Why Google sucks

*Amidst client work*

*BING*

“Google Search Liaison just posted a tweet.”

Huh?

Well…I wonder what it is🤔

…

…

Hope it’s not another fucking update.🤦🏻‍♂️

===

A couple of days ago, Google Search Liaison posted the following tweet:

===

“Last week, I gave a presentation about Google Search results not being perfect, how we update to improve those results, and how our guidance to creators needs to improve.

Google’s results aren’t perfect. We do make mistakes. We don’t always get it right. We’ll never get everything right. But what we can do is keep working to show the most helpful content that we can.”

===

I mean… lately… it seems like they can’t do anything right 😂

But anyway,

I'm pretty sure a lot of SEOs are going to agree with me on this — except the talking heads

You know who I’m talking about…

Let’s face it…

Google kinda sucks right now.

Let’s recap the last few weeks: 

• Niche sites wiped off the face of the earth, now everyone is calling their sites a “media company” 

• Reddit & Quora’s traffic DOUBLED in under a month, and they even have their own featured section for some SERPs

• An unbelievable amount of ad spots

• Rankings fluctuating as much as 5-10 spots within a day

• eCom sites that have been relying too heavily on blog content are starting to see declines (will give my thoughts in a future email on this)

Am I missing anything else?

I don’t thi— 

Ah yes!

The frequent fucking core updates!🤦🏻‍♂️

I mean… It’s just a complete mess at this point.

The algorithm is all over the place.

Look…

I’m not complaining. I completely understand that it’s just an algorithm and it’s not always going to be perfect.

And as I said yesterday, this is the game we’re playing. 

But when you’re rolling out updates every other week & month to improve the “user experience”

But you just end up making it worse?

Just doesn’t make any sense.

They’re scrambling all over the place.

The SERP has since been updated, but a few days ago, I searched for a type of fanny pack on Google. 

I wasn’t looking for myself (promise), I was doing keyword research for one of our brands. 

Anyway… here’s what the SERP looked like: 

• Google Ad carousel up top (standard)

• Organic shopping results (new)

• Positions 1 & 2 standard organic results

• Forums & discussion section (new)

• Positions 3-8

Now, our brand was in the #3 spot. 

Which is well below the fold, meaning I had to scroll down to see it. 

And if I was a consumer…between the ad spots, organic shopping, and other options on the SERP, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to scroll to the #3 ranking. 

This problem is amplified on mobile – several scrolls away…

So what does this mean for SEOs..?

There are two aspects to this:

One, Google is here to make money and they don’t give a shit about SEOs.

Google makes an obnoxious amount of revenue via paid ads, so they want to show as many paid ads as they can.

For reference, Google ad revenue was $112.691 billion dollars in the first half of 2023.

That doesn’t include Q3 or Q4, meaning BFCM revenue isn’t factored into that total. They’ll make somewhere on the mark of $225+ billion this year on ad revenue – why would they want to give that up? 

Fact: You have to rank in the #1 & #2 spots and/or in the organic shopping listings to make money via SEO. This applies to the eCom space; I haven’t looked at as many SERPs in the local or B2B space yet. 

Second, more ads means less AI content in the SERPs.

If half of the first page is ads, that means less space for AI content. 

This is just my opinion, but the amount of ads in the SERPs lately feels like Google’s band-aid solution to that problem. 

Fact: If you want to make money, you need to run Google Ads & SEO. 

That is all for today.

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell