I discovered recently that my website saw an abrupt, large drop in traffic from Google Search at the beginning of October of last year. When I looked in Google Search Console, I was surprised to see that the total clicks from Google Search for my website dropped 46% in just a 3-month period.
Here are the Google Search Console figures for the August and November of 2023 to show the shift:
| Period | Total Clicks | Total Impressions | Average Click-through rate (CTR) | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2023 | 10.2K | 501K | 2% | 18.8 |
| November 2023 | 5.49K | 336K | 1.6% | 19.8 |
| -46% change | -33% change |
This was a head-scratcher because I did not change anything in this period. I consistently publish and update original content. I follow Google's best practices as far as I can tell.
Fortunately, there is no commercial imperative for my website, so it does not hurt my pocket. Though, it is a disappointing development that people are finding my content far less often. Have I done something wrong? Or has Google changed drastically?
Has Google changed its algorithm for the worse?
The quality of Google's search results has deteriorated. 1 2 3 Google is fighting against a tsunami of spammy content trying to game its algorithm. Also, it is trying to pivot more towards AI (Artificial Intelligence). This is yielding some unexpected results.
The headlines lately seem to be favouring lazy punchlines which can be found by honing in on some of the weirder results from Google's new AI Overviews feature, clickbaity headlines such as "Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza". Google labels this feature as experimental, I would cut them some slack.
The more worrying trend is that websites like mine are losing a lot of search traffic for no apparent reason. It looks like some websites are being demoted.
The a-ha moment for me was when I read the BBC's investigation into Google's changes to its search algorithm. Their research has shown that over the last two years, updates meant to make Search more “helpful” has devastated many website owners who say they are following Google’s best practices.
Websites such as thedesk.net, housefresh.com, theworldtravelguy.com, and the thrillist.com have lost over 60% of their search traffic since September 2023; whereas Instagram, Quora and Reddit saw big gains. The trend is that the search algorithm appears to be favouring larger websites with user-generated content. According to Semrush, Reddit saw a surge that amounted to a 126% growth in traffic from Google Search since September 2023. This has contributed to its Q1 2024 earnings reaching $243m (£191m), an increase of a whopping 48% from the year prior.
What piqued my interest in all of this was the timing -- September 2023 was seen as turning point -- this was the same timeframe as my big decline! What happened in September 2023? 😵
Several times a year, Google makes significant, broad changes to their search algorithms and systems. They refer to these as core updates, and announce the changes on the Google Search Status Dashboard. On September 28th 2023, Google completed a helpful content update. In October 2023, they made a spam update. I guess my website has been reclassified as spam!
Is Google demoting or reclassifying websites?
Google states that its core updates do not target specific pages or sites. It does not demote websites:
In fact, there's nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites. Instead, the changes are about improving how our systems assess content overall. These changes may cause some pages that were previously under-rewarded to do better in search results.
Whatever the algorithm is actually doing, their reward system has flaws. The cream is not rising to the top of the rankings in some cases! I have seen a modest improvement on the ranking of my content since last year, but it is still well below what it was. Google's says the following on assessing your own content:
[..] pages that experience a change after a core update might not have anything wrong to fix. That said, we understand that those who may not be performing as well after a core update change may still feel they need to do something.
We suggest focusing on ensuring you're offering the best content you can. That's what our algorithms seek to reward. To learn more about how to create content that's successful, see our help page on how to create helpful, reliable people-first content. It has questions that you can ask yourself when assessing your own content.
The common refrain is to focus on making high quality content for people (not the algorithm). The rest will take care of itself. This sounds like solid advice, but I would not be confident following it if your livelihood depends on Google rankings. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a dark art that allows some folks to prosper doing almost the opposite. Let's look at one such cautionary tale.
The cautionary tale of HouseFresh
HouseFresh is a small independent web publication focusing on air quality products. The site was started in 2020 by Gisele Navarro who had experience in reviewing these types of products. She does firsthand rigorous tests on purifiers to give accurate, detailed information. HouseFresh is an example of what was a burgeoning industry of independent publishers producing exactly the sort of helpful, reliable content that Google says it wants to promote.
Things went well in the beginning for HouseFresh, its reviews started to climb high in the rankings on Google for terms related to air purification. The website grew into a thriving business with 15 full-time employees. Then, in September 2023, they noticed that they were displaced for some search terms by lifestyle magazines and media outlets, which were not testing the products. The hammer blow was Google’s algorithm update in March 2024 that led to a 91% loss of search traffic to HouseFresh. That is catastrophic.
