[xpose2000]

I think Danny should avoid future interviews with the Verge. heh. But seriously, I just don't like how the tone of the interview came across. Does anyone see Danny yelling in these conversations to warrant the use of the exclamation mark? If anything this makes the Verge look bad.

As for addressing SEO concerns. There is a lot of frustration out there these days by small sites and companies trying to make their way and Google results can be hit or miss. Major publications like CNET, Forbes, CNN etc are purposefully creating content and cramming it with affiliate links to sell crap to the masses. When a major publication writes about something its not an expert in, one has to start to raise eyebrows and wonder... Its painfully obvious. They get away with it because they are huge brands and can rank for anything, so they are abusing their power.

Sean Kaye says it best here: https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716935563075559630

Additionally, I want to mention an obvious manipulative practice that companies seem to be rewarded for, when if anything, should be penalized for.

And that is avoiding the "standard news" syntax of published content via manipulative URLS. Namely, avoiding using /id/date/title-of-post (or something similar) and just using the rootdomain/title-of-post to make it rank higher and seem more important than it is. These pages are not an About page, or Privacy Page, or Terms of Service page. Its manipulation and a shady practice and companies should be penalized for it.

[ipaddr]

I don't know Danny but as a neutral party he came off awful and not the right person to meet with reporters. He is neither warm or helpful nor entertaining or thoughtful (humble, etc). He comes off as a burned out newspaper columnist.

I think the key problem is he will play with words and what they mean by parsing them in a way to misunderstand the true meaning behind the question and then uses tries to make you feel less. Does he really not understand why writers are saying no one can find anything (translation: Google is showing less pages for keywords searched, less content is being returned and more ads are poluting the results)? He changes it into: millions are searching, I can take a picture of an apple and google will find it. Search results are better he says(in a see you are wrong and stupid for suggesting this). He completely misses the point.. EVERYONE is noticing how bad the results compared to what they were. Sure, millions of searches happen every day still.. but people are unhappy and they see the quality as lower. People don't automatically leave unless there is a reason and place to go to. Google is giving them a good reason.

Google shouldn't have sent someone who could have a thoughtful discussion or an honest discussion or a deceitful but pleasant conversation.

I don't think this guy personally is the reason why things went off the rails but he paints a picture that the search team has their heads in the sand and they are patting themselves on the back with how great results are when everyone can see the emperor has no clothes on.

[vgeek]

Gary Illyes and John Mueller (other prominent Google liaisons) are also kind of standoffish. Ginny Marvin is another SEland hire, but isn't as mean spirited, but is still as limited in how helpful responses are. John and Gary commonly mock people asking questions and just parrot Google's speaking points of "just create quality content and we will rank it well" that frequently do not mirror reality. If you have SEO questions, your only other official channel for support are Google forums-- maintained by volunteers outside of Google. That SEOs have no official support from the most prominent search engine (besides ambiguous documentation, ~5 liaisons and forums of dubious value) is laughable. If your site gets deindexed or penalized, good luck finding out why with Google.

With Bing Webmaster tools, I have actually emailed support and gotten a bug fixed within 2 weeks. With Google, your best option is yelling into the abyss.

[dannysullivan]

I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts):

"That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and content can move through cycles. You can have a rise in unhelpful content, and search systems evolve to deal with it. We’re in one of those cycles. I fully recognize people would like to see better search results on Google. I know how hard people within Google Search are working to do this. I’m fortunate to be a part of that. To the degree I can help — which includes better communicating, ensuring that I reflect the humbleness that we — and I feel — I’ll keep improving on myself."

[nickpeterson]

I read the verge and listen to their podcast. They don’t come across as overly sensationalist and seem pretty fair in other interviews. I think Google knows their search product isn’t as useful as it once was. Not sure about the root causes, but that’s just my impression from using it for 15 years.

[johnnyanmac]

>They don’t come across as overly sensationalist and seem pretty fair in other interviews.

funnily enough, they are the first site that comes to mind when I think about all those horrible blogspam articles meant to stroke common argumentative points back in the early 2010's. Android vs. IPhone, barely relevant influencer making statement tangentially related to tech, a growing focus away from tech and towards why the tech industry is actually every -ism under the planet, etc.

I hope they got better over the last 7 years or so since I stopped reading most news sides in lieu of Youtubers or searching for specific domain experts or niche, no-nonsense websites.

>I think Google knows their search product isn’t as useful as it once was.

I honestly think the elephant is too big to see the full picture of. I can 100% believe that the search team has some novel tech to really make the best search engine from a technical standpoint. I can also 100% believe that some other team (maybe in ads, maybe even as high as special fellows) inject into that pipeline and add in stuff purely meant for profit, even if results suffer. Or that some other support team does in fact work specifically with big sites to influence bump their SEO.

No one a Google can contain the entire codebase of such a product. It's all to easy to obfrusate such enshittification into it without the well-meaning engineers being any the wiser.

