Having a brief look at their traffic on Ahrefs; They've lost a bit of traffic, but it doesn't look like it's halved: 59 million to 49 million. https://i.imgur.com/fB1z5aq.png
Having a look at what their organic search movements are, most of them are just for celebrity names. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png
It seems in this update, and Google is putting a lot less emphasis on the word count. Instead, they are putting more emphasis on having the exact keyword in the title tag and coming from a domain with a lot of authority.
Google could have also struck DailyMail with a Manual Action (aka a penalty for breaking their TOS) which would vastly affect their organic traffic. Manual action is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
> They've lost a bit of traffic, but it doesn't look like it's halved: 59 million to 49 million.
The article is very sloppy about this, with a clickbait framing, but the actual claim is "we saw a massive drop in Search traffic from Google (lost 50% of daily traffic)", which I'm almost certain means 50% of Google search traffic.
SemRush is showing some more accurate updates it seems for a lot of sites on the latest update. This seems to be closer to a 35% cut (just from external data).
This entire conversation is about the Daily Mail itself, when the facts of the story are that in a forum post with no replies, the SEO person at the Daily Mail complained that traffic dropped for a whole 2 days.
Numerous sites are impacted when Google's algorithms change. The Daily Mail is not popular because of Google, it's popular because it's a low-brow tabloid and there are many people who love low-brow tabloids.
The story is also a clickbait headline from an SEO-discussion website, who presumably know a thing or two about driving traffic to themselves. Despite the headline and lede, this isn't a 50% traffic drop for the Daily Mail, it's a 50% drop in Google search traffic specifically.
Without some more context, like which other sites this hit and what's changed (ranking drop? fewer search matches?), this is basically a non-story.
The Semrush shows that they were getting 15 mil visitors from google per day before the update and 11 mil after. The absolute numbers might be wrong but they definitely were hit hard and they were getting a lot of traffic from Gogle.
As a monopolist, they need to meet much higher standards of accountability, transparency, and fairness.
Would we tolerate it if the electric monopoly cut off power to the Daily Mail? Or the water monopoly?
When you're not a monopoly, you don't have to care about any of these things. You're in it to win it.
As a society, we cannot have a monopoly willy nilly censoring sites with no accountability or means of redress. It is an intolerable situation. A monopoly must be demonstrably fair to everyone.
> The editors described the arguments for a ban as “centred on the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”.
I'm surprised it took Google 2 years to get around to the same viewpoint.
The editors of an encyclopedia talking about their own rules is literally a primary source. That's what a primary source is.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, surely if there's anyone who knows which sources are worth using, it would be the editors of the world's biggest encyclopedia?
It's sort of funny how knee-jerk "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" has become. It is among other things a user-editable encyclopedia. It's also the largest project of the Wikimedia foundation, an online-encyclopedia development initiative with a paid staff, and one of the highest-traffic websites in the world.
As you say, it is a primary source here. The question isn't what's on the Daily Mail's anyone-can-edit Wikipedia page, it's what a closed group of encyclopedia overseers have decided constitutes an acceptable source. What's more, the closest competitor, Britannica, relies on finding expert contributors instead of listing specific reputable sources, so its editors wouldn't be nearly as relevant here!
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia is a point here, it's a crowdsourced publication that purports to be a neutral source, despite well documented conflicts among the editors.
I would rather have conflicts among editors than no conflict whatsoever, as the latter suggests that they all agree on how to bias things. Conflict is a sign of trustworthiness here.
Even a cursory glance at how wikipedia is actually structured vs how early 2000s news media and schools portrayed it will lead you to the conclusion that it's a significantly better primary source than any other encyclopedia currently available.
The sort of stuff in wikipedia that traditionally might be slightly biased (current events, very new political stuff) doesn't even appear in other encyclopedias until a decade later, so that has to be worth something as well.
The number of eyes actively vetting and checking and re-checking every change on a moderately trafficked wikipedia page probably dwarfs the total number of editorial staff for even the largest of encyclopedias. The average accuracy is just going to be higher in a situation like that, even with people occasionally defacing pages.
