January 2024 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5098123.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 9:24 am on Jan 2, 2024 (utc 0)

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Happy New Year

I hope you survived New Year's Eve well and that your websites did too.

Apparently the upswing continues, I continue to see a slight improvement in the ranking and the number of readers. (on average +11.2 percent more per day at the moment).

It may be slow, but I hope it continues.

[saladtosser]

"Yes we still need links but G today.."

You may need Google but Google doesn't need you......... anymore...

[NirthaK]

Has anyone else the problem that impressions and positions are dropping since the 1st of January? In the end of December traffic increased but now completely crashed.

Has anyone recovered from HCU?

K.

[EditorialGuy]

Nevertheless the whole EAT concept is where things have been shifting for a while and thus also impacts the whole link thing Bloggerist was asking about.

Trouble is, EAT or (EEAT, as it's now called) has yet to fulfill Google's hopes or expectations. At this point, it's more of a goal than a reality.

Still, I remain optimistic in one respect: Somebody has to index the Web and make its valuable content accessible to searchers, and I don't think Google is ready to cede that role to a current or future competitor.

[javelin]

Still, I remain optimistic in one respect: Somebody has to index the Web and make its valuable content accessible to searchers, and I don't think Google is ready to cede that role to a current or future competitor.

Definitely agree, but unfortunately real authors or content creators are being counted as lost to their cause. I wish this were not the case whether at the hand of future AI or monetization goals. In the end I am afraid that G will make the biggest plagiarizing heist in human history with its index.

Anyway...... we still do what we do until we can break the beast.

@NirthaK I have only seen an increase in all metrics since the 1st. Its an information based site for education.

[Bloggerist]

@NirthaK it has been a nightmare of a cycle of minute recovery and then loss. You are not alone

[Micha]

The ranking development can now be compared to a horse race, one day many out of the top ten, the next day back in again. The traffic itself continues to develop well for me, even if I don't really understand it, because according to the data it should actually be the other way around.

@Speer I agree with you, real authors are being pushed into the background, but that won't last forever. You see it with ChatGPT, the New York Time lawsuit, now authors again, etc. If it develops like this, it will happen with Google too. I think Google overestimates its power and thinks it can bend everything in its favor with money and good lawyers, but it's a gamble and the stop sign will come eventually, just a matter of time in my opinion.

[NirthaK]

@javelin My traffic and impressions are online going down.

[bebopandrocksteady]

The concept of "EAT" has very little credibility when Google ranks random Reddit threads, forums, and social media. Type in a medical query and you're sure to get a Reddit thread with some random person giving out medical advice. Google is probably telling webmasters to do EEAT so they can train their AI with good information. Then trash the search results so SGE can come and save the day. It's all adding up, especially their shill professor from Wharton recently making silly comments [seroundtable.com...]

[christianz]

@bebopandrocksteady

The problem with highly EATEN sites and reason why Google is promoting forums (and Reddit etc) is that they do tend to be sterile, manicured, soulless, not coming from perspective of real world persons (like the searcher himself), made for SEO etc.

Sometimes it may be better to promote those manicured sites (health advice perhaps), but many other cases it is not. And people leave Google or desperately append "reddit" (because they don't know actual forums exist too).

I personally think EAT is horrible and should be abandoned entirely.

[javelin]

What is interesting with the fall 23 updates leading into Jan 24 shifts, is the movement of my newest site which is 100% EAT based. The site is new, approximately 2 years old as of now, near 500k words in its pages so a few hundred blog posts. This site is really my experiment, non income generating, educational based material.

It has 2 links pointing to it which I have organized, one from another site of mine which is related, another link from a collaborators site. All other links are organically given and most are useless.

Keywords were researched and used yet the best performance came from merely writing on topics which surround keywords more than the keywords themselves. Also over the past year, especially from summer leading into fall the increase in rank, traffic and dwell time on page increased significantly.

By Dec there was a decline but nothing to cause concern. Jan 24 now coming back to previous levels and I see other metrics improving thus the overall statistics should also improve.

The point to this site was as I said an experiment / hobby to play with and just see what would happen or could happen. It has been a bit surprising. A lot can be said for the content and thought which goes into the site as being its greatest influence. So I have to say that it would appear that the EAT concept does work, albeit it is quite slow. It is not a method moving forward that will drive big numbers or be anything that Google claims it to be this year. Nevertheless it definitely does hold an impact.

[ichthyous]

What is it with Google not being able to show a correct thumbnail for the site link these days? I have pages ranking #1 for competitive searches, but the traffic has vanished because Google is showing a blurry image of my site's logo instead of the image stated in the schema data. That implies that the user will have a bad user experience so the just don't click the link.

I just checked and several of the top 10 ranking sites had this same issue of the site image being a blurry logo, some others had no site image at all, and the #2 spot still had a big beautiful image carousel. This seems to be the norm now for the last couple of months and it causes people to skip over the link and move on to the listing with better images. Is anyone else having this problem with their pages?

[RubicCubed]

reason why Google is promoting forums (and Reddit etc) is that they do tend to be sterile, manicured, soulless, not coming from perspective of real world persons (like the searcher himself), made for SEO etc.

I feel forums ranking in Google's serps is training to prepare users for AI responses to searches instead of a list of pages. Right now when a user goes to a forum from Google, they are presented a threaded response that's a similar format to what is already seen with AI. Browsing through the threaded forums Google is ranking, to find what we are looking for, is a chore in itself and a very bad user experience. When Google goes full in on AI, with answers to questions instead of returning a list of pages, users will look to Google as a hero for cleaning up the intentional mess they now have. What better way would Google use to train users, and provide an excuse to us, for the leap from 10 blue links in the serps to none at all? Very bad times are ahead for us IMO.

