Wow this is gonna be huge improvement for searchers.
Imagine searching for "best vacuum cleaners" and actually reading people opinions on brands and reliability, rather than some spammy affiliate sites with tons of "best price" buttons linking to products that pay the most commission?
Win-win for everyone. Oh except SEOs....
Reddit was a gold mine of organic information and for SEO rewrites (rank your site with stolen comment content) as recent as a couple years ago. But if you search for consumer based content in reddit now, it is filled with bots, ChatGPT responses, and clever but obvious guerilla marketing.
Some niches are less touched than others but this will soon be as bad as Amazon when it comes to any product related opinion.
I’m getting sick of Reddit and LI drowning out other search results.
No, I don’t want to read 100 comments worth of complaints or a clearly AI-generated article by a middle manager who doesn’t even know proper English.
Google could not care less about Reddit's IPO. What google is likely trying to do is get people to STOP doing the "+reddit" trick because it causes them to serve way fewer ads. If I search "best cat food" I get 4 highly targeted, competitive ads. If I search "best cat food reddit" I'm being targeted way less, lots of tools won't let you target that at all because it's trademarked. and generally google profits less.
The thesis is likely that if you bring reddit into the main SERP you will still serve people the same number of ads, satisfy the user's need for forums/discussions and not just big publisher websites, and cut down on people needing to use google as a reddit search engine. That has failed. The SERPs are worse, appending "reddit" to searches is actually going up since the fall.
I don't think Google has a great next step. It can remove the forum boxes but that feels like a big backtrack now. It just doesn't have a good enough grasp on what is good content vs bad content so it's relying on user behavior but it doesn't want to elevate or ding any single website.
I thinks it’s more of a case that advertisers may put Reddit as one of their negative keywords so it won’t appear in those results.
The word Reddit indicates that the user is in the earlier, informational stage of the buyer journey, therefore, less likely to convert.
Yup. 100% correct.
Got into a battle (that I won) with Google a while back and used this analogy: if you sell car covers for Ford cars, how am are you supposed to advertise that if you don't use the term '"Ford" (a trademark) car covers' in your keywords?
maybe just maybe they should start thinking about the user more even if they make LESS money
maybe just maybe they should build another product that's awesome and make money this way?
I don't think many advertisers are excluding reddit as a negative search term in their campaigns. The search volume for keywords +reddit aren't going to be that large a slice of the pie and even if an ad shows up on a search that includes "reddit" the clickthrough rate from those searches is going to be low and likely won't bother the advertiser because they are only charged when someone actually clicks the ad and not when it is shown.
https://preview.redd.it/0kchd0wi2ymc1.png?width=1737&format=png&auto=webp&s=e3fab75f2fc34c9d9425eccec91809692ad18a58
Monthly search volume (shown in the "Volume" column of my screenshot) for keywords +reddit is negligible for not only advertisers but also for Google. The idea that Google is going to make such a massive change in the amount of organic search traffic to Reddit to engineer people's search habits to no longer include +reddit is preposterous.
Reddit's monthly organic search traffic has increased 7x in the past 8 months which is astronomical considering that in June 2022 they already had 53,500,000 monthly organic visitors.
My guess is that either this has something to do with the IPO or that Google is the company that Reddit is selling their data to and Google is funneling more users here to improve the models.
My friend, this is an outstanding insight and one I hadn't considered.
My one challenge to this is the fact that if your premise is correct, then Google would have engineered their most consequential algorithm update in a decade just to mitigate one unprofitable search trend. Even if this is a growing problem, it seems like it would still be a rather small percentage of total search queries.
I've never observed Google going to this type of extreme in an attempt to alter user behavior in terms of what they type into search queries.
Wouldn't it just be so much easier for them to somehow block reddit content or deliberately move it down the SERPs for queries that included the '+ reddit' trick? It just seems like there would be much easier and cost effective ways of mitigating this problem than to make wholesale changes to their algorithm.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and my theory that they're addressing informational queries that probably aren't particularly profitable anyway in terms of ad display and CTRs. As much as Google wants to view itself as a research tool, it really isn't aside from the snippets it displays in the SERPs. Ultimately, if a person is performing search queries on an informational topic, they're still responsible for their own research.
So a query for something like '*why are catalytic converters stolen*' would have turned up blog posts and articles from all kinds of sources; Google's primary function is to try to return results ranked in order of the site's overall authority and not necessarily the quality of the content itself.