I'm on the fence with whether I agree with you. Yes, biases may come into play, but Daily Mail has always played fast and loose with facts. If Google has found a way to identify bullshit like that and de-prioritize it from search results, that's both amazing and good for the world. It would encourage DailyMail to focus on news, facts, reality and not their usual tabloid fare.
And if it's not the majority definition and does actually not improve the search experience, the market will punish them for it.
I'm nearly degooglized (youtube vulgarisation videos are hard to pass sadly), i'm not a fan of their policies and their control of the market, but come on, this argument do not stand.
"reputable content" as defined by GOOG's own ideological bias
I think a fair assessment wouldn't pin 100% of the cause to Google's ideological bias. However, a fair assessment of the situation would also acknowledge the existence of Google's ideological bias.
The Daily Mail is neither fake news, nor propaganda, nor a content farm. These are ludicrous suggestions. It's an unpleasant sensationalist tabloid, but it abides by the UK press standards authority. There are equivalents in every western country.
It's definitely a content farm; I suppose the other two accusations depend on one's personal definitions.
"The production process was simple. During a day shift—8 a.m. to about 6 p.m—four news editors stationed together near Clarke's desk assigned stories to reporters from a continually updated list of other publications' articles, to which I did not have access. Throughout the day, they would monitor the website's traffic to determine what was getting clicked on and what to remove from the homepage."
The Daily Mail is neither fake news, nor propaganda, nor a content farm...There are equivalents in every western country.
The elephant in the newsroom, is that declining subscribers and outdated business models are pulling down the whole of legacy media towards the level of unpleasant sensationalist tabloid and further. The lack of fact checking we saw in the wake of the Covington Kids debacle stands in stark contrast to the level of journalistic integrity Dan Rather was held to on his fall from grace.
Legacy media can't compete with the Internet, and its quality is declining as it's circling the drain.
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - "Publishing photographs of the complainants taken in such circumstances represented an intrusion; the publication had not sought to justify the publication of the images in the public interest."
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/rul... - accuracy ("This article was a report of an inquest, in which the deceased had been inaccurately identified. This was a fundamental and damaging error on a basic point of fact. [...T]he correct position was readily available, [so] there had been a failure on the part of the agency providing the story to take care over its accuracy.")
But then surely the answer there is that other bad actors (The Sun, Daily Express, etc.) should suffer the same penalties from Wikipedia, Google, etc.; not that one should slide because others are just as bad.
I am conflicted.
I think that Daily Mail deserves it all. At the same time I don’t think it should be Google’s duty to limit the reach of a bad publication by means of algorithmic changes to its opaque Search product.
Except the whole reason Google rose to be the best search engine is because they created a better search. More context awareness and better algorithms to find quality/relevant posts. As the SEO meta game changes, so must they, to stay ahead of those who want to game the system.
once they decided to get into the game of determining what is and what is not the truth is where they step over the line. if I search for something I want what is popular to come up, not was is approved.
daily mail isn't gaming the system, people know it is a tabloid. the real issue is that many supposed respectable news agencies have been shown to have more than their fair share of misinformation.
> if I search for something I want what is popular to come up
I am in a different camp. I want something useful to come up. Once upon a time popularity (in the pagerank sense) and usefulness were better correlated. Today the signal-to-noise ratio is worse and those trying to game the system are more sophisticated.
The issue if you will, is that Google is moving from publishing a variety of perspectives to a single "true" one.
And furthermore the perspective that is crowned the true one, is based on whatever is politically convenient for Google.
If people loudly and angrily demand that Google show a lie as truth, then you will now be in position where Google will only show the lie without any questioning or contrary perspectives.
As the lie becomes established, so policy will made based on it. And it will be very deficient policy. And it will lead to disaster. Afterwards, people will ask? How come no one saw this coming? How come no one raised any objections?
Did you know that during the communist mass starvation, there was a lot of false propaganda about how well big the harvests were. People looking to ingratiate themselves with the elite lied about how well everything was going and flattered the elite with how great their their wisdom was.
They were surrounded by yes men who created a filter bubble. The distorted vision of that was catastrophical. Tens of millions dead.
Eh; their site is the top hit on Google for “The Daily Mail”
I suspect most people searching using Google’s news features want news, not tabloids.
