Signs The Google November 2023 Reviews Update Hit This Weekend

Google launched its November 2023 Reviews update on Wednesday afternoon, November 8. But we didn’t see it have much of any impact until Saturday, November 11th. It currently seems this Reviews update is not as widespread as the November 2023 core update but there are some sites getting hit hard by this Reviews update.

We saw a nice amount of chatter over the weekend and now, as of Monday morning, the some of the tools are picking this Google Search ranking volatility up.

As a reminder, this will be the last time Google has confirmed a reviews update because it is now more of a regular update, compared to past reviews updates.

SEO Chatter

Here is the recent SEO chatter from WebmasterWorld and our comments area here about what some SEOs are experiencing. We also have posts on X from Glenn Gabe:

And check out these two drops. Very interesting to see these sites lose visibility in certain SERP features, which can drive a ton of traffic. When you isolate the SERP features, you can really see that drop… Checking some of the queries, the sites still rank in the 10 blue… pic.twitter.com/vN57i3kQo2

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 12, 2023

There seems to be a lot of movement on Google today. According to my SEO tools, many of my most important keywords have literally shot up in the rankings.

Huge drop today… Here We Go Again

Our most developed and oldest projects (websites) have been heavily hit by this update. Traffic is down by good 90%, I want to say even 100% as they got thrown out of Discover.

The oldest project, with the most content, which had the most impressions on discover, fell hard. Today he is almost dying.
on the other hand, 2 new projects, with little content and that barely appeared on Discover, gained visibility and are at the top of visits.
I keep questioning why this is.

Traffic is staying the same as before, so no drastic drops or gains. However, conversions over the past 3 days have been absolutely awful. We’re talking 3x less than usual. No drops in clicks/landing page engagements, just total conversion annihilation. Is this zombie traffic or what?

Google search is really messed up somehow drastically, because I noticed it doesn’t return any results for some phrases, even though it should. It reminds me of search issues on the beginning of the search engines when they lacked sophisticated systems.
My website is now steady on -65% lost traffic since the update.
No further drops, but no gains either.
Funny enough, money is better, CPC is higher!

Sites hit with all these updates have their posts Dissapperrd from the serp.

I tested 2 same articles but spinned both using same technology..
What is surprising is old website article is no where to be found and new website article is already in page 2.

Same issue. Most ranking articles disappeared from serp long back.

Jeez, my site is taking an absolute battering after showing signs of recovery last week.

our articles are dissapearing, better say – popping out like a bubbles, one day – 1st / 2nd place at the top page. next day? nowhere. that thing 0 clicks / 0 impressions, I don’t get google anymore

All time lowest traffic today. Just fractions of what used to be normal ~1 year ago and all through 10 years…
I don’t know how to measure rankings of my keywords. My ~5 best keywords used to sit in the top 3 all the time.

Same here…traffic was high for a Saturday but no new inquiries or conversions for several days. It’s crazy how Google can just make it all vanish. Earlier in the week had new inquiries on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th and 9th…then from the 10th until today zippo. Today looks like traffic may be way down though.

I am noticing weaker US traffic today.

We are heading down again overnight. 10% drop. Makes me so tired.

Worst weekend in 5+ years.

SERP has started to shuffle by this morning…

By the way, one of my disappeared pages has re-appeared for two days. It seems I recovered it if it wouldn’t disappear again. In this shuffle I have been expecting the homepage to re-appear as well… Things are going better on my side..

Yes, I also see some pages are back. But don’t know when they do reshuffle things, Full google search is unstable due to Video Outside of the Viewport error and other updates made it worse.

Yes big shuffle. Traffic is down today. Big news sites are never affected…. Medium and small websites is affected all times many years…

Not seeing much. My sites just got crushed by the HCU – all of the subsequent updates haven’t had much impact on my sites at all. Traffic is still terrible; 50-60% down from before the HCU.

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend

Google Tracking Tools

You can see that most of the tools have shown calmer volatility since the early core update days. I suspect that is because this Reviews update is less widespread but as of this morning (not the weekend) some of the tools are showing volatility:

Semrush: