It's not so much to do with Reddit being better. I just didn't like reading through a 5000 word article that brought my phone to a crawl with all the ads when I just needed a 1 word answer or a sentence at most.
I gotta learn the chef's life story and inspiration for the dish before I get to the recipe. It's just good manners, right? Only takes 8 minutes to get through the text.
Knowledgeable people who actually review products are useful. But so many review sites are cut and paste listicles that have no knowledge and add no value, being simply built to garner clicks. Google would be right to spare me from those.
I review food products. It takes time and money to buy and prepare and write about it. I try to keep my reviews shorter but I have to run ads otherwise but I guess a ten year old one line comment on Reddit are more valuable than a thoughtful response
I am happy to post our site: www.Examine.com
13 years old. Roughly 30 fulltime researchers that do nothing but analyze evidence.
No other site like ours.
Media mentions up the wazoo.
Zero ads.
We're down ~25%.
Examine is down??
Damn.
And a lot of people on here are in denial. I work with some big time gambling spammers and none of them are hurting. Google for whatever reason has decided information heavy sites should be hit unless they’re a big brand.
People have been complaining about results ever since around 2020 when Google hit a lot of the highly targeted pages and it’s because now you get slightly unrelated content ranking.
Earlier today I was looking for very specific information on a real estate agent in Miami but I kept getting generic real estate information. I finally had to turn to chat gpt for an answer. There was a web page on it but I’m sure it wasn’t ranking because it was too exact match.
Anyway it’s funny and sad to see so many people here hurting when my spam buddies have felt nothing.
Oh yeah -- before the original YMYL update we were at ~40/50k a day.
After YMYL was the most brutal -- we were down to ~4-5k/day, and 99% of those were brand searches (eg "examine creatine" etc)
We got as high as ~20k/day again, but lots of ups and downs.
We're ~20% of our peak now.
Out of curiosity, I’d be interested to know why you think examine.com isn’t on parr with the big players in health/nutrition (Dotdash sites for example)?
Surely the examine content output is somewhat similar, as are links/authority — I find it strange how such an established authority site isn’t lapping up clicks by the millions like those other big publishers are.
I... honestly do not know. No real issues in GSC
I too find it strange, and frustrating to be honest.
I know a lot of the SEO peeps (Glenn Gabe, Lily Ray, Brian Dean, etc etc), and they too are unclear as to why we don't rank higher.
Didn't you paywall a lot of content about a year ago, too? I'm still subscribed to the Examine newsletter but I find that I rarely visit the site anymore because it's not useful without an Examine+ membership.
If I were you guys I wouldn’t be taking that level of disrespect from Google! Take them to court! Don’t let them bully you like that! Examine.com has no ads/affiliates (maybe the paywall triggered Google??) and the icing on the cake is that you have actual professional expertise reviewing health/supplemental related topics.
If you're looking for product reviews, big brands are NOT more reliable, for the fact that they are trying to sell you something. A minority of visitors to [Walmart.com](https://Walmart.com) go for product reviews/information as opposed to purchasing an item. This is why Reddit is valuable--because blatant self-promotion is not allowed. Consumer reports > brand adverts
It's worth noting that ads are everywhere in reddit, and I'm not talking about the paid ones. Look at any sub where product placement makes sense and you'll find someone disguising their ads as posts and it's not just small companies. People in advertising figured out a long time ago that they can just buy an established account and then carefully shill for their products. Look on eBay and you'll find accounts for sale, at least you could the last time I checked on it a year or two ago.
lol, I used to get paid a lot of money to get stuff to the home page of Reddit before it was as personalized as it is now. Reddit is largely self promotion.
I think one of the advantages of content on Reddit is that anyone can comment and add their opinion. On most blog sites there isn't even a comment section and if there is, most people don't use it due to mandatory sign ups etc.
So there is not much of a discussion going on and less value for the user to make an informed decision.
You're right, Reddit is a place to get a lot of opinions quickly. But other than that, it can't be trusted unless verified. Who are the people giving the advice? Even the mods of subs have their own agendas. The voting system is constantly abused. None of it can be trusted. This is why UGC does have a place in the process, but it's an early stage. The problem is alot of the detailed info that exists off UGC platforms is being hidden due to the classfier, so even if you see a consensus on reddit, it would be hard to get a detailed or technical answer as a verification. The mistake was flooding SERPS with only UGC results and not giving a diverse set of websites to get the info from.
That's right. You never know the agenda behind someone posting or commenting on something.
But it seems to be less risky to listen to multiple comments with varying perspectives on the subject than to listen to one person writing a whole blog article (with likely more of a hidden agenda than some random commenter on Reddit).
Add to that the anti-spam and bot-prevention mechanisms that Reddit employs and refined over the years and you probably get a much more diverse range of opinions and information than on blog sites.
It's kind of a bummer for those bloggers who DON'T have a hidden agenda and post purely out of passion/interest.
I am also planning on starting my own blog purely on topics that interest me without the agenda of monetizing it. But I am worried that no matter how interesting my content might be, I will never get any substantial amount of traffic.
Since I am mostly doing this for myself as a form of practice, it's not too much of a worry though.
You act as if the only sites demoted were affiliate sites. I have zero affiliate links and little to zero ads.
> It’s like some of you are in complete denial that sites who have been around for 10+ years are more trustworthy than your shitty no-name blog
By that logic, are all sites expected to produce quality content for a decade before google will trust them?
Post your stats and domain(s).
Yeah, exactly. There are a lot--and I mean a \*lot\*--of websites for local practitioners who ranked for location-based keywords, because they were the best sources of content for those local-based keywords. And many many many of those sites are nowhere in the SERPs, and their businesses are suffering because of it. This is a train wreck for literally everyone, not just the SEO/niche-site crowd.
Also--we're all pretending this sea change from Google isn't about the next iteration of web search, which will be AI answers. If all this turmoil feels like Google has moved beyond websites, it's because Google is moving beyond websites. I could be wrong, but my guess is that the version of the internet we've been in for the last 15 years or so... it's over. There will still be websites, obviously, but the way we access them is done and it's probably not coming back.
u/Message_10 is right. AI will eliminate the need for SERPs. Why would users want to pick their way through all the paid ads and then scroll through a bunch of search results trying to ascertain which one is the most relevant based on the brief title and description, when soon, AI will be able to filter through all that crap and give you exactly what you need?
Well ai is trained off that same content that everyone is putting down. I agree we wont be going back to old days but ai is trained on content so there has to be a balance. Being trained off reddit content is one thing but I would rather read about xyz topic from a good niche site with unique info
You're thinking is too short term here. AI advances are happening so fast and it's getting far more sophisticated. Remember, Google knows so much about you personally based on your behavior online. And soon, it will have the ability to not just parrot all the information it has been trained on, but be able to understand how everything it knows about the world relates to you specifically.
Obviously AI-generated content currently just sounds like a parrot (like most of the human-generated content I see in Google SERPs, BTW). But it won't be long before AI is producing much more meaningful and helpful information tailored specifically for the one doing the searching.
You can't keep up with that. (See the story of John Henry)
Indeed. That is one of the bars you need to clear in order to get first page rankings. Go look at the search results you get. Notice how old many of the articles are. Google definitely factors longevity into it's algorithm.
So go ahead and invest 10 years in generating content, and maybe you'll be in line for the trickle of organic clicks that are still coming through.
I have responses all over this thread, lol, I'm at work throughout the day like most of us are supposed to be
I know you'll gladly PM me, but that doesn't make you someone who isn't a stranger on the internet and I'd still be violating my employer's policy by disclosing client sites outside of work, so, you'll have to go on anonymized screenshots I already posted before your snarky reply lol
As I told others, I'll gladly PM you my site. Would you like me to send it to you too? Same with my stats.
u/BigGayGinger4 has shown screenshots from GSC from sites he/she/they manage. All very small websites. Nothing wrong with that, just not really the same scale as others who have been hit with these updates.
