Why is the Internet full of crappy & misleading articles, why have Google search results become questionable, and can that be fixed?
Everything in this article is my opinion – based on my knowledge, education, available information, and personal experience.
Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):
- What Google says they want to see on top
- Why is this impossible to satisfy?
- Monetized sites and “SEO articles”
- Conclusion
1. What Google says they want to see on top
These are the Google’s recommendations for any website articles (requirements is a better word):
- Original or at least with a lot of added “value” compared to the stuff already existing online.
- Written by an experienced expert in the field.
- Well-written.
- Written for humans, not for ranking on Google (and making profits from adverts and affiliate links).
If you wish, you can read the Google’s guidelines (Wayback Machine copy as Google tends to move goalposts every now and then). You can also read my articles about website monetization, and how to make a good website (i.e. a site that’s good for visitors).
2. Why is this impossible to satisfy?
Here’s why I know this is practically impossible to satisfy.
- How many experienced experts in a field are also very good at writing (so you don’t need to pay a writer/editor)?
See the above-listed four criteria. - How many of those are willing to work for free?
See the criteria 4 above. - How many of such experts who are willing to work for free can afford to dedicate enough time to write more than a few articles (and perhaps run a website)?
Again, see the criteria 4 above.
The criteria are mutually exclusive for 99.99% of experts in the world. Very few people can afford to work for free, especially on a consistent basis. So, the only ones who can satisfy all the criteria are profitable companies who can afford to pay experts and editors for articles. Yes, this is still technically made for profit (to get visitor on their site where they sell goods or services), just not obviously or directly.
A great example of this corporate stuff done right is the Park Tool company website and Park Tool YouTube channel. They make awesome tutorials and helpful articles, but that does serve as a marketing channel for selling more tools (it is what got them to the top), and all that work is sponsored by the company that sells bicycle tools (their full-time employees are writing articles and making videos).
What is wrong with this?
The above-discussed Park Tool website, to use that example, won’t recommend a tool by another brand that can be better or offer a better value for the money. The inherent bias is inevitable. It has to be.
The articles and videos are awesome and exemplary, despite the above-noted bias, but Park Tool is an exceptional example – it is usually a lot worse.
Independent experts can’t possibly match this, unless they are willing to do a lot of work for free, or if they monetize their website, which leads us to the next chapter.
3. Monetized sites and “SEO articles”
For an independent expert to cover the website hosting expenses and get some money for their time (bills must be paid), they must use some kind of website monetization (serving adverts or using affiliate links). In order for people to find their articles online, today, they must write for search engines first, since nothing else works, not really, not at the time of writing.
Of course, many people have abused this monetization side and taken it to an extreme. Here is a short list of what most Internet articles look like today:
- Paying or shilling for backlinks.
- Writing for search engines, instead of for (the human) readers.
- Hiring cheap “content writers” instead of experts to write many articles (or using AI to write articles – that is all the rage now).
Let me use my own experience as an example:
This will sound like bragging, but thanks to the circumstances (and my character), I am one of the very few people I know who satisfy the above-listed criteria. I am crazy enough to keep dedicating my time to writing informative and educational articles (and have been doing so online since 2015) for free.
Yes, my (BikeGremlin) websites are monetized: I use affiliate links and serve automated adverts. However, I don’t write articles “for SEO” (i.e. to rank highly on search engines like Google), I write them to explain and answer the questions as best as I can.
That used to work OK until 2023 Google HCU update. However, at the time of writing, my articles are practically gone from Google’s search results!
Why is that? My articles are what Google says it wants to see at the top (they aren’t perfect, but they are quite good, based on the numerous reader feedback over the years). My (wild?) guess is that Google knows their criteria are impossible to match. So, what I can see them doing now is placing the corporate-owned stuff at the top. Articles by websites owned by established for-profit companies, and some huge corporations (Google’s Reddit and Forbes deals).
Conclusion
When people ask for some bicycle (or WordPress/hosting) related help, I used to just type the question in Google search and get one (or several!) of my articles on the first page (often within the first few results). I could then just copy/paste the link to them, instead of answering the same question for the 1000th time. Now, I can no longer do that – my pages are nowhere near the first page (often not even on the second page).
Even if I add the word “bikegremlin” at the end of my search, Google will first show me my YouTube videos, even when there is an article that answers the question a lot better (Google owns YouTube, of course)!
It has been this way for over a year (at the time of writing), and it’s not getting better.
For people to see your articles in Google search today, you must have some funding backing – and hire a professional SEO expert on top of that. It has become a pay-to-win game, and the ones winning are the big corporations, mostly.
For reasons discussed in my “Is Google In Trouble?” article, I believe this is neither easy for Google to fix, nor do they really want to fix it. This is certainly not the only website affected by this.
Thanks to the good people who support my work via Patreon (combined with the automated ads and affiliate links), I can keep my sites running without paying out of my own pocket (in order to share the knowledge and information for free). The revenue is nowhere near to compensating for the time and effort (based on the average time needed per article, I’m waaay below the minimum wage hourly rate 🙂 ), but this was never intended as a for-profit project. What is sad is that without Google ranking, very few people can make use of it – it’s basically back to the word-of-mouth “advertising.”
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