April 2024 Google Search Observations

[Whitey]

@Micha

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.

Could be. A contact of mine is complaining that Reddit is outranking the source content in their observations.

@EditorialGuy

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].

A travel related site that I monitor uses a similar technique. It is ad heavy to the point of being a pain to enjoy reading the good content, but the content itself is about [Destination 1] + [popular subtopic's]. The traffic to this site grew very strongly since 2018 as content was added. Articles did not all rank straight away, but let's say 1 in 3 or 4 went straight into the top 10 within days or a few short weeks.

I wonder if these types of sites could be vulnerable to the ongoing march on AI where images, and subject matter can be written on all subjects and referenced to "headline authorities" (ie brand, Reddit's etc). Topical authority may be playing 2nd place to just "authority" in the eyes of G.

Again, just me saying as I don't know.

PS I think the current guidance from G is way too vague. Folks deserve not to be blindsided by this incredible life changing effect on business without a better level of accountability for webmasters to respond to. G is so pervasively dominant in the business World it needs to be brought into line with a better level of transparency IMO.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:28 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2024]
[edit reason] April thread split cleanup [/edit]

[Ingall]

@Whitey Thanks for your feedback. Self-analysis and sharing findings is a good idea.

My articles absolutely consistent with what my site content is generally recognized for.

I have exactly the same problem as Micha. Only news pages and empty pages with no content with a single spam link rank in front of me. Often also forums with deleted posts.

I've been running a small website for 5 years and writing about fitness and nutrition. I mainly write articles with scientific backgrounds and studies. I even create infographics for each post to better convey my explanations to my readers.

I implement exactly what Google expects in the webmaster guidelines regarding helpful, trustworthy and user-oriented content.

My pages have a very high average time on site and I constantly receive positive feedback via email from readers of my website.

I have never bought backlinks. I do get links from big sites, but always with no-follow. My backlining profile is therefore miserable.

However, in spring 2022, my content was rewarded by Google and almost all of my pages had top rankings. My site even ranked ahead of major sites with strong authority.

I think that my ranking was so good back then because of the positive user signals and that these were a higher ranking factor on Google back then than they are today.

The crash came in autumn 2022.

Suddenly there were parasites in front of me that contained no content at all.
e.g. A guestbook on a grief forum with an affiliate spam link to a nutritional supplement.
Social media sites with the brand name of a product as the profile name.
Medium, Outlookindia, newspapers with paid advertisements with poor content.

It was very frustrating because I sometimes spend weeks researching my articles in order to write them based on facts.

All of these sites have terrible content but strong authority and a very strong backlink profile.

In my opinion, the problem is simply that Google cannot recognize the quality of the content.

Google itself writes about assessing the quality of content:
“One oft the factor we use for this is links from other prominent websites to the respective content. This has often proven to be a good sign of trustworthiness.”

By the way, I still have top rankings on Bing, Duckduckgo and Ecosia (even ahead of major authority sites).

[Whitey]

@Ingall

In my opinion, the problem is simply that Google cannot recognize the quality of the content.

Maybe that's part of the reason why Google is using Reddit. Don't forget ChatGPT references it strongly for building it's LLM's.

The upcoming "authority update" scheduled by Google for May, could be part of this AI pivot.

On top of that, there would seem to have been a "content explosion" that Google felt it needed to reign in. Last year's Bard to Gemini launch and therefore product quality seemed poorly implemented to me, as a reaction to ChatGPT, a threat that IMO has now settled and passed.

In the end, Google isn't able to cope with the content explosion overall and the authority signals, so as usual it is defaulting to it's own limited decades old "brand" and authority signals, and more recently the Reddit / Quora relationships etc.

Business' may be squealing for mercy, transparency and fairness in terms of their contributions, but are users getting what they want? A user will still purchase or consume the same quantity of goods, services and information.

I've been running a small website for 5 years and writing about fitness and nutrition. I mainly write articles with scientific backgrounds and studies. I even create infographics for each post to better convey my explanations to my readers.

How do you monetize your content? Can you capture what's left of your audience and remarket or switch them onto an app? Can you build a community that follows or interacts through you?

I took heart from listening to a CEO of a major travel brand saying that 40% of their business now comes from their app? Social value can maybe pivot away from G dependence - not an easy solution for all business' though.

[Treud]

A totally dead weekend (usually holidays is when customer are shopping for us), no order no inquiry.
The 2 last orders i received were products are totally forget I I had them :)

I have this pattern time to time though (a couple times the last few years)

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Did I missed something? Where did you get the information about authority update on 5th of May?

[Whitey]

@Cyril TechWebsites

Did I missed something? Where did you get the information about authority update on 5th of May?

