#being historically relevant for four years with no confirmed history before that and then dropping off the face of the earth.
Text
in my "what happened to wallace fard muhammad" era again
#where in the world is wallace fard muhammad. i mean if he didnt die in 1934 he's sure as hell dead now but i would like to know wht happened#there's also the other mystery 'who exactly was wallace fard muhammad'#being historically relevant for four years with no confirmed history before that and then dropping off the face of the earth.#stunts of all time. i mean i say this but there's a distinct possibility he disappeared bc someone killed him so not a win for him in that#in that case
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Yesterday, Haaretz columnist Rogel Alpher published a piece titled “Israeli Minister Shaked Takes After Mussolini”. In it he opined that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was literally, not just metaphorically, a fascist. Alpher was referring to that speech where Shaked said: “Zionism should not continue, and I say here, it will not continue to bow down to the system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way.”
The minister’s announcement of a “moral and political revolution” aimed at strengthening national principles at the expense of universal individual rights was comparable to Mussolini’s “doctrine of fascism,” the columnist said. He cited Mussolini’s “revolutionary negation” of individualism and liberalism, wherein the nation “was a superior, super-personal reality … a moral law, a tradition, a mission binding together generations past, present and future, and all the individuals”(quoting from Jacob Talmon’s “The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution”).
Alpher’s column came after Gideon Levy’s column, which was also based on the speech Shaked gave, on that same critical sentence about Zionism and individual rights. But Levy actually thanked Shaked for “telling the truth” and for “speaking honestly.” And that truth was, as Levy put it: “Zionism contradicts human rights, and thus is indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps racist movement.”
But now we need to step back a bit, and combine these two angles into a kind of intellectual 3D picture:
If Alpher is calling Shaked an actual fascist, based upon what she said, and if Levy is concluding that those words are a true and honest representation of Zionism itself, then the combined logic must be, that Zionism is itself a form of fascism.
That actually makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t have to mean Zionism is a carbon copy of Italian fascism, just like the crime of Apartheid doesn’t require identical features to Apartheid South Africa (and as I have recently opined, Zionism is Apartheid, and worse). Racist, ultra-nationalist endeavors tend to flock together in alliance, just like the Mussolini-Hitler alliance, or more recently the Netanyahu-Orban alliance (wherein Netanyahu threw Jewish philanthropist George Soros under the anti-Semitic Hungarian bus). There has of course also been the actual alliance between the Zionist Revisionists of Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky and the Italian Fascists. Jabotnisky’s ideology, which informed the Jewish terrorist Irgun and Stern Gang factions in Palestine, was the informer of Menachem Begin’s Herut, which morphed into Likud.
When Jabotinsky’s fighters were training in the 1930’s, a leading Italian naval publication stated:
“In agreement of all the relevant authorities it has been confirmed that the views and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists are known and that they are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine. Therefore, as our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.” (Noted in Eric Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy, 2005, see p. 149-171).
Alright, alright, some will say – that’s the right-wing Zionism, but what about the left wing?
Well, I believe that Ben-Gurion’s famous words from 1938, where he said that
”If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel”
are an epitome of that essentially fascist ‘revolutionary negation of individualism and liberalism, wherein the nation was a superior, super-personal reality, a moral law’. It is that will to sacrifice individuals – aye, even children – for the supposed ‘greater national good’. Note that Ben-Gurion was not speaking about soldiers fighting in a war. He was speaking about children, who weren’t even citizens of any “Jewish state” and never signed up for it. Under this all-encompassing Jewish ‘national’ notion, every Jew is considered a part. This comes full circle with Netanyahu speaking on the supposed behalf of Jews all over the world, saying to them “Israel is your home” in the wake of terror attacks on Jewish targets.
All Zionists understand this, even if it is at an instinctive level. The will to sacrifice Palestinian rights (as well as other rights) for the ‘national Jewish home’ is a core tenet of Zionism. There are no real moral qualms in Zionism about ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; any such qualms are quelled by the claim that it’s ‘complicated’. When a Zionist like the self-proclaimed ‘leftist’ Israeli historian Benny Morris finally concedes the fairness of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, it comes with the supposedly-exonerating caveat–
“There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.”
Morris echoes Ben-Gurion’s words: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it” (as quoted in Morris’s own book Righteous Victims). Yet Morris opines that Ben-Gurion should have gone further in his ‘transfer’: “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job.”