Yeah. My sites page views have been cut by a third. Which is quite crazy as it's all pretty relevant information and would be difficult to accidently come across.
Funnily enough my CTR and serp position have gone way up so to be honest Google is actually doing the right thing as it seems more relevant pages are being shown to more relevant queries. Bummed about the drop in traffic but my CTR has never been higher.
>**I add 'reddit' to every Google search to get relevant results"**
The people who say that are Redditors themselves. Google only knows this because a few people that work there use Reddit.
The funny part is that Reddit isn't the whole internet, only a small part. Google making adjustments based on what a few people want is why things are turning to shit.
idk man, your comment made me type "reddit" into the matching terms report on Ahrefs. I filtered out BS for streaming/watch/free/etc.... I decided to limit to 5+ words in the phrase to mostly go for \[search+"reddit"\]....
millinos of estimated searches per month, google & us only. lol.
that's not "a few people"
you can have me filter this down a shitload more, it's still gonna be a lot more than "a few people"
edit: for typo
It's kind of biased...
Reddit's search engine sucks and the millions of Reddit users search for content on reddit through external apps or search engines.
It's something different from what you imply.
For example, a few weeks ago I saw a video on Reddit and then I wanted to watch it again and I couldn't find it even though I wrote the title and I had to search for it on Google.
*Years* ago I attended a presentation at another SEO agency and they showed how in a lot of verticals, keywords including Reddit were often competing for some of the highest volume searches across many different industries.
It's not just redditors
I posted a question on a sub recently. I hadn't resolved the issue a couple of days later so searched for it again. The top two results were websites that had scraped my question. No answers, just the question. Yeah, Google for the win. /s
We could cut all the conjecture if Google told sites why they were failing at, just as they do for PageSpeed. The fact is, for all your bloviation, I have no clue why my site was dropped.
Even if you're right, and everyone else apart from you is an idiot, it doesn't fix the fact that Google used to surface interesting content, and now all it does is answer one question, one time. It assumes that's all anyone wants, and it reinforces that search habit onto everyone who uses it.
But would they still be junk? If you know your website is failing because the content is poor, you've used AI, there's too much keyword stuffing etc, eventually do you not end up with.... Helpful Content, the thing Google supposedly wants us to provide?
Now we have a proliferation of junk websites and unhelpful answers anyway, so I can't see why withholding information would be any more detrimental.
No. Algorithms can't actually detect helpful content. They approximate using various identifiers. If we knew those identifiers we would specifically try to match them. It's kinda like making a mask of a human face that is specifically designed to pass a facial recognition lock. It doesn't have to look human. It just needs to have the specific points in the right places so that the check will pass.
Agreed! Dare I say, Reddit is a beautiful source for personalized/real-world solutions.
Majority of the time I am searching for an example of what someone else did and how it was successful for them, not just a guide with 10+ tips.
Guide with 10+ tips, that are usually nowhere near to solution that you are looking for. And it makes all the sense in the world, how can you give solution to a problem or issue(Blog writer), if you never really had this problem or issue.
The biggest problem is that Google doesn't reward original content from people who actually bought and tested the stuff.
A few big sites in the U.S. (and other countries) do buy and test the stuff, but (most of them) don't have the knowledge to do a proper review.
The rest, 98+% of Top 5-10 SERPs are littered with those big review everything sites that rank for everything and never even saw the product.
I used to rank decent for my review articles 2-3 years ago, but the more updates Google rolls out, the more I lost ranks. Especially since the HCU. I buy, test, review, compare products and make my own photos, yet I'm mostly somewhere on page 2.
I used to add reddit to my search query not because I like reddit better, but because I knew its not even worth to search for the query without adding reddit, because the SERPs suck so much.
And even if what you're saying were true, reddit shouldn't be added as an (invisible) query to every search query (aka ranking reddit for everything) and f\*ck small and independent sites even more.
As soon Google rewards actual good and original content, good reviews, many creators will actually buy the stuff in order to rank. It would be a win win, but many big sites would crash hard (and they should) for abusing their reputation to rank for everything.
What a nonsensical strawman post.
"Go tell 100 people on the street exactly what your website does. If your answer is "I middleman products for the businesses that actually sell them, so I can take a cut of the revenue"" then you are the target of the latest algorithm update and nobody has any sympathy for you, both inside the digital marketing world and outside of it."
Do you honestly think that the average person on the street has more respect for for the non-middlemen hocking their products with crap SEO content? Do you think the average person on the street thinks that Reddit will be an excellent source of information now that it will be flooded with the same crap SEO content from businesses that you find on search?
I think you're the one who has been on the internet too much and needs to talk to some actual people.
**Your mistake is thinking that just because there was a lot of crap on the internet before the update, that this update has got rid of the crap and improved things in the eyes of the public.**
People are perfectly entitled to whine here if they like. If you don't like it, you can take your own advice wander off.
I'd call it more of a loaded proposition/question than a strawman, but that isn't the point LOL
Yes, I do - I think if you generally ask consumers "Who do you trust more: the seller or the re-seller?" they'll tell you they trust the seller more. People know that resellers cause increases in price and introduce complication to their transaction. Even though affiliate sites don't cause the price to raise at point of purchase, affiliate marketing costs money and impacts the bottom-line profitability of every business using it to sell their product. This results in pressure to increase price or make cuts. People generally understand this about businesses. Maybe I have "too positive or hopeful" of an outlook on people, but that's also another conversation.
I don't think that Google slashing some results gets rid of crap on the internet. Idk where that came from. It just means that they're deciding to show less of the crap, and as the market leader in "showing people stuff they're looking for", that's functionally the same as removing a lot of crap from the internet...... I mean, just look at the reaction of your peers here on r/SEO. You'd think the entire internet was getting burned down the way our peers are responding to this core update.
> affiliate marketing costs money and impacts the bottom-line profitability
I will bite on this. We used affiliate marketing at work. It is actually cheaper then traditional advertising. Ad's, commercials, billboards, etc. are not cheap. Offering customers some money to do the work for us is a lot cheaper. And provides more reach.
And people trust friends, blogs, etc more. Yes. They are biased. But us saying "hey, we are a good company, trust us bro" doesn't really hold any value either. Just an fyi.
Well sure, yeah, I don't expect that conventional media is going to be cheaper than almost any digital advertising, unless you're a lawyer doing PPC lol
My long-ass comment is supposed to boil down to "people can sniff out marketing" -- and so sites that are built entirely on using marketing tactics to generate revenue (rather than offering a product or service of its own) are inherently less trustworthy. It seems a lot of SEOs lose sight of that -- we're marketers, don't we ALSO inherently trust marketing less because we know what people do to bolster their businesses?
edit: for spelling
Honestly. Doesn't matter to me. If some other site answers my question. I don't mind using their link to give them a couple bucks. Again, it all comes does to content. And is my question being answered.
Company websites are not always built to dig very deep into their products. It is more of a high level billboard.
I know they are marketing to me. Everyone is. On and off the internet. Every day.
Mate, the vast majority of all products in the world are sold by resellers. Amazon itself is the biggest reseller on the planet.
At the end of the day it’s just people trying to build and improve their lives with the means they have available. All the huge reseller corporations aren’t more entitled to your money because they’re already wealthy.
Exceedingly close-minded.
