On 25th October, 2022, a Twitter user commented that Google was like a “dying mall”, a place where one went out of habit, but couldn’t find what one was looking for.
This comments sparked off a flurry of activity on Twitter.
The tweet received 42,000 likes and close to 6,000 retweets. People have begun to feel that SEO tactics were gaming the system and Ads were irrelevant or not useful for the particular queries. This SEO expert in Kolkata looks into the matter closely as first published in Search Engine Journal.
One of the chief complaints about Google is that the search engine seems unable to comprehend or effectively evaluate searcher’s intent. This is forcing users to reformulate their queries which is obviously a waste of time and effort.
SEMRush recently delved into the problem and found out that around 30% of search queries are being reformulated. Some explanations to this problem have been offered. Google is perhaps using local search to answer the search query, providing the user with local results, which they may not have wanted.
Users also began to complain quite vociferously that poor content was being put out by sites. The content from the various sites was not what they were looking for, and after scrolling down through several results they finally found the answers they were looking for! This certainly reflects poorly on Google’s algorithms.
The major complaints from people were related to coding sites and recipe sites.
Obviously, Google’s E-A-T content guidelines are also to blame in this regard.
While Google loves long-form content and often ranks long-form content higher than short-form content, long-form content does not have the relevant content that users are looking for. It’s just lengthy stuff with a few paragraphs of relevant information. Needless to say, isn’t the algorithm itself being gamed?
For example, users say that if you are looking for a recipe, one first has to scroll through the website on the history of pepper before getting to the recipe itself! This is because content producers try to keep a reader on the page for longer, as not doing so, would increase the bounce rate.
Hence poor quality sites are really the problem.
Users also complained that they were now not feeling that “sense of discovery” which they used to feel in discovering obscure pages with relevant information. Now, however, they are seeing corporate blogs with hazy, generic information. This SEO expert in Kolkata certainly feels that the quality of content is not very useful, as Google deprioritized the content from forums and other communities where real people exchange their opinions.
This means that real insightful content is out of reach of the people as generic, de-humanized write-ups are taking over. This is because corporations with a large digital marketing budget are playing the system and getting generic, keyword-stuffed content to rank. This is a clear indication that content producers are gaming the system meant to vet them. And, sadly, they are winning.
If you are among the people who are suffering with Google and being forced to visit Bing and Yahoo! for answers, let’s know in the comments.
Pushing ads in the faces of users, poor quality sites, bad content, coupled with an algorithm that seems to insist you are searching for something else, this SEO expert in Kolkata feels there is a storm brewing against Google. Will the largest search engine lose major market share? IS it time to revise the famous Google algorithm? Watch this space for more!
