Indexing and Google's Core Updates, Product Review, Helpful Content, & Spam Updates

[Poplanu]

Hello! What software is used for content analysis (content score calculation)?

Screenshots are from Surfer SEO

 

[zelch]

This does look like a technical SEO problem to me too, largely one of indexation, BUT I've investigated dozens of these sites now and I've yet to run into that problem or anything obvious going on in robots.txt, etc. What I can say for sure is they all suffer very horrible on-site EEAT signals, or rather a lack thereof.

onsite EEAT meaning, outgoing links to authoritative sites?

 

[googlealchemist]

oddball question on indexing...

ive been using a pubsubhub plugin for years out of habit at this point if nothing else tbh, every since it was first proposed, quite a while ago now, that it helped notify search engines and index things quicker/better

is that a moot point now?

 

[Ryuzaki]

oddball question on indexing...

ive been using a pubsubhub plugin for years out of habit at this point if nothing else tbh, every since it was first proposed, quite a while ago now, that it helped notify search engines and index things quicker/better

is that a moot point now?

It's been moot since Wordpress launched. Wordpress by default pings a bunch of "ping aggregators" that Google crawls regularly. That's how Google quickly indexes new content that isn't using Search Console with a submitted sitemap. They aren't standing by with crawlers hitting homepages constantly waiting to see new posts. They just crawl these big ole universal RSS feeds.

If you look at Wordpress's Dashboard and go to Settings > Writing you'll find this:

You can add a ton more "services" aka Ping sites to the list if you desire. No need for extra plugins and all that.

 

[googlealchemist]

It's been moot since Wordpress launched. Wordpress by default pings a bunch of "ping aggregators" that Google crawls regularly. That's how Google quickly indexes new content that isn't using Search Console with a submitted sitemap. They aren't standing by with crawlers hitting homepages constantly waiting to see new posts. They just crawl these big ole universal RSS feeds.

If you look at Wordpress's Dashboard and go to Settings > Writing you'll find this:

You can add a ton more "services" aka Ping sites to the list if you desire. No need for extra plugins and all that.

Thanks

I've been using WP since around 2007 I think was my first blog.

If I had to guess I've been using the extra pubsubhub plugin for maybe a decade or so since I first saw it come out and people were talking about how it pushed out content to search engines quicker or more efficiently or some such...

I'm not sure what all the fuss was about then if it wasn't doing anything worthwhile in addition to the pinging in the writing settings.

I've tried adding a big list of other ping sites in there off and on over the years, but just generally keep it at the default of just pingomatic...I figure it's sort of redundant beyond that and will just hurt site speed.

Plus I'm using search console with main and video sitemaps submitted to them too.

Looks like I have to let this habit go and nix it from my go to default plugins!

Thanks again

 

[Ryuzaki]

My theory (which is that this is coming in waves, hitting diff verticals over the years, starting last March or May) about this "new thing" (which I'm proposing is some kind of EEAT rebalancing), is being confirmed.

What's confirming this is the Mediavine Facebook groups (which you get invited to when you get into Mediavine) is now on fire with everyone complaining they're losing 50% traffic in the past couple of weeks. And they've determined amongst themselves that it has now come to the travel vertical (and not food / recipe sites yet, but that'll be the second and big confirmation).

I saw it sweep through my vertical last September, which is when I noticed it hit all my competitors at the same time and started the theory.

I'm seeing this as some new Panda / Penguin event but they aren't being real clear about it. I don't mean that we are doing anything wrong, but that Google is drastically reweighting the variables in the algorithm towards EEAT in order to fight off AI content (that's my guess as to what the purpose is).

What I'm also seeing is that no amount of EEAT seems to be satisfactory unless it's astronomical amounts or you're a local brick and mortar style service company or whatever. Like DR80+ sites might skate by. Big legacy sites with huge brand names. Everyone else, no matter how good their EEAT is, is getting hit and being replaced by "local sites" that aren't necessarily local to you even on the same continent. Nobody else is escaping.

