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?

[Micha]

@Juniya There are enough associations, but we small site owners are not represented, so that would actually be a good idea.

But maybe we should also think about what we can do in general to help each other, I mean, there are a lot of people here, we should be able to do something to support each other.

[superclown2]

@Engine

Thanks for the info. I got what may be their IP addresses from [udger.com ]. They have never crawled my sites as far as I can see but they seem to be connected to Hetzner, details here: [whois.eurid.eu ]

Hetzner is one I block on sight, perhaps I am wrong to do so?

[not2easy]

Hetzner server farms are often blocked on sight but if you know the IPs assigned to OWLer, you can disallow Hetzner's range and allow OWLer's. There are how-tos in the Apache forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Sodero18]

Published a short article yesterday for the first time since the Google mess that started last September. Like alot of people here, we stopped writing new content for months. The article ranks at the top of DDG and Bing for the keywords and is about a Microsoft app. Interesting that it's at the top of Bing. Nowhere to be found on Google of course.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@Juniya Indeed they have. Whilst searching for Web Publisher Association, I did come across a small group of people who are, seemingly, trying. What it will achieve I'm unsure. We do need something that can defend small content creators from G and their manipulation. It is annoying that G and the US Government are together in this. Blocking Tiktok and not doing something to destroy their monopoly. What are rules when they are not followed by those who bring them in?

[webpublishers.org ]

[Micha]

If it wasn't so stupid, you could laugh out loud. Google completes the spam update, small sites lose visibility, but the spam problem is spreading, even at SGE. Some people are reporting about it on Twitter

[twitter.com ]

[Conro]

It's unbelievable how they can't go 5 minutes without humiliating themselves, but the worst thing is that despite having an army of people who point out their mistakes, they are capable of doing worse

[Fluff_Nutz]

For quite a while now I have had a hunch that they have literally no idea what they are doing. They are driven by greed so much it blinds them into making foolish and idiotic mistakes, such as the one posted above. That is only one of many examples of how bad their SERPs are now. Also, during this current ''update'' they switched some of their staff around. Further giving hints into their issues and troubles within their workforce.

[searchengineland.com ]

[Conro]

Maybe they discovered Fiverr and now engineers find them there

[EditorialGuy]

during this current ''update'' they switched some of their staff around. Further giving hints into their issues and troubles within their workforce.

The good news is that they've implicitly acknowledged a need to fix Google Search. Also, I believe that Ms. Reid has been at Google since the days when Google Search was arguably better than it is now, so maybe she'll bring a new (or should I say old?) perspective to her job.

[Conro]

They are starting to release sge in the United States Even if it hasn't been triggered by lab. Are you happy? Now take your remaining traffic and bring it to zero

[searchengineland.com...]

[Fluff_Nutz]

'Some users who do not opt in to the Google Search labs SGE feature may see AI overview answers in the search results' as if I didn't expect Google to steep even lower than they already have. Well done on forcing it down people's throats. Good luck on building a search when every website is obsolete and new content is now longer being created.

Just wish my website, which had a very short lifespan, could have generated something before its demise.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I believe everything is finished for us. At least, within info content niche. Now there is no sense to keep doing our job, it's obviously we are done by SGE.

[Conro]

Maybe Google will change and become an aggregator of large sites that it will use for high-cost advertising and to gather information to use for SGE, it will use the entire web. At the moment sge is a failure, there are cases where as a source it links to spam or adult sites. They're ruining who knows how many companies for something that people don't need

[Micha]

@Cyril TechWebsites However, too many spam links are displayed for this and the simple user will also notice this. I therefore don't think it will come to us in Europe any time soon. I don't think even Google is stupid enough to publish such a faulty product worldwide. (and it's not a social network)

[Conro]

@Micha When you point out that ChatGPT is wrong, they often respond to you, even a site can do it. I generally answer that looking at multiple sites can give you an idea of whether the things written are right or wrong, but if one only trusts what ChatGPT says, one relies on a single source. For SGE it's the same, which is nothing more than a scraper that rewrites content taken from different sources with natural language without permission. The chances of error with sge are going to be very high and how will people trust this stuff?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Micha +

1) Maybe you are right, and they won't roll out it fully now. But it's obvious that it's their goal, they want to collect all revenue to their pocket. New head of Google's Search team already told they will continue to roll out SGE more.
2) My main traffic is not from EU, it's from US, UK, Australia - they are all declining and going to reach absolute zero (factually), while my traffic from India, Philippines, Indonesia, etc. boosted after the March 2024 Core update. They are taking the reachest traffic away from us, it's obviously fro me too. That's their goal.

Maybe, in 5 or 10 years there will be some new laws or regulations, but right now it's not going to happen. I believe, that's the finish for 80% of us. We are now got a mark "unhelpful" like during nazis regime. And that's all, we can't do nothing with it.

I have a question: soon my traffic from Google will be actual 0-100 visitors per day. But I'm still getting some thousands of traffic from other search engines (Bing, Duck, Yandex etc.). How can I deny Google's SGE bot to scan my website? Should I just block Google's bots and that will stop SGE too? Will be very glad if someone knows the answer.

