October 2024 Google Search Observations

[Micha]

Could Google finally make up its mind? The back and forth is really getting on my nerves. One day it's really good, the next day it drops, etc. Many keywords jump back and forth in the ranking. A little consistency would be really good for the nerves.

[edited by: not2easy at 1:34 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

Google is also starting to worsen the results for news. If you visit topic pages in Germany, they are hopelessly outdated. Even Discoveer only displays articles that are at least 4 days old and, in addition, total nonsense (or the usual leading media). This no longer has much to do with “news”.

[RedBar]

Sorry to sound so pessimistic but this is the reality of the situation.

Absolutely and it has been going this way for more than a decade.

Strangely enough in the UK, even though it is not funded by advertising, we have seen an enormous move away from the BBC and mainstream TV programmes / channels and since the 2020 scamdemic this has accelerated.

Many of us have become much more aware / circumspect of what we are being offered and especially so what is being promoted by many governments as to one's own or country's future prosperity.

The exaggerations and, in many cases lies, propagated by these institutions are being treated with the suspicion they rightly deserve.

Much of this disinformation is promoted by G/B/Y/D.

[Micha]

Well, you can't really accuse our public broadcasters (i.e. Germany) of disinformation, maybe sometimes of bias. But the website of the largest news program of the public broadcasting service is ubiquitous and ranks at the top for practically everything. This is extremely annoying because this supremacy is promoted by Google and paid for by us. Information is important, but this dominance is an insurmountable obstacle for us small news publishers.

[christianz]

Very weak traffic.

[ichthyous]

since the 2020 scamdemic this has accelerated

Was it really a "scamdemic", or are you just perhaps a bit misinformed and swallowed too much propaganda? Over 1 million people actually died just in this country alone (USA). I personally know two that died from COVID...as in dead and never coming back. Both of the ones that died were COVID/vax deniers who refused to get vaccinated so they kinda got what they deserved. But they were fed a lot of misinformation in order to get to that point, and they didn't have the intellectual capacity to see that for what it was...propaganda. I personally was in hospital for 8 days after my first go with covid in 2021 before the vax became available. That was after another 8 days at home burning up with relentless 104 degree fevers. I had to come home with an oxygen machine and it very damn well killed me. So please stop going on about the COVID scam...it wasn't a scam, it was a real pandemic and anyone who says otherwise has been brainwashed. Yes, some things could have been done differently, but the world had not seen a pandemic in 100 years so it was a learning process. Continuing to claim (falsely) that it was just a scam is disrespectful to others that did lose loved ones and were impacted more severely than you. Count yourself lucky you didn't end up dead from it.

[breeks]

I had COVID and recovered, and I was back running 5 miles four times a week within a month. I never took the vac, then or now. So, every experience is different. Unlike Google search, where we are all in the same boat. "Sinking"

[engine]

Mods note
Please, let's not get into specifics and beliefs around topics such as Covid.

Let's discuss what you've done for your site optimisation.

[Micha]

Google seems to have corrected something again. Everything has returned to the way it was before the August update, and since Friday, the traffic from messages on my site has completely disappeared. Instead, spam and other nonsense now dominate the results again, and the Discover feed has been transformed into a product recommendation page for Amazon.

[christianz]

Everything has returned to the way it was before the August update

I wish. Traffic and rankings were a lot better before August update.

[saladtosser]

According to twitter DS has quit as the liaison after the sale of SEL, any thoughts on that and how the future looks? I suspect DS knows organics are on the way out so getting out while he can, thoughts?

[RedBar]

This time I've lasted 11 years and 1 week plus finishing on a nice round number.

Enjoy your future endeavours.

[Dooku]

Things are moving at google......in the right direction for us.....not for them :-)
[wheresyoured.at...]

Next year is going to be eventful.

[superclown2]

Google has eliminated the need to search! Type in just about any term connected with my vertical and the organic SERPs of the first page, at least, will be dominated by the same half dozen web sites, all of which, coincidentally, are heavy spenders on ads. Looking for anything specific? Why bother, these same half dozen sites will mention it somewhere, hopefully, and if not you can probably get by without it anyway.

[mosxu]

Outright harassment by zombies for days! No shame!

[Markedd]

@superclown2 It has been almost a month since I haven't been able to use a search engine, not only Google. All I get is somewhat related to what I search. If I search forest, I get Forest Gump. If I search for what is Austria known for in terms of products, I get products that I should buy in Vienna, including Vienna itself (not a joke.). Scrolling through forums for hours, using the search on social media and unfortunately the LLM chat boxes seems to be the only way to get somewhere nowadays. And it's by design, that's the frustrating part.

