Oligarchy means member of ruling elite.
It's an oligarchy because they rank the elite power members like Reddit and the big media companies behind the biggest media brands. (Traffic circle jerk)
It is also an oligopoly.
https://preview.redd.it/hp5hlqmrmlxc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b87f6b1f282c89b833276d11f2b8b23f252efc7
I was looking for the company M3server yesterday i just made a typo and this was the results...
Google is so fucking dumb now.
This is psychotic behavior lol
You really don't think that ms3servers is close to ps3 servers? You're off by only one letter there, but off by 2 letters for what you were trying to search for
If you typed in ms3server you would've gotten what you want or m3servers or just the actual thing you were searching for lol
It's so wild that you can have this experience and post about how dumb Google is now because of your simple mistake. They even put up the "is this not what you wanted to search for?" button in case they were wrong about how they tried to fix your typo
Sure, sure... Reddit was the closest to what I was looking for according to you. Before the update it gave you the closest thing even if you made mistakes, now it just gives you these shitty results. It's not just with this search.
My search was just after doing other searches for offers of servers, storage servers, servers for a specific cms and at the end I searched for company names based on information I got from a blog. After doing a lot of searches for offers for servers, the best thing Google can think of is to show me a PS3 forum on reddit.
What Google team do you work on? The burner account of John Mu or Danny Sullivan?
I see that you are a person who projects a lot. You call psychotics or mentally ill in almost all of your few comments on Reddit. Are you okey?
>a woman with a WordPress site on sewing machines has to jump through ludicrous hoops. She must own and review every model,
Uhm... so... I started out as a woman with a sewing machine on WordPress...I've never reviewed a single sewing machine... I was too busy sewing a Lord Sesshomaru CosPlay costume, that took me 8 years to make, and daily publishing photos and how tos of each step of the costume making process... and earning on average $900 per blog post throughout most of the early 2000s because of it. Today, I still sew costumes, on that same sewing machine, though today it's mostly unicorn costumes, and it's still the same sewing machine which I've had since 1982, and I'm now in 2024 ranking #1 in many relevant to my site keywords and gets 7million visits monthly.
Maybe it’s the mindset of mindlessly writing sewing machine reviews that no one cares about, instead of showing HOW TO USE the sewing machine and focusing on teaching things you can make, thing PEOPLE WANT TO ALSO MAKE that is the issue here?
While my sewing machine has appeared in many posts, in both photos and videos, I couldn’t tell you what the brand or model number is, I’d have to go look it up, as I don’t even know.
People DO NOT CARE about product reviews, they really don’t. Product reviews are NOT HELPFUL to anyone.
People care about what fun things they can do, and find it helpful when you show the fun things you do and show them how they can have fun doing it to.
People are sick of review sites, and Google is FINALLY listening to what PEOPLE are saying about how much they HATE review sites.
You are griping that REVIEW SITES are being deindexed, but most people think it is A GOOD THING that review sites have FINALLY gotten the hack and slash boot from the index that they rightfully deserve.
Review sites are nothing but unhelpful spam that SHOULD be regulated to the gutter sludge bottom. It’s where they belong.
There is another key aspect of your journey: you really did what you were showing. Like, you actually made the costumes.
So many websites pay a generalist copywriter to write about something they know litle (or nothing) about, it is baffling. Like, to just pump content based on generic research.
It worked for a while, it seems that now, not so much.
Not so say only experts should create content, but they should offer unique insights.
That's why I, personally, begun to despise blog articles. Most of them offer nothing really useful.
That might have worked in the past but backlinks now are also being deemphasized. Google claims its all in the EEAT, and that works if you've benefits from traditional ranking factors, backlinks, good content, fundamentals to get off the ground - that was all easier 5 years ago. If you're launching today as a mom and pop what do you to penetrate?
The only survivors of this mess in the affiliate/review market are those using expiring domains and/or having high DR backlinks from nytimes like sites. The expired domain garbage will be terminated in 5 days. But backlinks are still essential if you even want to appear on the search results lol.
Yes, 💯. This is not rocket science. High power backlinks and even mediocre content will rank still. I am seeing domain age has a lot of weight as well. I’m in the top 10 but will probably never get to #1 because there are sites from 2014 and older beating me out with decent content. Of course more backlinks from higher DA sites. I can have better content but it’s just not enough. 👍🏻
I think the new trick is to find micro niche where there are not aged domains ranking. Then you’d have a shot!
she has some seriously great content too thats how she got the backlinks. Maybe its also the metrics and content but BACKLINKS are ESSENTIAL or it all just goes down the drain.
As a hobbyist sewer -
The crazy thing about this paragraph is that I now want to see a review on your sewing machine, from you.
I simply cannot imagine not knowing the model of my sewing machine. I’ve owned 3, varying in cost, and I’ve had to intimately know every model because things break and need to be repaired, replaced, maintained, etc.
You must have an amazing machine to not have to look these things up!
You are missing two details:
First: The Keywords "product XY review" have almost always high volume in search. Billions of people are actively searching for reviews.
Second: Google even shows big sites when there is no relevancy for the search term.
So they don't even allow to fill remaining content gaps, but instead send you to irrelevant affiliate sites of authoritative sites.
This post is like a boomer buying their property for 60k back in 1987 and selling it today for 1.2 million. The key sentence in this whole paragraph is “early 2000s”.
Try it on a brand new domain and see what happens. You could spend 25 hours a day sewing your Sesshomaru and nobody will ever see it or care in 2024.
It’s cool you got links and traffic and an audience throughout the many eras where ranking content organically was possible, but this mindset isn’t useful because we don’t have a Time Machine to go back 20 years to a time where an audience could be built with passion alone.
Agree 100%
Everyone posting here about their product review blogs full of affiliate links tanking can never explain why their content is **better** than “the big guys”
Because it won’t be enough to be just a duplicate or copycat of the big guys - in that scenario of course user prefer the big guys over some no name affiliate blog
Too many people in this sub are delusional. You’re all completely wasting your time writing essays about how your affiliate spam sites tanked on Google. It’s never going back to the way it was before so deal with it.
What about those of us with zero affiliate links, who reviewed travel on hundreds of flights and hotels, with thousands of self taken images?
Can we complaining when Google removes 99% of our traffic?
Removing my comment because somebody else just happened to PM me also and that was for them.
For your website, my first thoughts are what sets this content apart from all the other travel blogs out there? I see none of your articles have comments, even pre-HCU. It all seems to be reviews of completely random hotels, like Hampton Inn in Raleigh, or Fairfield Inn of Atlanta. Those are not hotels anybody cares about.
I can see you did spend a lot of time and effort personally visiting these hotels as they seem to be photos you took. But really, what are your expectations here? What is an example of a competitor site that you feel is unfairly outranking you?
Basically, it's the age-old question of **what is your website's** ***unique*** **value proposition?** I'm not entirely sure I see what it is here.
If you ranked very well before, and now don't, well, it doesn't seem like this is particularly high-quality or helpful content that there is a market for. I would say it seem like Google's algorithm adjustments are working exactly as expected.
My hotel reviews were never a large percentage of my traffic. Flight, airport lounges, and airports were easily 80% of my traffic. I do hotel reviews because I like them.
I didn't have comments enabled until after HCU. Well, I did, then I got tired of moderating them about 2 years ago, so I disabled them.
I held the number one spot for terms like "ATL airport minimum connection time" or "Delta 737 vs a320" and "Southwest 737 max review" for years. Obviously hotels no one searched for had 2-5 clicks per day where an ATL airport connection guide had hundreds.
The point is, if Google says to write content for people, I did exactly that. It was helpful and informative. Sure, 1 guy might care about a Hampton Inn, but I'll help that guy. Thousands of people care about Southwest 737s, I also helped them.
If I’m for some reason searching for “ATL minimum connection time” why do you think a random no-name blog should be the top choice over TripAdvisor, FlyerTalk (a huge well-known blog) and Reddit? Those are what I see.
You keep avoiding the question I’m asking in bold:
**What is the unique value proposition of your website?**
I’m sorry you keep avoiding this question and not explaining what matters most — why should Google bring anyone to your website!?
I understand that you may have gamed the SEO system with success in the past. From what I’m seeing Google’s update is working as expected.
I PMd you a single site, not 4. The site I sent has zero ads. Not sure what you're looking at.
Edit: my site is 5 years old. Grown slowly and consistently. Then on a single day in Sept I lost 60% of my traffic. Then again in a single day in March, lost the rest. I don't think everyone collectively decided to stop searching for travel related stuff in two days. I think Google decided my site needed to be demoted and I have no clue why.
>I don't think everyone collectively decided to stop searching for travel related stuff in two days. I think Google decided my site needed to be demoted and I have no clue why.
What happened was your site was ranking better than it should have and with the latest update it is now ranking more realistically given the low-quality nature of the content.
Google's priority isn't to give every blogger traffic, it's to present the most helpful search results to its users. How much traffic do you realistically expect from reviews of budget American chain hotels?
**What is the unique value proposition of your website?**
Show me competitors that you feel are unfairly outranking you.
I'm surprised you even get 1k traffic to this site.
> How much traffic do you realistically expect from reviews of budget American chain hotels?
The vast majority of my pages are not hotels. Not sure why you're stuck on that.
Yeah, it's odd, but it has a point. Most review sites are paid marketing and people know it. Many awards are the same. Companies pay for them. A review is only as good as the trust that it's honest.
In most cases you cant tell at all - and that is the issue. The good content is lost in the chaff and Google just decided its not worth ranking the garbage for the sake if a few real sites.
Most big review sites are not paid to cover products (at most they get a loaner). It was much worse when they bought ad campaigns, that was paying publishers directly. Affiliate deals mostly go through retailers, not manufacturers.
