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]

[Micha]

Google: AI search is great, people want it. But the reality seems to be somewhat different. The company apparently doesn't know its users as well as it thinks it does. [seroundtable.com ]

[christianz]

Drop yesterday, after recovery on May 13th and 14th. I am not sure if it's the horrific SGE related drop. I think the SGE massacre is still to come and will kick in over coming days/weeks.

[christianz]

I think the business model in post SGE era is not making any income and not receiving any traffic, but producing content for Google's scrapers for free. Obviously, not viable if you want to get any compensation for your work, but perfectly viable if you just love Google very much. And I think most of us do.

[Treud]

I’m dropping in countries where I convert, and raise where I can’t :D Such a joke Google.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Yup traffic crash landing over here too, -30% drop over the course of a single day.

I mentioned the 'Web' tab or option in the other post, so I'll be brief but yes it is incredibly difficult to find unless you know what to search for. Ridiculous. To make matters worse the 'Web' filter rubbish still shows links from Youtube, Google garbage and several blue links from the exact same website. Makes me think that the only winners here, other than the Google greed are big websites. Smaller ones need some serious luck from outside

So what is next in Google's path of destruction? Well the tale of the mysterious disappearance of the Cookies, of course! So with that I guess its safe to say we can expect an even further decrease of revenue as the year continues.

It's so stupid and mind boggling why Google would put all their eggs into a single AI basket. Potentially destroying 25yrs of search and, lets not forget, their biggest and main source of income. They should have both blue links and AI co-existing. Possibly putting their AI box in the right side tab. Having blue links on the left, main area. Giving users the option to choose between links and AI. Google clearly ran out of logic with this new management. I personally won't be supporting their AI obsession.

Anyway like I said several months back this is one of the worst years, if not the worst year, to be a content creator.

[Dooku]

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

So, in the mean time the web is getting spammed with HUGE amounts of AI generated sh|t.....which in turn gets scraped again by google to train their AI......and more spam get's generated......google keeps scraping......yeah, this is going to be a really valuable data set..LMAO

[MayankParmar]

@Micha Google doesn't know anything about its users

They're trying to copy Perplexity and OpenAI, but they don't realize that people who use GPT or other AI tools still use Google for their reasons. This doesn't mean Google should become like Perplexity or ChatGPT. Just create a new product ffs. No one is ditching Google for ChatGPT. The two are DIFFERENT products. How the #*$! no one at Google understands that they can compete with AI apps without ruining search.

I know some non-tech people who no longer trust Google because of Quora, Reddit and AI.

[MayankParmar]

We have gone from ‘just Google it’ to ‘they show anything on Google’ in just two years. Incredible leadership by Sundar Pichai

[Micha]

@MayankParmer I also meant that sarcastically. Google has completely lost touch with its users. But to be honest, I'm not surprised. The CEO is good for the investors, but an absolutely bad appointment for a company that is supposed to be innovative.

But let them carry on like this, it wouldn't be the first company to be ruined, and no matter how big Google is, in the long run this way will do a lot of damage to the company.

[ichthyous]

I’m dropping in countries where I convert, and raise where I can’t :D Such a joke Google.

Absolutely...my USA traffic is -24% in the last week. For me the overall effect of all these updates is to have lost most of my converting traffic...mostly from USA, but I have also noticed the almost total disappearance of inquiries from the UK, Europe, UAE and Australia....basically the entire world.

What I am getting is the leftovers...customers who have $200 budgets for $1500 items. Sales have come to a standstill. I am investigating other options such as placing ads on social (not boosting posts) and youtube videos, but it will be very hard to replace those sales from Google organic search.

[renatovieira]

Semrush is on fire and around here, all my sites are in huge drop.

[RedBar]

I'm just testing "web" results in the UK and so far the results are very clean. So, we now have classified ads results and a hard-to-find web results, dare G actually try it in the main navigation?

Thumbs up to them for including "web" in the navigation when using it.

[RedBar]

Just tested it on a few mobiles and "Web" is there in the main navigation.

[NeapTide]

It seems like some one from Google did read old comments in this thread where I recommended to make separate tab for web searches just like Bing.

They did implement it but in the most useless way.
Bing did it better from the very start. They kept Co-Pilot on second number. So if someone wants chit chat and answers from AI they can straightaway switch to Co Pilot.

This is the professional way of doing things. What Google did they just put every available ingredient in kitchen in a bowl and turned on the mixer without caring about taste or end product.

Their stupidity is not just centered around Google search but they are trying to kill their Android OS as well. Just recently they introduced 20 testers policy for Independent developers and now they are suspending newly submitted apps or games if they find bugs twice or some mistake like privacy policy link not added or if some function/button is not working as expected on their test device.

It seems like greed has slowly made policy makers at Google lose their minds.

[Dooku]

Just tested it on a few mobiles and "Web" is there in the main navigation

It seems the issue was at my end......after restarting Firefox the Web filter was there again.....weird.
I wonder if this can be automated somehow, so after entering a search term and hitting the enter key some script could maybe automatically select the More link and select Web......possible?

[ichthyous]

Has anyone noticed a steep decline in link count in GSC from high-rank sites? I have zapped all the .id spam links and Google still shows them, but my links from very reputable sites are vanishing slowly. Anyone else noticed this?

