“I'm here with hundreds of people who have gathered to witness what has been described as perhaps the greatest turkey event in Thanksgiving Day history,” Les Nessman, WKRP news director, five-time winner of the Buckeye Newshawk Award and two-time winner of the coveted Silver Sow.
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The biggest turkey right now is Google. Sorry if I seem to be on a kicking Google kick, but damn it’s like they’re lighting their entire business on fire. Too soon?
Here's Google’s latest lice-infestation, head-scratching move. According to Carl Hendy, an expert in analyzing how Google’s search algorithm works from a safe distance, Google is prioritizing Reddit over other high-quality inputs.
I noticed this on steroids a few days ago when Google offered me a “Reddit” option. We’ve always had options on Google. Date ranges. Things like that. Seeing another brand as an option threw me. It’s not like Instagram or Twitter are or ever have been options.
Yeah, Google paid Reddit to access their data. But, Google has paid other publishers and none of those publishers have ever been a named Google search option.
This is a big deal. And, a crazy one. Come down the rabbit hole with me.
The problem is, Google just opened a back door. They’ve made it clear: if you game Reddit, you game Google. Which means -> search is now in the hands of a bunch of unpaid moderators at Reddit. Who’s only pay was buying Reddit stock at the IPO which is, now, trading under the IPO price. This is seriously messed up.
Really, this is just the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the extra nutty peanut butter ice cream that is Google’s recent strategy. Case in point, Google needs — no, sorry, they desperately need — people like, my friend, Matthew, to produce content. Without him and countless others like him THERE IS NO INTERNET. Nothing for Google to index. No way for them to make money. Hurting Matthew is suicidal for Google. Which makes it cray-cray for them to put sites that copy Matthew’s work over Matthew’s original work.
404 wrote about all of this in January. Since it’s getting worse, I ran the numbers.
[START] Google gets money when they send people to sites with original content. They get the same money* if they send people to a site with derivative content.
[+] Helping original content creators helps Google again tomorrow.
[=] Google has a direct economic incentive to keep original content creators in business. Now AND for the future.
[*]UNLESS, the site that scrapes original content shows vastly more ads than the original, legit site. Then, the aforementioned economics would be blown to bits. Like turkeys hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! And crashing through windshields of parked cars!!
Now, Google can't say they're going to send their search traffic to bad guy sites. That would upset advertising's apple cart. But, if this is not Drowning Man Syndrome, it's the only explanation for what's going on here.
Think about the nonsense from the faux Forbes site. Do we really think Google didn't know? A site is showing hundreds of ads. At once. How many API calls is that to Google? For the same domain for the same IP address for the same webpage for the same session for the same browser ID for the same device ID.
This is not difficult for Google to know. So, it’s pretty reasonable to think…Google must know. They know which sites are harvesting ad dollars. But it's in Google’s best interest to let them survive. So, you have to wonder… is that why Google sends them traffic over legit sites?
If Google stealthily enabling bad sites and abdicating search to unpaid minions, the internet as we’ve known it is over.
Look, I don’t have the data. Apparently, no one does. I don’t have the smarts or the tools to get the data. But there are people out there who do. People like 404 or Adalytics. It would be incredible if they did. We wouldn’t need to speculate. We would know if there’s a case to be made here that Google is a very bad, very complicit actor in rampant ad fraud that’s harming the people who are the internet.
Oh, did I say, “complicit,” and, “case.” Sorry, I didn’t mean for this to sound all legaly. We were just rapping about one of my favorite old shows. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
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That was fun. But in case I’m not being clear, and I want to be very clear, this is a VERY BIG DEAL. All caps big.
MFA works best when MFA sites get good rankings. The best way to make that happen is for Google to give them a good ranking. Which puts Google at the epicenter of MFA.
For days, I’ve been asking people who should know and I get answers so fuzzy they sound like the Deep Throat guy Woodward and Bernstein chatted with in a parking garage.
Except instead of, “Follow the money,” I get, “You’re mixing search ranking and MFA.” Yes. I know. And, that’s the entire point. Linking MFA and search is the money.
But where do you find a link no one wants you to find? Google is much bigger than search. The massive industry built around search seems to be circling the wagons here.