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?

[saladtosser]

Just wondering what job you plan on training for after AI wipes the board with text/image content and sora wipes out video/Youtube? Since people in countries like India can make one 10th online to make a living than those in the west I suspect content creation will be fully AI/Fully India in a couple of years because it will only make financial sense to create from a country that isn't a rip off to just exist in!

What will the rest of you do who were cursed to be born in a rich country and want to create content? I'm consider moving to India, I can live like a king in India on my wage rather than a poor guy in my country and do the exact same job, plus the weathers better! This comment is about AI in general not the update, its whats really coming for us all and should be way up on the fear agenda, these are just steps you have already willingly given your content to Google and every AI system out there to replace you!

Who would have thought AI would have come for creativity first and who would have thought living in a poor country would give you an advantage when using these tools to create? Isnt it all a bit ironic!

[ichthyous]

Just wondering what job you plan on training for after AI wipes the board with text/image content and sora wipes out video/Youtube? Since people in countries like India can make one 10th online to make a living than those in the west I suspect content creation will be fully AI/Fully India in a couple of years because it will only make financial sense to create from a country that isn't a rip off to just exist in!

Indian, Chinese, and SE Asian infringers are already the worst for my content, and there is really no way to pursue it since the damages are so low compared to the US. But keep in mind that the AI platforms have no rights to use any copyrighted works, the platforms will be sued, not the end users. Once the courts settle the matter it will be open season on AI. The lawsuits are already piling on from the writers and the stock photo sites. Do you think that these AI platforms will be able to withstand all of the creative professions combined sueing them endlessly over training the dataset with copyrighted materials? People recognize the threat and are already circling the wagons. The threat comes more from Indian AI startups who can't be reached so easily in India and who would have to be sued in India under a much slower legal framework. But India is a member of the Berne convention too, so they would have to abide by that.

[ichthyous]

Tomorrow there will be an interesting webinar regarding the NY Times lawsuit vs. OpenAI. The panel includes copyright attorneys and explains the premises behind the suit. For anyone who wants to inform themselves of the legal challenges to AI platforms in the US you can join at noon EST. I am posting this here since so many are discussing an anticipated AI apocalypse in this forum: - [fedsoc.org ].

[Whitey]

More from my above reports.

Another ccTLD of ours (the 3rd) is now showing greatly and suddenly inflated indexed pages above those that we indexed in sitemaps. 82k GSC indexed pages when only around 7k are submitted as indexed in GSC.

Impressions are also all over the place. Down 50% on our .com for 3 days, then bouncing back some of the way on today's reports.

As mentioned above, zero clicks on 2 ccTLD's, bouncing back to normal. NB traffic from one ccTLD for the corresponding local country switched to .com (which covers that country with indexed pages), then everything reversed. The keywords did not transfer back and forth, they were totally different.

I can't believe we're the only ones. Are folks comfortable with the reports being generated in GSC, or are members experiencing indexing report volatility and anomalies that are concerning them?

[Whitey]

Google is reporting some changes on the performance reports:

2024
March 4 onward (Search results)
Google Search has changed the way event rich results appear in Search results. As a result, you may see a drop in clicks and impressions for your event search appearance reported metrics in your performance report. This doesn’t indicate a real drop in traffic, only in the way we categorize it in Search Console

[support.google.com...]
I’m not sure if this is related to the experiences above.

[oldog]

"Just wondering what job you plan on training for after AI wipes the board with text/image content and sora wipes out video/Youtube? Since people in countries like India can make one 10th online to make a living than those in the west I suspect content creation will be fully AI/Fully India in a couple of years because it will only make financial sense to create from a country that isn't a rip off to just exist in!"
Easy answer.....if google stop the adsense all those billion of pages from india and china will stop to exists ...simple as that
no money no honey ....lol

[sk7411]

Looks like there was some correction happening on Sunday after it hit one of our sites on Mar 7-8 .

[mosxu]

What is up with Elon suing open AI ?

Having Open AI open source and offered on multiple platforms is good for competition!

[Conro]

Yesterday traffic -30%. Today -3%

[Conro]

Now - 12%. Traffic seems to return to normal then collapses

[not2easy]

@moxsu, the "Elon suing AI" thread is here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[ichthyous]

Traffic remains high for me from everywhere except the United States, where it starts the day - 40-60% every day now. For the past few days 'direct' traffic was down massively, this seems to have changed today...both search and direct are slightly up. But in general I am seeing a stairstep pattern upward all day now, with the lowest traffic early in the day and more traffic as the day progresses. This is not a normal pattern, and to me it indicates that more traffic is coming in after business hours end...also when competitors stop their ads?

