Chaos at Google
What the hell is going on at Google HQ?
Google has gone viral a few times in the past week, and none of the reasons are good for them.
Random niche site complains about SERPs (learn from this)
I have to hand it to House Fresh.
Niche site owners have been complaining about the SERPs ever since the HCU dropped back in September, but these guys found a way to turn all that angst into links + traffic.
The random air purifier niche site wrote a long article whining about how the SERPs are dominated by big legacy media brands reviewing products that they’ve never tried and have no expertise in.
Google favors high-DR sites. Nothing new here. Not exactly breaking news.
With the heavily emotional tone of this article you’d think House Fresh lost 97% of their traffic or something.
But no.
Their traffic dropped from 84k to 43k. Yes, losing almost 50% of your traffic sucks but it’s not like they’re dead in the water. They can easily recover and probably will. They’re obviously still making money.
In case it wasn’t obvious: this isn’t some type of earnestly-written cry-for-help type of article.
They obviously wanted this to go viral and it did.
You can tell because they planted some seeds on Reddit shortly after publishing the article:
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of detective work to see that the company itself was behind these posts (at least the first ones).
One of the accounts that initially pushed the article even outright mentioned their connection.
Pro tip: don’t mention your connection with the site when you’re trying to push something on Reddit. Amateur mistake here.
And if you look through the post history of the accounts that initially linked to the article you can see that they mention being based in the UK.
HouseFresh doesn’t have an address where they’re based (free tip if the owners are reading this: add it for EEAT purposes)…
…but the site is owned by a guy named Danny Ashton who also owns a content marketing agency called NeoMam Studios that’s based in…you guessed it. London.
Also if you go through the LinkedIn accounts for House Fresh’s staff the majority are based in the UK.
They didn’t cover their tracks well. But it worked anyway.
All of this isn’t to say that they’re doing anything wrong here. Actually the opposite.
It’s very smart content marketing and got them a TON of links and traffic.
They did a great job capitalizing off the trend for their own benefit.
I wish I would have thought of it.
The one downside here is you always risk attracting the Eye of Sauron whenever you go viral for talking shit about Google.
This particular article caught the eye of Danny Sullivan who posted about it on X.
Google typically doesn’t like it when people embarrass them. It’ll be interesting to see if House Fresh sees a traffic gain or loss in the next few months.
Google announces Reddit partnership
Google announced that they’re “deepening their partnership” with Reddit.
One part of this is that they’re using Reddit data to train their AI chatbot (insane to think about if you’ve spent any amount of time on Reddit).
Most interesting for SEOs: The partnership “will facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information…” and “…make it even easier to access across Google products.”
In other words: the show goes on.
If you aren’t spamming Reddit you’re falling behind. Reddit is an essential part of SEO in 2024 and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change any time soon.
It’s hard not to be conspiratorially-minded about this.
First Google gives Reddit hundreds of millions more pageviews per month, then they pay them for access to the data, then Reddit files for an IPO…come on.
Don’t be surprised if Google outright acquires Reddit in the near future.
It would be the logical next step.
We’ll find out soon enough I guess.
Google Gemini’s AI disaster
I try to stay away from hot button political issues here (you’re welcome btw, if you want to read that crap you can find it literally anywhere else online) BUT it would be hard to not have an SEO/Google-focused newsletter and not mention the insanity.
In case you missed it, Google’s new AI image generator has racism baked into the algorithm and refuses to generate any images of white people.
This isn’t surprising if you’ve spent any amount of time around tech people.
Now genpop is aware of the bias that we’ve all known about for years.
Their AI chatbot also doesn’t know whether Elon tweeting memes is worse than Hitler.
Yeah, things aren’t going well at Google.
Like I said, I hate to talk about hot button political BS but this shit is bananas.
Heads definitely need to roll at Google HQ.
Conclusion
Google seems to be in a state of turmoil.
It’s bad news after bad news after bad news.
SEOs hate them (they hate us back btw), regular users hate them, everyone hates them.
Fortunately for Google, they’re so dominant that they can absorb bad news and not lose any market share.
The only people in the world who could challenge them in the search game are Apple and Elon. And Google pays Apple ~$20 billion/yr to not compete, so that just leaves Elon and I don’t think he’s interested.
For better or worse, we’re stuck with Big G for the long haul.
Hopefully they can get their act together soon.