Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

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JOoa0ky said:
Where I think they'll penalize you is if you simply change the date without any edits. I mean that's pretty easy to implement and easy to spot...
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I actually caught one of my competitors do this and they were even called out on reddit by it

Basically, they had written a bunch of "Best of X for {year}" style posts on multiple product lines. One of their readers on Reddit posted a screenshot of their site code messing up upon opening and found out that they were actually using a template that automatically updated the date on the title to the latest year as well as changing the published date to the latest year and a recent month

I easily found out long before since they were basically talking about pros and cons that related to the older models of the things they were talking about... which was a clear indicator that either a author had no idea of the product or updated the date without updating the info
 
Warning: rant incoming

January: +20% - all-time high
February: -20% - lost all snippets (without update)
March: -20% - core update
June: +20% - regained snippets (without update)
August: +40% (core update)
Today I wake up to -40% - think I lost all snippets again.

I know I probably have to wait it out, but I'm done with this shit.

Many posts that were #1 for the last month are nowhere near the first page now.
This means the algorithm was broken last month or is broken now.

How can you build a business on this crap?
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
Warning: rant incoming

January: +20% - all-time high
February: -20% - lost all snippets (without update)
March: -20% - core update
June: +20% - regained snippets (without update)
August: +40% (core update)
Today I wake up to -40% - think I lost all snippets again.

I know I probably have to wait it out, but I'm done with this shit.

Many posts that were #1 for the last month are nowhere near the first page now.
This means the algorithm was broken last month or is broken now.

How can you build a business on this crap?
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I also seem to have lost quite a bit on some major keywords.

For some, you can argue for those they replaced them with, but for others it is very bad, like disregarding the intent/product category entirely and just showing reviews for something else ("sports car" vs "car").

I'll have to wait this out and analyze, but yes, I feel the same way.
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
Warning: rant incoming

January: +20% - all-time high
February: -20% - lost all snippets (without update)
March: -20% - core update
June: +20% - regained snippets (without update)
August: +40% (core update)
Today I wake up to -40% - think I lost all snippets again.

I know I probably have to wait it out, but I'm done with this shit.

Many posts that were #1 for the last month are nowhere near the first page now.
This means the algorithm was broken last month or is broken now.

How can you build a business on this crap?
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You can't.
 
bernard said:
I also seem to have lost quite a bit on some major keywords.

For some, you can argue for those they replaced them with, but for others it is very bad, like disregarding the intent/product category entirely and just showing reviews for something else ("sports car" vs "car").

I'll have to wait this out and analyze, but yes, I feel the same way.
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Yeah for example I have the only article about 'cats vs dogs'.
Now, I rank second for the search term 'cats vs dogs' and the new snippet is 'what are dogs?'.
Biggy said:
You can't.
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Thanks for the encouraging words :wink:
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
Yeah for example I have the only article about 'cats vs dogs'.
Now, I rank second for the search term 'cats vs dogs' and the new snippet is 'what are dogs?'.
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Did it seem as if some places got taken by sites purely on age/DA etc?

I'm seeing a 6 year old article from a newspaper that claims to have tested 50+ products, but when you click it there are no products and only 1000 words of text.

Quite messed up.
 
bernard said:
Did it seem as if some places got taken by sites purely on age/DA etc?

I'm seeing a 6 year old article from a newspaper that claims to have tested 50+ products, but when you click it there are no products and only 1000 words of text.

Quite messed up.
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Some definitely are. This could be temporary due to user metrics that have to be collected again after an update was done, mentioned by @Ryuzaki on this forum before. During the time that those metrics are collected, Google 'falls back' on high authority websites.

In my case, it's the 'snipped ban' I'm afraid. Although the post is much more relevant, the entire website is just not accepted for featured snippets anymore. Doesn't make sense, but yeah, that's what it is.
 
Biggy said:
You can't.
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To me, the laws of diversification demands that at a bare minimum any income source should make up no more than 20-25% of your livelihood.

SEO niche sites with complete revenue dependence upon one customer (Google) is like walking into raging fire pit with a non-stop onslaught of napalms that will leave you without ashes...
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
How can you build a business on this crap?
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Develop multiple income streams.

Here's what I do:
a) Ad revenue from one site
b) Consulting using my technical skills.
c) Income from capital - dividends and interest.

