September 2024 Google Search Observations

[RubicCubed]

Here it is September 1st and Google's degradation of search continues. For an info search I see one large Youtube video at the top directly followed by a People Also Ask box. Scroll down, and there is the first organic result followed by a video box then two organic results with Reddit being one of them. What follows this is a forums and discussion box. The forums and discussion box has Reddit at the top with a one year old thread, then a different forum with a four year old thread and finally a different forum with an eighteen year old thread. There is absolutely nothing useful for this search for the average user. With results like this, I'm not surprised to see other search engines sending us more traffic and they slowly are.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:10 am (utc) on Sep 2, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[universenet]

All AI content is spam and should be deranked by search engines and banned by advertising networks, without any exception. I don't even like the idea of using AI image generators for illustrations.

Quora is AI generated
Answer is never in first chapter because reason that people click on link
But Quora is one of the best website for google (together with reddit)
Everyone in google know that Quora is AI generated so what?
Nobody cares
If nobody cares, what does it matter?
All they care about is money and all the other stupid stories.,
about Artificial intelligence-yes or no,
about Spam Yes or no
about SEO yes or no
All that going in water in one second.

[christianz]

Quora is AI generated
Answer is never in first chapter because reason that people click on link
But Quora is one of the best website for google (together with reddit)

AI portion of Quora is spam and should never be ranked. It is like ranking pages with all possible arithmetic operations, instead of ranking calculator app. It is also low quality generic content full of errors and it is also illegal, because LLMs are trained on our content without our permission and used for commercial purposes.

[Shepherd]

...like ranking pages with all possible arithmetic operations, instead of ranking calculator app.

That's beautiful.

[renatovieira]

Lots of volatility today in the SERPs. On my side, positively. Has anyone else noticed?

[EditorialGuy]

I'm not seeing any more volatility than usual today, but we've had a solid increase in Google traffic over the past week or so, at a time of year when traffic is usually declining after our summer peak.

And while this is good news, the increase is nothing in comparison to the losses in Google traffic that we've seen since 2022.

[christianz]

No, it's constant negative trend since mid August and this week has been worst.

[Micha]

The weekend was indeed very weak, but today my news page is seeing a significant increase again.

The problem child remains the shop, which unfortunately continues to be dead and we now fear that we will not survive the month if it stays that way. There are more than enough visitors, but they are not buying anything.

[Mark_A]

@Micha "There are more than enough visitors, but they are not buying anything."

Is there any way you can find out if they are real humans or just robots?

Perhaps invite them to answer a few questions and be put into a draw to win a prize?

[Martin Ice Web]

There are more than enough visitors, but they are not buying anything.

confirmed

Is there any way you can find out if they are real humans or just robots?

this users a humans.

Just with the end of the update sales went close to zero, traffic is up by 50%.
As we have insight in different shops, we can confirm that this is in all verticals at the same time. If queries are totaly mismatched or transactional queries are filtered 100% has to be investigated.

[morpheus83]

We saw a nice uptick on the 4th of September (was very happy as traffic was back to pre update levels), that lasted a day and traffic is back to the update lows. Seeing a lot of volatility though.

[Micha]

@Mark_A These are people, and since I also have access to the data from several stores, I can confirm what Martin writes. The sales of all stores have declined sharply at the end of the update, while the number of visitors has increased sharply. It is also noticeable that the stores that use Google Ads pay significantly more money, but as a result do not attract any customers.

[gatormark]

AI results at the top of search engine pages have greatly impacted our traffic from search results. Additionally, Google’s “contract” with Quora and Reddit have impacted sites as well since Google now features their pages in search results on page one.

[RedBar]

Very disappointing traffic levels for my global site continues even though my SERPs look ok meanwhile our UK-focussed hotel venue is chugging along very nicely at the moment.

[ichthyous]

I am still seeing strong traffic, search traffic is up 47% today over the previous three Mondays, with international traffic being much higher than USA in general. My traffic always shoots upward this time of year when students are back in school. But search traffic is still 15% higher over the last week than for the same period in 2023. I am also seeing a more regular flow of customer inquiries than earlier this year, although it's still not exactly strong and it's a higher proportion of inquiries from outside the USA. USA sales are still lower compared to last year, and much lower than 2021 or 2019. 2020 and 2022 were both awful.

[NickMNS]

I'm also seeing a big increase in traffic over the past few days. I appear to be up 3x today, as compared to same day last week, 1.5x yesterday, this is according to my Adsense dashboard. But, I'm caught with my pants down as I haven't setup GA4 correctly for my main site, and the UA to GA4 auto-conversion never worked properly. According the GSC, there was no change in clicks from search. So not sure where the traffic is coming from. But it does appear to be US traffic. I'm guessing it must be coming from social, because RPM is way down.

