November 2024 Google Search Observations

[Shepherd]

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System: The following 3 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5112287.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 10:50 am on Nov 1, 2024 (utc 0)

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Maybe, but how would they monetize search?

"ChatGPT is shaping up to be an exciting test of whether people will pay for quality information and a search experience that delivers reliable, actionable answers. It could set the stage for a new model in which users are willing to invest in search tools that prioritize depth, accuracy, and tailored insights over sheer volume of results." said ChatGPT

In my opinion, a paid search product is going to be the ONLY way to get quality search results moving forward. AI is the latest big bang and we are going back to 1998 in terms of the search landscape. I look forward to the next 20+ years.

[gatormark]

Yesterday was weird. I went to bed with an hour remaining in the reporting day, with a certain revenue and number of clicks. I woke up with LESS revenue and 60 more ad clicks. I haven't seen visible clawbacks like that in a long time.

[Dimitri]

Namecheap has increased their domain renewal fees a lot.

Prices of .com are increasing years over years, because the central registry obtained the authorization to do so...

You can try Cloudflare for your domains, they sell them without margin, so technically no one is cheaper (beside promotional discounts).

I went to bed with an hour remaining in the reporting day, with a certain revenue and number of clicks. I woke up with LESS revenue and 60 more ad clicks. I haven't seen visible clawbacks like that in a long time.

Big mistake, this is the reason I never sleep, you never know what can happen when you are asleep...

I still think there is a problem with the reporting, I am still missing my first 3 days of November, and I also saw odd things, like impressions disappearing for no reason. I am displaying ads only to particular visitors, and even if I might miss a bot or two, I know this is not possible that hours of impressions turn to 0.

[breeks]

I have been dropping domains as they come up for renewal. Cutting corners when possible to save some $ as my traffic slowly dissolves away. :)

[gatormark]

Big mistake, this is the reason I never sleep, you never know what can happen when you are asleep...

LOL

[engine]

There's a specific search (for research) i've been doing weekly for years, and this week the UI is awful, cluttered with a greyed out URL, a favicon, and the "people also ask."
It's now harder to see the links than it was, and, importantly, Google fails to find the specific it used to pick up.
No wonder people are reporting traffic declines!

Note, this search I undertake is not packed with ads as it's a bit too specific. I used to be able to find stuff in an instant of completing the search, but now, i've got to struggle to find the link I need.

Google needs to go back to basics if it wants to show it's serious about traffic.

[edited by: engine at 2:45 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2024]

[Dimitri]

This is why I support Mojeek, and tell as much people as I can. We should all support Mojeek !

[christianz]

Giant drop on November 6th. Massive. Weakest, worst traffic in at least a year.

[EditorialGuy]

There's a specific search (for research) i've been doing weekly for years, and this week the UI is awful, cluttered with a greyed out URL, a favicon, and the "people also ask."

I was searching Google for something unrelated to my own topics a couple of days ago. The first six organic results were YouTube videos.

Google seems to be abandoning the open Web. Given the size of the Web (and how much information is on the Web), mightn't there be an opportunity for a new search engine that focused on guiding searchers to useful Web sites?

[Dimitri]

mightn't there be an opportunity for a new search engine that focused on guiding searchers to useful Web sites?

No need of "new", we have Mojeek already ;-)

[renatovieira]

HUGE drop today!

[superclown2]

No need of "new", we have Mojeek already

1) 99.9% of internet users have never heard of it.
2) They never will because of Google's illegal deals.
3) Even those that do hear about it won't use it because they have either forgotten, or never saw, what a proper search engine is.
4) The legal actions against Google will take years to be even slightly effective because the system allows Google to drag them out with endless appeals.

DDG have spent a fortune on TV advertising here in the UK for months now. Our stats show that they still account for just 0.5% of our visits. Bing tried a (ridiculous) TV campaign some years ago and got nowhere. None of the regulatory measures that Europe have brought out have made an ounce of difference.

Where is James Bond when we really need him?

[Micha]

@renatovieira shouldn't it read: Huge drop this week?

