I'm not saying Google is doing this but what if....

[jamie3000]

These updates never make any sense. Both black and white hat sites getting hit at random.

I'm not saying this is happening but what if....

At random intervals Google removes 30% or so of a websites link juice then holds it for a random amount of time before giving it back. Making it just appear as one of those "traffic swings" with the intention of making people try AdWords as a traffic source to replace their lost organic traffic.

Damn it, it's the weekend and it's my turn to make a slightly crazy conspiracy theory lounge thread!

 

[Dark Sky]

I think they destroy small sites on purpose, simply because they know the smaller guys won't understand and just post more content. Whilst the big companies will just hire SEO agencies who have already figured out what they did to fix it.

It's all about the content my friend. Content to google is the equivalent of pornhub to humans.

As Jordan Peterson said: If you can't figure out why someone is doing something, just look at the outcome they created. That will explain why.

 

[Fussganger]

My theory is that Google has another motive as well.

Obviously, they want people gravitating towards Adwords, but they know little sites won't do that since (If I'm not mistaken) you can only advertise your own business via Adwords.

What if they do this to keep people invested in the SERPs? If all I see are sites like Spruce and NYtime on Page 1, I would have no incentive to try to compete with them. They have no threat and don't feel compelled to write quality content.

Shuffling things up sends a wave of hope and suddenly people think that they have a shot and with all the "Quality Content" hype going on, they try to out-do on another and thus, Google ends up with better Serps.

Again, that's just me guessing..

 

[ziko12345]

I think that this was accidentally created and they saw positive outcomes and decided to do it on purpose.

 

[nakamura]

A few years ago they actually made sense and Google also explained what changed and what they worked on.

But now it seems so random, intransparent and it makes no sense.

 

[Dark Sky]

Just to add to my original comment.

If google knocks the small sites of the big keywords, it forces them to go for smaller keywords, the outcome of this is more long tail keywords get answered. Users satisfaction increases.

If everyone competed for the same keyword, no one would be able to find any answers on google.

They need the big keywords answered by the big companies who invest $100s in one piece of content, this maximises the amount of users that end up happy. They don't want to rank $10 content for a 10,000 search volume keyword, they want those 20,000 users to find the $200 content.

Destroy the small guys hopes of ever ranking for it, and they are resorted to targeting long tail keywords with 10 searches per month.

A very efficient model, I'd be surprised if they weren't using it.

 

[MaxiJazz]

Who’s behind Google?
Alphabet
Who’s behind Alphabet?
Investment funds.
Who’s behind most media outlets?
Well, investment funds.

Oh, wait, this sounds like a nonsense. Which in turn, feels like a barebones conspiracy theory, for miles.

What if the same investment funds were behind these two? Check Nasdaq. Follow the fucking money, then redefine conspiracy freaking theory. The question is: is there a conflict of interests somewhere?

As always, I am nobody. And a nobody does not fit into an E/A/T system Google talks about. So don’t trust me, check for yourselves, but promise me you will use your own brains to draw conclusions.

Questions remain unanswered. Money are there though, and nobody gives a shit to talk about the real problem. Nobody.

Right.

 

[BrandingCat]

Left hand = Google
Right hand = Rankings

 

[splishsplash]

These updates never make any sense. Both black and white hat sites getting hit at random.

I'm not saying this is happening but what if....

At random intervals Google removes 30% or so of a websites link juice then holds it for a random amount of time before giving it back. Making it just appear as one of those "traffic swings" with the intention of making people try AdWords as a traffic source to replace their lost organic traffic.

Damn it, it's the weekend and it's my turn to make a slightly crazy conspiracy theory lounge thread!

It's just not how Google works at all.

The search team is just a bunch of geeky engineers trying to make search better and they have to go through really strict approvals to roll out changes in the live index.

Forget blackhat and whitehat. This is not what google are interested in anymore.

The rollouts are all AI. No one really knows what to expect. Sometimes they work, sometimes they need tweaking based on how the world responds.

There's a few concepts at play in google.

1) Relevancy
2) Authority
3) Power

Relevancy comes first in most niches.

In some niches they weigh authority more, like health/finance.

Power boosts everything. How they judge authority in the past was based on links only.

