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]

[ichthyous]

I do NOT spam people/companies and hardly receive ANY complaint.

@Dooku With all due respect, cold emailing people who haven't asked for you to email them IS spam, and it's rather hard to believe that you never receive any complaint doing it. I know from experience that even people who have first contacted you will sometimes mark your emails as spam. If enough time has passed and they don't remember the interaction aymore for example...people have a short memory and limited patience for emails about things they don't really care about. If you really thought that this was a good method though you wouldn't have written this:

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

But perhaps I'm just misunderstanding why you think others might not agree with this absolutely non-spammy method you are talking about? Hey, if it works for you then by all means keep doing it...

[gatormark]

cold emailing people who haven't asked for you to email them IS spam

Very true!

[RedBar]

cold emailing people who haven't asked for you to email them IS spam

I wish someone would tell the French that, it is by far and away my spammiest source of junk meanwhile Egypt is by far my biggest source of very frequent trade offers / spam.

At this time of year when coming up to my industry's second largest global fair I do get a lot of cold emails with free invitations to the fair. Quite why I should I am not so sure since I have been an exhibitor there since the mid 1970s therefore I pass them on to peoplke who can / will use them.

I've been sending out email newsletters / offers since 1995 about once a month and very rarely get any unsubscribes but I do get a few bounces every months mostly from Hotmail and Gmail as people leave companies, change addresses and / or pass away. This never amounts to more than 20-30 out of some 20K I send.

In my experience commercial quality bulk widget stock disposals are always extremely popular.

[Dooku]

@Ichthyous,

absolutely non-spammy method you are talking about?

Without drawing a picture....:
Company A has a problem and are looking for a solution. Company A has posted this somewhere online. Yes, they are getting answers, but most are not that good any way. The trick is to find that information online, refer to it in your subject and email and provide a solution. Technically it's a cold email, however I provide an answer for their question/problem they ALREADY posted online through email and NOT via the same website/portal they posted. And if your solution is good and your email well crafted, they do NOT complain.

Some times when you are online a LONG time like most of us on this forum, we get stuck inside a bubble and start to think that "we know it all and we have seen it all"......it's human nature. We think "naahh, that won't work, it's just stupid"....etc..etc...
I had to leave that bubble and start looking outside my known circle and get creative. Find creative solutions for problems that are out there and you WILL succeed.

[sk7411]

Something happened yesterday. Down another 13% :)

[ichthyous]

Without drawing a picture....:
Company A has a problem and are looking for a solution. Company A has posted this somewhere online. Yes, they are getting answers, but most are not that good any way. The trick is to find that information online, refer to it in your subject and email and provide a solution. Technically it's a cold email, however I provide an answer for their question/problem they ALREADY posted online through email and NOT via the same website/portal they posted. And if your solution is good and your email well crafted, they do NOT complain.

@Dooku. That certainly seems like a lot of work to find companies complaining about a topic and then to track down an email that might or might now make it to a party responsible for making decisions.

Some times when you are online a LONG time like most of us on this forum, we get stuck inside a bubble and start to think that "we know it all and we have seen it all"......it's human nature. We think "naahh, that won't work, it's just stupid"....etc..etc...
I had to leave that bubble and start looking outside my known circle and get creative. Find creative solutions for problems that are out there and you WILL succeed.

I have learned not to waste time on certain types of marketing in my 20 years in business...at least email is almost free and if you can manage not to get blacklisted then fine. I have to be very exact with my email campaigns as Amazon is quite strict and it's more of a pain to have to comply with all their demands than its worth.

I am currently at my highest (web) traffic ever and at my highest income level ever from this business for exactly the reason you mentioned, diversifying the income streams and trying new approaches. And 2024 has not been a great year for sales at all...the contrary, one of the worst since the financial crisis. But revenue was coming in from other sources such as copyright infringement settlements and services instead.

As a note, I say web traffic because pre-2010 Google used to send a ridiculous amount of traffic from Google Images. That dropped 90% in one day and never returned. So technically I may have had more overall traffic pre-2010, but GI traffic rarely converted anyway.

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop today...

[daniel1213]

Same here.. HUGE drop today! :-(

[Micha]

I'm really sorry to write this because I wish it were the case for all of you. Google suddenly seems to have taken a liking to my news site. I already mentioned that I had a very good weekend, but it goes even further than that. Since then, I've had roughly the same high number of readers that Google sends me every day (357% more than during the week), mainly via Discover. Sistrix also shows me that the value of visibility continues to rise (quadrupling since Friday). I would like to understand where this is coming from all of a sudden, but since I haven't changed anything on the site, I don't see any reason.

[christianz]

Slight recovery past 2 days. Keyword counts per Ahrefs also reversed and appear to be going up again. Too early to tell if its a real trend.

[ichthyous]

@Micha...same for me, the period from after labor day until now has been extremely high traffic. But it is slowly tapering off. I am seeing loses in top 3 and top 10 terms again and also my USA traffic is reverting to the old lower level day by day. Customer inquiries are also slowing down again. Non-USA traffic is still sky high though

@renato. A drop seems like it might have started yesterday at around noon...my traffic dropped like a stone and stayed down rest of the day. Today USA traffic is -40% at 11am, which has broken the pattern of being up every day since Sept. 3rd or so.

[RedBar]

HUGE drop today...

Oh ... 75% of my Googleday gone and already at 167% v the month so far !

[rustybrick]

You are all seeing these big swings in today's data? Another huge swing, wow.

[Micha]

@ichthyous That is precisely what surprises me. I don't see any fluctuations in the ranking. Only the number of readers who come to me via Google fluctuates a little, but that's normal. Nevertheless, there are significantly more visitors than my site had before the HCU. Besides, I watch a lot of German websites and none of them show such strong growth.

At first, I thought it was a weekend effect, because it happens that things are going very well at the weekend and by Monday it's over, but it just keeps going. For some search terms, my site has now even overtaken the major German news sites. Of course, I don't want to complain, because it's good that it's not just downhill, but I just find it extremely strange and would like to be able to explain it.

[gatormark]

I too have a nice increase in traffic today, but that is not reflected in my revenue…yet.

[renatovieira]

@rustybrick - Yes, today's data. Yesterday was less notable. However, after 4pm, everything went back to normal. It seemed like a filter was turned on, then off...

[daniel1213]

Guys, I use cloudflare Free version. Do you think this aspect is a negative factor for Google? Some websites have fallen since the last update, others have not. If I make a new website, in 3 months it is over the old one, which is illogical. I don't use blackhat techniques, only backlinks between websites (in articles). Have a good day everyone

[RedBar]

My Wednesday 18th traffic spike continued to end at 237% v 1-17 September average, it was also my highest day since a huge spike on Thursday 8th August.

All sources and page flows appeared to have been completely normal. Today's traffic is back to this September's average.

[christianz]

It appears that for Google this brief flash of sanity (lasted about 3 days) is over starting today. They are boosting junk pages again. 2 trend reversals within 4 days.

[EditorialGuy]

I haven't noticed any extreme volatility lately, but overall, we're down horrendously from the same 30-day reporting periods in 2022 and 2023. The following Google pageview stats are for an editorially driven information site that dates back to October, 2001. (The site has a low ad density, features affiliate links on a minority of its pages, and uses only basic "best practices" SEO such as descriptive page titles/headlines and occasionally JSON structured markup.)

2022: Baseline
2023: Google pageviews down 38.58% from 2022
2024: Google pageviews down 82.43% from 2022, down 71.39% from 2023

Ironically, our Reddit numbers are way up (by more than 500%), probably because Google sends so many people to Reddit, where they apparently find links to our site and click them because Reddit's own answers are inadequate.

Am I frustrated? You bet. I've been writing about our topics on the Web (and also in a book) since 1996, and the site is the very definition of "helpful content." (It's geared to the needs of readers, with revenue taking second place to editorial content.)

[NeapTide]

@Christianz yead I am also seeing junky and spam driven pages now leading page no 1. Good job google. Instead of crediting old and well established sites they are just giving boost to pile of junk new websites.

