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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
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
Google vs. ChatGPT vs. Bing, Maybe — Pixel Envy
Google vs. ChatGPT vs. Bing, Maybe — Pixel Envy
People are not interested in visiting websites about a topic; they, by and large, just want answers to their questions. Google has been strip-mining the web for years, leveraging its unique position as the world’s most popular website and its de facto directory to replace what made it great with what allows it to retain its dominance.
Artificial intelligence — or some simulation of it — really does make things better for searchers, and I bet it could reduce some tired search optimization tactics. But it comes at the cost of making us all into uncompensated producers for the benefit of trillion-dollar companies like Google and Microsoft.
Search optimization experts have spent years in an adversarial relationship with Google in an attempt to get their clients’ pages to the coveted first page of results, often through means which make results worse for searchers. Artificial intelligence is, it seems, a way out of this mess — but the compromise is that search engines get to take from everyone while giving nothing back. Google has been taking steps in this direction for years: its results page has been increasingly filled with ways of discouraging people from leaving its confines.
#ai#trends#search#internet#platforms#metrics v humanities#LLMs#companies/microsoft#companies/OpenAI#companies/google
·pxlnv.com·
Google vs. ChatGPT vs. Bing, Maybe — Pixel Envy