Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
(larslofgren.com)646 points by greg_V 10 months ago
646 points by greg_V 10 months ago
It's really frustrating. I currently want to buy a mattress and a refrigerator. The results for those are so awful as to be useless.
A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search through your photos using filters.
The same kinds of things are happening on the web which already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).
In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some prints, harvest your data, or something.
I would like any apps that have to do with collections of files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.
> A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
You just described what I missed about the older software. Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card format, making it a lot less usable.
Deterministic software puts the user in control of the product. Nondeterministic algos put the products in control of the user. Naturally companies want the latter and under guises of the ‘now better’ give the user worse and charge them more. A new generation isn’t even aware they’re being fleeced because they don’t have anything to compare with. And the frog boils slowly…
I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren’t just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still works, but that’s about it unless I go to big designer brands where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately Ikea didn’t have any shelves that I liked, which is why I build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware store.
It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.
I was looking for a product recently. I wanted to buy from a UK business.
I found countless Web stores pretending to be UK businesses complete with founder stories and convincing copy... All turning out to be Chinese fronts.
They know the tide is against them and see starting to employ some shady tactics to get sales.
At the same time the big money in China is buying westernised historic brands to trade through.
I'm not anti-China for goods and services, but I am against the deceptive practices I've been seeing.
> they aren’t just reselling stuff from China
At this point everything you buy is from China in some way or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn’t exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with American made things that I almost prefer items made elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.
Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time. For refrigerators, you can look at consumer reports and wirecutter--and you can reasonably do some evaluation at your local big box appliance store. I wouldn't buy based on a random web search though.
> Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time.
Yes. Refrigerators, at least, are made by a relatively small number of companies with established brands. They have EnergyStar ratings, and there's some objective evaluation.
For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam. Mattresses actually cost about US$50 to US$80 in bulk. Search Alibaba. Almost all consumer-facing companies are resellers. Markups are huge. Essentially all the mattress review sites are paid promotions.
Wirecutter's gone downhill after the NYT purchase as well. The Spruce seems somewhat better (but is also part of a huge web site family, so caveat emptor)
Either you do deep research, or you find a trusted friend to advise you. The Internet is largely useless at this point.
It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense, Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich (or at least price-insensitive) readers.
It's easy, browse to GE on big box hardware website. Select the model you want. Avoid everything else.
if there is a trial period better get cheapest and highly reviewed mattress. Even if it's a scam you get to know it within x days and can return it.
I try to buy natural materials like latex or cotton - which cannot and are not mass produced (difficult to roll and transport from across the world)
Try visiting a hotel that uses them, for reference.
If I want to buy something like that I set an alert on slickdeals.net Like everything else it used to be better years ago, but there are still some genuine great deals and lots of insight if you’re willing to sift through the comments.
When I was looking for a fridge a year or so ago I heard that Samsung was trying to fix their bad appliance rep and quality of parts had gone up, but I went with a different brand.
There’s been an issue the last few years of fiberglass escaping through the cover on memory foam mattresses. If I was mattress shopping I’d probably still get foam, but look for one without fiberglass or find some kind of allergy cover to at least contain it.
The only signal I use is warranty. So I tend to go to Costco, and avoid Samsung.
It's not a bad idea to pair that with lawsuits related to such warranties.
Costco and Samsung are big enough that you can achieve reasonable signal.
When your local car dealer offers you a full drivetrain warranty though (assuming it's a full warranty and not one of the other ways people are often fleeced), will they honor it when the lemon they sold you breaks the first time? the 2nd? the 3rd? Will they, instead, note that most people buying that car don't have much money (or, if you used any form of dealer financing, know for a fact you don't have much money) and require you to retain a lawyer and sue them to recover any damages?
Samsung appliances are awful. I'd rather do my own dishes or put my food in a cooler.
