Upon the recently announced Google update I've seen some people Tweet things like

• if you are afraid of algorithm updates, you must be a crappy SEO
• if you are technically perfect in your SEO, updates will only help you

I read those sorts of lines and cringe.

Here's why...

Fragility

Different businesses, business models, and business structures have varying degrees of fragility.

If your business is almost entirely based on serving clients then no matter what you do there is going to be a diverse range of outcomes for clients on any major update.

Let's say 40% of your clients are utterly unaffected by an update & of those who saw any noticeable impact there was a 2:1 ratio in your favor, with twice as many clients improving as falling.

Is that a good update? Does that work well for you?

If you do nothing other than client services as your entire business model, then that update will likely suck for you even though the net client impact was positive.

Why?

Many businesses are hurting after the Covid-19 crisis. Entire categories have been gutted & many people are looking for any reason possible to pull back on budget. Some of the clients who won big on the update might end up cutting their SEO budget figuring they had already won big and that problem was already sorted.

Some of the clients that fell hard are also likely to either cut their budget or call endlessly asking for updates and stressing the hell out of your team.

Capacity Utilization Impacts Profit Margins

Your capacity utilization depends on how high you can keep your steady state load relative to what your load looks like at peaks. When there are big updates management or founders can decide to work double shifts and do other things to temporarily deal with increased loads at the peak, but that can still be stressful as hell & eat away at your mental and physical health as sleep and exercise are curtailed while diet gets worse. The stress can be immense if clients want results almost immediately & the next big algorithm update which reflects your current work may not happen for another quarter year.

How many clients want to be told that their investments went sour but the problem was they needed to double their investment while cashflow is tight and wait a season or two while holding on to hope?

Category-based Fragility

Businesses which appear to be diversified often are not.

• Everything in hospitality was clipped by Covid-19.
• 40% of small businesses across the United States have stopped making rent payments.
• When restaurants massively close that's going to hit Yelp's business hard.
• Auto sales are off sharply.

Likewise there can be other commonalities in sites which get hit during an update. Not only could it include business category, but it could also be business size, promotional strategies, etc.

Sustained profits either come from brand strength, creative differentiation, or systemization. Many prospective clients do not have the budget to build a strong brand nor the willingness to create something that is truly differentiated. That leaves systemization. Systemization can leave footprints which act as statistical outliers that can be easily neutralized.

Sharp changes can happen at any point in time.

For years Google was funding absolute garbage like Mahalo autogenerated spam and eHow with each month being a new record. It is very hard to say "we are doing it wrong" or "we need to change everything" when it works month after month after month.

Then an update happens and poof.

• Was eHow decent back in the first Internet bubble? Sure. But it lost money.
• Was it decent after it got bought out for a song and had the paywall dropped in favor of using the new Google AdSense program? Sure.
• Was it decent the day Demand Media acquired it? Sure.
• Was it decent on the day of the Demand Media IPO? Almost certainly not. But there was a lag between that day and getting penalized.

Panda Trivia

The first Panda update missed eHow because journalists were so outraged by the narrative associated with the pump-n-dump IPO. They feared their jobs going away and being displaced by that low level garbage, particularly as the market cap of Demand Media eclipsed the New York Times.

Journalist coverage of the pump-n-dump IPO added credence to it from an algorithmic perspective. By constantly writing hate about eHow they made eHow look like a popular brand, generating algorithmic signals that carried the site until Google created an extension which allowed journalists and other webmasters to vote against the site they had been voting for through all their outrage coverage.

Algorithms & the Very Visible Hand

And all algorithmic channels like organic search, the Facebook news feed, or Amazon's product pages go through large shifts across time. If they don't, they get gamed, repetitive, and lose relevance as consumer tastes change and upstarts like Tiktok emerge.

Consolidation by the Attention Merchants

Frequent product updates, cloning of upstarts, or outright acquisitions are required to maintain control of distribution:

"The startups of the Rebellion benefited tremendously from 2009 to 2012. But from 2013 on, the spoils of smartphone growth went to an entirely different group: the Empire. ... A network effect to engage your users, AND preferred distribution channels to grow, AND the best resources to build products? Oh my! It’s no wonder why the Empire has captured so much smartphone value and created a dark time for the Rebellion. ... Now startups are fighting for only 5% of the top spots as the Top Free Apps list is dominated by incumbents. Facebook (4 apps), Google (6 apps), and Amazon (4 apps) EACH have as many apps in the Top 100 list as all the new startups combined."

Apple & Amazon

Emojis are popular, so those features got copied, those apps got blocked & then apps using the official emojis also got blocked from distribution. The same thing happens with products on Amazon.com in terms of getting undercut by a house brand which was funded by using the vendor's sales data. Re-buy your brand or else.