So this takes me back to the war of attrition. Do we even want to battle that war? Google must be seeing that their user satisfaction metrics are going down and will have to reverse course on this by some amount, if not completely. But it won't be completely because we're now a year into this mess and they haven't slowed down.

I'm seeing this as an industry changing event on the level that Penguin was. I'd say 90% or more of the SEO's I knew at that time quit and moved on to other things (crypto was the big choice back then).

I don't have any guidance or suggestions or anything at this point. I'm simply stating that this is an Extinction Level Event that's coming in waves and if you think you'll be untouched, you're already dead, waiting for your turn to realize it. And by "dead" I just mean, be ready to take a 50% shave on your SEO-derived revenue.

 

[Darth]

@Ryuzaki I don't usually check those FB groups but just had a look and man, it's bad out there for some. Clearly there is a lot of travel bloggers that have been nuked.

And this is before Google rolls out its AI assistant in search results (who knows what that will do to traffic - nothing good though), and 3rd party cookies are removed from Chrome.

Tough, uncertain times out there for publishers right now.

 

[smithy]

What's confirming this is the Mediavine Facebook groups (which you get invited to when you get into Mediavine) is now on fire with everyone complaining they're losing 50% traffic in the past couple of weeks. And they've determined amongst themselves that it has now come to the travel vertical (and not food / recipe sites yet, but that'll be the second and big confirmation).

I'm in the travel vertical, but I am not a travel blogger. I was first hit in September.

But yeah, I have heard a lot of chatter that those bloggers who give recommendations about destinations have been hit hard.

 

[tomo8900]

What's confirming this is the Mediavine Facebook groups (which you get invited to when you get into Mediavine) is now on fire with everyone complaining they're losing 50% traffic in the past couple of weeks. And they've determined amongst themselves that it has now come to the travel vertical (and not food / recipe sites yet, but that'll be the second and big confirmation).

Isn't this more to do with the Product Reviews algorithm morphing into the 'Reviews' algorithm and specifically within travel - publishers writing about experiences in places they have never actually visited?

For instance:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1647976266010701826

I would imagine most recipe sites won't be hit in the same way as it is much easier to cook a meal, take photos and write about your first-hand experience (and therefore offer the signals the algorithm is looking for) than it is to travel to hundreds of different locations and do the same.

 

[bernard]

That's some blackpilling from @Ryuzaki.

On the one hand, it's obvious to me that ChatGPT and AI is a huge game changer, but perhaps not to create websites. I know for sure that AI is the only thing you can't afford to not focus on.

 

[ToffeeLa]

Just to touch on the travel vertical...

There are vast differences between sites in the travel vertical, between the traditional insurance/flight affiliate site and the local expert evergreen one, between the 'what I did on my holidays' one and the 'best hotels in' affiliate version.

When it come to 'travel bloggers' specifically (think '10 things to do in Barcelona') there are a lot (a substantial majority?) of small publishers using content by other people because they are expanding their sites beyond what might have been their own experiences.

So each of the 10 things might have been written by different people. And those people get a link back, which turns itself into a giant 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' link wheel which is easily identified.

Plus these types of blogs tend to be earning from Ezoic ads plastered between each section (see also recipe sites) and the content is a very similar version of a listicle of Wikipedia-scraped info as 100 other sites.

And generic '10 things' info is anyway the kind of stuff that Google is happy to show its own images and content for.

I just checked the Barcelona version I mentioned above: three sponsored listings, then an image carousel (which links to results with GetYourGuide and Viator listings at the top), then TripAdvisor, then a PAA section, before we get to the first listings. (I'm not counting TripAdvisor as they are the 'protected' giant of the travel search results.)

When it comes to other kinds of travel sites, there are a couple of low-quality networks on poor domain names with low DR that I am keeping an eye on which are killing it at the moment. Plenty of sites are doing fine, thanks, because they are answering the questions that people actually have and not aiming at queries that Google is targeting.

