This forum would be filled with angst if there were any meaningful contributors left in the webmaster community.

I have been very very critical of what Google has been doing, if you actually look at my posts over the past few years. I would be even more animated if it wasn't that, from my perspective, HCU actually was positive update, demoting lots of soulless SEO-first junk.

AI overviews will likely be different - very negative story. Possibly catastrophic.

I realize that forum member who criticized Google were generally put off into a corner. Like bad apples. I just try to call it like I see it. Maybe there simply isn't a pulse left in the "webmaster" community. Soulless.
To keep this somewhat factual, this is what the Guardian articles says:
- volume will drop 25% by 2026 owing to AI chatbots and other virtual agents
- publishers could see a decline of up to 60% in organic search traffic, translating to a loss of an estimated $2bn (£1.6bn) in ad revenue.
Those number are based on research. Speculation sure. Who would bother debating the actual extent of this?
I think catastrophic is about the best word to describe this.
Perhaps the news websites lawsuits will slow things down, but that's news. For the person who wrote articles or content that doesn't have that backing? You've already been scraped.
The question becomes, what is the next move? Do you launch a website? Do you write an article?
Obviously Google relied on our content and websites at one point when they needing ad clicks. It was a win win.
Think of all the wasted bandwidth on this forum talking about how bad srapers were and how we could combat them. Think about how Google viewed scraped content. If you took another websites content as your own. Well they would banish you and your adsense account.
Now?
Just steal. They have the best scrapers that mankind has ever seen. Yet not even a murmur. A complacent bunch. Which again is my point. The regular here know nothing about creating content at all. Very much disassociated with this topic and the feelings it should be creating. But it's not.

I honestly don't find your post that controversial. I'm a content creator and a pretty vocal critic of Google and the like (even outside of this forum), but I know I'm tilting at windmills and need to get the places to act that have ways to stop the companies. Which unfortunately is almost impossible in my country, because in Germany you only listen to the big players in an industry.

However, I think you are wrong on one point: It also affects store operators, because article descriptions are also “stolen” and therefore these websites are also affected.

Another point where I disagree: What's the point of being afraid or panicking? It's better to use this time to be active and draw attention to the impending disaster.

Hi MrSavage, good to see your posts are on form as usual :-)

Without a doubt a lot of webmastering has changed massively and the ease of WordPress etc is to do with this, whether or not this is a good thing depends where one sits, me 30 years textpad, most site builders wouldn't have a clue where to start if they had to deal with real / any coding.

However just how important and influential is this nowadays, methinks not a lot?

Here's a question for everyone. If AI gets its act together and does provide accurate answers to queries etc, surely only one AI will become the Supreme AI simply because, presumably, they will all be giving the same answer information ... Will it be the simplicity of a white page with an instant answer or will it be a walled garden with multiple answers and plastered with advertising ... I think even I know the answer to that one!

@Mr Savage - Shame on the websmaster community for being so numb to this or so accepting.

It isn't that we are accepting, it is that there is no one who speaks for webmasters, divide and conquer has been the mantra of G et al, and it is true that a single webmaster has zero market power in the face of such massive corporations as G. Webmasters have liked to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs don't need trade unions or guilds etc .. but the truth is individual webmasters are en masse being predated by bigger fish. We need a trade union to put our case, otherwise we will remain being victims.

We need a trade union to put our case, otherwise we will remain being victims.

This situation has been discussed here ad nauseum since the mid noughties, it is most unlikely this could /would ever happen.

I would not say the webmaster community has been numb to it, progress is an ongoing evolution of the entire market. I also don't think people just accept it. Countless people have been critical of Google pretty much since its inception, but in reality, what can be done?

When I speak about progress I don't agree it's always for the better, and along the way every bit of change helps someone and hurts others. Look back to the 90s web directories were still huge and for the owners very lucrative (even small ones) then as search got better, they were forced into obscurity. Only the big players survived and then through time they were weeded out. We could say this was largely down to Google making it next to impossible for directories to rank for search terms. Google's answer to this would have been why link to a list of results within our list of results.

Over time search engines became the main way of finding information, now we are seeing AI pose a real threat to search engines. This time the case may be why show a list of results when we can simply answer the user's question?

Is this good or bad? For many users, AI does make it easier to get answers.

AI does make it easier to get answers.