[christianz]

I haven't noticed any extreme volatility lately, but overall, we're down horrendously from the same 30-day reporting periods in 2022 and 2023. The following Google pageview stats are for an editorially driven information site that dates back to October, 2001

If you still have content pieces up from 2001 and links from 2001 and unbroken and resolve (even with multiple redirects) to those same content pieces, Google should treat them as absolute salt of the Internet and give them permanent advantage in the ranking. But instead they will most likely promote random spam on Reddit, YouTube, Ticktock etc. Not to mention spam on F***es and all those other authority farmers.

I say "most likely" because Google doesn't always get it wrong. My site actually significantly benefited from HCU and demotion of countless worthless copycats/scrapers and other types of spam. However, August core was anti HCU and revived about 10-15% of those spammers so far.

[Whitey]

Traffic and clicks down 30%. Conversions around half. Impressions are spiking.

An eyeball check on a key location core search term shows only 3 non brands in top 50 results. Top 20, zero non brands.

[Treud]

Yes impressions are bouncing a lot. Google should test different layout.

But recently I feel it’s totally filled with Reddit and Quora forum answers, and sometimes different questions are leading to the same Reddit post.

[engine]

illed with Reddit

It's quite frustrating because it's not always the answer, and the clustered results mean a user has to click through several links and then all the clutter to get an answer.

[Martin Ice Web]

big drop over night around -70%. Either the last update has not finished yet or there has been another update started right away. Could be as well that this is as shift due to black weeks that started last week. Or this is the christmas shift that happens every year.

New Layout:
Since they lost the EU untitrust case in germany we have a 4 column display with other prize comparing websites at the top of every search. They interfering blocks of product search ads are gone.

[Micha]

Yep, I'm seeing a drop now too, but I can't say whether it's due to discover traffic or not. However, the ranking itself is stable, there have been no changes.

[renatovieira]

Another day of huge drop!

[universenet]

Everyday up and down in visits are just because random and total disordered Google search.
Why Google search is disordered?
Because Google want disordered search !
Disordered search killing all competitions..

[KaseyM]

Big drop this end this past week or two (again) - the floor is falling away...

[gatormark]

Traffic has been up the last few days and today it finally looks like the revenue is catching up to the traffic. It’s hard being optimistic in this up and down Adsense world, but I hope the trend continues.

[ichthyous]

Not seeing a big drop here yet, search traffic was high today...let's see what tonight/tomorrow brings. I have seen customer inquiries completely halt this week...almost nothing new all week.

[Micha]

Another day, same old story. A bunch of visitors after a big drop yesterday. Does anyone actually understand what Google is doing anymore? I'm starting to get the feeling that even at Google, no one understands the search engine.

[Chris travel 30]

We do see less visitors in the last 10 Days in row than ever before on our travelblog. Traffic is down by 40 % compared to before the update startet. I am starting to believe, the one who programmed and started the last update, did forget to implement a "Stop-Button" so what we see now is a released algorithm that does what it wants *sarcasm off*. Anyways: But how Micha said, this is the big question which was also mentioned on SE Roundtable: Does google know what is going on? I think YES. Because there is allways a plan behind every action. Even when I personally can't believe that is actually what they wanted to create. They did it seems like they want to stick to it to see what will happen. No matter what the outcome will be.

[l1fejosh]

HUGE drop here. Could be related to our business page being suspended for switching our address - but it's actually frightening.

[EditorialGuy]

Our week-over-week Google traffic has been up and down more than usual in the last week or so, with a couple of extremes in the plus and minus 20 percent range. Swings on most days have been less dramatic, though. And the fact that our sample size is a lot smaller than it used to be (thanks to Google's updates over the past year) probably makes the daily variations look more dramatic.

[Chris travel 30]

Just wanted to drop my latest thoughts on the August Core Update: I noticed that many articles that have been optimized for a specific longtail keyword sufferd the most. For example an article that is specificly written for a 3 weeks USA roundtrip along the westcoast: Every keyword constellation that has "3 weeks" in it dropped 5-10 positions in the last 28 days compared to the 28 days before. (Like 3 weeks westcoast USA trip, USA westcoast roundtrip 3 weeks, Kalifornia 3 weeks roundtrip and so on.)

