May 2024 Google Search Observations

[Billy85]

When I checked my site, 90% or so were some Spam links, but I wouldn't disavow them because I've heard that some sites were worse off after disavowing.
Almost every site has to deal with this and from what I understand, Google only regards those that are listed in your search console?

I also think it has also to do with the amount of people that click on it, meaning, if you try to build backlinks and nobody is clicking on it, google disregards them or gives that link less relevance.

[edited by: not2easy at 1:30 pm (utc) on May 2, 2024]
[edit reason] split thread cleanup [/edit]

[superclown2]

Huge drop across the board today...lower traffic than the holiday weekend so something is definitely up today

I'm seriously wondering if people are falling out of love with the Internet.

When it first began it was an adventure playground full of unique websites, some wonderful, some dreadful, but plenty of variety.

Now wherever I go it's big companies with ads, ads, ads and more ads; most of which are served by Google. It just isn't fun anymore.

[NeapTide]

Serps are just 2 or 3 repeated results from same 5 or 6 websites.
Rest all buried deep under mud.
Observing it since past 6 months now.

Search for some info and you are fed reddit, quora, forbes, nyt, bbc, nbc, dailymail. The information you are actually looking for you might find 20 results under or after repeatedly changing search string that might bring that buried website up with required information.

[NeapTide]

Who says chatgpt is better?
I have tried to write code for certain combined use libraries for which i couldn't find information on github, stackoverflow and the code chatgpt gave me was plain garbage. Application simply stopped loading.

Its only good for writing simple codes. When it comes to complex codes or innovation its just as much garbage as Gemini. Obviously it steals info from internet and when it doesn't find any it throws excuses and write you some unusable garbage.

[RedBar]

I'm seriously wondering if people are falling out of love with the Internet.

That started several years ago after many people realised that they neither had the time nor the intellect to absorb everything that is available. Once shopping sites and the devices we use became more sophisticated Joe Public realised that they didn't need to keep chasing around from site to site and, of course, word of mouth on social sites plus familiarity of specific sites such as Amazon and eBay, people did not find the continual need to be searching etc.

They're comfortable where they get their music, films, games, almost anything, it's normal, it's nothing new to do, they're not "out of love", they're comfortable with their relationship knowing where what they may need is right there on whichever device they choose to use.

I've watched this for 31 years now, my wife, my chlidren now 40, I've seen and experienced what they have done, it's been a very interesting learning curve.

[Micha]

I'm seriously wondering if people are falling out of love with the Internet.

It should also be remembered that a few large companies are trying to take over the Internet and practically lock users in their backyard.

[ichthyous]

I'm seriously wondering if people are falling out of love with the Internet.

I noticed that Google has added a huge block of product search results at the top of more searches now, so this could be affecting traffic. I would argue that the "falling out of love" hypothesis would be a long, gradual dropoff...until the end of 2023 my traffic was better and so were conversions. It doesn't just drop off a cliff, which is what started to happen at the end of 2023 for conversions. The lower traffic is more recent and it's all due to Google.

We could possibly be entering a period where consumers are tapped out and not willing to shop as much, but I have been through recessions and slowdowns before, most notably 2007 was smoking hot until December, and then the sales basically stopped. By September 2008 we had the financial crash and it took years for the economy to fully recover from that. Traffic was still pretty stable, people just get very cost conscious or stop shopping completely. We are not in that economy at all. My customers are affluent to wealthy...they aren't hurting, they are richer than ever. The stock market is red hot, homes keep going up in value, even crypto is back up. So if they aren't buying it's because Google is nabbing all of that converting traffic IMHO.

[oldog]

@ichthyous Shopping : IMO 90% of western world shoppers go straight in Amazon they don't search, as for groceries furniture retailers etc they will go to their local shop

[Micha]

@oldog That may be true, but if the stores are no longer visible on Google, logically no more customers will come. Google is definitely cutting off stores and especially since the end of April it has become extreme (my observations only relate to Germany, of course)

I think there are several factors at play, including people's exhaustion, but also the fact that Google is intercepting potential buyers through the mass of advertising.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Wow... after almost 2 years of penalty it's the first time Google shows me a signs of recovery after HCU. Just amazing:

[i.imgur.com...]

