October 2023 Google Search Observations

[Cyril TechWebsites]

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System: The following 3 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5093320.htm [webmasterworld.com] by not2easy - 11:10 am on Oct 1, 2023 (atl -4)

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Seeing further drastical drop on Saturday. I stopped producing new content and updating the old content. There is no sense anymore for me, feeling awful to say that, but my website was fully destroyed with the "helpful" update.

[Conro]

@Cyril TechWebsites That's exactly what they want from Google - for you to stop, so they can promote their artificial intelligence. Among these low-quality results that Google currently provides, it will seem like a great thing. We just need to think about how to get rid of Google now and sell advertising on our websites directly. To retain users, we can use newsletters and social media for the time being. Are there any other methods that can attract direct users, do you know?"

[superclown2]

This update is the biggest joke of an update I've seen so far

If you read the bits of evidence from the current trial that has been released (despite Google's attempts to block it) it is clear that they habitually 're-adjust' the SERPs in order to hit earnings targets.

I never believed in the past that they would deliberately degrade the search quality in order to increase their profits but my faith in that has been destroyed.

I see they have sacked hundreds of recruiters so they won't be hiring fresh talent in the near future. Google's last attempt to squeeze as much money from the public purse before the axe falls, perhaps?

And no, I don't subscribe to the theory that they want to replace the SERPs with Bard (which so far is an abject failure as far as I can see; I don't know anyone who uses it and all the talk here in the UK is about ChatGTP. Google's 'me-too' hardly gets a mention).

[RedBar]

We just need to think about how to get rid of Google now and sell advertising on our websites directly.

IIRC this idea was also proposed in the mid-noughties however then, as now, there was nobody to organise it, no webmaster organisation, obviously nothing became of it even though there were some good suggestions. The professioinal webmaster community then was much larger than it is now with many having learnt code and coming here for assistance when something did't work.

The vast majority of sites these days are built in WordPress plug n play, period.

Google has been for quite some time a class ads website, understand that and see if you can work within its boundaries and rules, if you can't then it's time to get out and do something more productive and profitable.

[mosxu]

@micha

[twitter.com...]

“Our best shot at making the quarter is if we get an injection of at least % ideally % quires ASAP from Chrome”

Please correct me if did not understand but is Chrome creating the traffic somehow when revenue is not achieved?

The percentage has been edited but how bad is it?

[edited by: mosxu at 5:27 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2023]

[christianz]

Just blocked both ChatGPT and Bard crawlers via robots.txt (had already blocked CommonCrawl). I know they can theoretically ignore it in sneaky ways, but, if for nothing else, it made me feel better.

There is also zero downside as those chat systems don't and won't bring in any monetizable human traffic. And it only seems like a fair exchange for the wonderful HCU "update".

[ichthyous]

Just blocked both ChatGPT and Bard crawlers via robots.txt (had already blocked CommonCrawl). I know they can theoretically ignore it in sneaky ways, but, if for nothing else, it made me feel better.

There is also zero downside as those chat systems don't and won't bring in any monetizable human traffic. And it only seems like a fair exchange for the wonderful HCU "update".

I am considering this myself, as my entire site has already been scraped and is being used in generative AI images. But I do worry about losing referrals to my site from Whatsapp using Meta AI assistant now. So far I could not find a single reference to my site in all the chats I tried, so perhaps it won't be a big loss. I also think that AI will not end up being the whole ballgame, but just an add-on...it's very clear that people want the most current info, and AI isn't providing it yet.

[ichthyous]

Massive drops across whole swaths of semantically related terms today. I just checked and many of my main landing pages are down 25%-70%...huge drops for every variation of the terms. Meanwhile I have not lost any rank at all, and in fact am ranking higher on some of them. Even terms with #1 ranking have lost the traffic this entire week. Not one new conversion for 8 days now. This looks like a repeat of the tactics Google used in 2022...all the quality traffic just vanishes, and is replaced by sudden surges of traffic, traffic to obscure low-level pages, and visitors which do not convert at all.

Another observation solely based on my customers and conversions...it seems that when the stock market is higher business and traffic are higher, but when the market drops (like it has in September) the visits seem to drop and so do sales. It's the "wealth effect". I sell very high value items so that only applies to the type of customer looking to drop thousands of dollars, not small sales.

[christianz]

But I do worry

You can stop worrying. 26% of top 1000 websites are already blocking these bots. It's a no-brainer.

[originality.ai...]

