I attended Google's creator conversation event, and it turned into a funeral
giantfreakinrobot.com
giantfreakinrobot.com
This "article" fails to answer the first questions you'd have. For example, how did Google single you out for this invitation? The article asserts that it was all "shadow-banned" site owners, but then says the Google employee denied all shadow-banning. So how was the invitation phrased?
I'm not even going to waste time breaking down the rest of the empty bullshit in this article. It's unfortunate, because I'll bet every claim made against Google is true. But I'm not going to give a single one credence without specifics. If you're too lazy to provide those, you don't deserve support.
As for shadowbanning, well, it doesn't take much to remember Google is a search platform and then to match that with his complaints about his site getting deranked.
Maybe that could have been made clearer, but surely if I could figure that out you could too.
Anybody on here can speculate as to what Google does to this or that Web site; but if you're going to write an article claiming it as fact, you need to support it.
It's a bummer that your time is free.
That's a whole other level of time-devaluation.
What's interesting about that is that if any of the (dozens? over a hundred?) salespeople that I interacted with could have provided a solid rationale for what they were suggesting in the context of what a particular client wanted to achieve, I could have been persuaded. None of them ever did at any time. It was always just a one-sided appeal to spend more money with no coherent plan for a return on spending.
What Google seems to be doing is banning aggregation sites. There was a previous posting today by someone who was complaining about low ranking for his book review and link farm site. Google wants to be the only aggregator. Why fan out queries to another level of aggregator?
A list of the 20 sites he's talking about would help. How many of those are aggregation sites?
Answer: it WAS to invite people who run shadowbanned sites, they just don't acknowledge that there is such a thing.
The writer is too lazy to say.
It seemed super suspicious from the jump, I kept asking myself, “There has to be more to this story, this guy is being incredibly vague, is there more to this?”
A couple days after his media circus tour, videos from other people started popping up. these videos told us a little bit more. video after video of this guy—for hours—trying to start fights with dozens of people. multiple videos of him complaining while getting ejected from various bars by bouncers. he spent like 6 hours at many, many bars provoking and then feigned shock when it happened. “my hat. every time i go to this particular city, they physically beat me because they don’t like my hat” … ya left a little bit of important context out eh friend?
this blog post feels very similar to me as that guys initial video. something is missing.
It WAS to invite shadowbanned sites that they don't acknowledge exist ... why? Is there some other euphemism that they use to describe these sites, and that would make some sense as a group of people to give special attention to?
Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites.
This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
Someone from the data science side at Google, who is probably very far removed from the actual ranking algorithm, said that there was no shadowbanning of domains. That is, of course, total crap and probably just the result of some misunderstanding of what banning, demoting, penalizing, etc., means to different people.
The people at Google who actually work on communicating to webmaster never said there was no shadowbanning.
The author claims that a bunch of "shadow-banned" site owners were invited to some summit, but couldn't be bothered to say how this invitation was phrased or delivered. How were the recipients identified, especially when he says the Google person claimed that no such sites existed?
This whole thing is an insulting waste of time.
This is irrelevant for the theme. Some could came in a plane and other in a car, but who cares? Is assumed that either they were invited or wouldn't had walked on the building and asked about how improve google for hours. I assume that Google has some level of check-in security at least.
> claimed that no such sites existed?
claimed that they weren't shadowbanned, that is a different thing. And they were said that only some pages were affected. This means implicitly that google was aware that the webs existed.
I initially read this article with sympathy, but something isn’t adding up
And that's exactly the point: How do you invite "shadow-banned" site owners specifically, without stating why or how this select group has been identified (and denying that anyone's shadow-banned)? This is an obvious question that's ignored by the article.
"Hi! You've been invited to join a select group of people we totally didn't shadow-ban, to discuss the shadow-banning that didn't happen. We look forward to seeing you and getting your input on not being shadow-banned!"
https://x.com/joshtyler/status/1851872361420853690
I was able to reproduce the SERPs with this query
>I attended google's creator conversation event
When I removed the "client" parameter to post the link here, the original post ranked higher. However, that's really neither here nor there. Reddit is consistently cited as outranking original content.
Personally, I've learned not to cry about sites that don't rank. My time is better spent building new sites. Sometimes de-ranked sites come back in subsequent updates. Not everything sticks on the first try. You have to be persistent if you want to profit from organic traffic.