With this update, Google has implemented three new spam policies targeting scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, and site reputation abuse

While the first two policies were immediately enforced, the site reputation abuse policy will be effective starting May. [searchenginejournal.com...]

[Micha]

@Cryril TechWebsite In other words: Websites that write off (parasite seo) should rank worse. As I have already written, I fear the worst.

@ingall What you write applies almost exactly to my website.

About the state of my site, for the first time in months the number of keywords on Google is increasing again (according to Xovi) and the ranking has generally improved. The number of visitors has also increased slightly. However, I'm guessing that this will still change, as the core update is still ongoing.

[ichthyous]

About the state of my site, for the first time in months the number of keywords on Google is increasing again

Me too, albeit very slowly...however, when the traffic to your most important category looks like this, slowly gaining peripheral keywords isn't going to help. Google has dropped the traffic by 90%, and I am still ranking higher than ever:
[ibb.co ]

My ranking went up sharply this weekend, by my traffic is -47% from an average Monday at this time. Overnight traffic was extremely low. So, if Google is now using the excuse of spam updates to make all the traffic disappear, and the updates have happened back to back without any pause since 2023 then what is left? They will continue to use the updates as a smokescreen to take all the traffic...who can argue with trying to combat spam?

[RedBar]

A quick March update for a couple of my sites:

Global site: It's busiest month since November 2022 at +11.4% v March 2023 which was my busiest month of 2023 but -8% of March 2022 also the busiest month of 2022

Local UK hotel site: Likewise its busiest month since July & August 2023 and before that Jul/Aug/Sep 2021 !
Traffic +7.4% v March 2023
March 2024 v February 2024 +11.5%

[Conro]

But how can you be more incompetent than these Google incompetents. They say they want to remove 40% of spam, and spam is getting higher and higher, with sites with great content penalized. I challenge anyone to want to continue running any website

[NeapTide]

In my niche, for most queries, there are 5 or 6 results from same website along with all Google garbage boxes.

Quite frankly Google is intentionally favoring few websites and displaying results from them on top. They are more like bot websites using bots to fetch app/game updates and publish them as soon as they are available.

Remaining are thrown under the bus who can't keep up with their speed.

[Conro]

It seems pretty clear to me that they are trying to discourage content creation, this way it will be easier for google to focus the user's attention only on sge

[BigKat]

It seems pretty clear to me that they are trying to discourage content creation

Maybe they want to have less content to crawl so they can realign network resources for SGE? See: [linkedin.com...]

This quote from Gary Illyes is telling:

we're crawling roughly as much as before, however scheduling got more intelligent and we're focusing more on URLs that more likely to deserve crawling.

[ichthyous]

I have stopped worrying about what Google wants. I am writing articles for my site now whether Google cares about them or not. They have already been indexed and are already being seen and read. I waited a decade to have enough time on my hands to do it, so now I am...my customers will like it, my fans will like it, and maybe Bing will like it. They will be included in AI datasets which is also important. It's a lot of work, but also gratifying.

We have to move past doing everything for Google now...the contract is definitively broken. My traffic for the last few days is so abysmally low that Google is doing me the favor of releasing me from its grip to move on to find other ways of finding customers. I will turn articles into videos too if need be...and I will finally be free of having to think about Google's ups and downs every day of my life.

I am fortunate to be in the financial position to do that, mostly from the sales I had through Google search going back 20 years now. But that party is OVER. It's time we all start thinking post-Google. Google has been thinking post-websites for years already.

[Micha]

We have to move past doing everything for Google now...the contract is definitively broken.

I subscribe to that. Google talks a lot anyway, but a lot of it is just generic talk in my eyes. They don't care about small websites, so why should we jump?

[Ingall]

@Whitey I monetize my website through affiliate links. Since I don't write articles for money, affiliate links are the only way I can write independently.

I also have a lot of items that I don't monetize at all.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dubious website operators in my area. It is possible that my site only has a similar pattern to the spammers' sites because of these affiliate links and is therefore downgraded.

The problem with these HCU updates is that the entire site is evaluated. How can small sites like ours have a chance against large media companies?

It would be better if Google also evaluated the topic relevance to the main page.

For example, why does a parasite spam post about dietary supplements on a platform like GitHub rank first on Google?

“GitHub is an online service for software development and version management for Git-based software projects.”

Such parasite pages do not appear on Bing or other search engines.

In the future, I will write a second post for each of my articles on GitHub, Medium or Linkedin, in which I simply tell users that they should go to Bing or Duckduckgo if they want relevant information about their search term.

I'm sure many Google users are disappointed with the search results and think there is no relevant information.

They don't know that there are so many great websites that contain exactly the information they want, but are not visible because they are buried in garbage.

I think Google doesn't care about the satisfaction of its users.

