Hi Gisele! I love this. Investigative, evidence-led and genuinely interesting end-to-end. I feel like this prevalent issue doesn't get anywhere near enough exposure, so it's good to see it being communicated so well here. I come from an agency that champions content that is genuinely expert-led for SEO, but I often feel like we're swimming against the tide. When you see patterns like this, it's very hard to maintain integrity when I know how easy it is to use cheaper tactics to gain rankings much easier or that you couldn't achieve otherwise. Ultimately, though, we encourage clients do the right thing, knowing that the output should be valued more by the right kind of consumer/customer and maybe, eventually Google.nnWould you mind if I connect with you on LinkedIn so I can follow for more content like this and your made-for-Google BS piece? https://www.linkedin.com/in/jburtonuk/

I broadly agree that Google has prioritized revenue over search quality for quite several years now, and our experience and many others match up with this change in focus.nnEd Zitron talks in detail about this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

I don't think this is the issue at all now. We can see that Google is pushing 'sponsored' content which means they are prioritizing the pages that have invested and paid them directly versus the publishers (us) who the ad content is shown through. Advertisers may have complained about their ads not getting clicks through blogs etc. and so Google decided to push their advertisers to the forefront (page 1 searches and AI) to ensure clicks and ROI. That's just my opinion though.

Gracias por leer y por los consejos! Hemos estado creciendo nuestro canal de YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@HouseFresh/) y nuestras redes con buenos resultados. Todo lo que ha pasado en 2023 y 2024 nos enseñó que no podemos poner todos nuestros huevos en la misma canasta.

Thank you for taking the time to read it and for sharing your experience, Hayden! We are slowly but surely rising from the ashes of the Google apocalypse that 2024 was for HouseFresh. We recorded a podcast episode a month or so ago where we covered the aftermath of this article and shared our experience visiting Google HQ to discuss the things we wrote about here with their engineers: https://youtu.be/aye4V4WXXzQ

This is an amazing and enlightening article pulling back the curtain on a problem I've quietly had for a long time now. I loved every second of it and I hope you all the best!

Thanks, NikitannI do feel more hopeful after we meet with Google this week, but who knows what the future will bring.

That's a great article. Thank you for sharing it, and I hope that Google changes its approach that started to favour big media publishers flooding the SERPs with average content stuffed with affiliate links.

Thank you! Our Midea cube is going strong in our basement, and we use it for Youtube, so I can recommend that device. I'm sure you have seen our page, but if not, here is our list of current recommendations: https://housefresh.com/best-dehumidifiers-we-tested/nnHope your grandfather liked the article too!

i found this via we're in hells video the internet is over and I had high hopes but this was an amazing read ive forwarded this onto my grandfather as this confirms everything hes been talking about. Ive been looking into buying a dehumidifier for months but ive been trying to wait it out until black friday and im so happy ive found a site i can trust to give honest reviews i live in a pretty tropical area and my old machine is awful.

Básicamente, Google no llegó a ser capaz de poder diferenciar entre los expertos y pseudoesxpertos y se fue por el camino más fácil ... que la "mayoría" decida. Sin embargo, el mundo está cambiando y ahora es muy posible generar tráfico hacia un sitio web, hacia una página de Facebook, hacia un producto específico usando los reels de Facebook, los shorts de Youtube o los videos cortos en Tiktok. En lugar de escribir, podrían grabar lo que hacen e igual hacer comparaciones y verdades reveladas. Estas plataformas están pagando muy bien por este contenido, que quizás sea por esto que Google realizó cambios tan drásticos... lo de ahora no es la lectura, sino el video, la rapidez.

[…] users, though, the results have been mixed. Some people have complained that small publishers have all but disappeared from Google, leaving major publishers like Forbes to rake in more clicks and earnings than […]

Thank you, Jakar! I really hope so too, but I also have to plan for them to not fix this so I am putting all my effort into YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW5aDZyLh2s8hOE18uqqrWgnnThanks for taking the time to comment. n

Very excellently written. Hope we see new results where expertise, regardless of size is taken seriously and given its proper due. Not sure when that might be, but I hope sooner than later.

