I can’t believe Google is doing another Core update this month. Is it normal for them to have this many updates? I had a website six years ago, and I don’t remember so many updates back then…
They always do this before Black Friday or Christmas.
Dany said:
They always do this before Black Friday or Christmas.
Yup, they clear out all the affiliate and AI spam to make room for e-commerce sales.
Huh? This year is the fewest updates they’ve had in the past 4 years.
This happens after people started flooding the web with AI-generated content.
dominic said:
This happens after people started flooding the web with AI-generated content.
Their algorithm is AI-generated, and they admit it’s broken. Google is basically asking GPT if the content is good now.
Google just wants to show more content that people actually find useful and less content made just to perform well in search results.
Google only releases core updates when less than a certain number of sites are affected. Nobody will like it, and I’ll probably get downvoted because in 2024 we still shoot the messenger. But that’s why I keep posting the truth. It might seem like ‘everyone’ is getting hit, but less than 0.0005% of people here got hit by this core update. Google rolls out updates, and the impact is measured. If they rolled out one, we’d have seen it. Remember, you’re competing with other sites, and what they do affects your ranking too.
@kenmarkawey
I mean, most webmasters here don’t have big sites, but in communities where people are running real publishing businesses and making decent revenue, more than 0.0005% are getting affected. I’d say it’s more like 5-15%.
- I never said I was talking about large sites, I just referred to site size. 2) No, we’ve already looked at this - the biggest post about the HCU update got less than 200 upvotes. That’s a lot smaller than 5% of this forum, which has over 300k members.
@kenmarkawey
How many of those 300k members are still active? How many are still doing SEO? How many have sites with enough traffic to notice they’ve been hit by the HCU? How many missed or ignored that poll? One of my sites got hit, and I didn’t even fill it out. In active communities of real publishers, your numbers are way off.
@Trevor
Stop trying to inflate the number. It doesn’t matter how many are active - less than 200 were hit. I can’t really help you with math. Have a great day.
kenmarkawey said:
@Trevor
Stop trying to inflate the number. It doesn’t matter how many are active - less than 200 were hit. I can’t really help you with math. Have a great day.
Before you even get into math, you need to understand basic data sampling errors. You’re not even doing the math right.
@Trevor
I’m going to try to help you out one last time… The HCU cohort wasn’t hit because of SEOs or this forum. We’re not responsible for what Google does. We aren’t responsible for why people’s sites got hit. All the HCU cohort here has done is blame SEOs and try to convince people to leave Google, which is pointless. I have no more interest in discussing this.
@kenmarkawey
Remember, you’re competing with other sites in all search indices. What other sites do affects your ranking too. But another thing affecting your ranking is that more people are talking with AI like ChatGPT rather than doing Google searches. As people use LLMs more, they’ll need fewer reasons to open a new tab just to search on Google. Consider that whatever your article or post is about, it’s likely already being fed by an AI to a user somewhere.
@TechTitan
We haven’t seen any changes in Google’s volume, despite what ChatGPT and Perplexity say. The average Google user is not moving away from Google. Your experience with an LLM might be better, but until the average user tries it, they have no reference point. The average Google user is still using it.
@kenmarkawey
There have been posts and YouTube videos where people are noticing their organic traffic from Google has been declining. All of them can’t be lying. It’s an observable fact that content quality is no longer driving the same traffic it once did. The title of this post suggests that people are worried about these updates reducing their traffic.
@TechTitan
Google is not a quality engine. Its daily active users are measured by Statista and SimilarWeb, and they’re not moving away from Google. Some people hate Google, others market LLMs, and some just want to believe that Google is dying, but those are all emotions, not facts. Google’s quality is something we can measure objectively, not emotionally.
@kenmarkawey
The point isn’t whether Google is dying. The question is whether these updates are changing the way they do business? Maybe they’re deciding to cater to larger players paying for CTR. It could be a way to maximize profitability, but it’s a short-sighted move. It suggests that Google believes there’s less potential in the search engine space and wants to cash in while it can. But it’s also a sign that they see LLMs as a serious competitor.
@TechTitan
If Google were catering only to big players, they wouldn’t keep rolling out updates. This is just part of their business model and will continue.