Found 4 bookmarks
Newest
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?
How Perplexity builds product
How Perplexity builds product
inside look at how Perplexity builds product—which to me feels like what the future of product development will look like for many companies:AI-first: They’ve been asking AI questions about every step of the company-building process, including “How do I launch a product?” Employees are encouraged to ask AI before bothering colleagues.Organized like slime mold: They optimize for minimizing coordination costs by parallelizing as much of each project as possible.Small teams: Their typical team is two to three people. Their AI-generated (highly rated) podcast was built and is run by just one person.Few managers: They hire self-driven ICs and actively avoid hiring people who are strongest at guiding other people’s work.A prediction for the future: Johnny said, “If I had to guess, technical PMs or engineers with product taste will become the most valuable people at a company over time.”
Typical projects we work on only have one or two people on it. The hardest projects have three or four people, max. For example, our podcast is built by one person end to end. He’s a brand designer, but he does audio engineering and he’s doing all kinds of research to figure out how to build the most interactive and interesting podcast. I don’t think a PM has stepped into that process at any point.
We leverage product management most when there’s a really difficult decision that branches into many directions, and for more involved projects.
The hardest, and most important, part of the PM’s job is having taste around use cases. With AI, there are way too many possible use cases that you could work on. So the PM has to step in and make a branching qualitative decision based on the data, user research, and so on.
a big problem with AI is how you prioritize between more productivity-based use cases versus the engaging chatbot-type use cases.
we look foremost for flexibility and initiative. The ability to build constructively in a limited-resource environment (potentially having to wear several hats) is the most important to us.
We look for strong ICs with clear quantitative impacts on users rather than within their company. If I see the terms “Agile expert” or “scrum master” in the resume, it’s probably not going to be a great fit.
My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People tend to lie to their manager, who lies to their manager. And if you want to talk to someone in another part of the org, you have to go up two levels and down two levels, asking everyone along the way.
Instead, what you want to do is keep the overall goals aligned, and parallelize projects that point toward this goal by sharing reusable guides and processes.
Perplexity has existed for less than two years, and things are changing so quickly in AI that it’s hard to commit beyond that. We create quarterly plans. Within quarters, we try to keep plans stable within a product roadmap. The roadmap has a few large projects that everyone is aware of, along with small tasks that we shift around as priorities change.
Each week we have a kickoff meeting where everyone sets high-level expectations for their week. We have a culture of setting 75% weekly goals: everyone identifies their top priority for the week and tries to hit 75% of that by the end of the week. Just a few bullet points to make sure priorities are clear during the week.
All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify gaps in prioritization and staffing.
At the beginning of each project, there is a quick kickoff for alignment, and afterward, iteration occurs in an asynchronous fashion, without constraints or review processes. When individuals feel ready for feedback on designs, implementation, or final product, they share it in Slack, and other members of the team give honest and constructive feedback. Iteration happens organically as needed, and the product doesn’t get launched until it gains internal traction via dogfooding.
all teams share common top-level metrics while A/B testing within their layer of the stack. Because the product can shift so quickly, we want to avoid political issues where anyone’s identity is bound to any given component of the product.
We’ve found that when teams don’t have a PM, team members take on the PM responsibilities, like adjusting scope, making user-facing decisions, and trusting their own taste.
What’s your primary tool for task management, and bug tracking?Linear. For AI products, the line between tasks, bugs, and projects becomes blurred, but we’ve found many concepts in Linear, like Leads, Triage, Sizing, etc., to be extremely important. A favorite feature of mine is auto-archiving—if a task hasn’t been mentioned in a while, chances are it’s not actually important.The primary tool we use to store sources of truth like roadmaps and milestone planning is Notion. We use Notion during development for design docs and RFCs, and afterward for documentation, postmortems, and historical records. Putting thoughts on paper (documenting chain-of-thought) leads to much clearer decision-making, and makes it easier to align async and avoid meetings.Unwrap.ai is a tool we’ve also recently introduced to consolidate, document, and quantify qualitative feedback. Because of the nature of AI, many issues are not always deterministic enough to classify as bugs. Unwrap groups individual pieces of feedback into more concrete themes and areas of improvement.
High-level objectives and directions come top-down, but a large amount of new ideas are floated bottom-up. We believe strongly that engineering and design should have ownership over ideas and details, especially for an AI product where the constraints are not known until ideas are turned into code and mock-ups.
Big challenges today revolve around scaling from our current size to the next level, both on the hiring side and in execution and planning. We don’t want to lose our core identity of working in a very flat and collaborative environment. Even small decisions, like how to organize Slack and Linear, can be tough to scale. Trying to stay transparent and scale the number of channels and projects without causing notifications to explode is something we’re currently trying to figure out.
#startups#business#product strategy#companies/Perplexity#ai#search#future#project management#job-titles#business/hierarchy#tech#examples#work/productivity#workflows#tools
·lennysnewsletter.com·
How Perplexity builds product
The Man Who Killed Google Search
The Man Who Killed Google Search
The relentless pursuit of growth and revenue by Google's ads and finance teams, led by Prabhakar Raghavan, has compromised the quality and integrity of Google Search, leading to the ouster of Ben Gomes, who prioritized user experience over profits
Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable, less transparent, and is dominated by search engine optimized aggregators, advertising, and outright spam.
Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.
In April 2011, the Guardian ran an interview with Raghavan that called him “Yahoo’s secret weapon,” describing his plan to make “rigorous scientific research and practice… to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,” and how under then-CEO Carol Bartz, “the focus has shifted to the direct development of new products.” It speaks of Raghavan’s “scientific approach” and his “steady, process-based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception that ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity,” a sentence I am only sharing with you because I need you to see how stupid it is, and how specious the tech press’ accolades used to be. This entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I’m actually astonished. What about Raghavan’s career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots before and said something? Am I insane?
Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. McKinsey has paid nearly $1bn over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. I’m getting sidetracked, but one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labor.
#enshittification#companies/google#seo#search#bts#opinion#business#metrics v humanities
·wheresyoured.at·
The Man Who Killed Google Search
Amazon discontinues charity donation program amid cost cuts : r/technology
Amazon discontinues charity donation program amid cost cuts : r/technology
when a customer wants to buy a product, they usually go straight to Amazon.com and enter what they’re looking for. But there’s also a large segment of customers who begin their search on google, and ends up at Amazon. Well guess what. When that type of search to purchase experience happens, Amazon has to pay google. Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google, and be good overall for the brand value of Amazon.
There is no way for a customer to go through the traditional shopping experience, and then during checkout decide they want to give a portion of their purchase to charity, because giving to charity isn't the point of the overall program. Amazon Smile was developed by the Traffic Optimization team, whose entire purpose is increasing efficiency and lowering costs of getting customers to Amazon. A team of Amazon employees whose sole purpose is doing good in the world doesn't exist, despite employees repeatedly asking for such a team to be built in pretty much every single all-hands meeting.
Literally everything the company does is about profits, and extended customer lifetime value. Everything. Even the charity programs are just designed to save Amazon money.
#business#advertising#search#insider#business/models#companies/amazon
·reddit.com·
Amazon discontinues charity donation program amid cost cuts : r/technology