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]

[RedBar]

@RedBar Is your site also informative, or do you sell something?

It's a specialist widget site for the global construction industry and associated trades with peocessing factories in several different countries. It features in-depth information and images for architects and specifiers plus details for regular bulk buyers in the associated industries.

We do sell but do not incorporate prices on the site since nearly every buyer's specific requirements are different, project work no matter how large or small, is bespoke, however there are many global purchasers who buy semi and part finished peoducts for their own national, or international, production.

[oldog]

Does anyone who suffers from depression ( and as I see many members here do) because Google destroyed his/hers business,........
How about suing Google for personal and physical damage ? I'm talking about ppl who had well designed and high ranking white hut websites.

[Whitey]

@oldog - there is a huge underreported social consequence in the lack of accountability and responsibility by Google for these shifts without transparency that destroy business’ and people’s lives.

Recently the spotlight was put on FB in a senate hearing, but nothing with Google.

Why has there has been no Senate enquiry or EU investigation into these practices?

Sometimes I wonder why people just accept powers (Governments, big business etc) to be sending them into the abyss. Like lambs to the slaughter.

And nobody says anything. Weird.

[Micha]

@Whitey

Why has there has been no Senate enquiry or EU investigation into these practices?

I can tell you, because practically no politician in an important position in Europe knows what's going on and they don't care. A small example from Germany: In our country, politicians only ever talk about "helping big companies with subsidies etc." and hardly anyone talks about small companies, and the Internet is actually "new territory" for many of these old geezers, because apart from social media and a handful of large, well-known websites, they know and use nothing. (Excuse the "old geezer", but unfortunately this applies to most of our politicians in important positions).

[ghostofseo]

The Verge just wrote a fluff piece with AI and is ranking at top of Google #1 for best printer.
[theverge.com...]

Video - [x.com...]

[ichthyous]

Two decent days of traffic, and today down we go again:

The United States
-12%
The United Kingdom
-24%
Australia
-35%
Germany
-17%
The Philippines
+454%
Canada
-31%
The United Arab Emirates
-37%

Noticing a pattern here? Traffic from anyplace Google can monetize (read: rich countries) is seeing traffic drop like a stone. First Canada vanished, then Australia, then UAE, then USA, and now UK traffic. All have dropped considerably, but my ranking is stable and even higher.

[delorean]

Just wanna make a slight update on my post.

Google MARCH 2024 Search Update In A Nutshell
REDDIT/QUORA/LINKEDIN = TOPPERS
YOUTUBE/TIKTOK = APPLE OF GOOGLE'S EYE
BIG BRANDS = BOOST
SMALL INDEPENDENT SITES = RANK DROP/SOME PAGES DEINDEX

Overall, a trash update.

Do you guys agree?

[Conro]

The update is still in progress. There are still small and medium-sized sites left to disappear or replace with expert forums

[Conro]

I keep saying that our sites don't have anything. Here's how Google is set up now :D
[twitter.com...]

[exploria]

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

[Martin Ice Web]

@Conro,

german serps are now flooded with Kleinanzeigen ( former ebay Kleinanzeigen), Aliexpress, marketplaces from big companies, shops i would never ever buy from.
I realy can´t see how this could help users to find what they want. Very sad move from google.

[Conro]

@Martin Ice Web It seems that now the small and medium-sized site is only good for plugging the holes, sometimes not even that because there are websites in their place that have nothing to do with the search query. I'm waiting for the update to finish, but at the moment I really don't know what to do because the traffic is going down day by day

[renatovieira]

Very high volatility on all my sites. Local and global websites, in several languages. End of the march core update?

[ichthyous]

Looks like USA and UK traffic are clamped down hard again this morning...-54% and -30% at 9:30am. Traffic to my home page is -76%! Let's see if it suddenly shoots upward toward the latter part of the day as has been the trend. These 'updates' are killing off my business for weeks at a time...

[ichthyous]

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.

Google is depending on lack of transparency and confusion to capture it all. Why would Google ever provide anyone with clarity or speak honestly about it, so that governments will investigate them? What Google is doing is pure monopolistic playbook but the laws are written for older types of corporations which produce physical goods...coal, steel, oil etc. Nobody sees that search and data are our modern equivalent. The members of congress here are pathetically clueless and small business doesn't have a seat at the table. Plan for life post-search as Google clearly plans to kill organic search off dead as a doornail.

[Conro]

@renatovieira It looks like the update will end when traffic reaches zero for small and medium-sized sites

[mhansen]

Plan for life post-search as Google clearly plans to kill organic search off dead as a doornail.

