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]

[ichthyous]

I think the days of updates with specific durations are long gone and Google is just constantly rolling out algo adjustments these days. Traffic is always in Flux now. For the last two days I have had a total collapse in UK traffic, down 65% so far today. That will suddenly revert, maybe tomorrow or the next day as if nothing happened. Google is experimenting with rolling out all kinds of AI snippets, layout changes etc all the time now. There's not a thing to be done about it except realize that Google traffic is highly unstable and refers very poor leads now. I am literally deleting the inquiries as they come in with no response now...that's saying a lot because I don't take that attitude with prospective customers in general. But when they are this clueless I can't spend my time on them.

[ichthyous]

OpenAI has announced a new search engine, "Search GPT" - [cnbc.com ]...aimed to give users “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” Does this mean that outlinks will be included in the searches? Sounds like it might be the case.

[Micha]

It sounds more like the publishers with whom the company has contracts and to whom it pays money are being favored.

[universenet]

@Universenet Internet is totally Pay2Win now!

Maybe is better say: internet is now pay and lose

[ecommerceprofit]

I came here to post as ichthyous did. I love it! Google will now have real competition. I no longer depend on Google but still fun to watch Google start their slow decline over the next 10 years.

[ichthyous]

I came here to post as ichthyous did. I love it! Google will now have real competition. I no longer depend on Google but still fun to watch Google start their slow decline over the next 10 years.

@ecommerceprofit. We have no idea whether this will actually benefit anyone other than OpenAI, or how long that will take, or if people will use it at all...but in general more competition is better

[Juniya]

They, Google brought this on themselves with their useless CEO, head of search or whatever and their greedy board of directors. I hope OpenAi creates their own publisher network where they can show ads(this is probably their main goal in the future, follow the money!)

It's about time! But, Google has a strong foothold, openAi needs to really really market themselves internationally especially for them to make an impact, Bing has been trying for decades but it's very difficult.

[NeapTide]

SearchGPT will just be a copy of Google displaying quick AI results at top and stealing content from websites. Its time to pack your things and move to some other business where you don't have to remain dependent on these Internet Pirates.

[Treud]

And when you add the statement of Microsoft CEO telling that everything available on Internet is « available for free usage » we better stop these bots to crawl. My question is : Can these huge companies just ignore any fence and just scrap whatever they see ?

[Samsam1978]

I am down to 2016 levels crazy, saw some old competitors actually have 0 traffic now. I don't know what is going on but it is not good. I guess the internet is just going to be AI. I won't stop writing though for my website. I won't stop doing human content. Just wish Google will give us old publishers some credit. At least Tiktok is paying me I guess and going viral on allot of my content, youtube does not seem that interested in my video content.

[Conro]

Practically now they have copied Perplexity, they use a spinner to rewrite the content of others and put links on which no one will click. Fair use should not be used for commercial purposes like this, since there is nothing new added, plus they hurt the source. If they allow us to do this we should all become spammers, oops revolutionaries of the web, less effort and more money

[Samsam1978]

How can they get away with it? Honestly, no-one will click on the AI ads, that is my prediction. People don't want to just have 1 website as there source of all information that is crazy idea. Google are ruining their business as well as ours. I am not sure how many of us publishers will be surviving after this. There won't be any of us left.

[Conro]

Think of affiliate sites, deleted with the most trivial excuses, such as the fact that they talked about the same topic, so what does google do? It steals their content and rewrites content that was already on the web, doing just what it complained about, but it does it worse, with an artificial intelligence that responds without any human control and misinforming people. The target, however, will be ads with the recommended products of their advertising. Google has become a spammer

[ichthyous]

Traffic is wild these days...three days of totally vanished UK traffic (yesterday UK was -53%!)...then suddenly a 5X increase in UK traffic at 8am and back to normal. Now traffic to my home page is, once again, at -70% this morning. Every day we are on the merry-go-round of suddenly-disappearing-traffic.

[Samsam1978]

@ichthyous - have you checked your server for apache errors. Sounds odd to me that is some crazy figures.

[ichthyous]

@Samsam Why would it be apache errors? This is normal now...traffic to my home page dropped off a cliff at the end of June and has seen dramatically lower traffic ever since, with a few exceptional days where it seems to return to normal. It's much lower than last year at this time. USA traffic suddenly plummets all the time, then returns. I haven't had drops this big in UK traffic before, but it lasted more than two days until 8am sharp. That has nothing to do with errors on my site or all traffic would reflect a drop at the same time, not specific regions and pages.

This is reflective of what Google is rolling out in that region and whether it affects my content. Already my sales inquiries have vanished since the end of 2023. Anything that is coming in is generally a low budget / clueless type of customer that I cannot work with, so no sales at all. Sales this year are not just down, they are at zero now.

While my overall traffic isn't down and my visibility is higher than it was last year according to all the metrics, my site is no longer ranking for a whole range of commercial terms. That has been replaced with traffic that is not looking for products and doesn't result in any sales. From what I see, the same ecommerce sites are ranking for the commercial terms that used to bring me sales. Without exception they all have online checkout and show price ranges and reviews. I don't have an ecomm capable site, no prices and no product reviews...just extensive 5 star reviews for the business in Google Business / Maps.

