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]

@SissiIf If only my company is doing badly, you're right, but if entire industries are doing badly, then it's the job of politicians to intervene, that's what they're there for. Politics should actually prevent a corporation from having so much power, and yes, Germany has done a hell of a lot wrong in this regard, namely watching some US corporations get too big. And in the US, I think Google should be put in its place pretty quickly, because these AI responses are nothing more than a huge copyright infringement.

And don't think I'm just sitting here hoping for politics. Of course I'm looking for reasons and taking action, and yes, it's working, my site is seeing more traffic, but I'm not selling anything either.

[oldog]

@Micha From today's Guardian

[theguardian.com...]

[superclown2]

if entire industries are doing badly, then it's the job of politicians to intervene

Quite right; but the problem is the American legal system.

A case against Google was filed nearly 4 years ago.

The trial started last September and ended in November. That was six months ago and there is still no verdict.

When there finally is a verdict, and if Google is found guilty, there will be another trial to decide what remedies there will be.

There will then be an appeal.

There will then be another appeal.

By then the whole thing will be moot anyway because of the inevitable evolution of the Internet.

This is why Google likes their cases to be heard before judges. In a jury trial there is usually a verdict and punishment is handed down to guilty parties. A single judge's verdict can be questioned by higher and higher courts almost ad infinitum; that of 12 unbiased citizens, deciding unanimously, is much more difficult to challenge.

So yes; relying on officialdom (at least in the USA) is of very doubtful value. Making sure that the public, and those who pay the money for Google ads, know what is really going on is far more effective. Word of mouth and social media are very potent weapons.

[Micha]

@olddog thanks, I'll read it later in a quiet minute.

@Superclown2 so no different to us, just unfortunately our politicians still think the internet is not needed. And I agree, it's important to make the problem more visible and also show inexperienced users that there are alternatives (I'll put a recommendation on my website later ala "We recommend DuckDuckGo", it may not help but at least it's a small thing).

What really annoys me are the people who celebrate Google and put the blame solely on the website owners. This glosses over the problems and makes many websites worse than they are.

[Whitey]

By then the whole thing will be moot anyway because of the inevitable evolution of the Internet.

Modifying the laws which companies have to comply with is a start.

But what motivates that are the politicians and the votes. Then of course corporate lobbying of which Google is powerful.

I don’t think there’s ever been a more complex legal scenario confronted by humankind in business than Google. If you’re a business, you can’t avoid it at any level.

[RedBar]

I thought I was having a reasonable traffic day until I checked my logs and found that Singaporean Huawei Clouds bot had been 48.9% of visits. I've tried every method possble to block this thing without any success meaning thousands more visits over the next few days:-(

Obviously this also means my real traffic today is very low.

[Micha]

Incidentally, the EU has just passed a law to regulate AI and, of course, the issue of copyright is missing. But there are also a few good aspects, such as the fact that AI systems must be monitored by humans and a labeling requirement for AI-generated content (only how this is to be implemented is a mystery to me).

If I understand this correctly, then Google's AI nonsense won't be appearing here any time soon.

[Dooku]

@Redbar, Do you have control over your own nginx or appache server? And are you using Cloudflare?

[RedBar]

@Dooku - I do not use Cloudfare and have control over everything. I had this problem before in January and couldn't find a solution then after many hours and attempts. It's my first-ever time of not being able to resolve such a situation.

[Dooku]

@Redbar, There is something(bug?) strange when using iptables or the UFW firewall on linux servers. For the most part those work, but I notice too many block rules for these kinds of bots do not work that way, UNLESS you ad the user agent to the nginx main config file and block them from there.
Or you need to install and use Fail2Ban, which also effectively blocks these bots using the correct settings.

[ichthyous]

The big drop off in top three ranking terms continues...all in a very short span of time. Haven't seen that in a while, but it doesn't seem to be making traffic any worse than usual so it must be low volume terms that are dropping off. I am also seeing a lot of movement in the competitive terms this week...I dropped from #1 to #2, then to #3 on some terms that I have been #1 for for years. Then I jumped up to #1 for other terms, and jumped up 30+ spots for others. Is anyone else seeing this?

