DailyMail: fifty percent drop in traffic after Google update
seroundtable.com
seroundtable.com
Having a look at what their organic search movements are, most of them are just for celebrity names. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png
It seems in this update, and Google is putting a lot less emphasis on the word count. Instead, they are putting more emphasis on having the exact keyword in the title tag and coming from a domain with a lot of authority.
Google could have also struck DailyMail with a Manual Action (aka a penalty for breaking their TOS) which would vastly affect their organic traffic. Manual action is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
The article is very sloppy about this, with a clickbait framing, but the actual claim is "we saw a massive drop in Search traffic from Google (lost 50% of daily traffic)", which I'm almost certain means 50% of Google search traffic.
If you were to use something like Similarweb, it will give you a estimate of overall traffic from all platforms: https://www.similarweb.com/website/dailymail.co.uk
Numerous sites are impacted when Google's algorithms change. The Daily Mail is not popular because of Google, it's popular because it's a low-brow tabloid and there are many people who love low-brow tabloids.
Without some more context, like which other sites this hit and what's changed (ranking drop? fewer search matches?), this is basically a non-story.
If we take a quick look over at DailyMail.co.uk, one can quickly identify where the problem might be located.
Give me an example that proves otherwise instead of downvoting?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
> The editors described the arguments for a ban as “centred on the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”.
I'm surprised it took Google 2 years to get around to the same viewpoint.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, surely if there's anyone who knows which sources are worth using, it would be the editors of the world's biggest encyclopedia?
As you say, it is a primary source here. The question isn't what's on the Daily Mail's anyone-can-edit Wikipedia page, it's what a closed group of encyclopedia overseers have decided constitutes an acceptable source. What's more, the closest competitor, Britannica, relies on finding expert contributors instead of listing specific reputable sources, so its editors wouldn't be nearly as relevant here!
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia is a point here, it's a crowdsourced publication that purports to be a neutral source, despite well documented conflicts among the editors.
Even a cursory glance at how wikipedia is actually structured vs how early 2000s news media and schools portrayed it will lead you to the conclusion that it's a significantly better primary source than any other encyclopedia currently available.
The sort of stuff in wikipedia that traditionally might be slightly biased (current events, very new political stuff) doesn't even appear in other encyclopedias until a decade later, so that has to be worth something as well.
The number of eyes actively vetting and checking and re-checking every change on a moderately trafficked wikipedia page probably dwarfs the total number of editorial staff for even the largest of encyclopedias. The average accuracy is just going to be higher in a situation like that, even with people occasionally defacing pages.
You have got to be kidding me, how can you say that with a straight face? https://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9345487/wikipedia-lamest-edit-...
I think a fair assessment wouldn't pin 100% of the cause to Google's ideological bias. However, a fair assessment of the situation would also acknowledge the existence of Google's ideological bias.
"The production process was simple. During a day shift—8 a.m. to about 6 p.m—four news editors stationed together near Clarke's desk assigned stories to reporters from a continually updated list of other publications' articles, to which I did not have access. Throughout the day, they would monitor the website's traffic to determine what was getting clicked on and what to remove from the homepage."
from: My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online @ http://tktk.gawker.com/my-year-ripping-off-the-web-with-the-...
https://www.ithenticate.com/plagiarism-detection-blog/daily-...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/09/news-corp-accu...
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - "The publication had failed to handle publication sensitively"
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - "Publishing photographs of the complainants taken in such circumstances represented an intrusion; the publication had not sought to justify the publication of the images in the public interest."
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - accuracy ("This gave rise to a misleading impression of the effects of GDPR legislation")
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - accuracy ("This article was a report of an inquest, in which the deceased had been inaccurately identified. This was a fundamental and damaging error on a basic point of fact. [...T]he correct position was readily available, [so] there had been a failure on the part of the agency providing the story to take care over its accuracy.")
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - accuracy ("The repetition of these serious allegations against the man, with no indication they had been disproven, seriously misrepresented the judgment")
amongst others.
The elephant in the newsroom, is that declining subscribers and outdated business models are pulling down the whole of legacy media towards the level of unpleasant sensationalist tabloid and further. The lack of fact checking we saw in the wake of the Covington Kids debacle stands in stark contrast to the level of journalistic integrity Dan Rather was held to on his fall from grace.
Legacy media can't compete with the Internet, and its quality is declining as it's circling the drain.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-goo...