If you are interested in the vertical, it is interesting to find the indie networks and monitor how and what they are doing. And the newer 'big sites' aiming at the Lonely Planet market.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Isn't this more to do with the Product Reviews algorithm morphing into the 'Reviews' algorithm and specifically within travel - publishers writing about experiences in places they have never actually visited?

EEAT isn't some single algorithmic thing like "Product Reviews" or "Helpful Content" or "Core Web Vitals", etc. It's a much higher-order, over-arching thing, like Page Rank. Every single update we've had that's been named for the past couple of years has had EEAT aspects wrapped up in it, as I'm sure dozens or hundreds of other variables that get re-weighted each time.

But my point is, you're asking if it has to do more with "Experience" than it does EEAT, but that's exactly what the first E stands for: Experience - Expertise - Authority - Trust. I understand the nuanced point you're making, that it popped off during a Product Review update. But that Product Review update rolled out specifically to push "Experience" as a factor out to what seems to be specifically the Travel industry.

And that's what I've been getting at if you read back through the thread. The naming of the updates has not only not mattered but have possibly even had some misdirection built into them. They're all EEAT updates, over and over, under different names, attacking a new vertical each time.

That's some blackpilling from @Ryuzaki.

Yeah, I didn't mean it to be that bad. I just mean that it's not going to be surprising that a lot of companies, sites, entrepreneurs, etc. won't be able to continue operating at 50% of their current revenues and close the shutters.

The number of sites I've seen in my vertical stop posting entirely since September, especially after their scheduled posts ran out, isn't surprising either. I think that's a knee-jerk reaction. I went in the opposite direction and chose to double-down and double the amount of content I was publishing, which proved to be equally silly. Something like 300-400 posts later and not a one of them has really gotten any action, which I've mentioned elsewhere. They index and climb the rankings but nothing can break through this artificial barrier they've created in my vertical.

Stopping posting altogether seems unwise as things will change in the future. But maybe they couldn't survive the war of attrition. I'm going to drop my publication rate by 33%, which is still more than I was doing before all this went down, but I'm going to start putting more irons in the fire and find new streams of revenue. This is the time to do that sort of thing. Then if the original stream returns, you're now sitting on two more.

I think SEO is one of those industries where the privacy mixes with the braggadociousness and the ease of privacy and ability to create false personas and to lie by omission and... I think things are probably more grim out there than they seem. People just won't admit it. I know a ton of guru sites that are slaughtered to like 25% of the traffic they had, and they're carrying on like normal because they don't want to stop selling their courses and all that. But magically "they just don't have time to do their case study revenue reports any more". I think it's worse out there than it appears, but not total death and destruction, just half of it. Nobody wants to admit their "failure" even if it's out of their hands and affecting everyone.

 

[bernard]

Yeah, I guess I'm as much guilty of not wanting to learn new tricks as any other old dog, but we all have to move forward eventually.

To where?

Services (local), creative work (Substack), coding tools and mini-SaaS, expert niche sites, video (TikTok/Youtube/Insta) etc.

I think about influencers and everything they're doing is just a way to leverage eyeballs, from one medium to another, from one method of selling to the next. They're not really fuzzy. Sell some workout clothes here, an Onlyfans membership there, personal training here.

Ideally that would be possible. Sell leads, sell services, sell coaching, sell content, sell entertainment.

My current website projects are sort of based on this idea, that they should integrate in my life as a whole. I do these hobbies and I have this expertise and I would be ok with my face being associated with these websites. Next is to embrace the Tok and the Tube. Doesn't even have to be your face on it. Spencer from Niche Pursuits I think does a faceless Youtube channel now.

 

[Execute]

Having gone through the whole thread again, I think @Ryuzaki is right in his submissions.
Content sites are a declining model, unless they're converted to omnichannel content brands where SEO is just a minor part of the traffic sources. And to do that requires significant effort and investment.
These google indexing issues, pages disappearing from SERPs, frequent and unpredictable algorithm updates, constantly increasing google serp features hogging search traffic to Google alone and increasing no-click searches, and the advent of ChatGPT and AI are a combination of factors squeezing the life out of content sites as we know it.

