Case Study: CelebrityNetWorth.com - The Impact of Google's featured snippets/instant answers

[Steve Brownlie]

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com

tl;dr

• Being in the snippets is probably not good for you if your business provides short answers
• You should listen to @CCarter and others here when they tell you to diversify traffic sources

Added thought: Big search engines can become your competitor in almost any niche. Depending on them as your only/main business model is super risky. Look at the locksmith guys - do leadgen, get paid. Now Google is trying to sell the premium lead gen placements themselves as a test. Flights aggregators vs Google flights etc etc. If you can see an easy way for search engines to muscle in on your niche, they probably will.

 

[turbin3]

INB4CLASSACTIONLAWSUIT

LOL Pretty much. I mean it's straight up IP theft in a lot of cases. The company is becoming bloated and oppressive in a manner that is the digital equivalent of a far-leftist government.

Although it's not always possible and sometimes, for some niches, there is no choice but to be at least partially dependent on their traffic source, let me also offer an alternate vision it seems most don't even consider these days. Lately, where possible and where the niche may allow, I've taken to creating entirely closed off, private communities that are entirely inaccessible, uncrawlable, and therefore unindexible by search bots. One example:

You (the user) must be a registered user, and your account must be approved. You (the site owner) entirely self-host all your assets and resource files. No third party CDN's. No HTTP requests being sent to the all-seeing assholes that gladly turn those traffic logs into net-positive revenue. On your part, you build, manage, and access the site entirely with an appropriately-sanitized, non-Chrome browser (watch out for FireFox "safe browsing" mode though... = disable). You also never use "G" or "B" services for the platform, and instead choose to self-host something like Piwik for analytics. You may also implement structural obfuscation with your platform, such as redirects that all external links pass through, utilizing an entirely separate domain you control. After all, you may have set things up to not leak valuable data, however your users may inadvertently. That's why it should be controlled at the process level anyways. You might also choose to tunnel all of your own traffic through a VPN, so as to not even leak your data to your own ISP. Descend down the rabbit hole as much as you like... At a minimum, one must accept degrees of discomfort, and in some cases significant discomfort, to free themselves of the bondage of analytic tyranny by our benevolent, digital dictators. The funny thing is, the claims are always the same. "We're doing it for your protection." "We know what is best for you."

</rant>

 

[Ryuzaki]

I mean it's straight up IP theft in a lot of cases.

The problem is that you can opt out. So would you like to appear in the snippets and lose 25% of your traffic, or not appear and lose 45% of your traffic? (made up numbers). Most people are going to say "fine, you mafioso bastards." It's a literal protection racket, they protect you from themselves for a fee. And if you say no, a competitor says yes, so there's an incentive to say yes to what's against your best interest, and that's obviously an unethical position to put millions of people in.

Given the choice to allow Google to crawl your site and given the option to opt out of featured snippets, is there really a case to be made? Are there any sensible politicians and lawyers ready to make this their life's work while refusing under-and-over-the-table money to ignore it or proclaim it good?

I'd think it could legit go through with some hot-shot underdog lawyer ready to gain exposure on a high profile case. Like... at what point do you have to renew an agreement to let Google scrape and use your site? If a 10 year old site online is being used for it where the administrator can be shown to not have touched the site in 9.99 years, what does that say...

It's like a perversion of "innocent until proven guilty" but more like "yes until you explicitly state no." This is obviously the case and it doesn't matter what that second quote is applied to. All you have to do is read between the quotation marks and you immediately understand someone is being taken advantage of.

 

[doublethinker]

@Ryuzaki, I completely agree with the logic. "It's daylight robbery but if I'm not onboard someone else will be."

That's what publishers thought so too with Facebook Instant Articles. When it launched opinions were extremely divisive. Should they jump on what was being labeled as the new standard of consuming the internet?

Then Google Amp showed up. I saw it as a reaction to FB IA, but I'm probably incorrect.

But what's really happening? Facebook is losing engagement, instant articles are losing steam and publishers aren't talking about it anymore. Google Facebook Instant Articles and I see articles about publishers pulling out because the revenue isn't there.

I don't know about the proliferation of Google Amp and this but the more things change the more they stay the same.

Until they don't.

On a separate point, the article claims that it ate a small business (celebritynetworth) and in the same article quotes the owner as having spent "literally millions" on collecting the data. Not quite a small business and really? Data as the cornerstone of your business, which is inherently hard to protect, which you can't sell and publicly provide.

People who sell their voice has a more defensible strategy.

Not trying to be a Google sympathizer, it is eroding IP and if too aggressive- detrimental to the internet. But I wonder if by doing this, it'll clean up the web's simple 1 second "oic" answers and prioritize heavy, deep thought articles.

 

[Darth]

@doublethinker I think consumers want the 1 second oic answers if they can be given. No one has time to read long articles for a simple answer. I agree IA seems dead in the water at the moment, publishers are revolting in sufficient numbers. AMP I am not so sure and still see plenty of those results ranking well. Again, AMP cannot be monetised with banner ads as well as non-AMP though.

 

[turbin3]

Don't worry @Ryuzaki, I'm not naive enough to think I can change the world. I guess what I was getting at is, people might open themselves up to the possibility that, they don't necessarily have to give G permission with everything they create. For typical marketing/monetization efforts, yeah that's probably unavoidable in many cases. For others, maybe where monetization is not as big a deal, or there are more creative methods of monetization and traffic generation, might be worth considering.

AMP will fail for the same reasons that G+ has failed: only marketers use it. The average person doesn't care, and it doesn't offer any actual unique value proposition over other alternatives. The performance difference that was raved about is negligible at best. Mind you, that doesn't mean there isn't still value that marketers can take advantage of in the meantime... Even short term value propositions are often worth experimenting with.