[Markedd]

@Cyril TechWebsites By god, man! Leave some traffic to the rest of us.

[ichthyous]

@ichthyous Shopping : IMO 90% of western world shoppers go straight in Amazon they don't search, as for groceries furniture retailers etc they will go to their local shop

@oldog Not for the types of items I sell, when is one of the few niches that Amazon hasn't entered...it tried about 10 years ago and failed. The items are unique, custom made, and a high price-point. They sell to affluent people, not just everyone off the street. Having said that...Google isn't allowing anyone to find our websites anymore, so those higher budget buyers are long gone since the end of 2023. Websites are just buried now.

[RedBar]

After Tuesday's unusually low traffic day, today seems to be back to normal levels for me and already higher than Tuesday with 10 hours to go.

[ichthyous]

A huge 26% decline in search traffic today, and the number of external backlinks to my site reported in GSC has dropped by 88%...almost down to nothing. Is anyone else seeing their backlinks completely disappear?

[ronron]

^ yeah, mine was due to the homepage not being included for some reason. Could be a bug.

[Conro]

@ichthyous Almost all the backlinks have disappeared for me today

[Micha]

I have to say, I can't complain, Google's traffic continues to fluctuate a lot, the visibility index from Sistrix also shows very strong fluctuations every day. But the number of visitors has been rising constantly for days, even without Google. The hard work is paying off.

@Ichthyos I just checked, I only have a handful of external links left and the ones that are still there are from spam websites. At the same time, the number of websites in the index continues to fall. On average, 500 articles disappear every day and the “crawled - currently not indexed” figure increases accordingly.

[Mark_A]

Bit quiet on the organic and ads front here in the UK this week.
There was a Monday bank holiday and It is now half term week at schools so lots of parents will be on holiday.

[Dooku]

This explains the current state of the internet after the last few algo updates and the road taken by google over the last 24 months:
[bbc.com...]

The forum over at seroundtable(and other seo forums) is becoming more and more toxic each day.
People are now beyond annoyed and getting really angry. At the same time more and more "internet decline" publications are appearing together with blogs like Ed Zitron......and obviously the usual complaints and the hilarious mockery articles about google's SGE results.
It's going to be a very interesting time in the coming months!

[Mark_A]

Interesting BBC article. Of course Google's plans involve monetising our content. Who cares about the individuals behind the sites Google's AI will scrape knowledge from? It is a parasitic relationship.

[NeapTide]

"The parasite will soon be out of host blood when host is dead"

My personal experience with generative AI is , its only good for making fake pictures and videos and copying artist voices. But when its come to information niche, often it gives outdated or wrong information. The codes written by it is often plain garbage.

[edited by: NeapTide at 1:45 pm (utc) on May 30, 2024]

[NeapTide]

Has anyone else checked their Google Search Console and see all backlinks gone? I have 1 website that merely had 40 - 50 backlinks and they were normal backlinks and not even spammy and they are all gone. External Links showing "0" and Top Linked Pages = No Data.

I never submitted Disavow file ever for this website.

On another websites. even authority backlinks from top websites are gone.

What's going on? Instead of removing crappy backlinks, Google is removing all good backlinks from popular forums, quora etc as well.

[Fluff_Nutz]

It is technically slave labour. They need our content to scrape and use for their own income, yet we get nothing in return, of course. Every day now, for the past month or so, the traffic from Google has been a drop of anywhere between 10-30%. I have gone from getting 4,000 views per day to a mere 100. It's business sure but its also livelihoods. Going from a service of 25yr+ to now changing it and ruining countless lives. Destroying their own reputation. Why did they not just create something new? I mean the leak is enough proof that a lot of sites were never going anywhere. Now, what they are doing seals it.

