Google Update: September 2023

[Micha]

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5092521.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 7:25 pm on Sep 14, 2023 (cst -5)

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And the next update is running ... [status.search.google.com ]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:27 am (utc) on Sep 15, 2023]
[edit reason] Update deserved it's own thread [/edit]

[christianz]

@Dalnoon

It's not a generic word. Its concatenation of words that doesn't make too much sense on its own. I can't say I am seeing tons of keywords like that but I do see them and I also have much higher direct traffic that a random useless MFA site would get. It's very old site in narrow niche and my (not too big) audience does use google to search within it (by adding its name like reddit).

I can't say this invalidates your thesis, because I haven't researched what sites are replacing my keywords. They could very well have much more branded searches, some of them definitely do.

[Micha]

The heavy handed German censorship is relevant here

There is no strict censorship in Germany, on the contrary. There are rules here regarding data and privacy that seem strict when viewed from the US, but they protect people (and since I run a news site in Germany, I know the laws quite well). To suggest similarities with China, by the way, is complete nonsense.

But the topic is very complex and does not need to be discussed further here.

Regarding Google: of course the company tries to adapt to countries, in China also differently than in Germany or the USA, but that doesn't change the way websites are weighted. In Germany, too, it currently looks like what most people here report. Search results are barely usable, lots of old articles, etc. (although I've seen rather little from Reddit so far).

[Dalnoon]

@christianz, ok, thanks for your input

[renatovieira]

Huge drop today... Here We Go Again :-D

[ichthyous]

The heavy handed German censorship is relevant here, but I don't want to delve into discussions comparing censorship in Germany vs China vs Russia. They are all very similar.

Let us apply a bit of historical accuracy here. Germany has laws regarding right-wing hate speech against minority groups, as the right-wing led the country to dictatorship and destruction not so long ago. Russia and China have laws punishing speech that the regime deems to be even minimally critical or threatening...a vast difference. Germany is one of the most open and truly democratic societies on earth, Russia and China are authoritarian regimes run by dictators.

Google and other tech platforms have the right to police threatening speech and misinformation on their services as that directly alienates users and advertisers. Look what has happened to Twitter after all controls were removed and the right-wing hate speech and fake news proliferated, it has turned into a trash can and has lost 90%+ of its value

[BlueEyes82]

Germany is the most meticulous about data protection law in the entire EU. It's not uncommon to overshoot the mark. Unfortunately, when it comes to laws, people often don't think about the consequences or reactions of websites. Now always sites offer:

A: Accept all cookies and advertising
B: A subscription for advertising and cookie-free reading

Otherwise you will no longer be able to use the site at all.
Large closed networks like Facebook and YouTube, which reach 80% of daily users, are never really affected by this anyway.

Personally, I think data protection is good, but in Germany it has lost all measure and benefit.

[mosxu]

Twitter has not lost 90% of its value more like lost 90% of bots!

Elon should stop other platforms from using bots as unfair competition!

[ichthyous]

A: Accept all cookies and advertising
B: A subscription for advertising and cookie-free reading

Otherwise you will no longer be able to use the site at all.

I have never seen this anywhere. Every site I visit offers the ability to opt out of specific cookies and data collection and customize your options. I usually reject all and still continue using the site. It is an annoyance to have to do it each time, but you can't have it both ways.

[Conro]

@ichthyous accept all cookie or pay a subscription for don't view ads is possible for the gdpr why the site offer the alternative for view the site. 1 accept all cookie 2 pay

[EditorialGuy]

To me, it seems this was a brand-driven update, meaning, if your website/brand isn't being actively searched by users, you get punished.

Our informational travel site has done well in the HCU (so far, anyway), and we're a mom-and-pop operation.

[RedBar]

@Conro

I'm confused by what you are saying. I have several large German customers and have many German visitors every day. They all access my sites without any issue, they do not have to accept cookies, they do not have to pay.

Are you referring to some other specific German site(s)?

[Conro]

@RedBar no. In Italy the principal big site of news use this system, for example you can see the site corriere. it

[RedBar]

@Conro ... That's completely normal for many sites accepting cookies, am I missing something?

[ichthyous]

Big drops today for USA (-26%), Canada (-61%), Australia (-67%) and Germany (-40%) at 2pm. Clearly the strong traffic pattern of early Sept. is over as all of the anglophone countries are perpetually lagging now. German traffic was unusually high earlier this month and is now reverting.

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

Crazy spikey day again after a 63.5% day Sunday, so far today 271.5%, these page view spreads are npt "normal" for me.

[renatovieira]

I also see traffic spikes, then cliffs. Today the SERP's are crazy... AdSense on the floor, I smell G's movements.

[l1fejosh]

+34% increase in USA traffic.
-27% decrease in Canadian traffic

We are based in Canada and we're seeing an increase in USA traffic and decrease in Canadian traffic.

We also just got #0 featured snippet for USA traffic as well...

I'm not mad at growing in the USA, it was one of our goals - but we are destabilizing in our own country.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Traffic has been more or less stable today. With a rather nice spike at both 5pm and 8pm UK time. Most of my traffic is from the USA.

