In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first content, designed to do not much more than rank highly on Google.
In a piece published today, she says HouseFresh has “virtually disappeared” from search results: search traffic has decreased 91 percent in recent months, from around 4,000 visitors a day in October 2023 to 200 a day today.
“We lost rankings we held for months (and sometimes years) for articles that are constantly being updated and improved based on findings from our first-hand and in-depth testing, our long-term experience with the products, and feedback from our readers,” Navarro writes. “Our article [previously ranked at #2] is now buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings. Sixty. Four.”
SEO-first affiliate content is being deployed ruthlessly at countless sites.
There is no obvious editorial necessity for Forbes to write articles like “Top 20 Largest Dog Breeds” or “What Fruits Can Dogs Eat?” — until you take a look at the sidebar of these stories, which are filled with dozens of affiliate links for pet insurance that Forbes gets a kickback from every time someone signs up.
Last year, when CNET was discovered to be using artificial intelligence tools to produce dozens of stories, it was SEO-heavy “evergreen” articles it focused on first. In the cases of Sports Illustrated and USA Today’s AI content debacles, it also was product reviews that were being churned out using automation tools.
The aggressive targeting of top Google search spots — with or without AI — by big media outlets affects small sites like HouseFresh the most. A significant loss of traffic for independent publishers is often enough to shutter an outlet entirely.
I've been using the internet since before the web existed.
I could swear there was a time that it didn't suck, but I can't remember when that was.
Of course, it sucks more now, but...
1995-2010 were the halcyon days. I miss the shit out of the web back then. And I've been around long enough that I set up some of the first mail relays and usenet mirrors when I was a teen, besides having one of the largest BBSs in Canada.
Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: "what's the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don't need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!" packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.
Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren't even ads, because the ad industry didn't know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.
The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000's was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.
But even back in the IRC and USENET days, there were plenty of asshole Nazis and petty arguments and such that it made the internet pretty unpleasant quite often if you didn't watch where you contributed.
That's why kid me had a handy stack of DDoS tools. My bot and I defended DALnet's #sailormoon and its denizens from Nazis, racists, and trolls. Yeah, I was a dork.
Which is great until they hit you back. I was lucky in that I was using my dad's university account which was pretty immune to petty bot DDoS attacks, but I was also not a Nazi troll. I was just attacked by Nazi trolls who thought they could take my connection down.
Dude! I see you everywhere! I think you're singlehandedly feeding the fediverse content! But anyway, yes, there were nazis and trolls, but in my experience, there was a group sense of decorum that we were all in this new utopia together and those folks got flamed by the whole pretty thoroughly.
I dunno, I had this conversation in another thread recently. I was 13 in 2000. The web was a disaster then. Sure, there were good parts, but every website was an outright attack on your computer. Java and Flash were everywhere and they were so easily exploited. I'd go to websites and they'd pop up 100 different windows of hardcore porn, audio on, the whole nine.
But yeah, it's just a different suck now.
There was a pre-Google search that was really bad. Then Google raised the standard by optimising for good results. The trick was to stay one move ahead of SEO devs. First people spammed keywords, then people spammed backlinks, etc.
The issue is now that it's very outdated and the best thing for websites to do is go spam AI articles about everything. The obvious move would be to move websites with higher specificity to the search query up.
The problem is that Google can do that and optimise for fewest actual clicks on links instead of needing to click 3 to get a result. Instead it's better to click 3 pages with 3 sets of ads then hopefully the "I got what I came for" feeling is in the goldilocks "enough to be interested but not to stop". This means more screentime, which is more ads that mean more money.
This is peak capitalism guuuys
It sucked back then, but it sucked happily. Now it's just sad.
Back then it was messy, you couldn't find anything, but at least everything worked as intended. Hell you could do a whois on something and actually get data back. You could email the netadmin of whatever place you had trouble with. Now it's just a wasteland of content free corpo sites.
The Internet has been gentrified. Sure, there were some tough places that you had to be careful about wandering into, but there were great experiences. Now it's this homogenous, cultivated experience.
Power corrupts. And those corrupted by power then redirect it to corrupt all they don't outright conquer.
I think it works as intended now, but it's just that the intended audience has changed. We all work for advertisers now.
At least if you follow the mainstream web experience. Luckily there are still nice places like this! :)
Although at least your computer doesn't slow to a crawl every time you go to the wrong Geocities or Tripod page with a million gifs and a custom cursor. Also, would you like to install Bonzi Buddy?
Also, for all of you who lived through the Eternal September, "me too!"