[Micha]

So far I seem to be lucky, the traffic remains at a good level. Compared to last week +55% on Monday, it is also developing well today. I'm still getting traffic from Discover, even if it has slowed down a bit compared to the weekend.

[Ingall]

Pages that only contain the keyword and an affiliate link even rank ahead of me on Google. Spammers simply place a single word on high authority sites (topic doesn't matter). It is enough if you publish a keyword from the nutritional supplements sector on a site where you can print on T-shirts, such as Spreadshirt. The Bark.com site with a single off-topic profile link (without text) ranks ahead of sites with high-quality content.

Even the guestbook of a grief forum, which was spammed with off-topic affiliate links, ranked top on Google.

All of these spam links are placed on off-topic sites with a domain authority of over 80 and rank in the first places.

Maybe Google should think about the fact that thousands of backlinks are not a sign of quality. It would be enough if the topic relevance was checked or the length of stay or bounce rate. These spam sites certainly have an average time of site of 0 seconds and a bounce rate of 100%. Why doesn't any of this count?

By the way, I didn't find a single such spam campaign in the search results on Bing.

We should all write to Apple and ask them to use Bing as their default search. Maybe this is how we honest publishers could survive.

[Whitey]

I'm sensing that 2 of our ccTLD's hit a canonical / quality / authority threshold that triggered the reaction we experienced from Google. There was a partial and temporary transfer of traffic from these to our .com. During that time the keywords appearing on .com GSC reports were not consistent with the ccTLD, and they only represented a 35% traffic compensation for the loss over the 2 days, when the ccTLD's went to zero clicks/impressions.

And then they were fully reversed (as previously mentioned).

Also, when typing in our domain brand into G search with .com I see sitelinks from .com, which is a first time in my ccTLD region. It's as if this site is recognized now for it's authority compared to the ccTLD's which are active, but have no backlinks or supporting content, other than good quality pSEO pages.

I find it interesting that this shift we experienced is during the current core update. It's as if G is re-evaluating our authority and local audiences.

If you feel you've been unjustly hit, then recovered, I'd recommend considering what thresholds you may have triggered and do a SWOT analysis to uncover your weak areas and strengthen them as best you can. If you can't do that, I'd be concerned on your ability to sustain during subsequent updates. We won't be looking at that for several weeks until the dust settles.

There's some well reported job layoffs (100's of staff/journo's) on a major quality content producing site whose core subjects had drifted too wide. IMO they now need to amend their content volumes and subject focus back to core. This has been building over a year from early 2023, with continued iterations of the HCU updates. I wonder if this update has hit them further with HCU baked in or if they were sufficiently damaged in the lead up and earlier outputs of HCU.

btw - someone needs to ask G if the GSC indexing reports are functioning correctly and notify SEO's if it's not. Something's definitely not right (I can't believe we're the only ones).

[Conro]

On my sites I'm writing articles about how to replace the google search engine with another one and why it would be time to try a new search engine. By now, google is a search engine Poor and As we've seen with reddit, top-ranking sites are only there out of interest. We should all do it, anyway google will kill all the sites and if it's not today it will be tomorrow, leaving only the richest sites that it finds useful to make more money. The user is disappointed by the inaccurate search and all the chaos that is there, the best thing we can do for the best web and for users is to start making users understand that there are also alternatives to Google, maybe better for their use.

[Micha]

By now, google is a search engine Poor

I agree with that. I also wonder what Google is trying to achieve with its update at the moment. The search results in German-speaking countries have become really bad. From yesterday to today alone, the results have deteriorated drastically. Every search I did today only showed spam websites. I can only advise everyone to use a different search engine, but few will, because Google is everywhere.

[Conro]

@Micha I don't expect anything good from google. A month required by the update is enough to take out half of the websites, then when we don't even have a user it will be difficult to make people understand that there are also alternatives to Google.

[Nutterum]

@Ingall You realize Google is paying 20 billions (with a B) per year, to be the default search engine of Apple right? Bing will never pay that much. What Microsoft will do in an year or two is pay Apple to have ChatGPT suggestive search integration, since Siri is down in the gutter right now for pretty much every country outside US and as such bypass altogether Google's search.