I got a mattress last year using Consumer Reports rec for most the mattress with the least synthetic chemicals. I am not going to say its name lest it look like I am shilling for them. I will say, it has been great.
Having bought a mattress recently, it might be worth going to a mattress store. The sales process sucks, but if you want to find a mattress you like, it's hard to beat actually laying down on one.
It also can help you identify the kind you like (coil, latex, etc) and composition you like (layer style and thickness).
Then you just search for those two things online.
That's how I found an amazing natural latex cooling mattress online.
And the best part is that most online mattress retailers have 90 day try out periods. We didn't like our first one, and instead of having us ship it back they told us to donate it and sent us the next to try. So now we have a really nice spare bedroom mattress as well as the perfect mattress in our bedroom.
I want to add in case people think this is strictly a Google thing. DDG is equally terrible at finding this kind of thing. I didn't realize until I read this thread that I was suffering this same kind of issue. Its so painful trying to find on the internet.
It’s the same for pretty much any product category now. Affiliate marketing and Google using its monopoly to prioritize ads over search results has basically ruined search. It’s in their best interest to lower the quality of results because the ads get more useful comparatively.
Gmail is next I predict. They have a monopoly over consumer email, so it’s revenue growth just waiting to be unlocked when times get tough. A higher percentage of your inbox is going to become paid Gmail ads and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it. Nobody wants to go to the hassle of changing their email address (the amount of boomers still on Yahoo mail is staggering).
Fantastic site. There's a Mattress Selector which seems just grand [1] Will definitely be using this next time I'm in the market.
May I ask why you use search engine for buying something like a mattress or refrigerator? I dont mean to sound that as an insult. I'm genuinely curious. I or anyone I know of will just go to a nearby store and checkout these items to buy. For things like these one would already know who sells these items, even online. So why not directly checkout those stores, either online or physical?
>The same thing happens every 3-5 years. [...] Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content.
What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".
I get flashbacks to the exodus of Digg, when the admins basically said "Look, we get a lot of junk content and a lot of common source content so we are going to start fast tracking the common source content from trusted providers"
We all know how that went over.
And then the exodus ruined Reddit. Eternal September dominoes.
“The same thing happens every 3-5 years.”
This is so true. I remember when Demand Media was crushing it on Google in the early 2010s. Seem like they were everywhere, and then one day they weren’t.
Investopedia is another one. Same for bankrate.com Other ones included wikihow and genius.com
Sure, people can submit low-grade garbage or vandalize pages, but that doesn't mean the site doesn't also have useful content, like: https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-Electronics
No it isn't, not in the moderated sections with lots of viewers: https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-Electronics
Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...
Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate articles for every minute detail of a product announcement (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success" caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of taking advantage of that fact.
Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.
It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.
>It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname.
That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes. John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of embarrassing the security company that had invested in the right to use his name.
Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their bad products.
For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0].
Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC.
>I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association
The writers, editors and other business partners who built their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good reputation are probably very not OK with it
The question was whether to name it after a person or not. Those people would be equally upset if it was named Bisclock, so them being upset at the current site is not relevant to the naming discussion.
For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?
Jardine is still a name in trading, at least in the west, not China, where they are not fondly remembered for their 19th-century "import activities".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jardine_Matheson_%2.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardines_(company)
If they really care about it they can just change their name though.
Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays. Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business, that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next thing to flip for a couple bucks.
I was talking to a friend about this recently.
I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months. But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc Martens.
My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My expectations based on the brand are not matching with reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.
From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders will have made significant bank from the destruction of that brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.
Sure but that seems to have been predictable from:
- 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers
- 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for £300m. Hired former brand president of Vans as CEO.
- 2019: declining quality reported for previous years
- 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for £3.7 billion.
> From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an individual, but for society at large it's a significant cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather, also transport), human time lost in production and sales...