So these are the more ‘honest’ voices of Zionism. The voices that forgot to keep the mask of political correctness. They come from both right and left, but the right seems more prone to drop the mask.
Incidentally, Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair recently posted a virulently anti-Semitic meme, where George Soros is depicted as a global manipulator, controlling a reptilian, a caricature ‘Illuminati’ Jew, and a train of other figures who are supposedly the ‘food chain’ feeding off the Netanyahu family, all (except the reptilian) holding their hands in the “happy merchant” fashion. The meme, congratulated by the Nazi Daily Stormer as “awesome,” caused quite some outrage in Israel, especially in the left. But Communication Minister Ayoub Kara, who is Netanyahu’s ‘Arab puppet’, asserted that Yair Netanyahu was “just a kid playing on Facebook.“
Yair Netanyahu’s meme is an example of how Zionism brings anti-Semitism full circle (as I wrote last year). And when it does that, many distance themselves, temporarily, because it looks bad.
But what if it’s not temporary? What if Zionism is, indeed the embodiment of fascist ultra-nationalism, and is racist at its very core? This would mean that it is also, inherently, anti-Semitic, because it would turn against Jews for being Jews – if they do not toe the ultra-nationalist line. These would be “the wrong kind of Jews”, as Zionist leader (and later Israeli President) Chaim Weizmann said to Lord Balfour. The same Chaim Weizmann who met with Mussolini four times between 1923 and 1934.
Understanding that Israel is enacting Apartheid is not a very complicated conclusion nowadays. To understand that this Apartheid is part and parcel of the basic Zionist ideology informing it can be a bit harder, but it’s a logical step to make. Again, Israel does not have to copy South African Apartheid for the crime of Apartheid to be enacted, as was cogently and meticulously documented in this year’s UN commissioned report on Israeli Apartheid by professors Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley.
Likewise, Israel doesn’t have to copy Italian Fascism precisely for Zionism to be regarded as a fascist ideology. Alpher’s appraisal of Shaked’s words are actually an appraisal of Zionism, with its revolutionary, ultra-nationalist notions. And Levy says that Shaked is actually telling the truth about Zionism.
So the plot thickens, the net tightens. And for those who follow the logic of this, the question is really reduced to: Do you want to support a fascist ideology?
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The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
https://ift.tt/2Txa4G5
0 notes
Text
The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
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The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?
Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.
Who’s who?
Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?
Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.
Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.
Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.
Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.
Why should we care?
This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:
Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.
Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.
Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.
Is the trend real?
While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.
So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)
Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.
I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.
Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.
Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.
Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One.
In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.
This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.
But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.
By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.
Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators
When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.
Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.
There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:
They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.
Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.
They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.
They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.
It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.
Google’s product review update
Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:
Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,
Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.
If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!
In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.
For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.
We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.
Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!
Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:
Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.
The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson
Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.
Step 1: Popular products
Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial
Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.
Takeaways
I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.
The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.
But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.
0 notes
Text
The World Wants to Know Bitcoin Price, BTC Forecast and Is It Healthy?
New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/markets/the-world-wants-to-know-bitcoin-price-btc-forecast-and-is-it-healthy
The World Wants to Know Bitcoin Price, BTC Forecast and Is It Healthy?
It’s safe to say that Bitcoin (BTC) is the most talked-about cryptocurrency in the world – but in what way have the people around the world been mentioning it in the past 12 months, starting November 2018 when bitcoin price dropped to USD 4,000?
To find out, we’ve looked at different search terms relating to BTC and see how they fare on Google Trends, finding a number of interesting details, and confirming yet again that the activity correlates with the price.
Even a decade after its existence, BTC is for many a controversial topic, and it’s even banned this form of money in certain countries. Nonetheless, many have ‘predicted’ a fortune in its future, coming out of the trouble past, with some researchers seeing large investors coming for this largest of cryptos. The very term ‘bitcoin’ itself has seen large ups and downs in interest over the past year. Not surprisingly, the highest interest in almost all things bitcoin-related was registered in June, when the price hit almost USD 14,000.
It’s important to explain that the term’s peak of popularity is represented with a value of 100 by Google Trends, so 50 means that the term is half as popular. There numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time.
