June 2024 Google Search Observations

[NeapTide]

That's how google is disguising ads in Generative AI results. They are not even labelling them ads anymore. Pure day light robbery of user generated content and plagiarizing that with ads for their own gain.

[drive.google.com ]

[edited by: not2easy at 4:57 pm (utc) on Jun 1, 2024]
[edit reason] new month, new thread [/edit]

[universenet]

Google: Affiliate is useless for users, so we penalize it. Google too, a few weeks later ... tests exactly what they found useless. So all the updates are nothing more than making room for Googles own offers.

Everyone with Affiliate website is going to teritory of google now...
Affiliate will be reserved only for google, and for other websites what try to use affiliate will be damage...

[Dooku]

Google: Affiliate is useless for users, so we penalize it

So the barrel is now practically empty, now google wants their fingers in our wallets? What's next? The moment you buy a new domain name and want to go online you receive an email from google, "first deposit $100 or we will not index you! And make sure you get one of those credit cards first to pay that $100, so we can also make some commission on that too!"

[ichthyous]

Yesterday traffic was in the tank the entire day...both search and direct traffic, and from every region. Today USA is at -50% at 11am...it dropped off a cliff at 9am sharp again. It seems the old pattern of USA traffic disappearing during prime business hours is back.

[Markedd]

I have some more depressive news unfortunately. I noticed that both Bing and especially DDG have started to follow Google's footsteps, prioritizing similar website (high authority + forums), so if you were hoping that an alternative search engine would fix things, it won't.

[Juniya]

@Markedd - I noticed that too, I am not surprised with DDG because they mostly use Bing's listings so once I noticed the trend on Bing, I knew the other smaller ones would follow. SMH...Devastating news, surprising? No.

Perhaps it's time to start thinking of exit plans from this industry after all these years smh...

[mosxu]

“Exit plans”

Unfortunately some of us put years of hard work and did not think how singularity works!

Big tech will slowly exterminate 90% of small businesses!

[Micha]

A look at the Search Console data: Impressions and clicks collapsed. A look at Google News: Even more fake news and pages that rank with articles that are updated once a day (no new text, just a new date).

So, as always, the spam update only seems to affect smaller sites. This slow death is annoying, Google should at least be honest for once and say that they no longer want us or that we have become useless to them.

[mosxu]

Of course they will not tell you are not needed, at this point probably they stopped feeding AI with some of us work and therefore spam updates will reflect that!

[Treud]

I receive more and more of emails of websites selling links, looks like they push so hard to collect money before it’s all gone….

[Micha]

@Treud I get more and more offers per day to set links and they offer more and more money. It's so stupid ...

[RedBar]

Several of us have commented about the poor DDG results at the moment. I have to admit that the few times I have tried Perplexity it has been mostly accurate about my widgets.

Global site - After several days of much lower than average traffic it has picked-up back to average for me, at the moment.

UK hotel site - Its traffic is normal. Whilst business / family travellers are regular site visitors for accommodation almost all other traffic is people checking live music gigs and restaurant menus. This is remarkably consistent traffic all year round.

The one "concern" we have is for this weekend which is our biggest charity event weekend of the year and has always been extremely successful however it's also Glastonbury weekend and what does this quite often mean? Rain!

We're on the opposite side of the country in one of the driest regions, fingers crossed.

[Mark_A]

.. it's also Glastonbury weekend and what does this quite often mean? Rain!

Also Wimbledon also means rain :) no escaping it ..

[ichthyous]

Bing and DDG are 3% of my search combined, hardly anything I would spend time thinking about...I wish it were different but Bing has never brought me a lot of traffic in the last 20 years.

International traffic is stronger, but USA is still highly suppressed. That's while my number of Top 3 ranking terms is still increasing daily for weeks. Google giveth, and in a few months google will taketh away...seen that pattern over and over

[Markedd]

@RedBar Unfortunately Perplexity is not a good company. Besides the whole article stealing and rewriting, it seems that it ignores robots.txt files where the webmaster tells it to not crawl the website. Honestly, I am appalled by how things continue to develop with these LLMs. New lows every day.

[RedBar]

Unfortunately Perplexity is not a good company.

And also unfortunately when nothing else is giving me decent search responses it creates a dilemma.

Look, we all know that G can do far, far better, it simply chooses not to do so therefore when needs must "we" are all forced into using something that, in reality, out of choice we would prefer not to do so.

[NeapTide]

Google is bringing back pagination and abandoning continuous scroll on desktop and mobile. So on 1st page out of 10 results you will get 3 Google garbage boxes (PPA, PASF) 2, 3 youtube videos, 3, 4 organic results from top websites and remaining web can rot on page number 2 and below.

Google is intentionally doing it because people were scrolling down past 10 results due to all the garbage being fed on top.

