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HouseFresh disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?
HouseFresh disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?

Claude Summary - HouseFresh's Battle Against Google's Algorithm and Big Media Dominance

Key takeaway

HouseFresh, an independent publisher, has experienced a dramatic 91% loss in search traffic due to Google's algorithm changes, which favor big media sites and product listings, prompting them to adapt their strategy and fight back against what they perceive as an unfair digital landscape dominated by manipulative SEO tactics.

Summary

  • HouseFresh published an exposé in February 2024 warning readers about untrustworthy product recommendations from well-known publications ranking high in Google search results.

  • The article explores tactics used by big media publishers to outrank independent sites, including:

    • Dotdash Meredith's alleged "keyword swarming" strategy:

      • Identifying small sites with high rankings for specific terms
      • Publishing vast amounts of content to push competitors down in rankings
      • Leveraging their network of websites to dominate search results

    • Forbes.com's expansion into pet-related content:

      • Publishing thousands of articles about pets to build authority in the space
      • Creating statistics round-ups to encourage backlinks
      • Using this content to support pet insurance affiliate marketing

    • Legacy publications being acquired and repurposed:

      • Example of Money magazine being bought by Ad Practitioners LLC
      • Shifting focus to intent-based personal finance content surfaced from search results
      • Expanding into unrelated topics (e.g., air purifiers, garage door openers) for affiliate revenue

    • Use of AI-generated content by major publishers:

      • Sports Illustrated and USA Today caught publishing AI-written content under fake author names
      • Outsourcing to third-party providers like AdVon Commerce for commerce content partnerships
      • Layoffs of journalists while increasing AI-generated commercial content

  • Google announced a "site reputation abuse" spam policy update, effective May 5, 2024, aimed at curbing manipulative search ranking practices.

  • HouseFresh experienced a 91% loss in search traffic following Google's March 2024 core update.

  • The author criticizes Google's current search results, noting:

    • Prevalence of generic "best of" lists from big media sites
    • Abundance of Google Shopping product listings (e.g., 64 product listings for a single query)
    • Lack of specificity in addressing user queries (e.g., budget-friendly options)

  • HouseFresh disputes various theories about why they've been demoted in search rankings, including:

    • Use of affiliate links
    • Conducting keyword research
    • Not being an established brand

  • The article suggests Google Search may be "broken," potentially due to:

    • The merging of Google Ads and Search objectives
    • Changes in leadership, with the Head of Google Ads taking over as Head of Google Search in 2020

  • HouseFresh plans to adapt by:

    • Focusing on exposing scam products and critiquing big media recommendations
    • Expanding their presence on various social media and content platforms
    • Leveraging Google's emphasis on fresh content to maintain visibility
    • Using Google's own broken results to get their takedowns in front of people

  • The author expresses frustration with the current state of search results and advocates for a more open and diverse web ecosystem.

  • HouseFresh remains committed to producing quality content and fighting for visibility despite the challenges posed by Google's algorithm changes and the dominance of big media tactics.

Through this strategy, Dotdash Meredith allegedly identifies small sites that have cemented themselves in Google results for a specific (and valuable) term or in a specific topic, with the goal of pushing them down the rankings by publishing vast amounts of content of their own.
“IAC’s vision for Dotdash Meredith — to be a flywheel for generating advertising and commerce revenue — is finally starting to pan out.  […] More than 80% of Dotdash Meredith’s traffic and digital revenue come from its core sites, such as Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and Southern Living, that deliver a form of what one might think of as commerce-related service journalism.” — Allison Schiff, managing editor of AdExchanger
To give the pet insurance affiliate section of Forbes the best chance to succeed, the Forbes Advisor team pumped out A LOT of content about pets and built A LOT of links around the topic with statistics round-ups designed to obfuscate the original sources in order to increase the chances of people linking to Forbes.com when using the stats
All this hard work paid off in the form of an estimated 1.1 million visitors each month to the pet insurance section of Forbes Advisor
This happened at the expense of every site that has produced content about dogs, cats, and other pets for many years before Forbes.com decided to cash in on pet insurance affiliate money.  They successfully replicated this model again and again and again across the huge variety of topics that Forbes covers today.
Step one: buy the site. Step two: fire staff. Step three: revamp the content strategy to drive new monetizable traffic from Google
“As a journalist, all of this depresses me,” wrote Brian Merchant, the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. He continued, “If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.”
Here’s a recap so far: Digital media conglomerates are developing SEO content strategies designed to out-publish high-ranking specialist independent publishers. Legacy media brands are building in-house SEO content teams that tie content creation to affiliate marketing revenue in topics that have nothing to do with their original areas of expertise. Newly created digital media companies are buying once successful and influential blogs with the goal of driving traffic to casino sites. Private equity firms are partnering with companies like AdVon to publish large amounts of AI-generated content edited by SEO-focused people across their portfolio of media brands. And here’s the worst part: Google’s algorithm encourages all of them to rinse and repeat the same strategies by allowing their websites to rank in top positions for SEO-fueled articles about any topic imaginable. Even in cases when the articles have been written by AI and published under fake authors.
#seo#companies/google#enshittification#advertising#magazines#platforms#internet#business#trends#search
·housefresh.com·
HouseFresh disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?
The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z
The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z

shift from traditional notions of information literacy to "information sensibility" among Gen Zers, who prioritize social signals and peer influence over fact-checking. The research by Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary, reveals that Gen Zers spend their digital lives in "timepass" mode, engaging with light content and trusting influencers over traditional news sources.

