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?

[EditorialGuy]

I'm still experiencing booms and busts with our traffic.

I haven't seen any booms or busts, but I have noticed more modest bumps and dips since the Core Update began.

For a couple of days, visits and pageviews were in decline (anywhere from, say, 10 to 20 percent) week over week, and then they'd go up by similar margins. The last two or three days have been in the down direction. Today looks like another better day (but only by a little).

One specific thing that I've noticed: Our top pages are mostly the same pages as always, but a couple of our travel site's very few pages about racier destination topics have cycled in and out of the top 10. I don't know if that's coincidence or not.

The Core Update is supposed to continue for another two weeks or so, and it will be interesting to see if the overall changes are any more eventful than they've been over the past two weeks. For our site, the Core Update's impact so far hasn't been dramatically worse (and hasn't been any better) than the HCU and Review Updates that wrought so much havoc in 2023.

[RedBar]

about racier destination topics

Now that's intriguing for me, where would you describe as racier?

[EditorialGuy]

Now that's intriguing for me, where would you describe as racier?

The pages contain annotated links to resources about sex and drugs in two major European cities. (Some of the linked resources are for people who want to party, while others have an academic or legal focus.)

Most of our other top-producing pages are about transportation. Maybe Google saw the word "trafficking" somewhere on the two sex-and-drug pages and decided they were about urban road travel.

[EditorialGuy]

I just ran across this factoid about who controls Alphabet and Google:

"Alphabet’s shareholders with the largest voting power are co-founder Larry Page, who controls 26.3% of all votes, co-founder Sergey Brin who controls 24.9% of the votes, followed by Eric Schmidt (4.2%), Vanguard (3.3%), and BlackRock (2.8%)."

Source: [kamilfranek.com...]

Between the two of them, the founders (Page and Brin) controlled 51% of Alphabet (including Google) as of December, 2022. At what point might they decide that they don't want to see their legacy flushed down the toilet? It sounds like they're in a position to do something about it.

[superclown2]

At what point might they decide that they don't want to see their legacy flushed down the toilet?

If you'd taken more billions than you could count out of the pockets of Internet businesses would you be particularly worried?

In the meanwhile the see-saw continues with our sites; completely flat during the early evening (which has been our busiest part of the day, for over 20 years) then a sudden burst for an hour that more than made up for it; then nothing at all since. Good job I'm not the nervous type but I do know that a lot of people are getting very depressed over this kind of thing. A lot of businesses will be going to the wall this year if this continues; which I believe it will unless they are stopped.

[ghostofseo]

Past 7 days.
Google Search down -38%
Reddit Traffic up 220%
Homepage is up 56% ~ not much value on my homepage vs sending people to our actual content.

If Google's goal is to wipe my website off the face off search, they're doing a great job.

But don't make any changes to your website Google says. While you dig a hole for my coffin? Not a chance I will do everything and anything to get my traffic back.

[jchiff]

Meanwhile, new Google partner Reddit goes public tomorrow as they walk a tightrope between keeping shareholders happy and avoiding a mass exodus of users and volunteer moderators. Could either be a sight to behold or a car wreck in the making:

[marketwatch.com...]

[superclown2]

the chaos in the SERPs continues for us as major search terms bounce between the top of page one to page 3 several times within a single day. Long tail is all but dead as Google ignore parts of queries as they steer the visitor to those that are more profitable for them. It makes little difference since they are buried anyway, under the ads and googlespam.

It seems it's all down to the European DMA and Google's efforts to 'comply' with it by exploiting every loophole their lawyers can find. The latest 'reason' for non-compliance is that they need to protect visitor privacy; this from the company that has done more to destroy it than anyone else in history.
[reuters.com ]

Meanwhile Reddit proposes to sell Google all it's data as TikTok (a growing threat to Google) may well be banned by the US government. At the risk of sounding like Cassandra I predict even worse days ahead for our industry.

[Micha]

The only thing I see as a change here is that the small sites are disappearing en masse, i.e. the rest that survived the HCT. Since Monday, you only see large providers (whether shops or news). But hey, as long as it doesn't bother the user, Google will carry on. Unfortunately, nobody in Brussels realizes that Google has triggered a mass extinction of small businesses and is now accelerating it.

Meanwhile Reddit proposes to sell Google all it's data as TikTok (a growing threat to Google) may well be banned by the US government. At the risk of sounding like Cassandra I predict even worse days ahead for our industry.

