January 2025 Google Search Observations

[engine]

The end of 2024 was one of the busiest for Google's changes and updates. No doubt it'll be settling to a particular status in 2025.

Let's keep an eye on traffic and conversions, and the impact of the AI-based responses in SERPs.

Previous thread December 2024 Google Search Observations [webmasterworld.com]

[Martin Ice Web]

Serps switching severals times an hour from good to bad. Serps layout is so spammy that i donīt know if it is sponsored or not. Reminds me of yahoo in the latest phase when all went down the hill.

[Micha]

It's really bad today. Lots of spam in the serps and it doesn't really matter what you write, Google ignores it. That really gets on my nerves, because what am I actually researching for if a cheap, 3-sentence article ranks, but my 1,000+ word article with background information etc. on the same topic can't even be found?

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

same in our niche. Shops with no description ranking very high. I donīt know whatīs up with google. Me as a user i want to get some information about the items i want to purchase. A picture and a keyword stuffed h1 is not enough.

[Micha]

@Martin Ice Web This makes you wonder why such shops, which are not “brands”, rank. It can't be because of the so-called helpful content, because it's not helpful. There is simply no cure for Google's arbitrariness.

[Martin Ice Web]

"Die Geister die ich rief werde ich nun nicht mehr los!" - helpful content. Millions of sites did it with AI and now it is easier to rank shops without any content because google isnīt able to distinguish between AI and human written content.

[haramamba]

Serps layout is so spammy that i donīt know if it is sponsored or not.

Interesting that Bing shows the same spam on the same places.

[Treud]

I guess the technic for Google to counter spam is just to hide everything that is not ads, or Amazon, or anything in the stock market.

If you are a hard worker pleb, you are a spam.

[RedBar]

Whilst nowhere close back to pre-update traffic levels I am seeing a slow improvement for my global site.

UK sites are all around their normal levels with one especially doing better however no idea why, nothing's changed and no offers.

[Dooku]

deepseek.com is it checkmate to G?

I sure hope so! Ooooooohh how I wish for a timemachine now to be able to travel 6 months ahead just to see the SE landscape.

For some reason I suspect the sweat of fear is flowing in Silicone Valley (and at G).

This is a really good explanation how DeepSeek works, and boy they make the US based AI systems look utterly crap:
[youtube.com...]
You can't help wondering if the prices and cost (cpu's and datacenters) of the current AI systems are nothing but a money laundering system.........when DeepSeek does the same at the proverbal 0,00001 cost?

[Micha]

Investors are very nervous. Nvidia has lost 600 billion in value at times and I wouldn't be surprised if Google's share price also falls sharply (the only question is whether it happens before or after OpenAI).
DeepSeek seems to be bursting the AI bubble on the Western stock markets, and if Google is also affected, Sundar Pichai will disappear from the scene very quickly. If the market does not recover to its original level, which would not be unusual, Google will also have to rethink. It wouldn't be the first time.

[not2easy]

Reminder = There is a discussion here about the DeepSeek app release: [webmasterworld.com...]

[universenet]

Interesting that Bing shows the same spam on the same places.

A few years before Matt Cutts from google even said bing does some strange things, it's like in some places it's copying google search entirely, even the same stupid search error as google
I do not understand why and how bing take that relation with google somtimes so strong
That is just not normal

[nuthin]

We are eagerly waiting for Google to adjust the geo-location accuracy such as threshold, so not "as-to" carry over more websites that aren't in a given city or state, however much loved is the efforts on page content optimisation targeting "keyword-phrase-city" , it upsets local based searches, pushing back small businesses in favour of those authority driven sites from "another city or state" , thus is there a timeline from Google to adjust this?

Just waiting for this to be rolled out and I'm sure some positive movement is around the corner........

1) adjust geo-location accuracy so over compensation isn't paid to businesses outside of city/state.

Once this threshold is met - I believe we would be much more happier. ;-)

[universenet]

1) adjust geo-location accuracy so over compensation isn't paid to businesses outside of city/state.

Thtist will never be, google does not want do more simple things
and how to do so complicated things

[nuthin]

I'm sure its' just a quick re-alignment and shuffle of the new set of results which others have highlighted we are due a quarterly update cycle, Google hasn't changed this aspect since inception so.. lets bring back the GOOGLE DANCE .