Ability to block Bard is a recent feature that literally appeared only 2 days ago. I was really looking forward to it and my prayers have been answered.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - I see a situation very similar to yours. My main keywords and terms are better positioned than before. I have several terms in first place in the SERPs, and the traffic simply disappeared...

Yesterday I had the biggest drop in traffic in the history of my main website.

I didn't have any terms or keywords demoted. So I have no idea what's going on in G.

Today it seems, "feels" like it's going to get a little better.

This fusion of AI with Search is going to give us a lot of headaches...

[Fluff_Nutz]

All nice over here right now. My website traffic is increasing. But I'm sure there will be an October update somewhere to destroy it all. I'm also contemplating blocking AI. Because its not just Google that we are blocking but content scrapers too. Right? They are just as bad.

Also, now that I have moved onto other platforms to gain better consistent traffic. That is actually working too, for now. Traffic was great throughout September. I'll not get too overly excited but seriously since October 2022 I'll admit its been tough.

[jinxed]

20% increase in organic traffic yesterday, seems to be holding today.

In my vertical it looks like a big boost to .edu domains.

[Micha]

@mosxu

Please correct me if did not understand but is Chrome creating the traffic somehow when revenue is not achieved?

Honestly, I still have no idea what Google means by this.

And in general, supposedly my website is growing according to Xovi, but the traffic is rather mixed, Friday was great, Saturday totally mau and today goes so.

[mosxu]

@micha

Thanks for sharing anyway! Injection of ? Any other options?

“Our best shot at making the quarter is if we get an injection of at least % ideally % quires ASAP from Chrome”

[superclown2]

Honestly, I still have no idea what Google means by this.

Simple. They have revenue targets to meet. They get extra money from Android, which they control, by pushing the organic SERPs further down with their junk, and flooding out even more ads, but to get even more they need to do the same on Chrome, which they also control. The problem is that they can only do so much without destroying their credibility as a so-called search engine completely. Did you see a difference a few weeks ago between their displays on Chrome, and the other browsers they pay to make them the default? The ones I saw were so at variance that I switched to FF which I never dreamed I would do; the huge PAA, taking up a full page of my desktop monitor and other routine googlespam on Chrome wasridiculous. I have no doubt that they did that because they needed, once again, to push the envelope as far as they could, and they reversed it because either it had achieved their aims, or they felt they had pushed it too far.

There are two separate parts of Google; the search section which tries to get the best possible results, and the advertising side that wants to satisfy Wall Street by posting ever increasing profits. The two are not compatible and if either side pushes too hard it could cause the company severe problems.

Result? A steadily deteriorating search experience for visitors, less money to finance good websites and ever lower ROI for their advertisers. Sergey and Bryn predicted this years ago when they warned that advertising could wreck search. How will they continue to post higher profits every quarter? Why, by a further reduction in headcount and other cost saving measures, and a continuing deterioration of their search quality, until the golden goose is well and truly burned to a crisp.

[RubicCubed]

The problem is that they can only do so much without destroying their credibility as a so-called search engine completely

By the looks of things, and comments from all over the web, Google has already has a public relations problem. Those who made Google (us), are being seriously mistreated and disrespected by what Google is displaying in the search results in place of quality pages. Advertisers, who now know Google was ripping them off, are also on edge, reduced their budgets or completely stopped their campaigns. I could only imagine what Google's users think after seeing some of the crap we're all seeing.

[HUnch]

In my niche some of the websites ranking on first page are redirected to #*$! sites which is just sad… very sad.. they are not rewarding the valuable sites and just showing crap in the search.

[Conro]

I'm reading the comments of some "SEO professionals" on Twitter, and it makes me laugh. I can't believe there are people who trust these individuals who are just there to take your money and don't mention the Google SERP full of ads and PAA at the top, and they don't even mention that Google search is no longer precise but generic. I hope people understand and don't waste their money.

[BlueEyes82]

In addition to the problems with high positions of the advertisements, search queries for large brands such as "Vodafone" now show 8 (!) pages of the company before any other website is displayed. Before the update there were a maximum of 3-4 results for the brand page.

[Conro]

@BlueEyes82 a professional seo can help you in this :-D

[Micha]

@Superclown2

Did you see a difference a few weeks ago between their displays on Chrome, and the other browsers they pay to make them the default

That's interesting, I just compared the two and you're right, there is a pretty significant difference.

[Razorllama]

A further -15% ever since Friday here. My Semrush and Ahrefs dashboards show an additional plummet in keywords/rankings.

