Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites | Hacker News Reader

Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

retrododo.com

136 pointsabhinavstarts58 comments

This post sits wrong with me. They're not entitled to increasing traffic forever, and when traffic drops, it's not always due to an external force being exerted onto you.

I actually subscribe to RetroDodo on Youtube and noticed that I don't view their content anymore. This has less to do with any "algorithm" but rather the fact that their "voice" seems to have changed (both figuratively and literally... a lot of their videos have a new "host" altogether) and that they're directing more energy at different things (books, discussions about the industry, more gimmicky videos, etc) that aren't giving them the same return.

The founder used to post about gaming-related "SEO plays" (some wikipedia for Pokemon or something if I remember correctly?) on his personal YouTube channel. With this in mind, I get the feeling that SEO has become more of a focus than what brought in his audience in the first place.

I'll start by saying, I'm sorry this is happening to the retrododo team, I hadn't heard of them before this article (I'm not really intro retro games) but it seems like they make genuinely good and useful content for the community.

On the other hand, more and more these days I see articles & videos that I (possibly unfairly) summarize as "My content deserves to be prioritized by 'the algorithm' and $BIG_CORP is against me".

I'm not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them. To me it seems more like building your brand organically, publishing via "open" platforms (and yes, I'm aware that's getting harder and harder) and encouraging your supporters to interact with you on platforms you control would be much more sustainable than expecting 'the algorithm(s)' will provide you with your expected growth.

I don't even use google, so if I were interested in getting "the best arcade cabinet" as one of the examples the author used - I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use, which are the places I would expect to hear about Retro Dodo

> I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them

How long have you been using the internet for? You don't have to be a content creator to have noticed the huge shift in the past decade, that is basically killing the internet.

Google's algorithm played a huge,role in that, it has become nearly impossible to find independent websites, and they don't even bother giving you more than a couple pages of search results. There is no possibility of the "organic growth" you talk about outside of social media platforms. And then the flood of AI-generated content nailed that coffin.

~20 years to directly answer your question.

I said this in a child comment - but to put it a different way - Imagine google didn't exist, how would you go about discovering content? When I first got on the internet there used to be directories, which was literally just a list of links sorted by topic. Although there was no "algorithm" I imagine (based on my own usage) that items listed closer to the top were more often clicked and thus grew faster than items lower on the list.

In fact, even before the internet, this phenomenon existed in the Yellow Pages which is why you have things like "aaa local plumbers" so they'd appear before their competitors.

Well, Google does exist. For the overwhelming majority of internet users, it'll be their primary means of stumbling onto a website. And the pool of discoverable websites has been shrinking for years now.

A tiny fraction of internet users will bother with alternate means of finding websites apart from ads, Google search, or sponsorships.

> I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use

In my mind, this is actually the problem. Over the past 15 years, the "web" has become increasingly platformized, and it's getting more platformized every year.

The web is, for all intents and purposes, at the control and direction of Google, Meta, YouTube and a few other players.

When you do finally get into the "independent web", it made up Forbes, Tom's Guide or CNET. 16 companies own the vast majority of the web that we all use: https://detailed.com/google-control/

So, I agree with you, but as a counter anecdote - I was subscribed to Nebula for ~2 years, and I barely used it because there was no algorithm telling me what things it thought I'd like. Even when I had a topic in mind that I was interested in (mega projects as a random example) I'd get low 100s of results, many from creators I had never heard of, and the ones I chose to watch would typically be from creators I knew from YouTube which of course, were presented to me by "the algorithm".

While I agree it's harmful to the web to be essentially under control of a very small number of mega corporations, even when you actively avoid them like I did in my nebula example, it's not clear what the solution to content discovery is (and of course, google et al don't really stop you from consuming content you already know about which is my problem with the original article)

Similar experience when I tried using DuckDuckGo as default on recently bought Android phone.

I'm all in for privacy - and actively dislike many of Google/YouTube moves (which seem intentional part of plan and not so much accidental or with technical reasons) - e.g.:

YouTube doesn't allow parents to limit their young kids to only whitelisted channels ...