* loads up google1, google2, google3. in FRAMES and runs queries to view 'results' -- what is expected from a search engine leader

lets not pretend Google is anything other than a search engine and they should entertain us!

NO Bs - no gimmick ;

I dare not question anything other than ... in the past theyve certainly not run with a set of results such as what is being presented for more than a very short period ~8 weeks, perhaps continued investment or lack of has the "search engineering team" no longer providing input on relevancy to chase whatever dream........

Very slow post xmas / new year Google...

[nuthin]

anyway .. since when did Google start to show Bing results?

might as well join forces and be done.

[RedBar]

Happy Chinese New Year :-)

@nuthin

Do I assume you only do business on a local basis and you want G to concentrate more on this or have I misunderstood you?

[renatovieira]

Huge drop this morning...

[RedBar]

Lots of valid USA traffic so far today however more than 50% of it has been to a specific section of my site by students searching for specialised information. This happens several times a year for whatever courses are being taught and usually last 2-3 days viewing several thousand pages.

Ah well :-(

[Martin Ice Web]

50% drop over night again.

[Micha]

Now Google is really exaggerating. Yesterday the shop had 230% more visitors than Google usually sends us (but 0 sales), today it's dead again.
But my news page has Discover traffic again, and that's with an article which I quickly “slapped together”. I really don't understand this.

[christianz]

@Martin Ice Web

I am also witnessing a drop. Began late yesterday. Sensors have picked up also. Not good.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Micha,

are you sure that were real users? When ever google is "upgrading" the quality we usualy see an army of bots hitting our site.


@christianz,
it is a up and down today. 5 min with good floating traffic ( no sales though ) followed by 55min of rubbish traffic. We will reach about 80% from the new normal traffic today. But this is just 40% of traffic
before the last spam update went in.

[Micha]

@Martin I think it was more likely a bot army, because the way traffic has collapsed today, I'd be surprised if there was even one real person among them yesterday.

[sk7411]

More Drop

[nuthin]

@RedBar - I'm just sick and tired seeing third party aggregator websites showing up highly positioned when a search engine should be directing users to a website and not having users being presented yet another site then having to click again to find end user sites..

surely I'm not the only one that has seen this set of results , honoring those type of sites, pushing back and direct connection to those where in theory a good search engine wouldn't want users being sent in a loop.

make it easy. keep it simple.

but nope I'm sure Google could be steering people away from scraping their results by purposely doing such actions, whilst leaving real businesses forced into google ads and hahaha not like google doesnt have full control on making sure margins are so tight with there automation suggestions it's just a complete mess.

Google continues down this route I hope a new evolution does occur and our reliance on them diminishes.. wont happen in my life time unfortunately.

[nuthin]

Don't get me wrong some would say if you can't beat em , join them... but the only purpose if I was to do that would be creating all these high authority hub type sites and having too then feature clients on there.. so hey Google, you wont rank these clients and send direct traffic well now deal with my #*$! of making your search engine seem less relevant with garbage we can manifest, due to your way of handling filtering/triggers etc.

They just need to roll out the other set of results and adjust their filtering dont know these days whats holding them up... Feb 1 tommorow seems like go time? lol

[renatovieira]

Massive drop this morning... Here we go...

[Dooku]

Too little too late, G is still walking and headed off the cliff, we can all rejoice now, the beginning of the end as they start to eat themselves to stay afloat:

[theverge.com...]

[forbes.com...]

[sparktoro.com...]

From about 2:30 a very good explanation why the US economy is the most anti-competitive in the world and explains why G can act like it does and why OpenAI burns money like they do and why Deepseek is so efficient:
[youtube.com...]

It's probably best to NOT even rely on the other upcoming options but instead search for alternative marketing to put your product in front of possible customers.

[christianz]

From about 2:30 a very good explanation why the US economy is the most anti-competitive in the world and explains why G can act like it does and why OpenAI burns money like they do and why Deepseek is so efficient:

And it's only downhill for US tech from here. European Qwant is already leaps and bounds better at ranking and spam filtering. I recently switched to Qwant on all my devices and I am genuinely surprised. Had been using Duck for years, but it's full of spam these days.

And Qwant has maybe 100 employees and doesn't have anything close to the ridiculous funding that US companies had been enjoying for decades.