Comment by vgeek

I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO/digital marketer/developer for roughly 20 years), but tend to discount many of the comments due to the assumption that many of the people complaining in broken English may not actually have the quality of site that they believe they do, but there are tons of good sites getting caught up in updates-- not just now, but in every update. The past ~2-3 years have had entire types of sites (e.g., useful blogs, data driven sites, useful/non-spammy aggregator sites) get wholesale demoted/deranked/deindexed.

In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for financial objectives more aggressively than user experience. Timing updates to coincide with beginning/end of fiscal quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive incremental searches (People Also Ask/Related Searches), various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc.. Essentially when they stopped promoting the "Don't be evil." slogan, they had legitimate reason to do so.

If I could give anyone advice with regards to establishing a website that is reliant on Google for traffic-- it would be to be extremely careful. I have one site now that is super high utility for end users, great UX, super fast, high repeat user rate, no ads/tracking/popup spam, great feedback from users and it is -60% in Google traffic from the March 2024 core update. There is 0 support from anyone at Google to identify why a site suddenly loses traffic. There are search liaisons who give snarky replies, but good luck getting any constructive feedback.

Even relying on paid traffic is just as dangerous-- given the black box that is Quality Score (it ties mostly to Click Through Rate, but has adjustable floor to increase effective costs) and Google's consistent drive away from measurable performance that helped them destroy traditional marketing channels so successfully.

All that I can think is that there is absolute panic at Google right now. When >50% of product searches start directly on Amazon (https://searchengineland.com/50-of-product-searches-start-on...), Google can't siphon anything off. With Meta adding things like Llama 3 to FB Messenger, there is going to be another huge hit to Google query volume-- albeit most likely low commercial intent queries (see: not as monetizable by Google), at least initially, but it will help increase user familiarity with chatbots and observed data will probably help improve Meta ad targeting ability in ways that may rival search query intent.

High value categories like home services, banking and finance are among Google's last relatively safe bastions of profit-- but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a level of sophistication to realize they're giving too much of their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other "near me" driven niches) that have success on GMaps seem relatively safe for Google at this point. If Meta handles the chatbot transition (if it actually happens) well, they stand to gain a lot of ground there, too, given that they do already have a decent amount of small businesses who use FB pages as their sole internet presence, along with associated meta-data like hours/location/menus/reviews.