What has happened?

[Samsam1978]

I have been doing this 17 years and my old site is now back to 2015 levels. Anyone know what the hell is going on, most competitors also the same. Thanks

[CommandDork]

'Back to 2015 levels' as in good? Or back to bad?

If good, congrats! If bad, I feel your pain. Been at it 20 years myself.

[RedBar]

I'd like to go back to 2010 levels, it ain't ever going to happen!

And this is, believe it or not, my 30th year, where the heck did they go? Well into the midnight hour methinks :-)

[Samsam1978]

2015 meaning it is bad, so between now and since Jan 2023 it has been really bad, why are old sites being treated like this? TBH for the first time yesterday I used duckduckgo as I could not find what I wanted on Google and duckduckgo came up with the site straight away. I wonder if regular users are wondering the same.

[Samsam1978]

Do you ever think I will make more money as a consultant? But, I don't think I could ever work for anyone else, even though this is lonely and is painful it brings with it the freedom. I just hope things return at some point and they stop ranking AI content that is robotic, users don't want to read that all the time.

[tangor]

@Samsam1978...

It is what it is/has/become, and no, we'll never go back to what it once was.

These days---if pulling 2015 levels---that's probably good income! G has tightened the pay out the last half dozen years and, as always, each year is LOWER.

Consultancy ventures? Been doing that for a few years, but always with caveats that one cannot control what g will do/change day to day. Needless to say the biz has been "okay", not stellar.

[martinibuster]

@Samsam1978

Are you publishing new pages on the website? Or has it just been sitting still?

[Samsam1978]

@martinibuster Not regularly posting new / updating content though is that required?

[tangor]

Not regularly posting new / updating content though is that required?

New content, freshness, always indicates the current status of sites.

[christianz]

It doesn't matter, however. Google is methodically reducing visibility of all legitimate organic websites that are not insiders or big ad spenders. The quality of content or relevance to search query doesn't matter anymore. It did 15 years ago.

[RedBar]

2010 and the great image theft was the start of the rot and the overt manipulation and it has gone downhill ever since with localisation especially a determining factor.

TBH localisation is a good thing for local users and results and that is who G ostensibly caters for. I use it locally in the UK and my results are impressive however when it comes to national or internation businesses and results it is generally completely the opposite with G all at sea. Yes, I realise that filtering so many global businesses must be difficult however some of the spammy garbage infiltrating its results can be ludicrous most of the time.

[christianz]

When they introduced the EAT (and YMYL before it) concept and started pushing it, I knew it was basically over for the Web. It was when they clearly departed from any kind of quality or merit based ranking and turned into pay-to-play system.

[RedBar]

and turned into pay-to-play system.

This is no critiism of you, it is the reality of what has happened with the www.

G did not invent "pay-to-play", they introdcued their version of classified ads in 2000 however pay-to-play had been trialled some 5 years prior by the then Altavista. How do I know? Because I was the one who instigated it with AV as an experiment. The ad system worked well however it was not that successful simply because of lack of user volume and also lack of trust, even in 1995 people were extremely wary of www scams.

Class ads / pay-to-play was an inevitabillity for many simply as their "way to market" since, as we all know, only 10 blue links can be shown on a 10 link page and if you want to beat your opposition / satisfy the perceived demand, then you have to resort to alternative marketing methods therefore one has to examine what marketing routes were used beore the www and their costs.

Most industries / informational businesses / hobbies have different routes and inevitably cost base and expenditures, however expecting search engines to supply free business leads forever was always wishful thinking. Even hobby sites depend upon links from otherwise like-minded sites, it is their free / low cost way of marketing.

30 years after the launch of the www I am still attending international widget trade fairs, my first trade fair was 1970, and I can tell you now that, forgetting the scamdemic, that most of our leads are still generated at these fairs. What is a major difference though is that we only supply business cards these days, no glossy and expensive printed brochures that are out-of-date before they even go to print meanwhile, as we all know, websites can be updated immediately in realtime.

Yep, the Wild West www was fun until about 2010 but since then I / we have had to cut our cloth a different way however our combined experiences have kept us at the top of our trade. Personally I do not expect our website traffic to grow at all since we are solely a global volume B2B supplier.

[Nutterum]

@Redbar - My first experience with the www was in June 1995 and I was a teenager back then. What a strange ride it has been. Sadly Search as we know it will in my humble opinion sieze to exist in the next 4-5 years. Chat GPT and its contemporaries will make sure of that. So many fortune 500 companies are all in on the tech (I have...ears and eyes in pretty much all the tech/ heavy industry corporation on the list) that it will make your skin crawl. I can't go in to much details to not expose anyone or anything, but what I can say is we are talking are hundreds of billions allocated to the tech when you do the napkin math. Most companies esp. the major public ones are having bi-weekly "How to integrate AI and keep Wall Street at bay" meetings.

