[initplus]

They’ve been de-ranked because their website hits all the “SEO optimized” red flags that Google are now downranking for.

Pages like “Outlook vs Tuta Mail” “Gmail vs Tuta mail”, “Yahoo vs Tuta Mail”. All with the same rephrased taking points about their product. Then each of those talking points has its own dedicated page, just saying the same thing over and over again.

Want a better rank? Remove all this SEO crap, leave up the parts customers actually want.

[rchaud]

Zapier, LucidChart and about a million other SaaS companies do this as well, because it's something people would search for. There's nothing in the Google blog that suggests they're turning the screws of SEO-optimized content.

https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-mar...

[initplus]

Explicitly mentioned on that blogpost:

“…or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”

The numerous “Tuta vs …” that all reword the same information clearly meet the “designed for search engines instead of people” standard imo.

[rchaud]

How is that not designed for people? Don't you think people are searching for comparisons between two different products?

Here's Zapier for instance, comparing their tool to a Microsoft substitute:

https://zapier.com/l/microsoft-power-automate-vs-zapier

[initplus]

People are searching for comparisons, but these pages have been designed to seem highly relevant to the search engine. Not to be highly useful for readers. That page from Zapier is another example of the same issue. When Google rolls out their new ranking algorithm to zapier.com, I'd expect it will also be de-ranked.

The words "Power Automate" only appear 3x in the page. The title, subtitle, and a link to the same page. Nothing else on the page is relevant to "Power Automate", it's just the same marketing copy from the rest of their website. As a user looking for actual details on how the products capabilities compare to Power Automate this page is useless to me.

Google have been completely transparent about this. They have explained exactly what kinds of pages would be de-ranked under the latest changes.

[amelius]

So this means that anyone can now downrank pages by publishing "X vs Y" webpages?

[initplus]

You can downrank your own pages and website by hosting low quality SEO focused content. Spammy content written by others, on their own domain, doesn’t affect your ranking.