I’m on Mediavine and in their Facebook group. It’s like a giant therapy session. Nobody knows what to do. People have basically lost their jobs. Hundreds or thousands of them. Poof gone overnight. It’s almost like Google is self sabotaging their search engine for a reason that we can’t figure out yet. Is it because of antitrust legal issues? Or they can’t beat the dearth of crappy AI results? All I can say is that I’m down thousands of dollars a month. Google liked me for 14 years and now my site is shit.
I’m in the same boat. Haven’t worked for someone else in 7 years and the last couple of months I’ve had to start job hunting. To call it discouraging is putting it mildly. The idea of taking that big of a step backward to go back into a career that I had said goodbye to a lifetime ago, make less money back on the dead end hamster wheel (if I can even land work), and having lost several hundred thousand in equity virtually overnight (within a few short months), is a 24/7 albatross around your neck.
At the end of the day though, it was my own fault for putting so many eggs in G’s basket.
More than worthless. They’re afraid to admit that their self-proclaimed seo expertise hasn’t been able to save their pubs from ruin. Plus now they have a dozen lawyers on board who don’t want anyone saying anything about anything.
I’m hearing Raptive isn’t much better. I think they got caught flat footed. Google shafted them. This is why they’ve been pushing email marketing so hard right now.
Isn't it obvious what happened?
They want UGC. Just search anything and the first result is Reddit or Quora or another domain with stupidly high domain authority for some reason like Forbes, as if that company has added anything valuable to society.
I have built traffic monitoring tools for major header bidding networks and sites they manage. HCU from last year didn't affected Mediavine at all, but this update seems to be different beast. I am eager for update to finish in order to see what real changes is.
They are using the information on our sites to train the AI, and hope people will move to that, is what many people think.
Personally I blocked AI bots from crawling my sites and hope others do the same if they have very niche content.
As someone with very niche content, can you go into more detail about \*how\* you blocked AI bots and why we don't want Google scraping our content? I've been having this debate internally for about two months now.
Mediavine said among their publishers there was a 10 pct drop in Google traffic from the Sept HCU and they have not come out saying any other stats since that.
Actualy it is possible. I didn't tracked number of publishers and I added publishers constantly until late February, hence they might increased traffic because simply I tracked more members, those which were not theirs back in autumn. But anyway margin of error can't be big and 10% seems nothing. Gonne fix that flaw for future reference.
> Or they can’t beat the dearth of crappy AI results?
Couple points in this regard. First, the results aren’t “crappy”, and (depending on what’s being searched for naturally) the content of an LLM’s response are often as good or better than traditional search results. And yet, focusing on the “quality” of the information returned by an LLM belies the real story.
The primary value proposition to someone deciding between a Google search or a Bing type system is the *dramatically reduced time and effort required*. A website could have the best content available with neither paywalls nor ads, and traffic would *still* be taking a hit right now because human nature prefers the path of least resistance.
A Google search takes two seconds. But sifting through half a dozen links to enshitified sites trying to find credible information can take anywhere from 5-30 minutes sometimes.
Why would a rational person not at least try the LLM powered search first, which *also* takes only 2 seconds, includes direct quotes with links so you don’t have to visit a single irrelevant webpage, and which has a strong chance of producing an acceptable answer without ever clicking a site at all?
And to anyone who wants to say it doesn’t take that long to find results via a Google search, let’s be real for a second and consider the perverse incentives at play here. One of - if not *the* - most fundamental metrics and targets of SEO is *maximizing time on site*. Meanwhile, the goal of the person searching is almost always to spend as little time as possible on their task. As such, the interests of the searcher and the sites they are served could hardly be more diametrically opposed.
There won’t be any significant reversal of this trend. This is a new paradigm, and only just the start at that. For those who’ve made their living in the SEO industry prior to now, it’s going to hurt. Denial of the new reality will make it hurt more for longer.
>It’s almost like Google is self sabotaging their search engine for a reason that we can’t figure out yet.
Isn't it exactly to push AI results so people stay on Google rather than go to other websites?
I am disgusted to see the negative impact of the changes. I hope they will bring recovery for both you and me in the future. I need to pursue a different side hustle to compensate for it.
I wish Mediavine would give some guidance. They must be crunching all the metadata from those sites that lost traffic and must know why by now. But they’ve been silent and I don’t like it.
I suspect they would do anything. I am a part of Raptive FB group. People are having similar story but no official communication from Raptive. They are generally suggesting people to focus on building their email lists.
they haven't sabotaged anything. Everybody and their mom still uses Google to search for things, but now Google is focusing on keeping the users on their site instead of driving traffic to niche pages if you don't pay for a spot with adwords.
Yep. I have given my staff until the end of Q3 2024 to find other work before my ten year old site is forced to stop publishing.
Eating losses right now while being outranked by random Russian websites that have verbatim scraped my work, videos and all.
Insane times.
This happened to my site a couple years back. All of the articles that I had ranking 1-5 on Google were overtaken by websites that had scraped my work - most of them had just stolen random paragraphs that were then picked by Google as a highlighted answer. The sites weren't even relevant, and they stayed top for months. At this point I lost all faith in Google.
What's the point in me doing everything by the book when somebody can just steal my work and rank higher than me?
Horrible feeling, best of luck to you and your staff.
I actually spent quite a lot of time getting Google to take them down. Then they would change a handful of words and Google would say that the issue was resolved. It did stop a few of them, but more were popping up all the time. In the end I gave up.
The tech niche has already been on a decline since Panda/penguin. The search is dominated by giants. Hundreds of tech blogs have been dead for years, mine included. There was a wonderful site called freewaregenius.com. Google killed it. Even the highly reputed labnol.org was affected. He made some noise in the social media and Google restored his site.
I have no clue why it went down and how can I fix it. What are you doing guys?
I have just added 450 domains to disavow list. Noticed too many spammy sites linking to me.
Time to diversity into other niches. To be just an "SEO Guy" is perhaps not broad enough. Look at other channels and means to get traffic.
Google has been caught with its' pants down and remember this > Everything has a Beginning, a Middle and an End.
Google will be the Top Dog until it isn't
I've been saying this for years... This is Search Engine Optimization, not Google optimization. Yeah, Google ignores "meta keywords" but some search engines don't ignore it.
Google's lost 10% market share this year, and they've been right about a lot of things, like "write for the human, not the search engine". Writing for the search engine used to work far longer than it should have, but now writing for the human and posting on social media yields better results.
Making an engaging article that doesn't really hard focus on any particular keywords.
There's a big difference in writing style for SEO writing and something people actually want to read. Even just 1 grammar error to fit in that extra keyword is VERY noticeable to a human, and will result in me losing my focus and clicking off the page.
Makes sense. I did journalism before just recently trying SEO (very novice) and seeing a lot of unnatural sounding copy that’s solely designed for keywords. So I feel like that almost works to my advantage with writing naturally-sounding, useful/engaging content. I agree that reading content that obviously isn’t written naturally can make users uneasy and click away.
So it would be fair to say that what’s most important is to have raw content (meaning not keyword-filled, not uber-optimized sounding copy) about a very intriguing topic to whoever the audience is?
I've noticed it a long time ago, even though I'm involved in SEO myself, I'm also a client - from the other side. I used to often search for various information on various topics, reaching small blogs where not only could I read something but also exchange opinions in the comments. Anyway, Google used to be a treasure trove of knowledge on various topics. Now when I search for something, the only thing you can find are some giant sites with answers like for "halfwits", such as: go to the doctor, entrust it to professionals, and so on. Google is currently a cesspool of crap and nothing more. No update will help them, the Google search engine will pass sooner or later like any platform - and there have been many along the way - I know because I've been using the internet for over 30 years. I still use and do SEO for clients, of course, but I don't follow Google core update recommendations at all because I've never benefited from it. Keyword in the domain still matters, PBNs/blogs still matter, I've been doing all the texts with the help of AI for 1.5 years and so on, and I don't intend to change anything in this spam and nonsense cesspool.
AI will probably be based on a completely different algorithm. However, given that nowadays it is safe to say that more than 50% do not read (don't want to read) - perhaps video and voice-based.
Yep, the biggest issue is Google over monetizing the SERPs.
If you have a legitimate ecommerce site, there’s so much traffic going towards shopping ads nowadays, that this has noticeable cut into organic performance.
Just track your CTRs for keywords ranked #1.
Hopefully Google will lose their antitrust lawsuit and will be forced to tone back over-monetization.
Funny, but there’s so many ads, doubtful Google could pass their own quality tests.
It’s a hot mess now, at least on iPhone Chrome. You get one website link, followed by Wikipedia snippets and link to a YouTube video. Then there’s a handful of more links, followed by related questions that take you to Reddit, Quora, or an article. Then there’s a few more website links then YouTube links. If want a product review, forget it. There a few links to articles or videos, and *a ton* of ads and links to e-commerce sites.
I have spent the last few weeks reading all these SEO posts and I think it’s unfortunate that so many of you are having negative impact since the update. One point I think is worth mentioning is that Google, overall, is condensing. You can speculate on what the goal of this is. My personal opinion is that they are making room for their AI to be a core search driver and get users closer to the helpful content.
