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]

DDG uses Bing and Bing has been having massive problems for a few days now.

SEOs making fun of publishers

These SEOs are the plague and there are more and more of them on X.

I worked as an SEO myself for a long time and I have to be honest and say that more than half of the industry gets on my nerves with their smart-assedness and their worship of Google.
Clients run to them in the hope of a better ranking. They spend huge amounts of money on it and then look stupidly into the tube because they are not honestly told that nobody in this industry can do magic and hardly anyone honestly says that you should diversify your traffic.

I am now of the opinion that the industry is largely made up of rip-off artists.

[RedBar]

I am now of the opinion that the industry is largely made up of rip-off artists.

There's not much doubt about that !

[Billy85]

@Micha
Problems in what way?
I noticed that there has been a change in SERPs and that ecosia & DDG weren't working for 1 or 2 days.

I used ecosia as my main Search engine, but unfortunately it looks like they're now getting their results from Google now (just like Brave), so I stopped using ecosia.

DDG is still uses Bing and their results haven't changed much.

[Micha]

Bing went down completely a few days ago and has been having problems ever since. Ecosisa is still using Bing, by the way, but the results have really gotten worse.

[christianz]

Bing/Duck is plagued with lots of SEO sites ranking in high positions. You know, those sites in "niches" that all have similar vacuous bloated articles re-spun and re-generated in different wording with ad box every 3 paragraphs.

With all the horror that HCU did, at least on Google you see them a lot less. I even prefer #*$!ty reddit or quora over that kind of generated spam.

[Dooku]

Bing/Duck is plagued with lots of SEO sites ranking in high positions

On top of that Bing has a "bug" that is STILL NOT solved, by which a competitor can get you deindexed from Bing after making a few complaints.
Also, Bing will deindex your website for the most idiotic reasons or no apparent reason at all.
Just take a look at the many webmaster complaints on the Microsoft Support forums about this issue and the many articles on blogs online telling the same, and that even included the utterly useless Bing support chats and emails they received. Bing is just atrocious.

[Billy85]

@Micha
I regularly compare and compared SERPs between these Search Engines in my niche.

DDG SERPs haven't changed much (for my niche) since Bing went down, Bing SERPs have changed for some keywords in my niche, ecosia keywords completely changed in my niche and for my website and they are now either the same or closer to Googles SERPs, than to DDG or Bing.

[ichthyous]

Wow, I am seeing a 70% drop in traffic to my site's homepage this weekend. Now a drop is normal on holiday weekends, but certainly not 70%....what's up with that?

[RedBar]

Very poor weekend for my global site at 60% yesterday and so far today after 20 hours at 40%. I expect tomorrow to be equally low.

UK hotel site ended up yesterday after a very slow start and has been extremely busy today as hoped for with food and live music.

[Micha]

What a strange weekend. Saturday traffic from Google collapsed, Sunday a strong increase, today so far 1 hour a lot of traffic, one hour as good as nothing, this has been going on since 6 am. I give up trying to understand that.

[tom_010101]

For me too, a little bit down again at the weekend. It goes down, down and down. Nobody knows why or why. I'm slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that this topic no longer has a future. :(

[Fluff_Nutz]

Oh wow, there is life after Google. My traffic overnight is +140%. Bringing me back to, almost, where I was. I think a few new articles went viral but Google, was -20%. So none of this increased traffic was sent from them. Nice! After months and weeks of solid decline I now see an increase. Now to try and maintain it.

[tom_010101]

But the increase didn't come from Google, or what?

[ichthyous]

Same old same old...very dead week. Low traffic and only four inquiries which I could tell were going nowhere. Since about 2022 I have noticed that holidays are especially slow now. Perhaps a permanent change in mentality after COVID, or people spending less after the sugar high of all that free pandemic cash being spread around by the US govt.

[RedBar]

Traffic back to normal for me today which surprised me a little.

It is a holiday weekend in the UK therefore I went out for a few beers last night and it really did shock me. Several pubs were already closed and the normally really busy pubs were all absolutely dead ... Were all the supposed 20 million car journeys happening last night?

[Micha]

I can't complain about my own website today either, although Google traffic is still poor, the measures taken in recent weeks are working surprisingly well. If it stays that way, I can be satisfied.