Even worse, if you block YouTube.com domain - kid can't sign into school account (Google classroom stuff) because signing into anything Google actually goes through something like accounts.youtube.com.

And yet after 20th or 30th time when I was not finding things though DDG and manually typing "google.com" to do a search there (browser and other android search boxes were defaulting to DDG).

I just switched default browser and search engine back to Google :(

Agreed. I guess the only fair complaining is the text snippet that Google get from sites to put on SERPs, saving a click. This is gross.

Reading the article makes it really look like 90% of their traffic came from Google queries like “best ps2 games”. So yeah, maybe that’s the problem.

> I'm not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them

Maybe its because Google started doing this with Eric Schmid saying "Brands is how you solve 'the mess'" and killing smaller sites and sources to prioritize big brands and it never changed since then...

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic.

The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.

The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine.

With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

at this point you can not claim that there is no credible competition.

from my perspective the "issue" is that none of the competitors get traction. why would they? you either have to pay or change your habits.

Regardless, DMA, Gdpr, and friends will slowly level the playing field.

Absolutely. Anyone who doubts Google killed web surfing should try the Marginalia search engine [1]. Unlike Google, Marginalia presents novel and interesting results.

[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

I use marginalia more to find blogs and explore personal sites. I think I visit the site daily.

Have you tried kagi?

Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays.

Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?

> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.

Certainly agree with this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia :

> In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%.

Pretty incredible market shares.

In my experience it gives really bad results for anything remotely specific. If it's just general popular stuff it's fine. But when searching for a very narrowly scoped query, it just gives back generic popular results.

I've been using bing for over 10 years and it has always been consistently better than Google especially without Googles evilness.

Google basically just surfaces content marketing these days. It killed the blogosphere. Anybody who isn’t promoting their crap full time is invisible now, and so corporations basically generate almost the entirety of the content we get to see now

It's frustrating to see a post like this just blaming Google for their issues, when perhaps their reporting/reviews might be at fault? Many people who look up reviews for products reviewed by Retro Dodo often criticize the reviews for lacking substance or getting very basic facts wrong.

I know that I added them to my personal filter list when I found them providing mis-info or just click-farming off of unannounced products.

It's not about whether you agree with their content, it's that AI and aggregated results are getting ranked above all original pages. I don't have any more hard evidence than the author does, but it's also been my experience that the film of mashed up self-contradictory detritus has been growing thicker and thicker over time. This new wave of non-content is totally different from the old landscape of true or false content.

For a while now, I have been wondering what it is that a small search provider like Kagi can do to have such an advantage over the R&D behemoth Google, measured in terms of blocking garbage results. This is eye-opening:

>And to rub salt into the wound, it was discovered that Google is paying some media companies “five figures” to use their AI to automatically scrape content from other publishers’ work (who have paid expert humans to produce) and publish it as news twice a day on their websites.

For every one thing you hear about, there are nine you don't. Apparently, the difference in quality is about what Kagi is not doing.

I left the article being like "oh it can't be that bad" and left my little Kagi oasis to try out some Google searches similar to the article and I've completely changed my tune. What in the hell happened? There's nary an organic result to be found, 80% of the page is shopping garbage and sponsored links, the few organic results are blogspam, and there's banner ads in the middle of results now?

The folks here in the comments are missing the forest for the trees here, sure algo tweaks reshuffle winners and losers but there's almost no results that aren't Google's own scraped content and ad spots. No amount of "make better content" can push you above the fold.

Every site in the world considers the Google algorithm "fair" when they are highly ranked and "illegal" when they are not. Ultimately you are not owed a spot in their top 10. The answer is to find other avenues for marketing and not rely on a single corporation to act as a free funnel for user growth.

There are no other avenues for marketing short-dated information to the general public. Books are the closest alternative, and they wouldn't work for reviews of new devices. For this stuff, everybody does google searches.

While it is simple to blame Google for traffic surge, the thing is that I have them on my RSS reader for years and I barely visit the site even once a month.