Seriously, in the more than 10 years that my news site has been around, I've never seen a drop in traffic like this week.

And do any of you still use Google? You can't find anything at all. Even the news articles are completely out of date.

[saladtosser]

@EditorialGuy I’m seeing a lot of traffic from Google search coming to my YouTube channel, which currently has 40K subscribers and averages about 4K views per day. On a good month, it brings in around £82—not exactly worth the effort when each video takes 3-4 days to edit, especially since we focus on evergreen content for our niche. YouTube seems like a tough platform to make real income unless you either got in early or are in a high-paying market. We've had just one member join in four years, so the whole membership idea hasn’t been effective, and I don’t want to put content behind a paywall.

Sponsorships are off the table too—I refuse to load my audience with in-video ads, especially considering many are paying for YouTube Premium to avoid them! Instead, I’m working on building a marketplace for our niche, where I see some real potential. If that doesn’t work out, I might close things down, as the ad revenue from YouTube and AdSense barely covers the hosting and internet bill—definitely not something you can live on.

[mhansen]

I have a 2022/2023 HCU affected site that recovered roughly 75-80% of it's traffic in the August 2024 update (I 410'd a lot of content). Everything was going well until late last week, and it has started bleeding off daily users from Google search which is continuing as I write this and it's down roughly 25% of traffic from Google search week over week.

Site is 6-7 YO USA, lead-gen through internal process, industry-expert content and useful tools to help users. Roughly 250 pages (down from +350 before HCU), 1,500-2000 highly engaged, end of journey (ready to schedule) daily users with very specific content that meets their very specific need.

The majority of queries I seem to be losing it on, are generic queries that are very broad versus targeted to the page content. ie: Instead of ranking P2 for "widgets" with a 50k monthly volume, it's dropped to P35 - but "blue twisty widgets for kids" which only has 250 monthly search volume, went from P35 to P1. Even so, conversions are roughly 25% down.

On the other side of the coin, I am seeing a noticeable increase of referrals from Bing (again), gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, and chatgpt.com, which I assume are from people testing out the new GPT search engine.

I'm also USA only and block other countries completely in Cloudflare with a full-stop block, or a challenge block to assure they are human and the past week has been all about politics, so maybe the users will return.

[edited by: mhansen at 8:46 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2024]

[christianz]

@renatovieira shouldn't it read: Huge drop this week?

Entire October was bad and first signs of degradation in search quality appeared around mid August. Since then Google hasn't done a single thing right. Some kind of major greed mode / next level en#*$!ification is being rolled out for Q4, judging by how high value traffic has been declining the most.

[Micha]

@christianz August, September and the first half of October were extremely good for me. September was even an absolute record, but something happened on October 18th and since then my website has lost almost 95% of its traffic from Google compared to September. Today a new low is reached, because there is almost no traffic from Google.
Since that day in October, however, I also see that Google News in my niche only shows outdated articles (some of them a year old) and only the big publishers. Also in the search itself only large publishers, no more small sites.

[renatovieira]

Another day of huge drops. Certainly the worst week in years... Let's see what lies ahead...

[ichthyous]

@renato. A noticeable drop overnight then it has snapped back to normal. However, home page traffic is -41% at 3pm, and my top traffic landing page is -24%. Some articles are +50% so the traffic is shifting. A big drop in customer inquiries this week though. Google seems to shift what parts of the site get traffic from day to day now.

[Chris travel 30]

Since yesterday I am catching feelings of resignation. We have been updating nearly all articles on our main site, a travel related blog relying on affiliate sales. It does a good income. Since August 15 we were seeing big drop, followed by slow and steady decline. In the last two days the google clicks were pushed under a important baseline:

[i.postimg.cc ]

In 24h there have been 0 sales. If this is going to continue, google has wiped out another publisher. It feels devastating. I never been a big IT nerd, but within some years of practice I learned how to play the game. Now it just feels like everything I have been working my a** off in the last years is falling apart under my hands. And the worst part: It feels like there is nothing I can do about it.

