In February 2024, we published an article warning readers not to trust product recommendations from well-known newspapers and magazines ranking at the top of Google search results.
I wasn’t expecting so many people to care (even though I secretly hoped they would), but we’re still getting emails and messages about it ten weeks later.
In these two months, I have talked to air purifier manufacturers, HouseFresh readers, other independent publishers, Dotdash Meredith employees, well-known activists, tech journalists, Redditors, SEO professionals, and even Google employees.
Today, I want to share some things I’ve learned and some things that happened after publishing that article.
I’ll take you through the tactics big media publishers use to outrank independent sites online. I’ll also cover what Google has done since we published our exposé and what they’ve announced they’re going to do. Lastly, I’ll share what happened to HouseFresh over the last two months. SPOILER: It’s not looking good for us.
That’s a lot, so I hope you’ll stay with me until the end (but no hard feelings if you don’t).
Dotdash Meredith allegedly developed an SEO content strategy called “swarming” to out-publish independent sites
Why indie publishers are being buried in search results by content published on multiple sites belonging to the same group
Within a few days of publishing the David VS Digital Goliaths exposé, I received an anonymous tip from a former Dotdash Meredith employee, who informed me of an SEO content strategy they implement called “keyword swarming.”
Through this strategy, Dotdash Meredith allegedly identifies small sites that have cemented themselves in Google results for a specific (and valuable) term or in a specific topic, with the goal of pushing them down the rankings by publishing vast amounts of content of their own.
“Swarming is about drowning out a competitor,” said the person who reached out. The objective is to “swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority.”
By the way, if “keyword swarming” is indeed a strategy, then it’s clear that it’s not just something you will find in the air purifier space. Dotdash Meredith could be doing this across many other products and topics, utilizing its wide range of publications.
That could explain why you will find multiple articles published on sites belonging to Dotdash Meredith ranking at the top of Google like this:
Is Dotdash Meredith to blame for choosing to “swarm” Google search results by leveraging their network of websites and their machine to create content at scale?
Personally, I think it’s not great for the internet, but I understand that if that the leadership at Dotdash Meredith is simply focusing on making money for IAC shareholders.
“IAC’s vision for Dotdash Meredith — to be a flywheel for generating advertising and commerce revenue — is finally starting to pan out.
[…] More than 80% of Dotdash Meredith’s traffic and digital revenue come from its core sites, such as Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and Southern Living, that deliver a form of what one might think of as commerce-related service journalism.”
— Allison Schiff, managing editor of AdExchanger
However, I don’t want to turn this into a personal crusade against Dotdash Meredith because it’s not.
The reality is that, whether they have a name for it or not, every other digital goliath is monetizing their websites by using the same tactics.
Let’s take Forbes.com as an example.
Connecting the dots between puppies, affiliate commissions, and Forbes
Why Forbes.com is flooding the web with affiliate-focused SEO content on topics far outside their area of expertise
Do puppies come to mind when you think of Forbes? If not, they should.
In the last few years, Forbes has pumped out thousands of articles about puppies, dogs, kittens, and cats. But why?
Well, if you pay attention to the URLs of the articles, you might notice that the majority of them sit inside forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/, which is the space where Forbes publishes their pet insurance affiliate content:
The Forbes Advisor team published all this content about cats and dogs because they needed to build Forbes.com’s authority in the space to compete with sites such as Dogster or Canine Journal.
The vast majority of pet-related content on Forbes.com pre-2020 wasn’t written from the point of pet expertise, and it wasn’t tied to highly searched keywords that would drive monetizable traffic:
To give the pet insurance affiliate section of Forbes the best chance to succeed, the Forbes Advisor team pumped out A LOT of content about pets and built A LOT of links around the topic with statistics round-ups designed to obfuscate the original sources in order to increase the chances of people linking to Forbes.com when using the stats:
All this hard work paid off in the form of an estimated 1.1 million visitors each month to the pet insurance section of Forbes Advisor:
This happened at the expense of every site that has produced content about dogs, cats, and other pets for many years before Forbes.com decided to cash in on pet insurance affiliate money.
They successfully replicated this model again and again and again across the huge variety of topics that Forbes covers today.
Trusted publications are being flipped by SEO-minded people with a taste for affiliate money
Step one: buy the site. Step two: fire staff. Step three: revamp the content strategy to drive new monetizable traffic from Google
Did you know that 19-year-old sports blog Deadspin is now a gambling affiliate site?
That’s right. Just a few weeks ago, Deadspin was sold to a newly formed ghost digital media company that immediately fired all Deadspin’s writers before announcing it would start referring traffic to gambling sites.
Stuff like this happens all the time, but most people don’t follow media news, so they’re completely unaware.
For example, if I mention Money, you might think of a magazine you could find at any newsstand since 1972. But what if I told you that the physical production of its magazines stopped in 2019?
The Money brand is now owned by Ad Practitioners LLC (recently rebranded as Money Group), a company that profits from affiliate links and has developed an ad network.