Articles are not interesting to me at large, 99.9% of the time, there is no comments sections to correct them or engage and challenge authors or other readers, seems like owners so not care about what their audience has to say. They only care about views. There is no community at the site, so they are at mercy of a search engine without spending a dime on advertising.

There is only room for a few "best top 10 Pokemon ROM hacks" articles... It was good when it last, but all comes to an end...

(this is a response to a comment that has been deleted while i was writing it

i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author).

if this is not ok, then i'll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a good reason to not have it posted, you may contact me by email (see profile))

the comment:

I think this is a feature, not a bug. The economic precariousness that the author describes is what makes the opinions of small outfits like his suspect. It's just too easy for companies to influence them with special treatment or outright payments. Reddit, for all of its faults, is hard to bribe. That is by design. We built mechanisms to intentionally cultivate diverse and redundant communities. Even if you try to control the mods of some particular subreddit, you are probably just shifting where the definitive/highly ranked conversations on a topic end up happening.

The author seems to decry Reddit as "not expert", but I think what its ascent has proven is the collective opinion of disinterested amateurs is often the best available.

my response:

that implies that every independent content producer is corrupt and only caters to the highest bidder.

how does reddit help here? each community is independent even on reddit. there are good and bad ones. a small community on reddit would be just as susceptible to manipulation as would a small community of the same size on an independent site.

and reddit is hard to bribe? well, maybe in specific cases, but reddit needs to cater to its advertisers just as well.

reddit, youtube and any other large site will only be able to represent the majority views because they can't cater to minorities that conflict with those views. advertisers won't have it.

an independent site can be completely onesided and be under the influence of some financial interest. or it can remain independent and actually represent the interests of its members in a way that reddit et al. can not.

> and reddit is hard to bribe?

It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.

fair point. but the same mechanism also suppresses minority views. which for them makes reddit worse. with independent sites everyone has to make their own judgement whether it is genuine or not. i can't say if that's better or worse, but i find the ability to express and share minority views to be important.

Who are these guys? Oh they wrote a book for example, ok let's search for that topic: handheld history.

15 results of book stores (including the publisher they released on), reviews, other news sites, all covering their book, and then near bottom, their own page on the book. That doesn't seem off really, their product is still reachable. Whether they should be considered the authority, or the store selling it should be, is up for debate.

The problem with modern search engines is discoverability. If you search for something by name, then sure you're likely to find it, but if you want to web surf and explore new content, then you're out of luck. My typical search results always turn up the same big sites: Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, etc. I rarely see new and novel websites promoted.

It's time to relaunch curated content in any form, directories, tagging etc.

2023 and 2024 has demonstrated handily that the entire web is at risk if we trust large corporations with everything.

The monetized web perhaps.

A lot of youtubers who run full time travel channels have started their own backup streaming video system. A lot of these guys have half million dollar sailboats or catamarans and getting demonetized would be disastrous.

If you hitch your wagon to the google bus, and the bus crashes, you don't have much recourse.

The issue here is that running a website at all is hitching yourself to the google bus.

I've been into retro gaming for a while (primarily consoles) and this is the first I've heard of this site. I've also not actively searched for "best ds games" or similar in the past 10 years as I just know to go to Racketboy [1] (which is currently down, so not a great look).

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240320154449/https://www.racke...

First you become value creating, then value extracting.

On a deeper note: Search is challenged. With the advent of first niche communities and now LLMs the traditional idea behind search engines is a left over from the 00s. Google need to earn by ads.

Retro Dodo probably need to focus on a niche community and retention over organic traffic like so many other small / indie shops.

Personally I use Kagi who are also in the business of disrupting them selves using LLMs - at least they have a business model that absorbs it.

Using the free version of the checkbot browser extension to scan 100 pages from your site shows that your HTML is not valid (0% - all pages have an error) and CSS is 90% valid. Correcting this might change your search traffic.

Does Google de-rank pages with HTML/CSS errors? First I'm hearing of it, but it sounds interesting.

