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).

[RedBar]

Why I would think it would take at least a month to test

Aha ... Do you think it takes a month to "test" their "improvements" or for their databases / equipment to catch-up with whatever?

Do they not do in-house testing before launching? Just how long and how many people have been working on this update that takes so long to roll-out?

I find it an utterly bizarre situation to deliver such questionable results.

[ichthyous]

Aha ... Do you think it takes a month to "test" their "improvements" or for their databases / equipment to catch-up with whatever?

Do they not do in-house testing before launching? Just how long and how many people have been working on this update that takes so long to roll-out?

I find it an utterly bizarre situation to deliver such questionable results.

My response to your post was tongue in cheek, that's why the ;) at the end. But considering how many users out there they may be running iterations in real time and then they collect the data for weeks or a month and analyze it. Perhaps we have all become a bit cynical and there might be some goals which align between googles profit and webmasters...ie weeding out bot generated and ai Gen content. Google's brand is becoming damaged now so perhaps there's a point where the reputational damage is costing them too. Just speculation there.

[RedBar]

My response to your post was tongue in cheek

Yep, yep, I realised that :-)

I just do not comprehend why / how it is that so many so-called "talented" staff can take so long to create a new update and then have to wait a whole month to evaluate whether or not it's done what they intended it to do ... or not?

[MayankParmar]

It's interesting how Google clubs "ranking issues", "AI Overviews expansion", new ad styles or other changes when it rolls out a core update, which takes longer than a month to "fully" roll out when pretty much all of us see changes in the first week itself.

Is this company now playing war games with publishers?

[universenet]

Is this company now playing war games with publishers?

They doing that all time
They want give fake hope to people
Like maybe now will be better... maybe now,.. ok last time was not... now maybe will be
All time google "cleaning" spamm, but exacly they producing spamm
Alltime they checking and checking, for normal people website what was checked one time no need check all time, but google "checking checking", exactly all is fake
And all time number of indexed pages of majority of website are in seach console but not in search live
Google killing internet, from update to update ,,, just killing interent
Google should be removed from that position
Now google doing core update for "small bussiness" website? Fake....
I always say about proof that with google something is very wrong and this is next:
If you have price for using google maps and over nite that price google put 100x more so something is very very strange with that company, even using google maps was free in past...
Somthing is deep wrong in google company
Google attacking publishers in daily base

[mosxu]

Guys,

No one is listening to us!

The algo is not listening it is on its way to singularity!

[Whitey]

https://status.search.google.com/incidents/42XCLGtpuCZkzqe4dc6S

Just a reminder that this bug has not yet been fixed and ranking results, (therefore traffic), are disrupted. Waiting a month on top of the March core update, plus this, makes me want to turn my attention elsewhere for a while to maintain peaceful sanity.

[oldog]

For the daily usual suspects ( grumpy old webmasters and google moaners) .....lol..just joking..
Have you ever checked if your websites have passed all tests in PageSpeed Insights ? Do you get that Green ...Passed ?
You continuously moaning that your websites got a slap since a year ago, BUT, you are not telling us what is your niche ? Who are your competitors ?
If you just posting your daily traffic variations coursing the evil which of the west without telling us your niche and your main competitors we the rest who doesn't face your problems can't give you an advise or some useful tips.

[morpheus83]

Anyone experiencing a drop since the update started? Our traffic has nosedived by 90%, although I am hoping it is because of the Search ranking issue.

[delorean]

Disaster. No HCU recovery.

[sk7411]

Our traffic is down . Everything was going good the day core update rolled out but since the following day it seems a disaster . Not sure if it is due to the ranking bug .

[MayankParmar]

Google has lied again. No recovery, nothing. Only owners who voiced their complaints on X and were featured by BBC, etc., have experienced improvements. How is this fair?

[universenet]

Just a reminder that this bug has not yet been fixed and ranking results, (therefore traffic), are disrupted. Waiting a month on top of the March core update, plus this, makes me want to turn my attention elsewhere for a while to maintain peaceful sanity.

Maybe some of google employers doing diversion in google search algo because they feel will lose job in google soon

[ichthyous]

In reality this update started a couple of days before they announced it, and all the customers went with it. Customer inquiries and traffic were just beginning to stabilize briefly for me, and now zero inquiries since this new update started.

On another note, now that the court has barred Google from paying Apple $27B a year to be the default search engine on Safari, perhaps that loss of revenue will force Apple to come up with its own search engine? OpenAI has announced one, but I doubt that anything OpenAI produces could compete with Google for a very long time. The majority of my mobile searches are coming from Apple devices so it could make a big difference to have that competition. Bing + Yahoo + DDG are still under 3% of the searches to my site.

[edited by: ichthyous at 1:55 pm (utc) on Aug 17, 2024]

[not2easy]

Safari allows options, you are not forced to use Google unless you want to. Of course you could add other SEs before they made it easier.

