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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

I own a small (~500k in sales/annum) ecommerce site. Enough for 3-4 employees, premises and a small owners salary.

About 50% of our sales come from organic search results (Google). We write a lot of content, have long form product pages, put out YouTube videos, sponsor blog posts, etc etc. but we have NO IDEA what really works, despite paying for services like ahrefs.

All we know is that when we drop off the first page of Google (which is increasingly filled with content and ads instead of search results) our sales take a dramatic hit. And that hit could easily make or break the business and the people we employ.

So Google, when you make updates like this, it has real implications on millions of small businesses. It’s not just a feature for “user engagement” or “customer satisfaction”, it’s a big deal.

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Google is aware that this is a big deal. It is a big deal to them as well. Search is their golden goose and they are terrified of doing anything that would break it or worsen it. No one has ever accused the Search team of having a "move fast and break things" culture.

That said, their interests aren't perfectly aligned with yours. Their main priority is producing a scalable algorithm that outputs rankings that users are happy with. If their A/B tests show that a new algorithm makes their users happier, then they will use that new algorithm (after an extremely long period of A/B testing and due diligence and gradual rollouts). The fact that your specific website is helped or hurt by their new algorithm, is not their priority.

If they decided to prioritize stability over user satisfaction, I can guarantee that you, me, and most people will eventually abandon Google entirely in favor of a different search engine that gives us results that we're happier with. This is exactly why smart companies continually try to innovate and change, even if they need to break a few eggs in the process.

I agree with everything you said, but there’s one additional nuance: what may be best for the user, may not be what’s best for the business.

I’d say that if there’s a general trend over the past decade, it’s that search results haven’t necessarily lead to a better user experience, but Google did a lot of fighting with spam sites, in addition to more ads / integrations with their wider ecosystem.

All this makes for a lot of quality hits in the whole experience, and I totally understand the frustration of people who depend upon their rankings. I don’t think there’s a solution, though, as Google needs to keep evolving, especially to fight SEO spam that tries to game their algorithms.

> most people will eventually abandon Google entirely in favor of a different search engine that gives us results that we're happier with.

LOL! Which one?

That would be a funny question to ask my parents. Not sure they would have a legit answer let alone a sarcastic one.

So why not be more transparent about what their goals are here?

Nobody has to spell out specifics, but the broad strokes on what they are trying to achieve, or issues they are trying to solve, would be nice.

What do you mean by happiness of results, how would you measure it.

happiness is hard to measure, but I can easily think of metrics that indicate unhappiness off the top of my head. not clicking through any of the hits, continuing to the second page of results, and retrying the same query phrased differently are all strong signals that the user was not satisfied with the results.

If you go from result-to-result, I'm pretty sure google track time spent in each one, as well as the last one you look at.

And the last one you look at is in most cases the one with the info you were looking for. Their algorithm pushes that result to the top for the same query in the future.

The effect is quite dramatic - for a query with only two results, a single click by one user can cause those results to switch which is on top a week later.

Doesn't that require to have analytics installed on the target website which many won't have?

Without those, how can Google now how much time I am spending on a website I am visiting, e.g., from firefox?

Also, why would time really matter? Say I'm trying to remember some javascript method name, and I go to various websites and the one that has the answer I close it immediately.

Not really, having analytics on the Google search page itself is usually enough (they see the time it takes for you to go from Results page -> Website -> Back to results page).

> Their main priority is producing a scalable algorithm that outputs rankings that users are happy with.

Are they measuring happiness? Or are they using bad proxies for happiness, or even sometimes ignoring happiness to optimize for number of searches?

An ideal search engine that delivers perfect results for everyone would be a site people only spent a few moments on. A shitty search engine with a virtual monopoly would be a place people wasted tons of their time banging their heads against. A search engine is like a door; you generally don't hang out in the doorway.

edit:

> most people will eventually abandon Google entirely in favor of a different search engine that gives us results that we're happier with

Nobody is doing this. Not only would it take a fortune to become a contender, not only are sites required to optimize for google, but in the end google would buy and shut down any threat. You could maybe compete with google if you had state backing and could lose infinite money over infinite time, but then google would just lobby to have you banned.

This is aside from the brand dominance, which would still keep google as the top search engine if the entire infrastructure of Search was thrown into a dumpster and the brand sold to people who rebuilt it from scratch with no knowledge of how it worked before.

I feel sorry for you, but in your position, my absolute first priority would be finding sales from sources other than Google. They're a private company and they have no obligation to you whatsoever.

I agree, that’s why half our sales come from elsewhere (social media, mailing list, subscriptions etc.) But we can’t ignore the power of organic search. For most people it’s where they start when shopping

With the level of power google has over us, can they really hide behind the defense of being a private company? What are the changes being made to the algorithm? Why isn’t this public knowledge?

Perhaps we should augment any decline in traffic from Google via paid search ads on Google. If google really is operating as a private company, maximising shareholder value, deliberately pushing businesses onto this path is a perfectly logical strategy for them to pursue.

The unfortunate implications on society is a consolidation of wealth and power and a widening gap between those who have and those who do not.

If I interpret your statement correctly, you're basically asking, in a summarized form, this:

   Is it right for Google, by changing their (non-public) algos, to de-rank to lower levels your website?