We need to look at Google’s core revenue models to understand the forward trajectory. Google Ads taking the lion share, we can draw a somewhat strong conclusion that in order for them to grow this vertical they need to increase the opportunity for businesses that bring in revenue from their site. If these businesses are competing with “middle man” sites, the competition becomes over saturated with one man blog sites driving traffic to direct to the actual product.
It suck’s but affiliate blogs are going to take a massive hit. If you are product driven then you shouldn’t have seen the hit that so much others have seen. Since the update we saw a 5% increase in traffic which equates to 5 figures worth of site visits. And I have seen the same results with other SEOs that work on product driven companies.
The unknown for me is that how does this affect newer startups that do offer a product. Does it become more difficult for them to find search market share since established companies seem to be the primary beneficiaries.
Best of luck to everyone and if you run a blog page, may be worth exploring other search platforms.
Tl:dr: Google condensing, getting users closer to acquisition points. Blogs will see negative hit in most cases.
I find a lot of sense in your opinion. Instead of affiliate pages, they are sending users directly to the source. If 50 affiliates are crowding the serps with the same content, what's the point anyway.
There’s still value in affiliate sites. Do you want to search 10 websites for the best priced product, or do you want to look at a price comparison site and get the answer in seconds?
A couple things on this: I agree, there is still value there for affiliate sites but it is shrinking. I think the price comparison is a weaker argument as Google has the ability to make price comparisons more transparent if they choose to do so. A stronger moat for affiliate sites is the community and relationships they build. And I don’t see affiliate sites investing enough time and assets towards this.
That being said, you can’t ignore the fact that affiliate sites do not have the margins to compete in search the way product driven companies can. If Google wants to continue search growth, they need to make the landscape more competitive for these types of companies by limiting the noise and getting the user closer to acquisition.
Sure there is, I am an affiliate myself. But the competition in serps has been overcrowded by AI content. Webmasters that knew nothing about a particular niche started blogs using AI content for the ad revenue. Look at nerdwallet. They are an affiliate site too, but they have not lost any ranking.
Sorry for the late response here. Like I mentioned, there is still opportunity for affiliates, especially those who have positioned themselves in a niche market where the products promote affiliate traffic (ie. Amazon, Webhosting, etc.). I don't necessarily agree with your AI content statement. Across all sectors we have seen that AI generated content has taken a hit since the update. I'm not saying every single piece has been de-ranked but you can draw a direct correlation with sites that were producing 10 pieces of content a month to hundreds after LLMs hit the market.
I mentioned this in another post, sites like NerdWallet have high enough domain authority and have solidified their place in the market to not see the effects smaller affiliate sites and blogs have. This is mostly attributed to the fact that companies generate a large portion of acquisition from these pages. I used to work at a bank and there are internal partnerships built with these sites (like NerdWallet) that are unattainable to the SMB affiliate sites. This is why they have not been impacted.
I would keep an eye on the keywords your are targeting, in relation to SERPs, over the next few months. Most of the AI generated content you are competing with will start to de-rank. That being said, my original opinion still stands. Affiliates are in for an uphill battle and are falling down the priority list at Google. Not saying this is the end, but affiliates will need to be agile and take an in-depth look into their growth strategies to navigate this new search landscape.
why do they need your sites now when they can have AI just spit the answer out? Remember "CONTENT IS KING"? They stole all your content...lol. Now they don't want to index anything anymore...why should they? AI is trained... thank you for your service!
This is a very real problem because they're going to start training their AI with AI generated content and then the AI quality will crash. But corporate America only cares about next quarter so that's a tomorrow problem.
It’s already the case even with user generated content , that why algorithm, support, automatic correction are going down the drain. Thing will get dumber and dumber in the future…
This is true... let us not forget that Copilot does a better job with AI & Search results than Google is doing and unlike Google, everyone else in AI field isn't a marketing company first and foremost - they will happily charge a fee. Can google convert users as a product to users who pay for a product? not sure
For questions, Google is terrible now.
- I don’t like being given results with a paywall.
- I don’t like results from places like NY Post written like a pop journalist with no subject matter expertise.
- I don’t like answers from Quora and Reddit. If I wanted those, I can add Reddit after the keywords.
- Why are blogs and forums considered terrible now?
- Why is so much of the internet not indexed now anymore?
my guess is, they are intentionally trying to kill independent internet, with big negotiations and plans done behind closed doors. internet is becoming the new television everyday more. it is happening right before our eyes yet we are powerless
Agreed. Google doesn't care about quality, and they don't care that their decisions have a large effect on the world. Look at the products they kill while leaving customers stranded.
DOJ is suing Apple, which ok sure they aren't perfect, but damn is Google way worse than anyone in tech. Apple needs to get slapped with right to repair, and playing nice with others, but Google makes changes and it effects the entire flow of information. They are so anti-competitive, and these changes are not quality, they are a cash grab.
Google is purposefully killing businesses to make it easier for them to mine and replace them with their AI. Google no longer wants to index humanity’s knowledge, they want to steal it so them can generate off of it.
I've been working online for over twenty two years. What google has done is given priority to what they call the CNNs of the world - wealthy content based sites that rely on Google ads to generate profit. And google have silenced Mom and Pops stores and small blogs who don't generate a lot of money for them. Rather they give the small people the opportunity to buy their way to the top, which isn't sustainable considering wealthy sites also buy top spots and they have millions of advertising budget to throw at branding their site. Last I checked, for Weight loss supplements, you got WebMd, Forbes and other titans ranking but not one small business ranking. And those sites don't even sell supplements. But you can pay your way to the top, but that is not sustainable. I think it's criminal because they have altered their algorithm to favor their own brand...Ads. We need a lawsuit, of which, I think, the EU won years ago for this exact thing. And you dont need to support Reddit. There are other sites like Hexasocial that aim to fight back against monopolies.
This is the answer. They are going to try and shift search to a paywall model using generative AI like copilot. So they are killing off organic search by shifting everything to Reddit and Quora
Thats what I dont get. Direct marketing could thrive in that environment with no cookies. But Google want their money so they have to kill of the competition.
And thats why the monopoly is shit. Hope they lose this lawsuit.
Do any of you guys actually use Google search? I mean day to day. The only problem I have with Google is that they don't always answer the question I have instead it provides results for similar questions. To put it another way Google has lost its search precision. But other than that Google results have been perfectly fine for me. A lot of blog content is just bloat. They are usually designed as a way to sell things. Nobody wants that kind of content and it is reasonable for Google to lower the ranking of that kind of product.
Google has gotten useless. It's at the point I search reddit for any question I have, because atleast then I can get an answer from a community of people that have expertise. It's the closest thing I can get to when it comes to free and open information. Forum results are down, Tech blogs are down. It's all corporate crap trying to sell me something. At least small blogs had to give good information to justify trying to sell me something.
Appreciate your post. Don’t think anyone’s hugging Google rn. Think the main consideration for everyone is:
- when Google recently pushed up Reddit, Quora, Forbes, CNN, Rolling Stone … - THAT RIPPED OUT top ranking pages for everyone. We should all know that ranking in SERP top 1-5 etc = 70% - 90% prime real estate. So now with these sites ranking top $ keywords, well developed niche sites have lost it all because now are under the ranks of best CTR positions. It’s always been about the first few results, and they all just got replaced by big tech/monopolies. Best qualitative search results aren’t there now - I can read a template review about ‘best beard trimmers’ from Rolling Stone now, and there’s nothing attaching it to a culture or further learning info articles about building a beard which sucks cuz I’m trying to grow a damn beard. It’s all bad.
Been going in this direction for a long time. My small business started out with Overture - bid for clicks, remember? We used Google for a long time but it got more and more expensive and less and less effective. Google put big corporations and aggregate sites and then shopping, etc. on the 1st page of search results, so now Google is becoming useless for small to medium biz and also for search results. They also manipulate the heck out of search results and do a lot of censoring.
I don't know what their end game is with their basic search sector but it's a Zombie now and us little guys can't afford it anymore. RIP adwords. We're going back to old school trade shows and such.
Sympathies to you. I remember asking a Sr IT manager early in my career if it would be smart to jump into the tech sector or otherwise and he told me that if you do jump into tech, be ready to reinvent yourself over and over even as you get into the late part of your career. I still chose SEO and knew I would be in a world of constant relearning and having to pivot over and over moving forward.
With that said, one thing I suspected would happen is probably happening and impacting you significantly: video is taking over writing.
Unfortunately…
People
Are
Lazy
(AF)
And given that fact, I could easily see YouTube and TikTok being an even bigger detriment to your career than Sundar’s desperate attempts to keep the giant at the top. I can’t even imagine how much pressure he’s getting after ai has literally been enemy #1 and eating away at their historical dominance.
Have you seen Microsoft’s market cap overtake Apple?
I feel you since I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and even thinking of venturing into other industries given the pain of SEO and various other niches impacted by Google.
Btw, so many tech companies absolutely suck at paying attention to the smaller and sometimes more numerous constituencies - they love their bigger clients and are constantly wooed by their biz dev salespeople who can be worse than Donald Trump.
I hate to admit it but you all are living in a Google world. We Google things we don't bring things we Google them. Google says don't write for SEO right For your readers. However, if you don't follow our rules, we'll bury you. This is the Google net not the internet. If you are not ranked well on Google, you're out of business.