HouseFresh outlined their hypothesis on how they lost rankings on terms that they held for some time. For example, the query “best budget air purifiers” that HouseFresh ranked at #2 since May 2023 is now led by sponsored posts, best-of lists from big media sites, advice from Reddit threads, and Google Shopping product listings. They have been outmanevoured by publishers who have developed content strategies that can corner some terms and topics.
One such SEO content strategy is called “keyword swarming". Gisele was tipped off about this strategy by an self-proclaimed former employee of Dotdash Meredith, a large American digital media company that operates websites across many categories such as Lifewire (tech), The Spruce (home and food), VeryWell (health), TripSavvy (travel), and ThoughtCo (education). The strategy is to identify small sites that have cemented themselves in Google results for a specific valuable term or topic, and publish vast amounts of lower quality content on these terms. It can be easier to climb the ranking if you have a network of websites that can link to each other. This could explain why you can see multiple articles published by websites belonging to digital media companies ranking at the top of Google for subjects that are at best, tangentially related to their general content.
While these visible patterns support the claim that digital media groups are gaming Google, there is an element of guesswork at play -- correlation does not imply causation. Whatever the exact strategies employed by digital marketers are, they are succeeding in the short-term. Google is getting a bloody nose from the targeted production of content at scale and domain reputation manipulation.
It is awful when SEO exploitation costs honest folks jobs. It appears that the algorithm is not demoting websites per se, but it is rewarding the wrong behaviour. Content production for the web is a precarious trade. You don't want to get down in the dirt to fight organizations that are employing these tactics.
Is Google able to tackle site reputation abuse?
Google has been more vocal about how they are tackling spammy, low-quality content. They've made several updates to their spam policies over the last year. Google rolled out a new spam factor called "site reputation abuse" that came into effect on May 5th. Google sees site reputation abuse as websites with their own good quality content also hosting low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site's strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish air purifier reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site.
Moz reported that there has been signs of Google penalising domains on reputation abuse, nine of the top ten sites penalised were a coupon or discount code subdomain. These ones are probably the clearest violators and are easier to single out. I guess time will tell if they can consistently weed out offenders and restore more parity.
What does the recent leak of internal Google documents tell us about Search?
A collection of 2,500 internal documents from Google has been leaked this month filled with details about data the company collects. The documents have been confirmed as authentic. Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told The Verge in an email, “We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information”. While I agree that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on a clutch of leaked douments, there is merit in analysing the documents to get a sense of what the company is thinking.
The most notable revelation is that Google representatives have misled the public in the past when discussing how they assesses and rank content for Search. Rand Fishkin said the following after reviewing the documents:
Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed, denial that subdomains are considered separately in rankings, denials of a sandbox for newer websites, denials that a domain’s age is collected or considered, and more.
Testimony from the antitrust suit by the US Department of Justice previously revealed a ranking factor called Navboost that uses searchers’ clicks to elevate content in search. The evidence strongly supports that click-centric user signals are being used as a ranking factor contrary to previous public statements by Google.
If Google are choosing to make clear false claims about Search to the public, it makes them less credible. I will treat their recommendations with a larger dose of skeptism in future.
Conclusion
The decisions Google make on Search have a profound impact on anyone relying on the web for business. Google is continually fighting against people trying to game its algorithm and regularly updates its algorithm to combat spammy content. Recent changes have harmed small businesses, even those who follow Google's best practices. My own experience is that I saw quite an abrupt, big decline in the rankings for the content on my website towards the end of last year. There was no apparent reason.
Digging into why this is happening has been eye-opening. Google is getting a bloody nose from the targeted production of content at scale and domain reputation manipulation. Whatever the exact strategies employed by digital marketers are, they are succeeding in the short-term. The investigative work from the BBC shows that one possible corrective measure being employed by Google is to favour big websites with user-generated content, such as Reddit, as more reliable sources. None of this is good news for small independent publishers.
You could say SEO is an unavoidable game and is just a fact of the web. This is a tired rigmarole. This seems different to me. Recent document leaks show that Google has misled the public in the past when discussing how they assesses and rank content for their search engine. Making "helpful" content is not enough. We are being left to read between some blurry lines.
P.S. Also last week (May 30), people have reported that Google Search Console is showing a decline in the number of links reported in the links report. It appears to be an issue that Google is investigating.
