Recent Comments on Search Engine Roundtable

Golden Phoenix commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

I have blocked China, SG and HK.

Comment ID #6810780583 12/17/2025 06:13 am

googleisjoke commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

don't you worry that they will get your site down? I once blocked russia and my site went down right after

Comment ID #6810753692 12/17/2025 04:39 am

FF222 commented on Google Says Optimization For AI Search Is The Same As For Traditional

The only difference is, that optimzing for AI doesn't make sense, because there's no reward for appearing in the AI generated answers. Users will not click through to your site, so you'll not be able to recoup any costs you invested into optimizing your content. Just shows you again why the "AI economy" is unsustainable, and why it will lead to the complete degeneration of the web even for content that will still stay on it or will still get published.

Comment ID #6810751876 12/17/2025 04:30 am

Cunir commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

I block China and other countries through CloudFlare and loads of visits still show up on GA. They don't show up in CloudFlare's own stats though, so I don't trust the info in GA - I'm sure they estimate a lot of the traffic

Comment ID #6810733268 12/17/2025 02:56 am

Leary Liang commented on Google Warns Not To Use NoIndex Tags In Pages That Use JavaScript

What sticks with me most about noindex is an experiment I once saw where someone put the noindex tag inside the body, and it actually worked, the page didn’t get indexed. That story never fails to make me smile.

Comment ID #6810658773 12/16/2025 10:14 pm

John A. User commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Strange that its stopped reporting CWV for Mobile but is reporting for Desktop. I have the same version sent for desktop and mobile. My site is predominantly a desktop site, but that still doesn't explain the drop. Also, I have noticed, there's been an increase in desktop CWV all of a sudden, but I can't reproduce the error in Chrome or Webpagetest :( https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/36291d5995212451d6fdc1f5b8ddf61032e8fe44434a94f7c6016bbc09d6e231.png

Comment ID #6810605233 12/16/2025 07:19 pm

Kf commented on Google Changing Q&A Feature In Google Maps For Ask

Yeah this is actually good. The q and a are very stale. Some are dumb questions like are you open, some are t years old

Comment ID #6810598553 12/16/2025 06:56 pm

DataDonkey commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

It's definitely bad and getting worse.

Comment ID #6810591038 12/16/2025 06:31 pm

DataDonkey commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Yes, the GEO IP DB is paid and works extremely well for country blocking. But Alibaba, TenCent, etc. have servers all over the world so those must be addressed manually. We're ecom and get attempted credit card testing fraud orders too, and those come from all over the world including compromised PCs in the USA running hidden proxies. With country blocks in place, and dealing with more elusive scraper bots as they become known, we've locked most of them out and have it under control.

Comment ID #6810589796 12/16/2025 06:27 pm

Sam commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Yep

Comment ID #6810561015 12/16/2025 05:05 pm

Sam commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

I just blocked a bot 70k in one day that looked like a fake google user agent, I have never seen so much scraping

Comment ID #6810560664 12/16/2025 05:05 pm

OKmann commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Is anyone able to access the "settings" tab within GSC? Across all my properties, I've been hit with a 504 error for at least 3 weeks now. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1bacd4efc80ae7e3e78447cf98eb0d35053968b1cf59f53e3d3a73610d3df8ff.png

Comment ID #6810560611 12/16/2025 05:04 pm

Dan commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Down 98% in the last few days since the update, impressions have tanked to their lowest in years, absolute crickets, no articles being indexed. What a lovely way to celebrate the festive season. Stay safe out there, everyone, and happy holidays!

Comment ID #6810499105 12/16/2025 02:50 pm

Rodrigo Calvo commented on Google Warns Not To Use NoIndex Tags In Pages That Use JavaScript

Honestly, the sheer amount of headaches this specific disconnect causes is exhausting. It’s frustrating to be the one constantly telling brilliant dev teams that they have to “dumb down” modern architectures because the crawler won’t execute past the first signal. We’re building spaceships for users, but we still have to park them in a horse stable so the bot can make sense of them. I’m tired of debugging pages that work perfectly in real browsers but remain invisible to Googlebot. It’s 2025, we shouldn’t still be fighting the crawler at this level.