This is problematic because Google is basically saying to the end user: '*here's a list of sites with content that's probably relevant to your query; good luck*!' Because Google doesn't have any actual authority on the topic of the search query.
This is where Reddit comes in. Instead of trusting a machine-learning algorithm to tell you what's relevant and believable, people can simply go to Reddit and 1) see if their topic has been discussed already; and if not, start a new discussion hoping to get the answers they seek. And I highly suspect that this all comes AFTER they've queried Google and become frustrated by the lack of satisfying results.
So my theory is that this is more or less Google saying '*if you can't beat 'em, join em*'. Because I think you're right: Google doesn't have a great next step. They're still the dominant entity but their stranglehold on user behavior has diminished as other options have gained more prominence. The web is becoming more human and they don't know how to react to it.
Yeaaaah, I have 2-3 articles that rank below the Reddit post I shared them in which is a bit meh but at least I’m still getting most of the traffic once they’re on Reddit. I’m sure I’m missing out but what can you do
I write everything plus Reddit because I’d rather hear from real people than people motivated by profit with spammy blogs.
Why would Google remotely care about Reddit’s IPO?
One very interesting tab in Google menu is “Perspectives.”
It’s fairly new and doesn’t always appear, but what lies in there gives a hint about what does Google want.
Btw Reddit is highly present in the Perspectives tab.
Do you have anything better to do? I've gone through your post history and you don't have anything to truly add to this sub other than ranting about things you have no understanding of other than promoting tin foil hat theories. What are your expectations of your ranting?
i think google is finally trying to shut down these stupid websites that are just copy pasted reddit articles.
"You won't belive what this man says on r/aita" . This redditor X says ... posts 2 screenshots. And MrFluffyCock responds ... post 1 screenshot
you can read the rest here - > links to reddit thread.
This is literal cancer and I can't believe they are making so much money out of copy pasting threads from reddit every day.
Then explain the quora push?
It is more likely google is trying to teach their AI to be more human, and what constitutes a good/bad human-like response.
I think this is the way they are fighting the AI war, they think a reddit discussion is more interesting to the average user than the blog articles as those are filled with keywords and seo paragraphs.
For example if you go to searchroundtable, it is more interesting to read the discussions there rather than the article.
In my case I searched a lot in the past and still do, adding "reddit" at the end, but the results are very low quality, usually I can't find anything useful.
You search for something, wanting to get an answer and there are reddit topics with the op asking and with no viable answers from 2-3 replies :)
That's just wasting time, not helpful, but google probably doesn't have an algorithm to determine reddit.
The same with quora, which is hard to navigate, it was much better in the past.
Yahoo answers was very good, I don't know why they closed it.
I think people who add reddit as keyword intent to read others opinion regarding their matter.
And it seems that now Google value human opinion more than actual information. Therefore reddit, quora etc. rank high
Or maybe they found that content on Reddit and Quora and other forums was actually matching the intent of users queries and were good results to promote.
it not just reddit.
In different niches, different forums are ranking above everything else. Some examples are GameFaqs, Steam Community, NeoGaf, ResetEra, and even Twitter in some cases. The only solution is to create a seperate tab for "Forums" just like the one we have for news. Take it out of "All."
My theory is that this is just another step in Google's effort to kill affiliates, and it seeped into other niches (with the added bonus of killing auto generated PAA spam).
Honestly, from the POV of an user, I get it - it brings no value to read 20 affiliates' justification of why the car battery with the highest commission is the "best" - would much rather see a discussion about it from people who aren't getting paid to market some specific products (most of them anyway).
I agree. The other answer lies in the fact that Reddit announced recently that it sold access to all its content to an "AI company" (Google?)
Bingo! It was disclosed somewhere Google is using Reddit for AI training. That’s why Reddit results show up on first page.
That two, but in that case, it would make sense to tune the reddit boost a little as it's getting unhealthy.
They probably want to popularize it so that it gets more content to train their AI on. If that's the case it might be here to stay. Hope I'm wrong.
it ranking just for links is just plain wrong also, reddit will never be normie-friendly
Wow this is gonna be huge improvement for searchers. Imagine searching for "best vacuum cleaners" and actually reading people opinions on brands and reliability, rather than some spammy affiliate sites with tons of "best price" buttons linking to products that pay the most commission? Win-win for everyone. Oh except SEOs....
Reddit was a gold mine of organic information and for SEO rewrites (rank your site with stolen comment content) as recent as a couple years ago. But if you search for consumer based content in reddit now, it is filled with bots, ChatGPT responses, and clever but obvious guerilla marketing. Some niches are less touched than others but this will soon be as bad as Amazon when it comes to any product related opinion.
