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?

[Mark_A]

I assume that you are not a sci-fi buff ?

Actually you have a point there was a reference to that in some sci-fi I read.
But my favourite sci-fi writer is Iain M Banks and I am not certain if it was in his culture novels?

Nothing wrong with "parasite" though, Google has been that way since its very beginning.

[saladtosser]

@Mark_A, your a living symbiont bud, microbiome are living in your stomach just for starters, your body contains trillions of microorganisms — outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1

[mosxu]

[dailypost.ng...]

Comedy club giving the impression that they fight fraud! 😀

[ichthyous]

Anyone else seeing huge drops today? Search is still down by a third at 12:30pm. Could this be the Easter holiday traffic starting already?

[not2easy]

@moxsu, it is a copy of what Google posted - see [webmasterworld.com...]
So I don't think the description is accurate.

The Google article is here: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-ads-safety-report-2023/

[mosxu]

@not2easy

Yeah but we need something done about the ilegal zombie traffic!

Competitors have no ability to create that type of traffic!

This has to stop!

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous - Traffic here is much higher than normal. I don't think it's related to Easter, but probably some volatility from the March 2024 core update.

I have a new website, 2 months old, that has been growing a lot in the last few days. Certainly because of the March 2024 core update.

[ubound]

@itchyours Yes, I noticed a big drop today early morning (Europe). A big proportion of my traffic is from the US, and at that point, it was still night over there, so I don't think it is related to the upcoming long weekend. However, from about now, I think it is reasonable to think that the long weekend will affect us even more, and we won't be able to tell anything until Tuesday.

[samwest]

From what I see, my traffic is the same, but my sales conversions are zero. 8 days in a row of absolutely nothing. This is a first in 25 years. Taking a stroll through my site, I now see Google has the site SWAMPED in ads including popups and header and footer tabs that I have not set. Shutting down all ads on the site to see what happens to conversions. They want to curb webspam, but then mega spam our site with ads. Figures...

Looking deeper, it appears Google has decided to activate auto ads and run an "experiment" on my site without my consent.
I am removing all ads. Their meddling has cost me $1000/month in lost income all for a gain in ad revenue of about 10 bucks.
Ridiculous. FAI.

UPDATE: Not more than 5 minutes after shutting down Google's freakin ad spam experiment on my site, the first sale in 8 days came back. Their meddling is criminal.

Moral of the story, if you are running ads on your site, you best go check to see if Google started an experiment without your knowing..then shut down auto ads. I'm sure there will be some other price to pay for shutting them down. Like all "government entities", they think they can run your site better than you...and it all ends up in a disaster.

[RedBar]

With just under 4 hours of my Googleday to go, surprisingly my global site is having its 3rd busiest day of the year, will it end up the busiest?

Plus the hotel site is already having its busiest day of the year ... Phew !

[jchiff]

Or, as the Mrs. pointed out, "The science fiction is a lot easier to write than the code."

Disillusioned Businesses Are Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks

[futurism.com...]

[ichthyous]

Disillusioned Businesses Are Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks

Yes, it's the most overhyped tech of the last century...it will start to unwind just like crypto unwound (and will unwind again). People are actually trying it and realizing it's not all that helpful...you have to spend so much time cleaning up the factual errors better just to write from scratch. Of course, it will improve over time...IF webmasters dont block AI bots completely and then the information pool shrinks so much that the dataset becomes totally corrupted. Oh, and what about all the copyright lawsuits?...

I can't wait until Sam Altman is cast into the dustbin of history for the charlatan he is, just like SBF...he doesn't actually have any skills, but as usual they always seem to control the money and profit the most, skills or not.

[Markedd]

I got double the traffic on YouTube in the last couple of weeks with just about 10 videos posted than I got with the website which has more than 700 articles. It's unreal. Funny thing is that I simply used some articles as a script for the videos. Google is an actual gate keeper at this moment since people want to see this type of content. They even ask why don't I make articles since they're easier to follow. I know my dude, but there's no place for this type of content on Google's web anymore..
I give YouTube about 4-5 years before it goes to the #*$!ter as well. Hope I make bank until then.

[RubicCubed]

Disillusioned Businesses Are Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks

This business owner believes AI is a tool to justify their content heist to reap all the rewards of our hard work.

[Micha]

@ichthyous Nevertheless, we website operators in particular will have to deal with AI more and more. The role of AI in journalism is growing; two major publishing houses in Germany are now using it to write articles. This will spread worldwide, in addition to the SBU etc.

[KaseyM]

Looking at my charts I started to see a recovery on March 24th but has since nosedived again.

Scary how many sites may go under very soon. I'd be more OK with it if the results were actually better...

[renatovieira]

Search console frozen since 28/mar. Has anyone else noticed?

[Treud]

We was since the 26th, but it’s good now. With google spamming me they can’t index my .Wepb

[Ingall]

An article on my website has been ranking number 1 on Google for months now. It was purely an informational article that I wrote myself after a lot of research. Since I was the only one who wrote about this topic, I met the search intention 100%. I had an excellent click rate and extremely high average time on site. This page has completely disappeared from the index for a few days. According to Google Search Console, there is no manual action and the post is still considered indexed, which is not the case. TIK TOK has taken my place with videos that completely miss the topic, alongside other irrelevant sites with high authority that provide no answer at all to this search query. So much for Google incorporating user signals into the ranking. Maybe Google removed my articles because it answered all of the user's questions and therefore no one clicked on the sponsored posts anymore.

