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?

[ghostofseo]

@conro what I meant to say is Google is removing the word "Review" from many of our Titles, so when you do finally show us in search we look like a retailer trying to sell a product, were a blog and we don't have a store. Now instead of competing with other review sites in our niche, we are up against major retailers like REI and Backcountry or Amazon. Typically when I look for a review online (maybe it's my bias running a review site) I search for other reviews. I have never really trusted reviews on retail sites as there's not much depth or "expertise".

@micha we're no longer listening to Google's advise. I did everything above board had been rewarded well for that for over a decade, nothing changed on our end except from adding even better content in recent years, yet after a few updates Google no longer likes our format.

The majority of the brands we have worked with have direct links from their homepage or product page to our reviews. Yet Google seems to be ignoring this reputation. We have always wrote for readers first and foremost. Then before publishing we optimize for Search Engines. This practice is now being frowned upon it seems now.

If I'm writing for readers and readers are coming from Google then we are also very interested in where they are coming from and why. This is just a marketing funnel and reverse engineering is not a bad thing. Or maybe Ahrefs and SEMrush are just spamming us with keywords and we should stop paying attention to tools like that?

[Micha]

@ghostofseo As far as I know, links are not that important anymore, E-E-A-T is the keyword and if we are honest, Google's automatic ranking is garbage because it automatically favors bigger websites as they are more well known. Only after that is content evaluated and if a site has a trust bonus, that doesn't matter as much anymore. There are many tips out there, especially from SEOs, but they are just as generic as Google's tips and you can never tell if they are good for your website. The best thing you can do is actually do your thing as well as possible.

On the subject of SEO tools: Of course they are helpful, but relying on them completely is not a good idea in my opinion. SEO tools, Search Console, your own stats (and by that I mean something like Matomo or similar, not the Google stuff), give you a pretty good overview. But again, data is all well and good, but it can't tell you what's really going on in visitors' minds. In other words, a user searches for keyword A, is shown keyword B and clicks on a page - that's what the tools can tell you. Now it's clear how they found you, but not what exactly made them read or buy something and how you can turn them into regular readers or customers.

[Whitey]

2 ccTLDs continue to be dead with zero clicks. Our .com is in the midst of a massive spike in clicks late this weekend. The .com had shown 2 enormous dips in impressions during Dec and Feb without effect on clicks.

The show's not over (if this is supposed to be the final week before things settle down). Aargh !

[GodLikeLotus]

I've been in this game along time, but never have i seen Google do such an update! i thought the idea was to land visitors on the exact page for their search, not just deliver our homepage for everything!

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by engine. New thread at: goog/5103705.htm [webmasterworld.com]
11:09 am on Mar 25, 2024 (utc 0)

[Conro]

Today the traffic was +10%. I publish an article and after less than an hour the traffic drops - 7%. But how bad is this search engine

[saladtosser]

I'm confused, taken from SER "DS Google's Search Liaison responded to a series of posts on Twitter, leading him to beg SEOs to stop trying to "show Google" things, explaining that the process of doing things to your site to rank better in Google is the opposite of the advice Google is giving. Instead, show things to your users/visitors that those people will like." How does this relate to structured data since structured data doesn't get shown to users, do we now drop structured data ?

[mhansen]

Google: Don't do anything special for us. Focus on your users first and everything will come naturally.

Also Google: Here are guides written by our experts, with lists of ways to do better in Google search.
Also Google: Use words people would expect to find in your content, and put them in your titles and headings.
Also Google: If you use images, video, css and JS, make sure you follow these guidelines so we understand them better.
Also Google: Give us your schema markup so we understand your website better.
Also Google: So you have products? Make sure you use other structured data "exactly like this" so we understand your products better.
Also Google: 100 other things you need to do in order to be shown in our search engine.

Also Google: THANK YOU SO MUCH website/business owner. We don't need you anymore since we consumed all that structured content you so generously made available through "fair use" and now we have trained our LLM to make us even more money. Ba-bye.

[saladtosser]

I just saw SGE is starting to be released, personally I think this is the end of the internet and pretty much 95% of sites will shut down because they wont cover their hosting fees from organic traffic anymore, but that aside i'm also confused that if this last update targeted AI written content why is google now pushing AI content directly! Just doesn't make sense to me! It was nice while it lasted guys but I think websites that don't sell products are done for with SGE launching and **product site will have to go all ads** soon as I suspect G will lose allot of money from AdSense losses with the demise of blogs/information sites unless G can display ads in the SGE panel itself which is probably the plan!

[Juniya]

@Saladtosser -- Well, you might be on to something, I think a lot of websites will die out, which is what THEY(google) want anyway, they want to reduce the amount of sites their little web crawler can crawl. This would save them tons of money, they are leaking tons of money on AI as well.

