Below are the most recent 30 comments. I try to keep it clean of comment spam, but some times things
get through and it takes me several hours to get to it. So please excuse any of that comment spam.
Google runs AdSense as an after thought, website is unusable on mobile and in all honesty they have never seemed to care about their AdSense partners compared to every other AdTech company.
the internet is dying. they are pushing AI videos. You can get 10m views for babies dancing or things of that, all fake of course. Real content is getting buried.
I had a good 26 years in SEO started in 99 when WebmasterWorld was more or less the only place to hang out online for webmasters .
My brother said at the time nothing lasts forever, he gave it 5 to 10 years at the time. Well it lasted longer and I'm truly grateful.
It was always about links and content and you could always recover after a beating.. I guess it is still but with a zero click internet and Ai traffic is not what it was. The game has changed and I don't have time for it.
The internet used to be fun back in the day but now the gatekeepers want to take every last dollar of the table. Whether that is Google Facebook Amazon booking etc. we are living in techno feudalism where you have to live in their platforms to survive and it truly sucks.
I have retired comfortably thanks to my online career but I do keep one eye on the serps and every time I look at it I have no inclination to come back.
Who knows something better might emerge in a year but it's not going to happen under Trump's watch with the tech bros in his pocket.
Turning off ranking improvements, more PAA type boxes and generally enshitifying the search results has been on Google's radar for years as that court document shows.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/69cd9bee66550499535a6412176dfbe1239c627b1d34fdf35991fe7fd491c607.gif
<blockquote>Propoganda, just like google said "the web is thriving" when we all lost 80% of traffic. Don't believe the reports.</blockquote>Your prediction "I predict, advertising is down by 70% for Google" is also a form of false hope. We all want the Google Crime Syndicate to pay the price for what they've done, but wanting it doesn't make it true.
We're all losing money because Google is taking it for themselves, not because the advertising market is collapsing. If Google were losing money, then we would see them raise minimum bid requirements and take other extreme actions to boost revenue because there's nobody to stop them. Not trying to be mean, just real. Most publishers should be looking for an off-ramp to part from their online businesses instead of clinging onto false hopes.
May is when they switched off topical authroity and the parasite seo started popping up everywhere. With a flick of a switch every intern at any media group was now an expert in almost everything + the flood of low quality AI content and it's never been fixed. now its just a flood of garbage.
Esp when/if you pay for premium! I have YouTube 63K subs side gig and wont entertain sponsor's for this reason! Sadly YT pays poorly creators who want to make a full time living off it have little choice!
Definitely could be a bug or an excuse to thieve more money away from publishers. Hard to tell which it is since they're both incompetent and corrupt.
If it is a bug, taking so long to report it to what's left of the community also shows how out of touch they are with what's going on.
Maybe google reducing Adsense is for them to earn more money themsevers, to make up for the shortfall in ad revenue guys? Maybe Google will just take more of your ad money and more of your traffic and you have no control over it, and don't know anything about this if you use Adsense. I'm thinking of just removing it if it is not paying me enough to keep the site online. Thoughts?
Google provides me with a nice map showing the sources of traffic to my site.
This graphic shows that Yahoo refers 20% (!) of Google's traffic to my website.
I mean... who even uses Yahoo? Yahoo is a dead horse... and so is Google.
These figures alone show what Google is doing with its AI overviews and other pleasantries.
It's a bloodbath.
P.S.: Since January 12, AdSense revenue down 30% :-(
Could this be the problem with AdSense?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/93efc24f2a296927f5f277927e351a493bf84af3f669b20302cc845e53a7d518.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7e1570fc157fe49548790936be765e97bad20d893a49995c5f9d69e7e86ff584.jpg
<a href="https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/">https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/</a>
<a href="https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/incidents/DfLEJTaVwBikfg6pA6nm?hl=en">https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/incidents/DfLEJTaVwBikfg6pA6nm?hl=en</a>
Something must be happening with adsense, the earnings got reduced to about 30% of what I used to make, in the last 2-3 days. The number of clicks are the same. January was always terrible, but this seems much worse than usual.
Seems all of this was planned right from Sept 2023- that was just the start of degrading "everything" including but not limited to traffic, RPM, CPC, earnings. They wanted to mark the end of Jan 2026 as the "ultimate end"
Some of the the money has moved to sponsored pitches by the YouTubers. I'm getting really tired of having to fast-forward through first-person spiels for VPNs, prepared meals, and mental-health sites.