My impression is that these creators have one-trick ponies they have deeply invested themselves into. They may not be good at creating new ideas. Expectations of fairness are misplaced. You have to roll with the punches. Dwelling on what they think Google "should be" is a waste of time. Highly recommend focusing on areas within your immediate control. Individual agency is empowering. Victimhood, not so much.
> The day before, he led the group on a tour
> The building was empty
Monday, October 28th, was a work from home day.
Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites. There was a lot of public discourse on X/Twitter on this topic for months.
This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
If it's already been made, someone may even pay you to take it away.
> calls chief search scientist “elderly”
> concludes google is dying
Author if you’re reading this the answer lies within.
Diddy Party Planner Reveals Freak Off Requirements
Yeah, I'm thinking you're right.
First: if I am not happy with my site's placement in google (I don't care, but if I did), and I complain, nobody would even acknowledge my existence. I have no idea how I could even talk to a live human working for Google. People who get invited to "conversation" are obviously very special. In what way? What did they do to deserve that?
Second: certain people built their business on certain aspects of behavior of certain technology that does not belong to them and they have zero control over. These aspects changed, and their business is suffering. I understand their frustration. But why do they expect that the technology owner would do anything to help them? They aren't their paying clients. The technology owner's interests are in no way aligned with theirs. Why do they think anything would be done?
Oh, and also - why do they think anything can be done? I mean Google's codebase by now is decades of code stacked on top of older code. Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. I mean some people probably know how some parts work, but overall likely nobody knows why the ranking is such and not other. And each change shuffles things around and some pages go up and some go down. Why should anybody in Google prioritize the complaints of those who went down, and even if they did - it only would result in replacing one group of complainers with a similar group of complainers with identical complaints. It is obvious that there's no perfect ranking that would satisfy everyone, and likely at the complexity it is every change leads to unpredictable chain of rearrangements. Googlers can politely listen to those who got unlucky but they likely can't promise them anything more than that.
More importantly, this creator (and I assume others as well including OP) has a good social following. He has been criticizing Google's treatment of small publishers, how Google AI is stealing content, and how bad the current search results are. The criticism is gaining traction, especially after Google Search's anti-trust trial. So, I am assuming Google wanted to take some steps and thought inviting the loudest voices would help bring the criticism down.
I kinda agree with your second point. These people built a business around a technology that they have no control over. But my only reservation is that said technology is Google—a huge monopoly and literally the gateway to the Internet. You can't let huge monopolies that control all entry and choke points go scott-free over these things.
Many business models rely on people finding you via Google. Lawmakers and courts in both the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, and other jurisdictions came to the conclusion that Google is in fact a gatekeeper.
If that means everyone deserves to rank with their website, is of course an entirely different question.
> Lawmakers and courts in both the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, and other jurisdictions came to the conclusion that Google is in fact A gatekeeper.
[Emphasis added and capitalisation changed in both quotes -- CRC]
Yeah, the GP acknowledged that Google is a gateway to internet; they just denied that they're the gateway. See the difference? That is, according to the quote from you, also what the courts said.
They very loudly complained on X/Twitter and cried about losing all their revenue, business, etc.
> Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. That is exactly what Google admitted at the event. They do not understand how to demote all the spam blogs without also demoting legitimate niche websites.
Maybe that’s the purpose of our economic system? No inefficient fun?
You're missing a(t least one) piece of the puzzle.
This is what powers their empire, not selling phones or even GCE. Search is but a delivery vehicle of ads, maybe one of the most powerful but not the only one.
(Disclaimer: I don't buy or sell ads, and run an ad blocker in my browsers.)
The ads are annoying because they break the reading flow (I think it is called parallax when the ad moves with your scrolling, but slower - I hate that).
My brain just compensates to keep z smooth reading peace but I have no idea what the ad is about.
And with a monopoly, some of the surplus simply vanishes as deadweight loss.
Google makes nearly $500K in profit (out of $1.6M in revenue) per employee. It seems possible that they could potentially bring back some of the old work environment, or maybe even reduce overall encrapification, but there is little incentive to do so.
Hence this event where owners of affected websites were put in direct contact with the product managers and software developers working on the topic.
But yeah, in general Google is often not incentivized to play fair. See the demotion of price comparison websites after Google Shopping ads were placed on top of search results.
These days they have a lot of competition in ads scene (meta, tiktok, x, reddit, amazon) and also other are gunning at google search: perplexity, searchGPT, bing. Apple choosing OpenAI for Apple Intelligence. Amazon teaming with Anthropic for Alexa. On top of that antitrust in EU and USA.
