Google cracks down on “Parasite SEO,” punishing established publishers
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Seriously. This change is what I want Google to do. Not spam up the top of the results with lying useless crap I didn't ask for.
I have gotten completely contradictory AI overview spam at the top when googling about medical conditions of all things - the thing is just babbling at you without any clue of what is being said, since obviously there is no person doing the talking.
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I think you're starting to get close to crux of the dead internet theory. The automation arms races mean a vanishingly small amount of content is human centric and novel. The rest are generated and consumed in some weird AI oruroborus.
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In my experience it's usually an excerpt summary of the first few results. Garbage in / garbage out more than the AI not working properly.
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Having spent close to a year on a project team using McKinsey consultants, when I now see a show featuring executives who have literally sold their soul to nefarious demons, I just assume those execs did so while working at McKinsey.
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But.. if its job is to provide answers based on those results.. and slight changes to phrasing produce diametrically opposed points of view.. exactly how can it be useful above just literally going to the sites?
There are a lot of cool uses of LLMs, but search and chatbots really so far aren't impressing me at all. It's like the whole world suddenly went all in on some shitty tech demos and can't admit it was a huge mistake.
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This is Google trying not to be evil but also lets sell lots of ads, hah. But also, props because crappy non-review reviews make peeps go to duckduckgo...
I was surprised this wasn't in the article as it was fairly well publicized: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
I was surprised this wasn't in the article as it was fairly well publicized: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
In February 2024, we published an article warning readers not to trust product recommendations from well-known newspapers and magazines ranking at the top of Google search results.
What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common?
They all know which are the best air purifiers for pet hair
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They can be very good at summarizing bodies of disparate information on the same subject, like tons of forum posts, reddit posts, SO posts, blogs, documentation, books, all at once. BUT, it is ONLY useful if you are already a subject matter expert or close to being one. YOU have to know enough to question the responses.
Lately I had ChatGPT help me write some webcomponents with the Lit framework. I've been doing web dev for years but I'm a bit out of date, so ChatGPT helped me crank out some code using the modern patterns of web components. However there were several times where, because of my knowledge and experience, I thought, "uhh that doesn't look right, why is it trying this hacky crap that's now built into modern browsers, it's like it's referencing an SO post from 2011." Because...it probably was. I was able to tell it "that looks out of date" and then it produced acceptable results.
If I didn't know any better I would have written garbage. But I did know better, so I could use it effectively.
Having that level of subject matter knowledge when using ChatGPT, and having the metacognitive ability to question yourself as well as the results.
The intersection between those users, and actual useful functionality of LLMs for which those users could use it, is...probably not a large set. The rest of the use cases are memes and bullshit nonsense.
Frankly the memes are what it's really useful for and where OpenAI should be investing. r/MemeEconomy could be a real thing!
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I usually find it includes a couple of them...which can be kind of stupid as you noted with the context dilution. It really depends on what the query is, sometimes useful, sometimes garbage.
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Google is just now noticing that 99% of what is published under the Forbes domain is a shit-tier content mill? It has been like that for over a decade.
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I think the Times bought Wirecutter because of their preexisting reputation.
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Google just mad that CBD gummy and pet insurance companies aren't advertising on Google directly.
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If your brand is irrelevant to the product you are peddling, why should your product get a boost because your brand is respected?
Apple could really boost the rank of C64 (Personal Computer) results in a generic PC search. Does that mean that the C64 pages published by Apple are more relevant than actual IBM PC compatible search results?
The ranking of an unrelated product being boosted by the site's unrelated reputation is what Google attacked.
If your product is actually relevant to the search prompt, then your site reputation shouldn't affect the ranking of your product in the search results. But a page advertising soap hosted by Apple.com shouldn't rank high in a search for computers (though under the old rules it would be promoted in the results because Apple.com)
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It's basically an almost universal rise and fall of search engines. C4 did much the same. In the beginning they were the best at returning relevant results. Then they tuned for best income, which combined with SEO just made the search worthless. That was the period when Google got started. They had such great success in the beginning because the competition optimized themselves out of the race.
Google at least has recognised the problem. Whether the fix will be more than cosmetic remains to be seen.
Unfortunately for users, there is no startup C4 or startup Google in sight to take over as "the search engine that actually answers my question".
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First party is the root domain owner. Their reputation is used in judging relevance.
Third party is the publisher who paid the first party site for use of their domain reputation to boost the search ranking of their product (especially useful when the product is unrelated to the first party's reputation as it pushes the irrelevant result up the ranks
)
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Quite profitably too. Which is why paid sponsorships are so popular
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I'm somewhat surprised that Google doesn't directly punish the actors here, if Forbes uses it's reputation to push garbage, why does Forbes's own reputation not take a big hit from it? I can see that this kind of scheme doesn't diminish how relevant the real content on Forbes is, but on the other hand, if there's no risk to leveraging their reputation to push trash there's no reason either for them to stop trying.