As a monopolist, they need to meet much higher standards of accountability, transparency, and fairness.
Would we tolerate it if the electric monopoly cut off power to the Daily Mail? Or the water monopoly?
When you're not a monopoly, you don't have to care about any of these things. You're in it to win it.
As a society, we cannot have a monopoly willy nilly censoring sites with no accountability or means of redress. It is an intolerable situation. A monopoly must be demonstrably fair to everyone.
I think most of us would encourage it. The paper and it's online counterpart are a detriment to society...
But I get your broader point.
Google has to order its results somehow. How do you propose they order them?
Should that be Google's duty? If so, what is Google's responsibility with regard to transparency and accountability?
daily mail isn't gaming the system, people know it is a tabloid. the real issue is that many supposed respectable news agencies have been shown to have more than their fair share of misinformation.
I suspect most people searching using Google’s news features want news, not tabloids.
Slurping a bunch of searches for news into your tabloid site sounds like an obvious case of “gaming the system”.
I didn’t know it was a tabloid until just now, because I’ve never heard of them. I’d have been upset with the news aggregators I use if they accidentally bubbled unreliable sources to the top of my feed.
I really don’t understand the controversy.
Why shouldn't they? If I search for information about the Earth, I don't want to see a bunch of flat Earth crap. If I search for information on vaccines, I don't want to have to sift through anti-vax results, no matter how popular they are.
People use Google because they think the results are good. Google's bet is that one reason people for this is that they surface true information. Therefore, they penalize information they assess likely to be false. If users disagree with Google's assessment — i.e. it buries valuable information or surfaces worthless information — they'll use another search engine.
As a flat earther (I'm not a flat earther), the emphasis I wuold be looking for would be on returning results proving the earth is flat when I search for information about the Earth.
I'm not sure Google can win this one.
I am in a different camp. I want something useful to come up. Once upon a time popularity (in the pagerank sense) and usefulness were better correlated. Today the signal-to-noise ratio is worse and those trying to game the system are more sophisticated.
And furthermore the perspective that is crowned the true one, is based on whatever is politically convenient for Google.
If people loudly and angrily demand that Google show a lie as truth, then you will now be in position where Google will only show the lie without any questioning or contrary perspectives.
As the lie becomes established, so policy will made based on it. And it will be very deficient policy. And it will lead to disaster. Afterwards, people will ask? How come no one saw this coming? How come no one raised any objections?
Did you know that during the communist mass starvation, there was a lot of false propaganda about how well big the harvests were. People looking to ingratiate themselves with the elite lied about how well everything was going and flattered the elite with how great their their wisdom was.
They were surrounded by yes men who created a filter bubble. The distorted vision of that was catastrophical. Tens of millions dead.
There is no objective, Platonic measure of "popularity", and Google always has to temper it with "correctness".
When someone searches for "california governor", Google needs to show results for "Gavin Newsom" instead of "Arnold Schwarzenegger", even though the latter is immensely more popular by any reasonable metric.
So yes, Google's engineers will keep tweaking the algorithm until it stops showing Arnold Schwarzenegger entirely. In search of correctness. Otherwise it will become unusable very quickly.
A problem I run into repeatedly with Google is that I enter search terms and when it gives me the wrong thing, sometimes the opposite of what I want, it strongly resists my refining it. For instance, if I search for "turning off feature X" and everybody else searches for "turning on feature X", Google will "correct" me implacably. You're not allowed to turn "X" off. Back in the old days when it wasn't as intelligent, you could add words that would divert it from the popular cluster of hits. This isn't just an annoyance, I believe it's shaping society by determining which ideas and information thrive and which wither.
Maybe instead of trying to sell drama and rage headlines they could focus on actually producing worthwhile content... but then again its Daily Mail.
What would be interesting is to see how other papers were affected by this.
The headline creation and news selection promote clickbait within organization. The most outlandish and catchy stuff gets most revenue, why spend days/week/months on quality article that will be surpassed in terms of ROI by gossip drop?
Over time ppl working in Daily Mail would naturally write stuff that trends on google.
And I wager that what was trending on google had a good chance to trend amongst their target audience too (stuff that triggers emotional responses).
Google is just responding to what people want; the search engine has taken a lot of flak over the years for being spammed, and alternatives have been cropping up. Though "to google" has become a household word, Google cannot rest on their laurels and take that entrenchment for granted.
There's a risk of bias though you're definitely right about that.
daily mail just basically got evicted by the landlord. I'm super curious to see where they drew the line.