You probably had no idea about this because Money.com looks just like it always has, and its About page focuses on its long history while failing to disclose who is behind the site:
In an interview with Axios, one of the owners of Ad Practitioners LLC said that Money was hemorrhaging cash before the acquisition and explained how it’s now thriving:
“Powel, a former Google executive, saw an opportunity to rebuild Money’s editorial strategy around intent-based personal finance content that’s typically surfaced from search results instead of clickbait business stories about celebrities and their wealth.
Big digital media companies like DotDash Meredith and Red Ventures rely on a similar strategy.”
— Sara Fischer, senior media reporter at Axios
In true ‘phoenix rising from the ashes’ style, Ad Practitioners LLC leveraged the public’s trust in the Money brand, its high-authority domain, and long-standing history as a finance publication to sell air purifiers — without any actual testing, I might add:
But it’s not just air purifiers.
Wondering how to reprogram your garage door opener? Let Money.com explain. Looking for the best paint sprayers? Money.com can tell you.
The key here seems to be adding ‘for your money’ to the title to keep things loosely tied to the financial aspect of the website:
This is how the people behind Money.com are “building upon the legacy” of the brand.
I’m nearly done kicking the big guys, I promise.
Big media sites are laying off journalists while partnering with marketing agencies that use AI to write commerce content
Exploring the trend of publishers that have been caught lying about AI-written, search traffic-focused content in the last six months
Commerce content is quickly becoming the main monetization route for media publishers. In fact, a 2023 survey by Digiday showed that 81% of publishers consider commerce content a vital part of their revenue growth strategy, with 43% reportedly producing 16 to 26+ new pieces of commerce content each month.
And while media publishers ramp up their commerce content, they also seem to be ramping up the layoffs.
So, who is writing all these commercial pages?
“The financial incentives for the current trend are strong, and as media companies continue to cut newsroom staff, the lure of cheap AI content is hard to resist,” said longtime service journalist Joe Lindsey in his article Commerce content is breaking product reviews. He continued, “The latest permutation of commerce content is that publishers outsource some or all of it to a third-party provider, which is called a commerce content partnership, and that’s where AI is pushing in.”
He’s not wrong.
Reports claim that big media publishers such as Sports Illustrated and USA Today have published commercial content written by AI under fake author names. In both cases, the media giants blamed a third-party partner who provided content to the publications.
In a statement to The Post, Gannett said the articles on USA Today “were created through a deal with a marketing firm to generate paid search-engine traffic.” According to The Verge, the firm behind these AI product reviews is called ASR Group Holdings. When following the lead, journalist Mila Sato found that ASR Group also uses the name AdVon Commerce.
What a coincidence…
Today, an article was published alleging that Sports Illustrated published AI-generated articles. According to our initial investigation, this is not accurate.
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) November 27, 2023
The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon…
The owner of Sports Illustrated released a similar statement when Futurism uncovered their use of AI-generated content: “The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce […] AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.”
Yet, when searching through LinkedIn, I could find multiple AdVon employee profiles that clearly specify the use of AI as part of their job:
Where does this leave the role of journalists in these publications?
“As a journalist, all of this depresses me,” wrote Brian Merchant, the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. He continued, “If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.”
But all hope is not lost.
Google set a deadline for big media sites to stop spamming the web
How the “site reputation abuse’ spam policy could affect big media sites, and what they’re doing to prepare for Google’s deadline
Here’s a recap so far:
- Digital media conglomerates are developing SEO content strategies designed to out-publish high-ranking specialist independent publishers.
- Legacy media brands are building in-house SEO content teams that tie content creation to affiliate marketing revenue in topics that have nothing to do with their original areas of expertise.
- Newly created digital media companies are buying once successful and influential blogs with the goal of driving traffic to casino sites.
- Private equity firms are partnering with companies like AdVon to publish large amounts of AI-generated content edited by SEO-focused people across their portfolio of media brands.
And here’s the worst part:
Google’s algorithm encourages all of them to rinse and repeat the same strategies by allowing their websites to rank in top positions for SEO-fueled articles about any topic imaginable. Even in cases when the articles have been written by AI and published under fake authors.
But Google has set a deadline for big media sites to stop spamming the web: May 5.
In early March 2024, Google announced an update to its spam policies, which included a point about “site reputation abuse” aimed at sites publishing pages with the purpose of manipulating search rankings by taking advantage of the site’s ranking signals.
Unfortunately, Google’s documentation only deems “site abuse reputation” as spam when the site uses third parties to produce and/or publish pages to manipulate search rankings.
The fact that U.S. News & World Report is hiring an SEO-focused Commerce Editor to publish 70-80 content updates per month tells me that, hopefully, these big media sites will start cleaning up their acts and move away from contracts with the likes of AdVon.
But what happens when an in-house team carries out this type of “site reputation abuse”?