Many people wanted to know what this much-talked about thing is and have typed ‘bitcoin’ in the last 12 months. It had a value of just 10 starting in mid-November last year, moving between 7 and 12 until May this year, but the popularity of the term started rising, making a smaller peak in mid-May, then a larger one in late June, and jumping to the peak of its popularity in the first week of September 2019. It was half as popular just 2-3 weeks later, falling back to its value of 10 in October. If we look at the interest for this term by region, Nigeria is leading, with the U.S. on 12th place, Germany 13th, South Korea 23rd, followed by Turkey and Russia, etc.
When people figure out the legality in their country, they need to learn how much it costs. ‘Bitcoin price’ started strong at 54 in last November, falling since and not really moving much up until late March, going from 18 to 37, then 68 in mid-May, and finally reaching its 12-month peak in late-June. The searches did fall since then, but it’s still in high 30s. Now that they have some BTC, people may want to sell some. ‘How to sell BTC’ moved mostly around value of 25, rising slightly in March and May, but peaking in late June. It hasn’t seen a value of 50 since, but it has been on a rise towards it in early November.
But when people have it, they also might want to spend some BTC. Searches for ‘spending bitcoin’ are among the more fascinating ones, as there are high highs and low lows. It peaked once in mid-January, but dropped to 0 (meaning that there was not enough data for this term) in January, May and August. When it’s not that low, it’s above 70. Australia, Canada, U.S., U.K,., and India respectively are recorded as the most interested in this term. ‘Bitcoin shopping’ and ‘bitcoin restaurant’ are somewhat less popular, but still often searched, with periods of lower and higher values – higher particularly in May, June and August. Starting with May, ‘bitcoin coffee’ has been popular predominantly in May, late June, early August and late September.
This is as good time as any to do just a short recap of BTC’s path in the last year, as you’ll notice that these jumps in interest match events in BTC’s history. Of particular relevance are BTC’s jumps in late June above USD 10,000, followed by USD 11-13,000, and even coming close to USD 14,000. This last week proved to be a peak of interest for many BTC-related terms in the last year. Other jumps in interests also coincide with BTC’s major changes in prices, especially in November 2018 and May-November period this year, which saw several jumps, and even witnessed a historic rally.
Bitcoin price chart:
Now, let’s say these people have sold their BTC, or never got to buy some in the first place, so the logical step would be to look at the BTC alternatives. And look at the alternatives people did. The chart is wild. This search term reached its peak not once, but twice in a single year: in late December-early January, and again in late June. But it’s been close to doing so at least four more times. The regions leading this search are Ireland, Denmark, UK, Canada, and Australia, with the US being in the 6th place, Turkey at 8th, and France at 10th.
If this is not your thing, perhaps you want to trade BTC. ‘How to trade bitcoin’ was surprisingly not a thing people googled often, moving below half its popularity until a jump in mid-May and peaking at the end of June. It’s back to its last-November values at around 50. Before and while trading, people ought to check out ‘bitcoin forecast.’ This term saw a smaller spike in late March-early April, then a higher one in mid-May, and the peak of its popularity in late June. On the other hand, people were mostly wondering if BTC is dead in November 2018, when it peaked. It dropped with many smaller fluctuations since. Particularly high interest in BTC’s demise were seen in late December, early February, and mid-August, when the value was 42. In early November 2019, the value was half that number.
Here are some additional and weird BTC-related things curious people googled:
"is bitcoin real money"
__
"what is bitcoin used for"
__
"how to steal bitcoin"
__
"is bitcoin healthy"
__
"bitcoin illuminati"
__
"which bitcoin is best"
Source: cryptonews.com
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The Chase Files 8/23/2018
Good Morning #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Thursday 23rd August 2018. Remember you can read full articles by purchasing Daily Nation Newspaper (DN), via Barbados Today (BT) or Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS).