Slurping a bunch of searches for news into your tabloid site sounds like an obvious case of “gaming the system”.
I didn’t know it was a tabloid until just now, because I’ve never heard of them. I’d have been upset with the news aggregators I use if they accidentally bubbled unreliable sources to the top of my feed.
> if I search for something I want what is popular to come up, not was is approved.
There is no objective, Platonic measure of "popularity", and Google always has to temper it with "correctness".
When someone searches for "california governor", Google needs to show results for "Gavin Newsom" instead of "Arnold Schwarzenegger", even though the latter is immensely more popular by any reasonable metric.
So yes, Google's engineers will keep tweaking the algorithm until it stops showing Arnold Schwarzenegger entirely. In search of correctness. Otherwise it will become unusable very quickly.
But there is no single right answer! Even a given person may want one answer in one context and another one in a different context. Popularity is not the answer, but neither is currency.
A problem I run into repeatedly with Google is that I enter search terms and when it gives me the wrong thing, sometimes the opposite of what I want, it strongly resists my refining it. For instance, if I search for "turning off feature X" and everybody else searches for "turning on feature X", Google will "correct" me implacably. You're not allowed to turn "X" off. Back in the old days when it wasn't as intelligent, you could add words that would divert it from the popular cluster of hits. This isn't just an annoyance, I believe it's shaping society by determining which ideas and information thrive and which wither.
If you want what's popular in a very raw sense, you'll get bots linking to each other. Otherwise, you need some other sense of popular that takes bits and pieces of usefulness and trustworthiness and more.
> once they decided to get into the game of determining what is and what is not the truth is where they step over the line.
Why shouldn't they? If I search for information about the Earth, I don't want to see a bunch of flat Earth crap. If I search for information on vaccines, I don't want to have to sift through anti-vax results, no matter how popular they are.
People use Google because they think the results are good. Google's bet is that one reason people for this is that they surface true information. Therefore, they penalize information they assess likely to be false. If users disagree with Google's assessment — i.e. it buries valuable information or surfaces worthless information — they'll use another search engine.
While I agree with you, the results you seek are still subjective results.
As a flat earther (I'm not a flat earther), the emphasis I wuold be looking for would be on returning results proving the earth is flat when I search for information about the Earth.
You'll never get an answer to this question from people who question google's ordering. Google has to order the content somehow. I don't think people bitching about their changes realize it is always a trade off. Some people win and some people loose.
The publisher/platform thing is also a false dilemma that keeps getting repeated even though it has no basis in the reality of the law. U.S.C 230 explicitly states:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The same law also states:
> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
So this idea that these platforms are de-facto publishers because they decided to curate their platform is explicitly incorrect as stated by the law.
I am not conflicted at all, Daily Mail clearly gamed the system in order to inflate their clickrate.
System was updated to make it harder to be gamed, inflated clicks are back to what it suppose to be.
Maybe instead of trying to sell drama and rage headlines they could focus on actually producing worthwhile content... but then again its Daily Mail.
What would be interesting is to see how other papers were affected by this.
Where do you see it was they were gaming the system? Their site was clearly popular. From what I see they were targeted based on the perception of that content’s value.
The gaming part could actually be natural product, not necessarily ill-willed intent.
The headline creation and news selection promote clickbait within organization. The most outlandish and catchy stuff gets most revenue, why spend days/week/months on quality article that will be surpassed in terms of ROI by gossip drop?
Over time ppl working in Daily Mail would naturally write stuff that trends on google.
And I wager that what was trending on google had a good chance to trend amongst their target audience too (stuff that triggers emotional responses).
It's impossible not to avoid "limiting the reach" somehow because a search engine cannot simply deliver to the user the list of all pages that it has crawled which contain the search words, in an arbitrary order.
Google is just responding to what people want; the search engine has taken a lot of flak over the years for being spammed, and alternatives have been cropping up. Though "to google" has become a household word, Google cannot rest on their laurels and take that entrenchment for granted.
Much more likely that they made some global changes, and dailymail happened to be one of the hardest-hit high profile sites, because the amount of click-baity untrue stuff they publish.