At some point Google decided that ONLY websites where you can actually see prices and purchase the product on the spot will ranking for any potentially commercial term in my field...that was a deadly change, and one that I hope reverts sooner or later. I am not up for building a new ecomm platform.

[saladtosser]

Dunno if anyone else here has noticed yet but G on YouTube is getting more aggressive to keep people on YouTube and many descriptions that contain links to sites aren't showing anymore, so if your doing YouTube to get hits on your site this is going to be painful when fully rolled out, they are also adding a "skip" link so viewers can skip the in video "sponsorship" bits, I suspect so sponsors stop paying YouTubers and pay YouTube direct. There is a great video explaining this all here [youtube.com...]

So yea, YouTube as a source for website traffic is going away, bye bye! Feels like G is getting really desperate to kill all website traffic from everything they own!

[Samsam1978]

@ichthyous it sounds like a nightmare, I am tired from it all tbh, consent changes every day and now my traffic is at levels I saw 12 years ago, 70% drop in revenue. I have written to my google account manager about the whole thing. I don't know what to suggest, it is as if they just don't care about publishers anymore and I am seeing spam at the top of my results. They just don't have ads slowing the page down. If your in the UK then its extra difficult. If you make money via e-commerce then that is tough, and I don't blame you for not wanting to add it to your site. Lot's of stress and hassle. I just wondered if maybe you checked your 408's in your logs.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@saladtosser

I used to have a ton of links on my video descriptions. Dating back 10+yrs. Some of which are, indeed, linked to my site. I haven't logged onto my Youtube for months now as I find it a useless place to try and build any form of business on. I'm not surprised to read about that though. Knowing Google. Best to run from anything they own before more tears are shed.
The traffic I got from Youtube to the site was terrible so I'm not 100% sure people even read descriptions. So, for me at least, no real damage caused. Still interesting to know and not surprised the destructive run-away train continues.

[jchiff]

It's the all new Internet!

[futurism.com...]

[Conro]

How long do you think you'll be trying to keep going with your sites? I have updated 350 posts in the last 3 months, I have reduced advertising to a minimum, but nothing has changed, except for the fact that this is the first month that I have not received the adsense payment because I have not reached the threshold

[Micha]

@saladtosser I just looked at my statistics for the last few weeks, because my podcast also appears on YouTube and has a very long description with links. You're right, there's hardly anything from YouTube on the page. I looked at the last 8 weeks and there were 4 clicks from there to my page. That's negligible.

[superclown2]

When AI Is Trained With AI-Generated Data, It Starts Spouting Gibberish

This has been predicted on these, and other forum pages, for ages. The guys at Google haven't understood it though.

Their record on 'other bets' or 'moonshots' has been abysmal. Will AI prove to be their biggest blunder?

[universenet]

In the top of AI, when AI will be master for internet things, google and other few search engines will do redirect every your URL address what you write will be redirected to AI.
NO?
Why not?

[RedBar]

I was having a quick look through my global site's stats and was surprised to see that as of my lunchtime today that July had just exceeded June's page views. What is even more surprising is that it has been with almost exactly the same quantity of visitors plus almost the same quantity of unique visitors.

Normally my traffic falls at least 10-15% during July and August however it has not driven any new customer B2B enquiries. What surprises lay in store for August I wonder?

[Conro]

In August there will most likely be a major update, now more and more seo are no longer taking sites affected by hcu because it is impossible to get them to recover. If Google does not change its algorithm, There will be fewer and fewer online sites, especially the older ones, this will not only kill Gemini which will have fewer and fewer sources, but also google search no one will use it anymore

[RedBar]

no one will use it anymore

Of course they will, we're just the tiniest proportion of complainants, 99+% of users do not view search like we do. In fact I see more and more users these days using voice search and not just the young and this must surely affect website traffic considerably

[ichthyous]

Their record on 'other bets' or 'moonshots' has been abysmal. Will AI prove to be their biggest blunder?

Ai related tech stocks are already falling like a stone, they were expecting quick profits. That's not going to happen, and the more they strangle the life out of small and medium sized sites the less data they will have, then clearly they have real problems. Large sites can simply put up a firewall and pull all their content because they have a huge brand, but we cannot. There's no way I will ever be able to ban search engines from my site, even though currently the traffic isn't producing any business.

It's a tough spot we are in as small businesses, but they have trillions to invest and will make sure that they ram AI down everyone's throats until they use it. I have to admit, Ai overview are useful, and they do include a carousel of links to the sites at the bottom which I click on for further info. So perhaps not a complete death knell...if google and OpenAi see masses of sites blocking them they will be forced to share more traffic with them or end up with very poor AI output. This will all take a while and many of us will be driven under or haved moved on by then.

[Conro]

You too have fewer and fewer backlinks on Google search console? I have a huge number of spammy links and the good links are slowly disappearing

[rustybrick]

Concro - I am seeing my normal count.