Earlier this year, Google made major changes to its search algorithms and spam filters in an effort to weed out low-quality content, but the impact has proven devastating for some small websites.
Major upgrades by Google in March and April caused a sharp drop in traffic, leading online companies to consider cutting staff or even shutting down sites.
Gisele Navarro is one of the unfortunate people whose websites have been caught up in Google's dragnet.
The 37-year-old from Argentina runs the HouseFresh website with her husband and has carved out a healthy niche for herself since 2020 with product reviews of air purifiers.
There was no advertising, no product placement, no trickery — if a product was bad, a reviewer on the site would say so.
They earned a commission from click-throughs to Amazon.
But a Google update changed all that.
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“We found out that because we were one of the few companies that actually did reviews, we had dropped from number one in the rankings to not even be shown anymore,” she told AFP.
HouseFresh once received around 4,000 referrals a day from Google searches, but that has since dropped to around 200.
Sales had fallen so badly that Navarro said he was advised to shut down the site and start over with a new domain name.
At the root of Navarro's and many other sites' frustrations is a lack of clarity about how Google ranks search results.
The US company is notoriously secretive about its algorithms, so much so that an entire industry has grown up around trying to manipulate them to get more clicks, known as “search engine optimization” (SEO).
This latest update has left SEO experts in a state of confusion, desperately trying to figure out why some sites have improved their rankings while others have dropped.
Google told AFP in an email that the update was aimed at giving users “fewer results that feel search engine-friendly.”
Google's algorithm remains a mystery to many, especially after recent changes. Photo: Shutterstock
“We only introduce changes that we test and find will meaningfully improve search results for people — and we're confident that these updates will help,” Google said.
But in a widely shared blog post in May, Navarro noted that people searching for product reviews are increasingly being shown ads and content that appears to be AI-generated or SEO-maximized.
Other content boosted by Google's update included user-generated content from websites like Reddit and Quora.
Google defended the approach by saying “people often want to learn from the experiences of others,” adding that it “conducts rigorous testing to ensure results are useful and high-quality.”
But staff at one European news site said their stories were now regularly being overtaken by largely unrelated content from Reddit.
One publisher, who asked not to be named due to the nature of the topic, said that since the update, referrals from Google have plummeted by 20-30 percent, making the cuts inevitable.
“In an already tough market, this is a real problem for independent publishers like us,” they said.
All the businesses AFP spoke to said they were now scrambling to find ways to avoid reliance on Google search, such as writing newsletters, producing podcasts or finding other ways to engage their audience.
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The president of a fintech news media company, who spoke to AFP on the condition of anonymity for fear of it hurting his business, said all his competitors were hiring SEO firms “to buy traffic”.
“We don't do that, but since Google's updates, those sites haven't dropped as dramatically in the rankings as ours, and so it's becoming harder for them to maintain their position,” they said.
Forced to drastically cut back on his staff, Navarro turned to video reviews and newsletters to reconnect with viewers.
And despite her experience at Google, she remains optimistic about the web.
She was heartened by the many messages of support and an increase in referrals from alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo.
“All of humanity's knowledge is on the web, and that's valuable,” she said.
“I'm not going to give up just because Google is broken.”