A new Google update threatens the continuity of small websites

By modifying the search algorithm and spam filter at the beginning of the year, Google tried to get rid of bad content, but the effects of the step taken by the giant American company were negative for some small websites, according to what was reported by Agence France-Presse.

A large number of website owners sounded the alarm on social media, expressing concern about the massive and unprecedented decline in the number of visits since the completion of publishing the update at the end of April, as this could lead to the laying off of employees or even closure.

Among the unlucky ones is 37-year-old Argentine Giselle Navarro, who runs the HouseFresh company with her husband, which has been offering a tool to compare air purifiers since 2020.

There is no advertisement or listing of product names on the site. If the results of the experiments are negative, the owners of the calendars indicate this clearly to the visitors, while the owners of the site receive money when users buy a product after they are redirected to its page on the “Amazon” website.

The latest Google update changed everything

Giselle Navarro told Agence France-Presse, “We realized that we had gone from first place (in search results) - because we were the only ones who actually tested the products - to not appearing completely.”

According to her, the number of visits to “House Fresh” decreased from 4,000 visits per day through Google searches, to about 200 visits.

Giselle explained that because of this significant decline, she received advice to close her site and launch again under a new domain name.

Likewise, many website owners are annoyed by Google's lack of clarity about how it categorizes results.

The American giant is particularly silent about its algorithms, so much so that an industry called “Search Engine Optimization” has grown to try to dissect the algorithm in order to “increase the number of clicks” during web searches.

The update has caused confusion among search engine optimization experts who are trying to understand why some sites' rankings were boosted in searches, while other sites' rankings were lowered.

In an email to Agence France-Presse, Google said that this change aims to provide users with “fewer results that give the impression that they are specifically designed to appear on search engines.”

The American company confirms that "the only changes we have implemented are those that we believe significantly improve results for Internet users, and we believe that these updates have been useful."

However, in a widely shared blog post in May, Gisele Navarro reported that people searching for product reviews are increasingly getting ads and content that appears to have been developed by artificial intelligence or optimized via SEO techniques.

Another element that has become more prominent since the update is the increase in content generated by users of social forum sites such as Reddit and Quora .

The company defended this approach by saying that “people often want to learn from the experiences of others,” adding, “We conduct rigorous testing to ensure that the results are useful and of good quality.”

Tough market

But employees at a European news site say that their articles are regularly downgraded in favor of content from Reddit, which is often unrelated to the primary search topic.

The head of the site, who requested to remain anonymous, said that referrals from Google have decreased by 20 to 30% since the update, and that budget cuts will be inevitable.

"In an already difficult market, this is a big problem for independent publishers like us," he added.

From newsletters to audio blogs (podcasts)... all the companies surveyed by Agence France-Presse indicated that they are urgently looking for other ways to attract the public to stop their dependence on Google’s search engine.

Gisele Navarro, who had to significantly reduce her team, turned to video and newscast formats.

Despite this experience, Navarro remains optimistic about the future of the Internet, and has received a large number of messages of support and recorded an increase in referrals from alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo .

“All human knowledge exists on the Internet, and this is not a small matter,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to give that up just because Google crashes.”

(AFP)