Seems to be a indexing/ranking issue in News and Discover for new articles published in the last 36 hours or so. It's stale, except for the extremely high authority sites.

Big stop yesterday, today I rebounded a bit, at least with ranking, not traffic, Traffic is still low since the core update in December. If you got hit you might rebound later today or tomorrow.

If our sites are all down in lockstep across a broad range of topics, that means this drop is planned by Gorg. If 90% of traffic suddenly disappears, where did it go? One guess...

After 20 years of evergreen content, Google deindexed 90% of our pages...from 1750 to 168. and core vitals suddenly decided our mobile pages are all too slow. Insanity by design.

(...) competitors; who may be years behind Google in terms of technology, but who can still produce vastly superior search results; are waiting in the wings

Simple answer: No.

I grew up in the time of Altavista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot and the likes. When Google came, users switched within months, because Google's results were superior. If Google's competitors were better now, users would have switched long ago. Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

Pretty much. Been saying this a few times here but seems like it's an unpopular opinion.

Us webmasters are an extremely small subset of users and our expectations are completely warped and biased simply because we have websites of our own we'd like ranked higher.

The vast majority of regular Google users are satisfied with Google's search results. In fact, I'm convinced the recent radical changes Google did are actually perfectly in line with what searchers actually would want to see more.

The fact we can't accept the above is entirely our own problem to deal with.

Disagree a bit. Personally speaking, what is so painful is the complete decimation of traffic, despite ranking well (featured snippets) and the contradiction of their own "best practice policies", particularly for things like Discover. Then when you try to engage genuinely, it's either ignored or you're told "not aware of anything being wrong" even if you share examples

Indexing issues? 30 minutes and post is not yet indexed, but they've indexed a scrapper's post (they're grabbing articles from RSS). What a trash search engine.

Whatever happened in the past 24 hours it's still going... I haven't seen a day like this for a while, it might continue on Monday as well

Specific keyword rankings that were boosted on 8th April that started slipping down from 22nd April and then were lost on May 1st are now recovered and held over the weekend (from May 21st). Those dates stand out in my data, is that the same for anyone else? It's like the SERP has gone back in time a month.

Google pretty well serves the wishes of their users, maybe not so well the wishes of a subset of site operators.

I put my my first site up in 1998 so I've seen quite a few come and go <G>

Google was like a breath of fresh air. It had a clean interface, uncluttered SERPs and it was way ahead of the rest in quality.

That was then and this is now.

The new Google interface is horrible with masses of googlespam, annoying videos and search results that move when you hover your mouse over what you want to click on thanks to popups; an invention of the devil. Try to search for what you want and they thwart you at every turn, showing you results based on 'authority' or a stack of obviously bought links rather than relevancy, whilst leading you into areas you never intended to go into.

Google are marketing geniuses. They gave away a first class browser, Chrome for free; it just happens to have their 'search' engine' as default, as well as advanced tracking systems. They nearly missed out on mobile but brought out a great OS and gave it away to all comers - subject to them being default search engine of course, which they now are on just about every browser and OS on the Internet after they cut deals with the owners (apart from MS of course, which has the dire Bing - hardly competition).

In the meanwhile G has become the bloated advertising agency it now is whilst other engines have quietly improved their offerings steadily. Sadly their marketing didn't keep pace. How do you spell Coil? Couil? couill Cewl? And who wants to type in 'duckduckgo.com' when they own the much easier duck.com? And did you see the laughable Bing 'howling' TV ads a few years ago? What were they all about?

Most people haven't a clue how to change from Google to a proper search engine. Even more don't know there are better options than G. However, like we now hoover our carpets with a Dyson or stick a Chinese bandaid on our cut finger we will eventually google something on Duck, Ecosia, or any other new entrant that comes along. Possibly one created by Apple to replace the billions they currently get from Google?

So far seems to be positive effect for my senior site, which typically got the short end of the stick since (and including) December update 2020. But I am not sure if this is meaningful or transitory bump.

Saturday 52.4%
Sunday 49.6%
Normal weekend range 60-80%

Weekend US traffic -9%

Traffic was increasing steadily Monday to Thursday then dropped 41% Friday and today's not looking that healthy either.

Just checked G US SERPs for my industry's biggest keyword, no change.

Only one non-USA company at #11 in the top 20 blatantly manipulated results!

Pathetic G ... Bear in mind this is an Indian origin product, the USA does not process it, it simply buys it in, an utter farce especially with some of these US sites ranking at the top in UK, India etc :-((

My sales vanished since about 7 days ago. The traffic decreased a little, but not as much to explain the sudden disappearance of sales. E.g. this Sunday I was about 6% down compared to the previous Sunday. It looks like these new visitors are a completely different bunch now, much less likely to buy.

At the same time in search console I see a massive drop for my keywords (the aggregate orange line that shows the average of all keywords combined). But when I look at my best ranked keywords, there is little to no change. Very puzzling.