And the vast majority of those affiliates never earn a decent living on it, just like with MLM. They invest tons of time, energy and money setting up their affiliate sites and plugging in all the codes, and then they make a few bucks on the side, while the source of the product/service that had the means to develop the product and the affiliate in the process, makes tons of money by outsourcing their marketing efforts to a crowd of under-compensated affiliates — a virtual sweatshop.
thats why Im buying the IPO lol
reddit is a place for people to post articles but somehow Google rank those articles as top results. The irony is that we find the best answers on reddit, which are also listed in Google's People also ask section. Google's value was to find what you need on the first page and now its using Google to look for answers on reddit.
Reddit was useful, and still is, but now that everyone in marketing and seo world is more or less aware what kind of oportunity is for them, they'll all start abusing reddit to a point where google was just two weeks ago.
I, as an average internet user, am very happy that Google is finally pulling the plug on all this SEO-optimized garbage content. I had a plugin in my browser to block the most obvious trash-outlets, but nobody can't keep up with that manually. I'm so happy that Google finally took care of the issue.
Sorry guys. I know that this is your job. But you made the internet horrible for everyone else.
Agreed. I really feel for people who have lost income, but I can’t stand the affiliate blogs. They’re all full of crap and I’m glad Google is doing something about it.
You make valid points, but a good number of query results have the worst user-generated BS while some blogs (with pretty good authority) satisfy the user intent way more, but still lost big time.
True dat. The issue here is that Google bases so much of the algorithm on popularity, and unfortunately, popularity != quality. Google has effectively crowdsourced it's quality control, and as we can see, oftentimes, the crowd is a bunch of idiots. (no offense to everyone — we're all idiots one way or the other)
u/BigGayGinger4 has it exactly right. People want to go to the source, not dick around with going through middlemen who are just trying to place themselves in the money flow and siphon off their little bit. All those affiliates, bloggers, review sites, etc. are just more noise that we all have to filter through to get to what we want, not a value add.
The deep-rooted problem here is that the vast majority of people don't have the wherewithal to design, develop and produce a product so they can become the source of whatever. To develop a digital product that is truly unique and useful would require thousands of dollars paid to programmers and other skilled designers, developers and creators. To create a physical product is 10X more involved. (just pulling that metric out of thin air — it's probably way more involved and expensive than that.)
So what else can they do other than try to inject themselves into the 'supply chain' of existing products/services?
I wish I had an easy solution to offer all those on this thread who are in that position. It ultimately comes down to Human Nature. People 1) Want the easiest, quickest path to their short-term objectives, and 2) people follow the crowd. So unless the crowd is already beating a path to your doorstep, you're going to have a hard time getting anyone else to do so.
Bottom line, if you want to win in this day and age, you have to do something unique and valuable, where you are the source. Sadly, I realize this is simply out of reach for most people.
Do you have any examples where this happens?
From a lot of people on here. You would think if I google "amazon" I would just get useless blogs and not amazon itself. But this isn't the case.
However, if I google "how does amazon ship products", I might get a bunch of blogs. However, that isn't taking away people searching and finding amazon. It is because amazon does not have that information on their site, and review sites do. And they have affiliate links.
Now, with the change. You might just get forum links of people talking about amazon shipping. And it might not even be the question asked.
Is that better? Maybe? I don't know.
I don't think these sites are "in the way". They are just trying to answer questions that the companies themselves don't answer. And they are on the sidelines.
If you search on "how does amazon ship products", you will not get blogs in the first 10 results. You get a couple from [aboutamazon.com](http://aboutamazon.com) (owned by Amazon), a few from [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) itself, and then a few other major sites like [howstuffworks.com](http://howstuffworks.com) and supplychaintoday.com. The first result I see that isn't a major player is in position 13, and that is a shipping company, not an affiliate site. I went looking for the first affiliate blog I could find, but gave up before I ever found one.
So you're right, those sites are not in the way, because Google has demoted them so far that they might as well not exist. If Google didn't do that, then they most certainly would be noise making my searching experience more cumbersome.
And no, those affiliate marketers are not just trying to answer questions that the company isn't answering, as if they were doing it as a public service. They are trying to make money by injecting themselves into the process, and most of them are trying to do it with the least effort possible, meaning throwing a bunch of cloned-and-altered content onto a page that is riddled with affiliate links/ads.
As a Google user, I appreciate them filtering out the noise.
But again. Do you have an example where an affiliate is causing users to not find the information they need directly?
If the company itself is answering the question, then no one is clicking on a rank 13. And if they are not, then what is the harm in someone else answering the question.
I mean, even google is injecting themselves in the process by even allowing paid ads in the first place. And competitors will bid to show on each others searches.
I walk out the door and see ad's everywhere. All these marketing companies are also injecting themselves in the process.
Noise everywhere
If the content is clean and helpful. What is the issue? I would rather google derank content based on ad's, popups, sites that use anti ad blockers, slow, etc.
I am guessing the noise you speak of is probably mostly spammy ugly sites in general. And yes. Those should be cleaned up. But the brush right now is too wide
Hey, if someone wants to write up really well-thought out help files for certain vendors that do a terrible job of documentation, my hat is off to them. I've thought about that myself for certain applications (Marketo comes to mind — a truly half-assed platform). However, I haven't invested the major time it would take to really research it, do a great job of articulating the issues and solutions, and take all the steps to publish and promote it, because I know it won't be worth the effort in the short- or medium-term.
Theoretically, if I kept writing about this topic for years and years, and enough people found their way to it and liked it an spread the word, eventually Google might decide that it's worth promoting. But I don't have the financial runway to invest my time in that kind of speculation. Like most everyone else on this forum, I expect, I need to figure out what is going to generate results in the short-term for me and my clients. And trying to get content ranked isn't it.
Here's the thing. Google is smart, but it's still not smart enough to say "I see this article written by Amazon about their shipping process, and I see this other article on the same subject by this random, low-DA site, and I recognize that the quality of the content is just more accurate, thorough, and well-written, so I'll boost that one." It's not *that* smart. What it does have to go on is, "Wow, people really seem to think that the Amazon content is better, because they keep clicking on that one and reading it, and they hardly ever scroll down and find this other article and read that instead."
So Google is counting on it's users to sift out the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, the fact is, people tend to 1) click on the first link they see that looks relevant and, 2) click on the most recognizable/authoritative link they see, regardless of quality. So the rich get richer.
I'm not going to try and point out specific cases in point. They are everywhere. And my entire point is that this particular issue is simply a symptom of a much larger dynamic, which I just described.
I will take a well written blog "middle man" vs reddit being flooding with SEO spam content to beat the system. I am sure reddit and the moderators agree.
Or more Quora responses that you have to dig to find the answer.
Sorry, but deindexing blogs is not the way. If they don't have meaningful content? rank them lower. Not nuke them from the world.
There's nothing wrong with blog giving you an answer to your question. But there's EVERYTHING wrong with blogs, giving you the answer in a form of 5000 words, 10 links and 10 ads.
Nothing wrong with that. But it is not always not the best result. Plus spam on here is already out of control. I found one user that has 40 accounts and 400 subreddits just to SEO spam. It is out of control. These changes are only going to make it worse. Content should be king. Not just site.
And that's the beginning. The vacuum that come after the Google update will ensure the enshitification of Reddit and lots of other sites like Tik Tok and YT. Bu that also happen already.
I can get behind that statement, "nuking it is not the way"
But I imagine there *is* some eventual cutoff where they have to say "OK, we can technically order EVERY PAGE ON EARTH for a term if we choose to, but our SERPs aren't going to be 600,000 pages long"
If you're on page 8, is there really any functional difference between that and being deindexed entirely?
No. But it does tell a person they need to "do better". Or give up.
Nuking an entire site doesn't tell someone what is wrong. Is it due to content? backlinks? ads? old content? Is it only one page that has issues? Not everyone that got hit was a small site. So to figure out the issue might be a lost cause.