[vlexo]

Forums are just opinions which may or may not be fact or fiction; they'd have to do much to figure the truth from non-truth, whereas general websites are trying to tell the facts/truth.

There's just too many differing opinions on forums to be useful I'd like to think? How do they go about using forums as part of the response? Did they need to actually improve the positions of forums to generate these answers? Can they have no showed these answers to users as part of a response without increasing the rankings of Reddit/forums?

[BlueEyes82]

I'm going to take a two-pronged approach for now. Since ancient pages with little design and a lot of text without maintenance have reached their highest levels since the HCU update (Sistrix), I will be editing them again after four years without maintenance. The pages look horrible to users and don't offer up-to-date content, but if Google currently rates them better, I have to make my pages and content worse.

[Micha]

By the way, something is coming our way again [seroundtable.com ]

[superclown2]

By the way, something is coming our way again

They've had more than 20 years to learn how to deal with obvious spam but still haven't managed it. Don't hold your breath.

[tom_010101]

One of the interesting news since 08.2023...

[Micha]

Don't hold your breath.

Do you believe that? I would say it should be done, because knowing Google, it cannot be ruled out that it will make the current situation even worse.

[javelin]

Do you believe that? I would say it should be done, because knowing Google, it cannot be ruled out that it will make the current situation even worse.

The day that they actually succeed at this is the day my email inbox is free of spam.

[superclown2]

Over Christmas and New Year my clicks and conversions were better than they have been for years. Now they are back to the new, abysmal normal. The reason? Google staff are back at work extracting as much money from the Internet (and the general public) as they can.

This will not stop until regulators force them to act. Roll on the EU Digital Marketing Act, I have no faith in the USA legal system.

[vgasoft]

Spammers make money for themselves, employees for google bosses. Google will never beat the spammers :)

[Martin Ice Web]

May i be allowed to add that AI is a machine learning algo. It needs constant input from sources. If new topics coming up, AI is stupid like a stone. So without "compelling" websites covering the topics there are no AI answers. google couldnīt be so stupid to kill serps in favour of AI or could they?

[bebopandrocksteady]

nothing new here: OpenAI (and google!) admits it's impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted materials: [engadget.com...]

[superclown2]

OpenAI (and google!) admits it's impossible to train generative AI without copyrighted materials:

That's pretty much what Google did right from the start, building a business based on the copyrighted work of others. We didn't object then because we got a fair bit of business in return. Things are different now though and they consider all our creations as belonging to them.

[christianz]

Traffic very weak since yesterday.

[renatovieira]

I notice intense movement in the SERPs. Lots of volatility. Something going on...

[waynne]

I did some casual research watching how people search and use google from their phones. I asked a few questions with varying need for factual answers or medical expert opinion and in most cases they were answered without even clicking through to a site. (4 people & 5 search questions each) only 3 resulted in a non ad click through to a website and this was for a tutorial guide on how to "make something", a YouTube video providing a review of the item and a product listing on Amazon. The ads performed well with about 4 clicks from each person over the trial period. I noted that older people tended to click through to websites either on ads or organically, younger people skimmed the info they wanted and moved on.

The PAA section which keeps popping up and expanding contains just enough text to answer the query. It does worry me that without context some of this could be bad advice.

We are moving to a world where people will not use "search engine" but "answer engines" it has been a long time coming and when ai arrives it will even worse than it is now.

There seems to be no future in the traditional content website, if you don't offer something truly unique or entertaining then people will have no reason to visit.

I don't blame Google for this, it is the way people are changing the way they find information and they seem to prefer ease and speed over accuracy and reputation of the source.

[londrum]

i'm not quite as pessimistic. wikipedia is basically an answer site with all the info you could ever want, but nobody thinks to use it exclusively. I'm guessing it will be the same with google eventually. people will always want a variety of opinions

it's a bit bizarre really if you think about it. their whole reason for being is to give people easy access to bazillions of websites, but now they think it's a good idea to limit them to just one... themselves

it's like a successful supermarket suddenly deciding to hide all their stock apart from their own home brand. people will soon get bored of that

[EditorialGuy]

their whole reason for being is to give people easy access to bazillions of websites, but now they think it's a good idea to limit them to just one... themselves

And that could be their downfall. Surely they're aware of the risk: If Google Search doesn't provide easy access to Web sites, a competitor (probably a new one, not a legacy search engine) will.

[javelin]

I did some casual research watching how people search and use google from their phones. I asked a few questions with varying need for factual answers or medical expert opinion and in most cases they were answered without even clicking through to a site. (4 people & 5 search questions each) only 3 resulted in a non ad click through to a website and this was for a tutorial guide on how to "make something", a YouTube video providing a review of the item and a product listing on Amazon. The ads performed well with about 4 clicks from each person over the trial period. I noted that older people tended to click through to websites either on ads or organically, younger people skimmed the info they wanted and moved on.

That is way too small of a sample to really tell anything. In reality this method of searching will put Googles bottom line in the toilet. Without dwell time you do not get conversion. This information is out dated now anyway. Have you seen what the kids are doing these days? They are using apps more than anything, Google is for school.

My kid is a computer science major and for them Google is as old as Facebook... its for old people lol. One day it will be the home shopping network compared to whats coming. The question will be, how do we fit into the new model they are creating?