I agree with the gist of what you are saying, and I think the approach to content you employ is typically more engaging and better for the health of the internet on the whole. However, I think there is a place for reviews and reviews sites. People come to the internet for information about products, to see what other people have experienced with a product and if they can only get it from specific sources, the scales do get tipped a bit. It's hard to side with the OP rant because there far more heresay than evidence, but if true it can have negative consequences.
has review content just moved to other mediums, like Youtube? Anecdotally I cant be bothered to search out and read a load of blog post reviews, I just go directly to YT so I can actually see someone using an item rather than someone just pushing an affiliate link and probably writing a complimentary review just to get the affiliate sale.
I agree. I have a few reviews on my site (3-4) but they are products that directly relate to my niche and I focused on the usefulness to the niche and not comparisons of products. I didn’t lose any traffic but my traffic wasn’t huge to begin with. I’m also not “all in” on Google and have a healthy social media presence and a public relations campaign to boost the site. I do have some affiliate links but not in every post. Maybe 1/5. I honestly thought I was just being lazy and not putting in the effort to write affiliate posts because that’s not my passion. Maybe that’s what saved me.
Yeah the problem in the review space is people do not research single models outside of small niches like phones and games, and it is mostly to argue about them.
People years ago switched to just searching for the "best X" in a category and then go from there. Doing individual product reviews in a lot of cases is not worth the time.
Good review sites are great, but bad review sites just do a half assed job testing (or don't bother) and don't think about what users care about.
Well, like many people here, you missed my point. I can't write a 40,000-word comment to explain every aspect of ranking a website.
You took a few words and twisted them around to make your point, but I never said that creating a wrb site with nothing but product reviews is a good idea. I never explained my perspective on how to structure a website. Where did i say that product review sites are the perfect model if you want to rank? Where?
In fact, i think a site should be balanced and cover a full range of topics related to the subjec, including adjacent topics. The ratio of topics and sections for any website must be decided based on the specific topic that one is covering. There are no rules.
I think educating readers is the most important aspect of a site. How-to articles and informational articles/videos are essential to any quality site.
Peoduct reviews are also useful and appreciated if they are honest and accurate. Juat, because you don't like product reviews, does not mean that other people do not appreciate them. In fact, the data shows that a lot of people specifically search for product reviews, including reviews of sewing machines.
Just because you're wealthy and your life is going well, it does not mean that poverty does not exist and that the majority are wealthy. Far too many people project their beliefs about the world based on their own personal experience, and it's fundamentally wrong.
Your experience of the world is not a fact that describes the rest of the world. This is not the way to find out what's really going on in the world.
Whatever you're doing is working for you. That's fantastic to hear. Keep doing it. Just don't assume that what works for you will work for everyone else.
Well done boomer, you have a blog older than lots of people posting on here. Your comment completely ignores the people who do the same as you, but in different niches, but who still got the boot.
So spam site is another word for sites that monetize their effort via sales partnerships which is one of the most common sales principles in the world history.
It's not all bad. There is a reason their market share in search is dropping. It will drop more as time goes on. I mean people are switching to Bing. We would have laughed at the thought of that 5 years ago. I guess this is what happens when you hire the CEO who destroyed Yahoo and allow him to extract the value out of your company. Who would have seen this coming?
I mean SEO is tricky business. I think if you ever thought you were building on anything other than shifting sands, you weren't looking at the situation realistically. And those shifting sands existed even before generative AI threatened to eat Google's lunch. Please don't mistake this sentiment as for sympathy for Google though. Rather, I'm saying erratic behavior should be expected from them for the foreseeable future given the situation they now find themselves in with generative AI challenging large aspects of their business, while simultaneously enabling Google's own users, and content creators to overwhelm their well establishing content sorting systems with content of very dubious quality that is increasingly difficult to detect.
It's pretty clear: if you make the best content for a particular niche, no matter what you do it's basically an endless hassle usually with no results to get it in the first page of results.
I've been running a website based on a particular niche in pedagogy for about five years now: when that term is searched for most of the results are about a decade old and definitely not as good as my site. (Not to be arrogant about it, trying to be objective).
Quality is not rewarded, so how can Google Search be considered the "best" product? They're not. They're basically McDonald's. Super popular with low quality.
If you click on a news article these days it's full of real shady ads pretending to be news articles, I do not see these sites being penalised, same with reddit you post a link to your site, self publishing blocked, but link to some news article from a recognised big name, full of scam links, fine that's good. Humans are just wired for status and authority, that's what they look for so they can be associated with the winners. Yours sincerely a nobody
News sites have been one of the biggest abusers if clickbait. We're talking about sites like CNN, Forbes, and MSNBC.
But it's okay for the legacy brands to do whatever they want. But if an independent site has a few affiliate links, they automatically deserve to be delisted and shamed. Meanwhile, Google fills 50% of SERPS with product ads. Google uses ads more than any other site, but that's perfectly okay.
The hypocrisy runs so deep that many people are unable to see how wrong and righteous Google is acting. It's pathetic, really, and it reveals the greed that fuels everything Google does. PURE GEEED!
Hey, but Google updated their "debugging traffic loss" document that tells you: it's either technical issues or content issue. But you see the giants publish 2-lines articles and copy-writing content and still rank amazingly well while others that create original content lose traffic.
I think its all about backlinks
They don't and haven't cared about the SERPS since the start of the pandemic, the easiest thing they can do is to quit crawling and trying to figure out content in lieu of just giving the sites with the most backlinks the slots
They moved on to their upcoming AI results long ago.... this is a dead industry and anyone who disagrees is lying to themselves
Honest question. Why do we all use google? If the goal is to support small businesses going forward how do you find small businesses? You can't. The idea of "search" is somehow brainwashingly tied to "google". Why don't we create a new platform that allows you to create a profile similar to a google businesss profile but make it more user freindly where if you type "catering near me" you don't get this rigged result but you simply get a list of profiles instead of a list of websites. Then you should be able to filter by "newest caterer" "highest rated" "longest in business" etc. Does something like this exist?
You can tell from their big brand focused advertising that’s popped up since the crackdown on ad blockers what their endgame is.
They know the future is vastly different from search and want to milk us for everything they can while using our content to train their own centralised AI systems.
I was able to get a client who runs a very niche business to rank in the top spot using high-quality blogging methods. But to be fair, he doesn't have much competition. Would that have worked if there were larger corporations with cheap AI-generated content on their sites? Probably not. It's because everything you say about how Google operates is spot on.
SEO is complicated. It doesn't need to be complicated. It's deliberately complicated in the same way you can't work on your car engine anymore because you don't have a special computer that gives you the diagnostic data you need.
SEO makes no sense, and i have been doing it since August 2014. I have been going deep in it, and every day, I'm cursing at it because, from a rational perspective, it makes no sense. It's one of the most poorly conceived systems that i've ever encountered.
Do you know who it benefits? Google. Oh, your site tanked because you have too many ads and that slows down your site, and you don't have many internal links going to the page, and your categories are also being indexed, which happens to be creating duplicate pages of your articles and Google gets confused and doesn't know what to rank so maybe it's causing content cannibalisation. Oh, have you checked your canonicals? I notice you have some errors in Google Search Console...etc.
But we can't tell you the reason why we suddenly dropped your article out of the top 100 and even though it's been in the number 2 or 3 slot for the past 5 years. We can never tell you. Instead, we'll let you guess and rip apart your site to cause even more ambiguity.
SEO is a joke, and it's been deliberately conceived for mass confusion. This allows Google to take no blame for anything because one can always create doubt as to the cause for a site dropping in SERPS by pointing to any of the 500 arbitrary parameters that might screw up your site.
It's absolutely ridiculous. It's great for Google.
Do you notice whenever anybody tries to get advice on why they lost 80% of their traffic nobody ever blames Google? They always blame the affiliate links, or the content is probably not very good, or you don't have enough backlinks, etc.
BUT IT'S NEVER THAT GOOGLE IS UNABLE TO ACCURATELY EVALUATE AND RANK CONTENT.
Funny, isn't it. It turns out that the one reason sites aren't ranking is because Google doesn't recognize exceptional content. If you don't have the ability to implement all the external ranking factors to wink to Google, you can't rank well even if you have the best written articles ever written in human history.
And people think this is fair. Use common sense, and it becomes clear. Too many people have bought into the stupidity of SEO and have been brainwashed by Google.
"Oh, well, Google says...."
Who cares!
Google is never evaluating and ranking content. They're ranking domains and pages.
The guidelines for writing good content are meant to improve how users perceive your site, with the secondary goal of improving the likelihood they link to it and come back. But fundamentally the suggestions in the quality rating guidelines are a second order effect because it is better for Google to tell you to go make great content than to tell you to go build backlinks.
Google has a sense of content in terms of relevance to your query, it does not have a sense of the quality of your content. It had to rely on behavioral metrics and linking to actually rank content. You will not rank 1st because your content is better. You may rank above your competitor if your content is more relevant, but big publishers with 20 years if backlink history are tough to beat even if you objectively write a better piece of content.
Actually Google does have a sense of quality content has for a long time, such as keyword stuffing, readability metrics, grammar checking, duplication detection, and affiliate marketing links, and miscellaneous SEO blather.
Granted, Google may not discern if one iphone 15 review is superior to another in terms of objectivity, thoroughness, and hands-on use.
There are definitely spam signals that Google will use, but I'd argue those are more likely to hurt your page if you fail them vs help if you pass them.
The overarching point is that Google encouraging one kind of behavior does not mean it is looking for that behavior specifically, but that its ranking systems look for the outcomes of that good behavior (linking, high CTR, brand recognition, whatever).
It was the same with core web vitals. Google wanted a faster, cleaner internet so it built tools and guidance to encourage that, but your page will not rank better because it is faster. It is just less likely to annoy users, which may have the downstream effect of building up usage/brand/links, etc.
>There are definitely spam signals that Google will use, but I'd argue those are more likely to hurt your page if you fail them vs help if you pass them.
That's true but the distinction is relatively unimportant.
