It goes without saying that it’s been a tumultuous few years for folks in the publishing space. Many websites owned by small publishers have been devastated by Google’s “Helpful Content Update” and the mainstream adoption of AI. Sites have lost 90% of their traffic. Publishers that have built a staff of writers have had to either shut down or consolidate their operations.
We’re truly at the mercy of big tech. Google controls organic search. Meta controls social media. Amazon is ecommerce. The list goes on. But Google is just a different animal.
In hindsight, they slapped the Helpful Content Update and a slurry of core updates that promised the cleaning up and reduction of spam in the search engine results. But today, Google Search has become even more unreliable and can feature a litany of spam listings depending on the day.
On top of that, AI has now become a hot commodity in the publishing space. Anyone with a pulse and a computer can now become the next J.K. Rowling when it comes to writing. The worst part is that Google pretty evidently has used the Helpful Content Update as a command to publishers to clean up their own content, for which Google’s bots can crawl, train their AI, and ultimately regurgitate what you have written in Google’s AI mode or Gemini.
It’s evident that Google’s goal is keeping people in the Google ecosystem where organic impressions are converted to ad impressions, which pad Google’s growing bottom line year after year. All at the expense of the hard work of publishers who write in good faith.
Now I understand that Google is a business. I also understand that the world is evolving and you have to evolve with it. Google does do some wonderful things. This article is currently being written on Google Docs which, case in point, shows that Google does have a suite of freemium products that are top notch.
But ever since Sundar Pichai took over the reins and assigned Prabhakar Raghavan (the guy that killed Yahoo Search) to boost Google’s ad revenue, Google has deviated from what made it a great company, which was innovation, and began to focus on greed.
Well, let’s let bygones be bygones. The issue at hand is that lots of publishers have lost organic traffic and don’t seem to know what to do next since Google likes to speak in riddles now.
Which brings me to my next point: the underlying issue is communication. I think lots of publishers’ minds would be eased if Google actually communicated with webmasters and publishers. That layer of communication decreased further when Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, moved on to another position with the company.
Now, Google’s point of view is probably: “Well, if I tell publishers why their websites aren’t ranking anymore, that gives them the opportunity to abuse and game the system.” That is an absolutely correct take.
Unfortunately, a lot of publishers are in the business of trying to game the system. That’s basically the essence of SEO. But here is my proposal on how Google can make things better.
Can we all admit that vanilla Google Search Console is a heap of garbage now? There are periods when the tool isn’t updated with the most up-to-date information. You are missing search queries and clicks because your data gets samples or clicks are tied to uber-specific personal search queries (i.e – find me an apartment in zip code with a credit score of XYZ).
Honestly, if you don’t set up an API pull of the data, you are potentially missing out on a subset of data as it’s only available there, not in the browser version.
But worst of all, GSC just doesn’t tell you what exactly is happening with your site or provide any insight on how to improve your site. Most SEOs rely on their own suite of tools like Screaming Frog that honestly can provide you more insight than Search Console.
Now, I have had a Garmin watch for a long time. Recently, Garmin, like most software, tried to make me upgrade to Garmin+ to get AI-infused insights on my health, activities, and recovery.
Why doesn’t Google make a premium version of Google Search Console that provides you with specific information about why your site isn’t showing high on the search results, or was crushed by a Google update?
If I had to bet, any SEO, publisher, and webmaster would pay top dollar for Google Search Console as a Software as a Service.
Again, Google would probably say people will abuse and game the system, but aren’t they already doing that with Google Ads? You’re basically skipping to the top of the search engine ranking positions to ensure you get visibility.
But wait, Google is flooding Google Ads with fake clicks and bots enough to fund click fraud companies. So wouldn’t it be a good idea to create a premium service that allows brands who don’t want fake top-of-funnel traffic to be able to drive that real organic traffic to their website?
This premium GSC would actually give them an idea of whether they need to fix the content or other elements on their site.
This would also likely put Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz out of business companies who have been a thorn in Google’s side. Enough that Google had to eliminate the &num=100 parameter in URLs as these tools crawling the search results were spoofing impression counts.
Plus, the benefit to Google would be that it opens another revenue stream. Google can probably charge thousands of dollars per month to only get the most desirable companies to use the service.
Joe’s Black Hat SEO shop down the street won’t be able to afford it.
But also, since sites would begin to improve, that only feeds Google’s AI project as they can probably bake in a clause that users of the product are open to their websites being used to train AI models. Better content would yield more accurate AI results.
The summary here is that Google needs to open an avenue of communication with website publishers.
Right now, as a publisher, that is the most frustrating thing to deal with. You’re constantly guessing or following the next best advice hoping for a website recovery.
Google says that you need to write for humans, but in the end, Google even knows we’re writing for the algorithm.