(therefore multiple themes like a potential conflict involving their public_vs_private services, impact of changes on the global users, can search algos be non-public, lack of alternatives, etc...)

Do you submit a feed to Google?

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7439058?hl=en

Not to be snarky but is there any evidence this goes somewhere other than /dev/null? I've seen support forum threads with hundreds of posts, many of them from users saying they had submitted feedback, and can't think of a single time it visibly made a difference.

He is not talking about submitting feedbacks, but using the Google Merchants for providing a feed for their products.

Are there successful examples of ".. sales from sources other than Google", or ones where majority is not via GS (google search)?

Short of good examples, this tough love comes of misplaced.

GS is THE dominant search engine. They WANT to be in that spot. It sounds strange to me, that google put themselves in such spot, and project that no one should have obligation towards them.

Here's some examples that we use:

- Instagram Posts + Stories

- Weekly Email to Mailing List subscribers

- Subscription for Free Delivery/Benefits (like Amazon Prime)

There are a lot of people that come direct as well or through Google searches for our brand name, especially repeat customers (about 70% of our customers have ordered before). These people can be word of mouth, ads we take out in other publications, non-sponsored blog posts from others etc.

How do you make the distinction, if at all, between people using the search bar to find your site again (or after hearing about from someone else) vs people landing on the site because they found a product on Google?

a lot of small ecommerce companies use social media these days. I talked to a guy running a men's grooming product company recently and they almost exclusively use TikTok/Youtube/instagram and have put a lot of emphasis on having a community around it and relying on word of mouth rather than buying ads on google or Facebook or relying on search.

There are tons of strategies, that is one of them. Many people use it. Doesn't mean this is the right one for everyone.

This comes with risk too. You are at the mercy of the tiktok/YT/IG algo instead of the Google algo. There's lots of work that goes into making content that is engaging and liked on social media. Having your community is not enough because even if you have 20K followers, if your content is not engaging, people won't see it in their feed.

As for relying strictly on word of mouth? Sure, but that's likely a minority of brands. Most people need the distribution from one of the big tech co.

Yes, it’s called word of mouth. It’s not common of course but reserved for those extremely special products.

> They're a private company and they have no obligation to you whatsoever

This is not really a bad thing, just treat them as a partner, they even do things for "free". They could stop working for/with you at any time, this shouldn't stop you for making the most out of the collaboration for now, but it's harder to plan for the long-term.

I ran a marketing agency and this is the problem with SEO. No one really knows what works. Sure, we know what works right now, but a new update might completely change that. And worse, you might get penalized because Google decided that what it used to think was great (and worthy of top rankings) is now suddenly not kosher.

You can do that Google tells you (“create great content”) but you still have to get it found. Unlike social media, this isn’t always a space where you can make the content exciting enough that it gets “discovered” through word of mouth. Not a lot of entertaining content pieces for “affordable door repairs seattle”

Leaving this industry has done wonders for my stress levels. There was constant anxiety that you’d wake up one day and find that your rankings have tanked overnight.

"We write a lot of content, have long form product pages, put out YouTube videos, sponsor blog posts"

Unfortunately, that's all table stakes. A lot of other companies do the same thing.

Google Search is like a mob

you either pay for the ads or else your potential customers will be presented with a competitor, who did pay for the ads (more than you)

same thing happened to Basecamp: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

this is the kinda thing you do when you have an illegal monopoly on search-based ads

> illegal monopoly

It's not illegal to have a monopoly, so I'm curious to learn what makes their monopoly illegal?

That's a reasonable perspective, but as someone with no stakes in it I would hope that Google prioritizes its users first and foremost. Note that:

* I am not saying that these interests are mutually exclusive.

* I am also not asserting that Google search is presently doing a good job serving its users, far from it in my personal opinion.

I certainly want "customer satisfaction" to be the big deal, however. I'm not quite sure why you put that term in quotes.

What about Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave search, .. ? Insignificant compared to Google?

Yes, it's insignificant. Bing is a few %, perhaps from people who are using the default search engine and think/don't care that it's google

Is it possible to tell if a user came from DuckDuckGo?

Apologies for the naivety of this question, but it's it possible to "wean" yourself off of Google (or any one income source)? that is, maybe "pretend" that by default you're only receiving 50% of your total income and then during leaner times you have some buffer to figure something out. I can understand there might be no way to do this in some (or maybe all) industries, but wondering what kind of resilience like this is possible in smaller businesses.

I'm assuming you are investing heavily in SEO optimization because it is cheaper than just buying the ad-space on google search.

Do you have an estimate on the price increase of dropping all that content creation/blog sponsoring, and just purchase the traffic directly "at the source"?

Time to buy google ads so you'll always be on the first page.

Alternatively, you're also free to pay many of the same manipulators that knocked you off for their SEO services in bumping you back up...

Rephrased: “have you thought about paying Google for ‘protection’ against their updates”

Spend 10k a month on ads and you'll be guaranteed to be found as well as bring in new customers.

There are ways to position your advertising budget so it generates new and more profit when you drop ads on Google & Bing + social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok :)

But yes, being at the mercy of the search engine Gods is no fun.

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