That's the reason google is killing lots of projects or loosing on many fronts these days or they aggressively try to monetise other projects (Youtube, Manifest V3.0). If they don't win in this AI race or diversify revenue/business model enshitification will continue.
in theory, winning the AI race gives them more runway, but we've hit the limit of LLMs and there is a lot of hope that some magical Gen-AI daddy will come in and fix everything. even if they get there, will it be profitable compared to competitors? and for how long?
Yeah, this is a nice thought, but Google is still a ~$3T business and probably will be for at least the next decade or two.
There's no karma or justice in the world, only cutthroat businessmen. And Google hires as many of those as they can.
Life isn't fair, nature isn't fair, nothing made by man is fair.
The best we've got is providing people with freedom. And cutthroat businessmen have provided all the luxuries and food you have.
As an actual search engine, Google search is still not bad, but now one of the many, without a large edge it used to have; I try it when DDG does not bring results I want, or I query DDG when Google does not bring results I want.
Without comment on the rest of the article, I can personally confirm that this particular statement is disinformation. I was there, in person, at the Google Mountain View campus, on October 29, 2024 visiting as a representative of an external partner (and as a long ago former employee). I did not attend this event, but I was nearby the entire day. Throughout the day the building I was in was very busy, with many people coming and going and working at desks. At lunchtime, we walked to the Google cafe a few buildings away which was brimming with people, to the point where our group of three struggled to find a table to eat at.
Of course there may have been buildings on campus which were empty or sparsely utilized. But the area I was in (western end of Charleston Rd) was anything but empty. In the future, the author should try to stick to the truth when making their point.
So that would be October 28. Apparently, the office was closed that day. As the author was there on 29 as well, it’s still pretty misleading though.
If they'd been talking about a certain other place that I know, I would've wanted to shout "Exactly!", and would've implicitly believed that's what they saw.
There's a type who exhibits a combination of arrogance and self-interested fixation. There's no malice, and they aren't sociopaths, and they don't think of themselves as jerks. But they have a sense of superiority and entitlement, and can be aggressively, er, norms-bending, to get what they want.
Some environments seem to either attract them, or to nurture them. It's something unclear to me about the individual environment, not the external kind of organization (e.g., one high-prestige organization has a lot of it, but another high-prestige organization of the same kind doesn't).
I could attribute it to "culture", because I don't have any more specific theory, and play by ear how to try to filter or nurture it out of a collective. But I suspect there's a critical mass of that type gaining positions of influence in the organization, at which point the culture becomes irreversible, since there's too much arrogance to see it as a problem. At that point, I'd guess the rest of the people should be looking at their options for leaving, and also try not to think or behave like that type themselves.
There are now 5+ writeups from different attendees. They all agree on the larger points: Google has no solution to the problem. Google asked attendees if they have ideas for a solution. Google told people their content is good and they deserve to rank.
I have no idea why the site owner thinks their site was downranked (and the article never says: it assumes some context I lack), but I cynically wonder if it's related to the back-button and video-ad thing.
Edited to add: This article here provides some information about the meeting/roundtable thing described in TFA. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-creator-summit-38196.htm...
One day your analytics show you're getting less and less traffic from Google, while other sources remain constant. What else could be the reason?
I am sorry this is happening to the authors. Maybe it’s related to the scumminess of their blog, maybe it isn’t.
I experienced none of what you did.
Maybe you should try a decent browser on a decent phone.
In other words, I'm not saying their site deserves to be shown, but in general people do deserve a way to see why their site is in a weird status and have some documented path to redemption.
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Quoting the relevant bits for convenience:
> Undeterred, we then asked the only question that mattered: Why has Google shadowbanned our sites? [...] He insisted it is only done at the page level.
> Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night. [...]
> When asked what was wrong with our sites, as if we were jilted lovers in an abusive relationship being kicked to the curb, one Googler actually said “it’s not you it’s me”.
> Finally, someone bluntly asked, since nothing is wrong with our sites, how do we recover?
> Google’s elderly Chief Search Scientist answered, without an ounce of pity or concern, that there would be updates but he didn’t know when they’d happen or what they’d do. Further questions on the subject were met with indifference as if he didn’t understand why we cared.
Like this? https://developers.google.com/search/updates/core-updates
> have some documented path to redemption
Like this? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...
Are you saying site-owner is just incredibly dumb, and never noticed/tried those online resources despite being highly motivated to do so? Or is it that you think they found a useful answer they didn't like, and are lying?
I won't speculate about why they attended this event despite running a site filled with content that's at odds with Google's published recommendations for ranking well.