March 2024 Google Search Observations

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Over the years, Google's principle seems to have shifted from its original "Don't be evil" to "Be a pure evil"... I guess if some authorities or government will stop it? They are just stealing our content, destroying the Internet prioritizing user-generated content (UGC) pages with a lack of quality and expertise, destroying teams and content creators behind the websites.

A lot of you are saying that they are after money. But what's their goal for the future? What result will they have in 2 or 3 years more? Internet will die, it's obvious that Reddit forum's pages aren't answering the majority of people's searches. What will they do when no one will continue publishing and updating content? Aren't they face a deep stagnation because of this? I just can't get what they are doing - I understand they are trying to steal everything is possible, but what's next step? How will they survive in the circumstances they are creating?

[EditorialGuy]

Food for thought: According to the Google Search Status Dashboard, Google's Spam Update began on March 5, and the rollout was expected to take"up to two weeks"--meaning that it should be finished by March 19, or tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how things have shaken out, and whether the two weeks remaining in the Core Update will have as much drama as we've seen in the last two weeks when both updates were running simultaneously.

[ghostofseo]

It's all good team, Google is saying not make any changes. Lol

[seroundtable.com...]

Sometimes you find interesting things in Google though. As I asked Barry to put himself in a publishers shoes and he stated he was a publisher, then I said actual website owner which he states he is. However this is what Google shows.

"In 2006, Third Door Media — parent company to Search Engine Land and the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series — was launched by founding partners Danny Sullivan, Chris Elwell, Chris Sherman, and Sean Moriarty."

So Third Door Media is actually the owner of Search Engine Land and our friend Danny Sullivan was the founder. Maybe this is old news, or maybe people are still in bed together.

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is still very sluggish...I wouldn't call it a disaster yet, but it doesn't look like it's improving. Every day my USA traffic is finishing lower and lower. The high-traffic category pages on my site have dropped by as much as 55% in the last week. Most of that appears to be USA...international traffic is actually up quite a bit.

The strange thing is that my ranking has not dropped, and even with the higher international traffic there are zero international inquiries since the 3rd. Not one new inquiry from the UK, Canada, Australia, Continental Europe or Latin America. How Google is managing to do this is a mystery to me.

[rustybrick]

@ghostofseo - Search Engine Roundtable is NOT owned by Third Door Media, it is own by me. I am not sure why you are upset with me. I just report the news.

I have been hit by plenty of Google penalties, including a Panda penalty, link selling penalty (before there were even manual actions), etc.

I've been through plenty of this over the 20+ years of publishing content on Search Engine Roundtable.

[Micha]

Today is strange, Google only pushes me readers on very old articles, on the current ones comes zero traffic from G. Google News is also full of totally outdated articles today, hardly any new ones, no matter from which websites.

[RedBar]

@Conro

@RedBar Had you lost a lot of traffic?

Incomparison to 2010 average I have lost 99.8%, compared to 2-3 years ago average 60% and heading towards 75% however the last few weeks has seen it come back to about 55%.

If these numbers seem big bear in mind until 2010 I had millions of PVs per month viewing images and like many others lost all that traffic within 2-4 months after the Google image theft of 2010. That image theft drove me to remove thousands of images completely and re-build everything in html5.

Therefore, realistically, I can only make a valid comparison after I melded several sites together some 4 years ago.

I also like to qualify my metrics in that I do not know how much loss of traffic, especially from the USA, is due to Google "updates" and Google "localisation" of its SERPs which I do know happens a lot in my experience.

I cannot see how I can possibly get back to 100% of 4 years ago simply because of localisation in the USA plus the extraordinary quantity of ads for my top 10 keyword products. The listings may be there however they just cannot be seen for obvious reasons.

[edited by: RedBar at 10:08 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2024]

[jchiff]

Following months of sudden decline here comes an overnight surge in traffic and adsense revenue continuing into this afternoon.

Marked safe from total annihilation TODAY :)

[Fluff_Nutz]

@RustyBrick Seems we have a celebrity in the forum then. Nice to have more experience in here. I, myself, am new to it all but I did read that the Panda update was a bad one back in the day. Anyway seeing you here does make sense as to why so much of the Search Engine Roundtable website covers what is said in these forums.

