Anyone in the SEO Industry Talking about Google's Decline? | Hacker News Reader

Anyone in the SEO Industry Talking about Google's Decline?

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This is a strange question I know, but given so many people consider Google's results to have gone downhill, and their rankings are seen as being gamed by dodgy actors putting out copy and paste content or things stolen from Stackoverflow and what not, I'm curious if anyone in the SEO world has commented on it. Like, the 'white hat folks at likes like Moz or Search Engine Land or various subreddits. Are there any of them struggling to rank sites against a flood of low quality content? Do any of them even notice a change in the results at all?

I'm curious because while we saw a lot of hacker/techie opinions on Google posted here, and a lot of more mainstream ones on Reddit and Twitter, we don't see much from the marketing folks supposedly responsible for the current situation.

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Yes it has been noticed. And by Google too of course. The latest Helpful Content Update was designed to tackle the worst, and that update is still underway.

The SEO industry response is to double down on long form 'evergreen' content of 1000 words or so, along with more topical news stuff for domain authority.

It's an ongoing war. And in the middle - we poor users.

The verbosity of all these SEO'd sites is just maddening. A recipe page is 90% a FAQ with vapid questions like "Is brown rice nourishing?" "Can I use filtered water with rice?" "Will the rice satisfy my family?" with multiple paragraph answers for each.

Yep. That's because the search algorithm demands a certain minimum length before the article is considered to be ranking worthy. Another case of stupid Google, stupid machines.

What makes this an interesting question is that it seems genuine and reasonable to ask; What do the seagulls think about the trawler's decline in fishing? Not realising - that the trawler-men, according to old seafaring folklore are following the seagulls.

CEOs, advertisers and Google have always been in a symbiotic relationship. One could say that the decline in search results is caused by SEOs "over-fishing" and Googles fight to prefer it own (advertisers) view of "search reality". Simultaneously, the pickings for SEOs have declined concomitant with Google's descent.

There is not enough enough diversity in the ecosystem. It's the obvious outcome of letting a too-powerful monopoly run amok.

> It's the obvious outcome of letting a too-powerful monopoly run amok.

I feel like as soon as a legitimately better search engine popped up, I would start using it. But there hasn't yet for me.

Are there regulatory or other moats preventing new participants for giving it a go?

Most of the moat seems to be some combo of

• Website today seem much more aware of how search would ultimately seek to summarize and off-site catalog their content to siphon away incoming users than when Google started, so you don’t have the benefit of naïve counter-parties anymore who will quietly welcome you scraping them.

• The web’s way bigger and faster now than when Google started so keeping results up-to-date is Sisyphean

• If you only have a search engine, you will have to pay for almost literally any other non-search data stream you’d want to use to augment search - locations and business info, traffic, routing, media names and metadata, stock prices, and so on.

• While power users here often complain, it seems that whatever metrics google is using have found that human-curated results and normal non-ML approaches like basic keyword search are not preferred and ML-based approaches have been more successful, which likely cost a lot in compute to build and definitely comes with a hiring talent premium for being a niche skill

The moat is money, and lots of it.

> as soon as a legitimately better search engine popped up

Kagi?

I don’t know if there has been a decline but since working on SEO for Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) which is in the developer/B2B SaaS space I have realized that tool comparison type articles rank highly and they are either content marketing by a vendor or they are pay for link sites. The first I would expect to rank (although that’s not necessarily great) but the second I would not. We have not paid. Some of these sites have such poor quality content and are filled with ads but surprisingly they continue to rank.

Sometimes the most honest thing on page 1 are the links labeled “Ad”. Almost everything is also often an ad.

One funny change is that in April, Google said that AI-generated content wasn’t allowed.

http://searchenginejournal.com/google-says-ai-generated-cont...

Then in an article just this month, “Google knows that the use of AI to generate content surfaced in search results is happening, and is fine with it, as long as the content produced by an AI is helpful to the humans who read it, says a company spokeswoman.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-you-tell-whether-this-headl...

Why the change?

Either they can’t identify AI-generated content or they can and they just don’t care. I think it’s a mix of both. The value of page 1 on a Google SERP just isn’t what it used to be. You’re stuck below the ads, the answer box, the videos, the sidebar, the maps results, and on and on and on.

In the industry I focus on (dentistry), Yelp and other “barnacle sites” take up about half of the organic (non local results). Spending time and effort to get to the last spot on page one just isn’t worth it.

To the extent Google Search is always fighting blackhat SEO types, you're right: Google Search has largely been gamed. Always has been. Blackhat SEO gets more advanced over time and it's a loosing battle. Some blackhats are using artificial intelligence techniques to churn out content at scale, often using private tools they keep to themselves for obvious reasons. It's an elaborate game of whack-a-mole and Google are losing.

I've said this before a time or more: Google is the new yellow pages, and not much more. Sure they could also be considered a UPostalService 2.0 - one that is openly reading your stuff and building data profiles, partially using that data in order to profit -

Part of this is google's fault, from things like expanding rich snippets, expanding shopping results (which as a consumer I like this direction, just wish it was like it was back in the day - less censored)

Part of this is bigger money can pollute the results better than a micro business.

Google will stay an important piece of the internet, people will continue to use it a lot, mainly due to android / maps / gmail.

The value of their search results has not only been on a decline from an end user searching perspective, but as a business owner / content creator as well - google does not send as much traffic to people's sites as they did say pre-panda 1 one days - for many reasons.

This is changing the value of seo, and the value of google for many.

When google gives you the answer for free (rich snippets) with no click - there is less incentive for place X to publish the answers for google to republish.

Google is updated frequently for locations and hours by businesses - and it's main value imho will continue to be for local / brick / mortar / maps / navigation..

for many other subjects in which people actually search for information, I have been witnessing more and more people, including myself, skipping right over google and going straight to youtube / reddit / amazon / hn / fb / etc - the research there often yields deeper fruit that google is not going to show in the first 5 pages / 50 results (plus 15 ads).. if at all.

google continues to censor and people continue to look elsewhere for info. I don't see this changing.

But yeah, the yellow pages aspect, that is still a thing, and has become quite competitive (and more and more gamed sadly)

small data points / opinions I admit.

I think at this point, it is dangerous to use Google; there are so many phishing websites that are trying to scam you in the Google Search results that it is not safe anymore to use Google. Google blackbox ranking algorithms are here to blame because they act as a positive feedback loop hell e.g. more SEO spam, better rankings, new blackbox Google ranking algorithm update, again more spam because SEO spammers and scammers are brute forcing what works and what does not work. And all this is fueled by ad revenue which incentivizes both parties to keep on going.

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