It also makes me wonder about the future of initiatives like Taboola Turnkey Commerce. In an article titled How Product Recommendations Broke Google, reporter John Herrman explained how Taboola’s proposal “claims to offer the benefits of starting a product-recommendation sub-brand minus the hassle of actually building an operation.”
This sounds like the exact same thing Google deems as spam.
Meanwhile, Forbes.com has reportedly blocked the coupons section of its site (forbes.com/coupons) using a noindex directive to prevent Google bots from indexing the page. Perhaps more media giants will follow suit in the coming days opting to deindex entire sections of their sites.
Will the rankings change once we reach the May 5th deadline? We’ll have to wait and see, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Google’s latest algorithm update led to a 91% loss of search traffic to HouseFresh
Broad pages with generic recommendations from big media sites have been pushed to the top, followed by Google Shopping product listings.
When Google announced its March 2024 core update, it said it was “a more complex update” than usual.
A couple of days after Google’s announcement, many websites were hit with manual actions that could be traced back to the presence of a significant amount of AI-generated content.
But none of them were big media sites.
Any hope we might have had of this update leveling the playing field for independent publishers like HouseFresh disappeared the moment we saw our traffic plummet on March 9th:
Now, this is the point where I clearly state that I know that Google doesn’t owe us anything. We don’t simply deserve to get search traffic because we exist or because we say we should.
That said, I disagree with those who are quick to shout, “Having a website is not a real business!” or those who reply with “Google doesn’t owe you traffic” when small independent sites complain about Google favoring big and/or spammy sites while gaslighting us into thinking that our content is not helpful enough for readers.
If we don’t stand up for our right to a free and open web, we’ll be stuck with platforms that only let us reach other people when we pay for it.
We lost rankings we held for months (and sometimes years) for articles that are constantly being updated and improved based on findings from our first-hand and in-depth testing, our long-term experience with the products, and feedback from our readers.
For example, let me share the current Google results for “best budget air purifiers,” a query we’ve ranked at #2 since May 2023.
Our article is now buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings. Sixty. Four.
There is also a clear proliferation of generic lists.
When you’re searching for affordable or budget-friendly products, are you looking for the best you can buy or just whatever’s available?
I’m asking because it seems Google expects everyone to find what they’re looking for in the same “best X of 2024” list, regardless of the specific query they’re searching for.
In this particular case, I am looking for the best budget air purifiers, but the generic articles by big media sites ranking at the top of search results are not aimed at those on a budget:
Many of these ‘best-of’ lists of recommendations feature products that cost over $1000 — that is hardly an affordable price tag for most people, let alone someone on a tight budget.
And it gets worse.
The screenshot above was edited to highlight only big media sites. Another unfortunate pattern appears when looking at the full list of Google search results: the further you scroll down the results page, the more product listings Google will serve you.
That’s right. Google is pushing products instead of helping searchers find what they are looking for.
Let me show you the extent to which Google search has become an online shop:
We regularly talk with people who feel confused by all the choices and jargon thrown at them when trying to buy an air purifier.
In the middle of this confusion and lack of clear information, Google relentlessly serves product listings full of jargon, brand logos, special offers, retailer URLs, 5-star ratings and SALE tags:
Google is drowning the very recommendations searchers are trying to find while surfacing generic best-of lists, 2016 Quora advice, and SO MANY products — many of which SUCK and don’t even meet the search criteria.
A big problem with Google's push for searchers to just shut up and buy is that they have no idea about what they are putting in front of people. pic.twitter.com/lSudpZkFPC
— housefresh.com (@ThisHouseFresh) April 26, 2024
We are seeing this happen across every term we used to rank for and have lost to Google’s latest core update, which they announced had finished rolling out one week after it did.
This is also evident when using Google SGE.
When searching for this same query, you get served with three product recommendations, two of which are “sourced” back to Google Shopping:
It all makes sense when you consider this was said during their latest earnings call: “We’re […] confident in the role SGE, including ads, will play in delighting users and expanding opportunities to meet user needs.”
So, it’s no longer just about Reddit and big media sites getting pushed to the top with sub-par content.
Google’s intention to encourage you to buy directly from search results (a.k.a. ‘meet your needs’) is evident, even in cases where you are just researching what’s out there.
The web seems to be getting claustrophobically smaller.
Personally, I’m done with banging my head against these terrible Google results.
That’s why I’ve gone back to how I used to use search engines in the early days of the web: mix and match. If I don’t find something on DuckDuckGo, I check Kagi, Bing, Google, and Brave. This is something I’m teaching my children, too.
I might not be able to end Google’s monopoly of search engines worldwide, but I can do it in my own home.
The future of HouseFresh
What we have done, what we will do, and what we were told we should do.
We’ve been wracking our brains for months to figure out what’s wrong with HouseFresh.
We received many messages from all sorts of people, and the vast majority of them were as clueless as we were about why Google keeps demoting our site.
Believe it or not, this includes people who work at Google.
Many SEO professionals have shared reasons why they believe HouseFresh has been punished, with theories that range from using the word “air” too often to writing titles that aren’t cool enough.