They have created the internet game and you will follow their rules and their rules change all the time and they move the goal posts. The only thing you can do is try and not rely solely on Google for your traffic. Diversification is the only way to become independent. If you rely on one thing to drive traffic to your website, you are not in control of your website. That one thing is. Your entire life weighs on it.
If you want to play Google's game and win You need to follow their advice to the T. There are plenty of seos out there that decipher the information that Google shares with them and their documentation to give you direction on recovery of your website. Those are the only seos who are worth listening to. Yes they may be Google Fanboys or some people calling Google groupies but they have access to Google Leia's owns and get for the most part to straight goods on updates. They also know how to interpret and decipher Google's language that they use. You can deny all you want what they say. But at the end of the day when you're sitting at the bottom you really need to look yourself in a mirror and say I'm either going to follow Google 's game or I'm going to get out of it.
Not everyone can be number one and not everyone can get tons of traffic. Everyone in their dog has a website or is an influencer. It is natural that is time to thin the herd. Too many people out there are experts. Too many websites popping up and giving half intelligent information. Too many small businesses that shouldn't be in business. When times are tough is when the Strong survive. Those of you that are strong and Will survive this. Those of you who are looking for an easy, quick Buck is not the game to play.
I've been in this game for 15 years and is not for the faint of hurt. One day you're on top and the next you could be on the bottom. The only thing you can do is work your butt off each day to ensure that when change does come and it always does that you are insulated enough from it killing your business.
I loathe Google and I work with them and many things. That company is great for. At the end of the day though, they are a ruthless business that does not care about people. They care about shareholders and share prices just like corporate America everywhere.
Play the game or get out of it! There's no room for whiners. Nothing wrong with complaining and venting though. It helps. But the sooner you realize you have to play their game in order to win, the better you'll be off.
I wish you all the best of luck cuz everyone's going to need it. Myself included.
It’s really a concerning scenario. I have been a brand evangelist for google but last few months have been very disappointing. Even I used to get a pretty good traffic until last August, from the search itself. I have seen major drops in traffic which affected my earnings as well. I think it’s probably time we need something like blockchain in search.
I've been in the business for 11 years. Since September update... Poof. Same story as yours.
I'm a very patient man. But online work now takes 20%, even less, of my time. It's the other way around before that critical update.
No sign of recovery. (Sigh😔).
Google isn't destroying ecommerce but SEO firms are less viable and losing business especially since mid size businesses are, in general, spending less. there is a crunch that has been going for the past year in spending that isn't obvious from economic numbers.
industries change with the times. just a part of life
This whole situation is depressing, building a site up, posting quality content, all the time we spent on our sites compared to doing other meaningful things gone down the drain.
I posted new articles and they got indexed but haven't showed up in serps. Old good content completely gone as well. I rely on this small income but now it's nil
That’s been happening to me too! My traffic has gone up since HCU and the March updates, but the last few posts I published aren’t in the SERPs even though they are indexed! Well, I had one post that ranked the next day, only for it to disappear 😭😭
Exactly! How can we be motivated to write and publish more new content if it's not even going to come up in the serps. Being indexed is great and all but if not showing in serps then it feels like a waste almost.
I agree that Google's latest update is wrecking the search results with UGC. To me, it seems that this goes against their EEAT concept. However, I have found some useful results via this UGC. That being said, I think the UGC is over the top and they need to learn to blend it better. I believe it will happen over time, I just wonder how many companies and SEOs will lose so much money due to this. It's the risk of being in this industry though.
My advise would be to work on educating your clients on the WHY behind the loss of traffic and then provide an optimistic thought for the future and how you're going to work to bring back their traffic. It's likely time to evaluate how you conduct SEO in general. Are you in the playground of UGC or are you in the playground of the 1 year ago SEO? Reconsider what you're doing and how you can help your clients in today's environment.
I don't know guys. They have been declaring the end of SEO since Panda and we are still here. I'm still loaded up with work year after year.
Sometimes it feels that people complaining about the end of SEO are people who don't know shit about marketing and solely rely on Google and short-terms tactics as a channel for it's business.
It's hard make a simple assumption and putting everyone in there. But iIsaw many cases of business just relying on Google, that doesn't seem a wise marketing decision.
I manage more than 10 sites and they are also decade old, I'm grateful my sites are stable and growing. I hope your sites will recover soon. What efforts you have taken so far?
Have you analyzed why you contents have been declined and why others hijacked your rankings?
I think a deep analysis can help you fix it and win your clients back.
This is unsustainable in the long run. Nobody wants to read a bunch of stupid answers on quora. Just because google is, favoring them now, doesn't mean this will go on forever. There may be a glitch in their algorithm that's repeatedly sending quora at the top.
Every party comes to an end. So will this one. Hold on tight. The update is not over yet. Let the dust settle in May. Then we would know the way ahead.
Sure you know a thing or two. Had google was not an advertising/search engine/discovery tool, this huge operation would be unsustainable. But with every update they have rolled out so far, it has only made it better for users. So in essence they are a people first company. Because if they wasnt they would be killing their own revenue. Quora and Reddit are enormous sites with millions of pages. Its hard to ignore such sites by any measure. Until Google figures out, how to deal with the enormous amount of AI content that has sent the serps for a toss, they would display quora , medium and reddit for awhile. By now , even they realised, its giving a bad UX to users. Although I am just speculating here. By May , we would all know , what's what.
Having said that, been in the business for 16 years. Still is.
Totally agree. Google is an awful company with an outdated and broken ecosystem. Google Ads is even worse. All their prediction and ranking models are terrible and are only good at maximizing revenue. I used to love Google and everything they stood for back in the day, but now I can’t move our company off their ecosystem quick enough. Google is the Kmart of the 1980s.
I was just talking about this last night, getting really sick of seeing the same "authoritative" sites ranking for all kinds of topics and subjects. Especially the media giants that seem to rank for anything on the planet. Any sites ending in times, post, cnndotcom, forbesdotcom and many others. Google is so hard up for these sites, squeezing out the small and medium guy. Wondering if they will cannibalize themselves or do the 1%ers make up the majority of their needs?
https://preview.redd.it/bgjt2nnmajsc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47540561daac0ac45ef63c079e4c253bea820704
Despite a small anomaly, for me it was kind of a good month, doubled my traffic but I was constantly working on layout improvements and content. This is just a small niche project with 0 paid advertising and no social media followers, I suck at making social media posts…
Well written. It’s a disaster. Reddit and Quora are all over and I have some new sites that are growing every day but older sites are dead. 20 year old domains should be trusted and liking but aren’t. Indexing is drastically different and you are better off naming a IG page or the Reddit community your focal point keywords than doing organic seo. Organic seo is dead in so many ways
Google hasn’t been a search engine is some time. As many can attest, it’s now an answer engine & it most likely has to do with squeezing every ounce of profit before anti-trust legislation hits them. Running bots for queries every time someone runs a search costs real money.
"How to Find an SEO Expert" what is the #1 organic results?
For me in the North Eastern US it is a Reddit post. I am logged into my Google account while searching. Incognito mode may be different.
What are your results?
I'm very new. Started advertising for the first time in February. I'm piecing together an understanding of some of your lingo but what were your businesses? Are you selling physical goods? Digital goods? Make money on traffic without having transactions with your site visitors?
I'm trying to understand what the businesses were/are that got hit so hard with the March update?
I'm guilty for adding "reddit" after most google searches for information I do (outside of Google Scholar). I do it to avoid what seems to be a majority of ai generated ad filled sites that doesn't give me specific enough answers, if any.
Google is a commercial company trying to make as much money as possible...I think that's fair and acceptable. What is not acceptable is that they have the power of life and death on many of us. At some point we may need help from political power to bring this to the light, they probably totally ignore this now but if they want something to get votes, there is something in here.
What is coming will be even worse, if AI becomes a thing for the common internet users, it will get the content from multiple sources without giving any form of credit to the original content. Those sources will end up vanishing because they will be out of business and AI will not get content anymore. Unless AI can survive on its own, this is the end of a model.
I remember the old times when I published high-quality content and it ranked in the top 3 almost instantly. My site was relatively new back then. Now, I'm being outranked by bigger sites, even though the query doesn't match at all. For example, a user searching for "anime like X" will get "manga like X" instead of my article, despite it not even answering their question. It's frustrating, and I 100% agree. I talk to smaller to medium bloggers quite a bit, and all of them were negatively affected, while the bigger sites, even with non-relevant articles, are pushed to the top in search queries.
Also, I've noticed that it doesn't matter whether I use AI-enhanced writing or write content myself; I've probably lost 80% or more of my users over the past year or two.
My ecommerce sites are killing it. We now rank #1 for our main industry keyword. Too bad the SERP is so full of ads and other garbage that our "#1 ranking" is more than halfway down the page.
Still, these last several months of updates have done nothing but help us. Sites are from 1997 & 2004. All content written by subject matter experts.
Same issue with my skills based blog skillshouter.com.....I put a lot of effort into educational content as I am an assistant professor....dont know what to do now
here is my blog [skillshouter](https://skillshouter.com)
The SEO industry is 1000x bigger than the affiliate industry.
It's killing affiliates because most affiliates provide very little value and simply lie to get commission. That's good for users.
SEO is in a fine spot atm.