I made the Checkbot SEO extension (https://www.checkbot.io/). Common HTML/CSS errors are fairly minor and aren't going to impact ranking, but are usually worth fixing to prevent potential problems.

Really serious HTML/CSS errors could get in the way of users and search bots from viewing and understanding a page though. For example, broken HTML might lead to broken links, broken heading tags, broken meta tags and broken images, which could have some impact on ranking.

So Checkbot isn't saying you can't rank well if you fail HTML validation (and it's very, very unlikely to be the issue in the article), but it's probably a good idea to fix it. It's really up to you to look at the errors found and decide if it's worth prioritising a fix, like you would with any other linting tool.

Ah, that makes sense! Thanks for the explanation :)

I see some comments here regarding Google or Meta market dominance, but the root issue is the open web's transition to controlled platforms. The rise of discord, twitch, or TikTok point to a continued trend and not a reversal. If I am a leader in content discovery or information aggregation, then I will have to work with the existing platforms like reddit to surface information. If Discord made itself discoverable, then search engines would instantly drive organic traffic to discord servers. But it is a closed platform. Forums fell in popularity for platforms with mobile apps that offer consistent interfaces, single user names, and easy-to-use community tools. The market is wide open for new content discoverability solutions but one would have to solve for the closed platforms dominating internet discourse today.

I cite Discord because it is text-first compared to Twitch. As an elder millennial, I find myself using Discord to interact with niche communities. For example, I care about a specific synthesizer emulation project. They have a discord server where we can discuss feature releases or music in general. Twenty years ago this community would be its own forum or a thread on a larger forum. https://dsp56300.wordpress.com

Lastly, if discoverability is monopolized by one player, then why and how did TikTok explode in the last five years? It is not the front page of the internet for all, but it is for certain age groups.

Tiktok isn't for everyone. Its was Chinese app that catered for the Asian population, specifically China because of their tight surveillance.

It got lucky. It caught on because the content produced was tightly cherry picked to show the best of best. And from another country. The same would happen if a Japanese app was translated to English and had Japanese content.

However people saw this and jumped on the bandwagon. Younger audiences who were too young for Discord nor that type of person.

There's nothing special to it. It's just as manipulative as any other social app. Pushing all of that aside, still doesn't hook.

Discord's UX is so intense it leaves you dazzled which neglects the focus for older audiences.

They saw the niche of IRC and that it being a fossil pit. The established old-hat gamer Vent/Mumble/TeamSpeak user and the younger generation. Throw some edgy icons and make folk feel that they have power with a "server" of their own, apply "invites" to make you feel special your specially included in the same as every other guild and you have a platform for the younger.

Now with loot boxes, human psyche exploitation as any game company does; Blizzard and Overwatch for example.

Matrix/Signal are all too sterile. Telegram is a muck pit and forums cost money. Prone to rotting and require expertise. IRC is an idle fest most times of the day outside of community channels.

Join EFNet and join a random channel with users outside of LinuxHax0rs and it's a ghost town.

It's me that still feels left out. Im 35, Discord doesn't fit the bill. I don't game anymore so mumble / vent don't work out. IRC as above - and I know how it used to be, I was using IRC at 13. Very exciting seeing klines and network splits, bot wars. But still very nerdy and dull without creativity and imagination.

MSN Messenger/Y!M were my jam and there's been nothing like it since. Skype had it but sold out. Facebook is just a data hole and Instagram, eh, it has zero interest to me. I have no interest in seeing some family and their kids or someone posing in front of some statue.

And I can't even view YouTube without being forced to watch ads or forking out for a subscription for "premium", when theres nothing premium about that subscription.

And that sums up the state of the internet.

I just want a client where I can play silly games like a TokyBoom or a sketch pad where you can draw as a group. Voice chat without having to configure microphone settings nine times, leave a chatroom and rejoin without having to need an invite nor losing all chat. I'd pay for that.

/vent I guess so I'm here on HN hanging out as an unix engineer with developers and programmers which are just as edgy as each other. Because some cloud isn't as great as that cloud and PHP isn't Python and that we all should be using some new javascript framework weekly.

