Crazy conspiracy theory or deliberate sabotage of your website?

Ok so this is just something that's popped into my head just now. So I've not had time to really think this through so it might be nuts but...

We all know Google indexing has gone to shit now. Even sites with good content are taking forever to get new pages crawled compared to Bing.

So what are the reasons for this? Could it be a bug? Unlikely, its been going on for so long now it seems like its by design.

Could it be there is just more content on the web now with AI content etc, maybe...maybe...but computational power is also increasing and Google owns google cloud platform so has no shortage of processing power. They also own one of the fastest fiber optic networks in the world. Also ahrefs and SEMRush index content (backlinks) often within hours sometimes and they're tiny compared to Google.

Could it be they care about the environment...LOL I won't even comment on a corporation caring about anything but the bottom line.

What do you do if you're a small company and you want to go after a brand new keyword but it takes ages to get your new web page to be indexed? Where is the first place you would turn to for search traffic that isn't organic...you'd buy the traffic from Google with AdWords right? Or at least there is a strong possibility you would.

What if Google noticed every time we have an indexing bug or slow down for an update roll out our AdWords revenue goes up?

Yeah, your conspiracy theory seems plausible. I mean, Google is a corporation, right? And making money is their focus. Why would they let people use SEO and piggyback on their services to earn revenue when they (Google) aren't getting a dime.

If you notice after the crazy fluctuations in late December and early Jan, we thought all is over. Guess what? Since last week there's major fluctuations again and everyone is talking about a possible algo update going on. But why at this time? Well, Valentine's Day is coming... And if you notice, this whole period of fluctuations is exactly like last year. I remember vividly the same exact fluctuations that happened from December 2020 to February 2021, just like now.

In fact, many comments in search engine forums and websites (like SEroundtable) have pointed out that they are facing traffic anomaly - one moment they are getting traffic as normal, then in the afternoon or night totally no traffic. It is like G is turning on the traffic tap and turning it off to throttle your website's traffic. And as many also pointed out their keywords would be ranking the first page as normal then down to several pages down then later back to the first page later in the day. If not, traffic from the US disappears but traffic elsewhere (like the UK, Australia, etc) are normal. It is like an intentional throttle.

I also mentioned in another thread earlier... What truly doesn't make sense is if you go to your GSC's crawl log (under settings > crawl stats)... You will see Google's bots/spiders are still crawling your website. YET, they refuse to index our blog posts or links. When I look at the coverage section, the last crawl date was like nearly a month ago. As you can see, GSC is giving me/us totally different reports. It all doesn't make sense too, especially when my website's daily crawl rate is high. I suspect it is part of their algorithm now.

And like you said, no surprise that they're doing all these 'slow index' to intentionally make you go for paid advertising.

Also, this past week my conversions have been very weird. For example, today most of my conversions are from the UK and Australia but none from the US. But the next day conversions are as normal from the US but disappears from the UK/Australia.

Perhaps if the post goes viral or is in high demand (say, a piece of breaking news but no one is talking about it yet), it will get indexed? Maybe that is why some swore their posts got indexed after sharing it in social places (reddit, quora, twitter, IG). We may need to experiment on this one.

It's 100% sure there is a flaw to the system
They been sued over and over for it - just one example https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/17/google-search-antitrust-lawsuit/
However, I am sure, the amount they been used for is just a slice of the cake they make from manipulating rankings.
The big guys always bullies the little man, it's a dog eat dog world out there.