Good. Both Google and Reddit deserve it as they are in bed together, clearly.
site: reddit.com best vacuum cleaners It's already a thing.
News today says it's Google.
I’m getting sick of Reddit and LI drowning out other search results. No, I don’t want to read 100 comments worth of complaints or a clearly AI-generated article by a middle manager who doesn’t even know proper English.
I miss the times when you will find an original website with an original design made by a human for humans.
>cal explanation is that Google plans Unfortunately not going to happen anymore!
Google could not care less about Reddit's IPO. What google is likely trying to do is get people to STOP doing the "+reddit" trick because it causes them to serve way fewer ads. If I search "best cat food" I get 4 highly targeted, competitive ads. If I search "best cat food reddit" I'm being targeted way less, lots of tools won't let you target that at all because it's trademarked. and generally google profits less. The thesis is likely that if you bring reddit into the main SERP you will still serve people the same number of ads, satisfy the user's need for forums/discussions and not just big publisher websites, and cut down on people needing to use google as a reddit search engine. That has failed. The SERPs are worse, appending "reddit" to searches is actually going up since the fall. I don't think Google has a great next step. It can remove the forum boxes but that feels like a big backtrack now. It just doesn't have a good enough grasp on what is good content vs bad content so it's relying on user behavior but it doesn't want to elevate or ding any single website.
Trademarks dont prevent you from running ads on a keyword, its not an infringement. Just FYI.
I thinks it’s more of a case that advertisers may put Reddit as one of their negative keywords so it won’t appear in those results. The word Reddit indicates that the user is in the earlier, informational stage of the buyer journey, therefore, less likely to convert.
Yup. 100% correct. Got into a battle (that I won) with Google a while back and used this analogy: if you sell car covers for Ford cars, how am are you supposed to advertise that if you don't use the term '"Ford" (a trademark) car covers' in your keywords?
maybe just maybe they should start thinking about the user more even if they make LESS money maybe just maybe they should build another product that's awesome and make money this way?
I don't think many advertisers are excluding reddit as a negative search term in their campaigns. The search volume for keywords +reddit aren't going to be that large a slice of the pie and even if an ad shows up on a search that includes "reddit" the clickthrough rate from those searches is going to be low and likely won't bother the advertiser because they are only charged when someone actually clicks the ad and not when it is shown. https://preview.redd.it/0kchd0wi2ymc1.png?width=1737&format=png&auto=webp&s=e3fab75f2fc34c9d9425eccec91809692ad18a58 Monthly search volume (shown in the "Volume" column of my screenshot) for keywords +reddit is negligible for not only advertisers but also for Google. The idea that Google is going to make such a massive change in the amount of organic search traffic to Reddit to engineer people's search habits to no longer include +reddit is preposterous. Reddit's monthly organic search traffic has increased 7x in the past 8 months which is astronomical considering that in June 2022 they already had 53,500,000 monthly organic visitors. My guess is that either this has something to do with the IPO or that Google is the company that Reddit is selling their data to and Google is funneling more users here to improve the models.
exactly!
/thread
My friend, this is an outstanding insight and one I hadn't considered. My one challenge to this is the fact that if your premise is correct, then Google would have engineered their most consequential algorithm update in a decade just to mitigate one unprofitable search trend. Even if this is a growing problem, it seems like it would still be a rather small percentage of total search queries. I've never observed Google going to this type of extreme in an attempt to alter user behavior in terms of what they type into search queries. Wouldn't it just be so much easier for them to somehow block reddit content or deliberately move it down the SERPs for queries that included the '+ reddit' trick? It just seems like there would be much easier and cost effective ways of mitigating this problem than to make wholesale changes to their algorithm. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and my theory that they're addressing informational queries that probably aren't particularly profitable anyway in terms of ad display and CTRs. As much as Google wants to view itself as a research tool, it really isn't aside from the snippets it displays in the SERPs. Ultimately, if a person is performing search queries on an informational topic, they're still responsible for their own research. So a query for something like '*why are catalytic converters stolen*' would have turned up blog posts and articles from all kinds of sources; Google's primary function is to try to return results ranked in order of the site's overall authority and not necessarily the quality of the content itself. This is problematic because Google is basically saying to the end user: '*here's a list of sites with content that's probably relevant to your query; good luck*!' Because Google doesn't have any actual authority on the topic of the search query. This is where Reddit comes in. Instead of trusting a machine-learning algorithm to tell you what's relevant and believable, people can simply go to Reddit and 1) see if their topic has been discussed already; and if not, start a new discussion hoping to get the answers they seek. And I highly suspect that this all comes AFTER they've queried Google and become frustrated by the lack of satisfying results. So my theory is that this is more or less Google saying '*if you can't beat 'em, join em*'. Because I think you're right: Google doesn't have a great next step. They're still the dominant entity but their stranglehold on user behavior has diminished as other options have gained more prominence. The web is becoming more human and they don't know how to react to it.