Some of the most echoed explanations include:
- We have affiliate links in many of our articles
This is how we sustain HouseFresh. We buy the products with our own money and spend weeks testing them, writing in-depth reviews, and shooting video content. If you buy a product after clicking on one of the affiliate links on our site, we receive a 3% commission at no extra charge to you. This allows us to continue providing quality content. We’re extremely clear about this and have disclaimers all over our website and YouTube channel.
I can’t imagine Google would demote our site because of this business model, seeing as it’s the same model that supports the very same big media sites Google keeps ranking at the top of the search results.
- We conduct keyword research as part of our content strategy
Something that Google spokespeople have said more than once is not to do things to “show Google” anything, such as writing content to manipulate search engine rankings. Many have argued that having a keyword strategy (writing content to answer queries that users search for) could be considered manipulation.
Many independent sites are deleting and “de-optimizing” articles, hoping that somehow that’ll fix Google’s issue with their sites. We have published many valuable articles based on questions people have about air purifiers and highly searched-for terms around the best units for specific use cases, but that shouldn’t instantly label our articles unhelpful. Plus, de-optimizing them will definitely affect traffic from other search engines, so we’re not going to do that.
If Google keeps rewarding useless overly-optimized SEO content written by AI published on big media sites while punishing little sites because they wrote articles trying to answer a question readers have, then fuck Google.
- We are not a brand
We understand that we need to prove ourselves as a trusted, reliable source of information. This is an ongoing focus, but becoming a recognizable brand takes time.
Unfortunately, people might not see us as a reliable brand if we’re constantly pushed down the search result rankings in favor of magazines with pedigree (even if their content strategy has pivoted to completely unrelated niches). But we’re trying and will keep trying for as long as we can afford to exist.
That said, the belief that only established brands can make it to the top of Google shows that we have normalized being surrounded by logos to the point where we’ve forgotten what the internet used to be like. We’ve forgotten that the web is supposed to be an open forum where anyone can produce great content. We’ve forgotten that Google was once the world’s best digital librarian, not the judge of a popularity contest.
- Google Search is broken
Every week, there seems to be a new article from a reporter trying to figure out what the heck happened to Google Search. Theories range from SEO breaking Google to AI changing the landscape, but everyone agrees that something is broken for the results to be this bad.
I’ve worked in the content marketing side of the SEO industry for most of my career, and there’s one story I’ve heard multiple times that might explain what’s happening. The problem started when the objectives of Google Ads started ruling the decisions of Google Search.
You see, Google’s founders believed that Google Search and Google Ads should be completely separate entities. However, in December 2019, the founders gave up control just before the separation of Search and Ads became a blur when the Head of Google Ads took over as the Head of Google Search in June 2020. Since then, search results have become flooded with ads and all kinds of functions designed to influence how we search for information. Years of this power dynamics and the introduction of machine learning could have led to the awful state of search results today.
If you want the full rundown, a recent newsletter from Ed Zitron explores this story in detail: The Man Who Killed Google Search.
Whatever the reason, Google’s algorithm believes our website isn’t good enough and that visitors will have a bad experience if they land on it.
As a result, since October 2023, we’ve gone from welcoming 4,000 people from Google Search each day to just receiving 200. And of those 200, most are adding “HouseFresh” to their searches to find us specifically.
This drop in Google search traffic has affected our income, our capacity to sustain our team, and our plans for the future.
But we’re not going down without a fight.
We’re doubling down on our mission to uncover scam products. Our target will be every shiny air purifier that big media sites are pushing.
Not a week will go by without us having something to say about some crap product big media sites are recommending or without us revealing some lie they’re feeding to their readers.
And if Google doesn’t want to rank our reviews, we’ll use their own broken results against them to get our takedowns in front of people before they waste their money on an overpriced, overhyped product:
The only thing we can do to get a seat at Google’s table is to use their obsession with freshness and their reliance on popular platforms to create a ripple effect around our content.
We will be relentless on YouTube, Reddit, X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, our newsletter, and every other platform where it makes sense for us to be.
We will keep Google busy crawling our name and our content again and again and again and again and again. And again.
Because even if Google decided to virtually erase HouseFresh from its search results, we still exist on the open web.
Bravo! As a similarly smacked-down small publisher, I am inspired by your outrage and willingness to raise the alarm. Google has removed my site from its listings entirely after the March update. My Pinterest pins, youtube content and reddit threads are all worthy of high ranking positions, but my blog is not. nnConsumers and lawmakers must take notice and finally try to bring these big corporations to heel. I hope its not too late!
Fuck yes! More of this energy please, but from all privately owned sites. Fuck Google!!!!!!!
Thank you! I gave up and got a job because I was in serious financial trouble. Did the thing Google always ask, buy the products and give a fair judgement. I was the only one in my niche doing so, down about 97%. Did rework most of my content only to get hit harder. Then I decided to move some of the content to a related domain which was still tiny. It’s actually growing and didn’t get hit (yet). Only thing I did was change the titles to make it look less SEO’d. It’s now outranking my original articles, like what? I’m sure it will get slammed eventually, Google lost the plot and I stopped using their search. nn
Thank you for speaking up, guys!