I firmly believe this to be the truth many of us need to face as the new reality. I've never subscribed to the "SEO is dead" mantra before, but organic, informational search results are quickly being displaced by AI generated answers that have trained on our content and pushed us off the search result pages. We see Forbes and Bankrate in places where we all once existed, but those too will be gone as quickly as SGE/Gemini have fully rolled out. (I'd predict early May, when they roll out the domain abuse algo.)

I'm guessing, but I believe most of US (Dev, SEO, Publishers, etc) live in a full-screen web browser on a PC or Mac desktop device. At the same time, a majority of the USERS of our websites are on mobile devices. Have you seen a Google SERP on a mobile device lately? Especially one that has SGE active for those queries. Organic results are simply nowhere to be found, even if you have a #1 organic position.

This is going to be the same very quickly for ALL search engines. It is what it is and it's eventually going to affect everyone.

[Conro]

I believe that the solution is to create content that is not useful to artificial intelligence, in this way you avoid sge and paa. Queries on some adult content are an example, not necessarily po*n

[NeapTide]

Once small websites are dead AI will be feeding outdated garbage because large websites can't give every solution.

People at Quora, Reddit etc often get bored and stop posting new answers because they are not making any money.. And if they do answer they often need to research on smaller websites to find proper solutions and post a link as reference.

What large corporations like Google are not understanding is that in the long run their SGE and Gemini will become useless once smaller websites with millions of professional solutions are gone.

Currently smaller pro websites are buried under Google Garbage boxes (PAA, PAS, Featured Box, SGE box) and repeated irrelevant results from large websites. Once they are gone, their AI will be searching quora reddit and some forums like idiots to find answers for newly discovered issues and they will often not find it.

[NeapTide]

At the moment I am doing following stuff

- updating website navigation and design
- removing garbage and dead backlinks with disavow tool
- posting new content
- updating old content
- redirecting old posts permalinks to new permalinks.
- categorising posts
- enabled breadcumbs (because google now show breadcrumbs in serps if they are available)
- fixing core web vitals of websites [INP can't be fixed because it depends on user screen quality and even google. com is failing INP]

- most importantly started working on alternate source of income.

[Whitey]

@ ichthyous

Why would Google ever provide anyone with clarity or speak honestly about it, so that governments will investigate them?

If they’re forced to do so. Legislation, bringing a case.

It’s a shame that the principles in the recent 2000 Swiss woman’s Human Rights Determination couldn’t be applied [reuters.com...] .

the Swiss government had violated the human rights of its citizens by failing to do enough to combat climate change, in a decision that will set a precedent for future climate lawsuits.

How about:

Something like: “Google violated the human rights of citizens and business’ by failing to do enough to disclose details that would go on to affect changes in its algorithms, such that it has caused harm to those dependent on it for doing business and earning income”.

Google is now a critical infrastructure for most marketing distribution globally and it needs to come up with a better way to interact fairly with those it involves. Some lawyers will find a way one day. This Swiss case was a first. The law needs to be tested or modified to accommodate it. Just my view.

[RedBar]

Yesterday,Tuesday 9th April, my global site had three very unusual occurences. It is very rare that it has a one hour period of zero traffic whatsoever, yes it has occurred in the past especially on Xmas Day however yesterday three times in 24 hours it had zero traffic at 00.00 - 01.00, 11.00 - 12.00 and 22.00 - 23.00.

Furthermore its traffic looked very similar to the mess it was a few months ago i.e. mostly single page views. USA / Canada traffic was way down and looked very spammy whereas most of the other traffic looked normal.

So far today it's looking messy as well plus US trafic is almost non-existant, hmmm...In-depth logs here I come.

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar,

we are seeing this lack of traffic too. But not this long time periods. More 10 to 15 min.
And we see a traffic pattern that has not been seen for some month now: a short rush on a single item. Like 10 to 15 visitors in one second. In most cases it is safari browsers

[Conro]

I'm noticing the same too. Mass visits on a single post for a few weeks now. However, the traffic is very unstable even today, one hour is good or higher than last week, while the next hour the traffic is much lower than the previous week. The AI Disaster Continues

[Whitey]

Ditto here. The roll on continues.

[Micha]

@Martin I see the same thing here. In addition, the pattern is currently emerging that traffic generally drops from 2 p.m. and suddenly rises very sharply from 6 p.m. onwards.

What is unfortunately also noticeable is that the number of posts in Discover that are pure advertising is increasing significantly. Especially about strange medical products.