Written by Rob O'Leary
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© Rob OLeary 2024
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It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse - Mashable ↩
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Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines by Janek BevenDorff, Matti Wiegmann, Martin Potthast, and Benno Stein ↩
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Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same - BBC ↩
Top comments (15)
So I checked mine out of curiosity since I haven't really added much to my blog in that timeframe and comparing Aug 2023 vs Nov 2023 I see -25% clicks (2k vs 1.5k)
But if you look at my chart for the last 16 months, May was a huge spike up for me for some reason (I don't think I changed anything on my side that I recall):
Interesting!
I consistently have a slight drop on Saturday, then a harder drop on Sundays.
Most of my posts are "Here was the error I got, here's how I fixed it" so my assumption is most people that read it are looking up the error they're getting at work during the week.
Its typical that traffic for tech content dips at the weekend because less people are working. You can see it is similar for my website. This reflect habits of people. Its the irregular macro trends that are harder to explain and may be down to changes in the algorithm, which is in May for you. On May 5th, Google started to enforce a new site reputation abuse policy, this may have contributed.
There is certainly a degree of chance to all these
Idk about chance, but there's a lot more small details that matter in making the numbers and flow than just the Google search algo.
I'm sharing this statistics from my blog so we can have a more broad view of the impact on google's algorithm:
By the way, I just visited your blog, and I'm reading some of the articles, good content :) I hope you keep posting.
Thanks for sharing Eduardo. You need be careful comparing statistics, especially between analytics providers. For example, some analytics providers get blocked more by adblockers and it skews results! Its best to compare the same source like Google Search Console, and try to identify factors that may influence variations numbers between websites.
Thanks for the compliment about my blog. I will continue to post but it is not something I will pursue for income!
You're right, even though my image is from google analytics the results can vary, here it goes, an screenshot from google search console, even though that awesome peak around march the downtrend continued, it appears I'm recovering, slowly but steady, even though I haven't done any major update to my site.
I feel you, I don't have any ad on my site, just a couple of affiliate links, I write about tech mostly to network and meet other developers.
I'll keep in touch.
I would say probably. Also, I think it's time for a new search engine for us dev's and engineers since we're typically looking for open source type information. It would be ideal if there was a new search engine who addressed and also did not include paywall sites in the direct results.
I agree. People like us should get together and create one. That would be sick
Definitely, I like that idea :-D
It's interesting, because I've been wanting to publish a post that narrates something similar for a while. I don't know what´s the case is in other latitudes, but at least here in Venezuela Google has long since ceased to be a reliable source of information. I remember at one time it gave a fairly high number of relevant results to any search, and now it is limited to trying to sell you some portable memory, some new technology or whatever comes to mind, but the truth is that already in the first 10 results comes a load of advertising and normally after one 15 sometimes much less stop being relevant results
It is worrying, because one can feel an interest of the giant in hiding valuable information and thus making knowledge just another market product. Another worrying thing is that in any "smart" TLF comes by default a Google application that not only spies on you, but also if you take on the task of deleting it. You find that one is almost impossible and two your phone just doesn't work properly when you disable it
I think we already have enough borders to manufacture more virtually, it seems to me that we are in time to join forces as thinking beings, to avoid not only a communicational wall, but the privatization of knowledge. Knowledge is universal, transmitting it and acquiring it is the way we have to emancipate ourselves and evolve as thinking beings. I think Google should Indemnification the general population for the way it makes use of advertising and information, skewing much of reality.
Many are unaware that a selfish can mean sending metadata hidden in the file.jpg with your location. It may seem like a trivial or unimportant fact, but when there is a whole marketing network determined to capture you for some of their brand new needs of the day to acquire. And the need for a market and a system of governments call it the Deep State or whatever you want, to maintain world control and a population focused on survival or make money to survive.
It can be a risk to life, be an environmental activist or be in search of social vindications and have an application that sends your location every so often, seconds? It is an interesting topic, because in the same way that Google hides small sites that have no relation to its commercial interests, in some way it contributes to what is consumed by the majority of the masses, which often does not go beyond sex, football, politics and religion... by unknowing other windows that could broaden their perspective and provide new nuances.
I think they owe more respect to us, and some money too…
Intresting article, for real!! I hope google at one point will step out. We have created an analytics system to go against google monopoly, open-source, and completely transparent!
Find our repo here.
Antonio, CEO & Founder at Litlyx.com
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