In March, Gisele Navarro saw Google Search traffic to her website, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh rates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020 when the pandemic created a surge in demand for air purification, and at its peak the business had fifteen paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio Ashton founded.) Google’s traffic to HouseFresh had been slowly declining since last October, but the recent drop was much more dramatic, from about four thousand daily search references or clicks. through Google results, at about three hundred. The site makes money from affiliate fees, taking a small cut when a reader follows a HouseFresh link to buy an air purifier online; less traffic means less revenue, and the site can now only afford to pay one full-time employee. Navarro told me, “We’re living our lives as if Google disappeared for us.”
The drop in traffic to HouseFresh has coincided with internal changes to Google’s search function. In late 2023, Google released a series of algorithm modifications; with a “core update” in March, it made these changes permanent. HouseFresh reviews used to rank well in Google searches for air purifiers, but lately their articles have been buried under recommendations from brand name publications: Better Homes and Gardens, People, Architectural Digest ( which is owned by Condé Nast, the parent company of The New). Yorker). Navarro even noticed Rolling Stone, the music magazine owned by Penske Media, recommending anti-mold humidifiers. To her, it seemed as if media companies were taking revenue from affiliates without the expertise that her own site had worked hard to cultivate, and it seemed like Google was rewarding them for doing so. HouseFresh followed Google’s guidelines for search engine optimization or SEO:suggests the company that websites “offer original information” and demonstrate “expertise, expertise, authority and reliability”, but this no longer seemed to have any effect. “There are people who feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro said. “It’s lying to our faces or flashing gas.” He started publishing articles on HouseFresh about declining search traffic, with headlines like “How Google Is Killing Indie Sites Like Ours.” Articles got more search traffic than reviews.
In May, we took a look at the inner workings of Google Search, based on a leak of twenty-five hundred pages of internal company documentation. The files were apparently uploaded to GitHub by an unknown party in March, but only gained attention when Erfan Azimi, a search engine optimization consultant, sent them to Rand Fishkin, a veteran SEO expert. and industry commentator. The leak comes from the Google Search API, or application programming interface, a sort of tag directory that outside developers can reference in their code to get information from Google’s internal infrastructure. This is an extensive list of coding tags that are incomprehensible to the lay reader. But the documents identify many of the variables that Google’s search algorithm takes into account, without specifying how those variables are weighted or how a site’s ranking is ultimately determined.
Some of the information revealed appears to contradict claims the company has made publicly. One variable that Google Search apparently tracks is when and where users click, not just on the main Google site, but on any page accessed in Google’s Chrome browser. In the past, Google has repeatedly denied having this data in its search algorithm. Fishkin told me that among SEO experts, this “reinforces a belief that Google’s public representatives have long lied, misled, and omitted key information.” The algorithm also flags personal sites or blogs with the “smallPersonalSite” tag, which some have interpreted as a sign that the company is demoting them in search results in favor of larger posts. (A Google spokesman denied that the company is targeting small sites, saying the leaked documents may contain “out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information.”) A dominant factor in Google Search rankings appears to be be an existing company or name recognition of the site. This represents a change. fish fish he wrote on his blog, which is hosted by his company, SparkToro, that “Google no longer rewards cheeky, smart, SEO-savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, the forms of popularity that can be measured by search and established domains that searchers already know and click on.” Hence, perhaps, the way HouseFresh lost out to Better Homes and Gardens, although anecdotally even legacy publications have recently received a hit to Google search traffic.
Google Search’s decline can be traced back to the recent round of algorithm changes. I wrote in 2022 about the deterioration of search results as authoritative sites were increasingly overwhelmed by over-optimized clickbait results and text from Google’s “Quick Answers” feature. The promise of the Google search engine is that it will answer queries with the maximum “relevant results“; if website builders provide enough high-quality content on a given topic, readers searching for that topic will find their way there. Business models have been built on this promise; indeed, much of the Internet is structured around this promise. But SEO has somehow turned out to be a failure, in part because its best practices have proven too easily manipulated. Drawing on the vocabulary of hackers, Navarro made a distinction between “white hat” SEO, which tries to follow the rules by creating valuable content with the right format, and “black hat” SEO, which dresses up poor quality content with format tricks to play with. Search Results. An excess of the latter has accelerated the collapse of SEO. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence threatens to completely turn the search model upside down. Google’s recently launched Gemini products aim to answer queries within the browser, so a user doesn’t have to visit an external website; This model seems very likely to further decrease search traffic. (The company quickly backtracked after Gemini-driven responses proved unreliable.) Navarro compared the search engine to real-world infrastructure: “Google, they own the roads. They closed our way; they closed a lot of roads. Nobody can get where we are.”
Google recently reached out to HouseFresh and had a call between members of the search team and Navarro, as well as the head of Retro Dodo, an indie gaming site that has also been affected by the SEO changes. Navarro told me he tried to convey to Google the dire impact algorithm changes can have on a site like his. The company asked how HouseFresh researches and writes its articles, Navarro said, presumably to better gauge how the algorithm should treat the site; they apologized, Navarro said, but did not commit to any specific changes. (A Google spokesperson told me, “We take feedback from creators seriously, using their insights to improve our systems.”) HouseFresh is already developing other ways to bring audiences closer to its content. Ironically, one method they’ve landed on is turning the site’s text reviews into videos and then posting them to YouTube, a platform that’s also owned by Google. Videos tend to rank well in search, even when the corresponding articles do not. (It’s hard to escape Google, which is why the US Department of Justice recently took the company to trial for monopolistic practices.) Navarro is also working with other independent websites to create DIY recommendations that aren’t based on search engines, reminiscent of the first web blogs and thematic directories, which served as the yellow pages of the Internet. “We need to start building something that’s human, that doesn’t have algorithms involved,” he said.
At the time of its founding in 1998, Google stated its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With the company’s new range of products and updates, however, it seems content to bury the same material that was previously dedicated to the surface business. What’s most accessible isn’t necessarily what’s most relevant anymore, and so a major breakdown may be looming: if website owners don’t trust Google to serve them traffic, and consumers don’t trust Google to offer them answers, then Are your search engine results really optimal for someone? “They made us all believe in their mission,” Navarro said. “Now I don’t even know if they believe in their mission.” ♦
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