If it's a question like "what is the capital of Borneo" or "what is the square root of 8" where there is a single, correct answer then yes I would agree (although Bard2 may well still get it wrong).

If it is something like "what is the best shaver for a unicorn" then that is a different thing altogether because it is a matter of opinion, and AI (as it is erroneously called) cannot tell the best from the worst, merely repeat data it has already been fed with.

Smart take on things. I have been blogging and writing daily about the outdoors for past 15 years.

Im not an SEO by definition or by choice but as a requirement of being a relevant publisher and a writer that enjoys having people read my content.

It seems now Im being punished with my site for numerous reasons.

#1 Clearly my SEO or understanding is lacking
#2 I run a review site
#3 It relies on affiliate commissions
#4 Im a smallPublisher
#5 I blog from the heart, and dont tend to "stay on topic"

So is any of the above reason to not show my content anymore.

Going from average position of 2-3 in SERP to 25+ on average isnt a reflection of my content, my visions or my site overall. There are not 22 sites for each query I look up doing product reviews better than I am.

Outdoor Retailer invited me to speak on a panel about Medias Role in the Outdoors. Alongside WSJ, WIRED. Rolling Stone and Forbes. And me my website the [snip] which Google has now deemed unhelpful.

I wonder why the largest outdoors trade organization wants my input yet Google does not.

In my heart I know my product doesn't suck nor should it be hard for readers to find.

[edited by: phranque at 5:10 am (utc) on Jun 4, 2024]
[edit reason] specifics [/edit]

Let's talk about ways to block unwanted crawlers from our sites.

I am with you on this! I have been active on X/Twitter ever since Google dropped this unnecessary nuke on us. I have never bothered to even learn how to reply to comments on Twitter until now. The webmaster crowd there is angry, depressed and bitter, just like me. It's therapy to be honest at this point smh.

It's not just the AI, its the ranking manipulation too. Why does a site that steals content need to be ranked higher? Its always the same sites and its so boring to look at. Not many of them deserve their high ranking. The only reason they have engagement is because they are the only sites that people can even see, the rest are buried. When my site was in its prime, before it was first hit with an algo ''update'' it too got engagement. Many comments and likes. People were following my newsletter, now not so much any more. None of this is fair and its increasingly frustrating

AI just adds fuel to the already burning fire. Now companies think that stealing content is fine and that they own it all. We, some of us anyway, pay for our articles. We have hired writers and use real money to keep it going. Now we get, not only the ranking manipulation, but get our content stolen without any compensation. How is none of this even getting looked at by those in law? Its criminal and they are getting away with it. Ridiculous.

No one even wants AI. Its spun rubbish from those that are struggling to, now, make a living. Theft. Besides typing something into AI over and over is so damn tedious. I recently spent almost 30 minutes looking for answers to my search query. Searching through several different websites. Imagine doing this with AI, it will become more frustrating because you are relying on AI to answer it all. I enjoy knowing facts and actual answers from real people, who have experience in what they are writing. Internet is fine the way it is just get rid of the same names in the SERPs. The corruption from greedy American corporates.

How about the admins here run a survey to find out who actually uses this forum?

My guess is that most are webmasters trying to earn from ads and will create any type of site that attracts traffic to earn commission from ad sales.

But I also expect some to be webmasters catering for a variety of industries, whose main concern with Google is about search results and sales of their own product.

@redbar This situation has been discussed here ad nauseum since the mid noughties, it is most unlikely this could /would ever happen.

Well then the power imbalance won't be rectified and G will continue to do just whatever it likes to and using webmasters web content.

Well then the power imbalance won't be rectified and G will continue to do just whatever it likes to and using webmasters web content.

The UK Competition Appeals Tribunal has just allowed a class action suit against Google on behalf of website operators who have lost money as a result of Google's shenanigans to proceed to trial. The sum claimed is up to $17 Billion.

So: this is just one move against Google, amongst countless others worldwide. I wouldn't be too pessimistic about the future.

It was all so unnecessary but Google's abusive practices in the quest for short term gain has left them open to massive retaliation.

I have said before that "webmaster" is a dated term. It really means someone in charge of a website. They may not be a content creator. It is no longer a single skills set: SEO, development, operations, etc. have become more specialised.

