August 2024 Google Search Observations

[christianz]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: [url=https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5108712.htm]https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5108712.htm[/url] by engine - 3:31 pm on Aug 1, 2024 (utc 0)

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Traffic drop since yesterday / today. Not sure who is gaining right now - SEO spam or Googlespam (SGE etc).

[NeapTide]

Spam on rise again.

Then I am seeing backlinks count increasing from just 1 website. And disavow links tool not working anymore. Google hasn't crawled disavowed links since 1+ year.
What are we supposed to do? Before this august update my website was getting increased traffic and now it has lost 50 percent traffic compared to what was gained.

How to get rid of these negative-seo links purposely made to look your website bad?

Why is google making everything complicated by abandoning important tools that helped webmasters in past?

[not2easy]

The disavow process was never intended to list unwanted backlinks, it was a way you could undo links you had created or bought and regretted. Think "Panda". You can ignore unwanted links that you did not create, probably the reason they discontinued the tool.

Google does get rid of nonsense links on their own. The "negative-seo links" are not made to harm your site's SEO, they are made to pretend their sites have value. I have never disavowed a link.

[edited by: not2easy at 12:18 pm (utc) on Aug 26, 2024]

[dolcevita]

On mobile google I see only the first 5-6 results instead of 10 as before. Below the results I see 3 blocks:
- People also search for then link More search results
- Apps with 3 apps and then More apps link
- Again People also search for with link More search result.

What I find bizarre is that there are 2 blocks of "People also search for" in the mobile results.
I think this is to the detriment of positions 6 to 10, which were replaced by "More people search for".

[gatormark]

@EditorialGuy

...or Reddit and Quora.

[NeapTide]

@dolceivta yeah if you are not logged into google on any browser, you are now shown 5 or 6 results and rest all are hidden now. That's the ultimate destruction of web right in front of our eyes. And among those 5 results you will find PAA, PASF, PAA and more PASF boxes.

Even on Play Store I am now observing same behavior in some categories. They will show 2 or 3 promoted apps then 10 apps (mix of newly launched and some old) and rest all good established apps hidden under large Display More button. This is to push developers to spend money on advertising or slowly rot away.

Pathetic. We are dealing with the biggest greedy bast***s of history. They are greedier than you could even imagine and doing all this to pacify their greed.

[ichthyous]

Big surge in traffic today...only US traffic not surging but it's early. This coincides with a reversal of the loss of top 3 and top 10 ranking terms...now I am starting to gain the ranking back again. This update doesn't know WTF it wants to do:

The United States
-17%
The United Kingdom
+191%
Australia
+169%
Germany
+252%
India
+57%
The United Arab Emirates
+73%
New Zealand
+236%
Canada
+1%
Brazil
+169%
Greece
+202%

[universenet]

Pathetic. We are dealing with the biggest greedy bast***s of history. They are greedier than you could even imagine and doing all this to pacify their greed.

@NeapTide

Do not be so bad about google, please
google love us,
google is fighter for better internet
for clean internet
(soon nothing will not exist, only google and derivates of google}
google is such amazing!
incredible google!

[Micha]

@universenet uh tell me, is everything okay with you, or do we have to worry about you after these words? ;-)

[universenet]

@universenet uh tell me, is everything okay with you, or do we have to worry about you after these words? ;-)

@Micha
time will show
For now I am ok
I love google so much, I am sure you love google too
I like how google eliminating competion
For now google is very good for this,
very brave

[christianz]

Do not be so bad about google, please
google love us,
google is fighter for better internet
for clean internet
(soon nothing will not exist, only google and derivates of google}
google is such amazing!
incredible google!

I agree with you. I love Google and I love how they are reintroducing old spam with the August update. Brave and beautiful.

Back to the subject. My large high quality site is losing ranks and traffic in orderly gradual fashion. For ~2 weeks, since the update started.

My secondary slightly spammy and a whole lot less "original" site is still gaining rankings but traffic gains have stalled.

[universenet]

my websites are visited more often with bing than Google
I did not change nothing so poeple using bing more and more?

[superclown2]

What I find bizarre is that there are 2 blocks of "People also search for" in the mobile results.

I remember seeing multiple ones a while ago in Chrome only. No sign of this, at the time, in FF or any other browser.

It came to light during the trial that earnings were down that month so the guys at Chrome were asked to help out by pushing organic SERPs even further down.

This is the type of company that we are up against.

[renatovieira]

After several days with signs of recovery, today a huge drop. Here we go again :-|

[ichthyous]

@renatovieira Same here...yesterday traffic was surging all day. Today my home page is -60% again. This update is odd, overall traffic is same or slightly higher but some parts of the website are dramatically reduced...namely the ones that convert the most. I haven't had a single new customer inquiry in six days now no matter how much traffic, so more of the same from Google

[Micha]

@renatovieira I agree, the same for me. After a few really good days, things are completely rubbish again today.

[gatormark]

One problem I see is that Google is throttling based on my lowest month's revenue of the year. For instance, my main site's revenue decreases during the summer because school is out. Then it starts to pick up mid August and will go strong through May. The site started to pick up at its usual time last week, but a few days later Google seemingly pulled back the traffic. It's weird. We'll see what happens come September 9. That's when it hits full stride.

[Martin Ice Web]

google:

Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

With the best will in the world , i can´t see it....

google is full of "The 10 best " , "Ranking the best 10" .... all are leading to amazon. How difficult is it to demote websites just made for amazon ads?