[Micha]

@ingall This is what happens to many of us. Articles disappear from the rankings and are replaced by spam or, as in my case with one keyword, by a website that contains no text. In my case, Google seems to like the page so much that it appears at number 1 when you google the name of my website.

User signals play a role, the only question is which ones and how Google's automated systems interpret these signals.

The core update is almost over and I think it's pretty clear that Google has once again promised a lot and delivered nothing. The updates have neither reduced spam nor brought quality content to the top. If I see it correctly, the results have remained just as bad.

[Ingall]

@Micha many thanks for your response. It's good to know that I'm not the only one this has happened to. You're absolutely right. Parasite SEO spam in particular has increased significantly since the update. I still have hope that something will change on May 5th.

I would be really interested to know which user signals are important to Google. Surely these pages without content have a bounce rate of 100%.

[Micha]

@Ingall Honestly, I fear that the update on May 5 will hit even more small good websites. I no longer believe that Google will be able to combat all the spam etc. effectively.

[Whitey]

@ingall @micha - were your articles consistent with what your site content is generally recognized for?

My reason for asking is that I believe there may be a trend emerging for content that sits aside from what the site is recognized for, being removed by Google. (I'm witnessing that on our own site where articles are being removed that may be considered like this).

Large sites that I'm observing with severe downturns, caught in the September HCU continue to decline. These sites drifted substantially away from their core content subjects of what they were known for. One was in the financial vertical and the other in the travel vertical.

The first financial site has a substantial quality backlink profile, social profile and media presence. However, presenting articles at scale about general consumer services and goods may have pushed it's authority outside of Google's tolerance thresholds by lowering algorithmic metric scores to be considered as not helpful. Done at scale this seems to have severely damaged the overall site.

The second IMO wrote too broadly about travel subjects to be defined by Google as authoritative.

@rustybrick reported that no site known to him had recovered since the September update : [seroundtable.com...] . So a prolonged period to reverse these effects may be part of "baking in" the update to the current core update.

I speculate that this may be a reason that may match your experience, but i could be wrong as i don't know for sure. It seems to me that there are multiple reasons to consider when the analysis starts to arrive over the coming months.

That said I am seeing some inconsistencies with a couple of our ccTLD's that dropped to zero clicks that don't comply with my above observation.

As part of the strengthening of Google's focus on authoritative sources to feed it's AI ambitions, it has acquired access to Reddit's content to further cross check authority across it's "helpful" scores. Even though it is currently clumsy and ugly in the SERP's i think this is part of Google's ongoing process, coupled with the decade long + focus on "brands" as Google's safeguard at scale.

I think it would be helpful if folks did some self analysis and shared their findings and observations to build up a consensus of understanding. My feedback has a high degree of speculation in it, although I feel it is closing in on some aspects.

[edited by: Whitey at 5:21 pm (utc) on Mar 31, 2024]

[Micha]

@whitey This does not apply to my site and most of the sites I monitor. We are very limited in our topic anyway and can't leave the topic area. Even my direct competitors, who have lost a lot of visibility in the last few days, are limited to this one topic. My problem is unfortunately the big news sites that only occasionally cover this topic and are immediately at the top. Otherwise, it's invariably questionable sites (often spam, empty pages etc) that rank better. See my example above with the name of my magazine.

[Whitey]

@Micha
My problem is unfortunately the big news sites that only occasionally cover this topic and are immediately at the top.

A "news" brand bias maybe on a subject that Google struggles to understand as authoritative to your site and those you observe? In this event Google is defaulting to the news sites? (just asking/probing).

[Micha]

Since we started (2014), we have only reported on one country. I've slowly gotten used to the fact that the leading media automatically rank well, regardless of whether what they write is true or nonsense. So if Google thinks the topic doesn't suit us, even though we've never done anything else in all this time, then I have to say they're completely mad.

Incidentally, one of the competitor sites is run directly by this country and that doesn't seem to be enough for Google either. The only difference is that all the sites (mine included) are smaller and none of them use news agencies but do their own research.

To me it looks more like the leading media outlets have too much trust from Google and the automated rating systems downgrade the trustworthiness of other sites because of this. But of course I can only speculate.

[EditorialGuy]

Whitey wrote:

I believe there may be a trend emerging for content that sits aside from what the site is recognized for, being removed by Google.

My experience has been the opposite. In the current update, and especially in the last couple of weeks or so, our informational travel site's top pages seem to focus even more on "topical authority" than usual. Currently, the top 10 pages are almost always about [Destination 1] + [our most popular subtopic] and [Destination 2] + [our most popular subtopic].

We've long had a couple of outlier pages on [two other destinations] + [another subtopic] that were nearly always in the top 10, but those two pages have now dropped into the bottom half of the top 20.

Overall, the effects of the Core Update haven't been too extreme for us. We've had some ups and downs over the past month, but the real damage was from HCU and Reviews updates in 2023 (and possibly from Google's increased UX clutter.) Overall, our traffic is off about 50 percent from a year ago after many years of stability.

[System]

New Month New thread at: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 12:23 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2024]
[edit reason] April [/edit]