The thing about complaining about Google is that it is pointless. I do not like them, nor any of big tech for that matter. Saying that here changes nothing. Read the "serenity prayer" (its the thing used by alcoholics anonymous and the like).

No point complaining about "AI" either. It is very effective for certain things. I have tried ChatGPT 4o on some programming tasks and it can do a lot of simple tasks, at junior developer level, and prone to imagining things. Its useful for doing tedious stuff. Its not intelligent, and it cannot reason, but it can carry out simple tasks - I have tried refactoring classes by splitting methods, inserting the right values to replace comments, things like that. It works.

If you were a creator. If you wrote articles.

I would argue that a lot of "content creation" online is just a "remix" of what other people wrote before, and it has been like this for more than 20 years. And for some topics everything has already been written. Travel guide for Paris? You have to cover the Eifel tower, Louvre, Notre Dame just like every other blog - they are not building a new castle or museeum there every year.

And keep in mind that google itself enforces this behavior of quantity over quality. If you dont always churn out hundreds of articles each day you won't get many views. Even if you write a great page over some topic nobody has posted about, some scummy site will just copy it to compete with you for adclicks and views.

I have tried ChatGPT 4o on some programming tasks and it can do a lot of simple tasks, at junior developer level, and prone to imagining things. Its useful for doing tedious stuff. Its not intelligent, and it cannot reason, but it can carry out simple tasks

My experience exactly. To me it is like having a well educated, but unimaginative, assistant.

It is brilliant technology but as you say, it is not intelligent at all and it is only as good at it's job as the data it feeds on. Perhaps the most oft-repeated phrase in computing is 'garbage in, garbage out' but it is completely true nevertheless; and the websites that these systems have been trained on contain plenty of it (and that's before the 'googlebombers' really get to work).

It is no longer a single skills set: SEO, development, operations, etc. have become more specialised.

For those working for large Corps in teams possibly so however I know for definite that I am not the only one still using most of the necessary skill sets required on a usually much lower budget.

@MrSavage, the way I see it, you are approaching 2 different but related topics, (1) AI, scrappers, bots, etc. and the other is (2) WebmasterWorld forum, the community, the current state of affairs, as you explain "still" (frozen?)

#1. I see people on other forums (not web/creation related) talking a lot of their use of AI, it's terrible, adults, educators, writers, whatever using AI to simplify their work, asking AI to make summaries or even to "please tell me what MrSavage means in just 2 paragraphs", also people asking technical questions, others (like me) answering in human form from experience, and then being told back "I asked Chat GPT to explain to me your answer, so you mean apples, right?". The human response to AI has been pretty poor, -I see lazy people-. And regarding webmaster/content creator forums? YES, like you said, almost nobody is doing it, all I see (specially in the spanish world) is lazy people playing with scripts to automate content creation... and then complain because google banned their Adsense account, to me... Wordpress has become a red flag, if the conversation is not about automated content generation or scrapping, then it's about "my website died and I don't know how to fix it", because they rarely know anything. I share the same views posted on this forum and I don't see Google as part of the solution, but just the opposite.

I'm not even sure I can contribute in any way regarding this topic (#1), pretty much everything has been said on this page already. I'm moving to the topic that I find interesting:

#2. This community and content creation. I grew familiar with several members of this forum, some are older than me and are not managing webs anymore, some sold their digital properties, others retired, and others just got bored (I'm one of them). This forum is not as active as in the past, and making it grow is not easy, I know people who asked me questions whose answers are HERE, but when they come to this forum they are like "eh... ok...", because it's not what they expect. Others that I met on the web are interested on the information posted here, but when they come they retire right away because they see the whatever they want to do is basically forbidden by this forum guidelines (insane number of people want "get rich quick" ideas).

I opened a thread about how silent the forum is, another one about forums being dead or not, another one on how to keep forums alive, also about the burden of creating content, getting bored, tired, or just having negative associations with the job because whatever effort you put in, ends up being copied right away and eventually one gets tired of DMCA's, creating original quality content takes time and effort, I started doing it because I love what I do (my hobbies), not for the money, but even so with the current state of things I find little motivation to produce content the same way as in the past. Besides... I also experienced issue (opened a thread about it) regarding stupid people... me posting quality content, seeing my traffic going up, and then seeing stupid questions coming in... it hits you eventually. I keep my contact form hidden, if you want to send me an email via my websites you have to really look for it, that's the only way I managed to reduce the nonsense on my inbox.