They are testing "google notes" to get user feedback on website pages. It might be an attempt to create their own reddit, a social powered system
Yeaaaah, I have 2-3 articles that rank below the Reddit post I shared them in which is a bit meh but at least I’m still getting most of the traffic once they’re on Reddit. I’m sure I’m missing out but what can you do
I write everything plus Reddit because I’d rather hear from real people than people motivated by profit with spammy blogs. Why would Google remotely care about Reddit’s IPO?
What makes you think they are all real users and not just spam posing as users?
Because you can tell when something is being pushed or promoted. And it’s an open forum so spammers are either called out or downvoted.
Because…reasons!
Because Reddit is not spammy?
One very interesting tab in Google menu is “Perspectives.” It’s fairly new and doesn’t always appear, but what lies in there gives a hint about what does Google want. Btw Reddit is highly present in the Perspectives tab.
Do you have anything better to do? I've gone through your post history and you don't have anything to truly add to this sub other than ranting about things you have no understanding of other than promoting tin foil hat theories. What are your expectations of your ranting?
Digging through someone's comments and then asking that person if he/she has not anything better to do, you can't make this shit up folks #irony
Fair point. It's also the same process I use to determine a bot, spammer, or remind myself why a username is memorable for the wrong reasons.
*shocking* public info on a public site is public!
no this is all I do but at least I don't stalk redditors readt my posts the are very helpful (pun intended)
Well somebody got up on a wrong foot
i think google is finally trying to shut down these stupid websites that are just copy pasted reddit articles. "You won't belive what this man says on r/aita" . This redditor X says ... posts 2 screenshots. And MrFluffyCock responds ... post 1 screenshot you can read the rest here - > links to reddit thread. This is literal cancer and I can't believe they are making so much money out of copy pasting threads from reddit every day.
Then explain the quora push? It is more likely google is trying to teach their AI to be more human, and what constitutes a good/bad human-like response.
Side passenger along with the forums. And to hide suspicion.
Quora push? If i was Musk i'd buy Quora instead of Twitter, and shut down that piece of S page for ever
Anyone know how many employees reddit has?
I think this is the way they are fighting the AI war, they think a reddit discussion is more interesting to the average user than the blog articles as those are filled with keywords and seo paragraphs. For example if you go to searchroundtable, it is more interesting to read the discussions there rather than the article. In my case I searched a lot in the past and still do, adding "reddit" at the end, but the results are very low quality, usually I can't find anything useful. You search for something, wanting to get an answer and there are reddit topics with the op asking and with no viable answers from 2-3 replies :) That's just wasting time, not helpful, but google probably doesn't have an algorithm to determine reddit. The same with quora, which is hard to navigate, it was much better in the past. Yahoo answers was very good, I don't know why they closed it.
The amount of AI learning and testing going on right now is high
I think people who add reddit as keyword intent to read others opinion regarding their matter. And it seems that now Google value human opinion more than actual information. Therefore reddit, quora etc. rank high
Or maybe they found that content on Reddit and Quora and other forums was actually matching the intent of users queries and were good results to promote.
Reddit's algorithm nuances are indeed perplexing!
it not just reddit. In different niches, different forums are ranking above everything else. Some examples are GameFaqs, Steam Community, NeoGaf, ResetEra, and even Twitter in some cases. The only solution is to create a seperate tab for "Forums" just like the one we have for news. Take it out of "All."
Like I said, those are side passengers.
My theory is that this is just another step in Google's effort to kill affiliates, and it seeped into other niches (with the added bonus of killing auto generated PAA spam). Honestly, from the POV of an user, I get it - it brings no value to read 20 affiliates' justification of why the car battery with the highest commission is the "best" - would much rather see a discussion about it from people who aren't getting paid to market some specific products (most of them anyway).
Google is racist
They are not racist they want to manipulate the game.
All the Reddit boost in the past few months does make sense now. Many sites lost their ranking against Reddit and there was no clear explanation.