[NickMNS]

Nope! It looks like there is a problem with Adsense reporting, Page views are up, but impression are stable.

[Micha]

Good news from the EU, source in German, so I'll translate it:

Google and its parent company Alphabet also collected a judgment that can no longer be appealed. The judges at the ECJ confirmed a fine of 2.4 billion euros that had already been imposed by the EU Commission in 2017. The subject of the protracted legal dispute was the Google Shopping service. According to the last-instance ruling, the company had given its price comparison service an unlawful advantage over competitors and thus abused its dominant market position.

[de.nachrichten.yahoo.com ]

No matter where you look, something finally seems to be happening. Even if this will not change the current situation, it will not be good for the share price in the long term that the company is allowed to pay more and more fines.

de.nachrichten.yahoo.com Streit mit EU: Apple und Google erleiden milliardenschwere Niederlagen vor Gericht Steuerdeals und unrechtmäßige Wettbewerbsvorteile kommen den Tech-Giganten Google und Apple nun teuer zu stehen. Der Europäische Gerichtshof sprach nach jahrelangem Rechtsstreit milliardenschwere Urteile. Eine Berufung ist nicht mehr möglich.

[RedBar]

Monday saw one of my lowest-ever workday PVs at 66.66% of my 2024 average so far and -18% v the first 9 days of September 2023.

This does not bode well since historically traffic for me usually picks-up well in the first three weeks prior to my industry's second largest global trade exhibition in Italy.

[gatormark]

Yesterday I had a 21% increased in revenue over the previous Monday. However, my page views were down by about 2000 views, Clicks were up by about 50. This is a very strange rollercoaster ride that has little consistency. However, I have noticed that the quality of ads on my main site are much better so that is probably the reason for the 21% jump. Additionally, school is in full swing so I expected to see a decent increase in traffic, which I have not. Very strange across-the-board.

[mosxu]

Number of people researching the web to buy a physical product is reducing day by day! Buyers use Amazon or temu app without clicking on searching engine ads!

I bet AI run out of ideas how to fix the above!

[delorean]

I'm always getting "Temporary processing error" in search console. Has anyone experienced this lately?

[christianz]

Number of people researching the web to buy a physical product is reducing day by day! Buyers use Amazon or temu app without....

Because 99.999% of the web is junk.

Affiliate pages that recommend you buy not the best product but whatever product they can earn commission on. And 99% of those have never bought or touched any of those products.

[oldog]

“Number of people researching the web to buy a physical product is reducing day by day! Buyers use Amazon or temu app without clicking on searching engine ads! ”
For many years now I go straight to Amazon to buy products, straight to booking .com to book a hotel and to official airline websites to book a flight…..and I bet millions of others. In a nutshell affiliate websites doesn’t have a future as more people go straight to the source instead of using affiliate sites…..

[Martin Ice Web]

What is googles new mission? To become the SE with the ever worst UI? Paired with the worst ever seen results?
All the silly stuff they put between the results are killing the reading flow. There seems no structure anymore.

[Micha]

What is googles new mission?

Making money, they have no other goal.
By the way, Google is making a lot of noise. Even the last remnants of useful results have now disappeared.
In addition, the number of links to websites that don't work at all or where the browser immediately spits out a security warning is increasing.

[ichthyous]

FYI Cloudflare now has an automatic "Block AI Bots" option to prevent AI bots from scraping your content:

[ibb.co ]

I am hesitant about using this as I think that it may be to better advantage to seed AI with so much content that I create myself that it spins the story in my direction. I have a brand and the brand is based on the person, so better to play ball and feed AI the content myself. I am also seeing more traffic from AI search, Copilot, GhatGPT, Perplexity, etc by the day. It's not huge but it's definitely growing.

What say all of you about blocking AI bots completely vs. feeding AI bots what you want them to eat?

ibb.co Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-9-13-28-AM hosted at ImgBB Image Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-9-13-28-AM hosted in ImgBB

[ichthyous]

Suddenly a huge carousel of tweets from X are in the #2 spot in many, many searches...ridiculous. Musk make a deal with Google to pay them off maybe?

[RedBar]

the browser immediately spits out a security warning is increasing.

I've been experiencing this more especially with non-https sites in Firefox.

[hero]

Amazing information. I really enjoyed reading this thread and discussion by the people. As someone who is involved in this discussion for many years, I would like to refer some information later . It's not only focused on discussing the topic inside out but also helpful for others. Hope everybody enjoys reading the blog.

[Rlilly]

Our Website is Organically number one in Google for several high valued keywords in our industry. I should be shopping for a Rolex. But by the time Google populates the SERPs with other stuff including Ads, this Organic listing is found at a staggering no 44. Meaning there are 44 listings above my no 1 organic listing. Business is dead.
SEO IS DEAD..