@SuperClown The post I read that from mainly mentioned that the ''updates'' of last year and this coincidentally occur on or around the DOJ court case. I'll post the link and make of it what you will.

[reddit.com ]

[superclown2]

The post I read that from mainly mentioned that the ''updates'' of last year and this coincidentally occur on or around the DOJ court case.

Google have a lot of very clever people, particularly in their legal department (many of whom used to work for the US government, but that's another story). They also have massive funds available for 'lobbying', commissions and whatever else you may wish to call it.

If they deliberately change SERPs results around court cases then that is only a fraction of the manipulation they are capable of doing. The revelations in the court transcripts should be required reading for every legislator in the world.

At the moment the SERPs here in the UK have certainly worsened since the European DMA came into effect as Google 'complies with the law' by exploiting every loophole they can find. Which, of course, they are legally entitled to do when faced with legislation that isn't watertight.

[ichthyous]

I'm also seeing a big turnaround since around noon yesterday. It seems that everything has snapped back to what it was before around the 3rd. And once again, as soon as the trend reverts the inquiries begin to pour in. It was 12 days of silence, and now multiple new inquiries in a short span of time. This endless cycle of Google squeezing the life out of businesses like a boa constrictor is getting old. How long before it reverts again, or before the next set of updates are announced?

[ghostofseo]

It's so weird after testing over 50 of our latest reviews we show up #1 in Duckduckgo for our search terms #1 in Bing for our search terms and on average now Google 24 for our search terms. Regardless of the Query we are buried into this spot.

Anyone else seeing similar results?

Clearly Bing and DuckDuckGo are not being "gamed" by my SEO tactics, they like our original content and show our content in the place it deserves to be.

Drops like this are far from normal.
[imgur.com...]
.
The above example shows how Google is trying to remove my site from search "organically" we don't have manual penalties, and unlike @RustyBrick have never ever ever even thought of buying links. I do appreciate your honest Barry, surprised the guy giving us so much advise was once involved in black hat seo.

I have done everything above board with my website. Got really good at SEO and publishing articles that stood out against any other review sites. Now Google doesn't like my website and I'm supposed to roll over and die. Not a chance.

Funny as I posted a YouTube video yesterday and it's showing at the very top for the same term as my review that's in spot $24. So I guess I'm a YouTuber now..... Or Redditor. Why doesn't everyone start their own Reddit threads and post all your content in there. It will rank better than you do now. Give it a try....

[rustybrick]

@ghostofseo I did not buy links ever. I am not sure where you got that information from. I had a blogroll section with links to sponsors before Google had the nofollow attribute and any guidelines on selling links. This was 2003, Google has no policies on any of this back then. A lot has changed over the 20+ years. I've covered almost all of those changes on that blog that is now own by Third Door Media.

[edited by: rustybrick at 9:22 pm (utc) on Mar 19, 2024]

[ichthyous]

Clearly Bing and DuckDuckGo are not being "gamed" by my SEO tactics, they like our original content and show our content in the place it deserves to be.

Honestly, I don't see how Bing is any different...I searched recently and the results were not great. My site ranks poorly in general, way below where it should be ranking for some of the terms. The same few mega sites came up over and over for all the searches...actually worse in terms of diversity of sites shown that at Google. I would love to rank better, but I can't see exactly what I might be doing wrong that my site ranks so poorly at Bing to begin with...

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I wish all Googlers to be marked as unhelpful people, and wish them to get real terms in prison for everything they did to a society.

[lesseo]

I have a global blog site that was negatively affected by this update. It experienced a drop in impressions in the September update. However, with content that has not been updated for 8 months, impressions have now dropped by 95%.

[Micha]

Last week really wasn't bad, but things have been going downhill again since Monday. The Discover traffic is at 0 and the traffic from Google is decreasing daily. Since Monday, Google seems to be ignoring all new articles. In other words, it continues to go downhill, with only a small break in between.

But that was to be expected. I would have been very surprised if the push from last week had continued, because that would not fit with Google's behavior.

[capulkit]

My 2 sites are completely dead. Main site is going down day by day.
I was first to launch few useful tools, big sites copied it and now I do not rank even in first 3 pages.

Do google ignore the original creator and award copy pasters.