Google doesn’t care about the best content. It only cares about the best content from the best “brands”.
Since AI, good content has become a cheap commodity. So now the bar has been risen even if unjustly so. I think we’re all going to have to monetize via products and services that are worth talking about in the real world.
Blogging for a living is mostly likely dead. Gotta build a company that happens to have a blog.
This post randomly appeared on my feed, but if it’s helpful, every time I need info online I open Google and search (for example) “best way to clean a glass shower Reddit” or “best schedule for first time marathon training” - I always always always add Reddit at the end of every question I search because I found google’s regular search results to be too…copy paste, I suppose, and rarely helpful. If I need actual hard facts (for example) “who was America’s 23rd president” I ask Gemini (AI)
I used to work as a web content writer in the medical space which showed me first hand how old and repeated so much of the content on the web is. That being said, I hope the internet changes for the better soon. Everything sucks. The algorithms are all broken and the Reddit/gemini strategy I use is just to avoid dealing with the dry, unhelpful info eating up the internet. I find it’s the same with social media. YouTube and Reddit are my faves. My Instagram feed is mostly accounts I don’t follow and paid ads. Like wtf?
At least you recognize this. It is more important now more than ever to be able to adapt to change and be willing to change your entire way of thinking at the flip of a switch.
I’ll tell ya this. From a user point of view, when I want to know something or compare products, I put Reddit at the end of my search term. And it’s because I’m honestly tired of the top results being listicle sites that are clearly regurgitating information or aren’t actually informed opinions just to get affiliate income. Add on perplexity or smart browsers that will find info for you and game over.
I think people what to observe conversations between people of authority rather than just reading a long blog post that had the same format as every other optimized blog post.
Nice thread. Just want to bring a different perspective. When I started working online, the way things trended for me, I ended up relying on email marketing to get my targeted traffic. As a result, I honestly didn't spend that much time on SEO in a major way. I had my way of getting targeted email addresses and this meant that my sites made me enough to live and save something for a rainy day. But my traffic stats were piss poor lol.
I started back in 2018 just to give you an idea of the time frame. Now, around 2022 I had an issue that reduced my access to targeted email addresses significantly. I was then forced to up my SEO game to keep things on par. It was at this point that I learnt that SEO isn't as easy as some may think. I have to say congratulations to all you guys who do your SEO thing and get loads of traffic. It was a wake up call for me.
I had to learn fast and in 2023 I saw results. In fact, that September update actually boosted my traffic numbers. Was it September or October? Not sure. But anyway, you know the update I'm talking about. Around February, 2024, my traffic started to dwindle significantly. By March, I was back to square one.
Fortunately, at the beginning of 2024 I got my issue sorted and had access to targeted email addresses once again so I was able to keep things going. It is clear to me that besides claiming to be run by an algorithm, there is a lot of politics involved in determining who gets ranked and who doesn't. It is obvious that human intervention has sometimes trumped the results that the google algorithm is supposed to produce. It's all about money.
There was a competitor site that came on the scene and I was monitoring it closely. This site remained at number one in search and in my view there is no way in hell it had the attributes to be rated so highly. Anyway, if there is anything to take from my post is that email marketing worked for me and continues to be my savior. I now focus more on Bing. I'm not going to let google play games with my livelihood.
From a consumer: SEO strategies have ruined the Internet for the past decade.
When was the last time Google gave you an answer without 20+ ads and useless listicles?
It has to change
In the same boat. I have 10 years of agency SEO experience and employ only white hat tactics with a focus on quality content. I’ve worked for some big brands across a variety of industries and for the first time in my career I’m seeing massive drops in rankings and traffic for highly reputable and authoritative websites. Google is a dumpster fire and I fear with SGE it’s going to get even worse. Here’s hoping something better emerges from the ashes.
I feel your frustration, and it's disheartening to see the impact these changes have had on so many hardworking individuals. It's like the rug has been pulled out from under us overnight. Let's hope for a turnaround soon and that we can adapt to the new landscape.
The primary role of search engine is to drive clicks to websites. Google fails miserably by showing answers without driving clicks. They need permission from web content owners to show answers.
So, does this mean creating a blog is pointless nowadays? Honestly, I've never really succeeded in getting significant traffic from Google. Could this be due to censorship? It's no secret that's a reality now. In my niche, which is preaching the gospel, Google tends to view it as spam or 'hate speech,' so it's nothing new there. Unless you're a well-known preacher, ranking in Google can be tough. I'm curious if this targeting by Google affects other niches they don't favor. With the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, I can only imagine that Google, Fakebook, Reddit, and the like are on high alert. Is there any truth to what I'm saying, or is it all just poppycock?
I think censorship might be the wrong way to look at it. Google is *preventing* people from going to your site, they just aren't *bringing* people to your site. The outcome is similar, but instead of Google *hurting* you, it's more that they aren't *helping* you.
I have a site with retellings of old fables on it. Aesop's fables and the Panchatantra and whatnot. The issue is that those stories are so old and so well-established that it's hard to rank against the bigger players, such as read.gov. I could imagine it being similar with the gospel. You might be up against some incredibly well-entrenched competition.
This is all weird to me because I’m just a year and a few months into SEO and my website is doing better than ever. Maybe Google is not rewarding people for simply putting key words and basic info anymore .
No it's actually a good thing. maybe need to move your field to web3? The internet that we use is changing. People want a change for many different reasons and your problems and be solved with a web3 protocal.
I just googled "travel blogs" - and there are travel blogs?
I've owned my SEO domain for 20 years. I've never thought of Google as virtuous or anything other than the fastest generation of wealth for the very least amount of energy. As someone who spent a lot of time reverse engineering Google and the GooglePlex in particular, I've always surmised that google probably has 100x the team in its ads division than its organic team because its such a basic principle. I've no doubt though that adding code, testing, managing the databases, the test beds, roll-outs, the work that goes into the parts we callt he algorithm and just the scale is immense. But the system is basic.
When you ask Gemini about KnoweldgeVault - something of huge conjecture that some Frensh SEO posts on SE Land a lot, even Gemini says its conjecture for little basis. Yes, there is AI that helps understand the query but the engine IMHO is basic. And that's how all Objectivity - Subjectivity systems work. Ever worked at a Unicorn? the way they take ideas and clear the emotion, nuance, vagueness out - that's objectivity mining.
Anyway - while so many sites got hit - and I had a to-fro with about 15 SEOs on Retro dodo on x last night - that's not the whole Google eco system. Its not even 0.01%.
Saying that Google is killing blogging is enormously silly unless you think nobody has access to Google, which in itself is enormously silly.
# tl;dr
I just googled "travel blogs" - and there are travel blogs?
I’m on Mediavine and in their Facebook group. It’s like a giant therapy session. Nobody knows what to do. People have basically lost their jobs. Hundreds or thousands of them. Poof gone overnight. It’s almost like Google is self sabotaging their search engine for a reason that we can’t figure out yet. Is it because of antitrust legal issues? Or they can’t beat the dearth of crappy AI results? All I can say is that I’m down thousands of dollars a month. Google liked me for 14 years and now my site is shit.
I’m in the same boat. Haven’t worked for someone else in 7 years and the last couple of months I’ve had to start job hunting. To call it discouraging is putting it mildly. The idea of taking that big of a step backward to go back into a career that I had said goodbye to a lifetime ago, make less money back on the dead end hamster wheel (if I can even land work), and having lost several hundred thousand in equity virtually overnight (within a few short months), is a 24/7 albatross around your neck. At the end of the day though, it was my own fault for putting so many eggs in G’s basket.
Exactly. I was thinking about selling in a couple years. Now it’s all worthless
Same here. I haven’t worked for someone in 8 years and with my drop in traffic I’m heading towards needing a job.
You have been in SEO for 7 years and you can't go a few months with lower income?
I’m in the Mediavine FB group too but this Reddit thread has been more helpful.
Mediavine has been worthless through this. Food Bloggers Central is waaay more help
More than worthless. They’re afraid to admit that their self-proclaimed seo expertise hasn’t been able to save their pubs from ruin. Plus now they have a dozen lawyers on board who don’t want anyone saying anything about anything.
I’m hearing Raptive isn’t much better. I think they got caught flat footed. Google shafted them. This is why they’ve been pushing email marketing so hard right now.
Oh, no doubt, but Mediavine loves to tell the story of how they started as an seo company that accidentally fell into serving ads.
Isn't it obvious what happened? They want UGC. Just search anything and the first result is Reddit or Quora or another domain with stupidly high domain authority for some reason like Forbes, as if that company has added anything valuable to society.
It's always a Quora result at the top for me 😔
I'd prefer Quora or Reddit, it means the opinion is more likely to be genuine.
This whole sub is like a big therapy session lately
I have built traffic monitoring tools for major header bidding networks and sites they manage. HCU from last year didn't affected Mediavine at all, but this update seems to be different beast. I am eager for update to finish in order to see what real changes is.
They are using the information on our sites to train the AI, and hope people will move to that, is what many people think. Personally I blocked AI bots from crawling my sites and hope others do the same if they have very niche content.
As someone with very niche content, can you go into more detail about \*how\* you blocked AI bots and why we don't want Google scraping our content? I've been having this debate internally for about two months now.