I had experienced everything that was described on this thread since last year, so much so that reading through this thread now seems like deja vu, as I could see everything that happened to my site being described here.
In fact, I even created a thread(s) here asking questions about it at that time, around mid last year. Initially I thought it was due to overoptimization of some articles and not publishing frequently enough, but I've since realized that it's way bigger than that, as Ryu pointed out.

As even some of the biggest and most reputable brands, like the top content brands in the health space like WebMD and Healthline have taken a huge hit on major keywords, like hypertension and diabetes and heart disease, sometimes dropping down to page 2 or lower, from my personal observations of them in recent times.
So it's obviously not just an issue of EEAT or creating a brand or frequent publishing, as those sites are major powerhouses in those regards.

Stopping posting altogether seems unwise as things will change in the future. But maybe they couldn't survive the war of attrition. I'm going to drop my publication rate by 33%, which is still more than I was doing before all this went down, but I'm going to start putting more irons in the fire and find new streams of revenue. This is the time to do that sort of thing. Then if the original stream returns, you're now sitting on two more.

@Bolded, question is what are these kinds of more irons in the fire?
Are they going to be on your existing sites, building off your existing sites, or completely new businesses?
What kinds of business models makes sense to start in this day and time, given the advent of AI on the horizon.

I know youtube still makes sense at this particular point in time, but with AI and proliferating content, there's a significant possibility it may develop the same issues as content sites have now.
Cos with youtube being owned by Google and being basically about content that is now easy to create thanks to AI, youtube now seems like what SEO was in its earlier days. And it's very conceivable that in the near future, google may start applying the same yoyo dance to youtube channels, and it becomes like deja vu all over again.

So what do you think are new business models to go into in this time and age?

I think things are probably more grim out there than they seem. People just won't admit it. I know a ton of guru sites that are slaughtered to like 25% of the traffic they had, and they're carrying on like normal because they don't want to stop selling their courses and all that. But magically "they just don't have time to do their case study revenue reports any more". I think it's worse out there than it appears, but not total death and destruction, just half of it.

Lol, I agree with everything you said here, particularly the bolded.
But I feel SEOs and site owners shouldn't be ashamed to talk about it or see it as a failure on their parts (as far as they were doing things all legit all this while). Cos everyone knows that Google has essentially gone crazy with its algorithm.
I personally think a lot of these issues are happening because Google has a problem with its algorithm, and is not willing to disclose it, and are trying to fix it inhouse, unsuccessfully so far.

Yeah, I guess I'm as much guilty of not wanting to learn new tricks as any other old dog, but we all have to move forward eventually.

To where?

Services (local), creative work (Substack), coding tools and mini-SaaS, expert niche sites, video (TikTok/Youtube/Insta) etc.

@bolded,
Exactly the same question on my mind.
I think this deserves a thread on its own, for brainstorming from SEOs generally on possible areas to move to, as SEO and content sites seem to be heading down a waterfall.

I'm going to create a separate thread for it.

 

[Darth]

Some brutally honest, eye-opening posts here. I wish everyone that has been hit so far some sort of recovery and path forward.

Also, looking at other options like @bernard mentioned is never a bad thing, in case this whole digital publishing gig ever turns to complete custard.

We are really getting it from all sides now, Google update, AI (not even really here yet, but won't be good) and 3rd party cookie demise/privacy concerns.

I think I would turn to local services (I just love building and optimising websites) and have always thought I could do the same for others and help with use other digital tools like AI etc. Kind of like a local digital consultant.

Only thing is, I hate clients/customers.

Anyway, don't mean to derail the thread.

Personally, I am down maybe 20% on average over the last 2 months only, but think it's more seasonal than anything else for my properties.

 

[Execute]

Personally, I am down maybe 20% on average over the last 2 months only, but think it's more seasonal than anything else for my properties.

Lucky you. Your case is better than for many people, and it being likely due to seasonal variations makes it even better.
Hope your sites continue to hold up well and hopefully grow further.

 

[googlealchemist]

That's some blackpilling from @Ryuzaki.