[Micha]

@Cyril TechWebsites Hm, your situation is really difficult. Of course, I don't know how the EU will deal with the SBU, but I don't think they'll make it that easy for Google. As far as blocking is concerned, the most you can do is block Google completely. But is that a good idea? ("Google-extended" unfortunately doesn't help, as examples have already shown).

[superclown2]

if one only trusts what ChatGPT says, one relies on a single source

You are absolutely right. Sometimes I find ChatGTP is brilliant, particularly at designing scripts, which I use it for a lot. Other times it makes such simple errors that I wonder whether it's worth using again. It's the old story - garbage in, garbage out, and the web is full of junk that is just wrong, biased, incomplete, you name it; not to mention those who take pleasure in feeding AI systems with even more garbage.

I have never believed that Google would be so crazy as to risk their current business method of replying to search engine queries with ads in favour of a very expensive, untested, unreliable Artificial Intelligence (or Stupidity) system that is difficult to monetise and is so open to abuse. I can see this whole thing eventually going the way of their driverless car and 'other bets' which have so far been estimated to have racked up losses of over 37 billion dollars, and which are showing no signs of, collectively, ever being profitable.

Then again a business that has been able to lose so much money on so many products (and which is currently running their one, mega profitable venture into the ground) really can't be all that well run, so who knows. I now see they are going to pay a fortune to Reddit for access to their data; I can just imagine the response of the fiercely independent users and moderators of that site (who of course created that data) to the idea of working for nothing whilst the owners make billions. It will make a great feature film.

Sometimes I really believe that we live in a madhouse.

[ichthyous]

My main traffic is not from EU, it's from US, UK, Australia - they are all declining and going to reach absolute zero (factually), while my traffic from India, Philippines, Indonesia, etc. boosted after the March 2024 Core update. They are taking the reachest traffic away from us, it's obviously fro me too. That's their goal.

@Cyril. Of course that's exactly what's happening...I am seeing the same thing. Google has been attacking USA traffic for years now. My USA, Canada, UAE and Australia traffic are all lower than they used to be. My Traffic from India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc are all higher.

Now that is partly due to the spread of internet on mobile and the fact that these countries are also developing, but more than anything it's Google taking away the converting traffic from rich countries and pushing it to ads. They want to ensure that anyone that survived from organic alone will now suffer and be forced to pay Google for ads, or just go out of business and provide less competition for their ad buying customers.

I have said it over and over, Google is now the enemy of small and medium-sized businesses all around the world. They are a pure monopoly and they intend to take it all for themselves because they are not innovating...it's just cannibalizing their outdated ad platform to report higher profits while they work on things like AI, which they see as an existential threat. This has been the plan for years and it has been getting worse and worse for years.

[NeapTide]

I was talking to some typical clueless chatgpt, co-pilot, gemini users in facebook groups who were praising these AI tools for quick answers but they were literally clueless that these AI tools are actually stealing data from websites that were made by real people and today with these AI tools those people (webmasters) are getting nothing in return.

Previously with old model of search engines, people were making money with ads and affiliate marketing since people were visiting their websites. But with AI tools users aren't going to real websites anymore from which the data has been stolen. Soon those websites will shutdown when they won't be making any money to even pay for hosting and domain names. Once 80 - 90 percent of web is dead, AI tools would be feeding outdated solutions to queries from their old database and these tools would be totally clueless about new issues and their solutions because they won't have fresh data available to steal and rewrite that and present that in sugar coating.

Non-technical people think AI robots are writing solutions for them but in reality bots can only steal data and rewrite that. They don't have human mind to think like real humans. Even if someone is demanding source code for an app and AI tool is able to write that, that's only because its source code is available on github, stackoverflow and it was trained on that.

I can give you an example of AI failure, I asked chatgpt and gemini to write source code for Roku TV remote app. These AI tools in return gave lame excuses because no one has ever published source code for Roku tv remote app and these tools weren't able to find any information about that.

Soon internet will be just Youtube, github, big news websites, netflix, amazon, ebay, reddit, imdb, pinterest, some forums and pirated apps/games/movies download websites. Remaining internet will be gone

[superclown2]

Non-technical people think AI robots are writing solutions for them but in reality bots can only steal data and rewrite that. They don't have human mind to think like real humans.

I use chat GTP a lot for building scripts and templates, purely because it saves me a lot of time digging out data from the Web. Invariably though I have to overhaul and debug them myself, particularly if I want to add extra functions. Nevertheless it is a very useful facility as long as it is borne in mind that answers it gives are highly suspect.

Current 'AI' tools are basically big databases designed to automatically collect and store data. Just like a slightly more sophisticated web crawler really. They are programmed to present that data in particular ways. If that data is 100% accurate then they are a wonderful tool, but any system that gets it's information from the web is highly suspect. Plus just wait until the so-called 'script kiddies' start flooding them with total junk.

To repeat, AI in certain circumstances can be a wonderful tool, but for reporting accurate information from the Internet at present is a pipe dream. These systems are not intelligent at all, at least in their current form.

