Lily Ray and Silvia Gituto, from Amsive, conducted a study on Google search and how it has impacted website visibility during 2023 due to numerous ranking system changes.
Google has faced criticism and accusations in the past few months from the SEO industry. In 2023, Google introduced several updates, including:
- February 2023 product reviews update
- March 2023 core update
- April 2023 reviews update
- August 2023 core update
- September 2023 helpful content update
- October 2023 spam update
- October 2023 core update
- November 2023 core update
- November 2023 reviews update
These updates have caused an uproar and frustration among SEOs due to the prevalence of low-authority websites in the SERPs. Many sites were negatively impacted by the Helpful Content Update and have not seen any relief.
To measure the strongest organic visibility growth and decline domains, Ray and Gituto used the SISTRIX Visibility Index. They classified the domains into four categories: biggest winners in percentage visibility growth, biggest winners in absolute visibility growth, biggest losers in percent visibility decline, and biggest losers in absolute visibility declines.
According to their findings, the top five domains with the biggest winners in absolute visibility growth were:
- Wikipedia.com
- Reddit.com
- Instagram.com
- Merriam-Webster.com
- Linkedin.com
On the other hand, the top five domains with the biggest winners in percentage visibility growth were:
- CIA.gov
- Reddit.com
- OED.com
- Yellowpages.com
- FactoryOutletStore.com
Meanwhile, the biggest losers in absolute visibility declines were:
- YouTube.com
- Wiktionary.org
- Amazon.com
- Walmart.com
- eBay.com
Lastly, the top five domains with the biggest losers in percentage visibility decline were:
- Overstock.com
- Vacationidea.com
- Familydestinationsguide.com
- Restaurantclicks.com
- Tripstodiscover.com
Ray and Gituto also discovered that the category with the most visibility was social media, user-generated content, and forums. The categories were created by classifying domains into topical groups with the help of ChatGPT. Each category included at least three domains. In contrast, the category with the least visibility was E-commerce.
Lastly, they observed a shift in search intent from transactional and commercial keywords to a mix of informational and review intent. The study suggests that the increase in user-generated content sites in 2023 may be due to the Hidden Gems update. Additionally, the decline in e-commerce visibility may be because Google is showing more types of content for transactional keywords.
