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?

[tom_010101]

My project crashed from 30,000 visitors a day to 16,000 in August 2023 and for a week it has been down to 7000 visitors a day. It's my life's work with over 30,000 blog articles but it seems it's over. :(

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Stocks are back in price. My congratulations to all of you with another robbery from Greedle!

P.S. Guys, who are facing with drop to zero again? From the start of the update, my website dropped to zero, then bounced back for a few days. amd now it's vanished from the SERPs again.

[edited by: Cyril_TechWebsites at 6:21 am (utc) on Mar 15, 2024]

[Conro]

Traffic continues to collapse and at this rate it will reach zero within a week. I just need to figure out if my site is spammy or useless. Definitely worse than the sites with automatic translation and paa that are in front of me.

[Micha]

Am I the only one whose website is experiencing a major upswing? Discover's traffic has been dead since September, but since last Friday different articles have been landing there every day and the number of visitors has shot up accordingly. Compared to the previous week, I currently have an increase of 230 percent.

Without Discover it would look like it has in the last few weeks, because very few visitors come via the "normal search".

[tom_010101]

Discover is normal. I know that. Sometimes an article is in Discover and then the visitors multiply. Only the “normal search” is decisive. Discover is just a coincidence. You shouldn't rely on it. I know this (unfortunately) too well.

[Conro]

@Micha It's good to hear that at least someone is having an improvement on traffic. I've never received any traffic from Discover, but I know it's a source that brings in a lot of traffic. Have you made any changes to your site lately in order to get more traffic from Discover? Are the visits to news articles?

[superclown2]

I'm getting wild swings with periods of masses of visits followed by near complete shutdowns. Totally unnatural.

This is the result of an ultra-greedy American company being allowed to have such a huge control over the earnings of millions of businesses throughout the world whilst it imposes it's own Google Tax on the entire Internet.

[Micha]

I realize that you shouldn't rely on Discover, but it's strange that a different article has been attracting tons of readers every day for a week now, and of course that's a bit reassuring.

@conro I cleaned out the categories two weeks ago, especially the subcategories, but nothing more. Edit: and yes, I run a pure news site without a store.

[Conro]

@Micha in what sense clean?

[Micha]

@conro I have removed many subcategories and now use more tags for a finer sorting of the topics.

[NeapTide]

So I just checked INP value for google(dot)com, the parasite making lives of people miserable and the parasite itself failed core web vitals with INP at 257ms.

Quite frankly, 90 percent of web is failing INP. I don't know what ret*rd working at Google gave the idea to make INP a core web vital. Actually your phone hardware (screen latency) is fully responsible for INP. If user phone is old or having poor quality screen, latency for interaction would be low

[einserpirelli]

INP isn't an important ranking signal anyway... so what...

[NeapTide]

Who knows what's the ranking signal these days.
But if you are launching something for masses to comply at least your own product should comply to that first.
Your own product (google) is failing core web vitals but you want others to pass them to rank better in SERPs. 😏

[ichthyous]

@conro I have removed many subcategories and now use more tags for a finer sorting of the topics.

Google doesn't index tags easily, and sometimes not at all. I find Categories and subcats get indexed and rank better, but tags rank terribly. Having said that, after this update I have noticed a lot more traffic to my tag pages and some (not all) of my major categories are withering away.

[ChrisWilson]

Last 48 hours my traffic in a non-commercial niche has almost bottomed out to the lowest it's ever seen since 2006. No manual actions, no ads on the site, and is a traditional forum.

[ghostofseo]

If Google's goal is to completely wipe my site out they are doing a great job at it. Thanks Google you have really messed things up.

[ichthyous]

-42% in USA traffic today at 2pm. Search is only down 7% though...the difference is the huge surge in traffic from UK, Europe and rest of world. Google has clearly decided to focus its efforts on stealing all the North American traffic unimpeded by any legislation. These fools going after TikTok as a threat to national security need to broaden the net and include an even bigger threat to small business posed by Google!

