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).

[Samsam1978]

This is the worse my rankings have ever been. AI sites popping up taking over my rankings less than year old. Not sure how long I can survive. Google end up banning these sites in 6 months to 12 months only to replace with another one. It's really effecting my site.

[christianz]

The fact that these AI sites rank at all is shocking. This August update seems to have weakened Googles defenses against such SEO content. It's not dramatic yet. Maybe some 10% more crappy SEO sites ranking.

Let's see if it gets worse. Spammers are certainly pumping out more "niche sites" than ever before and large publishers with no moral compass are milking their reputation more than ever before, because there is still no penalty for that.

[ichthyous]

Traffic is surging this weekend, everywhere except for the USA, which is only up +1%:

The United States
+1%
The United Kingdom
+58%
Australia
+206%
India
+53%
Canada
+72%
The United Arab Emirates
+53%
Brazil
+511%
Ireland
+358%
Israel
+129%
Germany
+53%

Google seems only to care about monetizing USA traffic unimpeded, perhaps because the company knows there is nobody to stop it. This traffic has resulted in real inquiries, so not bots. Hopefully it will keep up!

[Samsam1978]

Why don't they just BAN all new websites or slowly test them with a few pages here and there and build up over a number of years. AI websites are out of control. I see one in my niche that started in April 2024 now gets nearly 1 million unique in 4 months. Its crazy. They don't have adsense either as selling an app but even so.

It is crazy. It is an easy fix, promote old niche websites.

[Samsam1978]

Also notice how quite this forum is. People are giving up.

[Conro]

It is precisely the older sites that are penalized if they are not well known, the others I have no idea how they could recover. As far as I'm concerned, I've updated and rewritten hundreds and hundreds of articles, but it has only made it worse. In fact, with the new update, if it doesn't improve, I don't waste any more time. Google can keep the spam sites and forums with threads from 10 years ago.
I'm looking at the serp from mobile now and I see:
1 paa
2 3 youtube videos
3 search correlate
4 forum
5 same forum
6 site organic
7 search correlate
And... More search results (next pages)

Getting worse and worse

[RedBar]

Also notice how quite this forum is. People are giving up.

Quite simply how many independent webmasters / SEOers are there these days v employees told what and how to do something?

How many mom and pop sites are SEO'd well, how many m&p sites rely solely on their FB rankings? I know loads do in the UK.

How many well-constructed however poorly SEO'd sites are there that the owners have given-up on since they do not rank organically and their only solution is G Ads that they cannot afford?

I was talking to someone recently who worked for our regional council leisure department about websites and they proudly said that they had just been given a GBP 30K "allowance" to create a new site for a specific leisure project.

This person knew zero about design and SEO yet was "in charge" of this project plus she was also being paid GBP 50+K p.a. plus all other benefits ... I had to leave the room, uneffingbelievable!

[Micha]

This person knew zero about design and SEO yet was "in charge" of this project plus she was also being paid GBP 50+K p.a. plus all other benefits ... I had to leave the room, uneffingbelievable!

And I thought only in Germany people are so crazy...

The fact that there is so little activity in the forum could also be because people keep coming along and saying that complaining is pointless, or that they don't want to read it. That also puts people off, and many probably just don't want to keep talking about it and reading about how annoying the current situation is. Nothing changes anyway.

[christianz]

To be honest, search wouldn't be half as bad if 100% of the results were forums only. But not the big corporate forums like reddit, quora etc that are like digital concentration camps / plantations. Only small ones. And preferably not ones who were bought up by few large website holding companies and stuffed with ads to the max to be soulless passive income machines.

Instead a bunch of forums still owned and operated and developed by real subject-matter enthusiasts. That would be a flashback to glory days of the web.

Btw, I don't own any forums, just speaking as web search user who is sick of SEO content.

[Conro]

Many forums have been closed because of the GDPR and because people prefer to write on Facebook groups and pages

[ichthyous]

Also notice how quiet this forum is. People are giving up.

