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]

[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.

[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.)