Facebook

Before the Facebook IPO some thought buying Zynga shares was a backdoor way to invest into Facebook because gaming was such a large part of the ecosystem. That turned out to be a dumb thesis and horrible trade. At times other things trended including quizzes, videos, live videos, news, self hosted Instant Articles, etc.

Over time the general trend was edge rank of professional publishers fell as a greater share of inventory went to content from friends & advertisers. The metrics associated with the ads often overstated their contribution to sales due to bogus math and selection bias.

Internet-first publishers like CollegeHumor struggled to keep up with the changes & influencers waiting for a Facebook deal had to monetize using third parties:

“I did 1.8 billion views last year,” [Ryan Hamilton] said. “I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.” ... "While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals."

YouTube

YouTube had a Panda-like update back in 2012 to favor watch time over raw view counts. They also adjust the ranking algorithms on breaking news topics to favor large & trusted channels over conspiracy theorist content, alternative health advice, hate speech & ridiculous memes like the Tide pod challenge.

All unproven channels need to start somewhat open to gain usage, feedback & marketshare. Once they become real businesses they clamp down. Some of the clamp down can be editorial, forced by regulators, or simply anticompetitive monpolistic abuse.

Kid videos were a huge area on YouTube (perhaps still are) but that area got cleaned up after autogenerated junk videos were covered & the FTC clipped YouTube for delivering targeted ads on channels which primarily catered to children.

Dominant channels can enforce tying & bundling to wipe out competitors:

"Google’s response to the threat from AppNexus was that of a classic monopolist. They announced that YouTube would no longer allow third-party advertising technology. This was a devastating move for AppNexus and other independent ad technology companies. YouTube was (and is) the largest ad-supported video publisher, with more than 50% market share in most major markets. ... Over the next few months, Google’s ad technology team went to each of our clients and told them that, regardless of how much they liked working with AppNexus, they would have to also use Google’s ad technology products to continue buying YouTube. This is the definition of bundling, and we had no recourse. Even WPP, our largest customer and largest investors, had no choice but to start using Google’s technology. AppNexus growth slowed, and we were forced to lay off 100 employees in 2016."

Everyone Else

Every moderately large platform like eBay, Etsy, Zillow, TripAdvisor or the above sorts of companies runs into these sorts of issues with changing distribution & how they charge for distribution.

Building Anti-fragility Into Your Business Model

Growing as fast as you can until the economy craters or an algorithm clips you almost guarantees a hard fall along with an inability to deal with it.

Markets ebb and flow. And that would be true even if the above algorithmic platforms did not make large, sudden shifts.

Build Optionality Into Your Business Model

If your business primarily relies on publishing your own websites or you have a mix of a few clients and your own sites then you have a bit more optionality to your approach in dealing with updates.

Even if you only have one site and your business goes to crap maybe you at least temporarily take on a few more consulting clients or do other gig work to make ends meet.

Focus on What is Working

If you have a number of websites you can pour more resources into whatever sites reacted positively to the update while (at least temporarily) ignoring any site that was burned to a crisp.

Ignore the Dead Projects

The holding cost of many websites is close to zero unless they use proprietary and complex content management systems. Waiting out a penalty until you run out of obvious improvements on your winning sites is not a bad strategy. Plus, if you think the burned site is going to be perpetually burned to a crisp (alternative health anyone?) then you could sell links off it or generate other alternative revenue streams not directly reliant on search rankings.

Build a Cushion

If you have cash savings maybe you guy out and buy some websites or domain names from other people who are scared of the volatility or got clipped for issues you think you could easily fix.

When the tide goes out debt leverage limits your optionality. Savings gives you optionality. Having slack in your schedule also gives you optionality.

The person with a lot of experience & savings would love to see highly volatile search markets because those will wash out some of the competition, curtail investments from existing players, and make other potential competitors more hesitant to enter the market.

Kent Walker promotes public policies which advantage the Google monopoly.

His role doing that means he has to write some really bad hot takes that lack context or intentionally & dishonestly redirect attention away from core issues - that's his job.

With that in mind, his most recent blog post defending the Google monopoly was exceptional.

Force Ranking of Inferior Search Results

"When you have an urgent question — like “stroke symptoms” — Google Search could be barred from giving you immediate and clear information, and instead be required to direct you to a mix of low quality results."

On some search queries users get a wall of Google ads, the forced ranked Google insert (or sometimes multiple of them with local & ecommerce) and then there can even be a "people also ask" box above the first organic result.

The idea that organic results must be low quality if not owned & operated indicates 1 of the following 3 must be true:

• they should not be in search
• their content scraping & various revenue shifting scams with their ad tech stack demonetized legit publishers
• their forced rank of their own content is stripping them of the signals needed to rank websites & pages

Whenever Google puts a "people also ask" box above the first organic result that is them saying they did not know what to rank, or they are just trying to create a visual block to push the organic result set down the page and user attention back up toward the ads.

