Same.. I'm seeing a big spike in Google bot activities

@MayankParmar Since the last 48 hours or so, Google has sent tens of thousands of zombie traffic to non-existent pages.

Google is really broken. Adsense revenue is at the lowest. And analytics remains plundered as all traffic shows as 'google/organic'.

January 2021 v December 2020 PVs +17.52%

A little higher than I expected but only helped by the final week's good numbers.

Had a few months of flying high. Looks like something kicking me today though.

I hope this is on topic.
It is related to page coverage. I saw the number of pages indexed go from about 16k to 300K on January 1st. on one of my sites. But since then it's only increased slightly.

I'm wondering what is considered normal.

And what tools do you use to monitor page coverage?

@MayankParmar I too have seen a big spike in G bot activity

Anyone noticed a huge Traffic spike during the last 2-3 days?
Don't get too happy, it's a spam bot attack that was noticed from many websites.

More here:
[twitter.com...]

@jediviper - Feb/1 one of my sites received a lot of traffic from this domain: <snipname:tld>

I didn't care, as it is certainly spam.

---

Mod's note: No specific domains, please. We don't allow "outing" specific sites.

That said... the domain involved is a spambot, designed to imitate human traffic... and yes, it definitely is spam.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:56 pm (utc) on Feb 3, 2021]
[edit reason] Removed specific domain, per forum Charter and TOS. [/edit]

I'm seeing normal traffic from the rest of the world, but US traffic...the most valuable traffic.. is dead. In GSC, I'm seeing drops across discover, serps, and news when you filter by country.

This is on international sites/topics which traditionally get +50% US visitors...meaning the sites aren't focused on US-based things/people but they are tons of US-based readers interested in the topics.

I'm seeing a massive drop in conversions and a start of traffic dip starting yesterday. Then again, it could be because of the Chinese New Year long holiday impacting the conversions.

@topaz

Same here. That's after a few days of relatively and consistent performance too. Then again... that's kind of been the pattern for the last few months so hard to tell if it's just an extension of that.

Discover dropped on 28th and recovered on 31st, and it's now flat since 1st Feb.

@TalkativeEditorial

Same for me in Europe

Hey, in my niche (<widget> blog, eastern europe) i see subtle drop. But i have another problem - since now, every post that we pubilshed was getting really fast to top10 or top20 if topic is competitive. Now GSC shows me, that URL's are indexed, but they're nowhere to find in SERP. It's as if Google decided to cut these pages. We don't have any shady backlinks, posts are not overoptimized...

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:26 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2021]
[edit reason] Exemplified niche.... [/edit]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], electro karbolinek!

top10 or top20 if topic is competitive

is this personalized results?

@electro karbolinek welcome to the forum!

That's not actually unusual. Are you searching exact match for the posts?

Sometimes this happens when there is a Google bug that Google doesn't even know about, but webmasters do :-)
And sometimes it takes weeks for them to acknowledge this...

Big drop in traffic yesterday after fairly strong traffic previously...searches down 21% and direct traffic down 19%. The drop was in USA, UK, CA and AU (english speaking) traffic. This coincides with a recovery of ten top three spots and a general higher placement overall. Let's see if this follows the pattern of a big drop lasting a day or two late in the week which I have seen happening since at least the beginning of January...maybe earlier.

Drop in traffic yesterday and today continues...

Hey @phranque, nice to be here! After few years of lurking i've decided to register :)

is this personalized results?

I'm always checking in incognito mode on my private PC, private smartphone and business notebook via VPN. I'm also asking my friends from other cities to check results. We have quite a lot of top10's and direct answers for a small blog like us. We're trying to write good content - reviews, FAQ's, guides, no spammy texts.

That's not actually unusual. Are you searching exact match for the posts?

