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]

[NeapTide]

Lol. Hypocrisy at its finest.
They surely need to fire some people working on core web vitals side.

Today i again checked so called core web vital for Google and its failing them miserably.

I remember they devalued one of my websites before because it was failing metrics.

LCP is very high for google.com and so is INP. The only metrics google is passing is CLS.

Pathetic. If someone at Google reading this your company is pathetic and hypocrite. Stop dictating webmasters what to do when your own products do not comply with your standards.

[Conro]

@NeapTide Reddit also doesn't outperform cwv and yet it has increased traffic. He doesn't listen to them anymore, when it's going well they say one thing and then contradict themselves

[superclown2]

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 term 'premium content generated by artificial intelligence' is an oxymoron.

'premium' content means the content is better than the rest. Stuff generated by AI isn't, unless the source it was trained from is impeccable.

Since Bard2 (or whatever they call it) was trained on content from the Internet, which is riddled with errors, biases, junk, and downright lies, this content can never be labelled 'premium'.

Anyway, Google tried a pay-to-search' model years ago. Like nearly everything they touch (apart from advertising, masquerading as search) it flopped dismally.

[NeapTide]

In other words they are going to steal user generated data and charge money for it with their paid SGE/Gemini/Bard/Fart/Robbed


AI is only capable of plagiarism that is rewriting already written articles/essays/solutions. Same is true for coding. AI needs source codes to train and rewrite codes.

[ChrisWilson]

Yesterday my impressions shot way up, almost tripled but the terms are only semi-related to the site. So of course my CTR shot way down. This is so bizarre.

[Conro]

Today, as soon as I woke up, my site was +20%. I published a new post and before writing it I made sure that there were no others written by other sites. I publish it and after less than an hour, the time to be crawled by the Google bot and the traffic immediately dropped to a +1.5%.

[BigKat]

I see in a post Barry has on his site there are a lot of people talking about Google losing market share. Our sales have been improving from other search engines gradually for over a year. Anyone else in ecom experiencing the same? Below are some of Google's market share losses people posted about:

Google search market share Germany/Desktop:

March 2024: 78,01%
April 2024: 76,65%

US Mobile Share
March 2024: 95.03%
April 2024: 91.87%

UK Desktop
Nov 2023: 85.01%
March 2024: 82.69%
April 2024: 78.94%

Worldwide: - Desktop
March 2024: 81.63%
April 2024: 79.72%

USA: - Desktop
March 2024: 75.92%
April 2024: 72.64%

Seems Google's "profits first - users last" strategy is having an impact on their market share.

[Conro]

Of course, because it has become a google chaos. A person uses google to find sites, not to read questions, related searches, and be inundated with advertisements. Google no longer easily shows sites for the exact query and between penalized sites and rampant spam, people easily lose patience Because they don't find what they're looking for like they used to and use either other search engines or ChatGPT

[NeapTide]

People also do not search on Google to be repeatedly fed results from just 4, 5 or 6 websites. Yeah right. Even top 20 results for some queries in my niche are just from few domains.

People also do not search on google to be fed Google Garbage Boxes on top of SERPs or right after 1 or 2 results.

Yeah right. I was looking for something and first result on Google was "People also search for". WTF

[saladtosser]

I know a guy who was hit super hard by this last update, he swears to me he removed all affiliate links when the update started and tanked his site and traffic! He has been going back up the last few days to almost normal levels but hes afraid to put any affiliate links back on the site and looking to patreon membership or a paywall moving forward!

I've personally never used any affiliate links and haven't been hit by this update (I have no outgoing links TBH other than social media). Make of it what you will but I was scared of affiliate links back in penguin days as many posters suggested Google doesn't want middlemen taking a cut as they are the middlemen?! Maybe the future of the internet is paywalls and patreon now! Sad really.

I was under the impression Google only got big because webmaster recommended them to everyone back in the day (free ads on website to google search, i remember, every website I visited had this banner link to Google as the best search engine, maybe they were paid by G for these html static ads?!) webmasters are no longer needed by Google it seems and even Google is looking at paywalls.... Sad but I see a 100% chance for another true *search engine* to rise from all this, the transition will be painful though!

If webmasters got their act together like back in the day to promote Google they would all put free ads back on their websites but this time for DuckDuck or Brave and get the awareness out there they created for Google, but maybe webmasters are 2 far gone at this point and G got 2 big!? Someone needs to organise a concerted effort somewhere or the web is deader than dead and the scrapes you get now will be gone for good! This forum is also finished, why are the mods not organising something, anything? Everyone is 2 scared i guess?! Where is GoodROI mod? Gone bust from selling SEO services that don't work? We don't need BING we need DDG or Brave IMO, a company that isn't 2 big to no longer care! Caring is why Google got bid, remember the internship movie? They should do a follow up movie to that now with DS and JM instead of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn trying to persuade everyone Google is still cool haha

[edited by: saladtosser at 6:52 pm (utc) on Apr 4, 2024]

[saladtosser]

@NeapTide when you eat breakfast do you not want to know what other people also had for breakfast? Of course you do, why should search be any different?! :) What people also had for breakfast, coming to a cereal packet near you soon!