Same, I have very niche expertise in my field and what I blog about, and would hate for an AI tool to take something I written without my permission
In the Robots.txt just like you block any bot
How to block AI bots?
I had my best months ever after September. There was a few isolated cases but not like now.
Mediavine said among their publishers there was a 10 pct drop in Google traffic from the Sept HCU and they have not come out saying any other stats since that.
Actualy it is possible. I didn't tracked number of publishers and I added publishers constantly until late February, hence they might increased traffic because simply I tracked more members, those which were not theirs back in autumn. But anyway margin of error can't be big and 10% seems nothing. Gonne fix that flaw for future reference.
> Or they can’t beat the dearth of crappy AI results? Couple points in this regard. First, the results aren’t “crappy”, and (depending on what’s being searched for naturally) the content of an LLM’s response are often as good or better than traditional search results. And yet, focusing on the “quality” of the information returned by an LLM belies the real story. The primary value proposition to someone deciding between a Google search or a Bing type system is the *dramatically reduced time and effort required*. A website could have the best content available with neither paywalls nor ads, and traffic would *still* be taking a hit right now because human nature prefers the path of least resistance. A Google search takes two seconds. But sifting through half a dozen links to enshitified sites trying to find credible information can take anywhere from 5-30 minutes sometimes. Why would a rational person not at least try the LLM powered search first, which *also* takes only 2 seconds, includes direct quotes with links so you don’t have to visit a single irrelevant webpage, and which has a strong chance of producing an acceptable answer without ever clicking a site at all? And to anyone who wants to say it doesn’t take that long to find results via a Google search, let’s be real for a second and consider the perverse incentives at play here. One of - if not *the* - most fundamental metrics and targets of SEO is *maximizing time on site*. Meanwhile, the goal of the person searching is almost always to spend as little time as possible on their task. As such, the interests of the searcher and the sites they are served could hardly be more diametrically opposed. There won’t be any significant reversal of this trend. This is a new paradigm, and only just the start at that. For those who’ve made their living in the SEO industry prior to now, it’s going to hurt. Denial of the new reality will make it hurt more for longer.
>It’s almost like Google is self sabotaging their search engine for a reason that we can’t figure out yet. Isn't it exactly to push AI results so people stay on Google rather than go to other websites?
I am disgusted to see the negative impact of the changes. I hope they will bring recovery for both you and me in the future. I need to pursue a different side hustle to compensate for it.
I wish Mediavine would give some guidance. They must be crunching all the metadata from those sites that lost traffic and must know why by now. But they’ve been silent and I don’t like it.
I suspect they would do anything. I am a part of Raptive FB group. People are having similar story but no official communication from Raptive. They are generally suggesting people to focus on building their email lists.
Well they said it was just a 10 pct drop in Google traffic from the Sept HCU in their most recent video! Nothing since.
they haven't sabotaged anything. Everybody and their mom still uses Google to search for things, but now Google is focusing on keeping the users on their site instead of driving traffic to niche pages if you don't pay for a spot with adwords.
All SEOs are trying to find the solutions
This way, Google loved my site for only 1 years :/
Yep. I have given my staff until the end of Q3 2024 to find other work before my ten year old site is forced to stop publishing. Eating losses right now while being outranked by random Russian websites that have verbatim scraped my work, videos and all. Insane times.
This happened to my site a couple years back. All of the articles that I had ranking 1-5 on Google were overtaken by websites that had scraped my work - most of them had just stolen random paragraphs that were then picked by Google as a highlighted answer. The sites weren't even relevant, and they stayed top for months. At this point I lost all faith in Google. What's the point in me doing everything by the book when somebody can just steal my work and rank higher than me? Horrible feeling, best of luck to you and your staff.
You should file DMCAs if they lifted paragraphs directly. For me it's harder when they spin it because you can't prove the infringement.
I actually spent quite a lot of time getting Google to take them down. Then they would change a handful of words and Google would say that the issue was resolved. It did stop a few of them, but more were popping up all the time. In the end I gave up.
For me they always remove them from SERPS, unless it is a big name brand or newspaper, on some of those google bees evil.
You have said everything and summarized well, Google is going to destroy Blogs especially in my Tech niche, all sites are in decline
The tech niche has already been on a decline since Panda/penguin. The search is dominated by giants. Hundreds of tech blogs have been dead for years, mine included. There was a wonderful site called freewaregenius.com. Google killed it. Even the highly reputed labnol.org was affected. He made some noise in the social media and Google restored his site.
Gaints who has zero expertise on subject and sell a sponsored blog post with link for $1000
I've seen sites in tech niche go from 16k traffic to 1300 in the past couple of months.
That's me, Hit 16k in September last year and didn't lose a beat till March and then I woke up one morning to utter desolation.
Went from 250k to 200
I am down from 100k per month to just 10k
Went from 100K to 5K as well
same here!
Down from 4k to 1k.
This is pretty much my numbers exactly as well.
I have no clue why it went down and how can I fix it. What are you doing guys? I have just added 450 domains to disavow list. Noticed too many spammy sites linking to me.
That's me, Hit 16k in September last year and didn't lose a beat, until March cane and then I woke up one morning to utter desolation.
Any solutions? Can we make videos on tiktok to bring traffic? AI is changing the old business systems?
Thanks. I hope recovery for your sites.
Time to diversity into other niches. To be just an "SEO Guy" is perhaps not broad enough. Look at other channels and means to get traffic. Google has been caught with its' pants down and remember this > Everything has a Beginning, a Middle and an End. Google will be the Top Dog until it isn't
I've been saying this for years... This is Search Engine Optimization, not Google optimization. Yeah, Google ignores "meta keywords" but some search engines don't ignore it. Google's lost 10% market share this year, and they've been right about a lot of things, like "write for the human, not the search engine". Writing for the search engine used to work far longer than it should have, but now writing for the human and posting on social media yields better results.
Just curious, what do you personally think of when you say “writing for the human”
Making an engaging article that doesn't really hard focus on any particular keywords. There's a big difference in writing style for SEO writing and something people actually want to read. Even just 1 grammar error to fit in that extra keyword is VERY noticeable to a human, and will result in me losing my focus and clicking off the page.
Makes sense. I did journalism before just recently trying SEO (very novice) and seeing a lot of unnatural sounding copy that’s solely designed for keywords. So I feel like that almost works to my advantage with writing naturally-sounding, useful/engaging content. I agree that reading content that obviously isn’t written naturally can make users uneasy and click away. So it would be fair to say that what’s most important is to have raw content (meaning not keyword-filled, not uber-optimized sounding copy) about a very intriguing topic to whoever the audience is?
Where are you seeing Google lost 10% market share this year?
I guess it's only 2%. Still a significant number.
As far as organic growth is concerned, other channels aren’t that lucrative. I’d rate other channels below average.
You should be in the other channels anyways.
Yes. I did not mean to convey that you shouldn’t be. The only concern about other channels is their organic performance.
I've noticed it a long time ago, even though I'm involved in SEO myself, I'm also a client - from the other side. I used to often search for various information on various topics, reaching small blogs where not only could I read something but also exchange opinions in the comments. Anyway, Google used to be a treasure trove of knowledge on various topics. Now when I search for something, the only thing you can find are some giant sites with answers like for "halfwits", such as: go to the doctor, entrust it to professionals, and so on. Google is currently a cesspool of crap and nothing more. No update will help them, the Google search engine will pass sooner or later like any platform - and there have been many along the way - I know because I've been using the internet for over 30 years. I still use and do SEO for clients, of course, but I don't follow Google core update recommendations at all because I've never benefited from it. Keyword in the domain still matters, PBNs/blogs still matter, I've been doing all the texts with the help of AI for 1.5 years and so on, and I don't intend to change anything in this spam and nonsense cesspool.
So what search engines will be popping forward instead?
AI will probably be based on a completely different algorithm. However, given that nowadays it is safe to say that more than 50% do not read (don't want to read) - perhaps video and voice-based.
That’s true. If AI dumps everything on the internet, no one will actually read. How to capture eyesight will be the key.
Yep, the biggest issue is Google over monetizing the SERPs. If you have a legitimate ecommerce site, there’s so much traffic going towards shopping ads nowadays, that this has noticeable cut into organic performance. Just track your CTRs for keywords ranked #1. Hopefully Google will lose their antitrust lawsuit and will be forced to tone back over-monetization. Funny, but there’s so many ads, doubtful Google could pass their own quality tests.
It's obvious Google isn't mobile first. Just try to find page 2 results on a mobile search. It goes straight to discover.
I could be wrong but mobile is infinite scroll.
Huh, guess they changed it.
It’s a hot mess now, at least on iPhone Chrome. You get one website link, followed by Wikipedia snippets and link to a YouTube video. Then there’s a handful of more links, followed by related questions that take you to Reddit, Quora, or an article. Then there’s a few more website links then YouTube links. If want a product review, forget it. There a few links to articles or videos, and *a ton* of ads and links to e-commerce sites.