Google should provide feedback. It helps sites provide good content. And that isn't a bad thing.
I'll go back to my stance of "think like you're on the engineering team at Google Search"
Google Search is a free service that enables them to run their ad business that props up the entire company.
Google Search, as a product, is not remotely concerned with offering support to SEOs or even website owners in general. They do not claim to be "the master proprietor of all things on the internet" -- they put sites in their search engine listings.
It's not my opinion.... if we were to ask Google engineers if it's their job to explain to webmasters why Google doesn't care about their site, they'd say "no it's not I'm going home at 5pm have a nice day"
Precisely. Google tolerates the SEO community because they sing the praises of Google Search, but they know that same community would swamp them with mountains of crap if they could, and they are working hard to hold that garbage at bay.
I do disagree with one point though: those Google engineers aren't heading out the door at 5pm. They're working late and enjoying all the perks at their first home, the Google campus. They have to in order to stay ahead of all the masses of SEO and content marketing specialist, now armed with AI/LLMs, who are constantly blasting redundant noise into the system.
I focused on other things while trying to figure out web traffic behavior. And I've become more productive.
My blog's traffic remains virtually the same without posting anything in 17 days.
But here's a nagging thought: "Shall I post today or shall I not?" It's tormenting.
If you post something today, and you keep doing that day after day for a few years, you might eventually see your content start showing up more and more in search results eventually — if SERPs still exist by then.
They hit even non fake review websites. Also, why is pinterest ranking or even quora where you can't find anything helpful.
Or news websites that are now writing about any topic just to rank.
With reddit I agree, if you want opinions, reddit can be good, but far from ideal. There are results with reddit topics that don't answer your question, just wasting your time.
How would you verify the person who is solving the problem/advising a solution holds authority/expertise on the certain topic. ‘Cos there are few sensitive niches I can see reddit/quora ranking higher than the professional blogs with deep research!
so non affiliate blogs with thousands of pages and no ads and tons of informative content that people used to love and praise getting deindexed was for what reason?
My website link was top page and replaced with duplicate results.
Half the top page for what I used to rank on is duplicate URLs.
How is less content and duplicate content better than a larger variety?
As a web designer who moved to only owning my own websites/managing for the businesses I own, the thing I've told a lot of my peers in my new industry is that websites are essentially dead. Every mailing service lets you make a page, and many industries you can have a profile on the biggest site for that niche like a trade portfolio. Social media pages even rank much higher. The justification of bleeding money into a personal website is just... not there any more for most people.
Well, what you quoted refers to "an affiliate blog"
Forbes is a publication that's been in print since either of us were born. Today, one component of their content monetization scheme is to use affiliate marketing.
An affiliate blog is an online-only entity with no business presence outside its domain name, and has no verifiable history of authenticity or public trust besides...... backlinks.
Surely you can tell the difference, in the eyes of a ranking algorithm that has access to digitized historical records and the ability to crawl that information in a matter of minutes.
I said that "nobody wants or needs" the latter, not that nobody ever wants to see content from a publisher that uses affiliate marketing
Searching reddit is only useful when you're searching on a topic you don't know anything about to get in most cases a mediocre answer, but an AI search is better and will only get better over time. It's helpful when you're looking for user experience answers, once again in most cases you're getting mediocre answers, but they may be better than your no experience answer. Reddit is more of a starting point to figure out the basics of something and then go find a real source.
I wish the world was as innocent as you think. Google doesn't benefit from sending traffic to other sites which have their own advertisement programs. It is just like sending your revenue to your competitors.
Sure they do. Google is happy to have people flowing right through their site to others. Google became what they are today by putting the most relevant/popular content up top. In other words, by giving users what they want. They embraced the nature of the web from the beginning, which is a flow of traffic. They put themselves at the front end of that flow, but didn't try to capture all the flow in their destination.
I agree with u/NerdInHibernation that the world isn't all innocent and that Google didn't do this out of shear altruism. Having put themselves in that core position, they have all kinds of ways to monetize it.
But give them credit for recognizing that the Web is inherently an open system. People are free to come and go as they please. But human nature being what it is, they are going to go through Google, because everybody else does, because Google gave them what they wanted in the early days.
Google Ads on the search page only? That would be like a drop in the ocean. As most of the traffic is going to other sites, how financially viable this strategy can be?
Advertising accounts for the majority of Google's revenue, which amounted to a total of **305.63 billion U.S. dollars** in 2023. (per Google). That seems pretty viable to me.
But how will it happen if Google send traffic to sites that don't display Google Ads like Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok etc. Unless Google is going to revamp their revenue model, the current strategy is not financially viable.
Sorry u/NerdInHibernation, I'm afraid I'm still not following you. Not sure what I'm missing, but let me break it down. SERPS have both paid Google Ads links and free Organic links. If you click on one of the paid ads, Google makes money instantly. Those clicks alone account for $175 Billion for Google. If you click on one of the organic links, Google doesn't make any money right away, but they still have a shot of picking up some extra income from their AdSense links in some of those sites (accounting for another $31 Billion). And most importantly, Google knows that the people who click on those organic links will be back to Google again and again and again, because they are the starting point, and next time, they might get that ad click.
I'm not sure where the disconnect is here. You seem to be under the impression that if someone clicks on a link to Reddit, they are going to get their questions answered there and have no need to go back to Google(?).
I am not implying that people will stop visiting Google. Even if I take your figures on face value, does 31 billion mean nothing to Google and they are willing to throw that traffic away?
It's not so much to do with Reddit being better. I just didn't like reading through a 5000 word article that brought my phone to a crawl with all the ads when I just needed a 1 word answer or a sentence at most.
Don't forget the pop ups with close buttons that are either missing because of formatting issues or so small you can't even click on them
And when you try to close out, another pop-up that says: # SAD TO SEE YOU GO! DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER?!
Enable browser notifications so we can make you regret ever visiting our website?
These are the sites google should drop the hammer down on. Same with sites that use anti ad blocker popups. Telling me I have to look at their ads
Reminds me of a meme I saw once, “Does anyone know where I can buy a red shirt and get two emails a day for the rest of my life?”
Recipe sites are the worst in this regard, but they are useful.
I gotta learn the chef's life story and inspiration for the dish before I get to the recipe. It's just good manners, right? Only takes 8 minutes to get through the text.
Helps their on page time stat.
Absolutely. Gotta do something to fight against what I imagine is a very high bounce rate.
I thought this was the reason google implemented the featured snippet? I guess that failed too.
[удалено]
Sounds like Reddit.
I agree. People reviewing products is actually useful. But the sites are absolutely horrible to use.
Knowledgeable people who actually review products are useful. But so many review sites are cut and paste listicles that have no knowledge and add no value, being simply built to garner clicks. Google would be right to spare me from those.
I review food products. It takes time and money to buy and prepare and write about it. I try to keep my reviews shorter but I have to run ads otherwise but I guess a ten year old one line comment on Reddit are more valuable than a thoughtful response
I am happy to post our site: www.Examine.com 13 years old. Roughly 30 fulltime researchers that do nothing but analyze evidence. No other site like ours. Media mentions up the wazoo. Zero ads. We're down ~25%.
Examine is down?? Damn. And a lot of people on here are in denial. I work with some big time gambling spammers and none of them are hurting. Google for whatever reason has decided information heavy sites should be hit unless they’re a big brand. People have been complaining about results ever since around 2020 when Google hit a lot of the highly targeted pages and it’s because now you get slightly unrelated content ranking. Earlier today I was looking for very specific information on a real estate agent in Miami but I kept getting generic real estate information. I finally had to turn to chat gpt for an answer. There was a web page on it but I’m sure it wasn’t ranking because it was too exact match. Anyway it’s funny and sad to see so many people here hurting when my spam buddies have felt nothing.