DONVILLE FACING 20 YEARS – Former Minister of Commerce and International Business Donville Inniss could spend up to 20 years in jail and fined up to BDS$1 million if convicted of bribery charges in the United States. Inniss has a date with destiny in a New York courthouse at noon today, when he will be arraigned on three counts of money laundering. The Eastern District of New York’s press officer John Marzulli told the NATION on Wednesday that based on New York law (18 US Code 1956), the former Member of Parliament would face a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in a federal prison on each count. Thursday’s arraignment will be heard by US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, at which time Inniss can enter a plea. (DN)
NO COURTESY – Courtesy Garage has been fingered as the car dealership that so bothered Prime Minister Mia Mottley that she ordered home a team that was in Europe in search of secondhand garbage trucks for the Sanitation Service Authority. Mottley told a meeting on Sunday night the group had to dump those plans and return home because of some suspicious activity by an uninvited guest. She explained that “pursuant to a board paper” the group from the SSA and the Ministry of the Environment and National Beautification had gone abroad to examine used garbage trucks, but “a certain car company’s representatives happened to be at every location that the group went to”. “When the Attorney General and I found out we told the minister ‘tell them to come home the next day because I need to know how a private sector group that was not a part of the Cabinet paper could be there at every location,” the Prime Minister told a St Michael South East constituency meeting. “The Minister and I and the AG have agreed that is not the kind of Government we want to run,” Mottley added, while suggesting the unnamed representative’s attendance was no coincidence. She did not identify the representative or the company. However, an official source has told Barbados TODAY the representative was from Courtesy Garage, whose Regional Product Manager Sam Gaston could not be reached for comment. The source said the firm in Europe has recommended that Government acquires Volvo vehicles, which are said to be internationally-recognized dump trucks. “The company offered refurbished trucks free of cost to Barbados on condition that when things return to economic stability, the Government would give it the business,” the source said. There had been claims on social media that waste hauler and owner of Jose Y Jose Liquid and Solid Waste Management Inc Anderson Fatchild Cherry, who is abroad undergoing medical treatment for an undisclosed illness, had been the person to whom the Prime Minister was referring. However, Cherry today told Barbados TODAY, “not me”. The SSA had also called an emergency meeting to get to the bottom of the issue. Mottley had hinted that the local firm may have had inside information on Government’s plans. When contacted for an update on investigations into the matter, Minister of the Environment Trevor Prescod said he preferred to grant the Prime Minister the courtesy to speak, since she was the one who made the initial remarks. (BT)
UPP-STAGING DEMS – With the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in rebuilding mode, the two-year-old United Progressive Party (UPP) is moving to break the two-party grip on Barbadian politics, UPP leader Lynette Eastmond has told Barbados TODAY. And it has begun its own rebuilding effort by dropping its entire slate of 23 candidates who stood for Parliament in the May 24 elections and is starting afresh. With her political party gaining a meagre 1.3 per cent of the popular vote, the former Barbados Labour Party minister and senator who became founding chairman of the UPP, has suggested the party might never have a better opportunity to catch up to the major contenders on the political landscape. “It is a case of us now taking advantage while one of the two major parties is wounded and is now seeking to rebuild,” Eastmond said, referring to the DLP, which suffered an embarrassing loss in the general election, securing only 22 per cent of the votes cast and failing to win a single seat. The DLP has since elected the twice defeated Verla De Peiza as president. Political pundits have argued that De Peiza was placed at the helm to jump-start the process of bringing new blood into the 63-year-old party following the 30-0 decimation in the election at the hands of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP). A number of party stalwarts, including former Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, former Minister of Education Ronald Jones and former Minister of Social Care Steve Blackett, have announced their retirement from politics. Additionally, the party was rocked by scandal earlier this month with the arrest of former Minister of International Business Donville Inniss, who is set to answer money laundering charges in New York tomorrow. Eastmond, a four time losing candidate, and who was elected to lead the UPP for another year when the party held its inaugural conference last Saturday, acknowledged that taking advantage of the DLP’s wounded state would require hard work. “Our thinking is that we are in a very good position, but it does require work. It is true that we contested one election, but a lot of dedication and commitment is now required over the next four years. I believe that I have a team that is up to that task and we believe that we are in a better position given