If you’re a content provider, the shift to mobile, and to social and the shift in Google’s priorities mean that it’s worth a very hard look at how you’ll monetize and the value of permission (i.e. the subscribers to this blog are its backbone). And if you’re Google, it’s worth comparing the short-term upside of strangling the best (thoughtful, personal, informed) content to the long-term benefit of creating a healthy ecosystem.
Here’s the key question: Are the people who are making great content online doing it despite the search regime, or enabled by it?
Shallow social-shareable listicles and clickbait headlines have always been plentiful on the web, but it does seem clear that they’re getting much worse and more dominant recently.
Google is making the problem worse, but they’re not the root problem. In fact, the real problem is a pretty big problem for Google, too:
Everyone’s spending increasingly more consumption time dicking around in apps and snacking on bite-sized social content instead of browsing websites and searching Google.
There are a lot of sites I simply won’t click on and unfortunately, Google’s page 1 of results for nearly any search I execute leads me to those sites I’ve personally banned myself from visiting. Here’s a sample of sites that I’ve configured OpenDNS to not show me when I’m on my home network:
- Huffington Post
- Buzzfeed
- Forbes
- WikiHow
- Dummies.com
- Edmunds
- How Stuff Works
- About.com
- Business Insider (possibly the worst website on the Internet ever)
There are many more but this is just an example because all of these sites basically write articles just to get Google Traffic. I don’t get them my click, mind-share and therefore ad-earnings. There are high-quality web sites offering excellent value in broad and succinct topics that are suffering because of the points outlined by Seth and Marco. I’ve used alternative search engines like Duck Duck Go but their results are often very limited to what Google provides even though their limited results are of higher value.
The more we link to high-value websites and avoid clicking low-value links, the more we fight this algorithm.