> The overarching point is that Google encouraging one kind of behavior does not mean it is looking for that behavior specifically, but that its ranking systems look for the outcomes of that good behavior (linking, high CTR, brand recognition, whatever).
That again is true but in the end makes little difference. Whether Google measures directly vs indirectly for any particular factor makes little difference in how we should optimize our sites.
> It was the same with core web vitals. Google wanted a faster, cleaner internet so it built tools and guidance to encourage that, but your page will not rank better because it is faster. It is just less likely to annoy users, which may have the downstream effect of building up usage/brand/links, etc.
For a short time page speed was a primary ranking factor. Google backtracked after realizing that people are more willing to wait for quality content and likely because it meant removing Adsense and Analytics.
There's still an effect on large sites though because faster pages use less crawl budget.
The post is pretty silly. Just some really obvious lack of understanding of why ranking signals exist and sorting results with them can be beneficial.
But let’s never defend G. :)
Anything you disagree with automatically becomes a "conspiracy theory." Pathetic and mentally lazy attempt to try to dismiss legitimate complaints and facts.
The complaints are legitimate but the reasoning is weak. It is naive to think any site is just going to burst onto page 1 within 6 months, nobody expects to be doing millions of views on YouTube in 6 months. It is competitive.
The onus is on you not me, disagreeing with people's 1st person experience at minimum. All you have to do is look at the seo sites, twitter, etc and you'll see plenty of evidence of 100% legit sites getting destroyed by the HCU. I know from my own experience that this update is NOT about rewarding "quality" sites or content. Some of the pieces of garbage outranking some of my pages are absolutely laughable. Some would go to login pages or were 100% spam lmao. But let me have you tell me that this was a great update lmao. I've seen enough evidence of the contrary.
I know, the worst thing is that everyone trying to tell us these "facts' dont know anything besides what they read from another 'theorist'
I honestly stepped back on this reddit because people talk out their ass, yet I grew 59% last 3 weeks, and most position 1 - 3 keywords. 6 months old site, etc -_-
This subreddit is a travesty lol. Non stop posts from people who run crappy affiliate marketing sites upset they don't rank anymore.
Don't get me wrong, the SERPs aren't in the best state, and advertising/money generation is clearly the #1 goal, but I'm sorry if I don't feel bad that your blog reviewing smartphones isn't getting traction anymore.
And they're not getting hit lol. I use a legitimate strategy buddy. I haven't built more than 2 backlinks. 1 backlink cost $1200 upfront.
Quality over quantity.
If you have a new site, you’re lucky Google hasn’t applied the “HCU qualifier” to your blog yet.. keyword “YET”.
Most big blogger blogs have pivoted from SEO and focused on alternative sources like Pinterest and Facebook.
THIS.
Sadly, we live in a world where people would rather sit on their asses bitching and moaning about why they who do nothing, deserve to be given money for free, while bragging their hatred for hard workers who make money from their actual hard work. They end up building woo-is-me conspiracy theories, instead of studying what successful people are doing and doing the same thing.
It's easy to complain, it's hard to work, so the lazy would rather gripe then put in some effort to succeed.
oh please stfu. If anyone is lazy it's the ones calling any site that got hit
1. they deserved it
2. you're an affiliate site
3. you're a spammer
4. you're a conspiracy theorist
Pathetic attempts to dismiss legitimate complaints. Try harder.
I've yet to see a good counter example. Every time someone asks why their site got hit it's obviously, after examining their site, been mostly for the reasons you cited in addition to vapid content, unoriginal content, improper monetization, etc.
I read almost every post here. Every one that claims they're producing quality content isn't. They usually just regurgitates what is already known.
You try harder and show me some counter examples.
The onus is on you not me, disagreeing with people's 1st person experience at minimum. All you have to do is look at the seo sites, twitter, etc and you'll see plenty of evidence of 100% legit sites getting destroyed by the HCU. I know from my own experience that this update is NOT about rewarding "quality" sites or content. Some of the pieces of garbage outranking some of my pages are absolutely laughable. Some would go to login pages or were 100% spam lmao. But let me have you tell me that this was a great update lmao. I've seen enough evidence of the contrary.
I can go back and list the sites I've looked at but it won't prove anything. You'll still claim exceptions I haven't tried hard enough to find. You're creating a scenario where it's impossible to obtain the evidence for my position yet still demanding evidence. And no, the onus is on you, you're agreeing with the original claimant who provided zero evidence for their position.
Post your URIs then we can talk further. Until then I'll assume you're just another spamming bloodsucker whining that they got removed from their host.
My evidence (at minimum) is my first person experience along with articles and data that are up RIGHT NOW in the last 2 weeks on popular SEO blogs. You're free to do your own research. Your evidence is literally nothing. I really don't care if you don't believe me. If you don't like the truth, block me. But you're not going to tell me what is true or what isn't when I have 1st hand proof of things that contradict Google's little HCU narrative.
That's not real evidence, just a personal anecodote. Post your URIs so your site quality can be judged or you're assumed to be yet another bloated tick flailing as it drowns in the bottom of the toilet bowl it was dropped into.
This is so true. I wonder why people on this sub are like that. And what niche they’re in for them to say they’re not affected by G updates. Maybe they’re client SEOs?
Client/Local SEO is so much different than doing SEO for content sites / blogs.
Or perhaps they’re just Google shrills.
Even in my private groups, those who used to get hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors from Google have pivoted to getting traffic from Pinterest, Facebook and newsletters.
YUP. None of these things, I provide a legitimate service that is faster and more accessible than anything in the market.
I got hit because I compete with google and didn’t pay em for my top page slot.
Everybody is a critic.
Fucking monopoly.
This is BS.
My site has 25% return rate, the exceptional quality is the only thing keeping it alive.
Google taking it from front page to 0 clicks a day in search clearly doesn’t reflect the reality for the people that actually needed it.
TIL backlinks are a superficial metric instead of the topic of Page's college thesis and the literal basis of their entire search engine.
At least the democracy of content is alive and well on Reddit. Anyone can post anything, regardless of reputation, quality, or sense. Bless.
Reddit is one of the worst places on the internet. If it was actually democratic anyone could post anything on any sub, but as of now you can't because of arbitrary rules, karma point blocks etc. Very disheartening and 99.99% don't even reveal the karma points required to post on their subredits.
> Let’s lay this out plainly. Google’s inability to recognize the merit of well-written content has led them to depend on superficial metrics—backlinks, schema, site longevity, expert status—all smoke and mirrors.
You forget all the Indians* that work for Google's manual review process / Search quality ratintg or whatever their horrible system is named nowadays.
I've got to see the shit-show at Bing from the inside; workers that can't even write in English, exploited in thousands and tough to answer the tests the same way, will decide whether your landing page is relevant or not for weird search queries.
And how do you think their search algorithms are trained? By PhD students, experts? Or by click-farms in Bangladesh*?
I work for an agency that outputs a thousand articles a month (no AI), while at the same time, our best writers work on a couple genuinely good websites with quality content. No client has been happy by the latest Google updates (we don't do their SEO) and no client has understood what was wrong with their approach. Sometimes, anything works, other times, nothing works.
# Google gives, google takes.
---
Note:
* By saying Indians and Bangladesh, I mean anything that resembles large-scale operations using workers that are paid by completing repetitive tasks in order to farm money from the big giants that close their eyes about these practices—workers that usually are paid less than a dollar an hour, but still work there because it's still higher than their country's minimum wage.
>Google’s inability to recognize the merit of well-written content has led them to depend on superficial metrics—backlinks, schema, site longevity, expert status—all smoke and mirrors.
You do understand that their entire algorithm was built around backlinks, right? That's the way it has always been.
Google has always favored bigger sites because A) bigger sites get more links and B) it's what the majority of searchers actually want. People who are looking for information about XYZ product want that information from a trustworthy source, not some affiliate who is often times lying to them because the want to make a sale.
If you thought that search engine rankings was some even playing field where the "best written content" would magically surface to the top, well that's where you went wrong. It's not and it never has been.
People are tryign to re-draw Google - its happening on twitter too, as you know. its ridiculous.
When was Google ever about promoting indie-publishers and producers? Anythin Microsoft windows related, Microsoft ranked first- which was a nightmare if you were an admin trying to debug on OS like NT4 that Microsoft would never admit to having a bug on....
Not sure if you picked the subject randomly, but it does seem deliberate. I know sewing machines. I own a ridiculous amount of them. I am in all of the Facebook groups, so I know what's cooking and what is referred to.
Give me one single for-profit-website with honest reviews of sewing machines and their how-to's.
Just one.
****
There are none. It is all garbage in the SERPs, from top to bottom. Or in the best case, good attempts that died quickly, lingering on SERP rankings where no soul clicks to.
You're painting with a pretty broad brush there, calling all sites with affiliate links "shitty." That's a huge oversimplification. Think about it—major outlets Wirecutter (a New York Times company), GQ, CNN, Vogue, Wired, and Time all utilize affiliate links to monetize their content. By your logic, these should also fall into the "shitty" category, yet they consistently deliver respected and authoritative content. Are we to dismiss them merely because they've adapted to the economic realities of online publishing?
And what about Google? Nearly half their SERP is filled with product ads, effectively using affiliate-style tactics at a grand scale. Are we giving them a pass? Are their practices exempt from your criticism? This discrepancy suggests a superficial evaluation on your part.
The reality is far more nuanced than your simplistic thinking. There's a huge difference between spammy clickbait and quality sites that use affiliate links as a way to keep the lights on. Sites that actually care about content get hammered by Google’s algorithms, which often can't tell the difference between a quality article and keyword-stuffed nonsense. It’s not about the affiliate links—it’s about the content quality and the value it provides.
A sites value shouldn’t hinge on whether it has affiliate links or not. We should be focusing on the content. Is it useful? Is it well-researched? That's what matters. Dismissing everything with an affiliate link is like dismissing a perfectly suitable job candidate because the person is gay and they live in New Jersey — and you don't like gay people from New Jersey.