Although this is called "webmaster world", at one point that implied most or all of us created content.
My sense is that next to nobody here actually creates anything. Sure, you might have some SEO service. Maybe you have a store front. I'm sure you have some aspect of online presence. However, I'm pretty damn sure most everyone here doesn't write. Doesn't create.

I explained my angle above, but besides, I've been busy. I'm semi retired, and creating certain type of content takes about a week of hard work, while accepting certain jobs (special requests) takes the same week but interesting money comes in, it's no brainer why I choose one activity over the other.

And... you are not asking but... after many years of running my websites on my own CMS built on top of my own framework, I'm now rewriting it entirely on PHP because new webservers don't exactly come ready out of the box with Perl installed (along the needed modules) as in the past. Years ago I just copied the files, but since 3-4 years ago I have to sit and talk to the techs, no no no, let's not debate this, even if they tell me the server has this and that, it doesn't, and nobody notices this because nobody uses those things. I do, but I got tired of telling the techs what's missing and what to do, so yes, I'm working on and off on my new framework and CMS, this surely keeps me busy (and the priority goes to the jobs that land on my inbox from time to time).

I still want to improve.
Still want to do more.
Still enjoy contributing and helping others.
Still love discussing content creation.

But let's be honest, lots of people don't even read anymore, I was one of the first proposing this for discussion in the past and I was told "nah, you are wrong", no, I was right, and now I see more people telling me "now I see it, you were right all along". Educators (school and university) are now constantly telling me "facepalm yes you were right, I can't believe how stupid people have become".

And it's related, humans are the audience, it's just as Osho said "but the people are retarded".

Extra: I worked with writers and editors, besides my own line of work I was given a position as a writer and editor at a big company. You could get (years ago) a decent salary writing or editing. Today? not so much. People I knew (just writing), even an exGF, moved to other areas because people don't read the same amounts of information, and many can't deal with the information, they were told to write simpler stories, less text and more graphics, and the salaries went down terribly... someone I knew who was an editor moved to make and sell donuts, last thing I knew he wasn't doing well at all, same goes to other people I know, they are far from doing great.

Besides, socially (here where I live) writing is seeing as something cheap, not worth paying much.

Where is AI going to scrape up to date information when it has forced all the content creators out of business? I mean doesn't help me much, but will be interesting...

Also, people talk about AI getting better at being factually correct. I did some research and also used ChatGPT the other day. Some of the stuff the AI came up with was spot on - other stuff was completely factually incorrect. Well-written, but wrong.

I would imagine fact checking is orders of magnitude more difficult than grammar / syntax etc. I suppose it just depends on whether people care, I mean there have always been websites pumping out factually incorrect junk...

Over the years I've written many, many thousands of words that I've researched from reference books and technical data, and from my own training and knowledge. I'd create the content in my own words from practical experience, from conferences, from training session, etc. Every single document was from my mind.

The data for LLMs comes from information it has scraped from documents created by people like me, academics, technologists, journalists, etc. When, for example, these originators stop writing material I often wonder how those scraping will research new material to scrape for the LLMs. Surely, when it ends up scraping other databases from LLMs the information, potentially, becomes weaker, with quality becoming questionable.

It's worth noting that this is just about language, and not about visual and audible creations: Graphics and music are an example. The creativity is less about facts and more about how good the technology has become. I've seen many AI visual tools that are just weak, with others that are simply stunning.

There's still a long way to go, imho, but the disruptive technology of AI is moving fast, and it's be wrong to ignore the potential and opportunities.

Every forum has (or had) that user... that has no opinions, no experience, no background and no knowledge, and all this user does regarding every discussion is... browsing the web, read the first 3, 5, 15 results (mostly wikipedia) and posts back in copy&paste mode, or regurgitating in appropriation mode.

And as far as I can tell :) nobody likes that forum member, or at least nobody welcomes those interactions. Perhaps at the beginning things sound legit, informative, but it quickly wears down.

Now, personally, I find myself increasingly searching the web for information where the articles or comments include a visible form of "I tried this, I built this, I tested this, this is my experience", my approach has nothing to do with AI, I found myself doing this before AI hit the headlines, I guess (at least regarding the context here at WebmasterWorld) there is no need to explain why.