the outcome of the last election,” she told Barbados TODAY. But the party has retained none of the 23 candidates who contested the election three months ago, Eastmond said, suggesting that would-be UPP candidates would need to canvass on their own steam in order to get the nod from the party when the selection process begins. “Our position is that at the end of the election, seeing that none of us were successful, all of the seats are open again. Individuals who are interested in running again are being told that they can identify the seat that they are interested in and start working in that seat. If the person had won a seat then their case would have been the strongest but at this point all candidates would have to go through a selection process again,” the UPP leader said. She could not pinpoint a timeframe for candidates to be confirmed. “I can’t give an exact date but suffice it to say we have to give the candidates enough time to court their constituents. So, the sooner the better, but anybody interested in running should start working from now,” she added. In a general election that saw a record number of ‘third’ parties and independents contesting the 30 seats that would all be snapped up by the BLP, the UPP came in a distant fourth place in the popular vote, behind the business-oriented Solutions Barbados. Of the 150,141 voters who cast their ballots on May 24, the UPP polled 1,965 votes, less than half that 4,188 votes secured by Solutions Barbados. The Democratic Labour Party, suffering the worst defeat in Barbadian electoral history, received 33,985 votes, while the Barbados Labour Party’s landslide victory reaped an historic 74.58 per cent of the popular vote with 111,968. (BT)
REGISTRATION FOR JANUARY CXCS OPEN – The Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training has advised that registration for the Caribbean Examinations Council’s January 2019 examinations begins on Monday, September 3, and will close on Monday, October 1. Registration takes place between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, and forms are available from the Examination and Assessment Section of the Ministry of Education, Elsie Payne Complex, Constitution Road, St. Michael. They can also be accessed online at the Ministry’s website, http://mes.gov.bb. Those registering must bring the relevant fees; a Barbados identification card, driver’s license, passport or certified passport size photograph as evidence of identification; and a blue/black ink pen when registering. In addition, the CSEC examination fees, which are payable in cash on registration, are as follows: entry fee, $36 per candidate; subject fee, $36.50 per subject; and the local entrance fee, $30 per candidate. The local entrance fee covers all examinations which the candidate may be writing in May/June 2019. All fees should be paid in cash to the Finance Section of the Ministry Mondays to Fridays between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Subject entries with a School Based Assessment component will only be accepted from ‘Resit Candidates’. The Ministry advises candidates that it will not reconcile or adjust clashes of subject papers, so they should consult the timetables for the respective examinations before registering. A copy of the timetable is posted on CXC’s web page, www.cxc.org. There is also a link to this web page from the Ministry’s website. (BGIS)
TIME TO APPLY FOR PENSIONER’S REBATE – The Barbados Revenue Authority is advising pensioners that they can now apply for the Pensioner’s Rebate on their 2018 to 2019 Land Tax Bills. The Authority is therefore requesting that only new applicants should apply by either downloading the form from the Authority’s website at www.bra.gov.bb, or by visiting any of the Authority’s offices located at the Treasury Building, Bridgetown; Weymouth Corporate Centre, Roebuck Street, St Michel; Southern Plaza, Oistins, Christ Church; Warrens Tower II, Warrens, St Michael; or the Holetown Public Centre, St James. All existing pensioners have already been processed in the Authority’s system. All applications should be made no later than Friday, August 24. (BGIS)
HOSPITAL’S BACTERIA INFECTION ‘ERADICATED’ – Last month’s outbreak of a serious bacterial illness has now been fully eradicated, officials of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) revealed today. And the head of the hospital’s infection control team, Corey Forde, is praising the hospital for the capability of detecting the disease, known as Burkholderia Cepacia Complex. While outbreaks are commonplace in hospitals around the world, the QEH could boast of having one of the region’s best hospital surveillance systems, and was a regional standard-bearer of best practice, in infection control, he said. And the hospital has become the Caribbean’s standard-bearer for control and detection of these outbreaks. “It is not unusual for outbreaks but the most important thing is how it is dealt with. Our surveillance system at the hospitals is top-notch. We are able to identify outbreaks quickly and then act accordingly. We have had recorded outbreaks and we have dealt with them quite well . . . . Many countries in the Caribbean don’t have a surveillance system and we have been assisting some of them in getting theirs in place,” said Forde. He was speaking to journalists after the Pan American Health Organization handed over three Samsung Galaxy Tablets to the QEH this morning. The QEH confirmed that eight cases of Burkholderia Cepacia Complex were diagnosed in six weeks. At the time several measures were taken to bring the situation under control, hospital officials had said then. The bacteria, said to be most harmful to persons suffering with kidney disease or a weakened immune system, are usually found in soil and contaminated water. Patients diagnosed with the condition were separated from the general population and treated, amid stepped up health surveillance at the hospital, the QEH infection control chief said. The speed with which the hospital handled the outbreak was testimony to efficiency of the health institution’s counter measures, he declared. (BT)