Hopefully Google will realise this before they cause immense damage to themselves and, more importantly, us.

In the meanwhile, in my opinion, they are spending far too much effort trying to make a basically unsuitable system work whilst their regular SERPs (which used to be the best in the world) are getting worse thanks mainly to their priority of making money rather than providing accurate and useful results.

[ichthyous]

I was talking to some typical clueless chatgpt, co-pilot, gemini users in facebook groups who were praising these AI tools for quick answers but they were literally clueless that these AI tools are actually stealing data from websites that were made by real people and today with these AI tools those people (webmasters) are getting nothing in return.

I used ChatGPT today to help speed up fact collecting and writing of an article. It doesn't work that well...I asked it to condense text and add names of actual people who are publicly available on an organization's own website. To my amazement, ChatGPT instead added names of people in the same profession but not related at all to the organization. So not only did it fail, it failed in a spectacular way by creating a fictitious scenario out of the blue. Who can trust it with writing anything crucial? You'll have to do the same amount of work to fact check it all.

[Conro]

@ichthyous ChatGPT has a lot of propaganda behind it. You can try using it for simple things, like filtering out identical names in a long list. You will see that he will be wrong.

[MayankParmar]

One of my newer posts, which Forbes and similar websites have attributed, has been completely outranked by all websites linking to me. Forbes ranks above me, a Reddit post that links to my post outranks me, a forum post that links to me outranks me, and tons of other Forbes-like sites linking to me have outranked me.

To all the SEOs justifying this scam: YOU WON'T GET A JOB AT GOOGLE LOL

[Conro]

Soon, SEOs will have to find a real job. Someone will become a sorceress, someone else will tell the horoscope, someone else will start selling the fortune

[ghostofseo]

Since Google seems to be doing whatever they want with my titles included removing the word "review" I did some searching to see how Google is handling titles these days. [developers.google.com...]

"Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements. It's important to have distinct text that describes the content of the page in the <title> element for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages. Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) is also bad; for example, a common <title> element for all pages with text like "Band Name - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" contains a lot of uninformative text."

So my question to the community how does this apply to a review site like I have? Are we no longer allowed to have the word review in the titles? As we do for 900+ product reviews we have written showing the products actually being used in person and tested here in the Tetons? When someone is researching product reviews typically the user would type something like so into Google: iphone 15 review, Nike Kids Omni Shoe Review,

Seems like Google has taken a dislike to review sites, especially if you think you should be monetizing your content.

So what do we do? Remove all instances of the word review? Remove all affiliate links, Pretend SEO doesn't exists moving forward? We write reviews so people can find helpful information on the products we like. Products we have tried here in Jackson Hole, WY with stunning I will say it again stunning photos of the products being tested by myself and my staff.

Yet, it's ALSO my job as site owner, publisher and SEO to make sure people can easily find these reviews. Which is now looked at as a bad thing for optimizing content. If my content sucked people wouldn't spend much time on site, they would bounce. Google once had metrics that rewarded sites that were creating original content, sites that people often clicked, sites that people interacted with across different pages, sites people spend a long time on viewing pages.

For decades we have been at the top of Google for most every product review we have done. Again were a bunch of athletes, writers, gear testers and photographers based in Jackson Hole that take products to cool places for testing. What we do isn't comparable to the other review sites, we are not copywriters, we are actual people that love gear and writing about our adventures in the mountains.

Now Google has classified us into who knows what?

[Fluff_Nutz]

I have given up on following Google's 'guidelines'. They forever change the goalposts and even those who do opt to follow them still get smacked with updates. Its pointless; Imagine needing to change 1,000 or more plus articles. It really is stupid. Then, when you finally reach that 1,000 page G changes it all again.

I have review articles, not too many, but I plan on doing nothing. All changes are to suit them not the search. By removing the 'review' title it probably makes it easier for their AI to steal the content and for it to look like it belongs to G. As mentioned 'review' is a valuable keyword, it makes no real sense to remove it.

[Conro]

@ghostofseo You wouldn't solve anything by removing the word review and affiliate links. Why would you do that? You would completely distort your post. Google has been penalizing sites that make money from affiliations for a long time, this is because companies contact you to review their products, but Google wants companies to use their useless advertising. A honest review in a good site is much more profitable for a business than that wasted money of Google ads. Google is aiming for 0 clicks now it's not worth wasting time on it anymore, better to spend time making people switch to a search engine, which Google will no longer be.

[Micha]

You should "roughly" stick to Google's suggestions, but don't change anything when an update is underway, as this can backfire badly. You should also ask yourself why you should adhere to various "rules" at all, because how does Google evaluate this? For example: sponsored links should be marked with "rel="sponsored", but how does Google recognize the type of link? Also, it always says "write for the people, not for Google", which would also mean that if you customize your page accordingly, G would have to notice and it would also be harmful. What I'm saying is that there are rules to follow, but you're never going to please Google 100 percent unless you're a big publisher or a big company. Otherwise, it's better to do your own thing, because Google is right about one thing: you should "write for your readers" and build a reputation to gain regular readers. It's also more fun.