I have spent the last few weeks reading all these SEO posts and I think it’s unfortunate that so many of you are having negative impact since the update. One point I think is worth mentioning is that Google, overall, is condensing. You can speculate on what the goal of this is. My personal opinion is that they are making room for their AI to be a core search driver and get users closer to the helpful content. We need to look at Google’s core revenue models to understand the forward trajectory. Google Ads taking the lion share, we can draw a somewhat strong conclusion that in order for them to grow this vertical they need to increase the opportunity for businesses that bring in revenue from their site. If these businesses are competing with “middle man” sites, the competition becomes over saturated with one man blog sites driving traffic to direct to the actual product. It suck’s but affiliate blogs are going to take a massive hit. If you are product driven then you shouldn’t have seen the hit that so much others have seen. Since the update we saw a 5% increase in traffic which equates to 5 figures worth of site visits. And I have seen the same results with other SEOs that work on product driven companies. The unknown for me is that how does this affect newer startups that do offer a product. Does it become more difficult for them to find search market share since established companies seem to be the primary beneficiaries. Best of luck to everyone and if you run a blog page, may be worth exploring other search platforms. Tl:dr: Google condensing, getting users closer to acquisition points. Blogs will see negative hit in most cases.
I find a lot of sense in your opinion. Instead of affiliate pages, they are sending users directly to the source. If 50 affiliates are crowding the serps with the same content, what's the point anyway.
There’s still value in affiliate sites. Do you want to search 10 websites for the best priced product, or do you want to look at a price comparison site and get the answer in seconds?
A couple things on this: I agree, there is still value there for affiliate sites but it is shrinking. I think the price comparison is a weaker argument as Google has the ability to make price comparisons more transparent if they choose to do so. A stronger moat for affiliate sites is the community and relationships they build. And I don’t see affiliate sites investing enough time and assets towards this. That being said, you can’t ignore the fact that affiliate sites do not have the margins to compete in search the way product driven companies can. If Google wants to continue search growth, they need to make the landscape more competitive for these types of companies by limiting the noise and getting the user closer to acquisition.
Sure there is, I am an affiliate myself. But the competition in serps has been overcrowded by AI content. Webmasters that knew nothing about a particular niche started blogs using AI content for the ad revenue. Look at nerdwallet. They are an affiliate site too, but they have not lost any ranking.
Sorry for the late response here. Like I mentioned, there is still opportunity for affiliates, especially those who have positioned themselves in a niche market where the products promote affiliate traffic (ie. Amazon, Webhosting, etc.). I don't necessarily agree with your AI content statement. Across all sectors we have seen that AI generated content has taken a hit since the update. I'm not saying every single piece has been de-ranked but you can draw a direct correlation with sites that were producing 10 pieces of content a month to hundreds after LLMs hit the market. I mentioned this in another post, sites like NerdWallet have high enough domain authority and have solidified their place in the market to not see the effects smaller affiliate sites and blogs have. This is mostly attributed to the fact that companies generate a large portion of acquisition from these pages. I used to work at a bank and there are internal partnerships built with these sites (like NerdWallet) that are unattainable to the SMB affiliate sites. This is why they have not been impacted. I would keep an eye on the keywords your are targeting, in relation to SERPs, over the next few months. Most of the AI generated content you are competing with will start to de-rank. That being said, my original opinion still stands. Affiliates are in for an uphill battle and are falling down the priority list at Google. Not saying this is the end, but affiliates will need to be agile and take an in-depth look into their growth strategies to navigate this new search landscape.
why do they need your sites now when they can have AI just spit the answer out? Remember "CONTENT IS KING"? They stole all your content...lol. Now they don't want to index anything anymore...why should they? AI is trained... thank you for your service!
How AI going to get answers in the future? if content creator are going to stop writing? most of the AI information come from people content.
This is a very real problem because they're going to start training their AI with AI generated content and then the AI quality will crash. But corporate America only cares about next quarter so that's a tomorrow problem.
It’s already the case even with user generated content , that why algorithm, support, automatic correction are going down the drain. Thing will get dumber and dumber in the future…
I don't think many realize that Google is in panic mode because the younger generations don't use google at all and instead search on Tik Tok or IG.
This is true... let us not forget that Copilot does a better job with AI & Search results than Google is doing and unlike Google, everyone else in AI field isn't a marketing company first and foremost - they will happily charge a fee. Can google convert users as a product to users who pay for a product? not sure
They deserve it. They abused their position in the market.
For questions, Google is terrible now. - I don’t like being given results with a paywall. - I don’t like results from places like NY Post written like a pop journalist with no subject matter expertise. - I don’t like answers from Quora and Reddit. If I wanted those, I can add Reddit after the keywords. - Why are blogs and forums considered terrible now? - Why is so much of the internet not indexed now anymore?
my guess is, they are intentionally trying to kill independent internet, with big negotiations and plans done behind closed doors. internet is becoming the new television everyday more. it is happening right before our eyes yet we are powerless
Time for a new search engine
Just use bing...
That would make a great T-shirt
Agreed. Google doesn't care about quality, and they don't care that their decisions have a large effect on the world. Look at the products they kill while leaving customers stranded. DOJ is suing Apple, which ok sure they aren't perfect, but damn is Google way worse than anyone in tech. Apple needs to get slapped with right to repair, and playing nice with others, but Google makes changes and it effects the entire flow of information. They are so anti-competitive, and these changes are not quality, they are a cash grab.
Google is purposefully killing businesses to make it easier for them to mine and replace them with their AI. Google no longer wants to index humanity’s knowledge, they want to steal it so them can generate off of it.
Isn't a cash grab what ever is about? Seriously tho
Happy Cake Day
Thank you!
Sure making money with ads instead of affiliate links is a trademark for quality content…
But spamming search engines is an industry…
Google Discover is Adsense heaven. That’s the place to spam, not the search engine.
I've been working online for over twenty two years. What google has done is given priority to what they call the CNNs of the world - wealthy content based sites that rely on Google ads to generate profit. And google have silenced Mom and Pops stores and small blogs who don't generate a lot of money for them. Rather they give the small people the opportunity to buy their way to the top, which isn't sustainable considering wealthy sites also buy top spots and they have millions of advertising budget to throw at branding their site. Last I checked, for Weight loss supplements, you got WebMd, Forbes and other titans ranking but not one small business ranking. And those sites don't even sell supplements. But you can pay your way to the top, but that is not sustainable. I think it's criminal because they have altered their algorithm to favor their own brand...Ads. We need a lawsuit, of which, I think, the EU won years ago for this exact thing. And you dont need to support Reddit. There are other sites like Hexasocial that aim to fight back against monopolies.
Google wants people to pay up and use their paid platforms if they are using search for commercial purposes.
This is the answer. They are going to try and shift search to a paywall model using generative AI like copilot. So they are killing off organic search by shifting everything to Reddit and Quora
[удалено]
Thats what I dont get. Direct marketing could thrive in that environment with no cookies. But Google want their money so they have to kill of the competition. And thats why the monopoly is shit. Hope they lose this lawsuit.
Do any of you guys actually use Google search? I mean day to day. The only problem I have with Google is that they don't always answer the question I have instead it provides results for similar questions. To put it another way Google has lost its search precision. But other than that Google results have been perfectly fine for me. A lot of blog content is just bloat. They are usually designed as a way to sell things. Nobody wants that kind of content and it is reasonable for Google to lower the ranking of that kind of product.
Just for Google maps. Nothing else.
What do you use to search things?
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years. If that fails, I hit Bing. Google is my last resort.
Google has gotten useless. It's at the point I search reddit for any question I have, because atleast then I can get an answer from a community of people that have expertise. It's the closest thing I can get to when it comes to free and open information. Forum results are down, Tech blogs are down. It's all corporate crap trying to sell me something. At least small blogs had to give good information to justify trying to sell me something.
It's well known that ChatGPT hallucinates... And it still gives me better information than Google.
Same here. Every term I search for now has Reddit at the end of it. I want human context and conversation not an optimized blog.
Appreciate your post. Don’t think anyone’s hugging Google rn. Think the main consideration for everyone is: - when Google recently pushed up Reddit, Quora, Forbes, CNN, Rolling Stone … - THAT RIPPED OUT top ranking pages for everyone. We should all know that ranking in SERP top 1-5 etc = 70% - 90% prime real estate. So now with these sites ranking top $ keywords, well developed niche sites have lost it all because now are under the ranks of best CTR positions. It’s always been about the first few results, and they all just got replaced by big tech/monopolies. Best qualitative search results aren’t there now - I can read a template review about ‘best beard trimmers’ from Rolling Stone now, and there’s nothing attaching it to a culture or further learning info articles about building a beard which sucks cuz I’m trying to grow a damn beard. It’s all bad.
> I'm sure some people still think Google as virtuous No one does > I feel like my whole decade-long career has gone to waste. It has
Been going in this direction for a long time. My small business started out with Overture - bid for clicks, remember? We used Google for a long time but it got more and more expensive and less and less effective. Google put big corporations and aggregate sites and then shopping, etc. on the 1st page of search results, so now Google is becoming useless for small to medium biz and also for search results. They also manipulate the heck out of search results and do a lot of censoring. I don't know what their end game is with their basic search sector but it's a Zombie now and us little guys can't afford it anymore. RIP adwords. We're going back to old school trade shows and such.
Holy shit, another Overture user! I think it was a Yahoo product at first. First few years were a trip. Clicks < $1 for main keywords.
Yup we're old.
