As Google continues to exert significant control over what web surfers see, publishers big and small have had to become experts in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their content gets discovered and shown. But that’s become a losing battle.
Continual changes to the Google search algorithm have shifted which publishers benefit and which are left out.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of smaller websites complain that recent Google algorithm changes have led to a big drop in traffic to their websites.
Some have called it quits, like entertainment news sites Giant Freakin Robot and Quiet Earth and Apple news website iMore.
Giant Freakin Robot said its internet traffic went from more than 20 million unique visitors a month to just a few thousand a month because of changes to Google search.
“Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another,” website founder Joshua Tyler wrote in a Nov. 4 post. “Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way.”
Another worthwhile entertainment news site that has been negatively impacted by Google’s algorithm changes is The TV Answerman, run by Phillip Swan. The website has lost 90% of its traffic and revenue due to Google’s abrupt and dramatic change to its search algorithms, Swann said in an Oct. 11 blog post.
I understand why Google changes its search algorithm. It wants to weed out bad actors from gaming its search engine. But it doesn’t appear to be working very well. Content from legitimate publishers has been buried and spam content from other sites is being promoted.
Plus, Google is favoring some large publishers because they have legal teams that can fight it or can sign business deals with the search giant.
This is not the open internet we were promised.
Photos: Cover of “Internet: A First Discovery Book” by Scholastic (2000), top;
Poster using the book’s cover as seen in 2008. (Photo by Leslie Lindballe via Creative Commons.)
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