[superclown2]

It has been almost a month since I haven't been able to use a search engine, not only Google

20 years ago I could find exactly what I wanted, especially from a new upstart called Google. Now I can't. I don't trust so-called 'artificial intelligence' (a crazily expensive way of finding unreliable and possibly dangerous answers) but like millions of others I want a variety of answers to my queries from specialist websites. There is a collective madness in the air.

[Martin Ice Web]

@superclown,

as sad as it is, if you need to find a special item you have to search on amazon for it. Not google or bing. SEs are not the main place to search for special items anymore as their goal is to make as much money as they can while amazons primary goal is to satisfy the customer.

Since 3 days google is in full zombie mode again. Traffic is up but it doesn´t pay out.

[Micha]

By the way: is Google planning to rename ‘News’ to ‘old’, or why isn't anything being updated there anymore?

[gatormark]

Weird. My traffic is fantastic; the best that it’s been since February. However, it’s not being reflected in my revenue. I am assuming that they are simply not showing ads on certain pages. It’s disappointing, because I should be making about 25% more than I am.

[christianz]

Really low traffic today, according to GA.

@gatormark, your revenue is not good relative to traffic most likely because Google allocates lower quality traffic to you (and keep the best to themselves), plus there are huuuge amounts of bot traffic, some of it may get though the filters of whatever reporting analytics you are using.

[renatovieira]

Update today? Huge drop over here!

[Micha]

Does anyone understand the current chaos? Despite a good ranking, my traffic has dropped drastically since Friday and every day it gets less. The same applies to a number of other website owners I've spoken to in the last few days. Especially considering that Google traffic has increased dramatically since August. In the shop the same: until Friday, sales were good, now it's just zombie traffic again.

[saladtosser]

Huge swings today again, yesterday it looked like they did a roll back to around March.... now the past few hours it looks like a roll back of a rollback. I think this is the new norm and another money grab by G to have organics in a constant state of flux to prevent any company/site having any sort of stability if not using ads?!

[superclown2]

I'm noticing that responses to the clicks we get are varying widely too. One day it is excellent quality traffic, the next it is abysmal.

[renatovieira]

Drop today confirmed since yesterday.

[Fluff_Nutz]

I no longer see these drops as Google, literally, no longer gives me traffic. Seriously back in 2022 our glorious search engine, now turned, ad agency, gave me 3,000+ views per day. Alone. Now I get a lovely, massive, cannot believe how much traffic. It's so great.. okay I'll stop. Literally a zer0.

At least I have other sources, that is thankfully, working at present. Seeing a nice continuous growth spurt for the past few months now. Makes for a lovely change. In fact only a few days ago one of these sources gave me a lovely rare 120% traffic increase. Granted it only lasted an hour but it felt great. So great I took a screenshot and framed it onto my bedroom wall.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic did grow over the last days. But sales are a rollercoaster. One day ok, next day nothing.
In particular google did vanish all brands traffic and traffic to our main sellers.
We are manufacturer for some items, these dropped too.
In the current state of germans low economic situation it is hard to say where the drop comes from.

[gatormark]

Traffic has been good the last few days, but it is not reflecting in the revenue. Very strange, because a couple weeks ago, the traffic was starting to skyrocket, and it did show in the revenue. Also, my ad clicks are very high, but of course that doesn’t matter anymore since Google moved to the CPM model. You can’t win.

[daniel1213]

traffic in waves today. It's very strange. The traffic flows that reach the website are manipulated by Google. I had a page with wishes for the beginning of the school year, totally irrelevant for this period (school started in my country almost 2 months ago). Last night at 10 o'clock it was the most searched page, we had a flow of several tens of visitors. Totally aberrant.

[gatormark]

What I don’t understand is how having AI answers at the top of search results can be a good business model when you are dependent on the revenue from ads on websites. I have noticed that the AI answers are not always active, but when they are, that just takes away from website traffic; which should hurt Google‘s bottom line since they are somewhat dependent on Adsense revenue. It’s a very confusing business model to me. They should just get rid of AI and get rid of the Quora and Reddit contract…that would make a lot of publishers happy.

[EditorialGuy]

Here's a very discouraging article by Tyler Bishop of Ezoic. Key quote:

"AI chatbots, Big Tech, and AI platforms crawling and scraping content across the web for embedding in their increasingly homogeneous models have brought an unthinkable scenario right to publishers' doorsteps. Content may be going from the currency in which publishers trade into a near-valueless commodity in many circumstances..."

[ezoic.com...]

[jchiff]

And so it goes

[gizmodo.com...]

[gatormark]

@EditorialGuy

I can definitely see that being the case, especially if you are only a content provider. A business model of being only a content provider website is clearly a dead-end business model unless you are producing videos.

[EditorialGuy]

A business model of being only a content provider website is clearly a dead-end business model unless you are producing videos.