On the one hand, it's obvious to me that ChatGPT and AI is a huge game changer, but perhaps not to create websites. I know for sure that AI is the only thing you can't afford to not focus on.

If not to create websites, how do you mean then? Taking away clicks to our sites by answering questions for the user in the serps directly or...?

 

[bernard]

If not to create websites, how do you mean then? Taking away clicks to our sites by answering questions for the user in the serps directly or...?

What I mean is that whatever people get into, Saas, crypto, coding, content, consulting, it's going to be all about AI for the next 5 years, so getting to understand AI is pretty much the only thing that matters.

Whatever you end up doing, as an employee, freelancer or self employed, you're going to do it with AI, it's that simple as I see it.

 

[googlealchemist]

Services (local), creative work (Substack), coding tools and mini-SaaS, expert niche sites, video (TikTok/Youtube/Insta) etc.

Ideally that would be possible. Sell leads, sell services, sell coaching, sell content, sell entertainment.

My current website projects are sort of based on this idea, that they should integrate in my life as a whole. I do these hobbies and I have this expertise and I would be ok with my face being associated with these websites. Next is to embrace the Tok and the Tube. Doesn't even have to be your face on it. Spencer from Niche Pursuits I think does a faceless Youtube channel now.

Here's where I'm currently at and where I plan on going in line with this , and the other related posts in this thread...

For a good while now I've been very focused on one particular high payout subniche in a broader industry. Local lead gen...going very well due to said hyper focus and the fact that it's local brick and mortar service based stuff vs national affiliate etc type stuff.

And while you never know what might happen to really cause a massive, overnight paradigm shift and fuck your day up...overall I feel safe that the industry isn't going anywhere anytime soon...

I've been building related assets and relationships with clients for yeeeears specifically in this niche, and many more years in a broader sense before that.

With that established I'm now starting to move into more rev share/equity based models where the real money is vs just lead gen.

And beyond/in addition to that, I'm taking the niche specific knowledge, templates/sop's, assets to rank, lead flow, etc along with the increasing capital and cash flow to start my own company and scale that out.

The increased capital from that will be reinvested to scale out into more and more locations as fast as efficiently/effectively as possible. As well as starting to put more and more money into 'real' real estate vs just digital real estate of various types.

Into higher end residential (no dumps or the trash people that tend to come with them, not to sound cold) rentals

And maaaaaybe commercial...seeing what covid/lockdowns and the lasting spike in work from home vs going into the commercial, physical office makes me pause to say the least. But people are always going to need (nice) places to live.

I used to think I wanted to fix up and 'flip' properties, but more and more that seems like a lot of potential hassle and problems and a time suck that could be much better spent elsewhere.

I have good friends that I would trust that are contractors of various sorts to handle that part of it so it still might make sense to be the investor...make the profit as the moneyman...and help them make some good money as well with their businesses.

Just brainstorming there.

Other than that, in line with what you said about hobbies and expertise and creating content with your actual name and face behind it...that will be next for me too.

On the one hand, I can/do things that are boring as shit simply to make money...that money funds what I want to do (duh).

But it would be nice to have a 'passion project' that would still be monetized where I actually love the research (which I'm doing anyways) and the content creation, etc.

I've been doing more and more Youtube stuff for my current niche, made me super uncomfortable at first as I grew up as a shy introvert...and I'm doing stuff with my own voice and face in the videos.

But I've grown to actually really enjoy it more and more. And it's been absolute gold as far as lead gen/new clients and closing deals etc vs just anonymous vids/emails/etc.

Making personalized videos and being on phone calls can't be understated for conversions. That might sound super stupid and obvious but hey...I'm guessing a lot of internet marketers become IM due to similar reasons as me...not people persons to say the least.

I have one particular new project/niche in mind that I can actually bring in various family and friends to help with and we can all make some big money doing it, spread the wealth...they enjoy it too and don't have to work some boring, shit job ever again, etc.

