SEO TL;DR #8: Is Google Getting Worse, A Spike in 404s & Circle to Search
SEO TL;DR - 22/01/2024
Is Google Search Getting Worse?
No, at least according to a German study released by the Leipzig University - summarised over at Search Engine Roundtable. While Google has slightly improved in some areas, there is still a lot of spammy content within Google Search.
The study manually reviewed 7,392 unique search queries. It focused on product review types of queries.
The study tracked how results have changed for product reviews from Aug 2022 through Sep 2023 and found:
Google's got better: “In fact, the Google results seem to have improved to some extent since the start of our experiment in terms of the amount of affiliate spam. Yet, we can still find several spam domains and also see an overall downward trend in text quality in all three search engines, so there is still quite a lot of room for improvement."
Higher-ranked pages are on average more optimised, more monetised with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.
When to care about 404 errors in Google Search Console
A few days ago, you may have seen a spike in 404 errors in Google Search Console, with URLs all ending in /1000. This was the case for almost every website we manage, which happened worldwide.
With this type of activity, there’s nothing you can do about it, but thankfully, you needn’t worry. Google's John Mueller replied to this issue by saying:
No need to disavow; it's probably just random spam… You can ignore them. 404s are fine.
So long as a page is 404ing, any links that point to a 404 page won’t count towards your backlink profile or history or penalise you in any way, so you don’t have to worry about disavowing them.
We often see 404s when publications link to a product that has since been removed. In these cases, the 404 URL should be redirected, but only to a like-for-like product, or at a push, the collection page where this product used to belong. Redirecting to the homepage is not helpful, and any theoretical authority the link may have gained will be ignored in the same way as if it 404ed.
Circle to Search
Google announced a new feature called Circle to Search, which is currently only available on “select premium Android smartphones — the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series”. This allows you to circle anything on your screen and search for it - as demonstrated in the ad below for the new Samsung S24.
The video compares someone searching for a lamp they like in a film (the old-fashioned way - using a laptop and Google), to someone pausing the film, circling the lamp and immediately finding a listing.
In another example below, someone circles an orange bag within an image and is shown several listings for that product.
This highlights the importance of using good photography on your product listing pages, ideally showing the bag in all colourways and angles. Structured data is also essential if you want to appear for rich results, with star ratings, availability and price as seen above.