Now, it's machine learning.

Machine learning is looking at EVERYTHING. Images, layouts, content.. It's trying to identify the best possible sites for the users, based on what it knows the users choose. It's constantly learning.

You rank in 2020 by looking at what's on page 1. That tells you what the machine learning algo is looking for. Then you make something similar, but unique, because it also looks for unique stuff. You'll probably have noticed that there's more variety on page 1 these days.

Google will penalize sites less and less, because the machine learning is working out what users want and showing it to them, regardless of whether you have pbn links, bad anchors or anything else.

SEO is becoming both easier and harder.

In the past they would try to target sites who were doing spammy things, as this was a pretty reliable way of removing "bad" sites. Now, you have the machine learning getting more and more sophisticated and accurate and choosing sites that people want to see. So naturally, they aren't needing to allocate resources to go after "spammers", because the system just takes care of things better by its self now.

Who’s behind Google?
Alphabet
Who’s behind Alphabet?
Investment funds.
Who’s behind most media outlets?
Well, investment funds.

Oh?

Where did you learn that?

There's actually 2 people behind Google. Larry and Sergey.

The team behind the search is just a bunch of engineers who love their job. All these conspiracy theories are just wild.

No investment firm has any say at google. Vanguard only has something like 7% of the voting shares. Larry and Sergey have 51%.

 

[Toz]

Making it just appear as one of those "traffic swings" with the intention of making people try AdWords as a traffic source to replace their lost organic traffic.

 

[Ekalavya Hansaj]

And here I thought I was going to have a dull weekend. And now its me, my pints of beer and these google conspirarcy theories. Lolz

 

[splishsplash]

Let's think about this logically.

Do people understand how companies work?

Let's forget the fact that Larry and Sergey own 51% of the voting shares..

How do these investment firms manage to get the team of super smart engineers at google, guys like..

Ben Gomes who is one of the main brains behind search and has been at Google since 1999 and who's entire life work revolves around organizing the world's information.

Pandu Nayak, who joined google in the early 2000's after being on Nasa's AI team, who is a fellow and part of the core search leadership team.

And Urs Holzle, a swiss software engineer who is google's 8th employee. Yes, 8th employee. That means he's been there since it was a tiny little passionate startup.

So.. These guys, and all the other top engineers who are working to organize search are there in the google offices working on DeepRank and other parts of the algorithm.

Does some guy from Vanguard turn up and have a secret meeting with them? "Hey, guys! It's me. Evil bob from BigInvesment! Listen up. You're going to fuck up the algo to drop a bunch of small businesses 30% to push more people onto adwords. Got it?! Good. I have other evil plans to take care of, go to work!"

Now, before the team of stunned engineers have a chance to tell him that, unfortunately they don't have the power to do that.. He's already left.

Because that team has to go through months of rigorous testing to put a plan together that will be presented to a committee who will then vote on whether or not it gets pushed into the live index. Yes.. This is a real company, folks. With meetings, and teams, and procedures.

So, unfortunately, even if the 8th employee of google wanted to screw up the live index to please Evil Bob from Vanguard he couldn't.

Well, maybe Evil Bob has had words with the entire committee?

But wait..

Back to that old nugget of "How companies fucking work"

Let me explain.

You have shareholders. They hold shares of various classes.

Some of those shares have more votes than others.

First, an election committee will elect board members. Those board members are voted in with the shareholders who hold voting stock.

The board then elect a chairman of the board.

Now. None of these guys have ANY power to run the company.

They have very little direct power. They have the power to decide dividend payouts and other executive company matters, but no power to run the company.

What they CAN do is appoint staff, generally in the form of c-level executives who DO run the company. Those c-level executives will appoint lower level staff.

So, how does Evil Bob manage to effect power?

Still in this alternative universe where Larry and Sergey don't have 51% of the voting shares, Evil Bob's actual shares are irrelevant, because all a majority shareholder can do is elect a new board. Let's assume Evil Bob is a board member. He can raise an issue to vote on. So, he's going to raise the issue of fucking up the index to push adwords? And all the board members will then vote on this? What next? They would need to fire the CEO and find one who will do their will. And do you think that CEO will have the support of the company? What about all the search team that have been there from the start. The nasa guy. These passionate engineers. Do you think they are just going to be ok with their passion, their work, being destroyed?

