
Google Is Smashing Multi-Discipline Websites to Combat Fake News - danielrm26
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-effect-of-googles-late-2018-algorithm-changes-on-multi-discipline-sites/
======
stevenicr
Not sure I am buying that this is for "are coming from the urgent need to
combat fake news." \- maybe it's true, I'd love to see the internal reasoning.

I've noticed for a while that larger sites with lots of info that I run have
not been doing so well in the serps, yet smaller sites with only a dozen pages
can rank much higher, even though the amount of content is far less, I can see
how the 'stay in your lane' thing could be at play in the verticals I pay
attention to.

I had been assuming that this is because the 'rank brain' and AI type things
they had been touting are all basically failures. You can say it's to combat
fake news, it could be to combat sites like 'instructables' and answer sites,
(that was a combat things for google a while back right?)

I guess it could be said that fake news sites and spam sites had adjusted to
take advantage of the AI things and now they are desperately trying to unfck
all that, so a correlation could be true.

Smashing sites that have lots of info may have helped some things for them in
the past. However like much of the panda and similar spam fighting things
added to the algorithm some time ago... these use a hammer to smash what we
don't like things have plenty of collateral damage. Hurting well rounded sites
and users who may be looking for more info.

The good thing is that google has censored so much already that it's becoming
more and more like the yellow pages and less of a tool for deep discovery.
People are looking to other places to find new and cool things. It might be
HN, snapchat, some anime forum, whatever.

This is good for people in the long run I suppose. It also shows that human
curation is really king IMHO. Google's different departments are a bunch of
tails that wag the dog, so it will likely never be what it once was.

This is opening up options for new kinds of search and discover portals which
is exciting to me.

~~~
eudora
I've also been getting a strong impression of Google being a yellow pages.

Almost all of the time I Google something, it's because I want the top result.
As in, I search [company name] and go to companyname.com.

But otherwise, I find 90% of my searches are [reddit topic] or [wiki topic].

I use [reddit topic] the way I used to use Google itself.... I'm not sure if
this is a good thing.

It's where people talk, rather than SEO and try to sell you crap.

That said, there's increasing amounts of ads pretending to not be ads, scams,
and shills on reddit.