Google has to do some sort of curation, or we're left back in the early 2000's where people are just throwing keywords up for the google crawler to find. Is there a difference between those sites and the daily mail? Oh yeah, but I don't know where it sits on the spectrum when compared to those old sites and more reputable news agencies.
Yeah but if they don't do that, sites eventually figure out how to game the system/algorithm and we're back and square one. Google has to constantly make changes to stay ahead of SEO. It's like an arms race.
nearly all news sites, from infowars to nytimes, are borderline sharecroppers off the daily flow of traffic from google search. its usually only a fifth to a third of their traffic, but its their single biggest source usually. the cornerstone of the business.
daily mail just basically got evicted by the landlord. I'm super curious to see where they drew the line.
The Google UI seems to have changed also. No more numbered pages you can navigate back and forth, just a button to reveal more search results on one page. So for instance, you can jump straight to the "long tail" of a search for the less important results; you have to click through umpteen "more results".
The last time (~6 months ago) I was on one of their article pages (via direct link in a new tab, not via their homepage), the uBO icon immediately showed something like 50 or 60 elements blocked.
That value rose every other second as I scrolled, so yeah...
Alright sounds good. By the way where do we go to find out whether a publication is misogynistic and *phobic? We need to make sure we keep the internet safe!
You're kidding, right? SPLC is a virtue signal cesspool run by con men that has been forced to retract multiple smears in the last year alone, including smearing many "left leaning" journalists as Russian spies and fascists.
Their articles are full of mistakes. It isn't uncommon for the labels under the photos to ID the incorrect people. I wonder how much of the writing was original and how much was re-writes of previous articles or other publisher's articles.
It got dropped in rank because Google decided something else should be higher ranked. How do you propose google rank things? Don't forget people will always game whatever your ranking algorithm, so please elaborate how you'll deal with that too.
I always perceived that it was split along class lines (this is the UK, after all).
The true working-class tabloids were the Sun, Mirror, and Star.
The Mail and the Express seemed to be more for people who were doing a little better, were often (correspondingly?) a bit older, but were rooted in right-wing/small island mentality, and who would probably have been uncomfortable with the image/implications of moving to a broadsheet.
The Daily Express used to be a broadsheet, and was always thought middle market. It went tabloid after Beaverbrook died - in the 70s I think. Somehow, it had a reputation for decent, honest but right of centre reporting. Quite how I'm not sure as Beaverbrook had infamously told a 1948 enquiry into the press that he ran the paper "purely for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive". He may have been Murdoch's role model.
Ever since it went tabloid it's been downhill all the way, and right down the toilet after Desmond.
All the web sites that go with British newspapers (and for all I know, other newspapers in the world, but I live in Britain) have been doing grey-SEO stuff that's bound to get hit by algorithm changes.
By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g.
"When is the new Avengers movie out?"
"Which channel is The Crown on?"
"Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?"
"Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher.
Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
> "When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?"
What I'm increasingly noticing in the results for these is title:"Avengers movie release date", body:"No release date has yet been announced for the Avengers movie" (but not in the search engine snippet).
I hired the applicant who came late to the interview and had no professional experience. He spit on my face but his great aunt was in the hospital. Always understand, expect the best and people deliver!
A search engine should return high-quality results, right? Obviously quality is mostly subjective, but for most people a "reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication" — Wikipedia's words [1] — means low-quality.
google is an index of information sorted by what it thinks is most relevant to the searcher, and always has been. pagerank was a information quality and importance evaluater. pagerank is what made google google.
I would argue that dailymail fails the SPIRIT of the original pagerank, even if its heavily linked to, the information they hold is paparazzi stew. They have every right to choose to derank something so worthless.
seriously, who decides what I value? Should I decide for you what is worthless?
don't dismiss this is as a flippant comment because people with this belief will walk us straight into the hands of the political class who will jump at the opportunity to tell us what is and what is not.
You can be damn sure they will use all the marketed tested FUD to have people climbing aboard. Punch all the right buttons, have the correct statement to any challenge, and next were back the day of where the message is wholly managed. We already see regimes which operate this way but many just laugh it off "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE", well this is how you get there , by giving the power to decide to someone else.