On the other hand, as mentioned above on other threads, I find more people on forums explaining how they ask AI to make summaries of what they find, even posts on forums, and that's the only way they seem to be able to process information. I guess this is valid for some people on some scenarios... but by association, NOW, I'm realizing those people can't really process information, and then post opinions on threads showing full lack of understanding, false beliefs, or just wrong information.

Knowledge is welcome, probably we are living key stages of adjustments.

Writing is also a lot less profitable.

I have a website that has probably something like 100,000 words, all written by me, largely from my own knowledge about stuff I have expertise in (my old job, things I have post-grad degrees in). Its been cited in academic papers, I had a bit plagiarised by a textbook (and I am pretty sure there are other examples of similar I do not know about), it has links from wikipedia (not created by me!), big media sites etc.

It used to provide a substantial chunk of my living. Just from Google ads. It now has far less traffic and I have given up on monetising it.

I still write, but increasingly on my personal blog and things I am not aiming to make a profit on. I am planning a sub-site on how I educated my kids (work in progress) but that is a cause. I am working on something about business an politics - also a cause. Maybe some things that are reputation builders/draw attention to me so I can sell something else.

The profit now comes from UGC, and that is dominated by a few big companies.

100,000 words

100-200 pages is not much when considering that one script can be 10,000 lines of code.

Our SEO guy recommended adding a new article to our blog every week. So that was Monday's chore. One year of blogging = 52 articles x 500 words. After 4 years it amounts to about 100,000 words... all for the sake of ranking points.

After a while it gets hard to write about something new, even with 10 unique product lines. There has always been software that rewrites articles so that they can appear to be different. I experimented with them once but found the English was awkward. Today AI is available and it is promoted as a good solution for article writing. I experimented with that also and found the articles passable after a little editing to refocus the topic.

Today, as always, we only do original articles about newsworthy stuff like new releases.

But with everyone out there trying to increase traffic via blogging, what has the Internet become? I remember a time when a search could not produce any results at all but now a search on anything can return 1,000s of pages of results with most of them relevant to the query.

We are getting that high number of results due to all the garbage floating on the surface and also because by broadening search matches, more ads are displayed. Webmasters have been ill advised and most of what is touted as good SEO practice has been disproved. A long time ago we created 12 different websites with aliases of a domain and added the same page content, but with a different twist for each to evaluate the effects of different SEO principles. Each had a sitemap that was submitted for search. We waited for a few months and then checked search for the main keywords. The results were not consistent with anything recommended by SEO pundits.

Even "domain age" seems to be a myth. In fact I have always wondered if domain age is actually a penalty, similar to having a website that is dependent on search results to pay its rent and once that site registers for ads, it is then identified as a target to penalise so that it pays for ads to survive. We went that way for a long time, getting less and less value from our budget and never seeing any of our ads. The more we optimised our web pages, the worse they rated.

The show stopper came one day when we were checking our keywords in search and a new website appeared at #1 for our main keyword string. It was a brand new domain with only one web page, and that web page had no more content than meta tags for title and description and a H1 headline... no other content on the page!

Imagine seeing this after all else when we had been paying a lot money to get one site anywhere on the first page of results for keywords which we invented 26 years ago.

Shame on the websmaster community for being so numb

Businesses dependent on search probably believe that they have no choice. They are afraid of being penalised. In early days advertisers could complain only to get standardised excuses obscured by their smokescreen. Today there is no way to contact them and complain at all unless you have an ad manager and your budget is huge. Others getting paid for displaying those ads are also afraid of being penalised.

Here's a quickie... if a client is paying $6.50 for a clickthrough on their ad, what does the site displaying those ads get?

The only way anything can be done about the wrought is by way of class action. None of us can afford the legal costs. Apparently those actions are getting bigger and bigger, but they do nothing for the rest of us. The fines get paid and the milking continues.

My point of view today is that there is nothing that can be done about anything while the public is blindsided by propaganda and free services.

We no longer pay for ads and no longer pay attention to anything recommended by Google or the scammers spamvertising SEO services. Yet of the 10 spots on the first page for our keyword results, today we occupy most of them.

Although this is called "webmaster world", at one point that implied most or all of us created content.

Look at my join date...