This is why I say that these conspiracy theories are utterly ridiculous. When you understand how companies work, how software engineers are, how companies are run day to day, the approval processes involved to roll out live changes at google.. Come on.

 

[Mr Positive]

Isn’t this what @bartosimpsonio has been screaming here and we barely have paid attention to it

 

[bartosimpsonio]

At random intervals Google removes 30% or so of a websites link juice then holds it for a random amount of time before giving it back. Making it just appear as one of those "traffic swings" with the intention of making people try AdWords as a traffic source to replace their lost organic traffic.

Damn it, it's the weekend and it's my turn to make a slightly crazy conspiracy theory lounge thread!

Nothing crazy about this theory at all IMO.

They do inject randomness into the algorithm for sure. You can see this in many stages of the updates themselves.

I think they destroy small sites on purpose, simply because they know the smaller guys won't understand and just post more content.

Also because they've brainswashed a bunch of idiots who will support them no matter what.

Everyone who's been here since the beginning knows how Google works yet they believe it's a conspiracy when you mention it.

It's right there for everyone to see.

Stop using gmail, chrome and use fake data on your android phone and then this begins to reverse.

Everyone should just use a new gmail for every new phone.

I think that this was accidentally created and they saw positive outcomes and decided to do it on purpose.

It was definitely on purpose. Their earnings continue growing.

The business model is pretty simple actually. Everyone continues building free content for them, they show the content on their own properties with their own ads. It's brilliant.

The only question is how they managed to brainwash so many idiots to work for them for free and not complain at all.

A few years ago they actually made sense and Google also explained what changed and what they worked on.

But now it seems so random, intransparent and it makes no sense.

It was always random. They always spread disinformation. Always. The stuff they said everyone should do never worked for SEO because SEO is their #1 enemy. The job of Google's public relations about SEO is to disinform and keep you in the dark. Everything they say is just to throw you off. People don't learn and continue to believe that shit.

Big agency owners used to buy links while they echoed Google's BS in public.

I knew a link broker who sold links to the most famous "white hat" personalities out there, for example the owner of a well known SEO company who always spread white hat BS, virtual signaling in public just to please the Google drones, while he was buying black hat links behind everyone's backs. These "white hat" guru's link buying spreadsheets often landed on my desk (magically).

Manual Reviewers

Does anyone remember what happened to DMOZ?

How did DMOZ die? Editor corruption.

If everything feels a bit to personal, like they're targetting you, it may not be a coincidence.

Just a hint of what's going on.

 

[nakamura]

What I actually meant by that was they published updates which were having an impact on specific parts of the algorithm. For example one update, which targeted anchor texts. Another update which targeted low quality links, etc. Hummingbird, Panda, Pinguin, however you wanna call it.

Now on the other hand its totally blurred. You don't know what they targeted, what they changed or wtf happened. Lets just take this indexing/crawling issue for a moment. They don't really address it or give any update on this. Its just a "hey, we got an issue. we will temporarily disable it for a few weeks" but this crap has been going on since several months.

And yes, I totally agree with you. Their goal is definitely misinformation, it always has been. They are misleading people on purpose. From their point of view I can totally understand. Why should they tell the people what they changed within their algorithm? It would be way easier to exploit it or find a loophole.

In my opinion the Google search engine has never been worse. Its extremely easy to exploit it and the guys who are actually out there and deliver great content are the ones who are fucked.

 

[splishsplash]

Nothing crazy about this theory at all IMO.

They do inject randomness into the algorithm for sure. You can see this in many stages of the updates themselves.

Did you not bother to read any of my post?

How does this "randomness" get past committees and teams of engineers?

Are they all in on the conspiracy?

Do you understand the mindset of top 1% engineers? Top 10% even.

They have very little interest in money beyond its ability to provide comfort for them to keep solving interesting problems.

Do you not think just 1 of them would go public and say "google is a giant scam that injects randomness. It's all a big ploy to get you to buy adwords".

