Comment by sharkweek
9 months ago
I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts).
But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms).
I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.
The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
> But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty
FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
To be clear, I have never nor will I ever likely work at Google or any of its competitors. I have spent an ungodly amount of time building (and breaking) affiliate sites / information sites / et al as side projects.
Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with.
Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.
Google has always preferred top domains for a very long time, allowing them to abuse the rankings for years.
One relevant example I can remember, OVH is the top result for servers in Japan yet they don't have any in Japan.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan
https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.googl...
This has been going on for many years now. And they never get punished unless there's a huge uproar about it on ycombinator like with expertsexchange.
Certainty can also come from experience of previous actions when such exploits become commonplace.