[Treud]

I’ve seen this pattern of Google watering the flowers. Instead of giving a steady flow, they are like « damn, forget to water the plants, here it is a huge bucket of water »

[Martin Ice Web]

I’ve seen this pattern of Google watering the flowers. Instead of giving a steady flow, they are like « damn, forget to water the plants, here it is a huge bucket of water »

but this water is without any vital elements. You can´t live long with this water....

[RedBar]

I'm just coming up to 14 hours of my Googleday and African and Eurasian traffic seem to have returned to normal however North America is flat as a pancake...Is it only me?

[Rick_Mh]

My website in Brazil was extremely impacted this week. From 8 thousand simultaneous users to just 2 thousand. I can't understand, there were no changes on our side. We continue working as always and this decline is getting worse with each passing day.

I'm noticing a certain pattern. From 6 am to 9 am, access starts to rise and then drops without stopping until 2 pm. After 2pm it starts to stabilize and at 6pm it starts to improve.

[Conro]

I have just discovered that a site That I keep an eye on and like to Google has been shut down by the authorities because it illegally disseminated copyrighted content. The first time I see something like this, but google chooses the sites to reward well

[Whitey]

Just in case you didn’t know this is now the record at around 35 days and still friggin’ rolling. Any news on an ETA from G?

Previously:

Google posted the update was done at 11:32 am ET on November 28, 2023, after it started rolling out on November 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM ET.

This is the longest documented core update rollout, the previous longest core update rollout went to the August 2023 core update took 16 days, this one was 10 days longer. [seroundtable.com...]

[Conro]

They broke everything. Now in many queries in the top 7 positions i see only 3 organic sites

[Martin Ice Web]

Today is even worse. Another 25% down so we are at -75% right now.

Serps are looking like this:
-12 shopping with big pictures take full screen height
-4 organics big brands
-16 shopping with big pictures take more than full screen height
-2 organics
-16 shopping with big pictures take more than full screen height

And google is NOT marking the shopping ads as Ads! I don´t know but this is far behind current laws


Edit:

And the serrps have a full lack of "summery" pages. Its all single product pages now in serps. Complete nonsens.


From a users view this is useless and looks messy. First view and leave, stay at bing

[Conro]

I'm losing hope, even today - 20% traffic than last week and the removal of the entire subdirectory with affiliate content guides, even though it was heavily penalized because the serps had been replaced by ecommerce sites, didn't lead to any benefit.

[Micha]

And google is NOT marking the shopping ads as Ads! I don´t know but this is far behind current laws

This is not allowed in Germany, but obviously nobody cares. I would add to Martin's post that 80 per cent of Google results are completely outdated and absolutely useless.

[System]

Some AdSense posts were moved to the AdSense forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 2:59 pm (utc) on Apr 11, 2024]
[edit reason] thread split cleanup [/edit]

[saladtosser]

I wonder if G will push the warez-v3 forum into the SERPS? I personally find that forum the most helpful ;)

[mhansen]

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how a specific "tools" directory within a website had avoided the HCU crunch and actually grown considerably, while ALL of the general content took a hard hit. That is no longer true and the tools on the site are now seeing little to no visitors. SGE has moved into this space also, then the 4 high value CPC ads based on 2 words of the 5 word query, PAS, PAA, images, all the G widgetry.

I read a quote that Lily Ray shared on Twitter this morning from a conference she's attending: "What can you add to the conversation, that ChatGPT can't?" That gap is closing further every hour as Google finds more ways to distract it's users from what they are trying to find.

I don't think this is going to work as well as they do, as users abandon their answers and ads engine for others that show them the websites containing "what they were actually looking for".

[ghostofseo]

Desktop vs Mobile are showing totally different SERP placements, Desktop is choosing to use H1 title, while mobile is displaying the SEO title.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:07 pm (utc) on Apr 11, 2024]
[edit reason] site specific image - see ToS/Charter [/edit]

[ghostofseo]

Well the Reddit, Linkedin whitehat hack seems to be working for many. Think I am going to jump on the bandwagon.

Created my own Sub few days ago, it's already outranking my reviews lol.

Noticing my competition is posting to Linkedin, same same, already out ranking their own reviews. (sorry to my Linkedin connections) held off on using that channel to share my reviews but now is the time. Linkedin is up 25 million page views a day since start of March.

[Conro]

@ghostofseo Are the reviews of your products?