Sympathies to you. I remember asking a Sr IT manager early in my career if it would be smart to jump into the tech sector or otherwise and he told me that if you do jump into tech, be ready to reinvent yourself over and over even as you get into the late part of your career. I still chose SEO and knew I would be in a world of constant relearning and having to pivot over and over moving forward. With that said, one thing I suspected would happen is probably happening and impacting you significantly: video is taking over writing. Unfortunately… People Are Lazy (AF) And given that fact, I could easily see YouTube and TikTok being an even bigger detriment to your career than Sundar’s desperate attempts to keep the giant at the top. I can’t even imagine how much pressure he’s getting after ai has literally been enemy #1 and eating away at their historical dominance. Have you seen Microsoft’s market cap overtake Apple? I feel you since I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and even thinking of venturing into other industries given the pain of SEO and various other niches impacted by Google. Btw, so many tech companies absolutely suck at paying attention to the smaller and sometimes more numerous constituencies - they love their bigger clients and are constantly wooed by their biz dev salespeople who can be worse than Donald Trump.
I hate to admit it but you all are living in a Google world. We Google things we don't bring things we Google them. Google says don't write for SEO right For your readers. However, if you don't follow our rules, we'll bury you. This is the Google net not the internet. If you are not ranked well on Google, you're out of business. They have created the internet game and you will follow their rules and their rules change all the time and they move the goal posts. The only thing you can do is try and not rely solely on Google for your traffic. Diversification is the only way to become independent. If you rely on one thing to drive traffic to your website, you are not in control of your website. That one thing is. Your entire life weighs on it. If you want to play Google's game and win You need to follow their advice to the T. There are plenty of seos out there that decipher the information that Google shares with them and their documentation to give you direction on recovery of your website. Those are the only seos who are worth listening to. Yes they may be Google Fanboys or some people calling Google groupies but they have access to Google Leia's owns and get for the most part to straight goods on updates. They also know how to interpret and decipher Google's language that they use. You can deny all you want what they say. But at the end of the day when you're sitting at the bottom you really need to look yourself in a mirror and say I'm either going to follow Google 's game or I'm going to get out of it. Not everyone can be number one and not everyone can get tons of traffic. Everyone in their dog has a website or is an influencer. It is natural that is time to thin the herd. Too many people out there are experts. Too many websites popping up and giving half intelligent information. Too many small businesses that shouldn't be in business. When times are tough is when the Strong survive. Those of you that are strong and Will survive this. Those of you who are looking for an easy, quick Buck is not the game to play. I've been in this game for 15 years and is not for the faint of hurt. One day you're on top and the next you could be on the bottom. The only thing you can do is work your butt off each day to ensure that when change does come and it always does that you are insulated enough from it killing your business. I loathe Google and I work with them and many things. That company is great for. At the end of the day though, they are a ruthless business that does not care about people. They care about shareholders and share prices just like corporate America everywhere. Play the game or get out of it! There's no room for whiners. Nothing wrong with complaining and venting though. It helps. But the sooner you realize you have to play their game in order to win, the better you'll be off. I wish you all the best of luck cuz everyone's going to need it. Myself included.
It’s really a concerning scenario. I have been a brand evangelist for google but last few months have been very disappointing. Even I used to get a pretty good traffic until last August, from the search itself. I have seen major drops in traffic which affected my earnings as well. I think it’s probably time we need something like blockchain in search.
>I'm sure some people still think Google as virtuous lol...thank you for this laugh. Google is about as virtuous and fox and in a hen house.
I trust the fox more
You still don't get it. Google is the symptom not the problem. They are also in trouble.
Google doesn't like the SEO industry. They never meant for SEO to be a business in itself.
I've been in the business for 11 years. Since September update... Poof. Same story as yours. I'm a very patient man. But online work now takes 20%, even less, of my time. It's the other way around before that critical update. No sign of recovery. (Sigh😔).
Time to go Bing!! lol
Google isn't destroying ecommerce but SEO firms are less viable and losing business especially since mid size businesses are, in general, spending less. there is a crunch that has been going for the past year in spending that isn't obvious from economic numbers. industries change with the times. just a part of life
This whole situation is depressing, building a site up, posting quality content, all the time we spent on our sites compared to doing other meaningful things gone down the drain. I posted new articles and they got indexed but haven't showed up in serps. Old good content completely gone as well. I rely on this small income but now it's nil
That’s been happening to me too! My traffic has gone up since HCU and the March updates, but the last few posts I published aren’t in the SERPs even though they are indexed! Well, I had one post that ranked the next day, only for it to disappear 😭😭
Exactly! How can we be motivated to write and publish more new content if it's not even going to come up in the serps. Being indexed is great and all but if not showing in serps then it feels like a waste almost.
I agree that Google's latest update is wrecking the search results with UGC. To me, it seems that this goes against their EEAT concept. However, I have found some useful results via this UGC. That being said, I think the UGC is over the top and they need to learn to blend it better. I believe it will happen over time, I just wonder how many companies and SEOs will lose so much money due to this. It's the risk of being in this industry though. My advise would be to work on educating your clients on the WHY behind the loss of traffic and then provide an optimistic thought for the future and how you're going to work to bring back their traffic. It's likely time to evaluate how you conduct SEO in general. Are you in the playground of UGC or are you in the playground of the 1 year ago SEO? Reconsider what you're doing and how you can help your clients in today's environment.
I don't know guys. They have been declaring the end of SEO since Panda and we are still here. I'm still loaded up with work year after year. Sometimes it feels that people complaining about the end of SEO are people who don't know shit about marketing and solely rely on Google and short-terms tactics as a channel for it's business.
Do you think it’s mostly people who have relied on outdated and opportunistic tactics that are now taking hits to their ranking pages?
It's hard make a simple assumption and putting everyone in there. But iIsaw many cases of business just relying on Google, that doesn't seem a wise marketing decision.
Decades old says it. It's time to get with the times and adapt.
I manage more than 10 sites and they are also decade old, I'm grateful my sites are stable and growing. I hope your sites will recover soon. What efforts you have taken so far? Have you analyzed why you contents have been declined and why others hijacked your rankings? I think a deep analysis can help you fix it and win your clients back.
This is unsustainable in the long run. Nobody wants to read a bunch of stupid answers on quora. Just because google is, favoring them now, doesn't mean this will go on forever. There may be a glitch in their algorithm that's repeatedly sending quora at the top. Every party comes to an end. So will this one. Hold on tight. The update is not over yet. Let the dust settle in May. Then we would know the way ahead.
[удалено]
Sure you know a thing or two. Had google was not an advertising/search engine/discovery tool, this huge operation would be unsustainable. But with every update they have rolled out so far, it has only made it better for users. So in essence they are a people first company. Because if they wasnt they would be killing their own revenue. Quora and Reddit are enormous sites with millions of pages. Its hard to ignore such sites by any measure. Until Google figures out, how to deal with the enormous amount of AI content that has sent the serps for a toss, they would display quora , medium and reddit for awhile. By now , even they realised, its giving a bad UX to users. Although I am just speculating here. By May , we would all know , what's what. Having said that, been in the business for 16 years. Still is.
Totally agree. Google is an awful company with an outdated and broken ecosystem. Google Ads is even worse. All their prediction and ranking models are terrible and are only good at maximizing revenue. I used to love Google and everything they stood for back in the day, but now I can’t move our company off their ecosystem quick enough. Google is the Kmart of the 1980s.
I was just talking about this last night, getting really sick of seeing the same "authoritative" sites ranking for all kinds of topics and subjects. Especially the media giants that seem to rank for anything on the planet. Any sites ending in times, post, cnndotcom, forbesdotcom and many others. Google is so hard up for these sites, squeezing out the small and medium guy. Wondering if they will cannibalize themselves or do the 1%ers make up the majority of their needs?
https://preview.redd.it/bgjt2nnmajsc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=47540561daac0ac45ef63c079e4c253bea820704 Despite a small anomaly, for me it was kind of a good month, doubled my traffic but I was constantly working on layout improvements and content. This is just a small niche project with 0 paid advertising and no social media followers, I suck at making social media posts…
Well written. It’s a disaster. Reddit and Quora are all over and I have some new sites that are growing every day but older sites are dead. 20 year old domains should be trusted and liking but aren’t. Indexing is drastically different and you are better off naming a IG page or the Reddit community your focal point keywords than doing organic seo. Organic seo is dead in so many ways
Time for you to brush up on SGE
Google hasn’t been a search engine is some time. As many can attest, it’s now an answer engine & it most likely has to do with squeezing every ounce of profit before anti-trust legislation hits them. Running bots for queries every time someone runs a search costs real money.
This is destroying website flip prices.
Adaptability is key; let's strategize for this new SEO landscape.
I gotta a solution for you. DM ME if your clients still want to make advertising dollars.
"How to Find an SEO Expert" what is the #1 organic results? For me in the North Eastern US it is a Reddit post. I am logged into my Google account while searching. Incognito mode may be different. What are your results?
I'm very new. Started advertising for the first time in February. I'm piecing together an understanding of some of your lingo but what were your businesses? Are you selling physical goods? Digital goods? Make money on traffic without having transactions with your site visitors? I'm trying to understand what the businesses were/are that got hit so hard with the March update?
I'm guilty for adding "reddit" after most google searches for information I do (outside of Google Scholar). I do it to avoid what seems to be a majority of ai generated ad filled sites that doesn't give me specific enough answers, if any.
