December 2024 Google Search Observations

[Whitey]

Huge 48 hrs of overall site traffic doubling on only 3 url's, then back to zero. Top slot's since replaced with G overviews. For a moment I got excited. Looks like an AI smash and grab raid to me.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:38 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[christianz]

Has anyone done an objective analysis of the spam update's impact, with examples of specific cases?

Those who have tried have not published their findings because there is no logic or pattern to be found. Whatever gains Google made in fighting spam during the first half of 2024 have largely been lost since November.

It is NOT entirely Google's fault. Large part of it is incredible acceleration in spam production. Increasingly "sophisticated" and increasingly published under domains of "trusted" organizations.

It may be just coincidence but SERPs started their downhill trajectory right after Prabhakar Raghavan was replaced by Nick Fox and right after US elections. In effort to eradicate obvious spam they appear to reverting to boosting "authority" over actual usefulness, relevance and quality (defined mostly by user signals).

This approach has already been tried and already failed. It lead to "authority abuse" farming, "guest posting" and lots of negative publicity about "SEO sites" and "niche sites" invading search, not getting any real human content etc. Knee jerk reaction was HCU, which actually worked (a working Google update, wow!) but had some nasty side effects like insane boosting of Reddit and false positives - sites that are not "unhelpful" or "made for SEO" but lost all their rankings anyway.

Where does Google go from here? It is critical that they improve their system of identifying genuine websites with real value and purpose. Not websites owned by large companies or operated by major institutions, but simply genuine websites - large or small. Without that search is just sea of spam.

[flytomek]

Has anyone done an objective analysis of the spam update's impact, with examples of specific cases?

I found about ~10-15 examples of Spam Update penalized sites online. In most cases, the owners suggested a low domain age and low domain "authority". That was the common part.

[EditorialGuy]

Let's not forget that a poor-quality SERP forces Internet users to spend more time on Google, fall back on sponsored links (ads) or even head for AI search tools like Gemini .

Or maybe those searchers just bail.

I can't see Google's honchos being dumb enough to believe that crippling one's product is a wise move.

[ichthyous]

No idea what Google is doing, but the supposed updates don't seem over yet, there are wild swings from day to day and even hour to hour now. Saturday was -24% with traffic low all day. Sunday shot up with traffic high all day until late in the eve. Today traffic is right back down with USA traffic at -25% at 1pm. My articles are down by as much as 72% today. I also received an unusually high number of inquiries this weekend. Unfortunately, most of them were so delusional in their price expectations that I deleted them as they came in without responding. I have a field in my forms where people can state their budget if they choose to...it's a real time saver!

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google traffic has been up significantly in the last few days (as has our non-Google traffic). But I think this has more to do with seasonal demand than with Google updates, since we always see the curve head upwards in late December.

[Fluff_Nutz]

Traffic over here is good. It tends to increase during holiday periods. However, revenue and RPM is terrible. I have had better RPM with less traffic.

[Micha]

Since Christmas, there has been an extremely high amount of discover traffic every day. The last few days have been the best days for my news page all year, but unfortunately the ranking is still completely mixed up. If the news traffic decreases, it will look very bad.

[Chris travel 30]

We were expecting an uptrend for the end of december for our travel site. That actually came, which is good. BUT: The volatillity is still high and way higher than I expected.
Moreover, in one hour there are for example 80 visits and in the next our its just 20. First I was thinking that maybe the realtime tracking in GA has a bug. But the cycles come and go. Is anyone else observing something like this?

To you all: Have a great start in the new year!

[EditorialGuy]

We were expecting an uptrend for the end of december for our travel site. That actually came, which is good. BUT: The volatillity is still high and way higher than I expected.

Our editorial travel-planning site's annual low point came on December 12, which has been pretty typical for more than two decades. Traffic shot up after that (as expected), except for a short and predictable dip on Christmas Eve. Since Christmas, our Google traffic has been climbing at a lively pace. (Yesterday was our busiest day in a month.) It's hard to know how much of that to ascribe to seasonality and how much is the result of Google's updates. I can say that the November update gave us a real boost.

As for volatility, I haven't really noticed much of that for our Google traffic as a whole, since the upward curve has been pretty steady over the last week. Still, I have seen more variety in our top 10 pages than usual, which suggests that rankings may be bouncing around a bit for our less popular queries and pages.

[RedBar]

Monday saw my global site's second busiest day of the month with today, as expected, dead. Overall for the month traffic is about -40% with the last couple of weeks -50%

Will it get any worse? I have absolutely no doubt it very easily could do.

[engine]

New month, new year, new thread https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5116307.htm [webmasterworld.com]