Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites(retrododo.com) |
Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites(retrododo.com) |
> Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.
> Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.
Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people's sites for 7 straight months now.
You can read about that here,
https://www.seroundtable.com/no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-r...
and also this tweet:
https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1775495481604358363
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This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the "Helpful Content Update") that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and/or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.
From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.
I actually subscribe to RetroDodo on Youtube and noticed that I don't view their content anymore. This has less to do with any "algorithm" but rather the fact that their "voice" seems to have changed (both figuratively and literally... a lot of their videos have a new "host" altogether) and that they're directing more energy at different things (books, discussions about the industry, more gimmicky videos, etc) that aren't giving them the same return.
The founder used to post about gaming-related "SEO plays" (some wikipedia for Pokemon or something if I remember correctly?) on his personal YouTube channel. With this in mind, I get the feeling that SEO has become more of a focus than what brought in his audience in the first place.
On the other hand, more and more these days I see articles & videos that I (possibly unfairly) summarize as "My content deserves to be prioritized by 'the algorithm' and $BIG_CORP is against me".
I'm not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don't understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them. To me it seems more like building your brand organically, publishing via "open" platforms (and yes, I'm aware that's getting harder and harder) and encouraging your supporters to interact with you on platforms you control would be much more sustainable than expecting 'the algorithm(s)' will provide you with your expected growth.
I don't even use google, so if I were interested in getting "the best arcade cabinet" as one of the examples the author used - I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use, which are the places I would expect to hear about Retro Dodo
In my mind, this is actually the problem. Over the past 15 years, the "web" has become increasingly platformized, and it's getting more platformized every year.
The web is, for all intents and purposes, at the control and direction of Google, Meta, YouTube and a few other players.
When you do finally get into the "independent web", it made up Forbes, Tom's Guide or CNET. 16 companies own the vast majority of the web that we all use: https://detailed.com/google-control/
While I agree it's harmful to the web to be essentially under control of a very small number of mega corporations, even when you actively avoid them like I did in my nebula example, it's not clear what the solution to content discovery is (and of course, google et al don't really stop you from consuming content you already know about which is my problem with the original article)
How long have you been using the internet for? You don't have to be a content creator to have noticed the huge shift in the past decade, that is basically killing the internet.
Google's algorithm played a huge,role in that, it has become nearly impossible to find independent websites, and they don't even bother giving you more than a couple pages of search results. There is no possibility of the "organic growth" you talk about outside of social media platforms. And then the flood of AI-generated content nailed that coffin.
I said this in a child comment - but to put it a different way - Imagine google didn't exist, how would you go about discovering content? When I first got on the internet there used to be directories, which was literally just a list of links sorted by topic. Although there was no "algorithm" I imagine (based on my own usage) that items listed closer to the top were more often clicked and thus grew faster than items lower on the list.
In fact, even before the internet, this phenomenon existed in the Yellow Pages which is why you have things like "aaa local plumbers" so they'd appear before their competitors.
Maybe its because Google started doing this with Eric Schmid saying "Brands is how you solve 'the mess'" and killing smaller sites and sources to prioritize big brands and it never changed since then...
The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine.
With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.
Have you tried kagi?
Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?
> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
Certainly agree with this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia :
> In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%.
Pretty incredible market shares.
I know that I added them to my personal filter list when I found them providing mis-info or just click-farming off of unannounced products.
>And to rub salt into the wound, it was discovered that Google is paying some media companies “five figures” to use their AI to automatically scrape content from other publishers’ work (who have paid expert humans to produce) and publish it as news twice a day on their websites.
For every one thing you hear about, there are nine you don't. Apparently, the difference in quality is about what Kagi is not doing.
The folks here in the comments are missing the forest for the trees here, sure algo tweaks reshuffle winners and losers but there's almost no results that aren't Google's own scraped content and ad spots. No amount of "make better content" can push you above the fold.
Articles are not interesting to me at large, 99.9% of the time, there is no comments sections to correct them or engage and challenge authors or other readers, seems like owners so not care about what their audience has to say. They only care about views. There is no community at the site, so they are at mercy of a search engine without spending a dime on advertising.
There is only room for a few "best top 10 Pokemon ROM hacks" articles... It was good when it last, but all comes to an end...
i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author).
if this is not ok, then i'll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a good reason to not have it posted, you may contact me by email (see profile))
the comment:
I think this is a feature, not a bug. The economic precariousness that the author describes is what makes the opinions of small outfits like his suspect. It's just too easy for companies to influence them with special treatment or outright payments. Reddit, for all of its faults, is hard to bribe. That is by design. We built mechanisms to intentionally cultivate diverse and redundant communities. Even if you try to control the mods of some particular subreddit, you are probably just shifting where the definitive/highly ranked conversations on a topic end up happening.
The author seems to decry Reddit as "not expert", but I think what its ascent has proven is the collective opinion of disinterested amateurs is often the best available.
my response:
that implies that every independent content producer is corrupt and only caters to the highest bidder.
how does reddit help here? each community is independent even on reddit. there are good and bad ones. a small community on reddit would be just as susceptible to manipulation as would a small community of the same size on an independent site.
and reddit is hard to bribe? well, maybe in specific cases, but reddit needs to cater to its advertisers just as well.
reddit, youtube and any other large site will only be able to represent the majority views because they can't cater to minorities that conflict with those views. advertisers won't have it.
an independent site can be completely onesided and be under the influence of some financial interest. or it can remain independent and actually represent the interests of its members in a way that reddit et al. can not.
It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.
15 results of book stores (including the publisher they released on), reviews, other news sites, all covering their book, and then near bottom, their own page on the book. That doesn't seem off really, their product is still reachable. Whether they should be considered the authority, or the store selling it should be, is up for debate.