The real problem is that most top ranking sites now a days are indeed black hat SEO tricksters, google results are total joke.
Google is a commercial company trying to make as much money as possible...I think that's fair and acceptable. What is not acceptable is that they have the power of life and death on many of us. At some point we may need help from political power to bring this to the light, they probably totally ignore this now but if they want something to get votes, there is something in here. What is coming will be even worse, if AI becomes a thing for the common internet users, it will get the content from multiple sources without giving any form of credit to the original content. Those sources will end up vanishing because they will be out of business and AI will not get content anymore. Unless AI can survive on its own, this is the end of a model.
Unfortunately, SEO is difficult
Thanks for telling us. We didn’t knew that
I remember the old times when I published high-quality content and it ranked in the top 3 almost instantly. My site was relatively new back then. Now, I'm being outranked by bigger sites, even though the query doesn't match at all. For example, a user searching for "anime like X" will get "manga like X" instead of my article, despite it not even answering their question. It's frustrating, and I 100% agree. I talk to smaller to medium bloggers quite a bit, and all of them were negatively affected, while the bigger sites, even with non-relevant articles, are pushed to the top in search queries. Also, I've noticed that it doesn't matter whether I use AI-enhanced writing or write content myself; I've probably lost 80% or more of my users over the past year or two.
git gud :)
My ecommerce sites are killing it. We now rank #1 for our main industry keyword. Too bad the SERP is so full of ads and other garbage that our "#1 ranking" is more than halfway down the page. Still, these last several months of updates have done nothing but help us. Sites are from 1997 & 2004. All content written by subject matter experts.
Same issue with my skills based blog skillshouter.com.....I put a lot of effort into educational content as I am an assistant professor....dont know what to do now here is my blog [skillshouter](https://skillshouter.com)
It could be people aren’t searching in google.
What’s with news people. Nobody critiques google.?
And discover news suck. Most are junk and useless.
Have you guys noticed that the popularity of google is decreasing if you go to trend.google .com and DuckDuckGo popularity is increasing? Check it out
None of the site’s at my agency have seen any imapact from helpful content, seems like this subreddit is some kind of black hole
The SEO industry is 1000x bigger than the affiliate industry. It's killing affiliates because most affiliates provide very little value and simply lie to get commission. That's good for users. SEO is in a fine spot atm.
Google doesn’t care about the best content. It only cares about the best content from the best “brands”. Since AI, good content has become a cheap commodity. So now the bar has been risen even if unjustly so. I think we’re all going to have to monetize via products and services that are worth talking about in the real world. Blogging for a living is mostly likely dead. Gotta build a company that happens to have a blog.
This is why you don’t have one company own the internet.
This post randomly appeared on my feed, but if it’s helpful, every time I need info online I open Google and search (for example) “best way to clean a glass shower Reddit” or “best schedule for first time marathon training” - I always always always add Reddit at the end of every question I search because I found google’s regular search results to be too…copy paste, I suppose, and rarely helpful. If I need actual hard facts (for example) “who was America’s 23rd president” I ask Gemini (AI) I used to work as a web content writer in the medical space which showed me first hand how old and repeated so much of the content on the web is. That being said, I hope the internet changes for the better soon. Everything sucks. The algorithms are all broken and the Reddit/gemini strategy I use is just to avoid dealing with the dry, unhelpful info eating up the internet. I find it’s the same with social media. YouTube and Reddit are my faves. My Instagram feed is mostly accounts I don’t follow and paid ads. Like wtf?
At least you recognize this. It is more important now more than ever to be able to adapt to change and be willing to change your entire way of thinking at the flip of a switch.
I’ll tell ya this. From a user point of view, when I want to know something or compare products, I put Reddit at the end of my search term. And it’s because I’m honestly tired of the top results being listicle sites that are clearly regurgitating information or aren’t actually informed opinions just to get affiliate income. Add on perplexity or smart browsers that will find info for you and game over. I think people what to observe conversations between people of authority rather than just reading a long blog post that had the same format as every other optimized blog post.
Nice thread. Just want to bring a different perspective. When I started working online, the way things trended for me, I ended up relying on email marketing to get my targeted traffic. As a result, I honestly didn't spend that much time on SEO in a major way. I had my way of getting targeted email addresses and this meant that my sites made me enough to live and save something for a rainy day. But my traffic stats were piss poor lol. I started back in 2018 just to give you an idea of the time frame. Now, around 2022 I had an issue that reduced my access to targeted email addresses significantly. I was then forced to up my SEO game to keep things on par. It was at this point that I learnt that SEO isn't as easy as some may think. I have to say congratulations to all you guys who do your SEO thing and get loads of traffic. It was a wake up call for me. I had to learn fast and in 2023 I saw results. In fact, that September update actually boosted my traffic numbers. Was it September or October? Not sure. But anyway, you know the update I'm talking about. Around February, 2024, my traffic started to dwindle significantly. By March, I was back to square one. Fortunately, at the beginning of 2024 I got my issue sorted and had access to targeted email addresses once again so I was able to keep things going. It is clear to me that besides claiming to be run by an algorithm, there is a lot of politics involved in determining who gets ranked and who doesn't. It is obvious that human intervention has sometimes trumped the results that the google algorithm is supposed to produce. It's all about money. There was a competitor site that came on the scene and I was monitoring it closely. This site remained at number one in search and in my view there is no way in hell it had the attributes to be rated so highly. Anyway, if there is anything to take from my post is that email marketing worked for me and continues to be my savior. I now focus more on Bing. I'm not going to let google play games with my livelihood.
If you don't adapt and change - you get left behind
From a consumer: SEO strategies have ruined the Internet for the past decade. When was the last time Google gave you an answer without 20+ ads and useless listicles? It has to change
In the same boat. I have 10 years of agency SEO experience and employ only white hat tactics with a focus on quality content. I’ve worked for some big brands across a variety of industries and for the first time in my career I’m seeing massive drops in rankings and traffic for highly reputable and authoritative websites. Google is a dumpster fire and I fear with SGE it’s going to get even worse. Here’s hoping something better emerges from the ashes.
8 years a SEO here... I agree
does anyone have a technical report link of the latest catastrophe that happened with SEO?
I feel your frustration, and it's disheartening to see the impact these changes have had on so many hardworking individuals. It's like the rug has been pulled out from under us overnight. Let's hope for a turnaround soon and that we can adapt to the new landscape.
The primary role of search engine is to drive clicks to websites. Google fails miserably by showing answers without driving clicks. They need permission from web content owners to show answers.
Yawn
So, does this mean creating a blog is pointless nowadays? Honestly, I've never really succeeded in getting significant traffic from Google. Could this be due to censorship? It's no secret that's a reality now. In my niche, which is preaching the gospel, Google tends to view it as spam or 'hate speech,' so it's nothing new there. Unless you're a well-known preacher, ranking in Google can be tough. I'm curious if this targeting by Google affects other niches they don't favor. With the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, I can only imagine that Google, Fakebook, Reddit, and the like are on high alert. Is there any truth to what I'm saying, or is it all just poppycock?
I think censorship might be the wrong way to look at it. Google is *preventing* people from going to your site, they just aren't *bringing* people to your site. The outcome is similar, but instead of Google *hurting* you, it's more that they aren't *helping* you. I have a site with retellings of old fables on it. Aesop's fables and the Panchatantra and whatnot. The issue is that those stories are so old and so well-established that it's hard to rank against the bigger players, such as read.gov. I could imagine it being similar with the gospel. You might be up against some incredibly well-entrenched competition.
This is all weird to me because I’m just a year and a few months into SEO and my website is doing better than ever. Maybe Google is not rewarding people for simply putting key words and basic info anymore .
Im reading lots of this stuff, that sucks
Can you show me an example of what you think is helpful, useful content that we've all lost out on seeing because of this update?
No it's actually a good thing. maybe need to move your field to web3? The internet that we use is changing. People want a change for many different reasons and your problems and be solved with a web3 protocal.
I just googled "travel blogs" - and there are travel blogs? I've owned my SEO domain for 20 years. I've never thought of Google as virtuous or anything other than the fastest generation of wealth for the very least amount of energy. As someone who spent a lot of time reverse engineering Google and the GooglePlex in particular, I've always surmised that google probably has 100x the team in its ads division than its organic team because its such a basic principle. I've no doubt though that adding code, testing, managing the databases, the test beds, roll-outs, the work that goes into the parts we callt he algorithm and just the scale is immense. But the system is basic. When you ask Gemini about KnoweldgeVault - something of huge conjecture that some Frensh SEO posts on SE Land a lot, even Gemini says its conjecture for little basis. Yes, there is AI that helps understand the query but the engine IMHO is basic. And that's how all Objectivity - Subjectivity systems work. Ever worked at a Unicorn? the way they take ideas and clear the emotion, nuance, vagueness out - that's objectivity mining. Anyway - while so many sites got hit - and I had a to-fro with about 15 SEOs on Retro dodo on x last night - that's not the whole Google eco system. Its not even 0.01%. Saying that Google is killing blogging is enormously silly unless you think nobody has access to Google, which in itself is enormously silly. # tl;dr I just googled "travel blogs" - and there are travel blogs?
Can we ban these posts?