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?

[mhansen]

Observation from a website hit very hard by HCU in Sept 2023.

A previously (prior to Sept 23, HCU) popular 10 year old site I have visibility to, was in the process of being sold when it was hit by the Sept 2023 HCU algo. The buyer purchased the website anyhow and before they could get it transitioned to it's new home, it went from 110k month visitors down to just 3,000 by October 2023. The site stayed on it's original domain until January of 2024, when they moved all of the content (180 pages) over to the new domain, which is a very well-known news website who added a new section targeting the specific topic of the website. It's 100% informational. ALL content was moved over word for word, even the author information stayed the same, the links within the content, etc. The only changes made were font/styling changes, and the removal of the ad network the previous owner had on his website.

All content recovered nearly 100% and is already seeing +60k monthly visits (SEMR data). Most of the pages rank #1 for the search visitors the previous owner had planned them for.

[mosxu]

Compliance under DMA is translating in over 90% zombies…

Ia that a mockery of the EU regulations?

[Conro]

I'm noticing that the specific articles on my site that answer a query have been replaced by articles ever in my site that have one keyword in common but answer another search query. It's hard to think that google could have done worse, but it succeeded. I wonder how users will take it

[BlueEyes82]

@mhansen

I also recreated a website that lost 90% Google traffic during the HCU update in a similar way. Without links, the page has been increasing almost every day since December...I have avoided user-friendly comparisons, which Google seems to generally penalize and are using more text blocks again (old school). Google is pleased with what is actually a disaster for the mobile user.

But I have to say that the traffic for the old website on Bing is increasing and increasing, where I rank well but the positions are almost unchanged. This means that the increase in visitors is mainly due to many people switching from Google to Bing...

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@RustyBrick

You asked about drastical drop last time - here is what happened to my another website with this update:
[imgur.com...]

....
Guys, is anyone facing with the same "to zero" drop?

When I'm searching for my queries in Google - now I can't see a single page of my webiste in SERPS. But when I'm adding my domain name to query - I'm seeing my pages. They are indexed, but showing nowhere.

Is someone see something similar?

[Sissi]

Trying to understand why one of my pages (non english) is ranked number one for popular keywords car leasing with only 3 lines of contents and wrong pic.
While other pages with good and comprehensive contents are not even on page 5
My conclusion: the shorter and the more qualitative content is currently a favourite to Google

[Conro]

@Sissi I've noticed this since last year. If you're going to edit that article you're talking about now, maybe writing a good article that's over 1000 words, you're probably going to see it disappear from the serp or collapse much lower. Already tried several times on my site

[Sissi]

Or this is linked to indexation rotation that can absorb let s day few words first, in case they are good you have it otherwise if it s longer it will take an eternity.
Users need a quick and reliable answer no BS

[Conro]

@Sissi Short content is more useful to artificial intelligence than to users. Otherwise, Wikipedia would have been deindexed years ago. If you write a good article, getting to 1000 - 1500 words is the minimum sometimes. When you reduce a 1500 word article to 200 - 300 words then either you wrote 1500 crap words or those 300 words are a very superficial summary

[Juniya]

@Cyril TechWebsites

I have the EXACT same thing happen to two of my websites, zero to drop, and most of my posts are now not ranking. I think this means these websites have been 'algorithmically' been hit with the update. I am doubting that if we wait another week, two weeks or a month suddenly the content will rank where it used to be, doubtful but still possible, we are only a few days into the worst google update of all time.

[christianz]

Traffic is terrible this morning. Google vs spammers battle is more intense than ever. And they are not using precision munitions either. They are dropping nukes. Collateral damage is immense. Spammers are changing tactics. Reddit, Medium, Linkedin Pulse are turning into Blogspot style spam dumps. Quality of search continues to steadily decline. It's Spamaggeddon!

[Conro]

@christianz I am convinced that after this update, there will be very few people who will use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to write tons of junk articles or manipulative seo techniques. The bad thing about these heavy updates, however, is that inevitably some innocent people will also pass through, even if the most serious cases have been targeted with manual actions by google.

[Whitey]

Guys, is anyone facing with the same "to zero" drop?

Is someone see something similar?

@Cyril TechWebsites - same 2 ccTLD websites drastic drop to zero impressions / clicks a few days back.

Strangely, GSC shows a corresponding increase in indexed pages to around 150k for 1 ccTLD. It only has around 1200 pages to index. All noindex's are checked and in order, so what's going on, I wonder.

No manual penalties reported.

I'm nervous about 2 more ccTLDs going the same way. They've been stable for years and we've put through a massive UI/UX upgrade around December. Our .com has been climbing and we've been adding quality hand written content. The .com uses the same e-commerce content as the ccTLD's, although the regional ccTLD's only show content for their localised area adjusted with currency. Traffic to those ccTLD's is localised as you'd expect.

In Feb our .com held clicks but impressions went drastically down to zero for a day or so, then bounced back to normal. I thought this was a bug in GSC.

I'm suspicious that Google may be culling ccTLD's if they do not significantly differentiate from the .com as part of the core update. But it's too early in my view to 301 the ccTLD's to the .com. I'd like to see a bit more of what's happening as things settle down out there over March.

[edited by: Whitey at 12:53 pm (utc) on Mar 9, 2024]

[christianz]

I am convinced that after this update, there will be very few people who will use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to write tons of junk articles

There will be but they will be more careful and run this ChatGPT output through multiple customized filters to try to obfuscate it. Some of those filter may even ad misspellings and other things that make it look less GPT.

It's an arms race. It just is sad to see innocent creators suffer. Today it is almost impossible to put up a new legitimate website and expect it to get any exposure in search.