Have you ever worked at a software company? I have, and I can tell you just how stupid this theory is. Most engineers would laugh at this because it's impossible. The algorithm is not run by evil men in suits, it's run by teams of geeky guys in glasses who sit around pondering ideas to organize and return data.

Search is an INCREDIBLY COMPLEX problem to solve. Just because it looks random to you doesn't mean they are sitting there coding "randomness" into the algorithm. How would that even work. It would be so incredibly messy to try to code. Is it random relevant results, is it random results period? How does this randomness work on an engineering level. And if we have randomness, then why have some sites ranked constantly for years. Suddenly this problem becomes as complicated as search its self. "How do we program in randomness, but keep some results stable, and do it in a way that drives more adwords sales". It's so absurd. What makes it even more absurd is that Evil Bob at Vanguard wouldn't even do this, because he has the business sense to know it doesn't work. It's like walking into your office and robbing your employees at gun point so you can make some extra profit. It's literally THAT stupid. You think they want to deliberately DAMAGE a product they spend billions in AI research on, just drive a few short time sales.


And DMOZ died because it just a directory of sites.

Comparing search to a directory shows you don't actually understand the engineering problem at hand.

How do you think you can go to google and type

"will something bad happen to my cat if he eats lasagna"

and get this back

https://faqcats.com/can-cats-eat-la...is not poisonous to cats.,be bad for your pet.

Where it's highlighted the exact answer.

or

what clothes did poor people wear in rome

And I get

https://www.ducksters.com/history/ancient_rome/clothing.php
Which tells me

"The exomis was a type of tunic used by working men that only went over one shoulder. "

That's pretty damn good.

That's the result of years of clever engineers working on the problem of information retrieval, and that's why google is the giant that it is.

What I actually meant by that was they published updates which were having an impact on specific parts of the algorithm. For example one update, which targeted anchor texts. Another update which targeted low quality links, etc. Hummingbird, Panda, Pinguin, however you wanna call it.

Now on the other hand its totally blurred. You don't know what they targeted, what they changed or wtf happened. Lets just take this indexing/crawling issue for a moment. They don't really address it or give any update on this. Its just a "hey, we got an issue. we will temporarily disable it for a few weeks" but this crap has been going on since several months.

And yes, I totally agree with you. Their goal is definitely misinformation, it always has been. They are misleading people on purpose. From their point of view I can totally understand. Why should they tell the people what they changed within their algorithm? It would be way easier to exploit it or find a loophole.

In my opinion the Google search engine has never been worse. Its extremely easy to exploit it and the guys who are actually out there and deliver great content are the ones who are fucked.

No one is misleading anyone. It's just a team of engineers who make changes to the algorithm, test it for months before finally seeking approval for it to go into the live index to see if it improves the results. It's that simple.

You can't just "temporarily disable" things. It's a vast complicated system and a large part of it is AI. That means there's no "code to change". No one knows the results you'll get with machine learning until it's tested, and in many cases you can only test on the live index.

It's just complicated engineering well beyond most people, so what happens is people see conspiracies and evil.

Google is not easy to exploit. If it was you wouldn't be here writing this, you'd be rolling in your $$'s

What you say is "great content" is probably garbage.

Give me examples of sites delivering "great content" that are getting suppressed.

The reality is actually the opposite of what you're saying. It's HARD to exploit google in 2020. It was easy in the past. The only way to rank is to actually create topically deep, rich content that matches what the user wants.(I've seen people think their content is great, when it's complete trash.) and combine that with strong backlinks.

You can't "exploit" the AI. It's literally just discovering the qualities of pages that users like and then returning more of those where relevancy and authority are high enough.

 

[dudeiam]

As I said yesterday before I had to delete my post for giving too much information away, there are plenty of example of sites, with small, very modest set-ups with no footprint on AdWords WHATSOEVER who are still outranking multi-billion dollar multinationals with high - very high competition kws. I know this because I know two of them personally. I've tested all kinds of ranking factors and there's no correlation as to why he should be there. Things are just now how they used to be.