I'd say this is a bare minimum. Add multiple websites on this to smooth out the bumpy ride even more.
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
Warning: rant incoming

January: +20% - all-time high
February: -20% - lost all snippets (without update)
March: -20% - core update
June: +20% - regained snippets (without update)
August: +40% (core update)
Today I wake up to -40% - think I lost all snippets again.

I know I probably have to wait it out, but I'm done with this shit.

Many posts that were #1 for the last month are nowhere near the first page now.
This means the algorithm was broken last month or is broken now.

How can you build a business on this crap?
Click to expand...
I've been doing this for nearly 20 years and it's never been this crazy. Penguin wasn't this crazy. This is a fundamentally different time and most people in any niche that you can even slightly argue is YMYL are getting decimated. You won't see many people admit it on forums where egos flare up even anonymously, but if you're in private Facebook groups or the right tiny forums, it's chaos.

I watched this move across niches like Health and Finance of course, then on to Fitness, through Pets, then Home & Garden, then Travel and more, just absolutely destroying sites making $100k+ a month and reducing them down to $10k or worse. I managed to ignore it for a while until it reached me, and since then I've been ringing the alarm bells for the sake of the willfully blind people and the arrogant who think it can't happen to them and will still call us melodramatic. The attention seeking clowns who fancy themselves sharks smell blood in the water already too.

All of my ancient veteran buddies from the old days, we did everything right and are still failing (due to not choosing the least valuable niches that are safe from EEAT and YMYL). I've seen fundamentally needed businesses tank 70% revenue or fold completely. So either the game changed so much that people no longer need human written content (AI did this) or enough people have been killed and left the game that they canceled their rank tracking entirely (Google did this). If SEO's and affiliates are crushed, then service providers are crushed. Ad networks and affiliate networks are crushed.

The "joke" has always been "SEO is Dead" for at least the past decade if not 15 years. But each time the joke made its rounds it was truly another nail in the coffin. Some of us old guys were smart enough to evolve and pivot, but we started wondering a few nights ago if maybe we were the stupid ones and the smart ones bailed during Penguin.

I'm still in the Internet Marketing game, but SEO right now is a dead end. Here are some sites by people I know and respect who did most everything exceedingly well, but that didn't matter once Google came under threat from AI and killed off every innocent bystander it could.

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The bottom one just above is me. Don't be fooled by the 2nd rise in traffic on the right. Only the 1st bump is true. The 2nd bump was Ahrefs adding more keywords to their database. While in all of our cases the traffic estimations are probably 50% less than reality, the proportions of the ups and downs are correct.

66% shaves in traffic, 80% shaves, 55% shaves. This level of volatility is outrageous. There's going to be a lot of stupidity coming out of the mouths of people with survivorship bias and willful self-delusion to protect themselves from the fear that this won't come to them.

You'd think "well it's a zero sum game so somebody is getting the traffic". In my case I can tell you that 50% of the "lost" traffic was rewarded to big brands again. The other 50% is being pissed down the drain in such a manner that nobody can use it. They're showing "local" mom & pop (because they have "EEAT") results to non-local people for queries that nobody can monetize correctly, which is a huge blow to the SEO economy. It is literally pissing it down the drain and deleting it from existence.

I'm at around 57% of my peak traffic on this site. I went from $15k months down to what's going to end up around $3k now, and even if it levels off, when January rolls around that'll become $1.5k. For a site that was doing $15k. This is the story for more people than anyone is willing to admit.

I've saw around a -50% traffic hit last August. Since then it's been -10% here, -20% there. +20% at one point. Then the September Core Update hit me for -20% again. Which caused Mediavine to remove me from the Pro program, which hit me for another -10%. Then last night, I checked my analytics to see another -20% drop, which is the same reasons everyone's posting a storm in this thread.

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The pendulum has officially swung back again from "Put all your efforts into one monster site so it all compounds into an exponentially large payout" to "Build a ton of sites and spread your eggs around" again. My question isn't whether I'm capable, but do I want to again. Do I want to start a handful of sites at my age in this turmoil knowing that it'd take a year to start seeing revenue, and even that's not promised.

It's not a question of "is SEO dead?" but a question of "is it dead to me?" I can tell you that this volatility over the past 15 years or so has not been good for me as an aged adult who owns a home and has people that depend on me. I developed a financial anxiety from this nonsense, and I'm starting to see a lot of things more clearly.