Its not late state capitalism. Its hidden inflation. The market for actual high quality boots is much smaller than you are thinking. Including your own desire. The reality is doc martins are selling for <$180 max, basically mid-high sneaker (non collectable) territory. Actual quality boots like the doc martins of the 80's probably cost over $1000 dollars now. Are you willing to pay over $1000 for boots? Because that is what quality boots cost now.
Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion before they totally disappear. It was probably the only choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some missteps along the way where they may have been able to keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they missed it.
Project Farm on youtube does a lot of comparison videos between a bunch of brands of the same type of tool. He's sometimes able to snag an antique craftsman (before Sears sold it to china) and includes it in his tests. It's always amazing how much better US made craftsman tools are compared to anything currently made in china (including the current version of craftsman).
I think that the trick is to try to find new and upcoming brands that have a reputation for quality, and learn what high quality looks like so that you can confirm personally that the product is good.
This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable young people tend to do it but I certainly don’t blame anyone who decides that it isn’t worth the effort.
fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full of ads. scales really well too
Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven Forbes).
But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.
Well what did you expect them to do? Magazine subscriptions fell off a cliff as the Internet matured and no one wants to pay for online content.
I noticed recently actually seeing "Consumer Reports Best Buy" listed in ad copy for some products.
For decades they were extremely assertive about not licensing that sort of stuff out, to the point where advertisers used to say "A leading consumer magazine" if they wanted to hint about that.
I don't understand you, the term "Consumer Reports Best Buy" has been in use since at least 2004, which implies CR permitted the term to be used.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Not to become villains and scammers, obviously. That's the bare minimum of what you should not become no matter how bad your business is going.
Maximizing engagement is antithetical to rational discourse.
Apropos of nothing: NYT's subscriptions transistioned from ~0.5m print to 10m digital. (More or less.)
Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Also discussed on HN earlier
Someone once described the state of mobile gaming on Android like this. Games that are good make less money. Games that are just good enough to get you to open them but are also just shitty enough that when you hit an ad in-game, you click on it and leave, make more money.
Google team has long given up its user’s needs for incremental revenue goals. See the 10 ads that come before any result
Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site, weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page, percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the session, etc it all gets gamed.
Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?
> Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO
Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space means that everyone sets their sight on the same target. Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered, reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".
The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms Google uses to determine search rankings must always be a moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated and constantly curated by people. Any attempt to fully automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by automating the production of content that hits just the right buttons while still being royally useless to actual visitors.
I think today we can use LLMs to decide what websites are shit. The wheel is turning. SEO artists will have to provide actually useful, non-spammy content. If Google doesn't do it, some uBlock like service will implement it on user side. Or we'll just use chatGPT with search and not see the cesspool at all. You can edit its system prompt to avoid shit in search results.
Your comment assumes both that current LLMs can scale to replace Google which seems unlikely from. both a business and compute perspective.
And if they do, you'll get maybe a decade out of them before they succumb to the same problems as Google have.
Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.
Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.
> Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful
This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect / harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air fryers, mattresses, etc.
It has to do with these old brands exploiting domain authority, plus buying tons of backlinks. Investopedia.com is another example of this. Google assigns too much weight to authority domains. Google doesn't actually penalize paid backlinks for old domains, I think.
Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.
google search result can be shit and they will still make tons of money from 3rd party/publisher ads and youtube, cloud, gmail, atc.
One of the best things about Kagi search (https://kagi.com) is you can ban domains from search results. Forbes was one of the first I entered!
You can do a similar thing for Google with the uBlackList extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
This should come preconfigured with pinterest and quora blacklisted.
Haha :-)
I always feel bad if I click on any of those sites.
Indeed, but AFAIK you can't do the opposite (make results from certain sites show up higher in the results), which you can do with Kagi.
Even without having Forbes explicitly blocked or downranked, their article shows up well below the fold on Kagi: https://kagi.com/search?q=best+pet+insurance&r=us&sh=ac3i1h1... (shared link, you don't need your own subscription for this preview)
Their "collapse listicles" setting is probably one of the best features when trying to search for products, they squeeze all the listicles together in their own list (usually just below the fold). If you want them, they're there, and if you don't, they take up hardly any space.