This company is getting more and more evil everyday.


[searchengineland.com...]

searchengineland.com Google dropping continuous scroll in search results Continuous scroll launched in Google mobile search in October 2021 and on desktop in December 2022.

[Micha]

@NeapTide A thesis that supports your statement: Google now displays credit cards. WalletHub has taken a close look at this and lo and behold: if you rely on what Google displays, it can quickly become expensive. And this seems to apply to many products. So much for product recommendations should be for the user.

Source [x.com ]

[Shepherd]

google is intentionally (abandoning continuous scroll) because people were scrolling down past 10 results due to all the garbage being fed on top.

Of course they are... You can draw a short, straight line between EVERYTHING google does and the money.

I've made a little game out of seeing if I can scroll the generative AI off the screen before if renders... I call it F google

[mhansen]

I believe Google is desperately doing all they can to milk every penny out of every cushion they can find. I run a PPC campaign for a client and over the last year, we've seen our "branding" campaign go from the initial $2/click average, up to $8/click for the same exact match terms. There have been little to no changes in this specific ad campaign, and there are little to no competitors who bid on the company name. (I've never seen a single other ad on the company name).

Today, one of the opportunity campaigns saw a click of $95/cpc for an exact match 3-word phrase that for the last 3-4 weeks cost around $24/cpc for the same exact match query. (No, the higher cost did not convert either) They have no rules, no watchers, and no accountability for their actions, and I'm going to be hard-pressed to assure the company this is an anomaly and not Google shaking cushions to see how far they can push advertisers before they leave.

They have ruined their search engine to push ads and widgets. They are quickly ruining their ad market just the same.

[EditorialGuy]

According to RustyBrick's Search Engine Roundtable:

"Google told us this change enables them to serve faster results on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven't explicitly requested."

IMO, that explanation sounds pretty reasonable. What's sacrosanct about continuous scroll, which is quite new in the overall scheme of things? As RustyBrick also points out, "Google launched continuous scroll on desktop in December 2022, 1.5 years ago, and continuous scroll on mobile search in October 2021, 2.5 years ago. "

Source: [seroundtable.com...]

www.seroundtable.com Google Search To Drops Continuous Scroll On Desktop With Mobile To Come Google Search is rolling back its continuous scroll user interface and bringing back the legacy Google Search pagination bar. Google told us that starting yesterday it will stop offering continuous scroll on desktop, with the mobile search interface to follow in the coming months.

[Shepherd]

...instead of automatically loading results that users haven't explicitly requested.

That's tone deaf at best...

[Martin Ice Web]

Very big changes since yesterday. Not for good so far.

-user engagement is close to Zero
-sales are Zero
-google UI is close to not useable
-google ads SPAM is 100%
-user satisfaction 0%

[NeapTide]

@Editorialguy pagination was working great when google search was not a pile of reddit quora top news sites garbage.

Personally when i do search i go past 10 results to find what I am looking for. And if I don't find it then i change search keywords and in some cases that works and in other changing keywords don't because google would still more or less keep displaying same results.

[ichthyous]

Huge drop in USA traffic this morn, -60% at 10:30am. Search is -37%. I saw a drop in traffic from UK and Europe in the 2nd half of the day yesterday but it recovered today. Hopefully this is temporary.

[Micha]

Nasty at the moment. I see exactly the same thing on all websites that Martin has already described. The Search Console continues to show a massive slump in impressions and clicks.

Fortunately, my own site is holding steady, although Google traffic continues to drop, of course, but the other sources are providing more visitors.

A little fun fact: our journalists' association and the Federal Cartel Office have finally become aware of the tech companies' crap. So something is finally stirring in Germany

[RedBar]

After nearly 18 hours of my Googleday my traffic volume looks normal BUT in fact my USA traffic is at 50% of average, most unusual.

[Micha]

By the way, the spam update is over
[status.search.google.com ]

[ubound]

Statcounter seems to overestimate traffic by 400-700 uniques today and yesterday. Matomo, server side stats and Adsense page views are all without change.

[EditorialGuy]

By the way, the spam update is over

It would be interesting to read a postmortem. What did it target? What did it filter out? So far, the reaction here and on Search Engine Roundtable has been muted--just the usual complaints about Google, as opposed to reports on what the spam update did or didn't do.

[Micha]

@EditorialGuy I think it's because you can no longer tell whether a change you notice is due to an announced update or the general ups and downs we've been experiencing for months.
I had written that my site was getting less Google traffic, but this has been happening on and off for weeks, and then it goes up again and so on. The ranking changes I've been observing for days are also ups and downs. So I can't even begin to guess which of the changes I've seen over the last few days have been caused by the spam update.
And unfortunately, as always, Google won't say anything about it.