Very well done. As an independent tech news operator, I 2 also have felt the pain over the years of Google ‘s misuse of its algorithm, costing independent sites, valuable positioning and money to compete with big media and their teams seos. Leaving us to try and compete against these goliaths with our shoestring budgets. Small independent websites are the ones who are going to make the dish difference in this fightn. In America it is corporate grade that we hear about all the time. They don’t realize the companies and the backbone of America is small business. When will not be defeated? We will fight for our employees. Our livelihood and the right to be heard. Not pushed around or pushed out by those with more money. It is companies like house fresh on several others, including myself that we bring attention to the misuse of the internet. Actually buy these large media companies. Google has too much power and its search engine has too much power. When an update or an algorithm change can put you out of business on purpose or accidentally that is a dangerous tool. This is the Google net, not the internet. You have to play by their rules or you are not in the game. Chances are you’re probably not even in the game because they cater to corporations and big media. Running a small business online is difficult enough without having to worry about Google messing with your business. It is very frustrating and very difficult to understand that Google makes so many changes to their algorithms that the seos are even having a hard time understanding the changes that are being made and why they’re being made. There are many great seos out there who actually do understand like Lily Ray, one of the best in the world, and even to her world. The Google results are sometimes just baffling as to why Google is allowing such spam and broken results. It is very obvious for a person like her and her team. Why is Google allowing this to continue? Sometimes I feel like their search algorithms are so big that at some point something broke and they’re just trying to fix what they’ve broken. It’s almost like they don’t even have control over their own product anymore. They just keep putting fixes after fixes that don’t always fix everything. You know how you back up your computer and you can go to an earlier State before you installed all that fancy software or that software you shouldn’t have installed. They call it a restore point on Windows. You would hope that Google has some type of restore point for their search engine updates. They need to cope back about several years and do a restored. Then use the updates that they know work and apply them. Consumers are getting bad search results, websites who should be listed are getting pushed out. People are no longer trusting Google. This all sounds like a recipe for disaster just brewing. The thing is with a big company like Google is it takes a lot of media attention to bring this to the forefront for change to come about. However, once that ball starts rolling it gets big and it gets big fast and things start to change real quick. It’s either going to get super positive or it’s going to get super negative. Google needs to decide now which side on the news, does it want to be on. The one who fixed the broken search results or the company that lost their public share to another company because they could not fix their search results. Google is a company that you think is too big to fail but so was Microsoft one day and they are definitely a shell of what they used to be. Still a very large company but ask them what it was like. Post antitrust lawsuits. Google is fighting against a lot of antitrust lawsuits and we wonder why those are taking place well. You don’t have to look far than this article to know why they are facing antitrust lawsuits. I think something on a large scale needs to be done and there needs to be an organization that holds search companies responsible for the results. Whenever you wield enough power that you can put a man on the street and bankrupt him and affect his family and children and shudder his business with a simple computer code update. You will too much power. Just to sensationalize this a bit, what is the difference between a hacker that hacks your website and Google who hacks your search engine listings? The difference is one is a corporation and the other is a criminal but both of them do it for money and one of them does it legally.
This entire article (particularly the part about ranking #1 for a term for *years*, then all of a sudden ranking in the mid-60s after HCU) echoes my experience running my own site for the past 20 years. The lack of communication from Google over the loss of rankings – coupled with the overall public attitude of “everything is operating fine!!!” – has been downright infuriating. I understand a loss of rankings if we’d actually done something wrong or bad, but this has come completely out of left field. nnI have huge, originally researched articles that were all personally written by myself without any AI. They get updated with new, fresh info on a monthly basis. I never used any guest posting, link buying / selling, or other grey/blackhat SEO tactics. The topics are insanely popular with readers and have always performed well. Now, after HCU, every since one of my articles is ranked 50+ and has been replaced at the top of the results with either Reddit links that copy & pasted my work or newer, smaller sites that have also copy & pasted my work.nnPlease, somebody make it make sense!
Google search has gotten so bad that I started using Bing instead ( or DuckDuckGo)! I never thought I would say that. When I search on Google almost the entire first page of results are for paid placements or “other searches you may be interested in”. Here is a thought, why dont you focus on FULFILLING THE SEARCH I JUST SUBMITTED vs suggesting other searches I may want to try! The inset sections of products Google was hawking was simply infuriating. After not finding any relevant articles for the topic I was searching for in the first few pages of results I GAVE UP and used a different search engine (where I found an article in the top 10 results btw). I have no idea what happened to them but they got GREEDY and this article explains some of what is going on. Google search USED to by the de-facto best search engine bar none. It is sad what they let it become…. because now I do not use it much at all.
