Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

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Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product in 2021, and the article says big media companies (presumably with lower quality review content) suffered as a result.

But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.

So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.

If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!

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Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".

Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.

I still believe the original title is warranted.

The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.

does it?

I would happily believe that Google is corrupt in this manner, but the reason big domains have the advantage here is because they can afford to pay teams of people with the express purpose of gaming the system. this is true in all industries, everywhere, and it can only be fixed with society-wide change, which, short of a world war (or, more likely, two), isn't going to happen

It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.

To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.

> It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.

> To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.

To rub salt into the wound, any forum will happily let anyone and everyone post in support of any big brand, but instantly spam-block some lone developer trying to showcase their product (HN is different in this regard).

Microsoft/Jetbrains/Apple releases a new paid product, available as a paid subscription only - dozens of people will get upvoted telling the forum about it.

Some lone indie dev releases a free-tier search tool with optional paid tier, and they're banned for spamming.

Now I understand why you'd want to block people who self-advertise, but there's gotta be a middle ground.

Why is advertising on behalf of a company that has a larger ad budget than all the current readers salaries combined okay, but advertising for your own product is a bannable offence?

There really should be a middle ground where (like on HN) the audience understands that someone who posts something that took them 6 months to create is not the same as someone selling love potions or stock tips.

It's become bad to the point an indie dev can't even post to get feedback even when the thing he's poured his blood into completely matches the forum's topic. Extra minus points if he offers it for free (so suspicious!)

You are now expected to develop in the dark, without ever mentioning anywhere the thing you are working on and fully knowing that your "blog" gets completely ignored by Google

I personally refuse to host my blog on a "trusted" domain. I likewise refuse to use Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, and whatever else works nowadays because search engines can't be arsed to tell the difference between legitimate content and spam AND because people's attention span have become smaller than a tadpole's

This is a sore point for me personally. That's why I went through the effort of creating my own personal search engine that filters out all this SEO spam and made it public for others to use https://www.aisearch.vip

Big brand websites usually have decades of trust and backlinks to lean back upon. As a person working in SEO for 20 years, I'd argue calling search engines lazy is just lazy. It's a billion dollar industry. Whatever ranking factor they decide on, someone will abuse.

Consider how bad the results would be if I could generate 100 scam sites in a day and outrank traditional media. Only to repeat it tomorrow. Now step it up and have tens of thousands of people doing the same thing. Every day. Trusting a 30 year old domain isn't lazy.

Google's job is to fight abusers to give you good results. Is that not the point of a search engine? What else are they going to spend their time working on?

Putting the burden of SEO on everyone else is going to cause people to abandon making websites and seek other platforms like reddit, facebook, instagram, youtube etc... as they have been.

It also wasn't as heavily weighted to manually trusted domains before. I used to have a bunch of backlinks too, but all blogs/forums were manually downranked.

Now these "trusted" domains get free reign to do whatever they want like this.

Years ago Google banned BMW (I think) for their then very spammy tactics. Then they were forced to restore BMW because people searching for BMW expected to find BMW in the results.

The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.

the solution there is to not ban sites, but simply deprioritise them for a while. you get caught being naughty, your entire domain gets hit with a nasty downranking that gradually decays. put a little flag next to the link explaining to the user why the result is so low. except that the second thing will never happen because it seems that Google policy is to keep search users as powerless and uninformed as they possibly can.

What is the loop hole?

That Google cracked down on "product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product",

but not on top 10 lists (that mentions some in-fact-fake testing).

So therefore the big companies publish loads of trashy top 10 lists

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