I'm just waiting for the news that Google is taking over Reddit ;)

[BlueEyes82]

@Micha

Correctly. For all search terms, only the really big technology sites in my subject area are included. In addition, there are 3-4 places for the brand you are looking for, even for long-tail keywords from brands.

For Google, profit maximization certainly works in the short to medium term. In the long term, however, no one will invest more time and write about background information, instructions and tips on blogs and specialist websites that one would look for in vain on the brands.

In the long term, the Internet with a lot of information as we know it today will be completely dead. It's up to the big sites what can be found - at least on Google.

If this is ok for the users, nothing will happen, otherwise sooner or later there will be a migration to other search engines. Actually, now would be the best time for a new search engine.

[engine]

@Micha I think it's worth pointing out this [openwebsearch.eu...]
It'll never be quick enough, but something is happening.

[Micha]

@motor I am familiar with the project and in my opinion it is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately too slow. I fear that it will be impossible to break Google's power anyway. The company has become entrenched in people's minds and I think it will be impossible to convince the masses to change.

[superclown2]

I fear that it will be impossible to break Google's power anyway.

Is it really true that people prefer Google, or is it that you can't escape them? My Samsung mobile is really a Google mobile, and nearly every browser defaults to them in the address bar anyway.

I've switched a lot of people to DDG recently and none of them have shown any inclination to go back. If their monopoly practices are banned we will see big changes. Word of mouth (mainly originated by online professionals) made Google what is was, back in the days when it was a far better search engine than the rest. Now the opposite is true but they are sustained by questionable business techniques - read the trial transcripts and you'll soon see what they are.

[Micha]

Most people just use Google because they are used to it, and it makes no difference at all to most how good the results etc are. Sure, you can change it for some, but to make a significant change, a lot more needs to happen, and I think that's impossible, because you describe it quite correctly: Google is everywhere, and the company will not allow that power to be taken away from it. It's been asleep for far too long, and it's been able to build up its presence to the point where it's now damn difficult, if not impossible, to change that dominance. The only attack surface would be stronger regulation of the advertising market, but that's easier said than done and Google is already spending a lot of money fighting regulations.

[ichthyous]

I've said it over and over here...search is now a utility and should be regulated as such. We can no longer depend on the private sector alone to provide us with information as the profit motive drives all decisions and works to the benefit of the monopoly, not the consumer. So, why not leave Google to the private sector (and to go down the rabbit hole), and offer a public option search engine to compete with it? That way at least people have options. The best idea would be a partnership between US, EU, UK, AU and other democratic nations so as to not appear biased toward any one country.

The US Dept. of Commerce sued Apple today as a monopoly over its phones...that is an easier and more understandable target. But most regulators, legislators and the public do not perceive the danger of allowing one company to control search everywhere around the world! It's more complex and doesn't appear to be a threat to them.

All I ever hear is "well, it's Google's platform, they started it, and they don't owe YOU a living!". People don't understand that it is OUR content that makes up Google's searches and without it Google literally has no business model. Until which point Google gets into the business of creating all the content for every search itself (I wouldn't put it past them) then it's a symbiotic relationship that must benefit both sides.

[Conro]

@ichthyous That Google doesn't owe anything to websites came out of the mouths of the "seo" who parroted who knows who, maybe from someone from Google itself. If google doesn't owe us anything, then why is it that when I do a Google search, there are websites that it uses to monetize? Why did sge, Bard, gemini take all the information from our websites? Why does google crawl websites all the time if it doesn't need them?
Why is it that if everyone de-indexed their sites now, would google instantly fail with no more websites? Google owes all its success to us, even the free advertising we have done over the years

[ichthyous]

@Conro. I know that and you know that, but read the comments on any article about Google getting sued for its myriad forms of manipulation and you will quickly realize that most (not all) of the public doesn't even have a clue about why we are complaining. They don't understand that Google's product is our content.

And I have heard many, many times "Oh just move on already, if your business from Google is declining just move to another business model"...as if one can simply just open a bricks-and-mortar shop these days which isn't also dependent on Google local search or google maps for customers! In my city it is nearly impossible to run a profitable physical space, the rents are far too high. Social media is also not any place to turn for my business, it is quite useless. Any non-search type ad campaigns don't work well and are extremely costly. I see some of my competitors launch into them blindly only to watch them all cancel their ads...it's far more expensive than it's worth. Only large corporations that set aside sums they can waste entirely on useless ads can afford it...they do it to push out any smaller competition and control the field.

