vgeek 2 hours ago | next |

The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties, RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or authoritative for a given niche.

Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?

Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.

1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-si...

stackghost 13 minutes ago | root | parent |

>The same thing happens every 3-5 years. [...] Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content.

What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".

graeme 6 hours ago | prev | next |

Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.

thrance 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.

thmsths 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.

fakedang 3 hours ago | root | parent |

Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is. If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7 to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and you find out that the last page was page 3.

ilrwbwrkhv 44 minutes ago | root | parent | prev |

Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.

OptionOfT 38 minutes ago | prev | next |

This is not that different from this guy who posted how he 'stole' CEO traffic from his competitor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433856

And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their tool:

https://www.partitionwizard.com/news_en_sitemap.xml

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic_en_sitemap.xm...

All these 'articles' pollute search engines.

ericmcer an hour ago | prev | next |

"So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a fraction of one.

itissid 3 hours ago | prev | next |

Actually googling some of the terms from his post and seeing Forbes up there is oddly surprising, even after reading it all.

miki123211 2 hours ago | prev | next |

Is this an US thing? This has to be an US thing, right? How come I've literally never seen this in the EU?

I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but never from these brands.

OvbiousError an hour ago | root | parent |

Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time. Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on duckduckgo.

EcommerceFlow an hour ago | prev | next |

BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.

janesvilleseo 7 minutes ago | root | parent |

You don’t need an insider for you know where to just buy the link. They hang their shingle out on at least one link buying marketplace.

CM30 3 hours ago | prev | next |

Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation, but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.

But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.

ramesh31 3 hours ago | prev | next |

It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the brand dry.

cynicalsecurity 3 hours ago | prev | next |

So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.

erehweb 2 hours ago | root | parent |

Sure, and Google and FB have killed businesses before by changing algorithms. But what is fair prioritization? Non-trivial Q.

davidu 3 hours ago | prev | next |

This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It should make the WSJ though.

crote an hour ago | root | parent | next |

It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.

We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

cruffle_duffle 3 minutes ago | root | parent | next |

> If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.

akira2501 an hour ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> It isn't exactly news, though.

It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.

> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.

Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."

Dalewyn an hour ago | root | parent | prev |

>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.

There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.

Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.

MisterBastahrd 3 hours ago | prev | next |

I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on their CRM).

I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.

One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.

JadeNB 2 hours ago | root | parent |

> One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.

This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.

drcongo 3 hours ago | prev |

This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago, I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.

burkaman 2 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you should be aware that most of their results come from Google.

toast0 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want. So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.