I think that again, we need to put our pitchforks down and think through this critically. Maybe someone from Google did decide that CNW is about to blow the lid on their scam and decide to shit all over its business model. But let’s step back for an instant and think over some other possibilities.

Google released some pretty major core updates in 2018 and 2019. A lot of these updates seemed to focus on what the SEO community has taken to refer to as EAT (expertise, authority and trust). Google’s own guidance on some of these indicate a similar theme - they’re interested in sources, quality of analysis and other trust metrics. Some major sites saw some really massive drops over these years.

When I checked out CNW earlier on today, I read a couple of articles. There were no sources at all. The net worth calculation seems to be the individual’s reported earnings less state and federal taxes. And the content looks like it was lifted from Wikipedia - in some cases, entire sentences were reprinted word for word.

To get that, my browser had to make 426 requests, download 9mb of mostly adware and display ads almost everywhere.

Maybe this is all a big Google ploy but I think it’s more likely that their algorithm has changed to favour high quality sites as opposed to sites that used to get search performance because of valuable keywords in their domain.

As for their Android app, I’ve never owned a phone that runs Android so I can’t find and download an Android version but I decided to go down the rabbit hole and install CNW in my iPhone. They’ve apparently been ad free for two years, which is nicer than their web experience. But the content is the same kind of stuff as their website - entire sentences seem lifted directly from Wikipedia, their news section is similar, it’s just slightly repackaged stories from other sources.

Thanks to today, I now know that Takeshi 6ix9ine made $5m for a livestream which pushed his net worth to a reported $8 million. I’ve never felt so old or out of touch in my life...:)