[Micha]

@conro Unfortunately, you're right about that too. I think Google is no longer interested in its traditional search and is focusing too much on AI stuff. Unfortunately, this again shows how poorly the managers understand their own business.

Let's face it, if Google didn't have so much market power, the company would have been shunned by users long ago. Even though we webmaster reach a lot of users, Google is simply convenient for most people because it's always there when you open the internet.

[superclown2]

I think Google is no longer interested in its traditional search and is focusing too much on AI stuff. Unfortunately, this again shows how poorly the managers understand their own business.

If you're right they really have lost the plot because without advertising (sorry, "search") they are toast. Everything else they touch turns to dust. Perhaps that will include Artificial Stupidity as well - I've yet to see any real money being made from it.

[Micha]

Something to laugh about: Google has removed John Mu's website from its index.

[twitter.com ]

[mhansen]

@Micha - I wish there was "laugh" button instead of "Like" at times. That's funny right there!

[Conro]

@Micha This made me laugh, Maybe he should go to an seo for this penalty which I think is manual

[ichthyous]

As far as I can tell these updates are basically just affecting US traffic. UsA is -49% at noon, but almost every other country is strongly higher except for Canada. This seems to follow a very clear pattern for a while now, US traffic is much more suppressed than UK or EU.

[StupidIntelligent]

Google's John Mulluer's own website is now deindexed completely.

[seroundtable.com...]

His site's [johnmu.com...] contains some very disturbing folders, some he's allowed to be indexed himself.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Just curious do you think the hit on John's site is purposely done? The way he is acting too seems fishy. As if he is actually worried about his site. Google are constantly hitting sites, maybe this one is some kind of cover up? I just don't trust it. I don't trust anything Google does. The fact that this ''update'' takes an entire month rings alarm bells alone. Has anyone ever heard of an update taking longer than a few hours before? Sorry man it just smells of stupidity and we, the innocent web creators, are being mocked at.

[ichthyous]

The fact that this ''update'' takes an entire month rings alarm bells alone. Has anyone ever heard of an update taking longer than a few hours before?

I agree with this entirely...it's nonsense. Yes, Google does have a spam problem, and yes it does have a problem with AI gen content...but we are at the point where Google is simply using the excuse of constant back to back updates as a smokescreen for what is really going on, the complete decimation of organic search and the constant experimentation with how to push that traffic to ads and not to organic. Google needs to keep us, and the public, in the dark about it. Otherwise they face being seen as greedy and hostile to the little guy.

By the way...my USA traffic is -40% today at 2pm. Is it any coincidence that all the traffic vanishes at 9am sharp now in the usa? There is no regulation and nobody to stop them from grabbing it all. At least in Europe and UK some effort is being made.

[Micha]

@Fluff_Nutz I assume John is testing something, but it's still funny at first glance.

@ichthyous Google is seen as greedy and hostile by those involved with the company, so there is no reputation left to spoil. However, normal users don't care, they still use Google because it doesn't affect them. It's similar to Temu, many people know that the store is garbage, but still more and more people order this cheap junk from China.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Going by Reddit a lot of people are noticing the reduction to the quality of G search. Some even mentioning Bing being better, some other reports see Bing bringing in more traffic than normal as a result. That their indexing is better now too. However, what if this increased traffic from other sources is just what we are seeing because G are now giving us so little of it in comparison?

Everything G are doing is to stall. The fact that they are so far behind with AI, that Bing are still capable of bringing good results to their search. That their AI has been in motion way before G. Having less of the market may mean less pressure on them. But Google have been in the search biz for years now, too long really. To be so far behind makes no sense. Its all to stall so they can produce more of these ''updates'. Any excuse to bleed more traffic from those who probably deserve more. The hard workers that keeps their money pot going and practically created Google in the first place.

Their greed also shows by not placing source links into their AI. Acting like they own all content. Where do they think these articles come from? They just suddenly appear on their search from some magical tree? Seriously. Once they kill their creators they will eventually kill themselves in the process. Rely on AI too much for their own greed. AI will never be 100% fact and not everyone wants to use an AI box for their answers. They should find a good way for both AI and organic links to co-exist.

Its like putting AI in vehicles and expecting everything to be fine. AI comes with its own problems of glitches, bugs, malfunctions. Yes, it can help with workload but it should never be 100% relied upon for anything! Its illogical thinking. I'll be sure to laugh when G do indeed kill themselves.