Comment by granzymes
9 months ago
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
It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.
To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
6 replies →
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