They Sold Out! I Was Wrong About Google

[00:02] well I can't believe I have to make this video turns out I was wrong I was wrong about Google what was I wrong about well I took an optimistic perspective and I thought Google's telling us that they want better search

[00:15] quality they want better content and so if we make better content that's what's going to rank turns going to rank turns out they're actually totally

[00:29] lying all right so where is this coming from first of all actual experience we go look at the serps and you do just about any search and you got Reddit results and then you got you know some other stuff and Kora lots and lots of

[00:42] Kora I mean they've even got Reddit above the people also ask it's like I somebody say like Google won't stop until they can figure out how to get Reddit above the Google logo it's ridiculous like the favoritism they're

[00:56] showing for Reddit specifically but also for just other Forum content it wasn't that long ago we could consistently say that Forum content was lowquality content and basically you could outrank them with a half decent blog post almost

[01:11] every time over the last couple years that's not the case now that's not Google's failing us and that the search quality has gone bad because sometimes the intent of the Searcher is they want input from lots of people but look at

[01:26] this search query how often do baby chicks die well actually a scientif ific study would give me the best answer but scientific studies aren't very good at just giving me a direct answer so what do we do we go to Reddit first of all

[01:39] giving you statistics because they're going to say well all my baby chicks baby chicks die and someone else is going to say what are you talking about none of mine die I have perfectly healthy baby chicks all the time you

[01:53] would have to actually go look at a study or you could do what I did for my blog post and you could go look at data given from hatcheries where literally they hatch thousands of baby chicks and you could get a better idea of what

[02:07] look at the scientific study that I cited and all of the other things that I did and that article is one of my better for getting me traffic but here I am searching from a logged out browser and

[02:20] my blog post that used to rank pretty dang high oh I I still can't find it why that are out there but why is mine gone mine actually looks at scientific studies and pulls in statistics I could argue that well my article's really

[02:36] time from people my articles are really good why are they not showing up and there may be a lot of reasons for that and clearly there is blog content that that's appearing here we're definitely getting uh lots of YouTube videos which

[02:50] is super common nowadays as well I wonder why who is it that owns YouTube these days oh okay we also are seeing Reddit at the top I wonder why is that oh maybe it's because does Google have any sort of oh yeah look at that

[03:04] February this year Google expanded partnership with Reddit it's not a conflict of interest is it so what is inspiring this video well couple days ago is actually Jim he sent me this article the day after it came out he

[03:18] came across it and sent it to me and frankly it's really good so this is by uh Ed zitron he's got a newsletter but just go check out the article I'll link just go check out the article I'll link to it here in this video

[03:33] at a bunch of internal emails that were released as part of an antitrust case and they revealed a lot of stuff this goes all the way back to 2019 you see from the very beginning with Google it was always important to them that they

[03:46] keep search the way that search works separate from ads because that's where the revenue comes from and if the search team was going to be driven by Revenue goals then they weren't going to be focused on making the best search

[04:00] product they're going to be focused on optimizing their ad Revenue well in 2019 that suddenly changed they called this code yellow which apparently at Google is like Defcon one right this is like a big deal they pull everybody together

[04:14] forth right and there's a bunch of meetings that we don't have the notes for but a huge thing that comes out of this is that all these higher ups at Google who aren't any of the original people from Google and the people that

[04:26] created search as it is today all of these these newer leaders at Google are talking about how no no no we now need to update search and search results to help optimize to make us more ad Revenue because we're falling short on our

[04:42] numbers this quarter imagine that a big public corporation worried about hitting the revenue targets so that they can appease shareholders in the short term long-term decisions that make their products worse it's never happened

[04:57] before has it except every freaking day all right back to this I want to show you some specific things here from this article that just who blow my mind here beauty in this article is like every time he references something from an

[05:12] email he's just linking to the email you can literally go read these emails right I can see exactly what these people at Google said to each other but they talk about how there's this search Gap basically the number of searches being

[05:24] needed to be able to hit their ad Revenue targets and so they needed to try to get more search is done per day now one approach to that would be to best product and everybody wants to use it instead of new other search platforms