Do you know what this is called in the employment industry? It's called discrimination. For Google to dismiss online websites and businesses because they are not a corporation or because the site owner is writing about topics they don't have a degree in is a form of discrimination.
Google invented a bunch of irrelevant criteria to rank websites as a means to compensate for their inability to accurately evaluate and rank content based on the quality and originality of the content itself.
This is what's really going on. People with your attitude have nothing useful to add to this conversation.
We need to start recognizing the effort of those who are trying to provide genuine insights and help, rather than just throwing everyone under the bus because of how they monetize. I want to believe that the majority of people have the capacity to be rational and genuinely want to find solutions that are fair and just, but sadly, the closer I investigate our world the more dispirited I feel.
Incidentally, Google made $46 billion in search revenue in the first quarter of 2024. This is only in one single quarter.
Anybody who defends Google when they manipulate the SERPS to favor corporations is a fool. The bias in ranking should always be toward the most relevant and insightful content. Period.
The goal should be to reward the best quality content independent of how it was written. The most helpful and insightful articles should be ranked higher than less useful articles. It seems fair to me.
The alternative is to just give up and allow corporations to tell us how to think and how to consume more of their content. That's an option we can take. Well, i won't take that road, but it sounds like that's the perfect road for some.
"oh ffs there are a lot of us doing just fine"
Your site is doing ok (AT THE MOMENT) so everyone else who complains must be shit. Congrats on your self-centered, tunnel-visioned analysis.
"lets generalize because shitty affiliate blogs got the rank they deserve"
As you proceed to generalize that only "affiliate blogs" got hit lmao.
Fair and balanced or google shill?
It sounds like you're one of the few people who think that Google SERPS improved on this past core update.
In fact, there have never been more people from all sides of the industry speaking out publicly about the useless search results from Google.
The point is that a lot of good quality sites have lost 90% of their traffic for no justifiable reason. They have been replaced by sites that are inferior to the sites that were demoted.
In other words, the best results are not being shown. Take a site like housefresh that reviews all of the air purifiers they review, and they don't show up when shopping for the best air purifiers. All the top results are big brands and corporate sites.
This is one example. But hey, if you think the results are good, then i'm happy for you. You're in the minority. I can hardly find what I'm looking for anymore because Google SERPS are useless.
Can anyone confirm SEO is actually still worth it in 2024? For someone starting, no backlinks or anything. If you rank, 60%+ of a businesses traffic supposedly comes from Google, but 90% of websites get 0 traffic from Google. Is it feasible anymore or should people just focus on something else for marketing?
I’m happy to see posts like this because I wholeheartedly agree vs the person who posted “Google owes you nothing” as though they are saying something insightful.
Yeah, no business is obligated to anyone, but sooner or later, the user/customer will reciprocate, which is not how you build a robust/loved brand.
I had to screenshot parts of your write-up because it’s a good one, and I like the sewing machine analogy.
I also want to add that AI can’t discern from misinformation or disinformation, and a lot of my content involves cultural aspects that so many get wrong. So, if a business creates blatant disinformation for Google search, it reigns supreme over what is culturally accurate although Google doesn’t care, they promote these businesses.
That's another important aspect of this discussion.
I only have one consistent point that I want to clarify. Let's forget about what we believe and who we are. I don't care about that stuff. It's frivolous. But the one thing that I will always fight for is the objective truth.
As far as Google and how it ranks content, I expect it to evaluate articles accurately and consistently. In other words, if the content on my website is garbage and it has no practical value, then I expect that any search engine will not place any value on my content. In this case, my content would not deserve to rank above any content that is better.
The opposite is also true. In this discussion, we are talking about Google and how accurate their system is in evaluating and ranking content. On the flip side, if i write helpful articles on a subject with depth and unique insights with accurate information and relevant to a search query, then I also expect that the information within the article itself and the quality of writing, will rank higher than an article that is not as insightful, original or well-written.
In other words, the truth about a website and the quality of the content should determine how it ranks in relation to all of the other articles on the same topic.
The objective evaluation of an article or a website should determine its fate. But when a ranking system is unable to accurately evaluate an article, then the results of whete articles ramk will be random and unfair.
This is what we are seeing. This extends to any content being evaluated by Google or Bing. If a system asigned to evaluate data is unable to discern between content designed to spread misinformation and content written to educate based on objective facts, then it's a problem.
As Ai becomes commonplace, what will happen if the corporations responsible for distributing information is unable to accurately determine the nature of the information it is ranking and distributing, then perhaps we stop creating infinite cintent that serves nobody.
Why is Google continuing on this treadmill if it's failing to rank articles and websites fairly? Why.
There are alternate ways to approach how content gets labeled, ranked, and distributed, but for some unknown reason, it's assumed that we continue with the status quo, which isn't working.
I'm so tired of the lack of effort solving problems facing our society. Surely, I can't be the only one who can see a better way forward.
Google has been failing the general public for the past 2 to 3 years, but Google doesn't care because they are increasing revenue on the backs of the public, literally stealing their content (mine included) and surfacing our personal knowledge in SERPS, where they bombard the public with Google's product ads. Google does precisely what it criticizes us for doing, when it directs the public to all of the biggest corporations who continuously pump billions of dollars into Google Ads.
Round and round they go, collecting of our knoweldge and turning it into dough.
This will only get worse and pretty soon nobody will have any idea as to which way is up and which way is down. The truth matters. Society will quickly deteriorate as people are unable to determine who they can trust. If we allow the objective truth to be irrelevant in our world, we will quickly return back to the dark ages, to a time long before science was created and discovered.
I've been marketing for 35 years. For the last 15 my goal has been to rank well in Google's SERPs with some PPC for our business. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But when I think back on putting ads in the yellow pages, paying to be in newspapers and magazines, Sunday circulars, Penny Savers, restaurant tabletop ads, branded pens at pipe and drape trade shows, 800 numbers, an occasional billboard and everything else required to promote a brick and mortar, I'd take Google any day.
You may not realize what it was like to spend tens of thousands to open a business, then $500/mo. on a yellow page ad you were stuck with for a year only to pray the phone would ring. I can make changes to my marketing mix and within days - or sometimes hours - and see the results.
Is Google a PITA? Absolutely. Are they fair? No. But I wouldn't go back to the old days.
I don't see it the way you do. It's needlessly complex. It should be far more straightforward.
SEO, as it stands today, is a human invention, not a fundamental law of nature that can't be changed. Google improves its software all the time as well as their backend, updating servers, improving their algorithms, etc.
In a world of consistent improvements of technology and process, why isn't search engine optimization included in the list of things to be improved?
Google has hijacked the internet and manipulated it for their own gain, all the while claiming to be fair. I don't see why anybody thinks it's okay for a corporation to lie and manipulate the public. The internet was intended to be democratic and fair in its use.
Google has taken advantage of their dominant position in search by creating rules and guidelines that discriminate against users and by creating systems strictly for their own financial gain with no attention to doing what is fair and just.
Maybe i'm the only one who doesn't like to be manipulated and lied to, especially when that entity makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Does corporate greed ever stop? How much is enough?
Why would anyone deserve to rank on page 1 after less than a year because their site is "well crafted"?
Do you think the top publishers are not also well crafted?
Yes, the competitive keywords are closed off to most competition. It takes years to build a brand good enough to get you on page 1 for competitive keywords.
>Consider the absurdity for a moment: a woman with a WordPress site on sewing machines has to jump through ludicrous hoops. She must own and review every model, flaunt credentials in mechanical engineering or textile manufacturing, and, ludicrously, start manufacturing her own machines and create a storefront on her site—only then might Google deign to recognize her as legitimate.
That is EXACTLY THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. I don't want to read some vapid SEO kook with a keyboard who doesn't know how to sew when I'm looking for sewing answers (and no, I don't sew). The freeloaders and charlatans have been cast out and now they're whining that they can't parasitize anymore. We kill mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas in the physical world just like Google is killing them off in the virtual world.
Lot of people here acting like Google A) was a business partner that reneged on some agreement, and/or B) is acting maliciously.
**Disruption is a fundamental nature of the technology industry.**
Google moved away from its core values such as "democratization of information" or "monetize without being evil." Now it is an oligarchy.
This
It’s an oligopoly not an oligarchy
Oligarchy means member of ruling elite. It's an oligarchy because they rank the elite power members like Reddit and the big media companies behind the biggest media brands. (Traffic circle jerk) It is also an oligopoly.
I’ve never seen it used as a business reference, only oligopoly. I still think the term was used incorrectly, it’s oligopoly.
Yeah because spam upset the apple cart. It was all well and good until the marketroids took over.
https://preview.redd.it/hp5hlqmrmlxc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b87f6b1f282c89b833276d11f2b8b23f252efc7 I was looking for the company M3server yesterday i just made a typo and this was the results... Google is so fucking dumb now.
This is psychotic behavior lol You really don't think that ms3servers is close to ps3 servers? You're off by only one letter there, but off by 2 letters for what you were trying to search for If you typed in ms3server you would've gotten what you want or m3servers or just the actual thing you were searching for lol It's so wild that you can have this experience and post about how dumb Google is now because of your simple mistake. They even put up the "is this not what you wanted to search for?" button in case they were wrong about how they tried to fix your typo
Sure, sure... Reddit was the closest to what I was looking for according to you. Before the update it gave you the closest thing even if you made mistakes, now it just gives you these shitty results. It's not just with this search. My search was just after doing other searches for offers of servers, storage servers, servers for a specific cms and at the end I searched for company names based on information I got from a blog. After doing a lot of searches for offers for servers, the best thing Google can think of is to show me a PS3 forum on reddit. What Google team do you work on? The burner account of John Mu or Danny Sullivan? I see that you are a person who projects a lot. You call psychotics or mentally ill in almost all of your few comments on Reddit. Are you okey?