This will affect search. Hell it already transformed Bing in a significant enough way. And this is only the storm on the horizon. The next "big boy AI solution" is to integrate these bots in to the shopping experience. Immagine recursive suggested conversational search for products in Amazon or clothes in Zalando. I have seen with my eyes engineering team trying to force "good" outcomes from search conversations like : "I am attending a wedding and the dress code is green summer. I need dress and shoes that fit." and while typing this questions the AI is giving suggestions to add size, preferences etc. in the prompt itself.

In conclusion and I am sure you are aware of this, is to expand the Brand/close to brand research space as much as we can . It will be the only way to achieve relevance moving forward. All the other websites will slowly die out of profitability and their content will be gobbled and spewed out .

The real question then will become : "well who the hell will create the new content then?!" - This I cannot answer yet. Maybe the product companies themselves? Who knows. The future for sure will be interesting.

[RedBar]

@Nutterum

The real question then will become : "well who the hell will create the new content then?!" - This I cannot answer yet. Maybe the product companies themselves? Who knows.

Insofar as my widget company is concerned basically I have two types of customers:

1. Regulat buyers of 1 to 30 container loads of widgets per month. The smaller quantity buyers are usually large B2C retailers, the larger buyers are B2B, this is surprisingly similar all over the world. The widgets we supply are always of our own production in-house, we rarely out-source.

2. Project specifiers for hotels, shopping malls, office complexes, multiple huge residential developments, massive external groundworks etc ... These are always supplied in conjunction with suppliers from other countries and we supply widgets in either primary, secondary or tertiary format to the nominated contractor(s) for them to fit, install and complete the works. For many years this has entailed not only out-sourcing but also integration of computer systems hence we are usually at the forefront of any new developments simply in case it can be used effectively.

Can / will AI be of any benefit for my industry worldwide? I have absolutely no doubt that at some point someone will create something that will be useful for the industry but, as yet, I have seen nothing.

Can / will AI take-over creative design currently performed by architects / specifiers etc?
Can / will AI take-over raw resource extraction?
Can / will AI take-over actual production at all stages without human assistance?
Can / will AI take-over the actual development and construction process bearing in mind there is a worldwide shortage of fully-skilled people to do this now?

There are many, many other can / will questions that I doubt I shall ever see the answers to and this is purely for my industry, many other industries are researching the same way to see if / how they could possibly benefit from this technology.

One thing we can be assurred of, some of it will be an utter disaster and some will be an oustanding success, where I / you / we are at that specific time remans to be seen but what I do know at present is that my websites are required to keep many global users up-to-date with what we can and cannot do.

[Nutterum]

Big sites like yours and the ones I am consulting (I specialize in big in-house e-commerce / informational / B2B sites for large companies, there aint many of us out there believe it or not) will not feel as much heat, specifically the B2B sites, yeah they aint feeling a thing in the near term. All those billions of small information or mom-and-dad websites, yeah those are going to die in short order. It will be the mass extinction of the internet entities I bet my good leg on that.

[oldog]

@Nutterum...."All those billions of small information or mom-and-dad websites, yeah those are going to die in short "
I didn't knew that in this forum we have Nostradamus as well....lol...( I see you joined in 2014...way too young ..I understand ;-) )

[explorador]

What has happened?

I don't know, been doing this for 23 years and I have no clue on what's happening.
But, depending on your niche, word of mouth keeps working. Ads? I'm not convinced via other people experiences (I have never paid for ads). And social media? it works as long as it's something that requires little reading, social media is not exactly tied to high IQ.

Constant posting and satisfying user anxiety/obsession seems to do the trick. The websites in my niche at the top of the results post many articles per day, even if there is little useful information and it's just the repetition (diff wording) of the title with some pictures. It's like... they take a decent article and tear it down into pieces to build 5-7, short spans of attention involved. I made some tests with social media and wasn't happy, anyway I got some articles to become popular, lots of sharing, but I noticed almost nobody was reading completely.

In case you might be interested on watching a video with some "explanations", I recently came across an interview with Brett Cooper, she somehow hit it with the Daily Wire YT channel (Dave Shapiro), please ignore the names / personalities and political angles. She was interviewed on the show The Iced Tea Hour Clips (that's how you can find it, I won't post the link). The reason I'm sharing this, is because she explains things that don't make sense to me, the interviewers ask her "whyyyy?" and she explains via experience and confirmation what works today: it's lots of colors, text all over the content, and sounds, everything like... every 5 seconds. The Interviewers explain they hate this and doesn't contribute to anything, but she says it's what the audiences prefer, and includes herself on liking it. This is about video, you but can easily interpolate it.