[05:39] right but apparently this growth that they wanted in the short term was super critical to some company plan now there were some people at Google who are a little bit more Old-Timers who were not very comfortable with some of the ideas

[05:53] that were being brought up at this time and they brought those anxieties to other their leadership but but in the end turns out they were outvoted they got moved to other roles and we end up with the Google that we have today in

[06:06] March 2019 they put out their core update and all the buzz around it we can go look at articles like from search engine journal from the time and what was going on what were people seeing look at this traffic

[06:20] on several sites that were abused by penguin this was an update specifically specifically targeting spammy websites trying to fight web spam that's what penguin was all about about and sites that were hit by penguin oh suddenly

[06:33] this person says I'd given them up for dead then I noticed affiliate earnings on them for um this morning for the first time in a year traffic was way up 400 uniques a day to 2500 traffic boosts on a site that was hit by an anti-spam

[06:48] update in the past why would that be but it goes back to some of these discussions that were going on at Google and to be fair there were people like Ben Gomez who is the hero of the story read the article you're going to see how

[07:03] this is just super sad but he was raising a lot of concerns around this about basically there not being any way that the search team could get people especially in the short term to do more searches other than through hacking

[07:18] engagement hacking engagement just means that they're essentially tricking us tricking users into spending more time on Google but they'd been doing work before on trying to create more efficient Journeys for users and now

[07:31] they're saying oh but we'll make more money if we can make search less search results so they have to search again he raised concerns Ben Gomez raised concerns that that that the search team was getting too close to the

[07:45] money which was always a problem there's a reason that they kept search and AD Revenue separate he ends his email by saying I'm getting concerned that growth is all we're thinking about basically a very shortsighted approach so that we

[07:57] can make a little more money right now and AAS investors now you might think okay maybe they screwed up a little bit that was five years ago Ricky why are we talking about this now well one this article just came out sort of exposing

[08:09] article just came out sort of exposing that this was deliberate but two when we shine this light and look through this lens at what's going on right now with the serps it really makes you wonder I don't know what deal exactly Google has

[08:23] with Reddit but when I look at Reddit look at this I mean I'm here on a page on Reddit and how many ads am I seeing very few you're going to see more ads if you come to one of my blogs and Those ads are served by Google it seems like

[08:36] Google would make more money by sending traffic to our blogs like shouldn't that be what benefits them but there's got to be something going on here because for some reason Google is like actively picking Reddit it's not that they're

[08:49] just picking forums they're actively picking Reddit often times I'm seeing showing up before I see any informational content by someone who's actually curated the information done some research and put it together now

[09:03] I'm not defending all blog content there is a ton of spam garbage blog content on the web that frankly just deserve to be removed from the serps and I'm Unapologetic in saying that if you've spent your time focused on trying to

[09:18] create helpful content that would actually help a user I don't really care that you lost traffic now I empathize because you put a lot of work into that but come on if you're going to build a real business you got to create

[09:34] something of real value that people want and then that business is sustainable maybe that's a lesson for Google too they seem to have forgotten that principle these days now what's crazy here is they were so focused on making

[09:46] money in general that not only did they hack engagement in this way but they completely changed ads on the serers if

[09:58] you'll notice when we look at the Ser especially for commercial type search queries but really anything that somebody would want to run an ad against you're going to see at the top of the serps some of these ads here now today

[10:10] serps some of these ads here now today they say sponsored did you know that before this same time frame back in the early 2019 time frame it used to say the word add and it used to be bright green so it would stand out a little bit

[10:23] differently and did you know that the actual listing here looked more like an ad it it was distinctively like like different from a normal search result well right around the same time as this March core update they also redesigned

[10:36] ads and they did it first on mobile and then they later rolled it out to desktop where they kept the word ad at the time now it says sponsored but they turned it black black doesn't stand out as much to your eye and so maybe you're more likely

[10:48] to click on it the other thing that they did was they redesigned the result here to look just like a normal search result so it would look less like an ad and then over time we've watched them go from maybe a couple per page to more

[11:01] like four and sometimes even more it's crazy often times the number of ads we see and how they have redesigned them to make us more likely to click on them thinking that it's an organic search result it's trickery trick Tri intended