[christianz]

Last 48 hours my traffic in a non-commercial niche has almost bottomed out to the lowest it's ever seen since 2006. No manual actions, no ads on the site, and is a traditional forum.

Nothing good has come out of the March updates.

[Whitey]

Nothing good has come out of the March updates.

I think in about 3 weeks some good analysis and consensus will start to appear out there. How folks recover or not will be another story.

@rustybrick:

I am starting to see signs of more ranking fluctuations and volatility as of Friday, March 15th - likely related to both the core and spam updates. [seroundtable.com ]

There seems to be no let up in the volatility.

For me I'm anxious when i see wild fluctuations in impressions and indexing, that i previously thought was a GSC bug (it may still be). This is happening on sites that have not yet been hit and i take this to be a sign that those sites that have not been hit are on a marginal threshold close to a major drop.

It seems pumping out written/AI content or pSEO that ranks quickly causing accelerated traffic growth is a risky business without brand or reputation behind it. Even major sites that do this have been hit during earlier HCU updates, causing 100's (if not 1000's overall) of layoff's involving professional journalists and support staff. Check this out: [startupdaily.net ]

[Whitey]

The above link should resolve correctly to:

Finder cuts staffing for the 3rd time in a year, shedding 60 jobs [startupdaily.net ]

[Conro]

Guru seo: Affiliate links; eeat; photos, videos, write in the first person...

In the meantime, google takes it all

[twitter.com...]

[oldog]

Funny thing....a huge update ....a very small thread...
Meaning.....
Job as usual for 99,9% for the rest of webmasters...

[superclown2]

Job as usual for 99,9% for the rest of webmasters

The overwhelming majority of webmasters that I communicated with 20+ years ago are out of business. Sadly I have watched many on this site announce the same fate over the past few years.

[mosxu]

Invalid traffic for days now…

[JesterMagic]

The Reddit and Google deal has really affected the rankings of the posts in my forum for my niche. Reddit has come in an taken over my ranking position and now I am on page 2 or 3 depending on the keywords.

The best content for the keywords should rank. Ranking should not be based on deals and how well Google integrates with the content of another business or their own (like Youtube).

[RedBar]

Since the end of January my global site's traffic has been consistent and steady with no dramas of high / low fluctuations BUT real world business enquiries have fallen off a cliff edge specifically so the "West".

I have seriously been considering relocating to a more "central" country.

[ichthyous]

real world business enquiries have fallen off a cliff edge specifically so the "West"

Exactly...I was getting inquiries from the UK all of last year, but they weren't buying, now no inquiries at all from the UK even though the traffic is even higher than last year. That is also the case with Australia, Canada, the UAE and the United States. New business is effectively at zero and has been since about the 5th. On top of that USA traffic has been very low since this all started...every day traffic drops at 9am sharp and stays far below the norm.

[EditorialGuy]

Funny thing....a huge update ....a very small thread...

The responses to RustyBrick's Google update articles at Search Engine Roundtable are going nuts, with comments by the hundreds. Lots of people are furious, frustrated, and/or frightened. And why not? I've been using Google since the 1990s, and I've never seen its search results this bad.

[BlueEyes82]

@EditorialGuy

I also didn't think that there couldn't be even worse results than after the HCU update. I was hoping that Google wouldn't communicate its error to the outside world, but would fix it with the next major update. But like many others, I was probably wrong.

As has been written several times, the relevance of the results is bottomless. I don't think Google will change the whole thing in the medium term. The wrong people seem to be at the helm right now.

But I am sure that after this update, Bing will gain even more market share. The trend after the HCU update was very clear. Google will probably have to drive its business into the wall with an announcement.

[EditorialGuy]

An optimist might think (or at least hope) that, after cleaning its index of outright spam and junk sites, Google would turn its attention to restoring a modicum of quality to the remaining search results.

Then again, optimists are probably in short supply when it comes to Google's SERPs.