Like many other SEO's and IM companies, I'm about to shut down shop on this site. I'm firing my guys, leaving content in draft mode and others in text document form, moving it to a cheaper server, and letting it sit. It's at the point where it doesn't even make sense to sell it. And I've already started a new adventure where SEO will be a single tool in the tool kit but nothing to be concerned about (video production). And what I'd really like to do is have a product developed that I'm passionate about and believe in and go to town with PPC.

SEO ain't dead but it's on a damn long-term hiatus. We haven't even seen the SGE Search Generative Experience release yet where Google increasingly becomes an Answer Engine instead of a Search Engine. As bad as things are, this is the beginning of AI, which is the core cause of the problem.

bernard said:
I'm going to have to get a coding job and run this ish on the side and invest that money haha.
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This is where it's at for so many people. If I hadn't had a few really killer years, I'd be looking for a day job TODAY. That's how hard this sunk in for me last night. I've got a several year runway to get something else started, thankfully, but that doesn't mean I'm not a nervous wreck because I don't want to bleed away my war chest which could be a retirement fund instead.

The idea of getting a job with group healthcare, getting vested into a pension, getting some steady years in for social security payments instead of this feast or famine crap, getting employer matches on 401k's, actually having a social life, having time off... after all this time the grass might possibly be greener on the other side.

The problem is for many of us that's simply not going to fly. We're project oriented and have the entrepreneurial bug. But relegating some of this to a side project after work hours until the dust settles is not a horrible idea.

There's a lot of "figuring out" to do. And I'm telling you, everything I've just typed reflects the thoughts of all the big guys we've all come to know and respect over the past 20 years in this corner of the internet. I know this because I've been having this conversation with each one of them personally and repeatedly for the past year. Take it with a grain of salt at your own peril.
 
Bob_the_Builder said:
How can you build a business on this crap?
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Biggy said:
You can't.
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bernard said:
Quite messed up.
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Ryuzaki said:
The "joke" has always been "SEO is Dead" for at least the past decade if not 15 years. But each time the joke made its rounds it was truly another nail in the coffin.
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Ryuzaki said:
If SEO's and affiliates are crushed, then service providers are crushed. Ad networks and affiliate networks are crushed.
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CCarter said:
Actually, it's out on Mobile:

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Damn. When all the guys who you've been learning SEO from, taking inspiration from, and been following since day one start taking hits and closing shop...

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Welp I guess it's time to go back to the basics and read those Peter Drucker and Seth Godin Marketing books I've been stacking up in the cupboard and learn some "real" marketing strategies to claim my piece of the land
 
Is Google capable of detecting artificially generated content? Emphasis on "capable" here, not "actively detecting".

I feel like it's G's modus operandi to let algo abuse reach peak saturation whenever the market finds a mass exploit in its existing systems before bringing down the hammer nuclear bomb style to make as big of a PR impact as possible.

For example, hypothetically, the year is 2024 and people have pretty much self-sorted themselves into two buckets; A.I content devotees and human-sourced traditionalists. Google drops the 'Parrot Update', crushing the A.I-based sites like they crushed Penguin and Panda abusers before.

Obviously this is all based on the premise that Google can/could/cares to detect A.I content...
 
I have considered if I got hit for AI content because I have a lot of AI content. If so, then it's sitewide, because both AI and non-AI content got hit.

It could very well be, but it does not look like it improved results. Should paywalled content rank 1st for info queries?
 
harrytwatter said:
Is Google capable of detecting artificially generated content? Emphasis on "capable" here, not "actively detecting".
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I think the "correct" answer is no. That even OpenAI hasn't found a legitimate way to detect their own generated content. All the detectors are very hit or miss with no confidence in their actual ability, with just as many false positives.

With that being said, OpenAI had talk about using a watermark where they'd embed something in the hash or whatever method they'd use that would remain intact even with some editing. And that they'd share this with universities and likely sell it to Google. Who knows, but I don't think AI content is going anywhere.

I recall Google fighting everyone with the "above the fold" algorithm change and everyone collectively basically told them to fuck off, and they caved on it. Nobody was going to re-do all their sites to remove featured images, which were a normal and expected convention, to get text higher. That's how AI content will be, and as it improves the question will become why even bother to fight it. Universities and other institutions will find different ways to police it. Will Google even care when they're not necessarily a pure search engine any more and are using it more and more themselves?

Back to "the correct answer is no". That seems right based on all we've seen but when it comes to AI sites, I've only seen them tank if they were thriving before all this started hitting the mainstream adoption, and I've only seen new AI-based SEO projects get hit during updates.