Comment sections for social validation and information signaling

#stats#generations/genz#trends#social media#news#misinfo#tiktok#companies/google
·businessinsider.com·
The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z
Why Success Often Sows the Seeds of Failure - WSJ
Why Success Often Sows the Seeds of Failure - WSJ
Once a company becomes an industry leader, its employees, from top to bottom, start thinking defensively. Suddenly, people feel they have more to lose from challenging the status quo than upending it. As a result, one-time revolutionaries turn into reactionaries. Proof of this about-face comes when senior executives troop off to Washington or Brussels to lobby against changes that would make life easier for the new up and comers.
Years of continuous improvement produce an ultra-efficient business system—one that’s highly optimized, and also highly inflexible. Successful businesses are usually good at doing one thing, and one thing only. Over-specialization kills adaptability—but this is a tough to trap to avoid, since the defenders of the status quo will always argue that eking out another increment of efficiency is a safer bet than striking out in a new direction.
Long-tenured executives develop a deep base of industry experience and find it hard to question cherished beliefs. In successful companies, managers usually have a fine-grained view of “how the industry works,” and tend to discount data that would challenge their assumptions. Over time, mental models become hard-wired—a fact that makes industry stalwarts vulnerable to new rules. This risk is magnified when senior executives dominate internal conversations about future strategy and direction.
With success comes bulk—more employees, more cash and more market power. Trouble is, a resource advantage tends to make executives intellectually lazy—they start believing that success comes from outspending one’s rivals rather than from outthinking them. In practice, superior resources seldom defeat a superior strategy. So when resources start substituting for creativity, it’s time to short the shares.
One quick suggestion: Treat every belief you have about your business as nothing more than a hypothesis, forever open to disconfirmation. Being paranoid is good, becoming skeptical about your own beliefs is better.
#tech#trends#startups#faang#companies/google#capitalism#americanism
·archive.is·
Why Success Often Sows the Seeds of Failure - WSJ
Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic
Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic
For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself. The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.
Google’s product managers are each charged with finding ways to increase the profitability of their little corner of the googleverse. That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block. What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get. Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible. That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits. The exec who decided to save money by reducing the stringency of phone number checking for business accounts didn’t announce this in a company-wide memo. When you’re eating your seed-corn, it’s imperative that you do so behind closed doors, and tell no one what you’ve done. Like any sleight-of-hand artist, you want the audience to see the outcome of the trick (the cost savings), not how it’s done (exposing every searcher in the world to fraud risk to save a buck).
Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.
your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.
#capitalism#trends#enshittification#companies/google#faang#companies/apple
·pluralistic.net·
Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic
Fake It ’Til You Fake It
Fake It ’Til You Fake It
On the long history of photo manipulation dating back to the origins of photography. While new technologies have made manipulation much easier, the core questions around trust and authenticity remain the same and have been asked for over a century.
The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8, however, feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability.
We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.
The questions that are being asked of the Pixel 8’s image manipulation capabilities are good and necessary because there are real ethical implications. But I think they need to be more fully contextualized. There is a long trail of exactly the same concerns and, to avoid repeating ourselves yet again, we should be asking these questions with that history in mind. This era feels different. I think we should be asking more precisely why that is.
The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.
#trends#photography#computational photography#faang#misinfo#photoshop#history#tech#companies/google
·pxlnv.com·
Fake It ’Til You Fake It
Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.
Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees).
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:
These videos go into Tiktok users' ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience – the rest of the time, it's full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.
"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count.
"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it.
The algorithm creates conditions for which the necessity of ads exists
For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).
every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to se
I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money.
Compuserve could have "monetized" its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the "From:" line on email before you opened the message – charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening – but they didn't.
Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.
Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four"
policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created
technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.
even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see.
#platforms#internet#tiktok#trends#product strategy#advertising#metrics v humanities#SEO spam#business/models#companies/google#companies/meta
·pluralistic.net·
Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Why Google Missed ChatGPT
Why Google Missed ChatGPT
Even if chatbots were to fix their accuracy issues, Google would still have a business model problem to contend with. The company makes money when people click ads next to search results, and it’s awkward to fit ads into conversational replies. Imagine receiving a response and then immediately getting pitched to go somewhere else — it feels slimy, and unhelpful. Google thus has little incentive to move us beyond traditional search, at least not in a paradigm-shifting way, until it figures out how to make the money aspect work. In the meantime, it’ll stick with the less impressive Google Assistant.
“Google doesn’t inherently want you, at an inherent level, to just get the answer to every problem. Because that might reduce the need to go click around the web, which would then reduce the need for us to go to Google.”
#tech#trends#advertising#LLMs#companies/google
·bigtechnology.com·
Why Google Missed ChatGPT