CONTACT NUMBER AT GERIATRIC HOSPITAL – Family and friends of patients at the Geriatric Hospital who wish to visit while renovations at the Beckles Road institution are taking place, are asked to telephone the Nursing Administration Unit at 228-2597, so that they may be directed to the appropriate ward. The rehabilitation project, which started last Monday, is expected to last five months. (BGIS)
PAD CLOSURE STALLS UNION – Closure of the E. Humphrey Walcott Building has halted discussion on appointments and promotions within the Public Service. The building at the corner of Culloden Road and Collymore Rock, St Michael, was closed intermittently since July 20 to treat bed bugs. However, the chemicals used reportedly caused severe reactions among staff and it has now been “closed until further notice”. The Personnel Administration Division, the Ministry of the Civil Service and the Unemployment Section of the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) operated out of the building. The Unemployment Section is now at the nearby Frank Walcott Building. Acting general secretary of the National Union of Public Workers, Delcia Burke, told the NATION they were scheduled to meet with PAD officials on August 3, but the bed bug issue had caused it to be postponed. (DN)
SORROWFUL SMITH – A 53-year-old man, who pleaded guilty to two offences involving firearms, has not only apologized but has sought “forgiveness” for the wrong he has done. Anthony Alonza Smith of Clement Hall, Airy Hill, St Joseph issued the apology before Madam Justice Pamela Beckles in the No. 5 Supreme Court today. He had previously admitted to having possession of a firearm as well as for unlawfully and maliciously engaging in conduct that placed Jeremy Young in danger of death of serious bodily harm on April 1, 2012. “I am very sorrowful for my actions and I throw myself at the mercy of the court. I also apologise to my country, my family and . . . the victim . . . whom I have known for lots of years. “[It] was a severe misunderstanding that led to anger, the anger led to a mistake and the mistake was this incident . . . . [I ask for] forgiveness . . . for myself. I ask from this court and the victim . . . I ask forgiveness from everyone concerned,” Smith told the judge. Reading his written address, Smith, who is represented by attorney-at-law Sian Lange, went on to tell the judge that he was a father of three children the youngest who was now 12-years-old. Smith also pointed to his own health battles. “Madam Justice, I am a farmer by trade and many days my sweat and tears are . . . unto this sacred soil in the parish of St Joseph. Madam Justice, prison and the toils of life place an impact on my health…. I have deteriorated to a state where I need two operations. This is due to having a cyst and an abnormal growth and a hernia . . . . . Madam justice please have mercy on me,” Smith pleaded. His attorney submitted that, while the crimes were “very serious”, her client had several mitigating factors that should be considered when imposing sentence, including his guilty plea. “He does not pretend he is a perfect person [as he has a case] of short temperedness [and] at no time tried to deny that this situation was a mistake”. Lange went on to say that Smith had been well behaved in prison and had “no incidents of violence while on remand”. (BT)
KING FALLS SHORT – The comeback kid didn’t have another of those rallies left. Darian King’s latest Houdini act fell just short, as Barbados’ best tennis player couldn’t pull off another great escape in Wednesday’s heart-breaking first-round exit in the US Open qualifiers. Eyeing a great come from behind victory while trailing 5-1 in the third set, rain briefly stalled King’s comeback bid before Gerald Melzer eventually steadied himself for a 7-5, 4-6, 6-3 victory on Court 8. It was a depressing defeat to say the least for the 26-year-old Bajan ace, who was looking to repeat last year’s magic when he made a storybook run to his first ever main draw appearance at a grand slam. But there was no fairytale ending this time, as an inconsolable King sat in his player’s chair unmoved several minutes after the completion of the match. (DN)
MAPLE MASTERS MARCH TO SEMIS – Defending masters champions Maple and three other teams qualified for the semi-finals after yesterday’s tense action in the 33rd Barbados International hockey festival. In the battles which were staged exclusively at the football Astro Turf, Maple lost an early skirmish to another semi-finalist ABC 1-0. However, later in the evening Maple fought Bluez Ole Sticks in driving rain and heavy puddles to emerge 1-0 winners. All Stars advanced to the semis with a 1-0 win over the Islanders while the Y’s Guys proved smarter than Bluez Ole Sticks beating them 1-0. Over at the hockey turf All Stars and the Y’s Guys drew love all and ABC and Islanders fought to a similar deadlock. (DN)
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