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]

[Whitey]

Painful. Around 6 weeks now!

5 Mar 202409:02 PST
Released the March 2024 core update.
The rollout may take up to a month to complete.
[status.search.google.com...]

[Fluff_Nutz]

Oh wow, speaking about my newer site I had not even looked at the stats of my older one. Kind of wish I hadn't. It's so bad its laughable. It's now down by -72%. Gone from 4,000 views a day in its peak 2 yrs ago to now a mere 100 views per day. You could not make it up.

[ghostofseo]

Reddit is now showing in my Google News feed. Also please see the other thread I started regarding Google News webspam. (Un related)

[ghostofseo]

You can also add Pinterest to now showing up in Google News along with thousands of dead spam sites throwing 404 or worse.

I believe we are watching the death of Google in real time…..

Even a search in regular old Google for “Mountain Weekly News” is now only showing 46 results in Total. There should be thousands upon thousands or results like Bing shows.

Thoughts here?

[Conro]

To me, google seems set up to train AI with users. I do a search and instead of the answer I find more questions. The user clicks on other related questions and research that train the AI on how humans react. The answer to a query does not put it in the first place but starting from the third, this makes it better understood by the AI what is wrong and what the man finds right. Obviously, this is my opinion that maybe has nothing to do with the messed up serps of google. However, the problem is easily solved by switching to Bing or other search engines. Currently the worst for results is ux is google. Everyone I've had people try Bing has stayed with Bing

[Conro]

When publish a new article, does it rank well on Google? For example, on the first page or is it not placed anywhere also if it is indexed?

[oldog]

@Conro "When publish a new article, does it rank well on Google? For example, on the first page or is it not placed anywhere also if it is indexed?"
Yes, Every new article I publish goes to top 10 -20

[NeapTide]

@Fluff_Nutz
Your website was just 2 years old that lost traffic but I have intentionally shutdown one of my 13 years old website as spammers, manufacturers and others were just stealing my website images without giving any credit or backlink. It also slowly lost all the traffic with unhelpful core updates as repeated results from Reddit, Quora and google garbage boxes (PAA, PASF) were ranking at top pushing my site results way down below.

I used to write about electrical circuits mostly and circuit diagrams were part of articles that were mostly stolen.

The other reason for shutting it down is I don't want to feed AI tools my website data so that they plagiarize it and directly answer the user queries. I won't be getting anything in future, no traffic na-da.

I will keep running downloadable contents websites as AI tools can't host large downloadable files and users eventually have to come to my websites to download files.

[Whitey]

False alarm. GSC froze and took 28hrs to clear backlog to normal clicks for Friday and Saturday. Did anyone else experience the same? (and stress)?

Again, same same since Friday. No let up and remaining sites heading to zero. I thought I had it figured. Not so unfortunately.

[Micha]

Does it look better for you? In my case it wasn't a false alarm, luckily I don't use a GSC.

[RedBar]

This is an interesting statement by Billy85:

I have a shop, I have expertise and I bought all the products, my site still got hit and traffic continues to decline.

How many others here at WebmasterWorld are in the same boat? How many others globally are in the same boat?

How many tens/hundreds/thousands of sites are there promoting the same products with very similar text and images?

How many of these sites are performing fine on a local basis however are now struggling on a national or international comparison.

Has Google decided that many of these sites are NOT major / significant suppliers and have demoted them as such to regional sites?

Not only have I experienced this in the USA regionalisation / localisation for my main global sales site I experienced this about 2005'ish when G overnight demoted my export-only Indian factory site. It has never recovered and to this day receives mostly local Indian traffic even though it is one of the top 5 main exporters in its industry.

I am not criticising anyone for copying manufacturers' text and / or images for popular products but must ask simply how many others are doing this every day / week / month with new or updated sites, it must be millions in the overall generic view of the www?

Honestly, at times I can comprehend why simple and brief well-written sites can easily out-rank in-depth and complex sites, they are far, far simpler for the algo to evaluate.

[saladtosser]

Umm, im seeing a complete rollback to the SERPS before the update started, they were completely different all month now the same as they were before the update in my niche, anyone else? Also searching other things like "how to BLAH fast" and no longer seeing reddit?!

[Whitey]

@Micha - Traffic remains steady and on trend. Overall there has been a downward trend of around -15% from peak around 14 days ago, caused mainly from our /blog/ folder. We get a bounce when new articles are released, then they settle back and moderate.

For a long while I shared the sinking feeling of 1000’s of site owners that must feel out of control. It wasn’t fun.

Does it look better for you? In my case it wasn't a false alarm, luckily I don't use a GSC

[Conro]

@saladtosser Yes, there is movement, but I would say as usual

[Treud]

Since a week my traffic is increasing slowly, less huge wing of impressions, and my main Keyword (that drives me most of the sales) is slowly going back to a pre-patch level ! Update should be done or very close to be.

[ichthyous]

Today traffic started out strongly but then dropped at 1pm and stayed down until 6pm. Earlier in this series of updates I noticed the mornings were unusually low then a surge in the late afternoon, now it has flipped. The drastic drop in UK traffic recovered. Now it's UAE and Australia that seem to be unusually low, with traffic from Canada almost gone completely.

All of this hardly matters when you have lost 80%+ of the most converting traffic to your site. I am still ranking as well as last year or better even, but below is a YOY comparison of visits to my single most important category of my site for the last 60 days...the graph says it all. Along with the traffic went all the sales:

[i.imgur.com ]

Now I see signs that this reduction is starting to spread to other top converting sections of my site. I repeat, the ranking has not gone down. But the traffic is just gone. Some of this has to do with the image carousels being removed from organic listings now. Google figured out that if they made organic listings too noticeable that people skipped the ads.