The ride never ends, huh.

[Martin Ice Web]

since 2 hours we are facing a 80% drop. Yesterday traffic was very high. Lots of conversions. Unusual for a sunday. especially with the sunny weather yesterday.

[BigKat]

Looking at our traffic, it continues its decline. In the SERPS I see what others are witnessing - a rise in Reddit, Quora, forums and the like.

Does anyone else feel Google is promoting Reddit, Quora and forums in the SERPS to "train" users to embrace results that are discussions? I can see Google doing this to prepare users for the conversational results that SGE will produce for queries. If this is the case, it's going to get real ugly very quickly for a lot of us.

[HUnch]

@BigKat
Or google just messed up this update… on twitter and reddit many users are now complaining about the crapy results G is showing in the search. Many are moving to other search engines to get better answers. If G do not resolve this issue soon then people will permanently move to other search engines soon.

[ichthyous]

Looking at our traffic, it continues its decline. In the SERPS I see what others are witnessing - a rise in Reddit, Quora, forums and the like.

I just read something about this elsewhere, a blog post that I happened to stumble across by a blogger with tons of traffic and who supposedly makes millions from affiliate links, training courses etc. They were complaining about a catastrophic decline in traffic and the rise of Reddit and Quora.

Another article mentioned that people are searching for "reddit" because they think the user responses are more valid than blogs and articles which are spun out with SEO content to please Google. In other words, people are not trusting the results from Google are authentic anymore and so they just seek answers that they know are coming from real people.

With the rise of AI generated content this problem is only going to get worse as the AI is going to amplify inaccurate information based on previously written AI articles and poorly fact checked content. Nobody is talking about this that I have seen, and if I significant number of sites use tags to block their REAL content from being scraped by AI bots then the pool of available data is going to shrink. I blocked ALL of them on my site today. I have image data and I see that I had already blocked CCBot and Chat-GPT User and my images were still scraped by the thousands. The lawsuits are coming by the thousands, and I intend to join in.

I also think that we are going to see more frequent updates from Google now as it tries to deal with AI generated content. The rest of us are just along for the ride. Google is at cross purposes by trying to compete on the AI front, which only hastens the decline of its traditional search model. Google will try to manage the process so that it gains more from AI than it loses from search, but that will be very difficult.

[BigKat]

@HUnch

I don't think Google messed up and believe what we're seeing is purposeful. How else would you prepare and train users to perform searches to expect an AI generated response with no organic links to external sites?

@ichthyous

if I significant number of sites use tags to block their REAL content from being scraped by AI bots then the pool of available data is going to shrink.

Unless you can stop all scrapers, then those pages may be scraped and posted where ChatGPT and Bard AI will find them to crawl and obtain the content for their use. This is the reason why my company isn't doing this.

[ichthyous]

Unless you can stop all scrapers, then those pages may be scraped and posted where ChatGPT and Bard AI will find them to crawl and obtain the content for their use. This is the reason why my company isn't doing this.

I'm sure this will happen, but there is a reason that all of these AI companies have introduced robots.txt directives so quickly, and that is to avoid the torrent of legal action coming their way. AI is by no means a slam dunk, they will need to find a way to monetize it before it quickly becomes a liability in terms of legal bills, settlements and judgments. Also, if you are blocking scrapers explicitly in your robots.txt and your work is still being scraped and included it only strengthens your legal case that you tried to stop the action but it occurred anyway. I don't see any benefit to my site by allowing all these scrapers to use my own images to compete against me. And now they are releasing algorithms to blow up low-res images quite effectively and will start selling services to create high resolution AI generated content based on low-res scraped data. No thanks, not my work. The way I see it, the text on my site isn't going to be featured prominently in AI content so I have little to lose by blocking them.

[Helix Online]

According to SEMrush, I'm still losing far more keywords per day than gaining. This has been going on since September 18th. Even after the update finished, I've lost some #1 rankings to high-authority sites.

Google recommends that we should fix or remove unhelpful content. So should we update all posts that got affected? Is anyone here updating their posts that got spanked by Google?

The posts that outranked me are not better than mine, they have just better site authority. But I guess that is irrelevant since my site is "unhelpful" now.

[ichthyous]

@Helix Why should your site rank higher than much higher authority sites for these terms? Domain authority and page authority is a major part of the algorithm and always has been. Work on increasing your authority and do not delete good quality content. Eventually it will rise as your authority rises.