"Search is a shitshow" says SEO

I’m going to rapid-fire this, it’s a lot… a lot, a lot.

Prior Context

• It was discovered this year that 0% of websites that got hit with last year’s August 2023 Helpful Content Update have recovered. ZERO. NONE.

• Niche sites, affiliate sites, and even established brands with dedicated audiences saw decreases in traffic that led to businesses shutting down, or firing employees to stay afloat.

• People who run websites are growing frustrated with Google and Search as an industry because smaller publishers and websites are being snuffed out for larger sites, like Forbes — or are user-generated content websites, like forums

• Google announced a deal with Reddit to collect their user data and train their language models on the server content (this happened in February, but watch what happens next).

March

• March 2023 Core Update rolls out and it takes 45 days to complete, with Google saying it finished earlier than reported, they just didn’t do that this time, for some reason.

• This integrated the Helpful Content Update (now known as the Helpful Content System) into the Core Update Process

• In layman’s terms: there are no longer be two separate types of updates, they are now Fu....sion-HAAA!

I know I lost you, just hold on it gets worse.

April

• Hundreds of websites were deindexed

• Google claims to have reduced unhelpful content on the SERPs by 45%, although there was no metric to know this (outside of websites self-reporting decline or SEOs working with clients, we are forced to just take Google at it’s word that this is true)

May

• Site Reputation Abuse update released — which was aimed at websites that were doing what Forbes was doing (except Forbes wasn’t hit with a penalty [yet])

• Black Hat SEOs mourned the loss of their Indian backlink havens (RIP)

• May 15, Google launched AI Overviews, effecting 85% of queries

• Unable to understand sarcasm, it was reading Top Reddit SERPs that sometimes suggested people eat rocks as a treat, smoke while pregnant, or put glue in your cheese for pizza

• Also released was an image generator, which was providing results that were (at best) racist as fuck

• Google patches the image generator after about a week

June

• June 20-27: release of a Spam Update for Search

• Google reduces AI Overviews to 15% of queries

• Google expanded the AI Overview to be larger - taking up more space on the search results page.

• Between the force-fed AI features & Ads, Google was strangling Search.

• Google introduces new modals that would allow for zero-click purchases and interactions, futher removing traffic from websites that own the content

• July was a quiet month, no news, no controversy, just a breath before the shitstorm that was to follow…

August

• August 5: U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has violated antitrust law with its search business, stating that Google has a monopoly and has acted to maintain its dominance.

• August 15: Google launched its second core algorithm update of 2024, aiming to promote high-quality content and demote low-value SEO content.

• Over 14,000 lines of Google's search algorithm code were leaked online.

• Reddit moved from the 78th to the 3rd most visible site in Google's U.S. search results, just behind Wikipedia & Amazon (remember that deal back in February, about 600 words ago?)

September

• September 3: The August 2024 Core Update completed its rollout.

• A search ranking bug was identified during the first four days of the update, to the dismay of websites owners everywhere, they were warned that any traffic anomalies (sudden increases) were to be ignored.

• September 12: The DOJ's case against Alphabet's search business formally opened, scrutinizing Google's advertising business and its alleged monopolistic practices.

• September 23: The DOJ sought an adverse inference and sanctions against Google, alleging that the company instructed employees to adopt cautious communication practices, potentially hiding or destroying relevant communications.

October

• Google's Gemini model, designed specifically for search, was introduced to power AI Overviews.

• SEO professionals may need to shift focus towards conversational search optimization and long-tail keywords to improve visibility in AI-generated summaries.

• October 8: The DOJ indicated that it was considering a possible breakup of Google as an antitrust remedy, following the monopoly ruling.

• October 9: The DOJ proposed a series of sanctions against Google to prevent it from monopolizing the search engine market, emphasizing the importance of liberating these markets and restoring competition.

An absolute shit show.

Google is getting worse by the day and it seems as though a breakup of Search, Ads, Chrome, & Android is possible.

Google’s making the argument that because much of its software is open-source, that it is not ant-competitive.

SEOs are stuck in the middle, among choppy waters of traffic volatility, search engine features & algorithm changes, Google’s impending business restructuring.

Senior Vice President & Head of Search, Prabhakar Raghavan (who prev. lead Engineering, then Ads & Commerce [which includes Search]), was just relieved of duty in place of Nick Fox (21 years VP of Product at Google), indicating Google knows that it has been destroying its original claim to dominance.

The future is unknown, there’s a lot happening in the LLM space.

Models are dropping what feels at a faster and faster pace.

I still find myself revolving around the same handful of tools for what I do.

Last week I went to a Technical SEO conference to find people giving talks on subjects & practices that I’ve been doing for the last few years, but didn’t have formal introduction to.

Needless to say, I feel like I’m at the top of

I had my head down because while all of this was happening with google, I was doing this for my clients:

That’s it.

Just wanted to say Google is on some fuckshit but we out here anyway.

If you know someone who runs a business & invested in a website, but doesn’t get any love from Google, send them my way.

Until next time,

— Vic