Note
Google’s recent changes to its search algorithm, including the addition of AI-powered search results, have had a significant impact on small website owners, leading to a drastic decrease in traffic for many. Small website owners are facing challenges in adapting to these changes and are exploring new strategies such as engaging more with their community, creating video content, and implementing paywalls to generate revenue. The SEO industry is at a breaking point, with leaked internal documentation from Google revealing discrepancies in how search works and accusations of the company being dishonest about its search algorithms. The future of the web, particularly in relation to Google Search, is uncertain as creators and small website owners grapple with the implications of Google’s evolving search algorithms and the need to build sustainable businesses independent of platform reliance.
Highlights
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2024-11-27 10:20 In May, we talked to a bunch of small website owners about these changes and how it’s impacting their businesses, sometimes in disastrous ways. Since then These problems have only gotten weirder as AI search has only become more prevalent. In fact, Google just made another big update to its search algorithm to try and combat something that’s calling parasite SEO content, which is when a site that ranks highly for one thing starts publishing unrelated random crap about another thing just to steal traffic.
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2024-11-27 10:20 Hi, my name is Mike. I’m the creator and publisher of the Mountain weekly news, a 20 year old outdoor gear review site that has been completely wiped off the map. In the latest Google Updates, we’ve lost 91% of our traffic have gone from outdoor industry leaders in both summer and winter sports to essentially not existing
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2024-11-27 10:20 My name is Jake Boley and I run the workout shoe and apparel review website that fit friend. Since September of 2023, my traffic has been on a steady decline. It was relatively stable and growing slowly over the last three years, but since September it has been straight crashing. In March 2024, my traffic down over 95%. And again, there hasn’t really been an explanation as to why these web based. Businesses were all in a somewhat stable relationship with Google for years. But across the media right now, there’s an almost apocalyptic fear setting in. If referral traffic from Google goes to zero, there’s really not anything else to replace it with.
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2024-11-27 10:20 Google shopping results. Just makes no sense. As in blocks of eight rows with four products, four columns, eight rows of just air purifiers and then one result and then another block of six rows.
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2024-11-27 10:20 They’re being spammed, they’re landing on quora threads from 2016 when people used to use Quora and just an incredible amount of just shopping results. I imagine lots of people might be frustrated. We get emails from readers who have bought the wrong product and they just email us to say, I can’t believe I bought this, but I was.
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2024-11-27 10:19 Google was changing how search worked with AI, but in some cases it was just getting dumber. When I talked to Google CEO Sundar Pichai about AI in search earlier this month, he said a few really key things. One of those was to call AI hallucinations not a bug, but an inherent feature that LLMs need in order to be creative. He also repeated Google’s claim that AI overviews will lead to more users clicking through to read source websites. But he wouldn’t commit to releasing that data, which basically everyone wants to see.
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2024-11-27 10:19 If you were a creator starting a media business today, you would almost certainly start on a social video platform like TikTok or Instagram. And for the businesses that have relied on the Web in Google Search, things are now harder than ever before. So that really leaves us with one big question. What’s next?
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2024-11-27 10:19 They have new plans and in a way they look a lot like the old plans. Because the best way to build a real audience, one that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of a platform, is to do good work, engage with the people who care about you and make something that users want to spend their time and importantly their money on. As Giselle points out, in one sense Google 0 might actually be a blessing in disguise. We are engaging a lot more publicly with our community, which we had, but I think we didn’t put enough time into, for example, growing our social media.