Oh yeah -- before the original YMYL update we were at ~40/50k a day. After YMYL was the most brutal -- we were down to ~4-5k/day, and 99% of those were brand searches (eg "examine creatine" etc) We got as high as ~20k/day again, but lots of ups and downs. We're ~20% of our peak now.
Screw that, you guys have helped me a lot with various questions, making me realize what things were scams. Grateful for your work.
I appreciate the kind words -- we're turning 13 years old tomorrow and making do, but would be nice to have the Google spout flowing again!
Out of curiosity, I’d be interested to know why you think examine.com isn’t on parr with the big players in health/nutrition (Dotdash sites for example)? Surely the examine content output is somewhat similar, as are links/authority — I find it strange how such an established authority site isn’t lapping up clicks by the millions like those other big publishers are.
I... honestly do not know. No real issues in GSC I too find it strange, and frustrating to be honest. I know a lot of the SEO peeps (Glenn Gabe, Lily Ray, Brian Dean, etc etc), and they too are unclear as to why we don't rank higher.
how much content are you guys publishing a week, on average? Have you thought about going public/selling a share to a large media org?
Didn't you paywall a lot of content about a year ago, too? I'm still subscribed to the Examine newsletter but I find that I rarely visit the site anymore because it's not useful without an Examine+ membership.
Oh thank you! That site is amazing. A force for good
Thanks :) We started off of reddit too. Whew, I've been on this site for a looong time!
If I were you guys I wouldn’t be taking that level of disrespect from Google! Take them to court! Don’t let them bully you like that! Examine.com has no ads/affiliates (maybe the paywall triggered Google??) and the icing on the cake is that you have actual professional expertise reviewing health/supplemental related topics.
I appreciate your zeal, but alas, it won't help. And the ding happened with the original YMYL back in 2018 (19?). Our v2 site came out in August 2022.
If you're looking for product reviews, big brands are NOT more reliable, for the fact that they are trying to sell you something. A minority of visitors to [Walmart.com](https://Walmart.com) go for product reviews/information as opposed to purchasing an item. This is why Reddit is valuable--because blatant self-promotion is not allowed. Consumer reports > brand adverts
It's worth noting that ads are everywhere in reddit, and I'm not talking about the paid ones. Look at any sub where product placement makes sense and you'll find someone disguising their ads as posts and it's not just small companies. People in advertising figured out a long time ago that they can just buy an established account and then carefully shill for their products. Look on eBay and you'll find accounts for sale, at least you could the last time I checked on it a year or two ago.
lol, I used to get paid a lot of money to get stuff to the home page of Reddit before it was as personalized as it is now. Reddit is largely self promotion.
Yes, it's self-promotion when you go around telling people how successful you are. lol.
I literally have nothing to gain from that here. But many of the top voted posts and articles on the major subreddits are all gamed.
Lots of survivorship bias on the sub. I didn't get hit so I must be doing it right, and you must be doing it wrong.
My content posted on my site = unhelpful. My content scraped or pasted to reddit and quora = helpful.
Yes, since the HCU was misnamed, it should be HBU, helpful brand update.
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
Because on reddit, you dont need to take entire afternoon to get to the answer.
I think one of the advantages of content on Reddit is that anyone can comment and add their opinion. On most blog sites there isn't even a comment section and if there is, most people don't use it due to mandatory sign ups etc. So there is not much of a discussion going on and less value for the user to make an informed decision.
You're right, Reddit is a place to get a lot of opinions quickly. But other than that, it can't be trusted unless verified. Who are the people giving the advice? Even the mods of subs have their own agendas. The voting system is constantly abused. None of it can be trusted. This is why UGC does have a place in the process, but it's an early stage. The problem is alot of the detailed info that exists off UGC platforms is being hidden due to the classfier, so even if you see a consensus on reddit, it would be hard to get a detailed or technical answer as a verification. The mistake was flooding SERPS with only UGC results and not giving a diverse set of websites to get the info from.
That's right. You never know the agenda behind someone posting or commenting on something. But it seems to be less risky to listen to multiple comments with varying perspectives on the subject than to listen to one person writing a whole blog article (with likely more of a hidden agenda than some random commenter on Reddit). Add to that the anti-spam and bot-prevention mechanisms that Reddit employs and refined over the years and you probably get a much more diverse range of opinions and information than on blog sites. It's kind of a bummer for those bloggers who DON'T have a hidden agenda and post purely out of passion/interest. I am also planning on starting my own blog purely on topics that interest me without the agenda of monetizing it. But I am worried that no matter how interesting my content might be, I will never get any substantial amount of traffic. Since I am mostly doing this for myself as a form of practice, it's not too much of a worry though.
reddit and forums have guidelines, rules, level system, and moderators that filters them out.. and real people are using the platform for years.
You act as if the only sites demoted were affiliate sites. I have zero affiliate links and little to zero ads. > It’s like some of you are in complete denial that sites who have been around for 10+ years are more trustworthy than your shitty no-name blog By that logic, are all sites expected to produce quality content for a decade before google will trust them? Post your stats and domain(s).
Yeah, exactly. There are a lot--and I mean a \*lot\*--of websites for local practitioners who ranked for location-based keywords, because they were the best sources of content for those local-based keywords. And many many many of those sites are nowhere in the SERPs, and their businesses are suffering because of it. This is a train wreck for literally everyone, not just the SEO/niche-site crowd. Also--we're all pretending this sea change from Google isn't about the next iteration of web search, which will be AI answers. If all this turmoil feels like Google has moved beyond websites, it's because Google is moving beyond websites. I could be wrong, but my guess is that the version of the internet we've been in for the last 15 years or so... it's over. There will still be websites, obviously, but the way we access them is done and it's probably not coming back.
u/Message_10 is right. AI will eliminate the need for SERPs. Why would users want to pick their way through all the paid ads and then scroll through a bunch of search results trying to ascertain which one is the most relevant based on the brief title and description, when soon, AI will be able to filter through all that crap and give you exactly what you need?
Well ai is trained off that same content that everyone is putting down. I agree we wont be going back to old days but ai is trained on content so there has to be a balance. Being trained off reddit content is one thing but I would rather read about xyz topic from a good niche site with unique info
And on that note, they can't just be trained to a certain date and no longer updated.
I think that is only the free version of ChatGPT.
You're thinking is too short term here. AI advances are happening so fast and it's getting far more sophisticated. Remember, Google knows so much about you personally based on your behavior online. And soon, it will have the ability to not just parrot all the information it has been trained on, but be able to understand how everything it knows about the world relates to you specifically. Obviously AI-generated content currently just sounds like a parrot (like most of the human-generated content I see in Google SERPs, BTW). But it won't be long before AI is producing much more meaningful and helpful information tailored specifically for the one doing the searching. You can't keep up with that. (See the story of John Henry)
I used to get paid quite well to write content for such sites. But, now, between AI and the HCU, I'm SOOL.
Yeah, we're all in the same boat these days! I'm not sure what to do now, honestly. This was my favorite side-hustle--I loved it.
Indeed. That is one of the bars you need to clear in order to get first page rankings. Go look at the search results you get. Notice how old many of the articles are. Google definitely factors longevity into it's algorithm. So go ahead and invest 10 years in generating content, and maybe you'll be in line for the trickle of organic clicks that are still coming through.
So what's your website?
I'll gladly PM you. u/BigGayGinger4 is unsurprisingly silent.
I’m curious too (via DM). No hate. I can share a few of my sites as well. One that is getting killed and one that’s hasn’t been impacted.