[RedBar]

I have no idea what is going on however my PVs for the last 7 days are 131% and today, so far after nearly 12 hours, at 124%.

It all looks like genuine traffic from trade locations I would expect traffic. This is a continuation of traffic improvement from my low of week 8 2024, w/c Monday 19th February 2024.

Anyone else?

[rustybrick]

Sounds promising RedBar! Keep us posted.

[Martin Ice Web]

Very, very slow today. No inqueries, no emails, no calls, no SPAM, 40% drop in traffic, no sales from google traffic.

Seems like the core update is kicking in.

[Conro]

I see other new sites hit by google and having their first hcu punishment or whatever it is. Just a buggy machine Programmed by incompetents would cause certain sites that are really well-made to lose 40% of traffic.

[Dooku]

I wish all Googlers to be marked as unhelpful people, and wish them to get real terms in prison for everything they did to a society.

The average employment time of Googlers, especially since the last 5 years is only 13 months! So that guy who worked at G for 18 years(earlier thread) is one of the very few exceptions.
I watched a documentary about those famous google perks and how they are ALL designed in such a way that the only purpose of those perks are to keep googlers working for as many hours each and every day. Those perks are actually a devious way to exploit their work force.

Makes you wonder how "smart" the average googler actually is only to find out how they are exploited and worn down AFTER they are on the inside? No wonder the turnover is really horrendous at google.......

[Whitey]

Update: 2x ccTLDs that got hit, then bounced back, then got hit again.

50% of localized country traffic from 1x ccTLD has moved over to .com suggesting ccTLDs that don’t add value get the chop. That ccTLD was otherwise stable for the last 10 years or so.

That transferred country traffic isn’t consistent yet though. One day up, then nothing.

301ing the ccTLDs is tempting but I think it best to wait until the dust settles in April

[rustybrick]

The spam update finished like 30 minutes ago... core is still rolling...

[RedBar]

<slightly off-topic>
@Dooku

Whilst I have no doubt that some coders etc do get tired / bored, I have always experienced that most code monkeys (that's what we call ourselves!) generally tend to go above and way beyond the average cubicle worker mostly wanting to get it done and get it done correctly, 70+ hour weeks are very normal here and have been since the 1990s.

Is this unusual these days?

I must qualify this by stating we all live in a small market town with no one more than a 10 minute bike ride away, obviously with no city-style commuting / housing pressures.

[superclown2]

<even more off-topic>
The best work I do is lying in bed at 5.30am designing my latest project in my head. It's not counted as 'working time' though. </offtopic>

I'm still experiencing booms and busts with our traffic. I got a rush of it yesterday until about 1600 GMT and then practically nothing for the rest of the day. The SERPs looked the same, our positions for major search terms looked the same. The only explanation I can think of is that they are messing round with the cookies but I've no solid evidence of that since I delete them several times a day.

[ichthyous]

Update: 2x ccTLDs that got hit, then bounced back, then got hit again.

Same thing here...I had one day where traffic bounced back to normal and the phones were ringing. I received more new business in that 24 hours than in the previous two weeks. Yesterday late in the eve the USA traffic fell off a cliff again and is very low again today. How many days are we going to wait now...one normal day of traffic every two weeks? Soon, one normal day a month. This needs to end, Google is now the enemy of online businesses around the world...it has far too much control and it needs to be regulated as a straight up monopoly. So all those libertarians who think no regulation and no government is the solution to everything are extremely naive...only governments can dismantle monopolies. It happened in the 30's and I think it's going to have to happen again for the sake of societies everywhere.

[RedBar]

The best work I do is lying in bed at 5.30am

Whoa, you're not the only one who does that!

The amount of times I have had an "issue" and resolved it in my "sleep" and then woken up early to write it down is legend with my wife.

[Micha]

Google is now the enemy of online businesses around the world...it has far too much control and it needs to be regulated as a straight up monopoly.

That's all there is to say about Google.

[edited by: Micha at 3:39 pm (utc) on Mar 20, 2024]

[RedBar]

@ichthyous

I wrote earlier that the past 7 days my traffic was 131%, interestingly I just checked this, my USA PVs are -33.33% in that same period of overall traffic but about its normal quantity levels, for the moment the rest of the world seems to have woken-up for me.