[11:16] guess what if you click on it whether you wanted to or not Google makes more money from that ad now the article talks a lot more about the people responsible for this the people behind it the leader ship there and a little bit more about

[11:31] their background to give you a little bit more understanding as to maybe why they chose to make some of these changes and why the fundamental principles have been abandoned basically so that they can

[11:44] continue to grow even though they're like freaking huge and make boatloads of money there's some principles of business here that drive me crazy about Corporate America especially public companies just the nature of what they

[11:57] do and what they kind of have to do to be able to continue to have shareholders and stuff and the math person in me finds it just incredibly unsustainable know I'm including myself in this but I'm also including you if you're a

[12:12] make money from your blog you're a small business as the UN owner of a small business I look at it very very differently because I don't have other shareholders I get to report only to myself and if my company's making enough

[12:25] money to make me happy then I'm good and I don't have to do tricky stupid things in order to try to make a bunch more money I hope that you and your business money I hope that you and your business can maintain a mindset of growing to a

[12:38] point of where you want to be and if what you want is continual growth that's fine that's your choice but just you be the one to make that decision and don't well you got to keep growing and growing and growing otherwise you're worthless

[12:53] as a business anyway that's kind of an aside back to Google the big question is what do we do about this I have always tried to be optimistic I have tried to be optimistic about this business model I've been optimistic about Google and

[13:08] I've tried to think that you know what Google's incentive should be to try to be the best product and to get people to want to use their platform but that only makes sense if they have a long-term view in mind if they're worried about

[13:23] short-term numbers then it would also make sense that at various times of the are going in any particular year in revenue numbers hit certain targets they might be willing to manipulate search

[13:36] results in order to make a little bit more money over this next quarter who willing to do to be able to meet certain company priorities or agendas that they may have that we wouldn't be aware of and given all that I'm not sure it's

[13:50] just always do what's in their best interest for the long term and so that being the case I don't know that I can take a totally optimistic perspective trying to do I try to believe that that's where they're headed and I still

[14:05] believe that to some extent but also it doesn't really matter that much to me and it's because of this my goal is to create businesses that add real value to the world I want to create brands that

[14:19] that do good things and I want to encourage you to do the same I want you to create content of value that's going to be great and that's going to really help people in whatever industry that you're writing about and so that is what

[14:33] I'm going to encourage you to do in doing this the principles of Commerce are going to lead people to your content now it might not end up being through the exact same media that's been working in the past it might be that Google no

[14:47] longer sends you the majority of your traffic up until now 90% of the traffic to most of our websites on average has come from Google search and that's shifting we're focusing now on on other platforms we've been using YouTube for a

[15:01] it's actually really funny when people tell me well your business is failing because your traffic is down on this website I'm like I don't even care you know why because if I have traffic coming from YouTube and those people

[15:15] know my brand which by the way on YouTube they're going to engage with going to build a much stronger reputation than you can do if you use written content alone and by having that hardly notice the dips and traffic from

[15:29] Google search but also video is not for everyone I get that there are many other ways that we can attract traffic and that we can build a brand social media is powerful blog content through Google search it's a very transactional

[15:43] experience but if you can capture people when they come to your website and entice them to participate with you on social media to subscribe to something whether it's an email newsletter that you have or even better other social

[15:57] media platforms where you are actively engaging with people that's going to do substantially more to build your brand reputation so in the coming days weeks months and probably years we're going to be definitely focusing on a lot more

[16:12] than just writing blog posts and trusting in search engines primarily promising us that they're doing we're going to protect ourselves by we're going to be teaching you to do the same that's where we're headed and

[16:27] frankly you can sit here and be upset about Google and you can be sad and you want to do but the best thing that you can do is focus on what you can do instead of focusing on what you've lost so while I feel for you I feel for

[16:43] myself things are happening right now that are outside of our control it's part of life but it's a huge part of business so what are we going to do about it let's focus on what we can do and let's go make something amazing

[16:58] because that is what's going to make you stand out as a business and as a brand not just as a Blog that gets some traffic from Google