Kagi boosters:Google articles::SEO spam:Google searches
An aside about Forbes: I used to be subscribed to a few of their newsletters. About two years ago, I would notice that nearly all the newletter content would say something along the lines of "as reported by The Information" and I realized that a huge portion (>60%) of the newsletter content was just summarizations or rephrasing of articles from The Information. Which, I mean, great that you're citing your sources, but are you really providing a service here?
I just read The Information, now.
There are 2-3 very detailed articles on how only a few media companies that own top few hundred domains have spammed SEO and hijacked top spots in search results. I made a list of block-able domains (dot dash meredith sites only). I have roughly explained how I searched these domains. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6573b27441d99a0a0c792431...
Just copy paste this list to UBlacklist (or other tool). Need to sit down and search and add more sites including forbes someday.
Meta comment: I consider myself pretty adept at finding things people don't want to be found in securities filings, registration records, et cetera. The author is uniquely competent at this as well.
Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access. You have to pick a base to sell to. Selling to two different bases at once (advertisers/seo and actual users) means both resent you and neither respect you.
When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.
Right! Imagine how big they'd be if they hadn't given up on microtransactions in the 90s. I'd guess not trying to be broken up by the DOJ.
We'll never know because nobody tried. The internet is too broken now to bother searching. For a group of people that claim to love empirical analysis people on this site sure do love writing off anything but the current state of affairs.
I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on their CRM).
I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.
One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
> One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.
When online directories were still relevant, this issue was already a common occurrence. For example, DMOZ, and the number of spammy directories that existed for link building purposes.
It's not just Forbes that is using this strategy. Many traditional media sites, including CNN and USA Today are running the same type of content. And of course they'll not report on this issue, which might just well be why Google is doing this, a kind of kickback for traditional media.
The dirty secret is those are also run by Marketplace, it’s the same team under the hood once you get past the handful of people dedicated to each brand.
The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of the work.
When I am using Chrome on the phone to read the Google Discover news feed I am often horrified how shitty the experience is. Popups, cookie warnings, almost no article is visible initially, and some of them actively make it hard to scroll to the text. It looks like there is no use friendly news site left in Google's feed. I prefer LLM slop, thank you very much. The only attractive proposition is the fresh and targeted feed. Probably Google is not allowed to offer a reading mode that hides the cruft.
Try Brave on iOS. It is a much better experience than Chrome ( Maybe because Brave comes with Ad blocker installed, but not 100% sure )
"So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a fraction of one.
When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but then major travel agency, we'd pay £10 or more to Google for a single click sometimes. (Full story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
if they are doing affiliate marketing than it's realistic
Is this an US thing? This has to be an US thing, right? How come I've literally never seen this in the EU?
I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but never from these brands.
Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time. Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on duckduckgo.
For me in the UK "best pet insurance" is squatted by The Telegraph and "best cbd gummies" has Forbes top and The Independent second.
I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a revenue generator.
The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google "taking away" a revenue stream.
About 10th in the UK with that search, so probably this isn't across every geography.
Happens in India as well. Forbes is #1 for "best pet insurance"
To your point, my theory is that all their other tech efforts - that are very often sunset'ed in a couple+ years - are merely a smokescreen of the ad monopoly. Worst case, if they have to: "Tech is hard and competitive. Look at how many other businesses we started and were unable to be successful at. Search + ads is one click away from slipping away from us. We're not a monopoly. We're alone and very scared for our future..."
BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.
You don’t need an insider for you know where to just buy the link. They hang their shingle out on at least one link buying marketplace.
I suspect that's how geeksforgeeks got so dominant with their student written drivel.
This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago, I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.
You can block Forbes in Kagi search, but not in Google.