[Conro]

@saladtosser I've removed an entire subdirectory with thousands of guides with affiliate links. What did I get? I lost more traffic and Amazon api for a month. Don't listen to all the nonsense that SEOs say, surely google penalizes affiliated content because it wants people to buy by clicking on its advertising eats money, But hcu doesn't hit because you have affiliate links or advertisements. Online newspapers are full of advertisements and affiliate links but they haven't been affected by google hcu

[saladtosser]

@Conro news is an ongoing daily needed asset, until G create their own news company they are safe, you cant feed AI what hasn't happened only what has, they are free to-do whatever....My friend isn't an SEO just a web application developer and blogger since 1999

[Conro]

@saladtosser In fact, I was thinking of adding the news back to my site

[superclown2]

Yeah right. I was looking for something and first result on Google was "People also search for". WTF

I'd be more impressed by Google if they actually showed me what my search term asked them to show, instead of changing my query to a more profitable one for them in the hope I would click on an ad by mistake (or in desperation).

I've been predicting for months that they would 'push the envelope' as far as they could as the days of judgement got nearer. They are already under investigation by Europe for allegedly breaching the DMA and the verdict in the USA case (which they managed to get held virtually in secret) is due in May. Interesting days ahead.

[Micha]

Google uses our content to train its AI, but woe betide anyone else doing this with Google products. This company is just ridiculous.

[bloomberg.com ]

[Conro]

Ridiculous to be good. At the circus there are clowns who are more serious than them

[mosxu]

Is this update over yet? I have never seen scam domains ranking like this ever before:

cheapest
unbeatable
doordie :))

Absolute terms fooling AI into high CTRs, 1 trillion $ company ?

[Conro]

The update is still ongoing, and the more I look at the results, the more it becomes clear that google is in the hands of an artificial intelligence that doesn't have a clue what to do, apart from randomly destroying websites that aren't a brand. Yesterday I did a research on an seo topic and many articles were from over 10 years ago. Let's forget about google, it's unusable now

[Conro]

Today - 30% traffic, Never so bad. I've noticed that if I use a vpn, the serp changes For some queries and some of my posts disappear. Maybe that's why even though some articles are always on the first position when I don't use the VPN, they still lost half of the traffic

[NeapTide]

@Conro+
Indeed that's the case. SERPs might look good with your local IP but they are worst when you use VPN and change IP to some other country.
It's the indication that your website is either penalized or they tried to localize universal content of your website and f*cked up

[superclown2]

I've noticed that if I use a vpn, the serp changes

Google has been using localisation for years based on your IP address. There is nothing sinister about it.

[Conro]

@NeapTide He has certainly penalized himself. I then specify that I used the vpn but connecting to a US server. I'm in Europe. If I do the search with a different IP but always from my country, I don't notice disappearances of posts, but I do notice a lot of movement with sites that constantly replace each other for some queries. Today the update should end, there will be the coup de grace

[Conro]

@superclown2 Yes, I know, but the fact that the posts disappeared into thin air is new to me. Other times I've done the test and at least for my site, apart from the change of position, I have never noticed the complete disappearance of posts based on geographical location

[saladtosser]

Conro + I;m seeing this as well for the first time ever, started yesterday massive movements based on IP location!

[Conro]

@saladtosser A little while ago I activated the vpn and from a German server all my positions that I checked were worse or some posts disappeared. I turned off the vpn the locations are back to the way they were before. If my traffic stays like this, I give up everything, I'm not going to continue this agony anymore.

[christianz]

Google uses our content to train its AI, but woe betide anyone else doing this with Google products. This company is just ridiculous.

Unbelievable levels of hypocrisy.

[Micha]

Something is happening in Germany. The Commission for Licensing and Supervision has spoken out and made it clear that Google is violating the Interstate Media Treaty by discriminating against small publishers and denying them inclusion in the Showcase. This will be interesting, because the Commission can make life really difficult for Google.

[dwdl.de ]

[Markedd]

@Micha I wouldn't hold my breath that it will end with anything positive. It's the US that needs to fix this and they won't budge.

[Conro]

He's doing the same thing in the serp, destroying entire companies that depend on the traffic that google sends, but instead of giving space to everyone as he used to, he now gives more space to big sites and those who have a partnership with him, like reddit. This has greatly harmed us users end up with a search created on the gain and advantage of Google, not to please the user and makes people know about the web. If google had failed, I would have understood and another search engine would have immediately taken its place, but here it is doing things slowly, taking things off a little at a time after taking to train it to ai. This is unfair and you may not use copyrighted content without permission. Someone at the top should put an end to something that those who have a monopoly should not do as soon as possible and do not tell me that Google is a private company, Because when so many people depend of you 'Cause you've got a monopoly, You can't change the game overnight. I hope the DMA kicks in as soon as possible because between invasive advertising, Google forums, YouTube, related questions and searches, google is only putting itself in the foreground. For the DMA this can't be done, because they give too much priority to their services, so I hope they start doing something to Ending this Wild West