You've got to remember there's no longer great reliance on central algorithms across the entire spectrum of category. There is much greater reliance on any number of niche/nature specific micro-algorithms. Some may have just a handful, others, hundreds. So one size fits all strategies will not work anymore.You have to really to know your niche and see what works regarding the particulars.
But that's not all there is to the bizarre changes people are experiencing - looking at the bigger picture. Think about how the landscape will be affected by Google completely rolling out the quantum model for commercial purposes

 

[Fresh Ideas Marketing]

I feel after a last couple updates white hat sites getting a hit

 

[Dark Sky]

Did you not bother to read any of my post?

How does this "randomness" get past committees and teams of engineers?

Are they all in on the conspiracy?

Do you understand the mindset of top 1% engineers? Top 10% even.

They have very little interest in money beyond its ability to provide comfort for them to keep solving interesting problems.

Do you not think just 1 of them would go public and say "google is a giant scam that injects randomness. It's all a big ploy to get you to buy adwords".

Have you ever worked at a software company? I have, and I can tell you just how stupid this theory is. Most engineers would laugh at this because it's impossible. The algorithm is not run by evil men in suits, it's run by teams of geeky guys in glasses who sit around pondering ideas to organize and return data.

Search is an INCREDIBLY COMPLEX problem to solve. Just because it looks random to you doesn't mean they are sitting there coding "randomness" into the algorithm. How would that even work. It would be so incredibly messy to try to code. Is it random relevant results, is it random results period? How does this randomness work on an engineering level. And if we have randomness, then why have some sites ranked constantly for years. Suddenly this problem becomes as complicated as search its self. "How do we program in randomness, but keep some results stable, and do it in a way that drives more adwords sales". It's so absurd. What makes it even more absurd is that Evil Bob at Vanguard wouldn't even do this, because he has the business sense to know it doesn't work. It's like walking into your office and robbing your employees at gun point so you can make some extra profit. It's literally THAT stupid. You think they want to deliberately DAMAGE a product they spend billions in AI research on, just drive a few short time sales.


And DMOZ died because it just a directory of sites.

Comparing search to a directory shows you don't actually understand the engineering problem at hand.

How do you think you can go to google and type

"will something bad happen to my cat if he eats lasagna"

and get this back

https://faqcats.com/can-cats-eat-lasagna/#:~:text=Lasagna%20itself%20is%20not%20poisonous%20to%20cats.,be%20bad%20for%20your%20pet.

Where it's highlighted the exact answer.

or

what clothes did poor people wear in rome

And I get

https://www.ducksters.com/history/ancient_rome/clothing.php
Which tells me

"The exomis was a type of tunic used by working men that only went over one shoulder. "

That's pretty damn good.

That's the result of years of clever engineers working on the problem of information retrieval, and that's why google is the giant that it is.



No one is misleading anyone. It's just a team of engineers who make changes to the algorithm, test it for months before finally seeking approval for it to go into the live index to see if it improves the results. It's that simple.

You can't just "temporarily disable" things. It's a vast complicated system and a large part of it is AI. That means there's no "code to change". No one knows the results you'll get with machine learning until it's tested, and in many cases you can only test on the live index.

It's just complicated engineering well beyond most people, so what happens is people see conspiracies and evil.

Google is not easy to exploit. If it was you wouldn't be here writing this, you'd be rolling in your $$'s

What you say is "great content" is probably garbage.

Give me examples of sites delivering "great content" that are getting suppressed.

The reality is actually the opposite of what you're saying. It's HARD to exploit google in 2020. It was easy in the past. The only way to rank is to actually create topically deep, rich content that matches what the user wants.(I've seen people think their content is great, when it's complete trash.) and combine that with strong backlinks.

You can't "exploit" the AI. It's literally just discovering the qualities of pages that users like and then returning more of those where relevancy and authority are high enough.

Agreed.

I'm a server engineer in a big company . Any changes done on any servers need a change request, approved by multiple people, with blackout plans if anything happens that wasnt intended.

With big changes, they have to test it on project servers first, once change is approved, they can roll it out to the production servers, once rolled out, they start their testing again to ensure everything as worked as planned.

Once testing has finished, the monitoring teams are on high alert for those specific servers it was rolled out onto.

 

[Zbigniew]

I believe something along those lines too.

I'm certain that there is a randomized variable in the algorithm as well, to confuse/combat SEO. It would only make sense from them to do so.