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So what are currently reputable product review sites? For example, if I'm looking for an ANC headphones or an air fryer, where should I go?
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It’s not as bad, but I’ve seen multiple uk newspaper websites appear in the search results offering product comparisons on things you really wouldn’t expect them to have knowledge about.
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Interesting, but note that for-profit wiki hoster Wikia (now Fandom) is not Wikipedia, even though Jimmy Wales founded both.
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[Elon selling reputation Blue Checks for $8]
Everyone: "That's just bad business"
Google: "Lol - we came up with that years ago"
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RandomReader_Delta_X
Smack-Fu Master, in training
When talking about websites and servers: the "first party" is the actual website you are connected with, including its servers and IP addresses. The "third party" is every other website on the same or different infrastructure hooking into the "first party" trough links, cookies, tracking systems, or even the classical paid spot to post something on the "first party".
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Consumer Reports flies under the radar, but they still maintain a defiant independence and refuse to sell their reputation.
Limited access without a paid membership. CR is supported by their members, not advertising or sponsors.
https://www.consumerreports.org/
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I am evidently getting too old to understand how the series of tubes works anymore.
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That's giving Google too much credit: the SEO guys certainly don't help; but the measure that became a target came from inside the house: Prabhakar Raghavan(brought in by Google for his, um, excellent? work burying Yahoo search) was troubled by the fact that there was not enough growth in queries; and the solution ended up being leaning on Gomes and the search team to make search worse so that you'd get more queries because people wouldn't just find what they were looking for and then leave to go do whatever that was.
It's a sordid story. Obviously it's the SEO guys who are striving to be the most visible aspect of the rot; but the weaknesses they exploit are products of internal pressures at Google; and the specific people there who determined that a worse product would make line go up.
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The other day I was trying to search for an old TV show someone had asked about and I explicitly put "live action" in the search query. The AI summary suggested an animated show as the first result and said something along the lines of "It is considered live action because of the realistic and dynamic animation."
No! It isn't! Nobody calls that live action!
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Well played Ars, this article comes up 7th on the front page of a UK Google search for best CBD gummies.
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Thank you for those links. This and it's February predecessor are the best articles I've ever read on an air-purifier review website.
But seriously, these are great articles diving deep into the "Best X" nonsense articles that have been plaguing the internet of late.
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And hopefully they will start to lower sites reputation for this kind of behavior, so that the algorithm will actively punish this behavior.
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Forbes is nowadays basically "vanity self-publishing", especially contributors/blogs section.
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I think it is just a matter of time before the reputation gets dragged along to the bottom.
That is the trick. Jump out just before it starts to hurt and try something different.
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The way this works is that Forbes has a really high search authority score, that means they rank high in search results because Google has deemed them trustworthy.
Years ago, many companies decided to "sell" postings to their site, essentially turning them into pay-to-post blogs, Forbes was one of them. At one point, a single post on Forbes could cost $5k (I'm not sure if you had to pay extra for the "as seen on Forbes" branding). So ScamCoin Ltd. could pay Forbes to post a legit looking advertorial (advertisement disguised as editorial) and it'd rank high in search because of Forbes reputation/authority score. The links back to other sites from that advertorial would also boost those sites since crosslinking play a roll in the index.
To the customer, this is very nefarious. They see a reputable company posting a positive article about a product/service and their guard is lowered because they don't know that the product company they're reading about is the same one that posted the article.
Forbes is the first party website, ScamCoin Ltd. (in my made-up example) would be the third party.
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~$2-5k per post depending on the topic. I think there was a site that would get you a quote for a bunch of sites that do this. A lot of "Investor News" style sites do this as well. There's a lot more than you might think and it's not just search results, there are entire networks of "influencers" that shill this way. There was a recent China-brand robovac launch, and one thing I noticed was that a bunch of mid-level (~50k subs) YT channels released raving reviews at the same time, all hitting the same talking points .. yet the reputable ones that did thorough testing did not. The reason is that they likely would have to sign an agreement limiting what they could say about the product and/or bullet points they had to mention (some YTers have discussed this in a few videos).
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No doubt. I keep getting articles in my news feed from Forbes that make them look like engadget now.
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It’s actually pretty easy for Google to beat SEO, they just have to rank links according to how the people doing the searches act when seeing those links. They had that all figured out ten years ago. But then someone realized that if you made people look through multiple pages of results, and then repeatedly search the same thing with slightly different terms, they could serve far more ads per successful search result, and so the algorithm was deliberately enshitified to optimize for ad revenue rather than user satisfaction.
You can see a similar pattern on YouTube, where spambot comments that would easily have been blocked by basic filters on any web forum 20 years ago are being allowed through, because Google can charge advertisers for the ads that they serve to the spambots.
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Hmm the cynic in me feels like this is somehow just google wanting to direct more traffic to their shopping links than it is to improve search results for their users.
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Google really is broken. There are many videos on this topic but I thought this one really outlined the issues in a smart way.
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