Everything is made better...and hell even possible in the first place, having decades of growing marketing experience...mainly organic search. I've gotten tons of ideas, strategies, and inspiration from this forum already too (more broad marketing/traffic leaks/etc).

Now I'm planning to (FINALLY) stop ignoring paid traffic and learn/outsource that as that's been a huge missing link for me.

I'm seeing this as some new Panda / Penguin event but they aren't being real clear about it. I don't mean that we are doing anything wrong, but that Google is drastically reweighting the variables in the algorithm towards EEAT in order to fight off AI content (that's my guess as to what the purpose is).

What I'm also seeing is that no amount of EEAT seems to be satisfactory unless it's astronomical amounts or you're a local brick and mortar style service company or whatever. Like DR80+ sites might skate by. Big legacy sites with huge brand names. Everyone else, no matter how good their EEAT is, is getting hit and being replaced by "local sites" that aren't necessarily local to you even on the same continent. Nobody else is escaping.

So this takes me back to the war of attrition. Do we even want to battle that war? Google must be seeing that their user satisfaction metrics are going down and will have to reverse course on this by some amount, if not completely. But it won't be completely because we're now a year into this mess and they haven't slowed down.

What do you mean by 'local sites' that aren't even on the same continent? Specifically in the travel and other ymyl niches or more broad spectrum?

I'm working with local brick and mortar style service companies in a particular niche...less overall competition of course so there's that. But all the local contact info, content, socials, citations, the verified gmb...all seems to be enough on this level at least for EEAT.

But now I'm wondering what 'astronomical amounts' will be, unless they sort things out on their end...as I do plan on getting back into more affiliate and national stuff at some point here.

 

[bernard]

@googlealchemist

I think local is absolutely the place to be. Using your online marketing skills to get leads for a local business. To me this seems like THE place to be in the current year.

If AI is a macrotrend and it will mean even easier to have a computer job, then the second macrotrend is that salaries and value will go up significantly for those who do actual real life work. Nurses, tradespeople, dog walkers, artists etc.

Rev-share for sure, no cure no pay, basically affiliate marketing for local businesses. Front the money, front the Google Ads, front the website, front the SEO, just get the money.

Brand it as "Manhatten Dog Walkers" then find someone who is a dog walker and do a contract with them. They keep 80% and you take 20% but they have to use your brand, they have to get reviews for your page and so on. They have to have their face on it, provide images for SoMe and so on. You own everything, except perhaps their likeness.

This means that you can both go your separate ways in relative peace and you can find someone new.

You have a business, but it's really more a white label business. You only have the financial risk, none of it associated with the actual running costs.

 

[Ryuzaki]

What do you mean by 'local sites' that aren't even on the same continent? Specifically in the travel and other ymyl niches or more broad spectrum?

I'm working with local brick and mortar style service companies in a particular niche...less overall competition of course so there's that. But all the local contact info, content, socials, citations, the verified gmb...all seems to be enough on this level at least for EEAT.

But now I'm wondering what 'astronomical amounts' will be, unless they sort things out on their end...as I do plan on getting back into more affiliate and national stuff at some point here.

I mean that I'm seeing results in many verticals that are coming from brick and mortar type sites, but they aren't necessarily local to you, not in the same city, state, or continent. From the USA, Google is now happy to serve "local sites" from the UK, Australia, and even Japan (that last one could be due to the profile they have on me as a searcher, though).

The point is that they're elevating these types of sites for info queries, so the location doesn't matter, only that they're satisfying some EEAT requirements in some way that are being so heavily weighted that their complete lack of topical authority, quantity of content, or even backlink profile is being over-looked.

So what I'm getting at is you have two ends of the spectrum:

• Left = "Local to somewhere" sites that are incredibly weak collecting traffic for queries they'll never convert into money, to content that's not even necessarily worth ranking either (I've looked at gobs of it). Something (them having GMB profiles probably) is being insanely weighted.
• Right = Gigantic DR80 to DR90 sites doing the exact same crap the rest of us are doing, but they have crazy link profiles. They cover the basic EEAT we all cover, and their authors aren't necessarily qualified either. But they've published endless content and have killer link profiles.

