July 2024 Google Search Observations

[renatovieira]

Search Console frozen since friday. Has anyone else noticed?




[edited by: not2easy at 1:39 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2024]

[Conro]

Today I woke up conspiracy theorist, but do you think Google's henchmen send emails or leave comments to find out how much you understand about what you write by asking very technical questions incognito? If you answer well they leave the site stable, if you don't respond or don't give a sufficient response, the site starts to lose traffic after a few days. Have you ever noticed emails or comments from users who always use Gmail and ask very technical questions As if they want to investigate more than they know?

[superclown2]

don't let them tell you the content they produce is AI!

I am in the habit of calling it Artificial Stupidity.

It seems the (incredibly expensive to create, and unreliable) results from Bard 2 or 3, or whatever they call it now, have been a less than stellar success, and usage is falling rapidly. People seem to actually prefer looking at web sites! Rumour has it that Pinchai's job is very much on the line thanks to this, and the way that he has enraged publishers and legislators all over the world to such an extent that the company's future itself looks shaky. They face a potential break up from several fronts followed by years of expensive and disruptive court actions and legal appeals.

And that doesn't even take into consideration mounting copyright issues.

Some of us, of course, with the benefit of decades of real world business experience, have been predicting this for ages. What a pity no-one ever listens to Cassandra.

[saladtosser]

I agree @superclown2, I have tested different versions of chatGBT coding ability to solve a problem when im being lazy and I have to spend soooo much time getting it to write and rewrite over and over and over again to eventually solve the problem that it would have been faster write it myself, so became very un productive! Don't get me wrong I get it as a "useful tool" for people who don't know their stuff (in other ares outside their profession) but its not as replacement for humans experts in their own field, if that makes sense! If G is happy to replace us with a LLM god help us if they ever do crack real AI and not something wrapped in the pretence of being AI that's basically a "super content spinner" taking input from the whole of the WWW rather than a limited source set!

[Treud]

Traffic going low again and now I’m targetted by official bots, received thousands of bot from Urlumbrella.com , no idea why they are sending me, it’s useless, cost bandwidth and electricity for nothing….

[Billy85]

It seems to be the new normal for smaller sites.

One week up, next week down, but overall traffic is way down.

At least Search results give me a chuckle whenever I check my rankings, seeing the pages I'm being outranked by. I feel like Google is going above and beyond to outrank sites that are "unhelpful" by letting other pages rank with the most irrelevant sh*t.

[ichthyous]

Interesting article from the NY Times regarding the diminishing amounts of data available to the AI bots - [nytimes.com...]

This is behind a pay wall unfortunately, but it mentions that more and more sites have excluded the AI bots from indexing content or are putting up pay walls. The result is a rapidly shrinking pool of good quality data. This will impact non-profit and edu orgs from being able to harvest accurate data for their research. It is mentioned that a new model must come into play at some point, where content owners can allow data harvesting for non-profits but exclude businesses from using the data for commercial purposes.

As long as companies like Open-AI, Google, Perplexity etc continue to assert that they can harvest our data under the Fair Use clause of the copyright act without any kind of payment or attribution, then they will continue to be blocked. Fair Use is a convoluted and tricky bit of the copyright law which typically only flies for educational and journalistic uses... the notion that anything posted on the internet is available under Fair Use is nonsense.

No mention in the article that our dearest Google is acting like the mafia and forcing us all to either provide our data for their AI training or be excluded from the search index. That in itself is a monopolistic and coercive business practice which should be scrutinized by governments around the world.

[Micha]

I love Google sometimes. What was that, no favoritism? We published an exclusive article yesterday, umpteen websites are copying it (without citing the source, of course), and who is at the top of Google, of course: the big news sites. Who can't be found: us, the originators. I'm really tired of it...

[jchiff]

If you're keeping score at home:

"Google says I’m a dead physicist’: is the world’s biggest search engine broken?"

[theguardian.com...]

[universenet]

One of my website more of 90% visits are direct access.
And visits from all other search engines together are bigger of visits from google

[makintocheplus]

On my site 50% direct, 50% search engines (10% Google, 40% Bing).
French website online since 2011 was hit by HCU 2023 and Core update 2024.

@jchiff that article is a nice one, I read it all yesterday, it shows the searchers side struggle to find useful information on Google but talks in one paragraph about publishers losing traffic due to Google Core Updates. thanks for sharing!

[RedBar]

My global site's traffic is steady and about where I'd expect it to be at this time of year. Holday times often see yo-yoing quantities of visitors however real world enquiries are definitely down from the West. How much this has to do with current geo-political situations I'm not sure but I can foresee national wholesale supply shortages occurring in some countries as corporate buyers try to hold-out for lower supply prices which will not happen.

[ichthyous]

Traffic skyrocketed all day Sunday and search is 27% higher today as well...even USA ended the day 16% higher yesterday. No serious sales inquiries though, interesting...

[Juniya]

Not sure what impact if any this piece of news will have; [betanews.com...]

[Shepherd]

google reverses decision on eliminating third-party cookies

I always felt that Google was leveraging its browser dominance to stifle competition in the advertising space with the move to eliminate third-party cookies.