The solution to Google's claims is easy to solve. Either of the following would work.

• Have an API that allows user choice (to set rich snippet or vertical defaults in various categories), or
• If the vertical inserts remain Google-only then for Google to justify force ranking their own results above the organic result set Google should also be required to rank those same results above all of their ads, so that Google is demonetizing Google along with the rest of the ecosystem, rather than just demonetizing third parties.

If the thesis that this information needs to be front and center & that is a matter of life or death, then asking searchers to first scroll past a page or two of ads is not particularly legitimate.

Spam & Security

"when you use Google Search or Google Play, we might have to give equal prominence to a raft of spammy and low-quality services."

Many of the worst versions of spam that have repeatedly made news headlines like fake tech support, fake government document providers, and fake locksmiths were buying distribution through Google Ads or were featured in the search results through Google force ranking their own local search offering even though they knew the results were vastly inferior to Yelp.

If Google did not force rank Google local results above the rest of the organic result set then the fake locksmiths would not have ranked.

I have lost count of how many articles I have read about hundreds or thousands of fake apps in the Google Play store which existed to defraud advertisers or commit identity theft, but there have been literally thousands of such articles. I see a similar headline at least once a month without eve looking for them. Here is one this week for scammers monetizing the popularity of Wordle with fake apps.

Making matters worse, some of the tech support scams showed the URL of a real business and rerouted the call through a Google number directly to a scammer. A searcher who trusted Google & sees Apple.com or Dell.com on Google Ads in the search results then got connected with a scammer who would commit identity theft or encrypt their computer then demand ransom cryptocurrency payments to decrypt it.

After making the ads harder to run for scammers Google decided the problem was too hard & expensive to sort out so they also blocked legitimate computer repair shops.

Sometimes Google considers something spam strictly due to financial considerations.

Their old remote rater documents stated *HELPFUL* hotel affiliate websites should be labeled as spam.

Years later the big OTAs are complaining about Google eating their lunch as well as Google is twice as big as the next player.

At one point Google got busted for helping an advertiser route around the automated safety features built into their ad network so that they could pay Google to run ads promoting illegal steroids.

With cartels, you can only buy illegal goods and services from the cartel if you don't want to suffer ill consequences. The same appears to be true here.

The China Problem

"Handicapping America’s technology leaders would threaten our leading sources of research and development spending — just as bipartisan voices in Congress are recognizing the need to increase American R&D investment to stay competitive in the global race for AI, quantum, and other advanced technologies."

We are patriotic, and, but China... is a favorite misdirection of a tech monopolist.

The problem with that is while Eric Schmidt warns it is a national emergency if China overtakes the US in AI tech, Google also operates an AI tech lab in China.

In other words, Eric Schmidt is trying to warn you about himself and his business interests at Google.

Duplicitous? Absolutely.

Patriotic? Less than Chamath!

Who the fuck did this? pic.twitter.com/BD4NKpila6— Girolamo Carlo Casio (Free Twatter) (@INArteCarloDoss) January 19, 2022

Inflation

"the online services targeted by these bills have reduced prices; these bills say nothing about sectors where prices have actually been rising and contributing to inflation."

Technology is no doubt deflationary (moving bits on an optical line is cheaper than printing out a book and shipping it across the world) BUT some dominant channels have increased the cost of distribution by increasing the chunk size of information and withholding performance information.

Before Google Analytics was "free" there was a rich and vibrant set of competition in web analytics software with lots of innovation from players like ClickTracks.

Most competing solutions went away.

Google moved away from an installed licensing model to a hosted service where they can change the price upon contract renewal.

Search hid progressively more performance information over time, only sampled data from larger data sets, & now you can sign up for Google Analytics 360 starting at only $150,000 per year.

The hidden search performance data also has many layers to that onion. Not only does Google not show keyword referrers on organic search, but they often don't show your paid search keywords either, and they keep extending out keyword targeting broader than advertisers intend.

Yesterday's announcement on match type changes had me crawling through query data this morning. I'm staring at many 2-3 word exact match keywords that are matching to 8-word queries. G thinks 'deck paint' and 'how do i put paint on my deck' mean the exact same thing. CPA is 10x.— Brad Geddes (@bgtheory) February 5, 2021

Google used to pay Brad Geddes to run official Google AdWords ad training seminars for advertisers, so the idea that *he* has to express his frustrations on Twitter is an indication of how little effort Google is putting into having open communications channels or caring about what their advertisers think.

This is in accordance with the Google customer service philosophy:

he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions.

Those who were paying for ads get the above "serve yourself" treatment, all the while Google regularly resets user default ad settings to extend out ad distribution, automatically ad keywords, shift to enhanced AdWords ad campaigns, etc.