[Dooku]

@Ichtyous, I block all that AI sh|t. They are NOT your friend, please stop being gullible. You have your own brand, so why feed those trolls valuable info which they can and WILL use against you in the future.

NONE of that AI traffic ever results in a conversion. People who use Chatgpt or any other AI tool are NOT looking to buy anything online.

If you sell your own product or a service, then start advertising through other channels....and I do not mean paid advertisements :-)
There are many other ways that are much more targeted to get your product in front of possible customers.....forget google.

[ichthyous]

I don't understand what is happening since after Labor Day in the US (Sept 2nd). All hell has broken loose. I had my highest visitor count yesterday ever, by far...search traffic is up 33% over the last 7 days and direct traffic is up 10%.

More visits from AI searches for sure but its still overall a small number. I am getting a steady flow of new inquiries daily again, just like the old days. The major difference being that a much higher % of the customers are from outside of the US...mostly UK, UAE, Israel, Brazil, Mexico.

The number of top 3/10 ranking searches zoomed up for two months, lost much of it over the course of a week, and now is climbing daily again. Some major shift has happened where customers are actually finding me again. Let's hope it lasts because 2024 has been very slow since the beginning of the year.

[christianz]

Nothing interesting to report. Decline continues. About 5% of traffic disappears each week since mid August.

[Micha]

While we're on the subject of AI. By the way, Google currently recommends using Gemini for SEO, content etc. on Twitter. It really doesn't get any more ridiculous than that.

And as for the numbers, my news site is stable. Traffic is fluctuating slightly, but on average it's 30% better than in August and there's still a lot more coming in via Discover.

The store continues to suffer. Unfortunately, it's still the same: lots of visitors, but zero sales from the traffic Google is sending. In the meantime, I've spoken to a few other store owners in the industry and they report the same thing, suppliers also report that the number of orders is dropping and more and more customers are dropping off altogether. I am really at a loss, absolutely no measure to boost sales is working and Adwords is just burning money.

[gatormark]

Try to build community, not just provide information. Anyone website can provide good information. But community will give you a measure of stability. Measure…

[CommandDork]

I realized the end was near when Googs first started pushing its AI nonsense for content creation. It defeats the whole purpose of the Internet.

[renatovieira]

Big drop today! Here we goooo....

[EditorialGuy]

Try to build community, not just provide information. Anyone website can provide good information. But community will give you a measure of stability.

Not all topics or publishing goals lend themselves to community. Take a topic like travel. Let's say that you have a site or a section on Widgetberg, and your revenue comes primarily from display advertising and affiliate links. Your best readers aren't armchair travelers or personal followers, they're people who are actively planning a trip to Widgetberg. Those are the readers who convert for advertisers and affiliate partners, because they're looking for information on where to stay, what to do, and how to spend their money. And whether we like it or not, most of those "gold standard" travelers arrive via search.

[ichthyous]

Try to build community, not just provide information. Anyone website can provide good information. But community will give you a measure of stability.

I would second what others have said about building a community...not easy for many genres of sites. Instead, more attainable is reach for brand authority. Don't cheapen your brand and try to provide unique, insightful information that makes you look like the expert. My DA just jumped up to 45 after years lingering between 36-40. I think it's due to all the articles I am publishing revealing my expertise gained over a long career in my field. No metrics yet about the links those articles are garnering, but I am keeping an eye on that closely....

Another thing...don't jump at every here-today-gone-tomorrow trend. We have all seen how transitory traffic and success with Google is, and social media is even worse...I have known people in my field that placed literally ALL their eggs in one basket and got a huge following on one social media platform only to be wiped out. Now nobody even remembers who they are, they just vanished. At least nobody can delete our websites and it looks like Google is becoming more vulnerable by the day to competition.

Just because Reddit is on top now doesn't mean it will stay there. Just because AI looks like it will eat and dominate the world doesn't mean that it will, the jury is still out and a surprising number of people still like old fashioned things like reading articles online and even email campaigns. It takes a slow and steady pace and years of work across multiple platforms to build a stable brand.

[Micha]

Okay, I have no idea what's going on, but my news page had the busiest weekend ever. On Friday alone, we had over 350% more visitors than on Friday of the previous week (more visitors than ever), and Saturday and today also look pretty good. It seems like Google has released the handbrake at the moment. Sixtrix shows me that the site has doubled its visibility index. It would be nice if it stayed that way, but I'd rather not be too optimistic.

In the shop, the number of sales has increased. There are still only a few per order, but there are significantly more orders than in the last few days..