[Shepherd]

I hope whatever google is doing is working for them...
google Ads don't deliver any positive ROI...
Organic google traffic is dwindling daily...

Maybe it's the end. Maybe the pool of internet buyers withered to unsustainable levels.

[Conro]

Today I see more forums than usual. I doubt users want to read them to find an answer

[Treud]

Maybe for Google it’s easier to push forum first has they don’t a damn idea how to sort out AI created website and normal ones.
Damage mitigation strategy

[Conro]

@Treud Forums are high to train Google's AI

[renatovieira]

High volatility today...

[NeapTide]

I have submitted spam links report twice to Google Disavow tool since the beginning of March but it seems like Google is not interested in manual reports made by webmasters to remove bad or spammy backlinks made by rivals or scammers.
Currently, google has not taken any action against those submitted backlinks and they are still appearing in GSC.
My 1 website actually got badly affected after March 5, 2024 when Google launched anti-spam update.

[ghostofseo]

@NeapTide,

I feel your pain. When searching for my business name in Google search with quotes in the news tab, there are thousands of spammy backlinks. I have been updating Google, 5 links at [search.google.com...]

These show in Console, yet nothing is happening.

When I DMCA links to Google they get removed within 24 hours or less for the most part.

Here's what Google support recommend:

"I know it's frustrating. Spam and abuse are a constant issue for publishers and a huge threat to Google's credibility. But Google just won't take visible action on individual cases, the scale is too huge. They try to address things by tuning the algo, much to the frustration of publishers that want something visibly done about it in the short term.

If you want your case specifically investigated, you might message John Mu to see if you can get his attention. Sometimes he will reply to things, but there's a good chance he will suggest the same link I posted above. That's the system they have in place for reporting spam, " lol.. They had a link to John's twitter account the lolz continue

[NeapTide]

Google does eventually disavow submitted backlinks but as far as I have observed they might take months to do it. At the moment they have no intention of taking any action on submitted backlinks although if user is submitting them then Google should understand the motive behind it and take action faster.

At the moment, to lift shadow penalty that happened after anti-spam update (no manual action in GSC) you need to get rid of spam, dead and bad quality backlinks.

[ghostofseo]

Just made $200 from a website stealing one of my photos. So if the Google thing doesn't work out you can always send DMCA notices followed by Quickbooks Invoices.

Competing review site was using one of my photos. Ok that sucks, what really stings is they are being credited for the photo in Google yet my Copyright information shows in the meta Google description.

That site sees 50,000 people a day, my site now 200-300 tops. Down from over 100,000 a day in 2022 and dropped with every update since, so Google decided they must be the authority?

[NeapTide]

you are not alone. In my downloadable content niche, there is this 1 site that has been ranking for thousands of keywords for past 10 years at top of serps. When users visit that site, they do not get right file instead an app store is downloaded. In fact they are promoting their app store with false advertising and using wrong keywords to divert traffic. They are doing this for a decade now and Google is unable to figure out what they are doing.

There is another website that just recently got boosted. All they are doing is stuffing every possible keywords at the bottom of pages in the form of non-clickable tags. So tags appear like part of page content.

[Martin Ice Web]

next big drop over night. And again google hit the last converting pages. And again we are replaced by crap websites with very low content, bad description and sometimes completly unrelated.
This update has realy nothing to do with quality but killing all free business traffic.

[superclown2]

I believe we are watching the death of Google in real time…..

What we are seeing is the death of the Internet - or at least what it was intended to be 20+ years ago, a forum for the free interchange of information across the world. Instead Google has made it their own private bank, showing the information which is most valuable to them and restricting access to the rest. The legislators who have so far allowed this to happen have a huge responsibility now to put right the consequences of years of turning a blind eye to what has been going on.

'Lobbying' of course may have had a lot to do with this.

Google Delenda Est.

[saladtosser]

When we talk about all the business's impacted by Google updates I think we also need to think of the *individual*, for example I have a disabled friend who had to languish on disability benefits for 15 years because he couldn't leave the house, he had attempted suicide because of feelings of worthlessness! The internet gave him the ability to not need to leave the house, create a informational website over 20 years and gain some income (to live on and pay the rent/bills, hes never made a flahy amount of money) and this gave him self respect. I talked to him about SGE and he said since Google became the place to go "Its the same #*$! question everyday, you wake up you think, is this the day Google kills my income, is this the day I die" (because hes already said if he has to go back to that life of disability he will be offing himself as he doesn't want to be a burden! He fully suspects SGE will be the end and has brought "butterfly needles" in preparation to drain his blood into a bucket as a painless way out! Its very very sad situation, I was really shocked to hear all this from him! The mental health impact must be astonishing to not have another option to go out and get another job and you must feel insane amounts of worry!

[Micha]

@saladtosser It's damn hard to read something like that, but I have to honestly say that I can understand your friend, even though I really hope he was just saying that out of the situation and didn't really intend to take his own life.

But here's the thing: You put all your energy into a project, give your life meaning and a company takes that away from you. That's damn hard to take, especially for someone who is in a situation where they are not seen as a full human being by society (of course not everyone thinks that way, but unfortunately many do).

Of course we could say "he should go to therapy", but we are not in such a situation and can't imagine how someone who is going through something like this feels.