This is what happens when money is the end game, in the end, greed rules all, it's all about them making sure they are making profits for their shareholders and to make it look like they are always going to make money each and every quarter so that they can stick to MS/Apple/OpenAI on the media...smh

Anyway, I think we still have time to sell off our assets or adapt to the new internet. I still think the best thing we can do is to fight back, EU is trying to, somewhat, but they just can't change the industry like this without someone saying anything from the other end.

It's time to focus on getting traffic from Social Media rather than Google, it's easier said than done, and I am old school, I don't even have an instagram account but now I have no choice, adapt or...

[Micha]

People, please stay calm, websites won't die out so quickly and Google won't switch off its "normal" search so quickly either, etc. These are all horror scenarios for the moment, nothing more. We don't know what will happen, but nothing dies that quickly and there's no need to panic. At the moment, we should monitor the situation and stay calm, otherwise we can no longer assess the situation objectively.

Besides, social media are not exactly a good source of traffic either, as Meta, for example, has been limiting visibility for years. They are more of a supplement.

[MayankParmar]

Google's spam update is working as expected lol. I saw spam sites being pushed via SGE, and Google "removed" the spam after I reached out: [bleepingcomputer.com...]

Another reason to not trust anything coming out of Google

[ghostofseo]

@saladtosser understands economics and business! Every site owner and Google is not immune to this wants to keep people on site longer. Look at more pages, bounce less, or at least that's one of the things I hope for. Provide great content, people find it and they hang out for a while. But if Google is serving up correct results, guess what time on site goes down massively. I wonder if this metric is even public?

I asked Gemini and it spit out 12 minutes to 22 minutes. I would guess it's closer to a few seconds, or was in the past. Perhaps the new update jumbles things around a bit on purpose and now people are spending more time on Google just trying to find what in the past took milliseconds.

Google is able to answer lots of questions on site, so why send people to your blog or website where you now have the customer. Google wants it all.

@Juniya Facebook adds convert pretty good. I would suggest looking into that. For one of the topics we cover the CPC is very low and we have pixels on the site that FB has been able to track over the years, so they have the ability to only show ads (or in theory) to people that are interacting with content similar to my website, it was the best bang for the buck we have seen in advertising. Can be a pain in the ass to setup and we hired someone to manage it which also can be costly but for $5 - $20 a day we drove a ton of qualified leads. As we get in the warmer months we will start advertising there again.

I won't give Google any money to get my top placements back that's for sure. And the time we tried to advertise on YouTube was a total waste of money

@Micha I disagree, there is a fire in the building. Are you going to stay and wait for the firefighters to come get you out or try and self rescue. At least if you die trying to self rescue you go down with dignity vs putting towels under the door and hoping the big G reverses course. Nobody has recovered from the last update, not a single site tracked. So what on earth makes you hopeful now with Google. Especially when they come out with a message saying to be calm. They are trying to put out there own fires, it's spread and is out of control. Will you save yourself or will Google come to the rescue.

I'm about 1/4 the way done going through and re-working / re-optimizing, changing titles, changing SEO titles, adding meta. Tagging photos better. My content has always been at the top of Google where it belongs. Clearly they no longer appreciate my site structure, have categorized me wrong and perhaps this incredibly stupid topic authority is at play.

My website has covered numerous types of outdoor activities for years, the ones I participate in. Heck when it started it was a magazine covering mountain sports and culture. I won't go to far into details just yet. We had a mix of concert coverage, mountain town news, sports, products everything all in one. And guess what it resonated with people that live in the mountains because like me they shared passions across multipole pursuits.

[Conro]

Guys rest assured, google wants to take the whole pie using our work. I can't even read the nonsense they write on Twitter that just seems to make fun of people. I see sites I've known for years collapse and others writing pretty much the same things increase traffic. It happens when you entrust placement to a buggy ai

[Micha]

@ghostofseo Who says I have hope in Google? Certainly not. I haven't relied on Google traffic for years. My site has been hit too many times by Google updates for that and I have to deal with Google's obvious favoritism towards certain media in the German market.

What I'm trying to say is that this is all just a theory at the moment and there's no need to panic. Of course you should keep an eye on the situation, but I think it's wrong to react hastily. I'll take your example with the fire: I wouldn't blindly run out of the house, because that can quickly end badly. I would rather stay calm and move carefully, because then there is less risk of getting into an even worse situation.

I see time and again that website operators are quick to implement the tips from Google or SEOs because they slip down the rankings and then panic. And time and time again this ends really badly.