[Samsam1978]

Lost 40% traffic since 2021 on my old 15 year old website and I am published author with Google authorbox and runs adsense, all human content. Good news seeing 6% increase yesterday. Still lots of new sites with AI content ranking above me or ones with simple paragraph and no adsense. Hope they removed this rubbish AI new websites in this update. The wording is awful including the slang they are using. My rankings unchanged in SEMrush - outranked by new websites who went from 0- 1million users in a few months. Crazy. Google needs to stop this as it hurts real publishers who have degrees in English. Found over the last 3 years high ranking AI sites keep on ranking then just replaced by another AI content farm, can't be good for user. And don't even mention reddit, most of the posts in my niche are people not knowing what an earth they are saying - then I rank 2nd. Hope this update corrects all these flaws. Noticed they applied AI overviews again to my author account (I had AI overviews for last year before it was released to US). I have actually used it a few times but could do with making the AI overviews a little smaller or to the side like Microsoft - and giving the user a choice of if to see them in my niche. My site still fails core web vitals because I would rather have a lovely looking website and adsense don't help with the heavy code, lost allot of traffic when that came out but not in best interest of my user to change my UI.

[Markedd]

@christianz Google's so called solution to that was to kill all small websites and partially collapse the medium ones, while pushing the large websites up. Did that solve the then-AI issue? No, it calmed it for a few days, but the black hatters came back with vengeance. You need to understand that there are niches which are simply missing now, no info at all, Google doesn't want to index those website because the LLM has classified the website as bad for whatever reason. The issue is that now, there are even more AI websites than before. It's basically, large authority websites that use AI (CNET is a very good example) and then you have the less authority websites that use AI. When you can't build a long-term business, you go for the short term which requires automation.

[ichthyous]

How much of the traffic loss is from India? My Indian traffic is down by half...I suspect it has something to do with this quality update. No great loss, I get nothing but form spam from India and they rampantly infringe on my images. I would block all Indian traffic like I do with Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria and China, but I don't think it's a great idea for such a large country with a rapidly growing economy (and a democracy). Has anyone here banned Indian visitors completely?

[makintocheplus]

French website, no recovery yet...

[EditorialGuy]

Why would anyone draw conclusions about a month-long update when it started only two days ago, and when its rollout has been marred by a publicly announced bug that has yet to be fixed?

[christianz]

@Markedd

I hear you and agree with everything. But what would happen now if Google completely removed HCU? Total AI death...

I am not saying HCU is capable of preventing AI death of the web, but at the time (past year or whenever it was introduced) it actually was net positive, granted - with lots of collateral damage.

Like you pointed out, HCU (and following updates) did not deal with authority abuse and, increasingly, some of the biggest sites are becoming major AI spammers.

[MayankParmar]

@EditorialGuy because movements are usually observed within days. look at retrododo, it's recovery. ranks again on the first page.

[delorean]

This is so unfair. It seems like the two sites RETRO*** and HOUSE***** are all getting the attention. Many HCU-hit sites are still on the grave, like mine. Wake up Google!

[Micha]

@delorean Are you surprised? Both sites have also been very vocal in criticizing Google, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Google is letting them rank better. Nevertheless, they deserve the recovery.

I can't complain either, traffic is down again after three extremely strong days, but it's still strong. If it stays that way, I'll definitely be happy. However, I'm worried about the store because sales have slumped since Wednesday, although the number of visitors has risen. It doesn't look like zombie traffic, but the reluctance is strange.

[MayankParmar]

@delorean do you know what's funny? if you look for that gaming site on Reddit, you'd realize the community dislikes it a lot.

[Shepherd]

Am I the only one that finds all of this incredible odd?

Incident affecting Ranking
There's an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that's affecting a large number of search results.

15 Aug 202422:48 PDT
There's an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that's affecting a large number of search results. We've identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout. Next update will be within 12 hours.

16 Aug 202409:29 PDT
We're still working on fixing the issue with ranking. Next update will be within 72 hours.

What is the issue?
How is it affecting ranking in google search?

Is this something that should be obvious because I don't see it. Maybe the search results are just so bad that an issue affecting a large number of search results does not stand out. All very weird.

[universenet]

We're still working on fixing the issue with ranking. Next update will be within 72 hours.

Shepherd
They waiting for monday working shift of engineer workers
AI can not fix that so they need wait for engineers back from weekend
But of course google will not say that
After google will give fireout to them when they finnish job
All that new managers in google do not know fix problem
They creating problems
And everyone was on vacation now
Problem will be fixed today afternoon, usa time

[morpheus83]

@Shepherd its similar to what had happened with the Sep HCU.
https://status.search.google.com/summary

[MayankParmar]

I've penned down my thoughts on X: https://x.com/mayank_jee/status/1825170048153199098

[NeapTide]

One issue with ranking in google search that I observed is on mobile. Only 5 or 6 or 7 or 10 results are being displayed for most queries. Rest all are hidden in large More Results button.