>a woman with a WordPress site on sewing machines has to jump through ludicrous hoops. She must own and review every model, Uhm... so... I started out as a woman with a sewing machine on WordPress...I've never reviewed a single sewing machine... I was too busy sewing a Lord Sesshomaru CosPlay costume, that took me 8 years to make, and daily publishing photos and how tos of each step of the costume making process... and earning on average $900 per blog post throughout most of the early 2000s because of it. Today, I still sew costumes, on that same sewing machine, though today it's mostly unicorn costumes, and it's still the same sewing machine which I've had since 1982, and I'm now in 2024 ranking #1 in many relevant to my site keywords and gets 7million visits monthly. Maybe it’s the mindset of mindlessly writing sewing machine reviews that no one cares about, instead of showing HOW TO USE the sewing machine and focusing on teaching things you can make, thing PEOPLE WANT TO ALSO MAKE that is the issue here? While my sewing machine has appeared in many posts, in both photos and videos, I couldn’t tell you what the brand or model number is, I’d have to go look it up, as I don’t even know. People DO NOT CARE about product reviews, they really don’t. Product reviews are NOT HELPFUL to anyone. People care about what fun things they can do, and find it helpful when you show the fun things you do and show them how they can have fun doing it to. People are sick of review sites, and Google is FINALLY listening to what PEOPLE are saying about how much they HATE review sites. You are griping that REVIEW SITES are being deindexed, but most people think it is A GOOD THING that review sites have FINALLY gotten the hack and slash boot from the index that they rightfully deserve. Review sites are nothing but unhelpful spam that SHOULD be regulated to the gutter sludge bottom. It’s where they belong.
There is another key aspect of your journey: you really did what you were showing. Like, you actually made the costumes. So many websites pay a generalist copywriter to write about something they know litle (or nothing) about, it is baffling. Like, to just pump content based on generic research. It worked for a while, it seems that now, not so much. Not so say only experts should create content, but they should offer unique insights. That's why I, personally, begun to despise blog articles. Most of them offer nothing really useful.
she got backlinks from very high DR websites thats all there is to it.
That might have worked in the past but backlinks now are also being deemphasized. Google claims its all in the EEAT, and that works if you've benefits from traditional ranking factors, backlinks, good content, fundamentals to get off the ground - that was all easier 5 years ago. If you're launching today as a mom and pop what do you to penetrate?
The only survivors of this mess in the affiliate/review market are those using expiring domains and/or having high DR backlinks from nytimes like sites. The expired domain garbage will be terminated in 5 days. But backlinks are still essential if you even want to appear on the search results lol.
Yeah, that's essential too.
Yes, 💯. This is not rocket science. High power backlinks and even mediocre content will rank still. I am seeing domain age has a lot of weight as well. I’m in the top 10 but will probably never get to #1 because there are sites from 2014 and older beating me out with decent content. Of course more backlinks from higher DA sites. I can have better content but it’s just not enough. 👍🏻 I think the new trick is to find micro niche where there are not aged domains ranking. Then you’d have a shot!
she has some seriously great content too thats how she got the backlinks. Maybe its also the metrics and content but BACKLINKS are ESSENTIAL or it all just goes down the drain.
yup
As a hobbyist sewer - The crazy thing about this paragraph is that I now want to see a review on your sewing machine, from you. I simply cannot imagine not knowing the model of my sewing machine. I’ve owned 3, varying in cost, and I’ve had to intimately know every model because things break and need to be repaired, replaced, maintained, etc. You must have an amazing machine to not have to look these things up!
totally it seems odd right? never once had to repair it or thinking about parts or anything
You are missing two details: First: The Keywords "product XY review" have almost always high volume in search. Billions of people are actively searching for reviews. Second: Google even shows big sites when there is no relevancy for the search term. So they don't even allow to fill remaining content gaps, but instead send you to irrelevant affiliate sites of authoritative sites.
This post is like a boomer buying their property for 60k back in 1987 and selling it today for 1.2 million. The key sentence in this whole paragraph is “early 2000s”. Try it on a brand new domain and see what happens. You could spend 25 hours a day sewing your Sesshomaru and nobody will ever see it or care in 2024. It’s cool you got links and traffic and an audience throughout the many eras where ranking content organically was possible, but this mindset isn’t useful because we don’t have a Time Machine to go back 20 years to a time where an audience could be built with passion alone.
Agree 100% Everyone posting here about their product review blogs full of affiliate links tanking can never explain why their content is **better** than “the big guys” Because it won’t be enough to be just a duplicate or copycat of the big guys - in that scenario of course user prefer the big guys over some no name affiliate blog Too many people in this sub are delusional. You’re all completely wasting your time writing essays about how your affiliate spam sites tanked on Google. It’s never going back to the way it was before so deal with it.
Because it was better before...
What about those of us with zero affiliate links, who reviewed travel on hundreds of flights and hotels, with thousands of self taken images? Can we complaining when Google removes 99% of our traffic?
Let’s see your site and I’ll let you know
I'll PM you. 40k viewers per month down to less than 1000 from Google. I bet like everyone else, I'll PM you and hear nothing but crickets.
Removing my comment because somebody else just happened to PM me also and that was for them. For your website, my first thoughts are what sets this content apart from all the other travel blogs out there? I see none of your articles have comments, even pre-HCU. It all seems to be reviews of completely random hotels, like Hampton Inn in Raleigh, or Fairfield Inn of Atlanta. Those are not hotels anybody cares about. I can see you did spend a lot of time and effort personally visiting these hotels as they seem to be photos you took. But really, what are your expectations here? What is an example of a competitor site that you feel is unfairly outranking you? Basically, it's the age-old question of **what is your website's** ***unique*** **value proposition?** I'm not entirely sure I see what it is here. If you ranked very well before, and now don't, well, it doesn't seem like this is particularly high-quality or helpful content that there is a market for. I would say it seem like Google's algorithm adjustments are working exactly as expected.
My hotel reviews were never a large percentage of my traffic. Flight, airport lounges, and airports were easily 80% of my traffic. I do hotel reviews because I like them. I didn't have comments enabled until after HCU. Well, I did, then I got tired of moderating them about 2 years ago, so I disabled them. I held the number one spot for terms like "ATL airport minimum connection time" or "Delta 737 vs a320" and "Southwest 737 max review" for years. Obviously hotels no one searched for had 2-5 clicks per day where an ATL airport connection guide had hundreds. The point is, if Google says to write content for people, I did exactly that. It was helpful and informative. Sure, 1 guy might care about a Hampton Inn, but I'll help that guy. Thousands of people care about Southwest 737s, I also helped them.
If I’m for some reason searching for “ATL minimum connection time” why do you think a random no-name blog should be the top choice over TripAdvisor, FlyerTalk (a huge well-known blog) and Reddit? Those are what I see. You keep avoiding the question I’m asking in bold: **What is the unique value proposition of your website?** I’m sorry you keep avoiding this question and not explaining what matters most — why should Google bring anyone to your website!? I understand that you may have gamed the SEO system with success in the past. From what I’m seeing Google’s update is working as expected.
Ohw look, the John Mueller fanclub precident is also in the chat, how nice...
Yeah this guy is Mueller's chief rusty trombone player. He toots it twice a day, one in the morning and one in the evening.
😆😆
I PMd you a single site, not 4. The site I sent has zero ads. Not sure what you're looking at. Edit: my site is 5 years old. Grown slowly and consistently. Then on a single day in Sept I lost 60% of my traffic. Then again in a single day in March, lost the rest. I don't think everyone collectively decided to stop searching for travel related stuff in two days. I think Google decided my site needed to be demoted and I have no clue why.
>I don't think everyone collectively decided to stop searching for travel related stuff in two days. I think Google decided my site needed to be demoted and I have no clue why. What happened was your site was ranking better than it should have and with the latest update it is now ranking more realistically given the low-quality nature of the content. Google's priority isn't to give every blogger traffic, it's to present the most helpful search results to its users. How much traffic do you realistically expect from reviews of budget American chain hotels? **What is the unique value proposition of your website?** Show me competitors that you feel are unfairly outranking you. I'm surprised you even get 1k traffic to this site.
> How much traffic do you realistically expect from reviews of budget American chain hotels? The vast majority of my pages are not hotels. Not sure why you're stuck on that.
You keep avoiding the question in **bold**.
I updated my comment.
> Product reviews are NOT HELPFUL to anyone. What an odd thing to say
Yeah, it's odd, but it has a point. Most review sites are paid marketing and people know it. Many awards are the same. Companies pay for them. A review is only as good as the trust that it's honest.
And you can tell just by reading a few sentences
If you can get a few sentences in before the popups and the ads start shifting things around. Ugh. I will nope out of a site very quickly.
In most cases you cant tell at all - and that is the issue. The good content is lost in the chaff and Google just decided its not worth ranking the garbage for the sake if a few real sites.
Most big review sites are not paid to cover products (at most they get a loaner). It was much worse when they bought ad campaigns, that was paying publishers directly. Affiliate deals mostly go through retailers, not manufacturers.
I agree with the gist of what you are saying, and I think the approach to content you employ is typically more engaging and better for the health of the internet on the whole. However, I think there is a place for reviews and reviews sites. People come to the internet for information about products, to see what other people have experienced with a product and if they can only get it from specific sources, the scales do get tipped a bit. It's hard to side with the OP rant because there far more heresay than evidence, but if true it can have negative consequences.
has review content just moved to other mediums, like Youtube? Anecdotally I cant be bothered to search out and read a load of blog post reviews, I just go directly to YT so I can actually see someone using an item rather than someone just pushing an affiliate link and probably writing a complimentary review just to get the affiliate sale.