Could it be that G decided to start taking into account the site's core web vitals, and that that caused this change from 7 days ago? I have a significant number of pages that "needs improvement" in GSC for the desktop version of my site...

Has anybody experienced something like this? No big change in traffic, big decrease in aggregate keywords, and bad sales?

Traffic is down for me as well 6% over the weekend and maybe 20% since the beginning of May. Site is almost 20 years old.

Traffic is way down since the beginning of last week, and especially this weekend. I am not seeing much of an improvement today, but I am seeing a reversion to the pattern before last week where traffic to my home page is way down again. My ranking is significantly down since all these changes started mid-Feb and especially since mid-March. I have had a fairly massive loss of top ranking terms and it shows no sign of recovering to any real degree.

I don't think Core Web Vitals has anything to do with this, but it has thrown most of my desktop pages to red again for "CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop)". When I run a Pagespeed test the pages all come back as 70+ on mobile or 95+ on desktop so it's rather annoying.

The patterns are changing on a daily basis...one day a sudden drop in organic search traffic, the next day search is normal but direct traffic drops. USA was very much down for weeks, but now it seems totally random how traffic from a country will drop off a cliff for a day or two, then come back.

I am still seeing a sharp upward step traffic pattern, followed by a drop to almost zero visits in the middle of the day. This traffic pattern is totally abnormal...a throttling upward of traffic early in the day, followed by no traffic for 1-3 hours sometimes. I have also noticed that the traffic is not converting...I just had my first new customer inquiry in five days.

Wow, traffic almost at a standstill for my global site, after 17 hours 31.4%.

In contrast UK hotel site already at 103%.

Conclusion?

Google is no longer an independent global search engine, utterly useless!

Hardly a surprise, but there does not seem to be any consistency (at least from sites that I monitor) in terms of who is going up and down. And there certainly is ZERO application of the 'content policy' in my (personal) Google Discover feed. They certainly aren't favouring 'authority' sites over there. It wouldn't hurt so much if they actually applied those 'policies' consistently.

This has nothing to do with core web vitals. I have no idea what is going on with this update. A real mess, traffic is almost brought to a halt. Blackhat appears to be thriving.

Saturday and sunday very and very high traffic. Today a huge cliff. Here we go again :-|

@renatovieira same boat

@renatoviera At least you had high traffic Sat and Sun...It's been awful for a solid week for me. Today my direct traffic is down 40% and search is down 8%. USA down 13%, Canada down 20%, Australia down 52%...UK is up 20% though

Rollercoaster.

I am going up with this update or AI-made "auto-update".

This now means the last two weeks looked the following for me:

- down
- up
- down
- up

Talking here about major penalty/update level events.

Never seen Google this confused and it's been going on for months now. What are they trying to - seemingly unsuccessful - achieve and feel the need to reshuffle everything on a weekly basis? Where is all of this leading to?

A bit of transparency would be great in this case. Clearly something is up for some months now. They are doing something new or different. The usual "we are doing updates all the time" is not good enough in this specific situation.

An "interesting" Monday with my global site at 77.8% however it was from where and when traffic happened.

It was looking like another disappointing multi single page views' day and then about 17.00 UK time (12.00 East Coast), multiple visitors and PVs until about 23.00 (18.00). Much of this traffic was from mid-eastern USA especially Florida, and then it slowed to how it had been before 17.00 and back to multiple single PVs.

In the past 12 hours I have had half the traffic I had in that 6 hours.

Needless to say this is nothing like my normal traffic ever used to be.

I don't think transparency or consistency is something we can expect from Google about rankings/updates any time in the near future.

expect from Google about rankings/updates

All G does is pay lip service to the semblance of a search engine with its manipulated advertising platform ... the big brands love it since it's easier to cater for than tv / print and can be updated far more quickly and at lower cost.

Joe Public's been taken hook, line and sinker, freedom of choice, what?

I got hit by the algorithm, ranking dropped hard. My impressions were sliced by 50%. Truly amazing, I am thinking about shutting the website down and starting from scratch. I am getting old errors again from 2020 and 2018, core web vitals dropped to 0 good urls although there is a glitch on google's end (it happened before).

SEMrush shows that my visibility halved today...the biggest plunge I have ever taken and competitors that were far below me for the last 6-7 years are now far above me. I am bleeding top ranking terms across the board. Despite this, traffic today is stronger than it has been in weeks.

The odd thing is that if I search for the terms using a non-chrome browser in private mode I find my site placing much higher for some searches than is being reported by the SERP trackers, and it seems stable.

Same boat as Yollo on the core vitals, suddenly 0 good pages. If that is feedback for something else, then this IS about core vitals...at least in part.. The drop started on May 1st and it just keeps getting worse. Zero income days while Gorg hauls in millions per hour. Income equality...right. What a mess. They could care less if they upset all the applecarts with these "updates"...as long as its not theirs. If all the traffic is gone, where did it go? Gorgs insatiable maw.

It might interest you to know that not only is organic traffic down this week, also Google Ads traffic is down for us, we didn't change anything but impressions and clicks are down from Monday.