Yep, i'm searchig for specific phrase just like usual: "<widget> name review platform". Post is visible when i type site:URL, but nowhere to find in SERP. I know it sometimes takes time to rank specific pages, but i've never have to wait more than 24 hours, now it's about 3 days. No manual actions in GSC, url's are "green", AMP is active. <snip> We had a break in publishing posts (allmost 2 weeks), maybe that's the reason.





edited by: not2easy at 1:03 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2021]
Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:01 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2021]
[edit reason] Further anonymize niche. [/edit]

Might be, but it's also not uncommon for that to happen...because Google gonna Google. I've seen it several times before - it usually does resolve itself though. And it's worth remembering that there is some new look/ SERP redesign rolling out at the moment so who knows what's bugged out this time.

That said, like others are reporting, things are notably down in terms of traffic overall (not positions) and a big drop in Discover traffic, too. Not quite at the "you got zeroed" level, but definitely a hefty decline.

Thank you for reply - that calmed me a little. As usual i have to be patient and just... wait :)

Have a nice day!

I'm hit by the Google December update...50% of traffic gone...but what is interesting is, the average position in GSC shows almost the same prior to the update...I cannot make a sense of it...why is it like that? If avg. the position is the same, shouldn't be the traffic also?

Here in the UK, searching for information about a particular product, I have been pursued by a 'People also search for' popup box with 8 search terms in, none of which interest me. This first appeared amongst the ads. I closed it, and continued searching through the organic results. It re-appeared amongst the organics. I closed it again, looked at some more organic results, then it re-appeared. I wondered if I'd been infected with some adware so I clicked on one of the links to see what happened and it took me to a new set of Google SERPs vaguely relevant to the search term I'd clicked on (although as usual packed with the high adwords spenders) - so I suspect it's Google's work, not some computer virus.

This was as well as the usual junk that clutters up a Google page including some news from Ohio and Baltimore. I'm near Birmingham, England, several thousand miles away so I'm not interested. I gave up and went to Bing.

Speaking as a searcher I am heartily sick of Google and the sooner they implode the better.

Has anyone else seen this?

"Starting on February 18th, phrase and BMM keywords will begin to match the same user searches. With this updated matching behavior, ads may show on searches that include the same or more specific meaning as your keyword. This can lead to an increase in traffic on any phrase match keywords and a slight decrease in traffic on any BMM keywords.

To simplify keyword match types, this new phrase match will fully replace BMM by July. Your existing BMM keywords will continue to work, and you can use phrase match keywords for new keywords you would have previously added as BMM."

Thanks a lot, Google. Now you've pretty much proven that you just want to grab even more money from people. Now Google is trying harder to "simplify" searches and dump as much irrelevant traffic to the ads as possible. I don't believe their claim of "include the same or more specific meaning" because "more specific meaning" = "exact match". It's just going to become more of a broad match. And the only reason why I even continue to spend money on the ads is because Google screwed our site ranking up badly with spam sites ranking higher than us and our competitors.

Oh and I haven't changed the site lately and Core Vita now showed the 50+ good pages are now in "needs improvement" status. So this just shows this whole system, the ads, the stats, and algo updates, everything, is one big mess.

Gotta thank the CEO of Google. Must get the multi million dollar bonuses eh?

@madHuB

but what is interesting is, the average position in GSC shows almost the same prior to the update .... If avg. the position is the same, shouldn't be the traffic also?

GSC only counts queries for which your site had an impression. You now have fewer impressions, but maintain the same position for the the impressions that you retained. A more thorough and detailed explanation with links to the supporting Google documentation is included in the this post from a few month ago:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Also: welcome to WW

@NickMNS +
Thank you so much

Google Discover is still down.

What are we even talking about? For my main keyword that was bringing me 3000 clicks per day 1st page is showing 2 video generated sites with no relevant solution for this specific keyword. Ranked 3rd and 5th. My website has 5 10000 words articles on this topic and each of them are amazing 10 years old and updated each year. None of them are renked on 1st SEPR. Crazy?! I was getting 10 sales per day with 4000 visitors now getting 3500 visitors but they are non relevant traffic and I am getting 2 sales

Since 1/feb, a massive drop in traffic. Something is going on...