIO and javascript. There were atleast 4 flavors of js code being injected into the AIO block over the last 4 day. I assume this is just testing out features for G. It is very tricky to strip serps these days. It is only going to get worse.

Numbers are not looking good today. And indicators are spiking.

and there it is:

[searchengineworld.com...]

But why is this big deal? Even uncontacted tribesmen in Papua New Guinea have been browsing with Javascript enabled for the last X years. There is not a single person on Earth who is using web browser without Javascript running.

and there it is:
[techcrunch.com...

Javascript need for AdSense load properly

Javascript? That is a name I haven't heard in a while. Doesn't that have an impact on Mediavine ads? I know my site doesn't currently run Javascript. I assume it will be a requirement soon then. Will it stop site traffic drops too? I'll do anything for the bleeding to stop. Another -40% drop yesterday. A much bigger decline this time compared to previous days WTF?!

Javascript? That is a name I haven't heard in a while. Doesn't that have an impact on Mediavine ads?

Ha! G just wants to ensure people are really seeing their ads, ai overviews, PASF blocks, all this $%^&, and do not try to hide them with the adblock or other cosmetic filters.
They tell us: "It is anti-bot protection".
But how much bot traffic (comparing to the amount of human requests per second) do you have, G?

[edited by: haramamba at 2:14 pm (utc) on Jan 18, 2025]

The techcrunch article was posted here yesterday (post # 5116855), but it now has its own thread to discuss the js implications: [webmasterworld.com...]

Today is a federal holiday in the USA so things are a little slow for my niche.

Traffic is terrible. Possibly a new en#*$!ification update delivered under the cover of inauguration.

What now they want small businesses to have a voice?

My traffic was astronomical yesterday and higher than normal today, although the US and Canada are lagging. If anyone had hopes of any kind of regulatory action against Google in the US you can just forget that, not now with all of them falling all over themselves to pander to this new admin in order to gain influence. For the next two years at a minimum there will be no action. I see the rest of the world beginning to see these American tech platforms as hostile and parasitic and you might start to see many more limits placed on them outside the US. I for one canceled my Amazon prime account and deleted X. Next stop, delete my Facebook business page. The latter two were completely useless anyway, but I will certainly miss my prime account.

The traffic has been terrible since Monday. Especially in the shop, despite advertising (Google) 0 sales only cost.

@ichthyous is probably also the best thing to do, also for your mental state, with all the garbage on X and FB. By the way, you won't miss Prime for long, I cancelled it months ago and to be honest I don't miss it at all.

Sure something hit us last Friday or so .

@ichthyous is probably also the best thing to do, also for your mental state, with all the garbage on X and FB. By the way, you won't miss Prime for long, I cancelled it months ago and to be honest I don't miss it at all.

I hope so...I forgot that I also canceled Meta verified. $15 a month for what? It provided no benefit whatsoever. I am worried about deleting a 14 year old Twitter account with thousands of followers will do to my ranking in Google though. Each time I tried to delete my FB business page it immediately hit my Google rank.

@ichthyous Yes same here, traffic was quite high these 2 days, today I'm still waiting for the feedback, I received some emails too for products inquiries, but as it is the Chinese holidays, we can't ship now. So have to wait anyway for after the 8th
This week I had more leads than the last month.... hope they will convert!

Lots of fluctuations. Some of my projects lost 20 to 30 percent of traffic within this week.

puckparches, I’ve tried every version of ChatGPT (premium user) , hoping it would simplify coding tasks, but it often requires so much back-and-forth prompting that it ends up being inefficient if you already know how to code. Sometimes it solves issues instantly, but other times you can end up arguing with it for hours. While it can eventually get there (x amount of times), it requires significant effort. It has also made me a bit lazier with simple problems, though for complex challenges, it’s a useful tool if you already have the expertise to guide it. If the problem is truly novel, however, it can be pretty useless.

For example, today I asked it to visit a specific website and write a description of the business. Instead, it described a different company in another country with the same name, so it clearly didn’t visit the provided link even though I asked it to visit 2/4 times! Overall, it’s hit-or-miss. If you already know the answer, you’ll spot its mistakes more easily; if not, you risk accepting incorrect information. It’s still too unreliable to fully depend on, it remains a helpful tool for brainstorming ideas in its current iteration, i wouldn't dismantle the serps for it yet if I were google for sure!.Use us a little longer as you train chatGBT/Google before putting us our for pastor, your not fully there yet in terms of stealing and repackaging our shizzel in a fool proof way!

If anyone had hopes of any kind of regulatory action against Google in the US you can just forget that,

Thank goodness!

Something seems off with Google right now. Normally, my site traffic increases a lot after the holidays, but this time it feels unstable in terms of keyword positions. The main keywords are holding steady, but overall traffic is down 20-30% year over year

Def A/B testing with two sets of results. A is new and looks a much better than B.
While B is on we get rubbish traffic from all over the world and lots of robots. Nearly no real visitors.

Seriously Google. You are never happy until you drop my traffic right back down to August 2024 levels. The same traffic figure that I'm tired of seeing and yet you are, for some reason, obsessed with me having. I should not be seeing the same traffic figures all the time. I have been posting articles daily for months now. None of them mean anything. I got great growth over the festive period. Yes I expected to drop after the holiday was over but not all the way back to August.

I have now lost a writer and my motivation is at its lowest. Creating a business in a niche I have been a fan of for decades was too much to ask for! Dreams don't come true!

What do we do about these zombies? New administration seems to be busy with “Stargate” while we get charged for traffic that can not be proven it is real!

They switched to B set. Very, very, very worse traffic. Amazon & ebay are now our main selling channels. Before all this updates started it was google.
I don´t know if, in long sight google, hurts itself while presenting rubbish results to the users.