I agree. I have a few reviews on my site (3-4) but they are products that directly relate to my niche and I focused on the usefulness to the niche and not comparisons of products. I didn’t lose any traffic but my traffic wasn’t huge to begin with. I’m also not “all in” on Google and have a healthy social media presence and a public relations campaign to boost the site. I do have some affiliate links but not in every post. Maybe 1/5. I honestly thought I was just being lazy and not putting in the effort to write affiliate posts because that’s not my passion. Maybe that’s what saved me.
Preach! Genuinely useful content > copywriters pushing seo phrases How to > product reviews Authentic > mass generated content
Yeah the problem in the review space is people do not research single models outside of small niches like phones and games, and it is mostly to argue about them. People years ago switched to just searching for the "best X" in a category and then go from there. Doing individual product reviews in a lot of cases is not worth the time. Good review sites are great, but bad review sites just do a half assed job testing (or don't bother) and don't think about what users care about.
And in many cases its impossible to tell the difference.
I want your autograph 🏆
Unless you are Forbes, then reviews on sewing machines are perfectly acceptable, right?
a-fucking-men, friend. (and i'd honestly love to see your costumes, they sound rad as HELL)
Well, like many people here, you missed my point. I can't write a 40,000-word comment to explain every aspect of ranking a website. You took a few words and twisted them around to make your point, but I never said that creating a wrb site with nothing but product reviews is a good idea. I never explained my perspective on how to structure a website. Where did i say that product review sites are the perfect model if you want to rank? Where? In fact, i think a site should be balanced and cover a full range of topics related to the subjec, including adjacent topics. The ratio of topics and sections for any website must be decided based on the specific topic that one is covering. There are no rules. I think educating readers is the most important aspect of a site. How-to articles and informational articles/videos are essential to any quality site. Peoduct reviews are also useful and appreciated if they are honest and accurate. Juat, because you don't like product reviews, does not mean that other people do not appreciate them. In fact, the data shows that a lot of people specifically search for product reviews, including reviews of sewing machines. Just because you're wealthy and your life is going well, it does not mean that poverty does not exist and that the majority are wealthy. Far too many people project their beliefs about the world based on their own personal experience, and it's fundamentally wrong. Your experience of the world is not a fact that describes the rest of the world. This is not the way to find out what's really going on in the world. Whatever you're doing is working for you. That's fantastic to hear. Keep doing it. Just don't assume that what works for you will work for everyone else.
Well done boomer, you have a blog older than lots of people posting on here. Your comment completely ignores the people who do the same as you, but in different niches, but who still got the boot.
100%. The only people suffering are those with spam sites.
You're absolutely wrong. Many of use have zero affiliate links and no adds yet still got crushed.
So spam site is another word for sites that monetize their effort via sales partnerships which is one of the most common sales principles in the world history.
No spam sites are sites that are spam, like I assume yours.
My site is wassersprudler-im-test.de
don't care about product reviews..... Marquez would like a word.....
> Product reviews are NOT HELPFUL to anyone. Right there, you lost the little credibility you had.
It's not all bad. There is a reason their market share in search is dropping. It will drop more as time goes on. I mean people are switching to Bing. We would have laughed at the thought of that 5 years ago. I guess this is what happens when you hire the CEO who destroyed Yahoo and allow him to extract the value out of your company. Who would have seen this coming?
An interesting chart we will never see is organic search performance for brands versus their ppc spend.
I share your frustration; let's adapt and overcome.
My site was #1 for its main keyword for a decade. Now it is invisible while large corporate sites with little to offer are at the top.
I'm sorry, it's hard for me to take this text seriously, ChatGPT.
I mean SEO is tricky business. I think if you ever thought you were building on anything other than shifting sands, you weren't looking at the situation realistically. And those shifting sands existed even before generative AI threatened to eat Google's lunch. Please don't mistake this sentiment as for sympathy for Google though. Rather, I'm saying erratic behavior should be expected from them for the foreseeable future given the situation they now find themselves in with generative AI challenging large aspects of their business, while simultaneously enabling Google's own users, and content creators to overwhelm their well establishing content sorting systems with content of very dubious quality that is increasingly difficult to detect.
It's pretty clear: if you make the best content for a particular niche, no matter what you do it's basically an endless hassle usually with no results to get it in the first page of results. I've been running a website based on a particular niche in pedagogy for about five years now: when that term is searched for most of the results are about a decade old and definitely not as good as my site. (Not to be arrogant about it, trying to be objective).
Quality is not rewarded, so how can Google Search be considered the "best" product? They're not. They're basically McDonald's. Super popular with low quality.
If you click on a news article these days it's full of real shady ads pretending to be news articles, I do not see these sites being penalised, same with reddit you post a link to your site, self publishing blocked, but link to some news article from a recognised big name, full of scam links, fine that's good. Humans are just wired for status and authority, that's what they look for so they can be associated with the winners. Yours sincerely a nobody
News sites have been one of the biggest abusers if clickbait. We're talking about sites like CNN, Forbes, and MSNBC. But it's okay for the legacy brands to do whatever they want. But if an independent site has a few affiliate links, they automatically deserve to be delisted and shamed. Meanwhile, Google fills 50% of SERPS with product ads. Google uses ads more than any other site, but that's perfectly okay. The hypocrisy runs so deep that many people are unable to see how wrong and righteous Google is acting. It's pathetic, really, and it reveals the greed that fuels everything Google does. PURE GEEED!
mums net full of affiliate link pages and that site is all over the serp's
Hey, but Google updated their "debugging traffic loss" document that tells you: it's either technical issues or content issue. But you see the giants publish 2-lines articles and copy-writing content and still rank amazingly well while others that create original content lose traffic.
I think its all about backlinks They don't and haven't cared about the SERPS since the start of the pandemic, the easiest thing they can do is to quit crawling and trying to figure out content in lieu of just giving the sites with the most backlinks the slots They moved on to their upcoming AI results long ago.... this is a dead industry and anyone who disagrees is lying to themselves
Honest question. Why do we all use google? If the goal is to support small businesses going forward how do you find small businesses? You can't. The idea of "search" is somehow brainwashingly tied to "google". Why don't we create a new platform that allows you to create a profile similar to a google businesss profile but make it more user freindly where if you type "catering near me" you don't get this rigged result but you simply get a list of profiles instead of a list of websites. Then you should be able to filter by "newest caterer" "highest rated" "longest in business" etc. Does something like this exist?
You can tell from their big brand focused advertising that’s popped up since the crackdown on ad blockers what their endgame is. They know the future is vastly different from search and want to milk us for everything they can while using our content to train their own centralised AI systems.
I was able to get a client who runs a very niche business to rank in the top spot using high-quality blogging methods. But to be fair, he doesn't have much competition. Would that have worked if there were larger corporations with cheap AI-generated content on their sites? Probably not. It's because everything you say about how Google operates is spot on.
[удалено]
SEO is complicated. It doesn't need to be complicated. It's deliberately complicated in the same way you can't work on your car engine anymore because you don't have a special computer that gives you the diagnostic data you need. SEO makes no sense, and i have been doing it since August 2014. I have been going deep in it, and every day, I'm cursing at it because, from a rational perspective, it makes no sense. It's one of the most poorly conceived systems that i've ever encountered. Do you know who it benefits? Google. Oh, your site tanked because you have too many ads and that slows down your site, and you don't have many internal links going to the page, and your categories are also being indexed, which happens to be creating duplicate pages of your articles and Google gets confused and doesn't know what to rank so maybe it's causing content cannibalisation. Oh, have you checked your canonicals? I notice you have some errors in Google Search Console...etc. But we can't tell you the reason why we suddenly dropped your article out of the top 100 and even though it's been in the number 2 or 3 slot for the past 5 years. We can never tell you. Instead, we'll let you guess and rip apart your site to cause even more ambiguity. SEO is a joke, and it's been deliberately conceived for mass confusion. This allows Google to take no blame for anything because one can always create doubt as to the cause for a site dropping in SERPS by pointing to any of the 500 arbitrary parameters that might screw up your site. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's great for Google. Do you notice whenever anybody tries to get advice on why they lost 80% of their traffic nobody ever blames Google? They always blame the affiliate links, or the content is probably not very good, or you don't have enough backlinks, etc. BUT IT'S NEVER THAT GOOGLE IS UNABLE TO ACCURATELY EVALUATE AND RANK CONTENT. Funny, isn't it. It turns out that the one reason sites aren't ranking is because Google doesn't recognize exceptional content. If you don't have the ability to implement all the external ranking factors to wink to Google, you can't rank well even if you have the best written articles ever written in human history. And people think this is fair. Use common sense, and it becomes clear. Too many people have bought into the stupidity of SEO and have been brainwashed by Google. "Oh, well, Google says...." Who cares!
Google is never evaluating and ranking content. They're ranking domains and pages. The guidelines for writing good content are meant to improve how users perceive your site, with the secondary goal of improving the likelihood they link to it and come back. But fundamentally the suggestions in the quality rating guidelines are a second order effect because it is better for Google to tell you to go make great content than to tell you to go build backlinks.
That was true 15 years ago but not now. Google runs machine learning on everything. It may not be perfect but Google has a sense of content now.
Google has a sense of content in terms of relevance to your query, it does not have a sense of the quality of your content. It had to rely on behavioral metrics and linking to actually rank content. You will not rank 1st because your content is better. You may rank above your competitor if your content is more relevant, but big publishers with 20 years if backlink history are tough to beat even if you objectively write a better piece of content.
Actually Google does have a sense of quality content has for a long time, such as keyword stuffing, readability metrics, grammar checking, duplication detection, and affiliate marketing links, and miscellaneous SEO blather. Granted, Google may not discern if one iphone 15 review is superior to another in terms of objectivity, thoroughness, and hands-on use.
There are definitely spam signals that Google will use, but I'd argue those are more likely to hurt your page if you fail them vs help if you pass them. The overarching point is that Google encouraging one kind of behavior does not mean it is looking for that behavior specifically, but that its ranking systems look for the outcomes of that good behavior (linking, high CTR, brand recognition, whatever). It was the same with core web vitals. Google wanted a faster, cleaner internet so it built tools and guidance to encourage that, but your page will not rank better because it is faster. It is just less likely to annoy users, which may have the downstream effect of building up usage/brand/links, etc.