[tom_010101]

A thought I've been having over the past few days: How does Google actually view automatic translation using plugins like GTranslate? The plugin generates a new URL for each blog post with the respective suffix (.pl / .it / .pn) and translates the content automatically. Of course, the automatic translation is nowhere near as good as a manual one and reflects the typical Google Translator style. Do you consider this approach as potentially negative in terms of SEO? Assuming the hreflang settings are correct.

[RedBar]

After the first 15 days of September I see the following 2023 to 2024:

Global specialised .com widget site -12.2%
UK local .co.uk hotel venue site +12.0%

Insofar as the biggest regional downturn for my global site is concerned the "West" is notably in decline.

[Rlilly]

<Try to build community>
How does an ecommerce site selling a commodity product available from many sources build a Community? Any ideas?
Thank you

[RedBar]

Any ideas?

2020s I haven't a clue!

From about 1995 until 2010'ish we had a successful forum board however Google AdSense revenue dropped rapidly about 2010 plus the industry actually stopped participating with Q&As and by 2012 no one seemed to be very interested. Was it the first 15+ years of the Internet "revolution" and by 2010 most trades were then comfortable with their usage?

2012-2014 I constructed my html5 responsive site and having seen the many common questions asked by forum users over the years I incorporated into all those widget pages the most asked-for information.

Our hotel site has a Facebook page which the manager runs. It was very popular pre-scamdemic however post-s it has been completely diifferent with very little interaction since the hotel site now incorporates 99% of FAQs.

I've also seen a huge reduction, post-s again, in a couple of blues communities I participate in BUT my biggest increase in usage has easily been podcasts both live and recorded. These must surely have affected many community boards etc?

As I said I have no idea and would welcome someone posting who may have an insight as to whether communities can / do exist outside of very locally focussed ones?

[christianz]

Scraping by various AI companies is intensifying. I am estimating to be getting about 100k HTTP requests by them per day every day. It has steadily crept up over the past ~3 months.

Am I getting any benefit from this? Of course not. I am not Reddit or any of those mega corps. My small site can be freely abused.

[Dooku]

Any ideas?

Forget about building a community with e-commerce with items that are readily available everywhere. It's simply not possible. People will go with what they know and/or is the cheapest store.
Even if you sell widgets and provide services that are quite specific and require specialist knowledge (so it can not be copied easily by websites in Asia), it still is a bad roi. Because trying to build a community takes too much time and effort, I have seen this with website owners who have tried this.

Instead look for ways how you can get your product or service in front of people or companies for which it will solve their problem or is a good solution. I use (cold)email, don't care what others think about this method. If you know what your doing, the conversion is WAAAYYY better than google traffic. And if you provide top notch customer service and over deliver, you will gain customers that will keep coming back......much better than a "community".

[Martin Ice Web]

WOW, skyrocking sales - on amazon - while google traffic is pure zombie traffic

[ichthyous]

I wish I could find a way to sell on Amazon, but they just don't handle the kinds of high priced items I sell...it's left to a host of platforms which don't do the job well. In fact one of them is going out of business and is trying to sell itself before it files for bankruptcy...it's the #8 ranked platform in the world by traffic for this genre.

I have seen much higher traffic since Labor Day here in the US. Mostly non-USA traffic, but USA is also up about 20%. Many more inquiries, and better quality inquiries...but they aren't buying a thing. People are clearly hesitant to spend right now. Are they stung by high costs? Two wars with no end? US presidential election? Slowing economies? All of the above maybe.

Today my two top performing articles have dropped off the face of the earth and are -88% traffic this morning. They are the only pages on my site where this has occurred. Keep an eye out for your informational articles...something is happening with the algo.

[ichthyous]

I use (cold)email, don't care what others think about this method.

Wrong...it doesn't work and it just pisses people off to be spammed to death. If you are using lists of scraped emails the conversion rate is close to zero. I report every single spam I get to SpamCop so that they are added to blacklists. The email delivery rate for spammers will always drop to zero and you will keep needing to change servers/IP addresses.

Amazon SMS is by far the cheapest way to send emails and Amazon won't permit a high bounce rate nor a high number of emails marked as spam, they will just block your account. I had my account blocked and I am sending to customers who have contacted me in the past and clients, not unknown people.

Nobody likes to be spammed, and it just makes a business look cheap, shady, and desperate frankly.

[Dooku]

@Ichthyous, with all due respect, but maybe you are still stuck in some old methods?
I do not scrape email addresses, nor do I purchase email lists or any sort of those things.
And yes email does work, and it works very well. I am not going to provide a ready to use recipe here.
But you have to know HOW and WHEN to email.....the internet is a free source of information, and if you know how to use it, then it will provide good results. I do NOT spam people/companies and hardly receive ANY complaint.
It's a manual job and I have it done by a VA and obviously I do not send out a million emails each week.