[nickpeterson]

The primary criticism I have of the verge is they often have pretty non-technical people comment on technical things. It comes through hardest on the podcast where Alex Cranz often seems out of her depth

[webworker]

For me, it started around the end of 2018. It seemed like independent blogs and small sites got nuked from orbit, and articles on sites like Medium took precedence.

My take on what happened is that they decimated a good product in the name of "fighting misinformation" by surfacing content mainly from sites that had moderation policies of whatever sorts. Their way of effectively applying the same App Store style moderation across the entire web.

Things seem to have continued sliding downward in the years since. I won't be surprised when AI eats their lunch.

[Terr_]

> Namely, avoiding using /id/date/title-of-post (or something similar) and just using the rootdomain/title-of-post to make it rank higher and seem more important than it is.

This causes the small wayward fragments of Library Science curriculum embedded in my brain to quiver with rage.

Bonus points if the tail end of the URL contains what may-or-may-not be a bunch of tracking shit and it's not obvious how much it can be shortened without breaking the link.

[paxys]

I found it very weird that he was interviewed by The Verge in his capacity as a Google employee, with full blessing from the company's comms team and whoever else, and then decided to post a rebuttal of the article on his personal blog with a large disclaimer that the thoughts are his alone and not his employer's.

[bhartzer]

I get what you're saying, it's weird to interview him as a Google employee. But actually it would be really weird if they didn't include Danny Sullivan in the article in some capacity. Danny Sullivan, over the years, has been so influential and such an influential voice when it comes to Search and SEO. He previously was on the other side, not working for Google.

[dannysullivan]

It's because when I was interviewed, what I said was all speaking officially for Google. You can attribute anything there to the company directly.

My blog post -- I wrote that on my own. No one from the Google communications team reviewed it, approved it, vetted it and so on. That's what I was trying to explain.

That doesn't mean, of course, people won't think it somehow reflects on Google or what I do there. It no doubt will. But that's not quite the same thing as something being an official company statement.

[Implicated]

> And that is avoiding the "standard news" syntax of published content via manipulative URLS. Namely, avoiding using /id/date/title-of-post (or something similar) and just using the rootdomain/title-of-post to make it rank higher and seem more important than it is. These pages are not an About page, or Privacy Page, or Terms of Service page. Its manipulation and a shady practice and companies should be penalized for it.

As someone who has spent years manipulating ranking I can tell you this has nothing to do with effecting ranking and is most likely about optics/human readability increasing CTR.

If you have data that shows urls like "/id/date/title-of-post" rank worse than "rootdomain/title-of-post" (which is nearly impossible to accurately measure due to the nature of how things are _really_ ranked) I'd argue that the rankings are related to the CTR rather than the URL structure.

I've explored and tested various URL structures across xxx,xxx domains with effectively equal quality content (using "manipulative" ranking methods and content generation tactics) and there was no measurable difference in ranking.

> These pages are not an About page, or Privacy Page, or Terms of Service page.

No judgement, but this seems like an odd stance to me. You seem to feel there is some sort of established standard in the structure of website pages/hierarchy, particularly one that should have punishments enforced against those who don't abide... Thankfully there is not, if there were then there would have to be some sort of agreement on these things - who is going to make those decisions? Who are those decisions going to be optimal for?

No, to all of that.

> As for addressing SEO concerns. There is a lot of frustration out there these days by small sites and companies trying to make their way and Google results can be hit or miss. Major publications like CNET, Forbes, CNN etc are purposefully creating content and cramming it with affiliate links to sell crap to the masses. When a major publication writes about something its not an expert in, one has to start to raise eyebrows and wonder... Its painfully obvious. They get away with it because they are huge brands and can rank for anything, so they are abusing their power.

> Sean Kaye says it best here: https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716935563075559630

What? No. The problem isn't the publishers - the problem is the search engine.

They built a facade. They _cannot_ manage getting relevant results from relevant sources where there is financial incentive to be ranked higher than someone else. It's patches and rules and filters and manual actions all the way up. They can say otherwise all they want and it's bull. They're just trying to get just good enough results for the vast majority of queries so they can keep selling ads - they lost the battle with SEO/spam a _long_ time ago.

You can't/shouldn't penalize the publishers for capitalizing on their "power". You call it an abuse of power - what are they abusing? What are the boundaries? Who set them? Again - expectations on your end, but where do they come from? If you're believing what you're reading at face value re: SEO and think everyone is "playing by the rules" you're in for a rude awakening. That "power" is given to them by Google and their algorithm(s) and search quality team. That "power" is _ultimately_ granted to them by their backlinks and nothing more - they're the billionaires of SEO. They wield the power granted to them by the search engines and they would be foolish not to capitalize on it.

On the other side - Google should have done something about all this years ago. But.. how?

> When a major publication writes about something its not an expert in, one has to start to raise eyebrows and wonder... Its painfully obvious.