It's because nobody has real actionable information on how get back real converting traffic. Those days are gone and we will all get what google allows that day or even that hour. I have never ranked for so many top 3/5/10 terms in the last 20 years, but it's not referring as much traffic nor converting traffic. Google has removed the incentive to improve in search.

I wish I could depend on social media, but honestly I don't find that it works at all. It's a rigged game as well, wanting you to pay to boost your content to your own followers. When I did that and even ran ads on Instagram I got the most god awful inquiries. People filling out forms and then when you responded they had no idea why they filled it out. Useless.

Like all good things, the era of simply sitting back and watching the sales roll in online is over I think. It requires a huge amount of resources which are beyond the capacity of small business. Unless you have a lock on some unique product or service you can't compete against huge corporate conglomerates that are buying everything up.

In my extra time I have been writing articles this year. Several are ranking #1 or very well. I'm seeing whether I can siphon off a portion of the readers to convert them to customers, but it doesn't look like it...those that want to read articles aren't buyers. The extra traffic makes me happy and I'm sure helps my brand recognition but it's not translating to sales.

[Billy85]

I have no hope for this coming update(s) and future updates. The internet will become a very different place in the next couple years. (mainly transactional based results)
Less genuine content, more AI Spam content, thin content from big sites and the published content will get a lot worse.

I haven't really published much in almost a year because there is no point for me to spend money (couple hundred Euros) to purchase the products, invest a lot of time into reviewing these products, just to rank somewhere on page 2 and getting outranked by bigger sites that write 300 words and make a list of trash Chinese products.

The worst thing is when I get outranked by pages that are irrelevant to the query, just to bury my page a little bit further down. (for articles that ranked previously #1 or top 3, were regularly updated, had lots of comments and had an average engagement time 2+ minutes (sometimes even up to 5 minutes)

[Fluff_Nutz]

Okay, suggestions guys. One of my new writers to the site has messaged me saying that they plan on creating a new website of their own. Focusing on the exact same niche. Fair enough creating a site in the same niche. It happens.
However, what is currently troubling me is that they plan on using the content that is on my site, written by them. Then placing this content on their site as some kind of redirect. They call it a portfolio. Probably to boost their new site in the process. Could this potentially run risks for my site? How would you go about dealing with this exactly? I'll admit their message has caught me off guard a bit. Never come across a writer wanting to redirect and use content on my site before for their own personal use. I don't want to risk getting the site into trouble by outside negative influence, obviously..

[christianz]

people prefer to write on Facebook groups and pages

They are hoarded and nudged into FB and few other very large platforms. I don't think has been a natural process of people preferring FB over forums. Same with Google search and YouTube.

Initially some of it was natural network effect but at this point, given all the en#*$!ification and censorship, you can't claim that it is all because of network effect.

What we have now is some kind of anti-Internet where there are only 5 large mega websites and almost nothing but sea of "SEO content" around them, with few last remaining awesome websites that are increasingly difficult to find and non-viable to run.

Even my cute little website that I have been developing and running since 2007 is getting increasingly frequent offers to buy it by some multi-site "holding" companies who would just let it rot away and bring in passive income for next few years. I will not allow that. Yes, it is disheartening and demotivating seeing junk outrank me (and now AI junk) but I am surviving and keeping the spirit of the WWW alive, in my tiny little inconsequential corner of the web.

[Samsam1978]

Can someone recommend a company that manages copyright infringement please as I saw a few of you say you make money on this per year. Thank you.

[ichthyous]

Can someone recommend a company that manages copyright infringement please as I saw a few of you say you make money on this per year. Thank you.

I use my own attorneys as that provides the best results by far. But when I first started I used ImageRights and there is also Pixsy. I settled quite a few cases with IR but for a much lower rate than with my own attorneys. In the USA you will need an attorney that is admitted to the bar in that state where the infringing company is located. Good luck!