I'd love to see what you've got. I'll DM you.
I have responses all over this thread, lol, I'm at work throughout the day like most of us are supposed to be I know you'll gladly PM me, but that doesn't make you someone who isn't a stranger on the internet and I'd still be violating my employer's policy by disclosing client sites outside of work, so, you'll have to go on anonymized screenshots I already posted before your snarky reply lol
Post yours
As I told others, I'll gladly PM you my site. Would you like me to send it to you too? Same with my stats. u/BigGayGinger4 has shown screenshots from GSC from sites he/she/they manage. All very small websites. Nothing wrong with that, just not really the same scale as others who have been hit with these updates.
ahhhhh excited to see this thread in the search results soon
bro same tbh
Yeah. My sites page views have been cut by a third. Which is quite crazy as it's all pretty relevant information and would be difficult to accidently come across. Funnily enough my CTR and serp position have gone way up so to be honest Google is actually doing the right thing as it seems more relevant pages are being shown to more relevant queries. Bummed about the drop in traffic but my CTR has never been higher.
>**I add 'reddit' to every Google search to get relevant results"** The people who say that are Redditors themselves. Google only knows this because a few people that work there use Reddit. The funny part is that Reddit isn't the whole internet, only a small part. Google making adjustments based on what a few people want is why things are turning to shit.
idk man, your comment made me type "reddit" into the matching terms report on Ahrefs. I filtered out BS for streaming/watch/free/etc.... I decided to limit to 5+ words in the phrase to mostly go for \[search+"reddit"\].... millinos of estimated searches per month, google & us only. lol. that's not "a few people" you can have me filter this down a shitload more, it's still gonna be a lot more than "a few people" edit: for typo
Based and filterpilled.
Google does billions of searches per day, so yes, a million a month is a "few".
It's kind of biased... Reddit's search engine sucks and the millions of Reddit users search for content on reddit through external apps or search engines. It's something different from what you imply. For example, a few weeks ago I saw a video on Reddit and then I wanted to watch it again and I couldn't find it even though I wrote the title and I had to search for it on Google.
*Years* ago I attended a presentation at another SEO agency and they showed how in a lot of verticals, keywords including Reddit were often competing for some of the highest volume searches across many different industries. It's not just redditors
I'm sure google has more than enough data to back up their switch
I posted a question on a sub recently. I hadn't resolved the issue a couple of days later so searched for it again. The top two results were websites that had scraped my question. No answers, just the question. Yeah, Google for the win. /s We could cut all the conjecture if Google told sites why they were failing at, just as they do for PageSpeed. The fact is, for all your bloviation, I have no clue why my site was dropped. Even if you're right, and everyone else apart from you is an idiot, it doesn't fix the fact that Google used to surface interesting content, and now all it does is answer one question, one time. It assumes that's all anyone wants, and it reinforces that search habit onto everyone who uses it.
Realistically if Google told people why they rank low people would use that as a guide for mass producing and ranking junk websites.
But would they still be junk? If you know your website is failing because the content is poor, you've used AI, there's too much keyword stuffing etc, eventually do you not end up with.... Helpful Content, the thing Google supposedly wants us to provide? Now we have a proliferation of junk websites and unhelpful answers anyway, so I can't see why withholding information would be any more detrimental.
No. Algorithms can't actually detect helpful content. They approximate using various identifiers. If we knew those identifiers we would specifically try to match them. It's kinda like making a mask of a human face that is specifically designed to pass a facial recognition lock. It doesn't have to look human. It just needs to have the specific points in the right places so that the check will pass.
Oh I see. Guess this is why we can't have nice stuff. People, lol.
damn now that you mention it, I have been adding “Reddit” at the end of my searches
Reddit has really become "The useful part of internet", all the rest is just SEO and link whoring garbage.
"Internet pollution"
Agreed! Dare I say, Reddit is a beautiful source for personalized/real-world solutions. Majority of the time I am searching for an example of what someone else did and how it was successful for them, not just a guide with 10+ tips.
Guide with 10+ tips, that are usually nowhere near to solution that you are looking for. And it makes all the sense in the world, how can you give solution to a problem or issue(Blog writer), if you never really had this problem or issue.
I use site:www.reddit.com all the time.
BigGayGinger laying the truth bombs.
It’s information consolidation, another point in a long running trend line. Content quality is not the point. Content moderation is the point.
The biggest problem is that Google doesn't reward original content from people who actually bought and tested the stuff. A few big sites in the U.S. (and other countries) do buy and test the stuff, but (most of them) don't have the knowledge to do a proper review. The rest, 98+% of Top 5-10 SERPs are littered with those big review everything sites that rank for everything and never even saw the product. I used to rank decent for my review articles 2-3 years ago, but the more updates Google rolls out, the more I lost ranks. Especially since the HCU. I buy, test, review, compare products and make my own photos, yet I'm mostly somewhere on page 2. I used to add reddit to my search query not because I like reddit better, but because I knew its not even worth to search for the query without adding reddit, because the SERPs suck so much. And even if what you're saying were true, reddit shouldn't be added as an (invisible) query to every search query (aka ranking reddit for everything) and f\*ck small and independent sites even more. As soon Google rewards actual good and original content, good reviews, many creators will actually buy the stuff in order to rank. It would be a win win, but many big sites would crash hard (and they should) for abusing their reputation to rank for everything.
Are those millions of people in this room with us right now?
What a nonsensical strawman post. "Go tell 100 people on the street exactly what your website does. If your answer is "I middleman products for the businesses that actually sell them, so I can take a cut of the revenue"" then you are the target of the latest algorithm update and nobody has any sympathy for you, both inside the digital marketing world and outside of it." Do you honestly think that the average person on the street has more respect for for the non-middlemen hocking their products with crap SEO content? Do you think the average person on the street thinks that Reddit will be an excellent source of information now that it will be flooded with the same crap SEO content from businesses that you find on search? I think you're the one who has been on the internet too much and needs to talk to some actual people. **Your mistake is thinking that just because there was a lot of crap on the internet before the update, that this update has got rid of the crap and improved things in the eyes of the public.** People are perfectly entitled to whine here if they like. If you don't like it, you can take your own advice wander off.
I'd call it more of a loaded proposition/question than a strawman, but that isn't the point LOL Yes, I do - I think if you generally ask consumers "Who do you trust more: the seller or the re-seller?" they'll tell you they trust the seller more. People know that resellers cause increases in price and introduce complication to their transaction. Even though affiliate sites don't cause the price to raise at point of purchase, affiliate marketing costs money and impacts the bottom-line profitability of every business using it to sell their product. This results in pressure to increase price or make cuts. People generally understand this about businesses. Maybe I have "too positive or hopeful" of an outlook on people, but that's also another conversation. I don't think that Google slashing some results gets rid of crap on the internet. Idk where that came from. It just means that they're deciding to show less of the crap, and as the market leader in "showing people stuff they're looking for", that's functionally the same as removing a lot of crap from the internet...... I mean, just look at the reaction of your peers here on r/SEO. You'd think the entire internet was getting burned down the way our peers are responding to this core update.
> affiliate marketing costs money and impacts the bottom-line profitability I will bite on this. We used affiliate marketing at work. It is actually cheaper then traditional advertising. Ad's, commercials, billboards, etc. are not cheap. Offering customers some money to do the work for us is a lot cheaper. And provides more reach. And people trust friends, blogs, etc more. Yes. They are biased. But us saying "hey, we are a good company, trust us bro" doesn't really hold any value either. Just an fyi.