2023 and 2024 has demonstrated handily that the entire web is at risk if we trust large corporations with everything.
If you hitch your wagon to the google bus, and the bus crashes, you don't have much recourse.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240320154449/https://www.racke...
On a deeper note: Search is challenged. With the advent of first niche communities and now LLMs the traditional idea behind search engines is a left over from the 00s. Google need to earn by ads.
Retro Dodo probably need to focus on a niche community and retention over organic traffic like so many other small / indie shops.
Personally I use Kagi who are also in the business of disrupting them selves using LLMs - at least they have a business model that absorbs it.
Really serious HTML/CSS errors could get in the way of users and search bots from viewing and understanding a page though. For example, broken HTML might lead to broken links, broken heading tags, broken meta tags and broken images, which could have some impact on ranking.
So Checkbot isn't saying you can't rank well if you fail HTML validation (and it's very, very unlikely to be the issue in the article), but it's probably a good idea to fix it. It's really up to you to look at the errors found and decide if it's worth prioritising a fix, like you would with any other linting tool.
I cite Discord because it is text-first compared to Twitch. As an elder millennial, I find myself using Discord to interact with niche communities. For example, I care about a specific synthesizer emulation project. They have a discord server where we can discuss feature releases or music in general. Twenty years ago this community would be its own forum or a thread on a larger forum. https://dsp56300.wordpress.com
Lastly, if discoverability is monopolized by one player, then why and how did TikTok explode in the last five years? It is not the front page of the internet for all, but it is for certain age groups.
The real valuable content created by regular people is being obfuscated by useless AI white noise and nonsense content mill shit from giant corporations.
Things just keep getting worse and worse for media.
But why is every link on their website purple like I’ve already read it? Oh because their brand is purple.
Really sucks as a reader.
Also people who keep insisting on building solely and relying exclusively on SEO do not run a business but a franchise where the franchisor is Google and the franchisee’s conditions are reviewed and changed at moments notice with no recourse
from my perspective the "issue" is that none of the competitors get traction. why would they? you either have to pay or change your habits.
Regardless, DMA, Gdpr, and friends will slowly level the playing field.
It got lucky. It caught on because the content produced was tightly cherry picked to show the best of best. And from another country. The same would happen if a Japanese app was translated to English and had Japanese content.
However people saw this and jumped on the bandwagon. Younger audiences who were too young for Discord nor that type of person.
There's nothing special to it. It's just as manipulative as any other social app. Pushing all of that aside, still doesn't hook.
Discord's UX is so intense it leaves you dazzled which neglects the focus for older audiences.
They saw the niche of IRC and that it being a fossil pit. The established old-hat gamer Vent/Mumble/TeamSpeak user and the younger generation. Throw some edgy icons and make folk feel that they have power with a "server" of their own, apply "invites" to make you feel special your specially included in the same as every other guild and you have a platform for the younger.
Now with loot boxes, human psyche exploitation as any game company does; Blizzard and Overwatch for example.
Matrix/Signal are all too sterile. Telegram is a muck pit and forums cost money. Prone to rotting and require expertise. IRC is an idle fest most times of the day outside of community channels.
Join EFNet and join a random channel with users outside of LinuxHax0rs and it's a ghost town.
It's me that still feels left out. Im 35, Discord doesn't fit the bill. I don't game anymore so mumble / vent don't work out. IRC as above - and I know how it used to be, I was using IRC at 13. Very exciting seeing klines and network splits, bot wars. But still very nerdy and dull without creativity and imagination.
MSN Messenger/Y!M were my jam and there's been nothing like it since. Skype had it but sold out. Facebook is just a data hole and Instagram, eh, it has zero interest to me. I have no interest in seeing some family and their kids or someone posing in front of some statue.
And I can't even view YouTube without being forced to watch ads or forking out for a subscription for "premium", when theres nothing premium about that subscription.
And that sums up the state of the internet.
I just want a client where I can play silly games like a TokyBoom or a sketch pad where you can draw as a group. Voice chat without having to configure microphone settings nine times, leave a chatroom and rejoin without having to need an invite nor losing all chat. I'd pay for that.
/vent I guess so I'm here on HN hanging out as an unix engineer with developers and programmers which are just as edgy as each other. Because some cloud isn't as great as that cloud and PHP isn't Python and that we all should be using some new javascript framework weekly.
Reddit has gone to shit, digg is no more and Tumblr was too edgy for it's time. I think its time for real life. Oh wait.. I don't exactly fit in with the 40's folk who are out at dinners or clubbing. The younger crowds are all too kept in their clicks of university. Hobby groups are hobby groups and my generation where the hell are you!? With family and kids on Instagram...
I also agree with you on TikTok's value proposition – it is not unique – but like the previous networks before it, it has critical mass. That is it. It doesn't mean it will stay on top for a decade, but its heavy state influence (read funding) helped it stay afloat while it accrued users. And its existence and proliferation help enforce that - at least in the US - there is an open market for new platforms to gain mass popularity.
I would take AIM or Apple iChat or a static forum over discord, but the internet changed. I finally understand why folks 20-30 years older than me prefer less change. Adapting is hard.
A tiny fraction of internet users will bother with alternate means of finding websites apart from ads, Google search, or sponsorships.
I'm all in for privacy - and actively dislike many of Google/YouTube moves (which seem intentional part of plan and not so much accidental or with technical reasons) - e.g.:
YouTube doesn't allow parents to limit their young kids to only whitelisted channels ...
Even worse, if you block YouTube.com domain - kid can't sign into school account (Google classroom stuff) because signing into anything Google actually goes through something like accounts.youtube.com.
And yet after 20th or 30th time when I was not finding things though DDG and manually typing "google.com" to do a search there (browser and other android search boxes were defaulting to DDG).
I just switched default browser and search engine back to Google :(