[Dooku]

Anyone with an e-commerce website seeing this weird thing also?: google bot visiting the SAME product page like 20 times in a row and ALSO placing the item in the cart!? What could possible be useful about that?

[Micha]

I haven't noticed that yet. The only thing I can say is that in all the stores I monitor, sales have dropped sharply again since Sunday (if they had any at all). Only between 9am and 12pm, after that there are still visitors but no sales.

What I am currently observing on my website is a sharp increase in the number of visitors. The number of visitors, who come from all kinds of countries, rises dramatically for a few minutes and then falls again just as quickly. This has been going on all day today.

All in all, a very strange situation.

[Treud]

@dooku

It’s the Google Merchant center, they are checking several datas, price, shipping etc etc to see if it’s inline with what they have. They can also initiate some checkout (John Smith, if I’m correct).
I see this a LOT since the March update.

[saladtosser]

How does that "famous" SEO lily ray chick get paid for doing SEO? Shes literally posting on X all day everyday, does she get paid for tweets?.

[RedBar]

@saladtosser - Because some people are well-connected to the SS BS venture, knowledge, experience and expertise is not required in those circles!

[NeapTide]

I got only 3000 pages on my website but Google search console shows 110,000 internal links. That's insane number. Don't know where they found all those internal links.

[Billy85]

For anyone who hasn't noticed yet:
Bing has had an update in the last days and it looks like they are going a similar way to Google.

Bing SERPs are now Google SERPs on Wish.

[Markedd]

@Billy85 They follow what Google is doing to make more money, while also not entering Google's turf. It's quite clear that they don't truly want to compete. I don't know the reason and it's perhaps the same as why Google search has been the default for so long on Safari.

[superclown2]

Bing has had an update in the last days and it looks like they are going a similar way to Google.

They still hide their ads by giving them the tiniest possible labels, and those popups and popouts are so irritating.

Their designers have so much to learn about elementary marketing.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I get the feeling no one wants to compete with Google because of their monopoly and how corrupt it all is. With that in mind is it even worth the investment? Their monopoly needs to somehow be crushed before any new search comes and helps. Before competition is actually a thing. God help us small websites right now. Just thinking about the fact that my timing to creating a small website business, sucks. If I had started years ago at least I'd be left with something and used traffic to diversify and keep the business going. But starting now, impossible.

As expected my traffic, despite diversifying, has been terrible these past few days. No growth at all. In the space of a week I have seen another -30-40% drop. It used to be great, once. My content was all over Google. Top ranking articles. Images were also easy to find. Now its a different story. My articles were good enough to be top spot, now, apparently, they are so bad they deserve to disappear. Like magic. I even decided to write a 2,000 word article a few days ago. Complete with images, no AI and I was confident this article would help as it was helpful. But nope I, instead, was rewarded with another -14% drop. I'm hoping that once this AI mess has been implemented and the updated ended I can see light, doubtful I know. But this is all we can do right now. Wait and hope.

Content creators go in to these platforms expecting stability. In the website and Youtube scene, not a chance.

[superclown2]

I get the feeling no one wants to compete with Google because of their monopoly and how corrupt it all is.

There is also the massive investment needed to service millions or billions of queries every day. DDG is down now here in London; overloaded servers perhaps?

[ichthyous]

I get the feeling no one wants to compete with Google because of their monopoly and how corrupt it all is. With that in mind is it even worth the investment? Their monopoly needs to somehow be crushed before any new search comes and helps. Before competition is actually a thing. God help us small websites right now. Just thinking about the fact that my timing to creating a small website business, sucks. If I had started years ago at least I'd be left with something and used traffic to diversify and keep the business going. But starting now, impossible.

I started my site in 2003, and I can tell you that Google powered my business year after year. There have always been ups and downs, like when 90+% of image traffic vanished in 2010. But starting from 2018 onward Google has really taken off the gloves and now it has just morphed into something vampiric that is sucking the blood out of small business online. That is the power of monopoly.