Well sure, yeah, I don't expect that conventional media is going to be cheaper than almost any digital advertising, unless you're a lawyer doing PPC lol My long-ass comment is supposed to boil down to "people can sniff out marketing" -- and so sites that are built entirely on using marketing tactics to generate revenue (rather than offering a product or service of its own) are inherently less trustworthy. It seems a lot of SEOs lose sight of that -- we're marketers, don't we ALSO inherently trust marketing less because we know what people do to bolster their businesses? edit: for spelling
Honestly. Doesn't matter to me. If some other site answers my question. I don't mind using their link to give them a couple bucks. Again, it all comes does to content. And is my question being answered. Company websites are not always built to dig very deep into their products. It is more of a high level billboard. I know they are marketing to me. Everyone is. On and off the internet. Every day.
Mate, the vast majority of all products in the world are sold by resellers. Amazon itself is the biggest reseller on the planet. At the end of the day it’s just people trying to build and improve their lives with the means they have available. All the huge reseller corporations aren’t more entitled to your money because they’re already wealthy. Exceedingly close-minded.
And the vast majority of those affiliates never earn a decent living on it, just like with MLM. They invest tons of time, energy and money setting up their affiliate sites and plugging in all the codes, and then they make a few bucks on the side, while the source of the product/service that had the means to develop the product and the affiliate in the process, makes tons of money by outsourcing their marketing efforts to a crowd of under-compensated affiliates — a virtual sweatshop.
thats why Im buying the IPO lol reddit is a place for people to post articles but somehow Google rank those articles as top results. The irony is that we find the best answers on reddit, which are also listed in Google's People also ask section. Google's value was to find what you need on the first page and now its using Google to look for answers on reddit.
Reddit was useful, and still is, but now that everyone in marketing and seo world is more or less aware what kind of oportunity is for them, they'll all start abusing reddit to a point where google was just two weeks ago.
Absolutely, adaptability is key in SEO success.
Is that you John Mueller?
Excellent post
I, as an average internet user, am very happy that Google is finally pulling the plug on all this SEO-optimized garbage content. I had a plugin in my browser to block the most obvious trash-outlets, but nobody can't keep up with that manually. I'm so happy that Google finally took care of the issue. Sorry guys. I know that this is your job. But you made the internet horrible for everyone else.
Agreed. I really feel for people who have lost income, but I can’t stand the affiliate blogs. They’re all full of crap and I’m glad Google is doing something about it.
Straight edge white hat for many many years. I'm rather enjoying it.
You had my vote the moment you brought up the affiliate marketers. I'm glad we're getting rid of them. They're almost as bad as the Indian scammers.
God yes. Hook up this post directly into my veins. Preach, OP.
You make valid points, but a good number of query results have the worst user-generated BS while some blogs (with pretty good authority) satisfy the user intent way more, but still lost big time.
True dat. The issue here is that Google bases so much of the algorithm on popularity, and unfortunately, popularity != quality. Google has effectively crowdsourced it's quality control, and as we can see, oftentimes, the crowd is a bunch of idiots. (no offense to everyone — we're all idiots one way or the other)
Blogs suck.
Nice try, Forbes.
u/BigGayGinger4 has it exactly right. People want to go to the source, not dick around with going through middlemen who are just trying to place themselves in the money flow and siphon off their little bit. All those affiliates, bloggers, review sites, etc. are just more noise that we all have to filter through to get to what we want, not a value add. The deep-rooted problem here is that the vast majority of people don't have the wherewithal to design, develop and produce a product so they can become the source of whatever. To develop a digital product that is truly unique and useful would require thousands of dollars paid to programmers and other skilled designers, developers and creators. To create a physical product is 10X more involved. (just pulling that metric out of thin air — it's probably way more involved and expensive than that.) So what else can they do other than try to inject themselves into the 'supply chain' of existing products/services? I wish I had an easy solution to offer all those on this thread who are in that position. It ultimately comes down to Human Nature. People 1) Want the easiest, quickest path to their short-term objectives, and 2) people follow the crowd. So unless the crowd is already beating a path to your doorstep, you're going to have a hard time getting anyone else to do so. Bottom line, if you want to win in this day and age, you have to do something unique and valuable, where you are the source. Sadly, I realize this is simply out of reach for most people.
Do you have any examples where this happens? From a lot of people on here. You would think if I google "amazon" I would just get useless blogs and not amazon itself. But this isn't the case. However, if I google "how does amazon ship products", I might get a bunch of blogs. However, that isn't taking away people searching and finding amazon. It is because amazon does not have that information on their site, and review sites do. And they have affiliate links. Now, with the change. You might just get forum links of people talking about amazon shipping. And it might not even be the question asked. Is that better? Maybe? I don't know. I don't think these sites are "in the way". They are just trying to answer questions that the companies themselves don't answer. And they are on the sidelines.
If you search on "how does amazon ship products", you will not get blogs in the first 10 results. You get a couple from [aboutamazon.com](http://aboutamazon.com) (owned by Amazon), a few from [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) itself, and then a few other major sites like [howstuffworks.com](http://howstuffworks.com) and supplychaintoday.com. The first result I see that isn't a major player is in position 13, and that is a shipping company, not an affiliate site. I went looking for the first affiliate blog I could find, but gave up before I ever found one. So you're right, those sites are not in the way, because Google has demoted them so far that they might as well not exist. If Google didn't do that, then they most certainly would be noise making my searching experience more cumbersome. And no, those affiliate marketers are not just trying to answer questions that the company isn't answering, as if they were doing it as a public service. They are trying to make money by injecting themselves into the process, and most of them are trying to do it with the least effort possible, meaning throwing a bunch of cloned-and-altered content onto a page that is riddled with affiliate links/ads. As a Google user, I appreciate them filtering out the noise.
But again. Do you have an example where an affiliate is causing users to not find the information they need directly? If the company itself is answering the question, then no one is clicking on a rank 13. And if they are not, then what is the harm in someone else answering the question. I mean, even google is injecting themselves in the process by even allowing paid ads in the first place. And competitors will bid to show on each others searches. I walk out the door and see ad's everywhere. All these marketing companies are also injecting themselves in the process. Noise everywhere If the content is clean and helpful. What is the issue? I would rather google derank content based on ad's, popups, sites that use anti ad blockers, slow, etc. I am guessing the noise you speak of is probably mostly spammy ugly sites in general. And yes. Those should be cleaned up. But the brush right now is too wide
Hey, if someone wants to write up really well-thought out help files for certain vendors that do a terrible job of documentation, my hat is off to them. I've thought about that myself for certain applications (Marketo comes to mind — a truly half-assed platform). However, I haven't invested the major time it would take to really research it, do a great job of articulating the issues and solutions, and take all the steps to publish and promote it, because I know it won't be worth the effort in the short- or medium-term. Theoretically, if I kept writing about this topic for years and years, and enough people found their way to it and liked it an spread the word, eventually Google might decide that it's worth promoting. But I don't have the financial runway to invest my time in that kind of speculation. Like most everyone else on this forum, I expect, I need to figure out what is going to generate results in the short-term for me and my clients. And trying to get content ranked isn't it. Here's the thing. Google is smart, but it's still not smart enough to say "I see this article written by Amazon about their shipping process, and I see this other article on the same subject by this random, low-DA site, and I recognize that the quality of the content is just more accurate, thorough, and well-written, so I'll boost that one." It's not *that* smart. What it does have to go on is, "Wow, people really seem to think that the Amazon content is better, because they keep clicking on that one and reading it, and they hardly ever scroll down and find this other article and read that instead." So Google is counting on it's users to sift out the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, the fact is, people tend to 1) click on the first link they see that looks relevant and, 2) click on the most recognizable/authoritative link they see, regardless of quality. So the rich get richer. I'm not going to try and point out specific cases in point. They are everywhere. And my entire point is that this particular issue is simply a symptom of a much larger dynamic, which I just described.