[ins3rt]

This is my reality right know: [i.ibb.co...]

30% drop.

Spanish website.

[RubicCubed]

30% drop.

We experienced a much harder fall then this just from all the ads Google put in the serps months ago. Combine this with the horrific HCU, and it's a complete disaster in Google. The only thing saving us is the increased sales from other search engines.

[ins3rt]

Do you guys think there will be a "rollback"?

[pavf6]

People writing good quality content have lost their enthusiasm after looking AI generated spam sites copying and ranking higher day by day.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic is way up but it is not converting anymore. Seeing some of our informational sites getting more traffic. This we put a lot of work in. Old sites with new fresh content need a long waiting time to see some positiv results (>6 month) while new trash/back hat websites get instant push to the top for 3 to 4 weeks. When they then get burned by google they move to new domains and get the push again.
IMO it is bad to punish established sites (more than 10 years) and reward new sites.

[RareBit]

Crazy question possibly? Does Joe User realise how bad G is or is it simply us techie geeks?

I think the fact we have seen a rise in users searching for [term + reddit] says it all. I have had to do it myself when looking for information as G has either picked the wrong intent and shown sales sites when I am looking for specific information or just shown page after page of generic 'top 10 but never seen or owned the product' sites..

[RedBar]

For my global site Monday ended with my second highest day of the year at 284.5% however traffic came to an abrupt halt at UK 20.00. After 11 hours today it's at 30.5% with PVs to uniques reverting to almost 1:1, Monday was 1:6.1

Utter inconsistency seems to be G's delivery at the moment.

[Nutterum]

OK, guys,

As some of you know me already , I always take my time analyzing the impact for a week or two before I make any conclusions on GOOGLE UPDATES.

This time however I was prepared with a few content tests that started running in mid July. I had 15 Category pages with variety content - total of 1.5k words below the products that offered helpful tips, combinations, trends. Due to the nature of products (apparel) the combinations were paragraphs dedicated to other categories and how to combine different apparel items.

OK, so the second group has categories that still have the same amount of text but the content was created to provide as much info for that specific category (say everything about jeans in a practical way) and had only 1 interlink leading to another category and had a larger FAQ section.

So after the latest update hit, my variety content categories tanked BAD. As in from average 7.6 spot to 54. THey died.

The focused content categories improved quite a bit and gathered ~40% more longtail keywords going from 7.8 in SERP to 5.4 .

All in all Google prefers as close to the title and H1 focused content as possible. Total clicks were 14000 and impressions measured were around 1.6 million so the data is statistically sufficient.

[Martin Ice Web]

@nutterum,, that would 100% match my experience with serps in our niche, only that very low content sites rule where Title=h1=content.
Whenever a site has "helpful content" aside the title and h1 it tanked.

[christianz]

I think web users will soon have to "subscribe" to specific websites that they know are real and useful. Via RRS or Favorites or otherwise. Because Google is losing battle against huge wave of AI generated spam. I can't blame them for that because I wouldn't know what to do either, apart from creating a small search engine with human curated websites only (directory based).

Right now Google is in panic mode. They only show their own sites (YouTube), followed by short whitelist of big media and big tech sites, and what follows after that are forums (I actually really like the idea that niche forums are getting some traffic, they are awesome!) and after certain point its like a sharp boundary after which its 100% generated spam. Often hosted on random letter subdomains on hacked "authority" sites. It is quite comical to do long tail searches with Google and scrolling down to position 20+. If you search for how to change the air filter on some specific car you get a very lengthy technical article (AI gnerated) with lots of ads that is hosted on "asdfjfhnv" subdomain on some long forgotten (and hacked) NGO website or "qwogdhh" subdomain on some lawyers personal site.

Bing/DDG is exactly the same. They seem to love those gen AI "articles" even more.

If you are the poor innocent soul that wrote the actual article or collectively the poor and innocent webmaster souls that created a corpus of articles like that from which LLMs are now trained, you will NEVER EVER get any visibility. You will be valued exactly the same as 1000 AI spun copies of your work.

Today there is zero correlation with content quality, originality and ranking and publishing quality content on web is just about the dumbest and least fruitful idea anyone could have.

I think at this stage it is only worthwhile creating generative SEO content, but in order to get the same amount of traffic that you used to get you have to spin a lot more. Running faster to stay in place kind of thing.

I have never made SEO content because it is depressing, but it might be the last thing worth trying as far as publishing on post-AI web goes.

[superclown2]

I cannot remember seeing such poor search results in any search engine in the last 20+ years as I saw this morning. Even a certain popular review site was riding high for a service that it neither creates nor promotes, with none of the search terms anywhere to be seen. It was as though the results had been picked pretty well at random.

Young Google was great; in between it's not been bad; but now it seems to be approaching senility.

Meanwhile DDG is giving me bang up to date search results for even the most obscure terms I an entering. Perhaps MS should drop Bing and put in a bid to buy them.

[christianz]

Meanwhile DDG is giving me bang up to date search results for even the most obscure terms I an entering

In my experience, for obscure (long tail) terms they are loaded full with AI spam, unfortunately. But still they are better because I don't have to scroll 1000 pixels of YouTube every time.