Google hates strong SEO sites, because they won't make them any money. So that's a clever way of pushing them further down. I wondered when all results on the first page will be Ads only.
Google decides the layout. You can have the 'strongest SEO' in the world and Google still decide if they put 1 ad or 9 in front of the result.
Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.
It wouldn't be very surprising if Google varies the number of ads in a search results page based on the search term. For sites that have strong SEO for all of their key search terms that would be indistinguishable from Google placing more ads in pages where that site ranks highly.
My understanding it is very linked to 1) Profitability. Search terms around things like lawyers and credit cards. You'll almost always see 4 ads. 2) Genuine relevance. Google know for certain searches your not likely looking to buy something and to keep credibility don't show ads.
Occasionally you can find pockets of less competitive search's that 1) allow ads
2) relate to your product via the algorithm even if they don't to a human brain 3) Align to your desired audience and these can give great return.
I guess sites with real, useful content (e.g. Wikipedia) don't need strong SEO since they have a ton of back-links from other sites that validate their high ranking, so "strong SEO" is really about making a less useful site look more useful, which makes sense for them to hate.
SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".
There used to be such feature in the results page. I just went looking for it and I got 'Cached' and 'Similar' when I click in the little drop-down arrow. Nice feature that appears to be removed. How does removing that feature benefited the users?
No, it used to be part of the official results before the personal blocklist extension ever existed. Then some features were removed from the search results and then partially reimplemented in that extension.
If you know which site you want to search, and its search feature is as decent as wikipedia’s, I suggest adding it as a search keyword. Saves me some time to type e.g. ”wk turtle” in the address bar instead of going through the front page or lazily searching via some third party search engine.
I use duckduckgo, and for the most part, you know what you are searching for so the !tags are really good. !w search term, just takes you right to wikipedea. When I really have no ideal what or where I'm looking for something, I still find myself looking on google a bit, but for the most part, !youtube, !arch, !git, !stack, get me exactly what I want about 99 percent of the time.
Which is complete fucking bullshit. It's driving me mental that when I search for something, Wikipedia usually isn't on the front page. It's almost always the best result for most things, it should be on top.
Wikipedia's search is totally inferior to google. It requires correct spelling within one or two edit distances and the SERP is far less informative. This is a common enough action that those seconds add up. If ddg wants to be competitive they need to fix this.
Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.
The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.
Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.
Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)
Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.
If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.
You are perhaps joking but that has been my tack for a while now. Having specific sites I use to search through. I used to web search the pick from the offerings presented, not caring what site it was so long as it had the information I needed. But now I really value a good website that respects UX and good, honest content with low commercial influence.
I think it's Google's work to deprioritize them on other search engines it is still showing up at first DDG gives it special treatment, by highlighting its summary, which is often what I'm looking for.
I noticed that as well over the years. Also, one thing that really drives me crazy is that Google is trying to steer me into using the german wikipedia, even though I am already explicitly searching for the english article name. I really prefer reading the english version for techie topics, no matter if there might be an article in my native language.
This is the sort of "smart" behaviour that really feels dumb.
The way Google defends its income stream against that is simple: They allow your competitors to buy ads on your own names and trademarks, then you're forced to do so as well because otherwise your organic link is below the ads. It used to be that it mattered since only dumb users would click the ads. But now that they're unshaded and look 99% identical, only super nerds bypass ads. Meaning your #1 organic result is basically only good for bragging rights and nothing more if there's anyone willing to pay even a small amount to jump up above you.
Wouldn’t having strong SEO incentive competition to buy ads? Of course it also incentives them to work on SEO, but the only way to ‘get above’ a top ranking site would be to buy an ad, no?