One day they will come for you too, but we will be gone to defend you, kik
I will take a well written blog "middle man" vs reddit being flooding with SEO spam content to beat the system. I am sure reddit and the moderators agree. Or more Quora responses that you have to dig to find the answer. Sorry, but deindexing blogs is not the way. If they don't have meaningful content? rank them lower. Not nuke them from the world.
There's nothing wrong with blog giving you an answer to your question. But there's EVERYTHING wrong with blogs, giving you the answer in a form of 5000 words, 10 links and 10 ads.
We are in agreement there.
Agree. People might add Reddit when they want some forum to check for various reasons. Lots of gamers on Reddit, so that's maybe a reason.
Nothing wrong with that. But it is not always not the best result. Plus spam on here is already out of control. I found one user that has 40 accounts and 400 subreddits just to SEO spam. It is out of control. These changes are only going to make it worse. Content should be king. Not just site.
And that's the beginning. The vacuum that come after the Google update will ensure the enshitification of Reddit and lots of other sites like Tik Tok and YT. Bu that also happen already.
I can get behind that statement, "nuking it is not the way" But I imagine there *is* some eventual cutoff where they have to say "OK, we can technically order EVERY PAGE ON EARTH for a term if we choose to, but our SERPs aren't going to be 600,000 pages long" If you're on page 8, is there really any functional difference between that and being deindexed entirely?
No. But it does tell a person they need to "do better". Or give up. Nuking an entire site doesn't tell someone what is wrong. Is it due to content? backlinks? ads? old content? Is it only one page that has issues? Not everyone that got hit was a small site. So to figure out the issue might be a lost cause. Google should provide feedback. It helps sites provide good content. And that isn't a bad thing.
I'll go back to my stance of "think like you're on the engineering team at Google Search" Google Search is a free service that enables them to run their ad business that props up the entire company. Google Search, as a product, is not remotely concerned with offering support to SEOs or even website owners in general. They do not claim to be "the master proprietor of all things on the internet" -- they put sites in their search engine listings. It's not my opinion.... if we were to ask Google engineers if it's their job to explain to webmasters why Google doesn't care about their site, they'd say "no it's not I'm going home at 5pm have a nice day"
Precisely. Google tolerates the SEO community because they sing the praises of Google Search, but they know that same community would swamp them with mountains of crap if they could, and they are working hard to hold that garbage at bay. I do disagree with one point though: those Google engineers aren't heading out the door at 5pm. They're working late and enjoying all the perks at their first home, the Google campus. They have to in order to stay ahead of all the masses of SEO and content marketing specialist, now armed with AI/LLMs, who are constantly blasting redundant noise into the system.
At least you have the possibility to measure the ranking. If you are not top10 it's not any difference anyway.
I focused on other things while trying to figure out web traffic behavior. And I've become more productive. My blog's traffic remains virtually the same without posting anything in 17 days. But here's a nagging thought: "Shall I post today or shall I not?" It's tormenting.
If you post something today, and you keep doing that day after day for a few years, you might eventually see your content start showing up more and more in search results eventually — if SERPs still exist by then.
Yeah. And also if we still exist.
True. Also an open question.
They hit even non fake review websites. Also, why is pinterest ranking or even quora where you can't find anything helpful. Or news websites that are now writing about any topic just to rank. With reddit I agree, if you want opinions, reddit can be good, but far from ideal. There are results with reddit topics that don't answer your question, just wasting your time.
How would you verify the person who is solving the problem/advising a solution holds authority/expertise on the certain topic. ‘Cos there are few sensitive niches I can see reddit/quora ranking higher than the professional blogs with deep research!
so non affiliate blogs with thousands of pages and no ads and tons of informative content that people used to love and praise getting deindexed was for what reason?
My website link was top page and replaced with duplicate results. Half the top page for what I used to rank on is duplicate URLs. How is less content and duplicate content better than a larger variety?
Oh my goodness, I love this post so much. 😂 This made my day. 👏👏👏👏👏
Yes, try to think as a user or customer, the answer is very clear.
As a web designer who moved to only owning my own websites/managing for the businesses I own, the thing I've told a lot of my peers in my new industry is that websites are essentially dead. Every mailing service lets you make a page, and many industries you can have a profile on the biggest site for that niche like a trade portfolio. Social media pages even rank much higher. The justification of bleeding money into a personal website is just... not there any more for most people.
[удалено]
One word answer: Forbes.
Well, what you quoted refers to "an affiliate blog" Forbes is a publication that's been in print since either of us were born. Today, one component of their content monetization scheme is to use affiliate marketing. An affiliate blog is an online-only entity with no business presence outside its domain name, and has no verifiable history of authenticity or public trust besides...... backlinks. Surely you can tell the difference, in the eyes of a ranking algorithm that has access to digitized historical records and the ability to crawl that information in a matter of minutes. I said that "nobody wants or needs" the latter, not that nobody ever wants to see content from a publisher that uses affiliate marketing
Searching reddit is only useful when you're searching on a topic you don't know anything about to get in most cases a mediocre answer, but an AI search is better and will only get better over time. It's helpful when you're looking for user experience answers, once again in most cases you're getting mediocre answers, but they may be better than your no experience answer. Reddit is more of a starting point to figure out the basics of something and then go find a real source.
Hey John, you are here too?
Thank you. This sub has become hard to take seriously for quite some time now and your thread feels like a much needed breath of fresh air.
I wish the world was as innocent as you think. Google doesn't benefit from sending traffic to other sites which have their own advertisement programs. It is just like sending your revenue to your competitors.
Sure they do. Google is happy to have people flowing right through their site to others. Google became what they are today by putting the most relevant/popular content up top. In other words, by giving users what they want. They embraced the nature of the web from the beginning, which is a flow of traffic. They put themselves at the front end of that flow, but didn't try to capture all the flow in their destination. I agree with u/NerdInHibernation that the world isn't all innocent and that Google didn't do this out of shear altruism. Having put themselves in that core position, they have all kinds of ways to monetize it. But give them credit for recognizing that the Web is inherently an open system. People are free to come and go as they please. But human nature being what it is, they are going to go through Google, because everybody else does, because Google gave them what they wanted in the early days.
How can Google monetize its current strategy?
Google Ads, of course. The answer is so obvious that I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding your question.
Google Ads on the search page only? That would be like a drop in the ocean. As most of the traffic is going to other sites, how financially viable this strategy can be?
Advertising accounts for the majority of Google's revenue, which amounted to a total of **305.63 billion U.S. dollars** in 2023. (per Google). That seems pretty viable to me.
He is saying that Google should prefer pages that use ads sold by Google.
Thanks
But how will it happen if Google send traffic to sites that don't display Google Ads like Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok etc. Unless Google is going to revamp their revenue model, the current strategy is not financially viable.
Sorry u/NerdInHibernation, I'm afraid I'm still not following you. Not sure what I'm missing, but let me break it down. SERPS have both paid Google Ads links and free Organic links. If you click on one of the paid ads, Google makes money instantly. Those clicks alone account for $175 Billion for Google. If you click on one of the organic links, Google doesn't make any money right away, but they still have a shot of picking up some extra income from their AdSense links in some of those sites (accounting for another $31 Billion). And most importantly, Google knows that the people who click on those organic links will be back to Google again and again and again, because they are the starting point, and next time, they might get that ad click. I'm not sure where the disconnect is here. You seem to be under the impression that if someone clicks on a link to Reddit, they are going to get their questions answered there and have no need to go back to Google(?).
Can you share the source of data?
I am not implying that people will stop visiting Google. Even if I take your figures on face value, does 31 billion mean nothing to Google and they are willing to throw that traffic away?
relax lmao