I'm not sure that videos are an exception (especially with Google, via YouTube, controlling so much of that market), but in any case, I can't help wondering how Google expects to train its AI if the pool of useful human-created training materials (a.k.a. content) gets smaller and smaller. And, of course, Google's ad business depends heavily on generating revenues from third-party sites.

[gatormark]

@EditorialGuy

The advantage of videos is that you typically have a real life narrator with a personality that people may gravitate towards. For instance, I follow a Chinese travel channel because I like her content AND her personality. Now, AI can create videos, but they can’t create real life people with personality in those videos, yet.

[superclown2]

Redditors Are Trying to Poison Google's AI to Keep Tourists Out of the Good Restaurants

Easy. Remember the googlebombing of the past? Poisoning AI could be just as effective. To be realistic though a thoroughly corrupted AI system couldn't be worse than Google's plain vanilla, 'ignore keywords' results that are currently served up in the guise of genuine, unbiased search results.

[Dooku]

To be realistic though a thoroughly corrupted AI system couldn't be worse than Google's plain vanilla, 'ignore keywords' results that are currently served up in the guise of genuine, unbiased search results.

But that is just the front-end. It is actually much worse in practice due to the large increase in power consumption of these useless AI companies and the results of the stupid locusts running around trying to make use of that and in the process wasting valuable resources like food!
In some cities people are now openly hostile towards tourists, resulting in actual violence.
If this spirals out of control then poisoning the google search results is the least they need to worry about.

[shadowlight]

What I don’t understand is how having AI answers at the top of search results can be a good business model when you are dependent on the revenue from ads on websites. I have noticed that the AI answers are not always active, but when they are, that just takes away from website traffic; which should hurt Google‘s bottom line since they are somewhat dependent on Adsense revenue. It’s a very confusing business model to me. They should just get rid of AI and get rid of the Quora and Reddit contract…that would make a lot of publishers happy.

These ai answers are relatively new, its probably only a matter of time before they start putting ads into these too.

[EditorialGuy]

These ai answers are relatively new, its probably only a matter of time before they start putting ads into these too.

Yes, but Google doesn't run display ads, or what used to be called "banner ads," on its SERPs. That could change, of course, but it remains to be seen if ads that are designed to create awareness or branding (as opposed to direct-response ads) are effective when used in search results. I'm guessing not, since Google has had many years to test the concept.

[saladtosser]

My "informational" site seems to be holding steady rank and traffic wise but seeing competitors drop from page one to 3 then back again to original position a few hours later, its like total flux and nothing I have ever seen, constant movement for months now, hour by hour.... What are they doing?

Also seeing more "Google spam" like "people also searched for", "people had for breakfast", "people aren't clicking our ads enough this quarter" spam increase HUGE and placed in either first or second position.

When I search for something does it make sense for the first result to be a refinement search? No, it makes sense for it to be the last result of the page but what do I know I just go by common sense lol!

[NeapTide]

Why my category pages with little to no data getting indexed and appearing on first page while pages with content are no where to be found? This new update has totally messed up SERPs. Anyone else observing this behavior?

[superclown2]

It is possible to fight back against Google's abuse:

[bbc.co.uk ]

[not2easy]

Just an FYI - that article has its own discussion here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Micha]

I'm starting to wonder why I even bother running a website anymore. Yesterday there was an important event in my field, I spent the evening researching it and publishing a few very detailed articles about it. The “leading media” only published a dpa report and the result: my traffic has completely collapsed, the articles are only read by my regular readers because they can't even be found on Google.
Nobody can tell me anymore that it's about helpful content or something similar, because a dpa article that umpteen websites publish is not helpful.

Oh and as a bonus: Today, there is almost no traffic from Google, because even today, a search for my niche only returns these articles at the top (alongside spam nonsense).

[Whitey]

GSC has a bug today:

[seroundtable.com...]

Don't panic.

[universenet]

GSC has a bug today:

It is not bug, it is almost in real time view, but just almost

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop today.

[Micha]

It's getting more and more fun...
[arstechnica.com ]

[WhoKnows111]

A few years ago on holiday to Santorini with my wife (she has a lot of followers). We posted a picture of two of us, and the view from our hotel room... with nice endorsement of the hotel we were staying. The post went viral.

We won't be ever be able to return because they are always sold out and the price is 400% higher (it was already expensive before). We got nothing for it.

Since then we don't recommend nice places anymore.

[Ingall]

It seems as if Google is once again focusing on domain authority and no longer on good user signals or other quality features. Since yesterday, parasite spam has dominated the SERPs again. A few days ago, you could still see small websites with very good content in good positions in Germany. Today, I only see parasite spam on off-topic sites and spam on purchased expired domains in my niche.