This is akin to trying to fix a V8 engine without knowing how it works while simultaneously blaming the company that built it. No doubt it’s their fault, that you do not understand how it works or how to fix it, and instead of learning how it works, why not just complain about the company, because honestly, that’s easier. And while you’re at it, complain heavily about dotDash, a company that clearly invested in and learned how the V8 works and how to tune it for optimal power and efficiency, and as you see it, this isn’t even allowed because it’s not fair to you, yet you didn’t even bother. Annd while it’s easy to target dotDash, I see zero references to the solopreneurs that did the same and are absolutely crushing it today, none of which are large sites by any standards (50k pageviews, 200k pageviews, low DR, yet humming along).nnIt’s clear as day you were riding high on past success and expected this success to continue, without relearning or adapting, a critical requirement of owning and operating a business. Of course, as a result, you ate shit when it collapsed, had to fire everyone, and filed for bankruptcy, which I might add is actually more common than most like to admit. And no doubt you’re not alone; many made similar assumptions and equally sealed their fate.nnWhile I have no doubt that Housefresh is a complete write-off as a result, there are plenty of independent sites that’ll fill the void, and realistically, no one will ever truly miss Housefresh’s affiliate-focused content. At first glance, I see rtings.com currently has Air Purifiers in development, and the cycle of entitlement ends when another independent reviewer takes the time to learn how it works and takes your place.nnAnd yes, real businesses are not fixated on Google, they’re fixated on their audience. And you’re correct, this means you’re everywhere, and while it’s likely too late, perhaps you’ve learned enough to crawl out of this hole you’ve dug.
Thank you, Your responses are being noted, both positively and ,clearly from the reply above, by the larger players who have been “busted” gaming the system and sling mud downwards to shift blame. nnGoogle wrecked my hobby site, it rewarded my main site, but what it did completely was to fully make me aware that Google is not the internet and that now, despite being the most popular is not the basket all my eggs should be in. nnWhen my group of non website friends start complaining about how bad the results are ( unprompted by me) then the problem is not my sites ( or at least solely) and as i watch them try to figure out how to use Bing again it shows me google may well end up going the way of AOL and Yahoo. nnIn fact isn’t the guy in charge of google search / ads the same one who was in charge of Yahoo search , if so we need Dot Dash or Forbes to hire him and bring them the same success he did with Yahoo.
Thank you for a great article, more in-depth than most SEO professionals would ever get. It’s obvious that it’s not the lack of SEO knowledge that is your problem. The only thing I could suggest, and which worked for me in the past, and that I would use as last resort, is to change domain names. Google lies a lot about domain authority, penalties, age, and so forth. Many times I’ve had a domain in the dumps, and transferred the content to a new one to see it rank again. 100% identical content. And no 301 of course. I would only change the links and point them to the new domain if possible. Maybe try a variation of your current name and see. I understand this is hardly a “solution”, but I understand that in some cases when your domain is dead in the water, nothing will ever get it out of the purgatory.
I share your frustration.nMy website with audio reviews also tanked down. Now in the top 10 are mostly Reddit, quora and audio niche forums. I used to have featured snippets and many keywords in the top 10. Now I am nowhere to be found since my featured snippets dropped below 20th place and keywords that used to be in the top 10 are now below 30th or 40th place.nI will also write a similar text on my website and link to it from every single page.nEdit: My article is here:nhttps://cracklingsound.com/crackling-sound-disappeared-from-google-search/
So, Maria here believes that millionaires partnering up, using all their resources and abusing their historical brand reputation to manipulate search engine results with crap content and driving smaller, independent brands out of business is a fair thing to do. Not only that, she thinks that’s what anyone would do, and that there’s nothing wrong with it.nnDon’t get me wrong, it is smart from their part, but that doesn’t make it ok. In any case, Google should level out the playing field, not condone these kind of practices.nnA good search engione should provide the best information available as quickly as possible, and not some depersonalized AI crap that just abuses the SEO to rank higher. You fail to see the damage this does, because you only think about it from the business point of view.nnBy the way, you sound like the kind of person that defends billionaires. Get a life.
Bravo! Best article I’ve seen yet about the crappy state of Google search. I will be watching for your takedowns and sharing them!! Forget you Google! As my teens would say – YOU’RE DONE, YOU’RE DONE.
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I love you (platonically). I’m the editor-in-chief of protoolreviews.com and I have experienced every one of these issues and frustrations to some extent. Our niche is power tools, but it’s the same story with big media taking over most of the keywords we owned for years (and without the hard work of hands-on testing and actual reviews). nnThanks for all the research. We wish you well and perhaps Google will see the light sooner than later! People are definitely frustrated, and the once-staple search engine is quickly becoming as near to useless as I can imagine. Something has to change.
Wow, being outranked by your pins. Brutal. I’m so sorry this is happening to you too. Thank you for reading and commenting! Every time one of us shares our story, more consumers and lawmakers will take notice.
Hahahaha, I was worried when I wrote it that it was a bit too much!