[NirthaK]

@Chris_travel_30 Unfortunstely this is the truth. We can't do anything effective about it. I'm in the recipe niche and my site was devasted last year by September HCU. Nothing I did and changed improved the status quo. The site was hit by every following core and ghost update. And so it continued until zero clicks from Google were reached.

[mosxu]

Our problems started with EricSchmidt he instructed to associate with big bank accounts and push out small guys! That may change soon:

[instagram.com...]

[ichthyous]

Our problems started with EricSchmidt he instructed to associate with big bank accounts and push out small guys! That may change soon:

Elon Musk just bought the US Presidency, so we can be assured that X will be the major benefactor. I have just deleted my X account after 14 years, as it has simply become a cesspool of lies and propaganda...nothing but bots running rampant and circus clowns on there now. Perhaps the new administration will try to push or punish Meta and Google in some ways, but I doubt they will get that far as these companies have trillions to fight back in the courts.

[engine]

Moderator note
Please, we do not discuss politics!

[mosxu]

@engine

What do you think we are? You don’t like what users comment you instantly snap!

Politics are actually vey relevant and up to date information if it involves search engines!

Censorship is over!

[not2easy]

You don't go to a restaurant to buy a garden rake. We do not discuss politics here. It is not censorship, it is part of the Terms of Service, out of respect for members from around the world. There are lots of sites that discuss politics, but that is not welcome here.

We do discuss court issues in the Search Engine Govt, Policy, and Business Issues forum not in the Google Search and SEO forum. Let's stay on topic, please.

[RedBar]

For popular widgets in my sector it is now a diabolical classified ads mess with so many irrelevant results IF one can find them.

Interestingly for my less popular widgets the results at the moment seem to be normal.

Needless to say my traffic has almost been annihilated.

[superclown2]

I tried the ChatGPT app for Chrome earlier. It wiped out my usual Google search bar and also changed the default when I searched using the menu bar.

Results were not much use for looking for commercial terms but I can imagine it taking business when people are looking for information. Being the impatient type who wants to get instant results though I didn't have any use for it so I deleted the app.

How much business it will take from Google remains to be seen but since the latter is producing an ever slowing trickle of enquiries as they try to force us into using often cost-ineffective ads it doesn't really make much difference.

[ichthyous]

@engine and @not2easy Governmental policies and actions regarding Google and the other tech platforms directly affects all of us. Pointing out a change in government is not really discussing politics but pointing out what potential changes might be iminent. We all know that we are not supposed to be discussing our own personal political beliefs here. But it is directly relevant when Elon Musk funds the current Presidential election ($100m+) and is set to be placed in the government as a cabinet level advisor. What implications will this have for Google, X, etc.? I think it's both interesting and salient.

[christianz]

It seems like Google is replacing real US traffic with fake traffic. Because I can't explain why ad revenue RPM is down 30+% in Q4 so far.

[mosxu]

@christianz

Interesting …

[Micha]

Fasten your seatbelts, Google has launched the November 2024 core update.
[x.com ]

[MayankParmar]

This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search

Good luck to the people still fighting

[Dimitri]

So an update on 11/11 this is the 1+1 update? (which is zero in binary...)

[Brett_Tabke]

Google said on Elon Musks X platform today, that it was releasing a core rankings update. While many SEO’s are shutting down there X accounts due to Musks support of Donald Trump, Google continues to use the platform:

[searchengineworld.com...]

[goodoldweb]

The biggest internet spammers appointed themselves to police the internet.

Pay Google for an ad and you can spam all you want, "core update" or not.

[Treud]

Traffic on the very low tide since a week (billable visits), impression seem stable according search console, CTR dropping.

Luckily I’m busy with something not Google related !

[Juniya]

2024 seems like a dream, a bad one.

[sk7411]

Traffic Down :)

[mosxu]

It is probably wise not to make changes to our websites as the machines think you trying to steal and not improve!

Algorithms used have to be public for the sake of transparency and consumer protection! Since these are patented I see no issues with know how or whatever business secrets:))

[Micha]

Something is happening in Europe. Quant and Ecosia want to build their own search infrastructure in Europe. A sensible approach to finally make some progress here and not just leave the market to US companies. I hope it works. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find any English text about it)

[golem.de ]

Oh, and Treud, has it only been like this for you this week, or has it been like this for you since October too?

