[afavour]

IMO it does. It’s reflective of these news organizations not caring about their brand reputations and instead just looking at the $$$.

Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.

There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.

[azemetre]

Doesn't Google also punish small sites that do similar things? Like if I made a site that was sincere as an individual where I review kitchen utensils where I add affiliate links I'd be penalized, but the larger established domains are allowed to do the same thing without Google punishing them?

[greg_V]

Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.

[SoftTalker]

Online reviews are completely gamed IMO. My wife still looks at them, talks about the "highly rated" stuff she finds, and I tell her it's all fake she doesn't believe it.

[rightbyte]

I have been telling my mum the same thing and she don't listen. Googling for reviews used to work very well to like 3-10 years ago. I don't speak English nativly, and I suspect that it worked better in my native tongue for way longer then English. It is like it takes time for it to sink in for people, when they are trusting a process or institution.

I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.

I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...

*123 I just don't wanted to SEO help them.

[magic-michael]

Not all of those sites were innocent of doing it the correct way.

[azemetre]

Maybe not, but Google, with its monopoly, should play fair and not pick favorites because it increases their ad dollars bought.

[magic-michael]

How do you now they are completely separate? Or that there is no oversight?

Answer: You don't know. You're just speculating.