Decently good content on the web – matching 3 or more search terms – can simply not be found organically unless you have a superstar site.
Irrelevant big-shot sites, poorly matched by the search terms, usually swamp out your boutique page containing the actual answer, even including those search terms more bunched together (because the meaning is matched)!
Hurting the little guy
The little guy is forced to pay Google for sponsored listings 'above the line'. Affordable for some, but it eliminates many otherwise viable businesses.
And makes everything more expensive than it should be.
And hides good blogs from the world. Many of these nascent thought leaders will simply never emerge. At great loss to the world. To have to otherwise pay to be heard for something that should truly be the top hit!
The point is the fight against spam was no reason to eliminate the relevant smart or altruistic voice. There have been smarter ways to deal with spam for more than a decade now.
This is the collateral damage – pushed on to the small to medium guy – caused by Google's brainless and, it appears, intentionally evil solution to spam sites.
This more than irks me.
It has rendered organic search a shadow of what it could be.
And allowed Google to build a hideously over-sized advertising businesses that taxes every other commercial activity.
The few competitors have been utter dummies not to realize this, and instead, all three major competitors have simply copied Google providing zero genuine alternative. And equal evil.
I've pointed out publicly that Google has taken way too long to include 'semantic search' (search that understands us) but here I focus on the collateral damage and intentional evil of PageRank.
But this, intentional for at least a decade I would argue, collateral damage of PageRank is evil.
Citation & authority
From day one Google has been about giving us authoritative sites via its PageRank algorithm that biases hits by their citations.
The more incoming links a site records, the higher it is listed, as long as it contains the search terms.
That, initially was great.
Google, for good reason, rapidly rose to fame from around 1998.
An arms race
Of course junk and low-quality content, spam and malware quickly built up on the internet and these greedy, purveyors of crap and evil orchestrated incoming links to drive Google rankings through a spectrum of schemes from just legitimate link sharing strategies to multitudes of totally fake sites built purely to feed links into the target sites.
Google had to deal with it.
An arms race between Google and spam ensued.
Collateral damage
Although Google uses supplementary means to determine if sites are legitimate or just from content farms, or worse, spam and disinformation, they mostly use citation rank and bias sites up the hit list based on how-many incoming links come in.
But the little guy comes off as the collateral damage: our stuff just cannot be found organically.
'Experts' tell us:
"Oh, of course, nobody can ever get found organically.
How naïve of you!
The internet is just too big now.
You need SEO tricks and/or paid ads"
That may be true if your offerings are 'just the same' as anyone else. But if you have unique products or are a serious boutique thought leader with new ideas on timely or classic topics . . you still can't get found!
It does not matter how well the search terms match and how closely together they appear in your content. Until you have multiple incoming links from decently authoritative sites, forget it.
Instead stuff that has no bearing on the search will appear at the top (for complex queries of > 2 search terms).
So the web itself is of little use in disseminating information on its merit. And social media is similar.
Instead it's how loud or famous or rich or sneaky or, only slightly better, how funny or quirky you are.
Did be evil
In the early days Google was about 'don't be evil'.
And I gave them the benefit of the doubt for the best part of a decade.
But I became increasingly suspicious as virtually no attempts were made to do:
- Smarter assessment of web content using AI
- Elevate little guy stuff that matches the search terms as long as it has no red flags
- Genuine semantic search that actually understands the search query and the sites
Google is a super smart company. All of those things have been doable now for 10 years.
But it is not to Google's advantage to do it. Because this way everyone has to pay the Google advertising 'tax'. That is, pay for ads because organic search doesn't work. And competitors like Bing (& DuckDuckGo is just Bing under the covers) just copy Google instead of seeing an opportunity.
ChatGPT and friends
I predict those days will be over soon. There are a stack of new web search startups. And ChatGPT is stirring up lots of ideas in semantic search and more.
We've had Google essentially not innovating for 10 or 15 years IMO. I've been and still am a fan of Google. But I'm convinced, at best, they have not been working hard on this.
So it's wearing very thin.
If we ever needed any proof that competition and antitrust investigations are crucial, this is it.