[Micha]

Something is strange. The traffic on my website has increased significantly since Saturday. More visitors are coming from Google and it also looks better in the search console.
But when I look at the data from Xovi and Sistrix, my website is losing ground. Especially mobile, the website is losing a lot of keywords. Even with the most important ones, the site is supposedly no longer found. Somehow it doesn't all fit together.

[superclown2]

Google reverses decision on eliminating third-party cookies

Google are just continuing their usual habit of throwing money at ideas only to see them fail, leaving them with huge losses. They look to have failed with their proposed Wiz takeover too, but this could be a blessing in disguise when you look at what they lost when they bought, and sold, Motorola Mobility. Was it really nearly ten billion dollars?

It's just as well they have a search monopoly otherwise they'd have gone broke ages ago.

When the dust has all settled I wonder how much their venture into AI will have lost them?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Something is strange. The traffic on my website has increased significantly since Saturday. More visitors are coming from Google and it also looks better in the search console.

The same thing happens to me. But I see Semrush showing I'm keep falling down, Hrefs shows an uptick, and a little increase from Google through GA.

Update?

[mosxu]

The recent leaks were an absolute joke compared to what is is actually happening

[Micha]

@Cyril TechWebsites I don't think so. It seems to me that all the tools have problems accessing the mobile index. Because you should actually see a decline in the search console too, but for me it's been going up and up since Saturday.

google reverses decision on eliminating third-party cookies

What do you actually have? Be glad that all the meetings and strategy discussions of recent years were completely in vain. (Sarcasm)

[mhansen]

Odd observation on an HCU affected site that is seeing considerable traffic increases during this update. (+150% daily in SEMR tracking and GA)

- ALL of the pages gaining ground are old, currently 301 redirected urls.

3-4 months ago I made wholesale changes to the site structure and completely eliminated the old url structure. All are 301'd to their new pages correctly. 100% of the traffic increases I'm currently seeing are ranking the pages with the old url's.

Not sure what to make of it at this point.

[RedBar]

I'm currently seeing are ranking the pages with the old url's.

More than 12 months ago I moved an entire site from a .uk to a .com, many pages still rank under their .uk urls even though the .com urls have been indexed. G seems to be way behind with updating especially non-news sites.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is insane from day to day now. The weekend was very high and produced no conversions. Monday dropped considerably again and my home page and most important landing pages saw huge drops while more obscure pages saw more traffic than normal. Today USA and UK traffic are both way down, but the traffic has shifted back toward the landing pages and away from lower level content pages. Each day a different result depending on the implementation of AI overviews and snippits.

There has been much discussion since Google reported quarterly results of whether the AI overviews are actually helping to drive clicks and improve Google's bottom line...I see it on the business news. What is not discussed at all is the effect that this is all having on small and medium business dependent on traffic...that isn't even on the radar. As long a profits are inching supposedly higher due to Ai that's all that investors care about. Google owes nothing to the content providers it is devouring, they are fodder.

[Micha]

@ichthyous In Germany, it is reported that investors are disappointed with Alphabet. It is also interesting that everywhere it is reported that investors no longer know where the company actually wants to go and that the share has fallen. In addition, there is a lot of criticism that it is not foreseeable whether and how the billions invested in AI will pay off. It seems as if the people in charge at the company have miscalculated somewhat. It's not enough to jump on the AI bandwagon if you don't really have anything to offer, like a search engine that steals text to generate answers from it.

As for traffic, it remains stable on my site, even though I no longer know where it actually comes from. According to the data, I am losing more and more keywords on mobile. In addition, the search console now also thinks that many URLs throw a 5xx error (which is not true after checking), and the number of indexed pages is also going down again.

In the shop: from Saturday to yesterday, sales were actually okay, but today not a single sale. But I'm slowly losing track of the topic anyway.

[universenet]

Seems google overclocked reddit with too much visits
and right now reddit is down from my side
( I hope Quora will stop too)
Crazy world

[Conro]

Reddit has now blocked all search engines except Google. Of course, it's all a coincidence

[universenet]

Reddit has now blocked all search engines except Google. Of course, it's all a coincidence

It is deal with google?
They can not accept nothing more in servers or is just to block access from other AI?
Ok, but they got millions from google for that activity

[reddit.com ]

ah yes, money, money, soon google will ask from us money if we want use internet, if not pay we will see just advertised pages

[Micha]

@Conro that's probably a case for the competition authority

[Treud]

@Universenet Internet is totally Pay2Win now!

[Shepherd]

Seeing an old favicon in the google SERPs this morning, likely going to see that core update rolling out soon

[Fluff_Nutz]

Did we actually have an update this month? Certainly not seeing anything, but, to be fair, I haven't done much research. Unless I am mistaken July is meant as a low RPM month so I would not be surprised if we haven't. We will likely get one next month instead. Which is not far away.

So far my traffic has been really stable and on the consistent increase. In fact we have gone as far as being able to double our traffic since my last message on these boards a week or so ago. This is how its meant to be. You work and see it being paid off. I want to go as far as saying that whenever the SERPs aren't being messed with the traffic is usually great and stable. But alas boys and their toys...