[jchiff]

And the hits just keep coming:

[slate.com...]

[oldog]

Who remembers Matt Cutts and the good old days ?

[oldog]

Question : Fact is millions billions of users are buying every year a new desktop, or laptop computer where MS EDGE is build by default .Not to mention public organizations schools etc How many of them will ever think to install Chrome ?

IMO Crome, Firefox, Opera etc is used mostly by us publishers, developers and older users.
Finally Mac users will never change Safari . And the main serious web search is done by desktop or laptop but not from mobile devices .

[ubound]

IMO Crome, Firefox, Opera etc is used mostly by us publishers, developers and older users.
Finally Mac users will never change Safari . And the main serious web search is done by desktop or laptop but not from mobile devices

My Analytics tell a different story: No1 browser is Mobile Safari, but No2 and 3 are Chrome Mobile and Chrome. Only 32% use desktop.

[Martin Ice Web]

What I am getting is the leftovers...customers who have $200 budgets for $1500 items.

And i thought it is only us that getting this leftovers. We see that current sales are very low budget sales. The buyers that are buying more than 1 item are vanished.
Since two 2 days sales with google traffic stopped. And again amazon is picking up again.

What i noticed when reading forum posts i don´t see "google it or google for" anymore but more "u can buy it on amazon". I think mainly because amazon does anything for their users and google does anything for their inverstors.

[Billy85]

By the way:
I checked the web tab.
There are also YT videos, but instead being shown in the video preview thumbnail, they are shown as a blue link...

Maybe it would bring something, if it wouldn't be somewhere hidden on the right side.

[Micha]

@billy85 There are already instructions on how to set the web search as the main search in Chrome. Maybe we should spread the word.

[RubicCubed]

There are already instructions on how to set the web search as the main search in Chrome. Maybe we should spread the word.

Google is dead, at least here in the USA. Best not to promote anything with Google since all they want to do is take 100% of the traffic/profit from our work. If we are going to spread the word, let it be to use a different search engine.

Traffic quality from Google has declined so much I would put it on par with Facebook traffic. Google has too many ads, refinements (PAA), old forum threads (Reddit), etc. that average users can't find what they're searching for. If we are able to squeak out a sale from Google's terrible traffic, it's typically a low value order that will have a high rate of return. Higher rates of returns from Google traffic is likely the result of Google confusing their users so badly. This march to AI sounds great, but definitely is moving in the opposite direction of all the hype. There's a real opportunity here for some other company to step up to the plate to help users find what they want without all of Google's ads and gimmicks. If no real competition arises to keep Google honest, then search will continue its decline into becoming a worthless technology.

[Treud]

Everyone is going crazy for the AI, it totally reminds me the NFT release, market were crazy about this, and about 8month, no even a year, everything shattered into pieces.
This AI master race will not favor Google I think, looks like they try to squeeze the lemon at it max before throwing it.

I do hope the market shares will balance somehow and make a sane competition.

[londrum]

google's version of AI is so far removed from what AI is supposed to be I don't know how they even get away with calling it AI. It's just an article spinner. They have been trying to increase the size of our snippets for years, so they can squeeze in entire answers and stop people clicking away, and now they have found a way to do it. They just hoover up all the answers from our websites, change a few words and sentences around, and call it AI.

I exaggerate slightly, but not by much. I've seen examples on X where 80% of the text is identical to the original site

[ichthyous]

And i thought it is only us that getting this leftovers. We see that current sales are very low budget sales. The buyers that are buying more than 1 item are vanished.
Since two 2 days sales with google traffic stopped. And again amazon is picking up again.

Since the end of 2023 Google has done an amazing job making converting traffic vanish completely. I would think that we are in a major recession, but we aren't here in the US. I am getting people who are completely delusional in their price expectations, which was always the case but now it's basically all I get.

As 2024 progresses I am seeing inquiries from abroad vanish completely. Nothing from UK or continental Europe, nothing from Canada or Australia, nothing from the UAE. Now I see the USA traffic is actually reducing in volume. So this is a gradual plan to just grab all of the sales and then just shut websites out of traffic completely. We all knew this was coming going back to 2018 or so...you could see it from the tactics Google was using.

Google will become an afterthought for many of us, it will not occupy so much time and effort because there will be no return on that investment. The businesses which perhaps weren't so focused or dependent on search traffic are also starting to feel it, even though they might not be able to target why business is drying up exactly. But any business which was getting sales online either directly or indirectly is getting whacked by Google now.

I am seeing another big drop this morning...USA is -41%

[RedBar]

@ubound - Global plus regional stats from Statcounter April 2024:

[gs.statcounter.com...]

[Micha]

Impressions are down, clicks are down, Google traffic to my website has been dead for hours. As a news site, you have to manage that first.

I just looked at a Korean online grocery store that has zero sales through Google today and is down 80% since the beginning of May. As a website owner, you really should try to get away from Google somehow.

[tom_010101]

Yepp... The same on my german online magazin. Since 08.2023 the traffic is from 30.000 per day falling to now 5000 per day. And no idea, what i can do. After 22 years with my own company, the end is near...