[Conro]

@christianz There is tremendous volatility on many queries right now. A guide of mine with several solutions on android auto problems is surpassed by news sites that give a solution that there was on a certain day a few years ago. Obviously this solution no longer works and is not valid for all the problems that can be had with the operation of Android auto, moreover these news dealt with only a bug of a version of Android auto. Once My article used to be among the top positions, rightly so Since it has all the possible solutions to try for solve. It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that I'm about to end up under a bridge because of an algorithm created by Google's incompetents

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@Whitey

I'm hoping that this is a Search Console bug too. But the other thing that my GA4 must be glitching too, because it also shows drop to 2 clicks per day. But...

I'm checking my Semrush, checking Hrefs numbers - they are all showing some changes (~10%), but no drop to zero or something like that. Hoping this is a glitch...

[mhansen]

I'm checking my Semrush, checking Hrefs numbers - they are all showing some changes (~10%), but no drop to zero or something like that.

Not sure about aHrefs, but SEMR is days and sometimes weeks behind in reporting its positions. I see Feb 10th as the "Updated" date on several pages of the ranked positions in their index. It generally takes a month or longer for SEMR to fully catch up with SERP changes.

[ichthyous]

I am not seeing a huge decline in overall traffic, but this morning there is a big increase in traffic to obscure lower-level pages and also from unusual locations. I am also seeing single product pages with unusually high levels of visits from different unique visitors. It's as if this one item suddenly rocketed to the top of searches and lots of people clicked it, then it dropped out of sight again. So I think there must be a lot of churning going on now as the pattern of visits is very different from the norm. The steady decline in converting traffic continues...zero serious inquiries from USA, UK, CA, AU or UAE...it's like the blood being drained out of my business. I did get an inquiry from Mongolia though...no joke.

I am convinced that after this update, there will be very few people who will use artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to write tons of junk articles or manipulative seo techniques.

Don't count on it...Google, META, Microsoft are all depending on generative AI to boost their profits and stock price. They cannot hold diametrically opposed business objectives for long. Search quality. content quality, and veracity will absolutely lose out to profits.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:18 pm (utc) on Mar 9, 2024]

[Conro]

@ichthyous Now Google very easily penalizes content created with artificial intelligence. Of course, you won't stop the spammer, but he'll soon get tired when google no longer indexes his 1000 articles a day of pure ChatGPT garbage. It also seems that now in suspicious cases the manual action comes directly from Google. If you want advice, steer clear of auto post AI for your quality content.

[RubicCubed]

Now Google very easily penalizes content created with artificial intelligence.

This remains to be seen, though many will believe it simply because Google said it. Instead observe the serps for evidence. I see numerous very high quality websites have taken a huge hit in the last few days. By high quality I'm talking about site's created by professionals with degrees in their fields who have so much EEAT it is oozing out of their eyeballs. My observation suggests the facts don't back up the claim about Google very easily penalizing AI sites. But we are still early in this update to come to any definitive conclusions.

[Conro]

@RubicCubed The site is yours, and you can use AI if you want. On Twitter, however, we read about many sites created with artificial intelligence that have been completely de-indexed

[christianz]

I think it is mathematically impossible to "easily penalize AI content" because AI generated text does not encode the fact that it was AI generated within itself with any level of reliability. Especially short text.

Sure, you can probably detect ChatGPT with 90% accuracy for a long article, but only if its raw ChatGPT output. And you still get 10% false negatives or false positives.

Add more advanced and exotic tools and this reliability becomes coin toss and, therefore, not workable. If AI content was easily detectable we wouldn't have all this AI generated horse#*$! ranking.

[RubicCubed]

On Twitter, however, we read about many sites created with artificial intelligence that have been completely de-indexed

Manual actions were taken against many sites yet we also read where legitimate sites are nearly wiped out. As I said before, a few days into an update does not justify the premature belief that "Now Google very easily penalizes content created with artificial intelligence." These two simultaneous updates are not even 1/4 of the way rolled out so we must wait until they are completed to evaluate the damage and formulate an opinion based on factual evidence instead of relying on what Google says. Because we know what Google has said in recent updates has conflicted with the outcomes we witnessed with our own eyes.

[oldog]

Now that is for laughing out loud...Superfast website in WebDev ....FAILED....lol

[btffs.b-cdn.net...]
[btffs.b-cdn.net...]

[saladtosser]

No change here, website traffic still continues to improve SLOWLY but not counting on it staying now AI is out so YouTube is still main focus, up to 20k subs now! (faceless channel)

[Conro]

And who knows how many others have been de-indexed
[nichesitemetrics.com...]

[Ingall]

Since the update, the visibility of parasite spam sites such as linkedin, Medium, Mynewdesk, etc. has increased significantly. How can that be? Only spam sites like this rank in my niche. Many of these pages no longer contain any text at all, just an affiliate link. And then there are these large newspapers with paid articles that have no added value and often contain false information.

[christianz]

And who knows how many others have been de-indexed

Looked at some of those sites. Nothing of value is lost by deindexing them. Most fun is looking at author profiles. :) Some of those AI personas are even shared across sites. They almost create a real cross-site legacy on the Internet, almost becoming real :)

[christianz]

@Ingall It's because Google doesn't know how to filter out AI spam sites and nobody knows how to. They are trying to build AI that detects AI. Fighting fire with fire kind of thing. So far its not looking to be very accurate. Very blunt weapon. They also rely far too much on implied authenticity of content on super large sites/platforms. The authenticity increasingly is not there.

Like I said in my previous post. Sites like Linkedin, Medium are becoming the new Blogspot. Just massive dumping grounds for spam.

[Conro]

@christianz The fact that there have been so many manual actions means that Google's algorithms cannot yet replace humans, but one day who knows, even if for now these AIs are a hole in the water