However, I am worried about the store, it has been advertised on Google, but nothing is happening. At the moment I'm wondering if it's really just down to Google that sales are dropping so much. I mean, sure, Google only sends zombies, but have people generally become more cautious and now prefer to run to Amazon and those Chinese junk stores Temu and Co. I mean, Google can't be hurting sales that much because over the years you've collected people who already know you.

[ichthyous]

I mean, sure, Google only sends zombies, but have people generally become more cautious and now prefer to run to Amazon and those Chinese junk stores Temu and Co. I mean, Google can't be hurting sales that much because over the years you've collected people who already know you.

Someone was telling me yesterday about how her daughters found the same baby clothes on Temu for less than Amazon. I would not want to be in any business which resells low priced items now. But my high priced items are also not doing well since the end of 2023...mostly Google hoovering up all the best converting traffic but also I think that two wars, election year, inflation etc are all taking a toll

[Micha]

I'm just wondering that no matter what I do, no measure works in the store, that's illogical, there's enough traffic, but sales have been terrible for days.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that Google is increasingly ranking dead websites at the top? Especially when you search for something via Google Lens (I just spent an hour searching for several things and only dead websites were displayed at the top)

[Broaster]

I was hit two years ago never recovered, id get some spikes here and there but I barely get 20 to 50 visits a day if lucky. A lot of independent small publishers who were ranking well and making six figures off adsense have no lost all income flow the past 4 months. Many went from getting around 50 thousand to 100 thousand visits a day to 5 thousand or less. Why is google doing this?

[Micha]

Internal technical documentation Google documents relating to the ranking have been leaked.

Articel: [ipullrank.com ]



Of course, it won't be up to date, but it will definitely be interesting.

[Mark_A]

.. Many went from getting around 50 thousand to 100 thousand visits a day to 5 thousand or less. Why is google doing this?

In the beginning (pre Adwords etc) it was easy to rank a page / site on Google, and it resulted in thousands of converting visitors. These days the competition is numerous and intense.

Only ten pages can be in the top 10, can you really say your site is in the top 10 of perhaps thousands or more of other sites?

[RubicCubed]

Google documents relating to the ranking have been leaked.

After briefly reading through this, I can conclude Google has been very dishonest with us. I haven't trusted what Google has been saying to us for a long time, and this leak reinforces why we should never trust Google again.

[not2easy]

A more in-depth discussion about the leaked docs was posted here: [webmasterworld.com...]

It includes authentication of the leak and the start of a useful summary with contributing links is available via @rustybrick with input from Rand Fishkin and Mike King

[RedBar]

14 hours of my Google day and utterly dead, flat on its back across all my sites ... Have I missed something?

[ichthyous]

Apparently it wasn't just the holiday weekend...today everyone is back to work and traffic is catastrophically low! My home page is still at -67% just like the last 4 days. USA and UK are -56% and -34% respectively. Maybe everyone took an extra day off?

Category pages are pulling in more traffic than my home page now. I have lost about 20% of my top-3 ranking terms over the last few months. Perhaps a temporary situation, but it seems like a slow and steady decline.

[edited by: ichthyous at 2:36 pm (utc) on May 28, 2024]

[seokees]

In decline again. Little drop in traffic it seems, but no more conversions for a few days. Zombie traffic perhaps.

[Micha]

@not2easy Sorry, I had looked before, but I overlooked the thread, though it wouldn't hurt to post this again.

@ichthyous The traffic here in Germany is also getting more and more ridiculous. Google continues on its path, favoring large websites more and more, leaving small ones for dead. However, after the leak, I'm no longer surprised.

[RedBar]

Maybe everyone took an extra day off?

Well, I rarely do my grocery shopping before 7 pm however I have just been to my usual supermarket at 2.30 pm and, honestly, I could not get parked, it was heaving. I have never seen this supermarket so full in all the years I've been going there, wtf?

[Fluff_Nutz]

After reading the leak I'm not surprised why my traffic is continuously dropping with Google/Greed Corporate search. Another -10% drop overnight. Thankfully I'm becoming less dependant on them than when I first started. Terrible company. Every day is a drop from Google. I get the feeling they are deindexing everything. Which, again, would not surprise me.

Meanwhile thanks to, shall we say, other avenues? I'm still finding my traffic at +130%. I expect it to decrease over time as more competition comes into play and now that the work week has, once again, arrived. But hopefully it can remain stable and some growth remains. If it continues like this I'll be happy and so damn relived that I don't need Google in my life.

[ichthyous]

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

[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]