Reddit has gone to shit, digg is no more and Tumblr was too edgy for it's time. I think its time for real life. Oh wait.. I don't exactly fit in with the 40's folk who are out at dinners or clubbing. The younger crowds are all too kept in their clicks of university. Hobby groups are hobby groups and my generation where the hell are you!? With family and kids on Instagram...

I empathize you. I am hitting the end of my 30's and for a while I felt lost in the sea of young-folks memes and platforms. I am not on Meta's platforms or TikTok, and I largely quiet reddit. I happen to find YouTube with premium a good content portal for my interests. I started gaming in the last two years after a good 15 years of zero gaming. The PC community is strong now that handhelds are accessible and most recent non-Apple computers can handle popular games.

I also agree with you on TikTok's value proposition – it is not unique – but like the previous networks before it, it has critical mass. That is it. It doesn't mean it will stay on top for a decade, but its heavy state influence (read funding) helped it stay afloat while it accrued users. And its existence and proliferation help enforce that - at least in the US - there is an open market for new platforms to gain mass popularity.

I would take AIM or Apple iChat or a static forum over discord, but the internet changed. I finally understand why folks 20-30 years older than me prefer less change. Adapting is hard.

Perhaps try Matrix again? Element as a client might feel a bit sterile but the content is often anything but sterile, plus there are loads of other great clients too (Cinny, FluffyChat, Nheko, Fractal, NeoChat and more).

"blogging" is not as profitable as it used to be, episode 12512

I would be interested to know why Google has presumably identified this site as spam. Too many SEO gimmicks that have flagged the site?

Google has been dealing with a 100,000x increase in low quality content post-LLMs. They were getting a lot of bad PR for their poor search results sending users to spam websites created by nefarious SEOs, so their most recent algo updated prioritized real brands and deprioritized "content sites" monetized with affiliate links and ads. Some "real brands", such as Retro Dodo looked enough like a "content site" that they were negatively impacted by the algorithm changes.

tbh I trust a small dedicated subreddit more than a website I just heard of today.

Kagi small sites FTW.

When you drink from the Google firehose it's not IF but WHEN you drown. I gave up on Google and their SEO metrics and crap almost two DECADES ago as it was clear where their DONT BE EVIL was going. Sheeple just put up with line after line of SPONSORED search results because the honestly have no clue, so it's NEVER been a level playing field. It just took you longer to join the ranks of the shafted. Now if you spend some time ENGAGING with your clients instead of "organic search growth" you may do better. I've dropped Reddit as well but you know GROUPS.IO? DISCORD? (useful but Im not a big fan), BLOGS - i.e build a community and give Google the digit.

This is really sad and upsetting to see.

The real valuable content created by regular people is being obfuscated by useless AI white noise and nonsense content mill shit from giant corporations.

Things just keep getting worse and worse for media.

Do you read retrododo? Their content isn't the gold-standard for retro emulation and most folks in the retro community are on discord or YouTube.

The fact that the "gold standard" content isn't in easily accessible text format doesn't seem like a good thing.

This sucks, I’ve enjoyed some of their YouTube videos.

But why is every link on their website purple like I’ve already read it? Oh because their brand is purple.

Really sucks as a reader.

A lot of SEO influencers on twitter have been bragging their tactics to get traffic by using AI spam and other gimmicks. Now they come crying. Not saying this is the case with this specific site, but if you provide actual useful content you will send signals to G and you will rank. spam sites, content farming, and other SEO gimmicks should rightfully be deranked.

Also people who keep insisting on building solely and relying exclusively on SEO do not run a business but a franchise where the franchisor is Google and the franchisee’s conditions are reviewed and changed at moments notice with no recourse

The main culprit is this:

> Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.

> Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.

Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people's sites for 7 straight months now.

You can read about that here,

https://www.seroundtable.com/no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-r...

and also this tweet:

https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1775495481604358363

This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the "Helpful Content Update") that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and/or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.

From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.

Google is going to shit. Bring back Matt Cutts. Google's AI is unfinished and they're forcing it into search.

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