With less people spending on ads, I'd venture to say that much of the money Google earns and the biggest traffic disruptor is that one glaring block at the very top of every page that used to be called "SHOP FOR [SEARCH TERM], which looks like nothing more than an elaborate affiliate linking scheme. Now days, it just says ADS...which is disingenuous...because it would not involve ad pennies, but rather percentage of sales. A HUGE difference. That blocks appears and disappears regularly in our vertical. When gone, we do well.
If you even place a single Share-a-Sale or DJ (both of which are now virtually dead) or any other dedicated merchant affiliate link on your page, Gorg will slap you with a penalty and drop your page like a hot potato.
That would be terribly hypocritical. IMHO, also one of the biggest anti-competitive "draw offs" of traffic.
Interestingly, I compared all our site performance data with their published Q3 performance graph and the similarity was nearly in lockstep. When they were up...so where our sales...when they were down...our sales tank...the reason? When they drop, they can increase pressure on all our sites in an attempt to squeeze the stone. Makes sense. How? They can simply turn up the AI gain. It's likely quite 'magical' and deals with keyword targeting and where the black boxing really kicks in.
Or, maybe it's just because they are the 800lb Gorilla in the room.
I always correlate an earnings miss (which G can monitor in real time) with higher pressure on traffic as it is temporarily diverted to G interests. These anomalies would typically not occur in unfettered natural traffic, as our data from 1996-2010 shows.
While I do appreciate and use their "free" services (in exchange for my souls content and data), what Google really "gets done" best is consistently making themselves insane amounts of profit. If they don't do +20% annually it's cause for shareholder panic.
Unfortunately, they then squander that money into dead end projects that benefit nobody, like Google Glass or self driving cars, this is money that could provide food on our tables, but I digress...
From where we sit,, it just appears SERP traffic changes
behaviorally (ie:turn Zombie) when the master tally is off target. It's like a big profit driven PID control loop with loss as the error signal. This is not speculation. This is observation based on two decades of empirical evidence. In all fairness it's also not stated as fact. Nothing ever can be with a black box.
My observation this week is the same as all others being reported here. Dead traffic and all user Zombie behavior.
With the recent GART glitching, and these traffic/behavior indications, it appears something is brewing again.
Let me consult my OUIJA board.
Here's the Google Q3 report again since it's a page back now. [
cnbc.com...]
When things are good, I'm not reporting...so, yeah, things are not good again.
Apologies for the long windy one.
Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2020