Thank you so much for your kind words, for taking the time to read and for your comment <3

You know, this is something others have suggested as well, and it could be an interesting experiment to run. That said, we have discussed ads many times, and we always decide against them because we hate them as users, so we wouldn't want to force them on our readers. I guess a part of this has to do with the fact that we are stubborn and we consciously made decisions like telling people not to buy a product (when we would make money if they did) or not having ads on the site because we are trying to build something special. But this approach is clearly not working for Google search.

These issues seem to be everywhere! I've received reports from multiple countries where the search results have been taking over by big media sites with copypasted Amazon information. We're drowning in this stuff.

Thank you for reading and for commenting! "We might have a couple years of enjoying a small, exclusive mini-Internet before the bots arrived to spam it." I've been thinking the same thing, so I'm working on something...

That was really enjoyable to read. Really in depth and full of substance. The internet is becoming worse as time goes by. And it's becoming difficult to find pages like these

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Is it that HouseFresh isn't one of the big boys, or is it that the 16 big companies both dominate and play nice by Google? I notice you don't have Google Ads on your site. Maybe sites that "play nice" with Google (in other words, have Google Display ads and other Google technologies, like Google Analytics) are the sites that Google favors. Google is a revenue machine, so they have an incentive to drive traffic to sites that will maximize their revenue, right? And another way to maximize revenue would be to send to a site that is brand that then drives to other brand sites (like display ads often do), but then further down the page drives to brand and non-brand clickbait (so under the display ads there are clickbait ads, often from Taboola or Outbrain), and those links go to the same big brand, to another big brand, or to clickbait sites that typically get clicks to other clickbait sites and sometimes brand sites, often through other Google display ads and sometimes through more Taboola/Outbrain ads. So maybe Google optimizes for revenue from a website as well as all the downstream revenue from the website. This would explain why sites like https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/ and yours are struggling to the extent that they drive referral income that Google doesn't get a cut of... which probably explains why The Penny Hoarder now has Google Display ads. In other words, maybe you just need a "reasonable" amount of Google Display advertising added to your site. Not fun, and Google is trying to control you, and you'd be bowing to the man, but just a thought!

Best of searches got useless on Google in the last years. Same happens also in other regions like Germany. Simple searches for Best Washingmaschine will result in a full page of results with same copied fake reviews across many popular sites. Google needs to fix this ASAP!!!

Thank you for this breath of fresh air regarding Google, mega-publishers, AI, and the whole ugly mess the Internet has become. As a writer ("content provider") and early Internet worker, I am disgusted and vaguely ashamed by what we've become. nnI've been telling small business clients for a while now: stop obsessing on SEO, stop spending all your time and energy on social media platforms. None of these tech entities cares whether you succeed. They just want you to create free content for them. Maybe it's time to resuscitate real publishing, use subscriptions to pay for content rather than relying on ads or affiliate links, or take ourselves offline before all of our voices, content, writing, etc are scraped and regurgitated by AI and these very publishers taken to task in this blog post. nnOr go underground. We might have a couple years of enjoying a small, exclusive mini-Internet before the bots arrived to spam it.

The problem is that many alternatives, like Duck Duck Go, KAGI, Ecosia, etc., use the Bing or Google index. Since our drop, the traffic from alternative search engines as a % of total traffic is higher but still a fairly small amount due to the domination of Google as it currently has 81.95% of all searches.n

Thanks Dave! Your support is very much appreciated, thanks for taking the time to comment.

Man that was a good read! Talk about being on point with your arguments. Keep fighting the good fight.

Great article. How do these ranking change with other search engine?

[…] also don’t know exactly how smallPersonalSite is defined or used, but I do know that there is a lot of evidence of small sites losing most of their traffic and Google is sending less traffic to the long tail of the […]

And I'm not even surprised... Thank you for reading, James! We just published a follow-up, in case you haven't read it: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

The worst part about searching for this article after hearing about it: "house fresh Google update". Guess what, reddit ranks no.1 for this result for me. Says everything.

