Reddit experienced serious technical problems for two consecutive days – Wednesday and Thursday, which made it difficult for users worldwide to access the site. This is happening as Google rolls out its November 2024 Core update and webmasters hope for an end to the sitewide classifier that shadowbanned websites from appearing on Google search after the release of the Helpful Content Update (HCU) on September 2023.
The first outage started around 10 AM ET on Wednesday and impacted both mobile app and website users. To show that many people were affected by these disruptions, over 50,000 individuals reported the issues they were experiencing on DownDetector, a site that tracks outages such as this.
Though these events occurred within the same period, there is no evidence to support that the Reddit downtime was a result of the ongoing Google Core Update.
Tom’s Guide reported that Reddit was aware of the issues and was actively working to fix them. Reddit explained that the recent outages were caused by a problem in a new update they had rolled out. Even after taking steps to fix the issue, many users still experienced slow performance and occasional downtime.
People reported having problems loading pages and comments, and some even encountered an error message. However, by Thursday, Reddit shared that they had implemented a solution, and things were slowly getting back to normal for users.
A spokesperson from Reddit told CBS News, “There was a bug in a recent update we made, but a fix is in place and we’re ramping back up.” However, the company has not shared when users can expect everything to be fully stable again.
However, while Reddit downtime persists, website owners are having a smirk of retribution. Following the HCU that wiped out thousands of independent small websites and bloggers from Google search, many SEOs and webmasters noted that traffic to Reddit grew astronomically.
Google has been accused of favoring Reddit to rank high on its search after both companies entered a partnership that saw the Aphabet Inc. subsidiary pay the social media company $60m to allow it to train its AI using its user’s posts. Many alleged that it only made sense for Google to rank Reddit posts higher in SERPs so they can have more data or, it could be Reddit’s bargain for the collaboration.
Sistrix’s graph below shows a very huge leap in Reddit’s traffic which has continued upward to date since Google first released its HCU in September 2023. Insights showed that the forum and social network currently ranks as the 3rd most visible website in the United States, from its 78th position last year.
Other social media giants and forums such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Instagram, etc were also reported to have enjoyed huge traffic boosts by dominating search first pages for many queries that previously never ranked for.
Massive complaints and negative feedback have dominated the comment section of posts by Google Search Central on Twitter, with site owners berating not just the HCU sitewide shadowban, but Google’s AI – Gemini, which now occupies the top section of search pages and instantly gives answers to users from content gotten from websites.
The instant and satisfactory feedback most often leaves the searcher with no further need to visit any website. This effectively leads to reduced traffic for sites and loss in income – spiking the case on Google for its illegal monopoly.
These many resentments against Google are reflected in webmasters being overly interested in news of lawsuits on the search engine for breaking antitrust laws and also looking forward to the breakdown of the number one search engine by the US DOJ.