There is a lot of press right now on the new "economic populism" emerging in the US...that is, that the right has realized that Reaganomics and laissez-faire economics never worked and has destroyed the working class, and is moving toward regulation / action against monopolies - [cnbc.com ]

It seems that for the first time there is some awareness that an economy based on a few mega-monopolies where all the wealth keeps concentrating into fewer hands is not sustainable. With both left and right agreeing on this I see a lot more action coming down the pike against Google, Amazon, Apple, and all of the large tech companies. Part of the problem in the US has always been this blind trust in the market...those days are coming to an end. By the time any concrete action actually happens though we will have all closed our businesses and moved on. It might be for those after us to start over.

[ichthyous]

Is anyone noticing a huge drop in external backlink count from real, high-DA domains on GSC? Google dropped over 1,000 links in one shot, leaving the crap .id site links (that I have blocked in my disavow file) intact, and instead removing links from very high-quality / high domain authority sites.

Is Google zapping valid links now or is it just not indexing the content anymore, so the links are dropping off? Could it be that once Google includes the page in its AI dataset that it no longer intends to keep the page in the live index?

[brightstone]

@Dooku I had 4 items in my cart on Etsy today and was about to check out. I checked the price of one item against another seller, and when I came back to the cart to checkout, it only had 3 items. So it apparently not only adds items to a cart, it removes them also. Very strange.

[ichthyous]

9am - 20 unique visitors
12pm - 2 visitors

Every single day now....

[Micha]

@Ichthyos I empathize and add: 12pm to 8pm average of 50 visitors and 1 shopper in the store I currently manage, and this has been going on since Monday (a total of 8 small sales is really ridiculous for a grocery store). I ask myself: how can sales drop so drastically within 4 weeks, despite good rankings?

Well, at least my own site is up and running, although traffic from Google is also inconsistent. Discover has been completely at 0 for 2 weeks and Google News no longer plays a role in traffic. Instead, more and more traffic is coming from DuckDuckGo, Bing and other search engines that I didn't even know about before. And my WebApp is also being subscribed to more and more frequently.

By the way, I've also noticed that with the links. In addition, the pages in the index continue to fall, now there are already 20,000 URLs that are not indexed according to Search Console.

[ichthyous]

I ask myself: how can sales drop so drastically within 4 weeks, despite good rankings?

Only 4 weeks? My sales vanished by early 2024 and have never returned. All I get now are people who submit short, one line requests with misspellings on my site, or people with ludicrously low budgets...I delete the requests and don't respond. It's clear that either A) We are in a drastic recession because nobody wants to spend money OR B) Google has very effectively stolen all of the converting traffic and is now working on reducing all traffic, whether it converts or not. The last I checked my ranking was still quite impressive...so my bet is on B.

It's very frustrating as bricks and mortar is just not the viable in my area due to rents being astronomical...people are still closing their physical locations in my niche. Social media does not work for higher priced items, so I do not see where to turn at this point.

[Micha]

In fact, it's only been 4 weeks, in March sales were in the 5-digit range, in April they dropped but were still in the 5-digit range and now they are just in the 4-digit range and nothing is really coming in (the last few days per day just 2-digit, so not even worth mentioning.

There is a nasty decline in real wages in Germany, but that can't be the whole explanation. So I'm betting on your B, but how does Google do it? There have always been a few ads above the search results, that's nothing new. The store ran ads through the Merchant Center for the first time today, I'm curious to see if this isn't money wasted. But if things continue as they are, this will be the next store to go out of business.

Incidentally, social media does absolutely nothing for groceries either, newsletters obviously do nothing either, etc. No matter what he tries, it doesn't increase sales.

[x.com ]

And Google spits in our faces

Avoiding creator burnout

Who is responsible for the current stressful situation?

[edited by: Micha at 5:20 pm (utc) on May 23, 2024]

[seokees]

I am the lead gen business. Conversions are low to none existent for days. I am active in The Netherlands in the lead gen of aircons among other things, unrelated to a grocery store in Germany for example, but I recognise the same trend.

Since 2024 the leads are becoming worse. More bogus leads, or people that are less serious, not enough budget etc. Nothing is really changed on my end. There is less traffic yes, but the lower lead quality stand out by miles.