Comment by tgv

Those people did everything according to Google's guidelines then Google changed everything and screwed them over. That's what has been happening all the way since 2010 when they issued their first update and penalized all the small sites for following their guidelines. They are screwing everyone for their shareholders' sake.

> gambled with their livelihood

Google owns ~90% of search. Its basically a public utility at this point. On which every small business owner has to rely. There is no saying "Go use a competitor" when using a competitor means you will lose access to ~90% of world search traffic. Imagine your salary being cut down to 10% of what it was last month - that's what using an 'alternative' to google for your business means.

These tech giants have been holding literal unregulated power over the livelihoods of people for decades now. And as we have recently come to see in many examples, they use that power to screw over everyone for shareholders.

The situation we have today is a situation that is as crazy as privatizing the entire road network and allowing an unregulated company to do whatever with the traffic that runs on it.

Google now uses an ML classifier to assert the “helpfulness” of content. Your entire website gets penalized if the algorithm thinks your site is “not good enough”.

And so far, for the last 8 months, not a single person has had their site reinstated after this penalty.

That is the very definition of being robbed.

I have the same opinion but Google does downrank actual personal site/blogs even if it's useful or good and serves you garbage.