Thank you for reading and for sharing your experience, Ruben; I’m sorry this happened to you, too. A few people recommended starting over with a new domain, but it feels like such a step to take… How will we ever build a brand if we have to keep moving domains every few years?
Thank you for reading, Rasmus!
This is gold: “This is the Googlenet, not the internet.”
I’m really sorry this is happening to you as well, Ryan, and I can completely empathize with your words. A lot of people have suggested we copy and paste our content into a new site so it can rank again. I guess maybe we should do it before everyone else does it. nnI read something today that resonated: nn“Nothing bothered me more than seeing those who had plagiarized my content outranking me with my own words. […] A website on the wrong side of Google’s algorithm is like a car that is left abandoned in a bad neighborhood.”nnFrom https://www.johnwdefeo.com/my-work/good-cheap-and-fast
So, one thing that keeps getting completely missed in this conversation is that no one talks about the power of backlinks from authoritative sites. It is, overwhelmingly, the main factor in why & how a website gets to the top of the search results. That, plus how much you pay Google or if you’ve displeased Google somehow, determines how websites rank. nnOK, so why is this important? Because companies like Dotdash, Bustle, Hearst, etc. have created their own backlink networks and aggressively pump out content that will #1, always rank high because of the backlink profiles of the websites they come from and #2 create a synergetic system that continually strengthens and amplifies their own networks. That is the heart of what this post is about. I’d like to add: these backlink networks are usually made up not only of the front-facing brands like RealSimple.com but also defunct domains with high domain authority & quality backlink profiles that are essentially gutted and zombified to strengthen the backlink network. Check out unclutterer.com for an example. Check its history on the way back machine. 10+ years ago, it was a site focused on home organization. Today, it’s a zombie that was recently put up for sale. nnBig companies have created media mafia networks and Google is complicit. nnOf course sites like Housefresh can’t compete. They’ve being outspent and pushed out of the rankings by multi million dollar companies that understand how Google works and have gamed the system accordingly. Google could absolutely penalize these sites and deprioritize them in search results. Instead, Google plays along. The media mafia has flooded the internet with useless, affiliate garbage and Google doesn’t bat an eye; no sir, Google is in on the game too! It either creates its own or sells space for even more nonsense. Thanks, Prabhakar Raghavan! nnThe kicker is, they’re trying to sell us on AI being the tool that will help us wade through the muck but what it will really be doing is to more skillfully gather your data while guiding you to the sites that have already paid the most for your attention. Making you think you’re getting a bespoke list of high quality results when in reality, you’re sold out to the highest bidder. nnBecause what Google and cringey dorks like Sam Altman don’t want us to know (but what the media mafia networks already know and have exploited for maximum profit) is that neither Google search or AI can tell you if something is GOOD or not. nnGoogle can tell you if something is popular, but it can’t tell you if it’s high quality or not. nnAI can guess at what you consider good but it doesn’t actually “know” anything and it frequently makes stuff up. AI is like the personality hire at your office- looks good, speaks well, dumb as a brick but makes the higher ups happy. nnAll of this is to say, we need net neutrality and a functioning DOJ & FCC – and fortunately for us, we seem to have both, at least for a minute, in the US. We need robust privacy laws to keep these affiliate marketing vultures out of our inbox and off our devices and to prevent them from selling our data to other vultures. We need search engines that actually return relevant information instead of crowding our screens with ads. That’s for starters. We need so much more but this would be a good start. nnGive ’em hell, Housefresh. I will be too. n
I believe it really isn’t up to us; it’s business, and nothing about business is fair; life itself is not fair. I also believe it’s not about what happens to you, but how you react.nnI’m sorry that you, and anyone like you, did not adjust along the way. As a boomer, I’ve lived through more than most, certainly enough, that reading this post and your reply has me more worried about humanity than anything.nnYou write in expectations as if millionaires are not manipulating our elections, as if you’re entitled to a level playing field. Worse yet, I’m nauseated by the fact that you expect this yet invest no effort into learning how it works and complain about those who did, including the small and no doubt independent sites I routinely find in search, which I might add are very personal.nnI see the damage; I was a teacher. I’m not wealthy or even rich, but I did my part to help future generations. I believe that you’re deluded into thinking you’re special and that you think you deserve this.nnAs for life, I’ve done my part already.
Thanks! This article is pure gold, and it calmed my mental seo-indie-blogger breakdown. I will implement your strategies and expand my presence…. with freshness!
Thank you for reading and commenting, AC. This comment should be an article! This part stuck with me: “They’re trying to sell us on AI being the tool that will help us wade through the muck […] while guiding you to the sites that have already paid the most for your attention.”
Thank you for reading and commenting, Melania! I wish we had ‘expanded our presence’ sooner instead of putting most of our focus on creating ‘helpful content.’ We are also disavowing spammy backlinks that we’ve been ignoring because we followed Google’s advice: https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1786782512032731300 I will report back with what happened!
Extraordinarily insightful, thank you!
