Did Your Google Search, Discover & News Traffic Significantly Drop? Let Google Know.

SEO

By Chris Barnhart On Nov 20, 2023

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On Friday, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said you can reply to a thread on X or post a help thread in Google’s forums to let him know about sites that saw a significant drop in Google Search, Google Discover and Google News traffic recently.

It also seems that Lily Ray is building a Google Sheet with this data to pass along to Danny Sullivan at Google.

Sullivan posted on X, “If people want to share their sites adding to here or in the forums, happy to pass on. But the bug we found was resolved. We can look further at some of the examples, though.”

This was in response to these posts:

If people want to share their sites adding to here or in the forums, happy to pass on. But the bug we found was resolved. We can look further at some of the examples, though.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 17, 2023

Lily posted a form on her site that you can also fill out, which she said, “To everyone who messaged me yesterday regarding recent traffic drops in Google Discover, Top Stories, News etc. Please help me stay organized by filling out the below form. I am putting together something formal to send to Google.”

Of course, sending Google your site doesn’t mean you will see any benefit. I mean, here are some of the responses Danny Sullivan posted to some complaints already:

You’re site is primarily for Sweden, right? So that’s what you should be looking at. And I know when you look at it, you don’t see your content and consider that a bug. And then you go to other countries and sometimes see your content, which I think to you somehow confirms this…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 16, 2023

On Monday (because it’s the end of the day for me now, and I don’t want have this lost), please do a fresh post and tag me in it. What I’d like to know is what were terms you were previously ranking for, and for what country/languages, and I’ll pass that along so that we can…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 17, 2023

John Mueller responded to a similar complaint on Reddit about an SEO doing SEO for 20 years and nothing is working recently anymore. Mueller wrote, “I’ll go out on a limb, but this strategy sounds like even if things work out, you’ll be back here with the next update.” “I don’t have a simple one-tip-that-SEOs-hate, but my recommendation (feel free to ignore) would be to take a step back and think about the kinds of sites that align with your interests, knowledge, experience, and which could give longer-term value to the web overall. Nothing will last forever, the web is constantly adjusting to new users’ needs and interests, but still, there are things that will almost certainly be short-term-hacks (if you need to ask yourself “how long until Google notices”, right?), and ways that at least have a chance of being longer-lasting,” he added.

So I guess you can let Google know about your site to see if Google feels they need to make adjustments to their algorithms to better surface sites and the types of content you produce. I have no idea if it will make a difference but what do you have to lose at this point?