[ghostofseo]

@superclown2 " Long tail is all but dead as Google ignore parts of queries as they steer the visitor to those that are more profitable for them. It makes little difference since they are buried anyway, under the ads and googlespam."

~ this is something nobody else is really talking about. Add the word review to the end of the long tail keywords in search and Google is now just ignoring the word "review" in search at least for anything related to the outdoors and instead showing brand sites, big retailers and then if you scroll long enough some actual reviews.

Not sure how much longer we can survive this.

Went from 15,000 users a day to 405 as of yesterday. My content has never been better, there is nothing we can do to stop this. Maybe I just need to keep posting more content and hope Google gets it correct. Imagine if someone in business used terms like that. I would laugh and say shut it down. Unfortunately this is all the eggs in the basket for me. I have a good site. Readers agree, the brands we work with agree, the PR firms we work with agree, yet Google now doesn't like me so I'm to just go out of business. F*ck that I'm going down swinging if it happens. Not sitting back and hoping Google changes course.

[Conro]

These days I'm noticing a very strange thing. There are articles that are visited en masse, but not as consistently as if each article is moved to higher positions and then lowered back down in the serp. This behavior is really strange, also because they are not bots

[ichthyous]

Another huge drop...USA is at -32% at 7:30pm. Canada -65%, Much of Europe is way down as well, more than 40% lower than normal.

[superclown2]

I think it's worth pointing out this [openwebsearch.eu...]

@Engine: I wonder if these are the people who have been spidering my sites so heavily? I've been blocking bots wholesale, particularly German ones, because they mess up my stats. Perhaps I should be letting them in?

It would really help if people like this could let us have their IP addresses so they could be whitelisted. Any help we could give to potential rivals of Google would be a good thing.

[Conro]

Conspiracy mode on: Google pushes the big brands to the top of the SERP so these sites can get rich with their advertising. At the same time, Google crawls these big sites with so many daily visitors that they could survive even without Google to train their AI. None of these whitelisted sites will sue Google because of the huge gains they're seeing. They're happy, Google is happy.

[londrum]

I don't think it's a conspiracy when it comes to reddit. Just look at their traffic chart. Google did a deal with them and their traffic went to the moon

[Markedd]

I woke up this morning and I was like, hey let's check how's my favorite dead website doing? Well, still dead, but I checked the SERPS for the articles and get this, they're just gone, but no one took their place. Not replaced by anything, just gone. If you search for the topics I covered, there's just nothing there. Google says no one covered it. These people are absolute imbeciles.

[Conro]

@londrum In my opinion "of conspiracy mode on" , it also has agreements with Amazon, in short, their advertisements have the tag-id typical of affiliates and although some say that it is only used to track clicks to Amazon, it seems strange to me that the richest man in the world has not found a less obvious and doubtful method to track advertising links

[Conro]

@Markedd This I noticed he does with reviews. It is seen that google is now entrusted by artificial intelligence. It sucks, but it works great when the human hand comes along for whitelisted sites

[Markedd]

@Conro I am now honestly just discussing what Google does just for the sake of it. But seriously, if no one else covered a topic, why in God's name would you just not put anything there? I do have some 'intrusive thoughts' on that Google actually knows what it's doing, has made the math and eventually this idiotic set of moves will pay off both short and long term for them. Oh, the joys of being a monopoly.

[engine]

@superclown2
Here's a link to more info about OpenWebSearch and its crawler OWLer
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Juniya]

The answer is simple, we web publishers by now should have had a Web Publisher Association, a global one and this wouldn't happen but we generally don't. We have marketing/advertising associations/agencies but we don't have a united Web Publishers Association that and should be able to lobby for changes that favor us, the web publishers.

We could even be able to go to court to stop some of these so called "core updates", I know easier said than done but in the end, if anything is going to change in our favor, we have to have a united association with big, small and medium website owners all involved.

I believe some people on Twitter have registered this association.

At this time it's time to think solutions to fight back otherwise next year or even this year, they can easily throw ANOTHER update and wipe whomever is left off their SERPS just because they *think* they know what users want. It's madness.

[Dooku]

web publishers by now should have had a Web Publisher Association

Although I do not operate "informational/content publishing" websites but only do e-commerce, I would happily pay like 50 euro (or whatever) a year contribution for such an association.

Imagine if only 25% of website owners would become a paying member of such an association......that would amount to such a huge serious budget that even Google would think twice before doing "good things for their customers", because we would have the means to sue them endlessly.

[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.