Then there are other features which would be beneficial and offered in a competitive market that have been deprioritized. Many years ago eBay did a study which showed their branded Google AdWords ad buys were cannibalistic to eBay profits. Google maintained most advertisers could not conduct such a study because it would be too expensive and Google does not make the feature set available as part of their ad suite.

Missing Information

"When you search for local businesses, Google Search and Maps may be prohibited from highlighting information we gather about hours of operation, contact information, and reviews. That could hurt small businesses and local retailers, as well as their customers."

Claiming reviews or an attempt to offer a comprehensive set of accurate review data as a strong point would be economical with the truth.

Back when I had a local business page my only review was from a locksmith spammer / scammer who praised his own two businesses, trashed a dozen other local locksmiths, crapped on a couple local SEO services, and joked about how a local mover smashed the guts out of his dog. Scammer fake reviewer's name was rather sophisticated ... it was ... Loop Dee Loop

About a decade back when Google was clearly losing Google took Yelp reviews wholesale (sometimes without even attributing them to Yelp!) and told Yelp that if they did not want Google stealing their work and displacing them with a copy of it then they should block GoogleBot. Google offered the same sort of advice / threat to TripAdvisor.

A few years before that Google temporarily "forgot" to show phone numbers on local listings.

After Yelp turned down an acquisition offer by Google & Yelp did a great job making some people aware of how Google was stealing their reviews wholesale without attribution Google bought Zagat & Fromer's to augment the Google local review data and then sold those businesses off.

This is sort of the same playbook Google has run in the past elsewhere. After Groupon said no to Google's acquisition offer, Google quickly provided daily deal ads to over a dozen Groupon competitors to help commoditize the Groupon offering and market position.

Ultimately with the above sort of stuff Google is primarily a volume aggregator or has lower editorial costs than pure plays due to the ability to force bundle their own distribution. And they use the ability to rank themselves above a neutral algorithmic position as a core part of their biz dev strategy. When shopping search engines were popular Google kept rewording the question set they sent remote raters to justify rank demotion for shopping search engines & Google also came up with innovative ranking "signals" like concurrent ranking of their own vertical search offering whenever competitors x or y are shown in the result set & rolled out a "diversity" algorithm to limit how many comparison shopping sites could appear in the search results. The intent of the change was strictly anti-competitive:

"Although Google originally sought to demote all comparison shopping websites, after Google raters provided negative feedback to such a widespread demotion, Google implemented the current iteration of its so-called 'diversity' algorithm."

As a matter of fact, part of one of many document dumps in recent years went further than the old concurrent ranking signal to a rank x above y feature which highlights how YouTube can be hard coded at a number 1 ranking position.

Part of that guide highlighted how to hardcode ranking YouTube #1.

If you re-represent content & can force rank yourself #1 (with larger listings) that can be used to force other players onto your platform on your terms. Back when YouTube was must less of a sure thing Google suggested they could threaten to change copyright.

This same approach to "relevancy" is everywhere.

Did you watermark your images? Well shame on you, as that is good for a rank demotion

And if there are photos which are deemed illegal Google will make you file an endless series of DMCA removal requests even though they already had the image fingerprinted.

Now there are some issues where there is missing information. These areas involve original reporting on local politics & are called news deserts. As the ad pie has consolidated around Google & Facebook that has left many newspapers high and dry.

Private equity players like Alden Global Capital buy up newspapers, fire journalists, and monetize brand equity as they drive the papers into the ground.

If you are sub-scale maybe Google steals your money or hits you with a false positive algorithm flag that has you seeking professional mental health help.

Big players get a slower blood letting.

Google has maintained they do not make any money from news search, but the states lawsuit around ad tech made it clear Google promoted AMP for anti-competitive purposes to block header bidding, lied to news publishers to get them to adopt AMP and eat the tech costs of implementation, did a deal with their biggest competitor in online advertising Facebook to maintain the status quo, charge over double what their competitors do for ad tech, and had a variety of bid rigging auction manipulation algorithms they used to keep funneling more money to themselves.

Internally they had an OKR to make *most* search clicks land on AMP pages within a year of launch

"AMP launched as an open source project in October 2015, with 26 publishers and over 40 publications already publishing AMP files for our preview demo. Our team built g.co/ampdemo and is now racing towards launching it for all of our users. We're responsible for the AMP @ Google integrations, particularly focusing on Search, our most visible product. We have a Google-wide 2016 OKR to deliver! By the end of 2016, our goal is that 50%+ of content consumed through Search is being consumed through AMP."

You don't get over half the web to shift to a proprietary version of HTML in under a year without a lot of manipulation.

So, when Google tells buyers an ad sold for one price and they tell sellers it sold for a lower price, isn't that just plain old fraud? I mean, on top of the anti-competitive tying and all that, fraud is illegal, isn't it?— Jerry Neumann (@ganeumann) January 14, 2022