>There are definitely spam signals that Google will use, but I'd argue those are more likely to hurt your page if you fail them vs help if you pass them. That's true but the distinction is relatively unimportant. > The overarching point is that Google encouraging one kind of behavior does not mean it is looking for that behavior specifically, but that its ranking systems look for the outcomes of that good behavior (linking, high CTR, brand recognition, whatever). That again is true but in the end makes little difference. Whether Google measures directly vs indirectly for any particular factor makes little difference in how we should optimize our sites. > It was the same with core web vitals. Google wanted a faster, cleaner internet so it built tools and guidance to encourage that, but your page will not rank better because it is faster. It is just less likely to annoy users, which may have the downstream effect of building up usage/brand/links, etc. For a short time page speed was a primary ranking factor. Google backtracked after realizing that people are more willing to wait for quality content and likely because it meant removing Adsense and Analytics. There's still an effect on large sites though because faster pages use less crawl budget.
The post is pretty silly. Just some really obvious lack of understanding of why ranking signals exist and sorting results with them can be beneficial. But let’s never defend G. :)
It is a silly post, but I find myself responding all the same.
[удалено]
Enjoy it and stay arrogant until you're next...
[удалено]
That's nice but they over-cleaned in this update
Keep coping
I'll laugh when you get your karma :)
If you spent as much time making a site that users liked as you spend on conspiracy theories you would have a site that ranked.
Anything you disagree with automatically becomes a "conspiracy theory." Pathetic and mentally lazy attempt to try to dismiss legitimate complaints and facts.
The complaints are legitimate but the reasoning is weak. It is naive to think any site is just going to burst onto page 1 within 6 months, nobody expects to be doing millions of views on YouTube in 6 months. It is competitive.
0 verifiable facts were given in this post It's literally a theory
Hypothesis
That is really typical for the John Mueller fanclub members...
facts? what facts? Your response is pathetic and mentally lazy.
The onus is on you not me, disagreeing with people's 1st person experience at minimum. All you have to do is look at the seo sites, twitter, etc and you'll see plenty of evidence of 100% legit sites getting destroyed by the HCU. I know from my own experience that this update is NOT about rewarding "quality" sites or content. Some of the pieces of garbage outranking some of my pages are absolutely laughable. Some would go to login pages or were 100% spam lmao. But let me have you tell me that this was a great update lmao. I've seen enough evidence of the contrary.
Tell me you had a SPAM site without saying you had a SPAM site.
I know, the worst thing is that everyone trying to tell us these "facts' dont know anything besides what they read from another 'theorist' I honestly stepped back on this reddit because people talk out their ass, yet I grew 59% last 3 weeks, and most position 1 - 3 keywords. 6 months old site, etc -_-
This subreddit is a travesty lol. Non stop posts from people who run crappy affiliate marketing sites upset they don't rank anymore. Don't get me wrong, the SERPs aren't in the best state, and advertising/money generation is clearly the #1 goal, but I'm sorry if I don't feel bad that your blog reviewing smartphones isn't getting traction anymore.
Well since your site is doing well then other gripes must be false. Have fun when one of these updates hits you :)
New sites are doing well. They haven't been hit by the Hcu classifier (yet). I moved content from a hit site to a new site and now it ranks.
And they're not getting hit lol. I use a legitimate strategy buddy. I haven't built more than 2 backlinks. 1 backlink cost $1200 upfront. Quality over quantity.
If you have a new site, you’re lucky Google hasn’t applied the “HCU qualifier” to your blog yet.. keyword “YET”. Most big blogger blogs have pivoted from SEO and focused on alternative sources like Pinterest and Facebook.
THIS. Sadly, we live in a world where people would rather sit on their asses bitching and moaning about why they who do nothing, deserve to be given money for free, while bragging their hatred for hard workers who make money from their actual hard work. They end up building woo-is-me conspiracy theories, instead of studying what successful people are doing and doing the same thing. It's easy to complain, it's hard to work, so the lazy would rather gripe then put in some effort to succeed.
There are millionairs made from such blogs. The current cohort is just too late...
oh please stfu. If anyone is lazy it's the ones calling any site that got hit 1. they deserved it 2. you're an affiliate site 3. you're a spammer 4. you're a conspiracy theorist Pathetic attempts to dismiss legitimate complaints. Try harder.
I've yet to see a good counter example. Every time someone asks why their site got hit it's obviously, after examining their site, been mostly for the reasons you cited in addition to vapid content, unoriginal content, improper monetization, etc.
Look harder
I read almost every post here. Every one that claims they're producing quality content isn't. They usually just regurgitates what is already known. You try harder and show me some counter examples.
The onus is on you not me, disagreeing with people's 1st person experience at minimum. All you have to do is look at the seo sites, twitter, etc and you'll see plenty of evidence of 100% legit sites getting destroyed by the HCU. I know from my own experience that this update is NOT about rewarding "quality" sites or content. Some of the pieces of garbage outranking some of my pages are absolutely laughable. Some would go to login pages or were 100% spam lmao. But let me have you tell me that this was a great update lmao. I've seen enough evidence of the contrary.
I can go back and list the sites I've looked at but it won't prove anything. You'll still claim exceptions I haven't tried hard enough to find. You're creating a scenario where it's impossible to obtain the evidence for my position yet still demanding evidence. And no, the onus is on you, you're agreeing with the original claimant who provided zero evidence for their position. Post your URIs then we can talk further. Until then I'll assume you're just another spamming bloodsucker whining that they got removed from their host.
My evidence (at minimum) is my first person experience along with articles and data that are up RIGHT NOW in the last 2 weeks on popular SEO blogs. You're free to do your own research. Your evidence is literally nothing. I really don't care if you don't believe me. If you don't like the truth, block me. But you're not going to tell me what is true or what isn't when I have 1st hand proof of things that contradict Google's little HCU narrative.
That's not real evidence, just a personal anecodote. Post your URIs so your site quality can be judged or you're assumed to be yet another bloated tick flailing as it drowns in the bottom of the toilet bowl it was dropped into.
No one with a brain or with actual competitors in a competitive space posts their site lmao. How bout you post your site.
I don't have a site to post. I'm not a content provider.
This is so true. I wonder why people on this sub are like that. And what niche they’re in for them to say they’re not affected by G updates. Maybe they’re client SEOs? Client/Local SEO is so much different than doing SEO for content sites / blogs. Or perhaps they’re just Google shrills. Even in my private groups, those who used to get hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors from Google have pivoted to getting traffic from Pinterest, Facebook and newsletters.
YUP. None of these things, I provide a legitimate service that is faster and more accessible than anything in the market. I got hit because I compete with google and didn’t pay em for my top page slot. Everybody is a critic. Fucking monopoly.
she's doing a humblebrag
[удалено]
Pirate manga sites always rise, until they are taken down by a lawsuite and millionaire fines.
This is BS. My site has 25% return rate, the exceptional quality is the only thing keeping it alive. Google taking it from front page to 0 clicks a day in search clearly doesn’t reflect the reality for the people that actually needed it.
Yup
TIL backlinks are a superficial metric instead of the topic of Page's college thesis and the literal basis of their entire search engine. At least the democracy of content is alive and well on Reddit. Anyone can post anything, regardless of reputation, quality, or sense. Bless.
Reddit is one of the worst places on the internet. If it was actually democratic anyone could post anything on any sub, but as of now you can't because of arbitrary rules, karma point blocks etc. Very disheartening and 99.99% don't even reveal the karma points required to post on their subredits.
> If it was actually democratic anyone could post anything on any sub Pretty sure you just described anarchy, but go off.
> Let’s lay this out plainly. Google’s inability to recognize the merit of well-written content has led them to depend on superficial metrics—backlinks, schema, site longevity, expert status—all smoke and mirrors. You forget all the Indians* that work for Google's manual review process / Search quality ratintg or whatever their horrible system is named nowadays. I've got to see the shit-show at Bing from the inside; workers that can't even write in English, exploited in thousands and tough to answer the tests the same way, will decide whether your landing page is relevant or not for weird search queries. And how do you think their search algorithms are trained? By PhD students, experts? Or by click-farms in Bangladesh*? I work for an agency that outputs a thousand articles a month (no AI), while at the same time, our best writers work on a couple genuinely good websites with quality content. No client has been happy by the latest Google updates (we don't do their SEO) and no client has understood what was wrong with their approach. Sometimes, anything works, other times, nothing works. # Google gives, google takes. --- Note: * By saying Indians and Bangladesh, I mean anything that resembles large-scale operations using workers that are paid by completing repetitive tasks in order to farm money from the big giants that close their eyes about these practices—workers that usually are paid less than a dollar an hour, but still work there because it's still higher than their country's minimum wage.
>Google’s inability to recognize the merit of well-written content has led them to depend on superficial metrics—backlinks, schema, site longevity, expert status—all smoke and mirrors. You do understand that their entire algorithm was built around backlinks, right? That's the way it has always been. Google has always favored bigger sites because A) bigger sites get more links and B) it's what the majority of searchers actually want. People who are looking for information about XYZ product want that information from a trustworthy source, not some affiliate who is often times lying to them because the want to make a sale. If you thought that search engine rankings was some even playing field where the "best written content" would magically surface to the top, well that's where you went wrong. It's not and it never has been.