The rest of us are in the middle of this curve at the bottom, like an upside down horseshoe.

My speculation is that they're using AI to re-weight the factors and it's way off right now. It's not understanding nuance. It makes plenty of sense that it would push two binary opposites to the top and reinforce itself in that fashion. That's what humans seem to do with our black-and-white thinking in general, too.

I must say that I feel pretty dissatisfied any time I search, and I hope that's the case with everyone. If this AI ranking system theory is correct, we'll need to see a lot of split testing to get the AI out of this "local maxima" and realize that's there's an actual better maximum satisfaction on a totally different hill than it's trapped itself on, statistically speaking.

 

[Execute]

Here's where I'm currently at and where I plan on going in line with this , and the other related posts in this thread...

You plans seem quite solid.
Wish you luck.

I think local is absolutely the place to be. Using your online marketing skills to get leads for a local business. To me this seems like THE place to be in the current year.

Yeah, local seems like a reasonably good bet too, though you'll be competing with other digital marketers and agencies in your locality who have been doing local SEO and digital marketing for their clients.

I must say that I feel pretty dissatisfied any time I search, and I hope that's the case with everyone

I've been feeling like this for at least the past 2 years.
Sometimes I feel like banging my head against the wall when doing a search.
I think since google moved from keyword based search results to idea-based search results, the search results have been terrible generally.
You search 200 different keywords and google returns basically the same results because it assumes you're talking about the same thing, even when you've clearly indicated you'll like to see results containing something else, even putting the desired words in quotes yet you still see the same crappy results without the words you want.
Very annoying.
I wonder why enough people are not talking about this online generally, maybe because of fear of google de-ranking them if they talk about Google's horrible search results.

 

[bernard]

I must say that I feel pretty dissatisfied any time I search, and I hope that's the case with everyone.

I didn't use to do it, but I've begun doing the site:reddit.com before every search that isn't transactional or a wiki lookup.

There's just no good information in the serps anymore. With more and more searches, Google simple doesn't answer my query, but instead shifts it to a completely different query.

If there is an answer to that "controversial" query, then we can read Vice.com on how to mow your lawn while not perpetuating stereotypes.

ChatGPT will answer questions after a mandatory "be good" disclaimer. Maybe Google should try to do the same instead of censoring half the internet and destroying everything else as a side effect.

 

[Execute]

There's just no good information in the serps anymore. With more and more searches, Google simple doesn't answer my query, but instead shifts it to a completely different query.

Exactly.
And the more frustrating thing is that you know those sites definitely exist, and those pages exist, the pages that contain answers to your query, but Google just isn't bringing them out.
And is bringing out something completely irrelevant to your search.

I've been trying Bing and Duckduckgo for searches more in recent times, when Google refuses to be sensible in their results they're showing. Sometimes that helps and I find what I want, other times it doesn't help because their search engines are actually not yet as good as google uses to be before they made the switch switch to idea-based search results.
I'll also try the Brave browser search sometimes, and even the Ahrefs search engine Yandex or whatever it's called, I don't even know if it's functional yet.
Google should have at least given us an option to use their old keyword-based search engine when they were switching to this new idea-based search, so that we can still be using that as an option while they're perfecting and finetuning this one.
As it stands now, they'll likely start losing market share as more and more people take notice of their crappy results and start trying other options, like I'm doing.

Regarding your Site:reddit search, for some reason it hasn't occurred to me to do that, but makes a lot of sense where appropriate.
I'll also add that to my toolbox of google alternatives now, even though I'll still be using Google to do that search, but at least I can direct it to compel it to give me relevant results, hopefully it won't screw that up still.

 

[Biggy]

After months since my traffic dropped for approximate 60%. For some reason I just can't get it back up. Main problem i see is indexation prob lems and weird search results. (articles don't get indexed in 5-10 minutes like they used to)

Results for some keywords are now like huge coroporations and i also see sometimes tiktok shit on first page which is absurd!

Did anyone get back traffic back up? What to do?