WebmasterWorld has almost always been principally about position in the search results. There was a time in the early years where technical challenges to selected problems and solutions with bots, php, javascript, htaccess, etc. were discussed in some threads. What is clear to me is that there is a marked reduction in useful webmaster contributions here and other webmaster dedicated websites. A change in strategy for webmaster centric websites seems overdue - way overdue.

I became frustrated years ago troubleshooting serp position changes that appeared arbitrary (and there were). WebmasterWorld forbids posting website url's and where members shared similar challenges to mine or drops in traffic that I thought I could learn something about - I get nothing but speculation - nothing to analyze. To be clear since there is not a method to observe nor learn what might be going on within other websites having SERP challenges - I can't learn much therefore I'm wasting my time and they are wasting theirs.

In general, for many years now there's not much to learn on WebmasterWorld - just the latest slew of complaints about how traffic has dropped and theoretical Google SERP trends, the search engines ar evil, blah, blah.. - none of which is useful.

I visit WebmasterWorld occasionally, I am curious and mostly to see if anything has changed - SSDD.

I hope the best for WebmasterWorld and the webmasters that visit here.

Our SEO guy recommended adding a new article to our blog every week. So that was Monday's chore. One year of blogging = 52 articles x 500 words. After 4 years it amounts to about 100,000 words... all for the sake of ranking points.

After a while it gets hard to write about something new, even with 10 unique product lines. There has always been software that rewrites articles so that they can appear to be different. I experimented with them once but found the English was awkward. Today AI is available and it is promoted as a good solution for article writing. I experimented with that also and found the articles passable after a little editing to refocus the topic.

Today, as always, we only do original articles about newsworthy stuff like new releases.

Creating content is difficult, specially high quality content. Yet, SEO guides, SEO "experts", and even Google, suggest adding content constantly, about what? this feeds the never ending cycle of garbage, like "ok, today we are going to bake bread but with an ultra secret special variation", obviously, this means the writers are struggling to produce something of value, and instead they post promises and premises, but when you read... it's not even useful.

Still, you find testimonials of webmasters saying they post daily, yeah... daily.

Where I live, the administration (residential area) does as they are told "post new content to keep your audience engaged". Yeah, sure, what we get is a never ending cycle of garbage: remember we care about you, remember father's day is near, remember "you are a wonderful person, don't forget to smile", and this is not an isolated case, because other companies are doing the same thing: banks, medical clinics, doctors, etc. The result is everyone doing the same boring stuff that you end up hating, and they send you this to your inbox, you can block some, but not all, you can't block your bank information channel... it sucks.

I became frustrated years ago troubleshooting serp position changes that appeared arbitrary (and there were). WebmasterWorld forbids posting website url's and where members shared similar challenges to mine or drops in traffic that I thought I could learn something about - I get nothing but speculation - nothing to analyze. To be clear since there is not a method to observe nor learn what might be going on within other websites having SERP challenges - I can't learn much therefore I'm wasting my time and they are wasting theirs.

In general, for many years now there's not much to learn on WebmasterWorld

Yes.

But... there was an old forum member here who at the request of information, tips, techniques, etc, he usually posted the same stuff "read this old thread, everything you need to know is there, it works, it worked before and it works now, there is no need to reinvent the wheel: create high quality content for humans, not machines" etc. I entirely agree with that.

The problem is, now there are 100,000 websites talking about the same thing you do, some do it better, and some do it faster, then, you are just loosing against competition. You can't tell a runner to work hard and run fast and that's the key to success when there are 100,000 runners to compete with, the formula just won't work as before.

Another problem is... those tips don't really work now, specially with Google. Please, if any of you (general reader) are really interested on creating content and getting traffic, please! become aware of this. Many times if you search via Google, you won't find what you need, you will find what G wants you to read, or what G thinks you need, instead, other SE take you directly to the answers, effectively. Sadly, this won't exactly work as everyone keeps using Google. There are times where people say "I can't find anything useful", ok, you try with Bing and guess what? you find it, this may not always work, but it does work.

Long gone are the days where people would search on Yahoo, check; Google, check; Webcrawler, check; Altavista, check; and then people compared the results and used whatever was effective. No, today? google, google, google. Another problem? at some point searching on other SE's meant you were only getting Google results, because the one you were using just sent the requests to G, "powered by G".