It leads me to think they've employed some kind of rudimentary detection at least and while they speak out of one side of their mouth saying they don't care, in secret they're acting on it fruitlessly. At the end of the day, I don't think AI is going to revolutionize text as a medium, it's going to ruin it for most anything but certain niche purposes, like fiction novels and research papers. I can imagine schools even moving further away from textbooks and employing more video as the kids lose more and more touch with the written word.
 
The fear is close to meme level in here.

I have just ramped up content production on my new site which is responding well to my volume content approach.

My existing site is up aroud 24% since the update and 49% YOY.

That "case study" is utter trash. I could make up numbers too and write a mega guide on what my guess is to get published in Search Engine Land.

Anyone consider just pushing on, building an excellent high quality asset and ignoring the fear factory?
 
MrMedia said:
The fear is close to meme level in here.

I have just ramped up content production on my new site which is responding well to my volume content approach.

My existing site is up aroud 24% since the update and 49% YOY.

That "case study" is utter trash. I could make up numbers too and write a mega guide on what my guess is to get published in Search Engine Land.

Anyone consider just pushing on, building an excellent high quality asset and ignoring the fear factory?
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You must be doing something different to the rest of us, even the people @Ryuzaki mentioned who were making $100k a month and so clearly knew what they were doing.

I remember you mentioned that your site is DR 70+.

Do you think that is why your site is so far immune for these updates?

It would make sense, especially if you're not in a YMYL niche.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The idea of getting a job with group healthcare, getting vested into a pension, getting some steady years in for social security payments instead of this feast or famine crap, getting employer matches on 401k's, actually having a social life, having time off... after all this time the grass might possibly be greener on the other side.

The problem is for many of us that's simply not going to fly. We're project oriented and have the entrepreneurial bug. But relegating some of this to a side project after work hours until the dust settles is not a horrible idea.
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This is where I've been for a long time.

I don't particularly enjoy all the decisions and uncertainty with being self employed, but I also feel like a complete smuck if I work for someone else where there's no direct reward for making great decisions vs just getting by. I hate that feeling of optimizing for nothing.

However, the feeling of being able to say "not my problem" as you hang your hat for the day .. is beginning to look great to me.

If I did this part time, I do fear it would consume me too much as well. If I had a decent salary, it might not and I might feel ok just using it as savings / travel fund.
 
I did some deep research, and what I've observed is sites with a product (or a brand as Ryu said) or sites with very strong link profiles are the only ones that are beating my site and gaining rankings over me in the update so far.

It doesn't "feel" like the actual helpfulness of the content (user experience) is what was changed or rewarded in this update, because a ton of very unhelpful pages are outranking a lot of helpful pages I have. But, this is all observation so take this comment with a grain of salt, or don't. I noticed there are certain pages that I have an abundance of links pointing to, which aren't dropping in rankings.

For context, my content/affiliate site has gained 15% from the Core update, and then lost 15% (so far) from the HCU. So I've actually broken even at the very moment.
 
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smithy said:
You must be doing something different to the rest of us, even the people @Ryuzaki mentioned who were making $100k a month and so clearly knew what they were doing.

I remember you mentioned that your site is DR 70+.

Do you think that is why your site is so far immune for these updates?

It would make sense, especially if you're not in a YMYL niche.
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I think I saw MrMedia post on another one of these types of threads a while back that he's doing great numbers while the rest seem to be scared/fear based.

But, Look at what Ryzukai said, those doing "least valuable niches that are safe from EEAT and YMYL"

This makes me think that he's in a non YMYL niche with very little affiliate content and mainly just informational. I don't know about the recent thing but, to me, everyone's revenue seemed like it was going down before this update. But then I asked a few people and their sites were up.

Most of them do display ad revenue. One guy I know who's doing well (idk about right now but this year) is a guy whose site is in the animal niche. Like cool animals facts and info. Almost very little affiliate content.
 
smithy said:
You must be doing something different to the rest of us, even the people @Ryuzaki mentioned who were making $100k a month and so clearly knew what they were doing.

I remember you mentioned that your site is DR 70+.

Do you think that is why your site is so far immune for these updates?

It would make sense, especially if you're not in a YMYL niche.
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Perhaps but i genuinely believe content volume / velocity is the answer to many peoples problems here. No one wants to invest 5 figures a month in content incase it doesn’t work.

When they don’t the site crashes and their existing theory is proven correct and they give up.

It’s a vicious circle if you believe the fear.
 
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