Google's search is only valuable if it gives us the best results in response to our keyword. There has and will always be a degree of choice made by Google's algorithm in this, even for searches for things that have an objectively right/wrong answer. It has to prioritise somehow.
In this case, if a news site ranks high in metrics that Google's algorithm considers problematic --sensationalist, click-bait, heavily optimised, not mobile-friendly, whatever-- wouldn't you prefer it prioritised sites which didn't hit those metrics?
Its not deciding what you value, its deciding what it values, and if you disagree you don't have to use google search. Searches like duckduckgo will probably be less opinionated.
google does. thats literally the point of pagerank, was for them to decide. thats what differentiated them from other search engines, was evaluating link quality differently.
I know they have taken over the market, but it used to be, if a search engine didnt do a good job of sifting and ranking information, people would move to a new one. infoseek, webcrawler, yahoo, lycos, altavista, hotbot, ask jeeves, msn, alltheweb, teoma.
Youre arguing against the business model itself, which is that the company is RANKING content. It CANT be unbiased.
Think about it not as pushing things down, but choosing what to surface to the top. Hopefully cream. They have two tasks, find good content bring it to the top, and detect bad content impersonating good content and punish it for fraud.
A search engine has to rank the results somehow. Given you cannot fit all results in one page, how do you propose they be ranked? Who will be the winners and the losers? Please include how you'll handle your algorithm getting gamed by every single person on the planet.
Once again the problem is centralization - centralizing the power in the hands of one corporation with one algorithm because they have all the good software and hardware.
It's also the case that folks like those that run the Daily Mail have over-specialized their revenues in ways that depend on Google. They didn't have to do this, but they chose to.
I doubt it will change, but hopefully it'll be a lesson to other folks in the business.
You seem to believe that these two points of view are mutually exclusive. I used the word "also" intentionally because I believe they are compatible.
I firmly believe we can and should build non-exclusive non-silo search engine options. Data salary for general search use is probably a bad thing overall. I'm excited to see a world where competitors to the major search engines that are more open exists.
But at the same time, we're not talking about individual consumers. Individual consumers don't have much market power and dust can't express much choice. The daily Mail is a massive corporation and a massive publication. They could have made other choices, and elected to use other business models. They didn't. And to be honest I don't have much sympathy for them in this. If a single source of revenue dominates everything else that you do you are not an effective news organization. You're probably not even effective corporation is a whole, as most people who run companies Tell you not to overconcentrate your income in one source.
I see a lot of people citing their personal dislike of the site as a reason to wipe it from polite society. Why? What test did it fail and where is the evidence? Can you apply that test evenly to other websites?
Am I the only one here that sees these types of moves as a problem and doesn’t dismiss them purely because of my own personal attitudes toward the content?
Well, we don't know why it happened. If it's pure censorship, sure, that's a bad thing.
But if it's just that Google is updating its algorithm to pay less attention to sites which are heavily optimised/click-bait/sensationalist... that's not so bad.
> The paper reported in its front page story that an Iraqi man “caught red-handed with a bomb” had been awarded £33,000 in compensation “because our soldiers kept him in custody for too long”. In fact, the man in question was found not guilty and the reason he was awarded compensation was for unlawful and degrading treatment while in custody (he was beaten by guards) as well as unlawful detention.
I've finally come to the understanding that when times get tough, people are all for naked power grabs that support "their side", regardless of the broader consequences. You could see it as a flaw in humanity, but I think it's an adaptive trait, ensuring that your tribe secures adequate resources and all that. The real flaw is how we're unable to escape these sorts of evolutionary pressures and replace them with cooperative behavior across tribal boundaries. (In my opinion, this is what will lead us into devastating global resource wars when climate change and peak oil really come home to roost.)
Having a look at what their organic search movements are, most of them are just for celebrity names. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png
It seems in this update, and Google is putting a lot less emphasis on the word count. Instead, they are putting more emphasis on having the exact keyword in the title tag and coming from a domain with a lot of authority.
Google could have also struck DailyMail with a Manual Action (aka a penalty for breaking their TOS) which would vastly affect their organic traffic. Manual action is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en