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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?
How Product Recommendations Broke Google
How Product Recommendations Broke Google
Established publishers seeking relief from the whims of social-media platforms and a brutal advertising environment found in product recommendations steady growth and receptive audiences, especially as e-commerce became a more dominant mode of shopping. Today, these businesses are materially significant — in a 2023 survey, 41 percent of surveyed media companies said that e-commerce accounted for more than a fifth of their revenue, which few can afford to lose. It is a relatively new way in which publishers have become reacquainted — after social-media traffic disappeared and “pivots to video” completed their rotations — with queasy feelings of dependence on massive tech companies, from Facebook and Google to Amazon and, well, Google.
Time magazine announced a brand called Time Stamped, “a project to make perplexing choices less perplexing by supplying our readers with trusted reviews and common sense information,” with “a rigorous process for testing products, analyzing companies,” and making recommendations. In early 2024, the Associated Press announced its own recommendation site, AP Buyline, as an “initiative designed to simplify complex consumer-made decisions by providing its audience with reliable evaluations and straightforward insights,” based on “a thorough method of testing items, evaluating companies and suggesting choices.” Both sites currently recommend money-related products and services, including credit cards, debt-consolidation loans, and insurance policies, categories that can command very high commissions; the AP reportedly plans to expand to home products, beauty, and fashion this month.
Time Stamped and AP Buyline share strikingly similar designs, layouts, and sensibilities. Their content is broadly informative but timid about making strong judgments or comparisons — an AP Buyline article about “The Best Capital One Credit Cards for 2024” heartily recommends nine of them. The writer credited for the article can also be found on Time Stamped writing about Chase credit cards, banks, and rental-car insurance. On both sites, if you look for it, you’ll also find a similar disclaimer. For Time: The information presented here is created independently from the TIME editorial staff. For the AP: AP Buyline’s content is created independently of The Associated Press newsroom. By independently, both companies mean that their product-recommendation sites are operated by a company called Taboola.
Over the years, Taboola, which is best understood as an advertising company, became a major player in affiliate marketing, too, through its acquisition of Skimlinks, a popular service for adding affiliate tags to content. In 2023, it started pitching a product called Taboola Turnkey Commerce, which claims to offer the benefits of starting a product-recommendation sub-brand minus the hassle of actually building an operation.
As her site has disappeared from view on Google, Navarro has been keeping an eye on popular search terms to see what’s showing up in its place. Legacy publishers seem to be part of Google’s plan, but a recent emphasis on what the company calls “perspectives” could also be in play. Reddit content is getting high placement as it contains a lot of conversations about products from actual customers and users. As its visibility in Google has increased, though, so has the prevalence of search-adjacent Reddit spam. Since the update has started rolling out, Navarro says, she has “seen a lot of generic review sites” getting ranked with credible-sounding names, .org domains, and content ripped straight from Amazon reviews.
“You can search all day and learn nothing,” she says. “It’s like trying to find information inside of Walmart.”
For now, Navarro is unimpressed with these AI experiments. “It’s just shut-up-and-buy,” she says — if you’re doing this search in the first place, you’re probably looking for a bit more information. In its emphasis on aggregation, its reliance on outside sources of authority, and its preference for positive comparison and recommendation over criticism, it also feels familiar: “Google is the affiliate site now.”
#SEO spam#enshittification#ideals#internet#search#companies/google#AI#marketing#advertising
·nymag.com·
How Product Recommendations Broke Google
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
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
Pluralistic: Google’s enshittification memos
Pluralistic: Google’s enshittification memos
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies: https://killedbygoogle.com/
the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.
With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.
Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.
"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit." And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."
Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."
In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape." Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).
#enshittification#companies/google#SEO spam#search
·pluralistic.net·
Pluralistic: Google’s enshittification memos