[…] How Google is killing independent sites like ours – HouseFresh by […]

Thank you so much for taking the time to read the article and for writing such an insightful comment, Kevin. You touched upon so many important issues the web is facing right now. I read a hopeful article today from Molly White that covered some of these points and ended with 'We can have a different web, if we want it.' These platforms will be nothing without the users. Sharing the article here in case you want to read it: https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

Giselle Great article. Which in my view only skirts the tip of the iceberg at what is going on online. Look at all the social media platfroms, meta/facebook youtube. Even Amazon, gumtree, done deal etcnnFull of adverts that breach advertising regulations across borders. Full of adverts that are engaged in fraud. Or push poor quality, poorly made chinese made products at inflated prices. nnMany products that people find do not meet safety and quality regulations in Europe and the USA.nnThey use a mass of fake accounts to try and make out sales are taking place and people are satisfied with their products. But every now and then a real comment from a victim drops in. How a person received a device of poor quality and so on. Which exposes what is going on.nnThis is all you see on all these platforms now, adverts for wonder cures, rolex watches, wonder cctv cameras, Gimbals, bitcoin and wonder investment schemes. Its just dominated by one big massive scam on people.nnPolly Weston at the BBC with her dehumidifier article exposed the drop shipping of poor substandard products that breach all the consumer rights legislation. Which was advertised through one of these platformsnnThe common denominator is this. Those that run and own google, Meta, youtube Amazon etc. Are wedded to algorithms to do the vetting to prevent fraud and scams. nnThere is very little if any human auditing. Depending on a tired and jaded public reporting what they see as being in breach of the platform rules. But people have given up because they do not see any action by the platforms in response to their reports.nn As a result the scammers and drop shippers of poor quality garbage have learned how to subvert the algorithms. Every platform is awash. Nobody now can know for certain that what they buy through websites will be the real genuine article of the quality they expect. This goes for Amazon. Its just become a mass of Chinese manufactured copies being sold and priced as the genuine article.nnFake products, fake review, fake accounts providing reviews, fake account after fake account used as a tool to decieve and subvertnnThe social media platforms that are taking the adverts are taking in the money, and they are profiting off of the back of scams being inflicted on those that use their platforms.nnThe internet has been like the wild west for a while. But now it is totally out of control. It now needs proper regulation and enforcement. That deceptive marketing should be outlawed and those platforms that do not make effective efforts to prevent it should receive massive fines from regulators.nnTRUTH should be a requirement in all journalism and articles and posts made on any social media platform. What I mean is that there has to be concerted attempts to stop all the deceit, distortion, manipulations and miss-information that is allowed to take place which creates division across society.nnIt should be a requirement that if anyone makes any statement. That it should be true. Nobody should be able to make any statements that are innuendo and insinuation. Truth or nothing, barred from taking part if what someone says is found to be untruthfull and dishonest. nnREGULATION AND TOUGH POLICING OF THAT REGULATION IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD TO SAVE US ALL FROM THE SCAMMER CULT

Thank you so much for reading our article and sharing your experience with this issue. nnUnfortunately, our website has lost over 90% of its search traffic from Google since we published this article, but we will not give up.nnI'm about to publish a follow-up article to share what we learned since we published David VS Digital Goliaths, as many people reached out to us, including employees at Google and writers working with some of these big media sites.

Came from an LMG Clips video, and I have to thank you for this article. It was eye-opening with really insightful sources about an issue running rampant across my most frequented corners of the internet, and it has not only personally taught me about the traps and state of digital reviews, but it has also saved me from buying an overpriced printer based off of one of those junk roundups. Hope for nothing but the best for Housefresh, and the future of digital journalism.

[…] The 16 (or 12, or 9, or 23) Best Air Purifiers For Pet Hair. I’m not gonna read this on the air, but you might learn something about the way the web works now by at least skimming it.https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ […]

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[…] How Google is letting us all down: https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ […]

[…] might have noticed a post from HouseFresh doing the rounds, especially if you have anything to do with creating content intended to generate affiliate […]

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[…] published an excellent tirade against Google two days ago, How Google is killing independent sites like ours. Today, I decided to look at some of the “high-quality content” HouseFresh is […]

[…] How Google is killing independent sites like ours from HouseFresh talks about an ongoing complaint from smaller publishers and site owners about how they are constantly being outranked by larger publishers and site owners in Google Search. The irony here is that story is currently being outranked by Reddit – no joke. […]

[…] Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations 519 by beavershaw | 257 comments . […]

[…] Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations 513 by beavershaw | 255 comments on Hacker News. […]