[saladtosser]

@ghostofseo, how will these hacks serve you in a week, a month from now? Talking of Hacks, you're in the wrong place, and are *partially* why good webmasters *webmasters*, say it slowly and slightly whispering**) are in this mess; if there is a quick fix/hack, you're already on the wrong side! This takes years of hard graft, and you still won't always make it, mostly u wont! But at least you have that moral high ground?! It doesn't always pay the bills though, but if you have a passion for a niche......whoa

This forum is not TikTok and not YouTube. "I made 10k a month; here's how I did it. Watch my video because I want to share my secret sauce, so you, YOU, the random people I will never see and will never meet can replicate my 10k a day success/process, earn 10k a day yourself," and now because everyone is doing it, because I made it public it (fluff that doesn't work) becomes useless, but hey I can rely on "YouTube pennies going forward, because the get rich quick crowed are loyal as." They sacrificed there 10K a day secret to make a YouTube video hack so they can earn a couple of dollars a day on YouTube thinking they are Mr Beast lol.

Man, I feel old; I used to argue on here daily with Editorial Guy 10. 12 years ago (under a different name, obviously) about the evils of Google, but I've actually turned into him, cranky, you young whipper snappers, Google is right, lol! Who knew... Life eh! I actually love ED now and im sorry he got hit, and will continue to be slapped around like a 10 dollar hoe, I take NO pleasure, there was a time people on this forum could have united with others on other forums and turned the tide if they pooled together across all web masters, but them days were 10-15 years ago, fan boys shot it down like it was herpes's, seeing what had come for others (this is waaaayyy before AI, Halo 2 days when you had to write stuff haha) reap your rewards now fanboys but wait till SGE hits, you earned it, literally :) Go Google, Oohrah, :)

[ichthyous]

Google has completely decimated my UK traffic since the end of March, and it's not recovering:
[ibb.co ]

USA traffic is also tepid, but it did recover most of the loss from the previous Easter collapse. What is not recovering is the 80% drop to my most important converting page on my site. It was bringing in a ton of sales last year, but Google knows exactly where to hit you to make the impact really hurt:
[ibb.co ]

Keep in mind, I am still ranked at the top for all of these terms...up and down one spot, but the traffic and sales vanished.

[renatovieira]

@ichthyous

Keep in mind, I am still ranked at the top for all of these terms...up and down one spot, but the traffic and sales vanished.

The same here. I'm at the top of several SERPs, but no traffic...

[ghostofseo]

@conro I test outdoor gear for brands. They send me stuff to Jackson, WY we take it outdoors and see how good it really is, and then post our thoughts.

[ghostofseo]

@saladtosser website has been up since 2008. I understand what years of hardwork look like. When I mentioned "hack" it was clearly a joke. But we do need page views. So...

Most likely photos being posted to Reddit are no big deal, perhaps users will see my great photos, and then search for the product review with my company name in the search. That's the only way to get out content to show now.

I posted in a different thread about how a Linkedin business owner posted a review of an e-bike rack he hand built in Salt Lake City with a link to my review. However my review is not at the top of search, his Linkedin post is.

So logic would think my 15 years old Linkedin page might have some rank juice, or just Linkedin in general.

[Treud]

@itchyous You nailed it, Google just killed traffic on the converting pages or sending users that will never convert. Luckily other browsers have started to rise but it will take ages for them to compete really with Google in terms of users!

[ghostofseo]

Sent over 20 DMCA notices today. Seems like a LOT of e-bike manufactures are copying and pasting my reviews and photos to their website. And Google has removed my original content and is instead crediting the companies stealing my copywrite material.

I have to believe this is part of why I have lost 98% of my search traffic. Google thinks we are stealing when its clearly evident it's the other way around.

Wouldn't the wayback machine be an easy way to establish ownership, or authority. John Muller wont respond, nor will Danny Sullivan. Even Barry who past here is not wanting to talk to me.

I'm not going anywhere, have already lost everything and will do every single f*cking thing to get it back. Turns out I wrote a huge rant about Google's 2020 Update and at that time lost only 87% of traffic. Its on Linkedin if anyone wants to read it full of charts and graphs, and well history repeats itself.

But Google is beyond stupid to be ranking companies stealing my content. While my articles and even photos dont show in Search or Image Search.

Thanks Google

[Billy85]

I feel this core update and these core updates are more about maximizing profit, rather than improving SERPs.

I saw and I'm seeing several things they were testing during this update in relation to ads and pushing more ads down the customers throat.

IMO have/had a pretty good grasp in the recent past years, on what content is helpful, but some time along the way it changed from improving SERPs to improving profit.