alt Hacker NewsGoogle stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for "Best CBD Gummies"
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What's hilarious is when people boast about being "in Forbes" like it's the magazine from 20 years ago, and not this parasitic SEO operation that publishes garbage on anything.
Hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Google's search results have gotten so bad - seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage. I don't even want SearchGPT do take over the search market space because I'm almost sure it will still be garbage. Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please :(.
September thread on Forbes Marketplace and "parasite SEO" (300 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466
Why doesn't google just manually block/derank all these massive content spam sites like forbes, business insider. Actually solving the problem even though its not some neat tech solution. This is like watching doctors theorize on how to save a bleeding out patient that dies because they are talking.
Google has reams of company reviews, both those they've scraped and those they've solicited from the public. How hard could it be for them to downrank sites that advertise companies with relatively bad reviews, and uprank sites that advertise companies with relatively good reviews?
They could even scale the downranking so that the higher your site's reputation, the more it gets downranked if you're advertising poorly-reviewed companies. That would ding Forbes more than it would ding Joe's Little Blog, and prevent highly ranking sites (like Forbes) from having a monopoly on some search results.
An interesting intellectual exercise is to think about how a search engine could provide the best possible answer (from a user satisfaction perspective) to a query like "best CBD gummies".
A lot of people have a significant financial incentive to win at that search query.
What would the perfect top search result for that look like?
It would probably be an article written by professional writers in a trustworthy publication with a strong ethics policy, provably followed over the years, concerning whether they accept payment for promoting specific products in supposedly impartial reviews.
If you can figure out how to algorithmically detect that kind of content you could build a pretty great search engine!
Google should vibe out others as well. If I search now "Best CBD Gummies", the first few results are: vice.com independent.co.uk healthline.com observer.com
How is Forbes worse than any of those shallow comparison pages?
An entire department was just rendered useless. I genuinely don't feel bad.
One area where Google search is terribly broken is porn.
If your search for some specific term "$foo", nearly every result is just 'search site $bar for "$foo"', taking you to the site's search page, regardless of whether $foo is actually found on the site.
I assume the threat to their business posed by OpenAI (and others) is what is getting them to start addressing these long standing issues. I'm glad they're doing it, but upset that they let users suffer with sub-par results for so many years.
If you advertise with paid articles you are not spending as much as you could on adsense.
AMEN!
I remember this guy
pointing out the line between what you can get away with with SEO and what you can't get away with and what you can't get away with is making Google look stupid.
Google's official statement on the change: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reput...
That page gives a good hint at how opaque these paid placements can be to an outsider like Google. Really tough to prevent too much collateral damage when going after bad actors like Forbes. Glad Google is working on it though.
Google starts getting into the way too much. Recently I searched for German football clubs that "fan rivalries" and Google refused that and only gave me results for "fan friendships" .
Google should have done this 5-10 years ago.
Site that has historically abused its monopoly to game search profits clamps down on others doing exactly the same thing.
It sounds like they're just deranking the blog spam posts. In my opinion, Google should derank the whole domain/brand. If you purposely put your name on garbage, we should put your name in the trash.
What was the website they had to delist like 10 years ago that was like this? I'm drawing a blank.
When I search for “best pet insurance”, US News & World Reports still shows up 5th.
When I search for “Best Delta credit card”, CNBC shows up 6th
My feeling as a Google user since the beginning is that the search engine doesn't matter anymore in terms of quality. That is why I wonder how Google supposely discover their own "bugs" so late.
one lawsuit too late
[flagged]
I'm confused about how or why this is a new policy. My memory is inside Google we were discussing this risk back in 2003, probably earlier. Search quality was on it. I just assumed they'd lost the arms race, or that the parasites' ranking was justified for other reasons that were hard to tease apart. What are they doing new now?
I think often about Mahalo, the sleazy shovel content that was spamming the web back in 2007. Google shut that down somewhat fast, although it did take several years. These days with AI and more aggressive spammers it's a losing battle. The real problem is the financial incentives that make this kind of spamming profitable in the first place.
My tiny little blog gets about 3 requests a week for someone to "pay me to run a guest article". Going rate is $50-$200 and again, my blog is tiny.