[Samsam1978]

@Fluff_Nutz I would absolutely so NO to that. I would not be happy for them to even discuss the work they did for you with other SEO people. I'd say Im not comfortable with it, as it is confidential. A competitor may want to copy your site so I would not agree to it.

[Samsam1978]

@ichthyous thank you x

[Srikanthn]

Our site has been hit by HCU I am seeing the improvement from last 1 week. Yet to wait to get the conclusive outcome.

[Conro]

Today, on the other hand, I see the lowest traffic ever. The problem was updating hundreds of articles, I shouldn't have listened to those Google sociopaths. I hope they take every possible evil. It's over for me, I give up

[Micha]

It remains strange, I can't save myself from orders in the store at the moment and my news site is also doing well. The weekend was mixed, but today Google seems to be turning the screws again.
I continue to see a steady increase in traffic from Discover, on the news side.

[Juniya]

@Fluff_Nutz - You shouldn't allow that, tell them to create new content.

[ichthyous]

I continue to see a steady increase in traffic from Discover, on the news side.

Funny, my search traffic is increasing but I cannot get a single item to show in news or discover. They show a few impressions on the first day and zero clicks, then after the first day nothing. Not sure why but I assumed it's because my site doesn't have enough authority or because it's not listed as a news site...

[morpheus83]

Things were well till Sunday and then traffic dropped off a cliff. Seems we are sandboxed as of now.

[KaseyM]

Traffic so slow...

Not surprising when I get on most search queries:

AI Overview
Top Snippet that often contradicts AI Overview
People Also Searched
(5 scrolls later)
First blue link.

[Micha]

@ichthyous Is your site labeled as a source in Google News?

[mhansen]

Since late June 2024 (23-25th), I have seen a steady increase in direct traffic (GA4). It's never been this way in the past, and over the month of July, the "Direct" channel has increased to match that of the organic search (which did not go down) in August. I'm a CloudFlare user, block AI and many countries since the service is USA only.

Has anyone else seen this increase? If so, have you determined the cause?

Thanks in advance.

Edit to add: I dug deeper into my coffee mug to slap myself awake and then drilled deeper into GA, and found that +90% of this Direct traffic is coming from European countries that are not blocked. Also, ALL this direct traffic is very quick to leave the website, usually below 1-2 seconds and completely opposite of the engagement time search users are sent from the same countries (Avg +2 min engagement).

[edited by: mhansen at 3:33 pm (utc) on Aug 12, 2024]

[Markedd]

@@Fluff_Nutz So they want to use 301 redirects from your site to their own. This would help them rank faster and the website may go high up quicker and way above your own. It shouldn't really have an impact on you as long as Google is not a moron... But what I am curious is how much are they willing to pay for the backlinks. This should be some serious juice passed on and all for free? I have a few websites that could use it as well if you're willing to spread it for free, hehehe :D

[not2easy]

A 301 tells Google that the content was permanently moved, you do not want that.

Google may note that the content still is located where it was and does not have noindex tags so that means it is duplicate content, you do not want that.

[Fluff_Nutz]

@SamSam, @Juniya, @Markedd and @not2easy

Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I'm not really sure about this current situation.

For clarification he is adding these redirects from his own website. Not mine. There are no redirects on my site to his. He currently writes on my site. This is the first I have heard of him wanting to create his own site. Albeit in the same niche. So I was wondering if redirects from his own site to mine will have any negative impacts?

He says it will be a portfolio of redirects from his own site to mine. Which, I assume, will send traffic to my site. He calls it free marketing. Meanwhile he will continue to write articles. Hopefully of his own on to the site too, alongside this portfolio of redirects.

All he will be doing on my site is continuing to write articles that I pay them for.

Does this sound like a good deal? If not I'm tempted to boot him from the team. So before I make any rash decisions I am merely asking for advice.