How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh
housefresh.com
And why you shouldn’t trust product reviews from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google.
  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    Goshdarnit, I’ve seen these weirdo webpages before, which would talk at length about how they’ve conducted tests, but then not show any data. I was seriously wondering, why they were bothering, but of course, it’s some shitty metric they have to fulfill.

  • jaden@lemmy.zip
    7·
    2 years ago

    I think this is part of the reason that Google sucks nowadays. I genuinely don’t feel like I can trust it for finding products.

  • bedrooms@kbin.social
    5·
    2 years ago

    I feel like Google results these days value the domain rather than the individual webpages instead. Always the same websites…

  • Hadouken Shoryuken@feddit.nlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Kind of related question - any suggestions what to use if I want to skip this problem? I was looking for some headphones earlier and as explained in the article, most sites point to the same brands. I finally got to see some different brands/models and users reviews from forum group. The problem is I found those forums from Google… so any suggestions what I can try without being stuck in this google SEO vortex?

    • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Consumer Reports is still around and still excellent. I paid for a membership to them for quite some time and it was worth it.

      I think it’s an instance of the fundamental problem that if people generally want something (good reviews) for free, but it costs money to make, eventually it’ll get hollowed out and replaced with something empty and worthless, because there wasn’t money in continuing to provide it for free.

    • Ilandar@aussie.zone
      1·
      2 years ago

      A lot of people just add “reddit” to their search query. It does work pretty well, but I realise not every Lemmy user will be willing to do that.