I found you thanks to Corey Doctorow’s recent article (which reveals Google Search to be just one of a seemingly endless series of corners of the web’s enshitification). I attempted to research air filters/purifiers a year or so ago, but gave up because the ‘reviews’ were BS, and as your recent articles point out, from websites which ostensibly had nothing at all to do with genuine product testing until recent times, so I smelled that rat. A year on and it seems it’s even worse. Now I’m actually paying for access to a decent search-engine, Kagi, something I thought impossible to justify only a year or two ago! Thank you for HouseFresh. I’ve only had a quick look so far, but if you don’t have affiliate links to European or UK retailers of your reviewed products, I’d highly recommend it, because ordering from US retailers attracts not only added VAT, but often import duties too, and exorbitant shipping costs.
Hahaha, thank you for that! Also, we love Pro Tool Reviews! Power tools are a thing in my home so we’ve read many of your reviews and they are amazing. I can’t believe you’re also affected by this I’m sorry to hear that and hope it will be fixed soon.
Thank you for this post, Gisele! I love the energy in the last section. 😀 One of my blogs got decimated and now receives about 1 visit per day on a good day. My other blog lost about 80% of traffic (< 50 visits/day). Everything is written by me, no AI, 98% of the photos used are my own. I have some affiliate links, but not a lot. Most affiliate links are to products I use, or know a friend or family member that does. The blog has ads, but they are by Google, so if that's an issue, that's pretty idiotic. To be fair, I haven't "built backlinks", it just seems so icky and so like trying to game the system. I think when Google says backlinks are only one of the ranking factors, it's a complete BS.nnI use DuckDuckGo now as a search engine, and I'm trying to de-Googlefy my life slowly (not easy!). Anyway, you inspired me to just push on. I'm also thinking on updating my readers on the state of Google search, but it'd be rather off-topic on my blog. But if I can make at least one person switch from Google search, then I'd be happy. It won't make a dent, but if the person tells other people, it may create a small wave to get them unsettled.
Try a variation of HouseFresh. Google’s smart, but it’s not vengeful.
I’ve been saying the same thing! How about you just retrieve what I asked for? I think Google has put way too much focus and time into trying to read our minds, hoping to figure out the intent behind our searches. nnI have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on my computer and phone. If I don’t find something on DDG, I go to Kagi. If I can’t find it on Kagi, I check out Brave. Personally, I find Bing too cluttered so I stay away from it.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Roy, I’m sorry to hear your hobby site was also affected. I’ve received many, many emails from people who read this or the previous article and felt they could finally understand why their Google searches were returning such bad results.
Thank you for sharing your advice, JP. We have discussed testing this, as many small site owners have reported getting their rankings back just by duplicating their site with a new domain name.
Hahaha, you made me laugh out loud with that last bit of your comment. Thank you for reading and for following us!!
Thanks for the tip!
I’m so sorry to hear that, Bruno, and thank you for sharing your article. It’s good to see that other search engines continue to recognize your expertise and the quality of your content.
Thank you for your kind words, Robert!
Thank you for reading and for commenting, Anthony! I’ve been using Kagi for a month or so now, and it’s been great! I’m considering paying for the Family Plan so I can set it up on my oldest kid’s iPad instead of DuckDuckGo, as I like the parental controls. Thank you for your feedback re: European/UK retailers; I’ve passed this along.
Thank you for reading and sharing your experience! I’m sorry to hear one of your blogs has been hit as well. I was just like you before publishing the first article of this series (David VS Digital Goliaths), but we received so much support from our readers that I’d say it was definitely worth it, even if it is off-topic. You’d be surprised to see how many people will reach out to say, ‘I knew something was off, and now I understand what’s going on.”
I love this! I run a voucher code website, that was doing well until the big media publishers decided to use third party content/voucher suppliers and boom instantly demoted 10-15 places. Then the relentless Google algorithm updates make my sites roll up and down like roller coaster. Then on top of this the affiliate networks hold all the aces when it comes to PPC rights so we are unable to buy the traffic. So we have no where to go. I firmly believe that Google allows us to build a business, gain traffic and revenue and then demote you to force you to go down the ppc route. But for me that’s impossible as the affiliate network gives them to yep you guessed it the big media companies and they completely corner the market. I just cannot win.
I just updated my site explaining what’s happening. Linked to both your articles! 🙂 To be fair, now I don’t have any readers, but I will try to share on socials.
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Hi JP, did you kept your old sit up and running? Or did you killed it before you made duplicate to the new domain?
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Great Content. I am Also Facing the Same issue After Sep 2023 Update my Slow Downfall Started and cherry on Cake in March Update 2024 all Went down just like you. Dropped 90% in Just 2 days. So do our Earnings. Thankfully found another Steam of Income before the Update and doubled down on that.nnwhat platform are you currently Focusing on?nnAlso Want to ask as Reddit is Rising more. what if we do keyword Targeting on Reddit and share our Content Intro with links to our Sites and Posting on our self-subs ONLY?
I never thought I’d say this but I’m going to Bing … MSFT for the win?