Be careful what you wish for...
That value rose every other second as I scrolled, so yeah...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
https://stopfundinghate.info/2018/02/21/online-advertisers-d...
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...
They’ve been around much longer than the internet, fwiw.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/09/update-multip...
A: No, I hate it more.
B: No, IIII really do despise it more.
C: Oh my gawwd, the Daily Mail. Groooan!
Times change. Or perhaps there's some kind of 'class inflation'.
But really, today's Mail is all celeb ad-photorials(tm) and drivel.
The true working-class tabloids were the Sun, Mirror, and Star.
The Mail and the Express seemed to be more for people who were doing a little better, were often (correspondingly?) a bit older, but were rooted in right-wing/small island mentality, and who would probably have been uncomfortable with the image/implications of moving to a broadsheet.
Ever since it went tabloid it's been downhill all the way, and right down the toilet after Desmond.
It's a worthless rag full of content designed to get a rise from its readership, with scant regard for the truth.
Agree ?
</s>But what about dissidents in countries?
By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g.
"When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher.
Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
What I'm increasingly noticing in the results for these is title:"Avengers movie release date", body:"No release date has yet been announced for the Avengers movie" (but not in the search engine snippet).
I would argue that dailymail fails the SPIRIT of the original pagerank, even if its heavily linked to, the information they hold is paparazzi stew. They have every right to choose to derank something so worthless.
seriously, who decides what I value? Should I decide for you what is worthless?
don't dismiss this is as a flippant comment because people with this belief will walk us straight into the hands of the political class who will jump at the opportunity to tell us what is and what is not.
You can be damn sure they will use all the marketed tested FUD to have people climbing aboard. Punch all the right buttons, have the correct statement to any challenge, and next were back the day of where the message is wholly managed. We already see regimes which operate this way but many just laugh it off "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE", well this is how you get there , by giving the power to decide to someone else.
I know they have taken over the market, but it used to be, if a search engine didnt do a good job of sifting and ranking information, people would move to a new one. infoseek, webcrawler, yahoo, lycos, altavista, hotbot, ask jeeves, msn, alltheweb, teoma.
Youre arguing against the business model itself, which is that the company is RANKING content. It CANT be unbiased.
Think about it not as pushing things down, but choosing what to surface to the top. Hopefully cream. They have two tasks, find good content bring it to the top, and detect bad content impersonating good content and punish it for fraud.
In this case, if a news site ranks high in metrics that Google's algorithm considers problematic --sensationalist, click-bait, heavily optimised, not mobile-friendly, whatever-- wouldn't you prefer it prioritised sites which didn't hit those metrics?
i would expect publishers to make decisions more based on raw engagement and maybe their civic duty.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
Facebook - social
Google - search
Amazon - shopping
And so on.
I doubt it will change, but hopefully it'll be a lesson to other folks in the business.
Hmm, could it be that the system is set up in a certain way that most would make these choices? And does that benefit society?
If DailyMail had not made those choices but someone else did, then THEY wouls be the subject of the news.
Unless you are saying that there is absolutely no reason why there is a monopoly in those areas.
I firmly believe we can and should build non-exclusive non-silo search engine options. Data salary for general search use is probably a bad thing overall. I'm excited to see a world where competitors to the major search engines that are more open exists.
But at the same time, we're not talking about individual consumers. Individual consumers don't have much market power and dust can't express much choice. The daily Mail is a massive corporation and a massive publication. They could have made other choices, and elected to use other business models. They didn't. And to be honest I don't have much sympathy for them in this. If a single source of revenue dominates everything else that you do you are not an effective news organization. You're probably not even effective corporation is a whole, as most people who run companies Tell you not to overconcentrate your income in one source.
Am I the only one here that sees these types of moves as a problem and doesn’t dismiss them purely because of my own personal attitudes toward the content?
But if it's just that Google is updating its algorithm to pay less attention to sites which are heavily optimised/click-bait/sensationalist... that's not so bad.
You'll find the answers here https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/statisti... with a follow-up from this year in https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/daily-ma...
This includes great quotes like:
> The paper reported in its front page story that an Iraqi man “caught red-handed with a bomb” had been awarded £33,000 in compensation “because our soldiers kept him in custody for too long”. In fact, the man in question was found not guilty and the reason he was awarded compensation was for unlawful and degrading treatment while in custody (he was beaten by guards) as well as unlawful detention.