Tuta Mail, a popular encrypted email service, complained to European Union tech regulators that Google dropped its rankings for all sorts of keyword phrases with the Google March 2024 core update. Tuta is upset they no longer rank for [encrypted email] after this update.

Reuters reported “German email service Tuta Mail has complained to European Union tech regulators about what it described as a sudden drop in Google search results on the day the bloc’s new tech rules kicked in.”

“At the beginning of March 2024 Google suddenly stopped displaying our website for thousands of keywords, limiting search traffic to our site in large part to so-called ‘branded traffic’ only,” the company said in its complaint seen by Reuters. “This means people were no longer finding our encrypted email provider when searching for ‘encrypted email’, but only when explicitly searching for ‘Tuta’ or ‘Tutanota’,” it said. “Obviously Google changed something in its search algorithms, but we do not know what they changed or why,” he told Reuters in an interview. “After removing most branded keywords, we see that our total impressions per month (30 days) dropped by 88.47%. Google took away about 90% of our visibility online,” he said.

A Semrush chart shows a step decline with the March 2024 Google core update:

Reuters said “Google said it does not unfairly promote its own products. Tech experts said websites can lose Google ranking due to algorithm changes.” “Search ranking updates absolutely do not aim to preference Google products, or any other particular website. The email provider in question is easily accessible globally on Search,” a spokesperson said.

Tuta wants the European board to investigate, “We want the DMA taskforce to include our data in their investigation on whether Google is complying with the DMA,” he said.

We have seen this before and it is doubtful anything will change here with Tuta but it is always nice to these issues hit the spotlight.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.