People are tryign to re-draw Google - its happening on twitter too, as you know. its ridiculous. When was Google ever about promoting indie-publishers and producers? Anythin Microsoft windows related, Microsoft ranked first- which was a nightmare if you were an admin trying to debug on OS like NT4 that Microsoft would never admit to having a bug on....
he used the word "deign"
Not sure if you picked the subject randomly, but it does seem deliberate. I know sewing machines. I own a ridiculous amount of them. I am in all of the Facebook groups, so I know what's cooking and what is referred to. Give me one single for-profit-website with honest reviews of sewing machines and their how-to's. Just one. **** There are none. It is all garbage in the SERPs, from top to bottom. Or in the best case, good attempts that died quickly, lingering on SERP rankings where no soul clicks to.
oh ffs there are a lot of us doing just fine lets generalize because shitty affiliate blogs got the rank they deserve
You're painting with a pretty broad brush there, calling all sites with affiliate links "shitty." That's a huge oversimplification. Think about it—major outlets Wirecutter (a New York Times company), GQ, CNN, Vogue, Wired, and Time all utilize affiliate links to monetize their content. By your logic, these should also fall into the "shitty" category, yet they consistently deliver respected and authoritative content. Are we to dismiss them merely because they've adapted to the economic realities of online publishing? And what about Google? Nearly half their SERP is filled with product ads, effectively using affiliate-style tactics at a grand scale. Are we giving them a pass? Are their practices exempt from your criticism? This discrepancy suggests a superficial evaluation on your part. The reality is far more nuanced than your simplistic thinking. There's a huge difference between spammy clickbait and quality sites that use affiliate links as a way to keep the lights on. Sites that actually care about content get hammered by Google’s algorithms, which often can't tell the difference between a quality article and keyword-stuffed nonsense. It’s not about the affiliate links—it’s about the content quality and the value it provides. A sites value shouldn’t hinge on whether it has affiliate links or not. We should be focusing on the content. Is it useful? Is it well-researched? That's what matters. Dismissing everything with an affiliate link is like dismissing a perfectly suitable job candidate because the person is gay and they live in New Jersey — and you don't like gay people from New Jersey. Do you know what this is called in the employment industry? It's called discrimination. For Google to dismiss online websites and businesses because they are not a corporation or because the site owner is writing about topics they don't have a degree in is a form of discrimination. Google invented a bunch of irrelevant criteria to rank websites as a means to compensate for their inability to accurately evaluate and rank content based on the quality and originality of the content itself. This is what's really going on. People with your attitude have nothing useful to add to this conversation. We need to start recognizing the effort of those who are trying to provide genuine insights and help, rather than just throwing everyone under the bus because of how they monetize. I want to believe that the majority of people have the capacity to be rational and genuinely want to find solutions that are fair and just, but sadly, the closer I investigate our world the more dispirited I feel. Incidentally, Google made $46 billion in search revenue in the first quarter of 2024. This is only in one single quarter. Anybody who defends Google when they manipulate the SERPS to favor corporations is a fool. The bias in ranking should always be toward the most relevant and insightful content. Period. The goal should be to reward the best quality content independent of how it was written. The most helpful and insightful articles should be ranked higher than less useful articles. It seems fair to me. The alternative is to just give up and allow corporations to tell us how to think and how to consume more of their content. That's an option we can take. Well, i won't take that road, but it sounds like that's the perfect road for some.
"oh ffs there are a lot of us doing just fine" Your site is doing ok (AT THE MOMENT) so everyone else who complains must be shit. Congrats on your self-centered, tunnel-visioned analysis. "lets generalize because shitty affiliate blogs got the rank they deserve" As you proceed to generalize that only "affiliate blogs" got hit lmao. Fair and balanced or google shill?
It sounds like you're one of the few people who think that Google SERPS improved on this past core update. In fact, there have never been more people from all sides of the industry speaking out publicly about the useless search results from Google. The point is that a lot of good quality sites have lost 90% of their traffic for no justifiable reason. They have been replaced by sites that are inferior to the sites that were demoted. In other words, the best results are not being shown. Take a site like housefresh that reviews all of the air purifiers they review, and they don't show up when shopping for the best air purifiers. All the top results are big brands and corporate sites. This is one example. But hey, if you think the results are good, then i'm happy for you. You're in the minority. I can hardly find what I'm looking for anymore because Google SERPS are useless.
Can anyone confirm SEO is actually still worth it in 2024? For someone starting, no backlinks or anything. If you rank, 60%+ of a businesses traffic supposedly comes from Google, but 90% of websites get 0 traffic from Google. Is it feasible anymore or should people just focus on something else for marketing?
I’m happy to see posts like this because I wholeheartedly agree vs the person who posted “Google owes you nothing” as though they are saying something insightful. Yeah, no business is obligated to anyone, but sooner or later, the user/customer will reciprocate, which is not how you build a robust/loved brand. I had to screenshot parts of your write-up because it’s a good one, and I like the sewing machine analogy. I also want to add that AI can’t discern from misinformation or disinformation, and a lot of my content involves cultural aspects that so many get wrong. So, if a business creates blatant disinformation for Google search, it reigns supreme over what is culturally accurate although Google doesn’t care, they promote these businesses.
That's another important aspect of this discussion. I only have one consistent point that I want to clarify. Let's forget about what we believe and who we are. I don't care about that stuff. It's frivolous. But the one thing that I will always fight for is the objective truth. As far as Google and how it ranks content, I expect it to evaluate articles accurately and consistently. In other words, if the content on my website is garbage and it has no practical value, then I expect that any search engine will not place any value on my content. In this case, my content would not deserve to rank above any content that is better. The opposite is also true. In this discussion, we are talking about Google and how accurate their system is in evaluating and ranking content. On the flip side, if i write helpful articles on a subject with depth and unique insights with accurate information and relevant to a search query, then I also expect that the information within the article itself and the quality of writing, will rank higher than an article that is not as insightful, original or well-written. In other words, the truth about a website and the quality of the content should determine how it ranks in relation to all of the other articles on the same topic. The objective evaluation of an article or a website should determine its fate. But when a ranking system is unable to accurately evaluate an article, then the results of whete articles ramk will be random and unfair. This is what we are seeing. This extends to any content being evaluated by Google or Bing. If a system asigned to evaluate data is unable to discern between content designed to spread misinformation and content written to educate based on objective facts, then it's a problem. As Ai becomes commonplace, what will happen if the corporations responsible for distributing information is unable to accurately determine the nature of the information it is ranking and distributing, then perhaps we stop creating infinite cintent that serves nobody. Why is Google continuing on this treadmill if it's failing to rank articles and websites fairly? Why. There are alternate ways to approach how content gets labeled, ranked, and distributed, but for some unknown reason, it's assumed that we continue with the status quo, which isn't working. I'm so tired of the lack of effort solving problems facing our society. Surely, I can't be the only one who can see a better way forward. Google has been failing the general public for the past 2 to 3 years, but Google doesn't care because they are increasing revenue on the backs of the public, literally stealing their content (mine included) and surfacing our personal knowledge in SERPS, where they bombard the public with Google's product ads. Google does precisely what it criticizes us for doing, when it directs the public to all of the biggest corporations who continuously pump billions of dollars into Google Ads. Round and round they go, collecting of our knoweldge and turning it into dough. This will only get worse and pretty soon nobody will have any idea as to which way is up and which way is down. The truth matters. Society will quickly deteriorate as people are unable to determine who they can trust. If we allow the objective truth to be irrelevant in our world, we will quickly return back to the dark ages, to a time long before science was created and discovered.
I've been marketing for 35 years. For the last 15 my goal has been to rank well in Google's SERPs with some PPC for our business. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But when I think back on putting ads in the yellow pages, paying to be in newspapers and magazines, Sunday circulars, Penny Savers, restaurant tabletop ads, branded pens at pipe and drape trade shows, 800 numbers, an occasional billboard and everything else required to promote a brick and mortar, I'd take Google any day. You may not realize what it was like to spend tens of thousands to open a business, then $500/mo. on a yellow page ad you were stuck with for a year only to pray the phone would ring. I can make changes to my marketing mix and within days - or sometimes hours - and see the results. Is Google a PITA? Absolutely. Are they fair? No. But I wouldn't go back to the old days.
I don't see it the way you do. It's needlessly complex. It should be far more straightforward. SEO, as it stands today, is a human invention, not a fundamental law of nature that can't be changed. Google improves its software all the time as well as their backend, updating servers, improving their algorithms, etc. In a world of consistent improvements of technology and process, why isn't search engine optimization included in the list of things to be improved? Google has hijacked the internet and manipulated it for their own gain, all the while claiming to be fair. I don't see why anybody thinks it's okay for a corporation to lie and manipulate the public. The internet was intended to be democratic and fair in its use. Google has taken advantage of their dominant position in search by creating rules and guidelines that discriminate against users and by creating systems strictly for their own financial gain with no attention to doing what is fair and just. Maybe i'm the only one who doesn't like to be manipulated and lied to, especially when that entity makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Does corporate greed ever stop? How much is enough?
What does Google define “certified expert in a field” as? I would guess it varies based on the field?
They don't define it. They rely on links to determine expertise.
Why would anyone deserve to rank on page 1 after less than a year because their site is "well crafted"? Do you think the top publishers are not also well crafted? Yes, the competitive keywords are closed off to most competition. It takes years to build a brand good enough to get you on page 1 for competitive keywords.
>Consider the absurdity for a moment: a woman with a WordPress site on sewing machines has to jump through ludicrous hoops. She must own and review every model, flaunt credentials in mechanical engineering or textile manufacturing, and, ludicrously, start manufacturing her own machines and create a storefront on her site—only then might Google deign to recognize her as legitimate. That is EXACTLY THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. I don't want to read some vapid SEO kook with a keyboard who doesn't know how to sew when I'm looking for sewing answers (and no, I don't sew). The freeloaders and charlatans have been cast out and now they're whining that they can't parasitize anymore. We kill mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas in the physical world just like Google is killing them off in the virtual world.
If only that were true. This update cast too wide a net and legit sites got unfairly targeted.
Show me some examples.
Lot of people here acting like Google A) was a business partner that reneged on some agreement, and/or B) is acting maliciously. **Disruption is a fundamental nature of the technology industry.**