[saladtosser]

On a positive note the constant GoDaddy and other hosting company ads on YouTube will dry up, I can't imagine many people will want to host sites that don't receive traffic, so I see most hosting companies also going under. Maybe only Azure and Google hosting will be viable continuing with?! I guess the loss of hosting companies spending ad money will also hit YouTube creators as less companies compete for ad space? Which will disincentivise them to create video content? It seems like the whole online ecosystem will collapse because of AI/Google IMO! I just wish the robots came for the manual jobs first then creativity as universal basic income would be in place!

[ghostofseo]

Looks like Google got there top spot for the term "Google Search Forums" back from Reddit today.

So maybe there is hope?

[RedBar]

I have posted previously that March is usually our busiest month of the year and for the past two weeks now we're running at 135%. I am going to assume that this will continue until Thursday and then possibly fall off the cliff edge therefore next week onwards may see me crying into my beer:-(

[Micha]

I just want to share a tweet I just read on X that I totally agree with and I think this is a problem we all know.

[twitter.com ]

[NeapTide]

Using VPN I checked SGE results appearing after normal 20 results and they are worst. 3 results displayed in collage form and totally irrelevant results related to auto generated queries.

So this is new Google? I am sure they will bring those idiotic SGE results on top of SERPs in coming months or may be next year or so.

In the rat race of AI, google is just digging its own grave and also ours.

[Conro]

@Micha Only those at Google don't get it. I would now expect a response from DS, but I'm afraid that as always he will write a lot of things that won't help anyone, He is very adept at this

@NeapTide SGE was released last week in the U.S. for a low number of queries. Of course it sucks, In some cases it links to sites with redirects to adult sites or uses spammy sites as a source. A Disaster

[Conro]

I found 2 other sites that lost 60% traffic. . This time the drop is huge. They have images, authors with eeat, videos both on the site and YouTube. I really don't know what they want from google, other than the complete destruction of websites which seems the most plausible thing

[RubicCubed]

These updates, along with the shady games Google is playing with the serp layout, is nothing short of devastating. Google has gone to extreme measures to hide organic results by burying them under ads and refinement boxes (PAA, Discussions and Forums), making it extraordinarily difficult for searchers to see anything other than ads or partners. If it were any other business, making it next to impossible for consumers to find what they want would result in those businesses failing quickly. Q1 ends in less than a week so we should see in a few weeks just how much value there was for Google in creating obstacles for searchers and the destruction of our sites.

To survive in this environment we will have to raise prices and "buy" traffic with a broad marketing campaign. But I do know that not one dollar will be spent with Google doing this because they are the ones robbing us anyway they can.

[saladtosser]

I wonder if this is why google changed from CPC to RPM on AdSense, earnings have gone to crap and reddit adsense users are complaining about the loss of earnings and how it is demotivating them!

Could Google be trying to demotivate webmasters in multiple ways the past few years with all these little things so more and more give up?! Now G has harvested website data for the AI it would certainly reduce possibility of litigation if these websites no longer exist before the full launch of SGE?! End goal?! Tin foil hat?!

[rustybrick]

Semrush is heated - anyone here seeing huge swings in the past several hours?

[Martin Ice Web]

@rustybrick, we are seeing positive movements for traffic +25%. But traffic is all (100%) zombies. Never seen google did an 100% mismatch to the users.

[RubicCubed]

Could Google be trying to demotivate webmasters in multiple ways the past few years with all these little things so more and more give up?! Now G has harvested website data for the AI it would certainly reduce possibility of litigation if these websites no longer exist before the full launch of SGE?! End goal?! Tin foil hat?!

Definitely possible. It looks to me like Google is trying to build a firewall around the digital economy by booting us all out. Many sites will close and all the data they had published will be absorbed into Google's AI. SGE is now being tested in the wild, and reports say we can expect up to an additional 60% loss in traffic once SGE becomes the norm. IMO, it's going to get much uglier very soon.

[Conro]

SGE It's going to be Google's grave, because if people use google and not ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity It's because he wants to find websites. A good search engine could easily make an appearance and take the place of Google. May be openai? If they manage to please users and webmasters who will push the few remaining users to the new search engine, Google is over

[ichthyous]

USA traffic is off a cliff again this morning...-59% at 11am! Canada is -35% this morning. I don't believe in Google's updates anymore, it's just a smokescreen for a constant pillaging of USA traffic so that half the week now brings miserable non-converting traffic. This is while my ranking / visibility is on the upswing.

I have begun writing long-form articles to beef up the content on my site...I'm wondering if it's pointless now...

[Mark_A]

I believe it is our consistent spend on Adwords which results in our pages also doing well in organic SERPS.

And we don't see the massive fluctuations that people often report in these threads.

Don't get me wrong, we have focussed our web pages on our subject matter so they could rank on their own - but there are tens or hundreds of other companies that do what we do, and yet we often outrank them against relevant keywords.

Does anyone else also advertise and sees the same sort of results?