[Micha]

That could be interesting: Yelp is starting to fight back and has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in federal court in San Francisco.

[blog.yelp.com ]

[Fluff_Nutz]

At this point, who hasn't filed an antitrust claim against Google? Still its nice 'HA!' to see big sites and companies getting slammed just as much as the small ones. In reality none of this should be happening but here we are! Google continue to grow their problems, whilst everyone else has to suffer for their incompetence.

I'll admit traffic over here is incredibly slow. But its also growing, just slowly. Yesterday was a drop but we seem to be back today! Also noticed that the Reddit servers dropped, albeit briefly, once again.

[universenet]

That could be interesting: Yelp is starting to fight back and has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in federal court in San Francisco.

Google may propose bankruptcy after all the prosecutions against him.
Everyone will want to get money from google, as much as possible.
Companies will ask for big damage from google

[delorean]

Two weeks after the August 2024 core update, still my rank in serp is unchanged. Google please bring back the good times (2022-mid 2023).

[gatormark]

Another weird and volatile day. Today is starting off 35% lower than the past few days. It's lost traffic from the USA where I live, target, and operate the websites. It's crazy how that happens. Traffic does well for a while and then there's the pullback.

[renatovieira]

Definitely the worst day of the year today. Let's see the rest of the day...

[Juniya]

Google brought this to themselves but to me, it's just interesting nonetheless. Human greed always and I mean always wins.

You would think Google with all the data they have access to would perhaps somehow be able to defeat greed and keep their original promise of not being evil or whatever BS they sold, but no, how can they? Shareholders want more and more money each year regardless of whatever but history has told us that eventually, the company will crumble as greed would overshadow everything else.

But here we are, 2024 and Google is literally falling apart the same way thousands if not millions of companies before them have fallen. Nothing lasts forever is the only fact in this world.

[gatormark]

If you have work in a corporate environment for years, you probably know that this is truth. Even when something is working well, people have to change it so that they are not seen as obsolete. People change what is working well so that they can keep their job and be seen as having some value.

[universenet]

If you have work in a corporate environment for years, you probably know that this is truth.

the same thing happened at Boeing,
now it's such a big problem and collapse.
"Smart" people coming and destroy everyhthing
I remind video when senator Josh ask some question to CEO of Boeing
[youtube.com ]

This is today "culture of business"
I am not sure if that CEO know anything about airplanes
He just fell down, maybe from Mars (or some tree)

[headspace]

So here is what I have observed over the last two years:-

Google now controls the earnings from all internet websites and places a monthly monetary value on those earnings
at the BEGINNING of each month, based on the 'perceived' helpful content of the site.
Their algorithms then work backwards using organic traffic to achieve those earnings irrespective of what you do on your own website.

For example if G decides that website A will earn circa £500 per month in revenue from organic traffic and no more.
Your organic traffic will then be manipulated to achieve that target. (This includes search, video and social)

This can result in huge swings in traffic across a month, but the earnings from your visitors will
change little. If you want to earn more money you will need to generate it from direct traffic, which involves
paid advertising of some description.

G's objective is to Limit and tightly control what they pay out from adsense each month compared to what they gain from adwords advertising
with predictability. Once you enter the G eco-system of search console and analytics et al, they know what your site can potentially earn and what it is costing them
in lost revenue.


Summary

Monetary earnings from organic traffic is no longer in the hands or control of website
publishers. G pre-determines how much your site will earn each month and then their algorithms will
work backwards to generate that level of traffic.

The days of being rewarded for good SEO, novel or interesting content is long past.
If you want to earn more, then you need to use G paid advertising of some description.
Once you enter the G eco-system of chrome, search console and analytics they know what your site is costing them,
and by costing them I mean lost paid advertising revenue.

[gatormark]

@headspace

If you want to earn more, then you need to use G paid advertising of some description.

I have always used paid advertising through Google, spending a few hundred dollars a month. I have thought about stopping that all together, but I am afraid that Google might penalize me even further for not using Google Ads.

They got me.

[headspace]

@gatormark
Yes, I used to do a lot of paid advertising with G in the days when it was affordable in the UK, but for most small businesses
today, adwords advertising will not yield a ROI, simply because you need to pay circa £1 - £2.50 per click just to get noticed.

It was my observation in the past that if I did some paid advertising it improved the rankings of my websites, but today
while my rankings may improve through paid advertising the overall revenue earned is tightly controlled by G.
I stopped paid advertising altogether about 4 years ago. I now only have adsense ads on my websites because the revenue generated
each month allows me to see G's behaviour.
If you manage to Increase your direct traffic significantly, you will see that G will squeeze your organic traffic to compensate, so that they reduce the adsense payout.
For G it is now all about predictability of earnings. So for them placing a monetary value on each website at the start of the month and then getting
the algorithms to work backwards to deliver that traffic makes sense.

[Markedd]

A few years back I would have called it a bug, but seeing the situation now, I wonder if the code behind Google is held by some intern in the basement. I published an article a few days back to go nicely with a video for the full user experience. And I checked today if by chance Google put it anywhere near the front page. And it did to my utter surprise, under Reddit, YouTube, Quora, of course. But what was strange was the date, it said July. I posted it in August, what's going on. I used the console to check the date and sure enough, the published date is August, I am not an idiot (another big surprise). But I did see an upload date for an element that happened in July. It was the YouTube video. Google took the published time of the video which was embedded in the article and stated that this is when the article was published. Excellent work, team.