Comment by codexon
9 months ago
Google has been killing all but the most widely known domains for a very long time. I've mentioned this repeatedly on ycombinator multiple times, but only people who have made their own website 15 years ago and tried to grow it know what I mean.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675
My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem).
Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product in 2021, and the article says big media companies (presumably with lower quality review content) suffered as a result.
But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.
So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.
If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!
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Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".
Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.
I still believe the original title is warranted.
The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
does it?
I would happily believe that Google is corrupt in this manner, but the reason big domains have the advantage here is because they can afford to pay teams of people with the express purpose of gaming the system. this is true in all industries, everywhere, and it can only be fixed with society-wide change, which, short of a world war (or, more likely, two), isn't going to happen
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What is the loop hole?
That Google cracked down on "product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product",
but not on top 10 lists (that mentions some in-fact-fake testing).
So therefore the big companies publish loads of trashy top 10 lists
Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.
On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
>Google search has become worthless for me.
Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
> So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit. flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles. Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.
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This is honestly a terrible example even if it is completely valid. You can't even get Google to find the most basic possible content about, say, oranges, without it being some SEO ad-infested fandom.com page about fruit, let alone product specifications.
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FWIW I just tried "thickness of the Pixel 8 including the camera visor", and got a snippet from Google:
> The actual dimensions of the Google Pixel 8 are apparently 150.5 x 70.8 x 8.9mm, with the thickness rising to 12mm at the camera bar.
And nothing on Bing.
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> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with no free tier.
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
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> At $5/month for 300 searches
Wow, that's a lower search count than I would have thought. I am pretty sure I'd blow through that in a day or two...
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Same, I finally gave up and tried it after Google just stopped being remotely useful, and DDG is just a reskinned bing. A week on Kagi and I signed up for an annual plan, and never looked back.
Oddly as a Kagi user, it does have a fault.
It actually sucks at finding the low cost product.
Want the cheapest esp32 c3... google is a better place to start. I can quickly find the "price to beat" and go deeper elsewhere.
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Something as basic as: "2,5 cm to mm" won't show up the unit conversion widget if it's not formatted as "2.5 cm to mm", at least for me. WolframAlpha also fails at this query. However, ChatGPT understands it and gives the right answer.
> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
I second this. The quality of google search has reached a point that's only good to search things that can't be bought.
... and uncontroversial.
Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results, but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.
In general, I find the same is true for all mainstream search engines, including DDG and Bing. You can't even search for things to buy anymore, ironically; it'll just dump you into Amazon or some "top 10" shitpost on CNN fake news or Forbes, much like the trash pit of websites shown in the header image of this article. Like others, I also find myself searching on Reddit or HN directly. What the point of a search engine is at that point, I don't know.
It's infuriating that any qualifier you use is ignored. "Lightest laptop" will just return random lists of 10 laptops. No mention of weight.
Even when the results are not sponsored, they're all generic answers from generic domains. I'm traveling at the moment and it's impossible to find anything written by someone in a 1000 km of the city I'm visiting.
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
I use Bing, too. People are suprised when I recommend it, but for most general searches, it's quite a bit better.
I use an LLM for 80% of my queries now. Fighting Google isn't worthwhile, unless I need a trusted source.
How do you know when your LLM is bullshitting you
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What do you use?
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Same. Done with Google search. In addition to the results having become useless, it's Google's frenetic sprint away from the "don't be evil" ethos, which turns out to have only been in Incognito mode all along.
I subscribe to Kagi, and it’s great.
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I am a small business owner who started their site and SEO and within three months I was beating multi-million dollar competition on the most important keyword google search terms for our market and industry. I did this with no budget, no adspend, just basic SEO and good keyword research. It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.
Same. Numerous 1st page top results, and even snippets. Honestly no idea how... I do know SEO basics, but didn't know I knew them well enough for this. Within a year I had the first result for a very, very popular search term. Granted it was a lot of hard work (18 hour days, sometimes).
You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing what??
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The only thing I did was everything google recommended I do, literally. Run PageSpeed, do everything suggested. Log in to search console, do everything recommended. Super hard. And the keywords I dominate are for such things like, jewelry repair, jewelry repair near me, jewelry repair Seattle. Not niche. The reason I am beating such big spending rivals is because they usually have sites that break a lot of SEO rules funny enough. They try so hard and pay so much to "SEO Experts" but their site is templated spaghetti and no one can fix it, seemingly.
Same here. I'm right up there competing with billion dollar companies with decades of presence and I don't know how many backlinks. While my small business has no backlinks from others and only relies on content for ranking, being entirely dependent on Google to be honest.
I would guess you're working in a niche that has not been targeted by the big media sites alluded to here? Being halfway decent at SEO will come to nothing when you have 20 or so competing sites that can rank overnight for anything.
What's the site and what keywords are you targeting?
Parent poster is, I hope, wise enough to not answer.
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> It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.
If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business
Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>
Knowledge of my SEO prowess comes only recently. I have hung my shingle as a proven SEO expert so we will see. If anyone wants to hire me please let me know. I come with proven metrics.
The same issues you have with google search engine optimization are present in every other closed platform too. Welcome to the attention economy, you better learn how to go viral.