On a personal note I was, sigh, hoping to use the revenue gained from the site and use it to pay off the mortgage. It was great at first and I never suspected a thing. Using the site to pay off the mortgage was, indeed, possible. Now, just this minute, I have had to see my father's car been driven away in order to help pay the mortgage. We are now relying on public transport. I wanted to help him but because of Google all plans went through the window. I now get barely any revenue from the site and I hope the company eventually rots, no one will miss them.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Alphabet stocks are falling in price and stopped rising. Those of you who still receive some amount of traffic from Google — prepare yourself. In the nearest update they will vanish your websites from the SERPs absolutely to please shareholders.

[Dooku]

@Neaptide

see all backlinks gone?

There is a fresh few hours old Reddit thread about this same issue, many people complaining about wiped out external backlinks.
However, it might be just a bug, SC is broken, maybe google just using a whole different method to calculate and disply links...whatever, it's all speculation, but it's prevalent at many websites.

[superclown2]

Over here Forbes or Quota sit at the top of nearly every major search term in certain verticals, not just in Google but Bing and Duck too.

These sites are just affiliates They have no specialist expertise whatsoever. What happened to EAT?

[ichthyous]

Alphabet stocks are falling in price and stopped rising. Those of you who still receive some amount of traffic from Google — prepare yourself. In the nearest update they will vanish your websites from the SERPs absolutely to please shareholders.

Alphabet has risen plenty since 2023, I bought shares several times and it has done well. I figure if you can't beat 'em join 'em.

My traffic plummets every single day now at 8-9am...both usa and uk. It doesn't pick up again except for a small spike in the afternoon if I am lucky. Overall search traffic is down about 10-15% so the difference must be international traffic from useless places that don't convert. They aren't useless, just useless in terms of conversions for me!

[londrum]

I've just been looking at all the SEMrush charts for my competitors and every single one shows the same pattern... gradual decline over two years and bigger drops around Sep 2023 and Mar 2023. It's literally the same for all of us. We're all travel affiliates, but we all have original content, original photography, our own videos.
There's nothing you can do when every major player in the sector is hit, there's no recovering from it. google has taken over the traffic and sent all the users with buying intent through their ads or other properties

[saladtosser]

My friends, my fellow webmasters! I have never seen hate of Google across all social networks like this before: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and forums! I'm old enough to remember the community made Google by promoting them to friends/family and users of our sites back in the day, (i had a banner on my site freely promoting them way back when); they have used and abused us and plan to abuse us further, this is just the very beginning!

The community, (you, fellow webmasters) have a chance to break them (maybe the only chance) by working together, spread the words to all, vote with your feet, remove Google Chrome, Gmail and search now, tell everyone what they are doing to the internet and get them to switch! Bring back the old Google or just sod off, and please take the PR team with you, they have outstayed their welcome and are more redundant than our websites! #dontUseGoogle

I've transferred my email from gmail to another service ($290 a year) and moved my website from google hosting ($250 a month), deleted chrome and the only time I use google is to check rankings (and have a little click of other peoples ads haha), Cloudflare or azure for analytics and went to mediavine because AdWords gets me about a $1.50 per K and mediavine gets me $15-20 for every k visitor nowadays, sorry Google, you used to be cool but you got fat, old and don't put out anymore, like my ex wife, and like with her I stayed faithful..she, like you left me! I just didn't take her back when the new guy didn't work out and BEGGED me back, Ill try to take you back Google, if you change your ways, but trust needs to be earned! Therapy over!

[Micha]

@saladtosser The good old days of Google are long gone and it's no wonder many webmasters are upset.

I think you're right, but let's face it, so many website owners are stuck in Google's ecosystem and rely on what the company says. Plus, they don't inform themselves. A handful of sites kicking Google out won't be enough, and there won't be any more.

But it's not so easy to escape the Google universe beyond the websites; with Android alone, Google gets enough data to keep playing its game. So the company will continue to rage and we will continue to suffer.

[NeapTide]

Currently I am paying for 2 hosting servers one shared and another dedicated server. Since I am now making pennies, I will have to shutdown dedicated server that was hosting all large downloadable files. I am thinking about moving them to parasite's paid Drive (Google drive) . It will be a lot of work to upload all data and relink it with but Google drive is very very cheap.