Comment by stevage

9 months ago

I think there will be tons of signals google could use to rank up a high quality independent site like this one. They just choose not to.

It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update did help rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.

First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?

And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications they recognize?

  • People clicking on known brands most of the time now is a behavior that was reinforced by google.

    I used to find good high quality results from domains other than the big brands through Google, now it is never the case. Now that smaller domains haven't been getting that search engine traffic, people wanting to make a sustainable business being a content creator have moved to other platforms for a long time now.

  • > First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?

    Probably the ones the author refer to would be a good start.

    >And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on?

    It's an interesting question, but the premise of your question is even more interesting: that serving shitty web results is somehow what a search engine is meant to be doing, because that's what users "want". I'm very skeptical of it.