Alphabet (Google) shares reached an all-time high today.

As long as Google doesn't lose market share to Bing, they won't change the quality of search results.

P.S. Just saw that the Toyota Club Russia (forum) ranks ahead of me with affiliate links to a dietary supplement. Wow, certainly very helpful for users looking for a review of this product.

[ghostofseo]

@Ingall affiliate marketing is bad now unless your promoting Google's products in which case they would love to see you join their program - [workspace.google.com...]

All kidding aside. There is NOTHING wrong with affiliate marketing. You may here otherwise on Reddit or in some forums but if a website owner wants to monetize their content via very small affiliate commissions then by all means. Now can you live on just affiliate income alone, perhaps but it might be tough. That's were advertising comes in. Which now looks to be another big red flag for Google.

So are we supposed to all work for free, as passion projects? My website started out as a blog, and I had a full time job. Then we started making a little money, and a little bit more and then I quit my job to give the website a go. 10 years later and we have an office in downtown Jackson, WY lots of staff, and lots of overhead.

So my blog is now a business doing hundreds of thousand in revenue. That shouldn't be looked at as a bad thing. Again this is a "blog" or news site or whatever you want to call it. But we need to earn money to survive. I doubt anyone at Google would go to work for free, aside from some Ivy league grads looking to intern for Alphabet that don't need to earn a living.

[jchiff]

For those around long enough to remember: Inktomi was filled with advertisers and spam, while Yahoo! Answers became the place to find real info from real users!

Sound familiar?

So. if at all possible, try to survice this latest iteration from Goog just out of spite lol.

[sk7411]

Something is rolling today!

[renatovieira]

Yes, something is rolling today. Drop on all my sites in all niches...

[Micha]

The same here, the whole day is bad, visibility index down, but since 8 pm the traffic from Google has risen sharply, which is very unusual. The update is probably in its final stages and now Google has to shake things up again.

This will probably come as no surprise to anyone here: Google seems to be planning a premium feature for SGE. I have to say, the company really has a sense of humor: process content from websites, integrate it into its product, charge money for additional features, and the website owners have to see where that leaves them, that is, except for a handful who get paid.

[ft.com ]

[christianz]

This will probably come as no surprise to anyone here: Google seems to be planning a premium feature for SGE. I have to say, the company really has a sense of humor: process content from websites, integrate it into its product, charge money for additional features, and the website owners have to see where that leaves them, that is, except for a handful who get paid.

I have not given Google permission to integrate anything I have into anything other than the SERPs. Google really needs to implement more precise and fine-grained way to signal what SGE functions you want your site featured in. Something like "nosnippet". I would immediately opt out of everything and never reconsider.

[MayankParmar]

TheVerge has posted an article on best printers 2024: [theverge.com...] and the second half is 100% written using AI according to GPT zero. Ranks first.

[christianz]

@Mayank

The title starts with "Best printer 2024..." which in itself sounds like a SEO cliché :D

It is actually funny, if you ignore the suffering of small/medium size publishers and creators.

[EditorialGuy]

Our editorial travel site's pageviews were up 21 percent yesterday in a week-over-week comparison. That could be some kind of post-Easter effect, mind you. (Since Easter moves around in the calendar, a direct year-over-year comparison wouldn't show that.)

[Whitey]

That could be some kind of post-Easter effect, mind you

Similar here. It seems that tracking tools out there are still seeing instability going on though, so..... :

Google SearchLiaison
@searchliaison
It's still rolling out.
[seroundtable.com...]

[mosxu]

In the news,

Google considers charging for AI-powered search in big change to business model…

Small businesses have nothing left in their coffers and despite that G still applies the cheese moving algos and so called updates!

However they need to watch out because consumers have rights and moving their cheese will make them depressed!

P.S Politicians do not like depressed voters

[engine]

@mosxu, here's a link to reference that report.

Google, the search engine used by more than a billion people around the world, is reported to be considering charging for premium content generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

The company, owned by Alphabet Inc, is said to be revamping its business model and looking at putting some of its core product behind a paywall.

It would be the first time Google had charged for any of its content.

[bbc.co.uk...]

Clearly, it's looking for ways to monetise, as would any business.

[Micha]

@engine

Clearly, it's looking for ways to monetise, as would any business.

The difference is that most companies do not use more than half of the content on the Internet to earn money themselves.

[NeapTide]

If you are earning money from Adsense and think that traffic from Bing, duckduckgo, Baidu, Yandex etc will make you any money, you are wrong. I am getting huge traffic from Baidu and Google does not even show ads on pages that are visited by users from Baidu. Baidu is quite popular in Asian countries these days.

This is so much criminal behavior at so many levels.

Google does not want any other search engine to flourish in market because they are direct threat to their business.