Comment ID #6810488915 12/16/2025 02:28 pm

Bender G commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

two conversions throughout the afternoon :(

Comment ID #6810439206 12/16/2025 12:53 pm

John A. User commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, why have I reposted your comment with paragraphs, I want to test a theory to see if Disqus sees if having one large paragraph is spam.

Comment ID #6810437498 12/16/2025 12:49 pm

John A. User commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

If we used GA, and removed our block list, I'm sure our traffic would look similar. You folks using GA need to get a handle on these bots because I'd say 90% of the hits our site gets are from bots. GA traffic data has to be highly unreliable due to it's failure to distinguish valid human traffic. Doesn't anyone have or sell an updated exclusion list for those using GA? If not, that would be a great opportunity for anyone willing to put in the time and effort. If all else fails, maybe it's time to move beyond GA and find an analytics service that excludes bots. Would be far better than flying blind with GA because flying blind and being oblivious to the lack of real human traffic is what Google wants otherwise they would have fixed it already.

Comment ID #6810436670 12/16/2025 12:47 pm

Barry Schwartz commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

I have no idea.

Comment ID #6810435238 12/16/2025 12:44 pm

UncleKrusty commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Thanks. Has Disqus rolled out something new that's doing this or maybe a new mod setting that needs to be dialed down? It appears I'm not the only one with this problem, and there were no links in that post either. Just weird....

Comment ID #6810433727 12/16/2025 12:43 pm

Barry Schwartz commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

I think I found it and approved it.

Comment ID #6810431852 12/16/2025 12:40 pm

Dimitris Abrazis commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

8 visitors from china only. My traffic is 90% down for the past 2 days

Comment ID #6810426728 12/16/2025 12:30 pm

Dimitris Abrazis commented on Google Search Console Performance Reports Finally Up-To-Date

Still Stuck. I was the one posting yesterday on X about it. The past 2 days traffic is almost dead. I really have no clue what is happening. Traffic was never that low in every other core update.

Comment ID #6810425539 12/16/2025 12:28 pm

Mark Ting commented on Google Ads Exact Match Not Eligible To Show Ads In AI Overviews

Since exact match ISN'T exact match...

Comment ID #6810407224 12/16/2025 11:54 am

UncleKrusty commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

If we used GA, and removed our block list, I'm sure our traffic would look similar. You folks using GA need to get a handle on these bots because I'd say 90% of the hits our site gets are from bots. GA traffic data has to be highly unreliable due to it's failure to distinguish valid human traffic. Doesn't anyone have or sell an updated exclusion list for those using GA? If not, that would be a great opportunity for anyone willing to put in the time and effort. If all else fails, maybe it's time to move beyond GA and find an analytics service that excludes bots. Would be far better than flying blind with GA because flying blind and being oblivious to the lack of real human traffic is what Google wants otherwise they would have fixed it already.

Comment ID #6810404337 12/16/2025 11:48 am

John A. User commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

What countries, let me guess China?

Comment ID #6810372486 12/16/2025 10:48 am

FokGoogle commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Experiencing the same. High visitor count but they're mostly zombies.

Comment ID #6810365580 12/16/2025 10:34 am

masterx commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

“What the hell is going on?… Is it full of bots everywhere or what?… We’re getting visits from countries outside our target.” https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7f4de04de38be19c4fdbcb120454029b1f1d595b57bfb38c3f088f06a2ff8079.jpg

Comment ID #6810353282 12/16/2025 10:11 am

Rombout commented on Google Doodle For Seasonal Holidays 2025

I was kind expecting some big again. This time its just a GIF animation

Comment ID #6810337328 12/16/2025 09:38 am

John A. User commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

The GEO IP is a paid product right? I also block some IPs from USA if they are heavy visitors because no user would read that many pages. FOr me, I can't see why FB needs to send bots to my site at such a heavy rate, they're not a SE engine and I don't get that many visitors from them so I block them.

Comment ID #6810337286 12/16/2025 09:38 am

SpXmtdd commented on Google December 2025 Core Update Intense Impact

Vietnam traffic on a German website, of course it's probably AI bots

Comment ID #6810316752 12/16/2025 08:56 am

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Daily Search Forum Recap: December 16, 2025

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