You say they're not an expert - but who says you know what's what? And how do you even define what that topic is, let alone who the experts are? How do you assign "expert" status to a website in various topics (that also need to be defined)? Now, we need to do this for _every_ topic - it's not possible. Ok, so we'll choose the important topics and we'll manage who the "experts" are for those topics... This is what they've done. But even then, if you're trying to break into one of these protected topics as a non-behemoth - good luck.

Again, not the problem of the publishers that they can throw garbage content at valuable keywords and outrank the small players with much better content. That's Google's fault. It's _their_ job to determine those rankings and they're not good at it. Refer to my earlier statement about it all being a facade. They're just trying to be "ok" enough - there's no way to be _good_ at search-everything. Too much financial incentive to game the results - they'll never stay ahead of the curve without alienating too many "small" publishers in the process.

There's just no way that what they're saying publically is what they're actually doing or saying privately about how all this works. _Nobody_ is playing fair here.

[xpose2000]

> As someone who has spent years manipulating ranking I can tell you this has nothing to do with effecting ranking and is most likely about optics/human readability increasing CTR.

I do not agree. For example, CTR can be increased by modifying the design/text of a button. Or modifying the placement of the button, etc. CTR will not increase or decreased based on the structure of the URL. Hence the word CLICK in "CTR". Most of the time if the URL is listed somewhere, its truncated. Mobile phones trim it down to the domain name.

Plus it's just bad practice and will run into problems eventually. What happens when you have similar titles? Does this increase CTR or increase mistakes?

I still think its a shady practice and can't think of a single reputable major publication that would utilize that structure for Editorial. They should be penalized for a blatant attempt at manipulation. There is no other logical reason for it.

The verge: /features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results.

> If you have data that shows urls like "/id/date/title-of-post" rank worse than "rootdomain/title-of-post" (which is nearly impossible to accurately measure due to the nature of how things are _really_ ranked) I'd argue that the rankings are related to the CTR rather than the URL structure.

Of course I don't have the data, but one has to assume they are doing it for one simple reason. Manipulation in search. It's not for a better user experience. How often are you typing in URLs manually?

> No judgement, but this seems like an odd stance to me. You seem to feel there is some sort of established standard in the structure of website pages/hierarchy, particularly one that should have punishments enforced against those who don't abide... Thankfully there is not, if there were then there would have to be some sort of agreement on these things - who is going to make those decisions? Who are those decisions going to be optimal for?

Generally speaking, yes URL taxonomy has best practices. I don't believe someone is going to create an about us page with /id/date/about-us and thinks that is a good idea, but anything is possible.

[Implicated]

> Plus it's just bad practice and will run into problems eventually. What happens when you have similar titles? Does this increase CTR or increase mistakes?

In support of your point of "manipulation" - does it matter? They don't care about the actual content - they just need you to click so they get their ad views. It doesn't matter if there's more than one entry in the database with the same slug - or what content is even there.

> I still think its a shady practice and can't think of a single reputable major publication that would utilize that structure for Editorial. They should be penalized for a blatant attempt at manipulation. There is no other logical reason for it.

I agree that it's non-standard and that they're doing it for a reason not in the best interest of the internet as whole. But, shady? Eh - by the same logic (in my mind) you'd have to call the person who named their business AAA Lockpicking shady because they took advantage of a "standard" way that directories work to get their name above others.

> one has to assume they are doing it for one simple reason. Manipulation in search. It's not for a better user experience.

Ok, so every web service with a presence on search engines is manipulative and should be punished if they do anything that's not in the best interest of the user experience? (I understand this is pedantic, but from the perspective of the search engine - who draws the lines about what is and isn't acceptable, or seen as manipulation?)

I agree with what you're saying in theory, but I'm not sure I can get on board with penalizing any of these publishers for doing what is within their power to improve their position. Like... at some point, as public companies, you could argue that they're obligated to capitalize, no?

We deal with "manipulative" marketing all day, every day. We're drowning in real manipulation where massive corporations are employing people with education and experience to help them manipulate us as much as possible. I have a hard time putting "optimal" url structure in that bucket.

Google/MS/etc should, instead, draw some real lines and enforce their existing and extended policies in a consistent and transparent way. That's the solution here - not pitchforks for those who are taking advantage of what works.

> Generally speaking, yes URL taxonomy has best practices. I don't believe someone is going to create an about us page with /id/date/about-us and thinks that is a good idea, but anything is possible.

For what it's worth - in my testing/experience, dates and _very short_ 'category'/'topic' slugs improved rankings compared to /keyword-only. ie: /shoe-reviews/20231027/blue-shoes proved optimal over /blue-shoes. (Without the dates was equivalent to keyword-only.)

I share your frustration - I just don't see it from your perspective that the publishers should be punished. They're playing by the rules. The rules are terrible and that's not an accident. Google doesn't want specific guidelines that can be/are enforced - they don't want search to be a meritocracy, no matter what they say. They've had plenty of time to make it that and they've gone the complete opposite direction. It's not the publishers that are to blame for taking advantage of the tools and resources available to them to legally improve themselves.