[Dooku]

Quant and Ecosia want to build their own search infrastructure in Europe

[computing.co.uk...]

[techcrunch.com...]

As much as I hope a REAL search engine will be developed in the EU, nothing will come of this joint venture when you look at how they will go about it and what they are planning. It's the usual half baked nonsense.....a car with three wheels. On the outside it looks the same, but it just won't work.

Unless some company get's REAL funding like they receive in the USA and set's up shop in at least 10 to 15 BIG data centers around the world using tens of thousands of servers and running this based on their OWN technology and index like Google then it might be viable......anything else is just transposing air.

[saladtosser]

They need to act fast; I believe there's more driving the development of AI summaries than just keeping users on Google to click ads. It seems part of a broader plan to dismantle the open web, eliminating competition from other search engines both current and future!

If fewer and fewer websites remain, there’s less content for future search engines to index, making it impossible for new competitors to emerge to provide a REAL search engine (Google of OLD). This will ALSO prevent future LLMs freely training on the open web as Google has had the luxury of doing and they will need to come to Google and pay for the training data, under licence I suspect for that lovely recurring fee.

Google will of course spin this as them having saved the WWW information for future generations even though it was them that destroyed it!

But wait, how will they have new data to train their AI on in the future for events and discoveries yet to be made you ask? They will keep making exclusive deals with a few choice sites like Reddit and others to keep producing content for them to adsorb of course, open web becomes the closed web (the fraction that's left of it)

Next, they'll target e-commerce. Soon, all products might be listed directly on Google, with payments processed (and commissions collected) by Google itself, consolidating even more control and reduce/eliminate the need for a ecom website!

They are pulling up the draw bridge behind them IMO!

[renatovieira]

Here we go! The November 2024 broad core update is rolling out.

[status.search.google.com...]

[gatormark]

I have noticed an uptick since the US elections. Not a change in my traffic, but a change in the ad spending. It looks like I am on pace to have higher revenue than November of 2023. If that holds true, it’ll be the first time that has happened in four years.

[ichthyous]

Big drop in USA and Canada traffic starting at about 10am here. USA is -27% and CA is -58%. Search down 6% overall. The first down day since the span of three mysteriously low traffic days before the election. Not that it matters, up or down the traffic is only bringing a trickle of customer inquiries this year. People should be inquiring for holiday gifts and this week not a thing.

[saladtosser]

I believe they are gaslighting with this update, seen hour on hour movement for the last 6 weeks (loads of posts on this in that time) then total stagnation since the announcement, nothings moving! I believe they ran the update 6-4 weeks back and announced it when it completed!

[Treud]

@Micha

From what I'm seeing: from March 2024 to July I had stable traffic from GSC but the billable visits were off the roof, after checking with WP Engine, I saw many came from the same IP (Google) and other cities in the US, so it was some boting, the bandwidth was impacted too (scrap website?). Conversions were bad at this time

August to mid-September were okay months, with normal traffic patterns (like 2023). This month, I see the same, traffic matches between the WP Engine dashboard and GSC. Bandwidth is low. There is no conversion, but I have inquiries. For this month, it's normal as everyone is waiting for Black Friday deals!

[Chris travel 30]

Just a guess: What if the update has allready been finished? The volatility on the SERPs is coming down like a stone here in germany since Nov. 12. But: The days before the official announcement have been hot. Any guesses on that? I do not see any changes for my sites at the moment at all. The movement just stopped in the night from Nov. 13.

[sk7411]

We are dropping but that doesn't mean the update has just started. We all know the update was pushed a few days or perhaps a week before they announced it.

[Micha]

@treud Thanks for the reply.

The update has been going on for a while, but it's currently interesting. The ranking of my website is improving, but the number of visitors via Google has dropped again. Meanwhile, the Google News traffic has reached 0. What I find very strange, however, is that very old articles in particular receive traffic from Google, while new articles, i.e. all the news that we publish during the day, receive 0.