What's the issue with all these websites? Is it simply that you have a distaste for affiliate sites in general?
It’s worth noting that Lars Lofgren’s own affiliate site (the person that wrote this article), hradvice.com, was impacted by a Google update in August, so there might be some personal bias and motive here.
But I’m curious—what exactly are the criticisms you have towards platforms like NerdWallet and Bankrate? Would love to better understand.
Reading this comment just above your comment is funny:
Cory Doctorow article nails it https://doctorow.medium.com/the-specific-process-by-which-go...
It is Google "do no evil" to blame.
Great Article it's been pretty sad with google for a while, poisoned ad networks thanks for sharing.. I was wondering if you could give your input about nature.com as well they seem to post on hackernews all the time seems like a ranking game as well. cheers
Just start browsing search results from the second page.
So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.
Is it unfair though?
While there’s definitely optimization for search, it doesn’t appear to be purely about that. A lot of the content, particularly on Forbes Advisor and Forbes Health, seems user-driven and genuinely helpful. If you spend some time exploring those areas, you’ll notice well-researched, in-depth guides aimed at offering practical advice.
Just some quick research and Google searching:
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/financial-eme....
https://www.forbes.com/health/nutrition/diet/healthy-life-ex....
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/digital-wallets-payme...
I just did the “best pet insurance” search and once reputable sites came up.
- US News and World Reports
- CBS News
- Forbes
- Motley Fool
The entire web is a shit show.
In the past I have wondered why Hacker News had so many articles from Forbes. Now I know.
And this from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871410
[Edit, add link to article about Forbes and Hacker News]
This is not that different from this guy who posted how he 'stole' CEO traffic from his competitor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433856
And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their tool:
https://www.partitionwizard.com/news_en_sitemap.xml
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic_en_sitemap.xm...
All these 'articles' pollute search engines.
Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation, but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.
But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.
To be fair, Google HAS shown "signs" of cracking down on this; but they haven't actually done it in any useful capacity yet.
They call it "Site reputation abuse". https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
I’ve worked here a while. He’s a bit aggressive about it but a lot of what he says is on point.
The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.
It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.
A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.
We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.
It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.
All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.
That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
Thank you for the inside view.
It is interesting that there's a huge rush to grow; the bigger and lower quality you get, the more incentive Google has to change the algorithm. The business could completely evaporate overnight.
This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It should make the WSJ though.
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
> If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
> It isn't exactly news, though.
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
> This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue.
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
Big companies have been owned by shareholders for hundreds of years. Most companies being plundered right now were created by selling shares to initial investors. These shareholders held a sense of responsibility towards customers, towards employees and towards their community, which made the companies long term successful.
Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned to think long term.
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
> most of us have simply stopped using Google
Citation needed
Google has lost a small amount of market share, but nothing too significant to warrant "most of us have simply stopped using Google": https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-shar....
Is there a way I can blacklist Forbes from my google search results?
> As for oversight, Forbes only has 2 board seats. And really it only has one.
It doesn't matter though. They have permission to use the name and domain, Forbes clearly knows what they are doing and why. If it wouldn't be ok with them, they'd revoke the permission (I'm not sure, but I assume they can, right?) So, yes, you can claim there is an oversight. If anything, Google's definition is a bit clunky, since it doesn't grasp the essence of the problem. But it also shouldn't matter, since it should be pretty obvious there is a problem indeed.
Now, why Google is ok with that (or didn't notice that) is another and very valid question. I mean, great, Forbes can host whatever bullshit they see fit, but then it would be appropriate for the whole domain to never appear on the first page of Google. Or second. Or tenth.
But then again, it doesn't seem like Google really tries to battle other, lesser doorways and LLM-generated content. And it's easy to see why.
I need the author to tell me again who runs Forbes Marketplace. I assume it's Forbes. It's not?
The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties, RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or authoritative for a given niche.
Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?
Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.
1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-si...