My guess is, that the google SPAM AI (SpamBrain) detected the use of the longtail keyword constellation with " ... 3 weeks ... " and thinks it has been used too many times, so it MUST be spam. Even when it was used just about 20 times in an over 3000 words aricle.

Any thoughts on that?

[christianz]

Also saw drop and weakness in traffic yesterday. It really started to turn for the worse on Friday. There was one week when destructive August update trends reversed (last week) but now Google has decided they need still more spam and continue with the program.

My guess is, that the google SPAM AI (SpamBrain) detected the use of the longtail keyword constellation with " ... 3 weeks ... " and thinks it has been used too many times, so it MUST be spam. Even when it was used just about 20 times in an over 3000 words aricle.

My theory is that longtail is suffering most because August core (which still is rolling out effectively) just generally weakened spam filtering. And most of the spam (especially generative) is built for specific long term SEO terms, because they can generate "articles" for all kinds of exotic keyword combinations under the sun.

[cooler29]

I am seeing in few very competitive niches (USA and CA) cloaked pages in top 3-4 results. Before last (aug core update) they were a bit lower ranked than Redit and Quora pages, now cloacked pages are up and Quora and Reddit results goes next, strange...

Anybody else has a similar situation?

[christianz]

I am seeing in few very competitive niches (USA and CA) cloaked pages in top 3-4 results. Before last (aug core update) they were a bit lower ranked

August core is designed to lower the ranking IQ and weaken spam filtering to pander to a bunch of whiney "niche site" spammers. Naturally, you will see all kinds of toxic waste regaining top positions. This is completely normal and expected.

[cooler29]

@christianz , I understand what You are talking about thanks for comment :)

Just this part I don't understand what exactly You mean on: "This is completely normal and expected.", so what is normal and why it is expected?

[cooler29]

@christianz in other words should we "dagrade" quality sites to become "niche site spammers" as You said, or You think that Google will find a way to deal with that so we should continue to create quality content?

[christianz]

@cooler29

As you can probably tell I am just frustrated and venting (as usual) :D

I will always continue to build a site that serves its purpose and not make it spammy SEO site. But I don't blame anyone for creating spammy side projects if that's the only thing that can attract any traffic and revenue.

Of course I hope Google will revert the August update. Briefly it looked like they did (last week) but that has stopped.

[cooler29]

Thanks christianz for sharing Your opinions and views...

[Micha]

Does anyone actually understand what Google is doing? Visitor numbers today: I've just broken the visitor record that my website set last week, and it's only noon.
I don't see any logic in it and the ups and downs are getting worse and worse.

[renatovieira]

Same here. But I won't complain. Conversion is very high. Adsense is high too. I hope it stays that way...

[ichthyous]

I am actually seeing USA traffic trending slightly downward even though I'm picking up top ranking terms again. USA traffic was high for about two weeks after labor day, but slowly started settling to lower numbers. UK, EU and the rest of the world (ex Canada) is still much higher. I am getting as many sales inquiries from abroad than from the US at this point, and the slide in the USD is making it easier. Honestly, I hope the USD keeps dropping like a stone as it's the only way the Brits, Canadians, Aussies and EU customers will buy anything...

[Chris travel 30]

Same here. Visitors are high today BUT: Sales dropped to lowest since weeks. So far its only today but its odd. It does not make sense, besides that maybe google is sending other kind visitors, not related to what they have been searching for, so they dont buy, they just visit.

[morpheus83]

Seems the update is running all over again. Our traffic levels have plummeted to the same levels as the start of the Aug update. I hope something good comes out of it.

[Martin Ice Web]

I hope something good comes out of it.

For whom? google or us?

New low today. Yesterday was indeed very good.
And again google shows ecomm site that i would never ever buy from. And these shops do have excatly this one item and no user related items which you can choose from ( like lenght, color )
In most cases this is just a replacement item for the "main" item these shops sell. If you look for technical information - nothing. Datasheet - nothing.

current google useability: 0%