Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 71 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
Tip: Refine Your TikTok Feed
Analysis: The Big Deal About the HouseFresh Post
Tip: Refine Your TikTok Feed (FYP)
If something pops up in your TikTok feed you don’t like, you can swipe right past it. This will give the app’s algorithm a nudge that you weren’t a fan of that content.
But what if you want to give an even stronger indication that you didn’t like the content, and want to see less like it in your feed?
Simply “long tap” on your screen until the menu below pops up. The video will keep playing, but you can tap “💔 Not interested” and the feed will move onto the next video.
You can also tap the “More >” option to hide all videos from that particular user or sound.
Happy doom-scrolling!
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: The Big Deal About the HouseFresh Post
Unless you live under a virtual rock – or don’t pay much attention to SEO – you’ll have seen this post from HouseFresh floating around the internet.
It sparked a firestorm last week not only for the content in the post itself, but also the aftermath of its publication. (You should read it if you have 15 or 20 minutes.)
I would like to talk about why this is such a big deal and what it might mean for publishers going forward.
The premise of the article is that HouseFresh is an independent site – that is, not backed by investors, nor a larger publisher like the NY Times (see: WireCutter) – creating great content that adheres to Google’s oft-touted E-E-A-T standards.
So what’s the problem? That same quality content is being pushed down the Google SERP by well-funded giants like Popular Science, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed and Forbes.
HouseFresh specializes in product reviews on air purifiers, dehumidifiers and sensors. (Those are the three main sections under the review dropdown in the site header.)
Unfortunately, reviews for these kind of products, which they test in their home, are being outranked by generalized reviews that are more concerned with touting high-affiliate-margin products (more on that below) than actually telling consumers the best option for their homes.
That begs the question: Since when are the aforementioned Big-Brand Publishers experts in air purifiers for pet owners? (Again, check out the full post for more context.)
I had never read nor heard of HouseFresh before everything hit the fan last week, but a quick look around the site makes it clear that real people spend a lot of time not only writing reviews, but testing the products that inform those reviews.
The HouseFresh post convincingly presents strong arguments – if not evidence – as to how larger, older publications couldn’t possibly be putting in the same time and effort. Even so, the big boys are all over the top of search results while HouseFresh and its ilk garner less and less traffic all the time.
So why are websites that are traditionally known for ranking music albums, posting cat memes and giving financial advice, respectively, suddenly going after topics that are about as on-brand as a hot dog stand at a vegan festival?
You probably already know: money. By peddling products in these categories, the larger publishers can suck traffic away from the little guys and earn a commission on affiliate links.
Danny Sullivan – @searchliason on Twitter/X – is Google’s, well, search liaison. (He used to write about SEO before Google snatched him up years ago.) He’s thoughtful and genuine about responding to complaints and strategic SEO questions.
When one of the authors of the HouseFresh post – Gisele Navarro – shared a thread on X and tagged Sullivan, he responded thoughtfully, as he often does.
He’s also transparent about the fact that Google isn’t perfect.
The issue, however, isn’t that Google’s search liaison empathizes with small publishers. The issue is that they have a “man on the inside” and this still keeps happening.
The Big Boys are getting the “benefit of the doubt,” as HouseFresh points out, no matter what they write. So while the likes of HouseFresh are fighting tooth and nail to rank for content on which they’re clearly experts, places like Popular Science can slap together a Frankenstein of keywords and templated tactics masked as SEO best practices and instantly outrank a much smaller team that did much more work.
Nowhere was this conundrum more evident then in the days after HouseFresh’s post was published.
Other websites began to aggregate the original post, much like I’m doing now, and actually outrank HouseFresh on Google.
In a world where multiple content websites can rip off (even with good intentions) an original post and almost instantly out-rank it, something is seriously wrong.
Many independent sites will go out of business if this trend continues.
Google has been sharing the same guidance for years on how to rank higher on Google: write quality content for humans, not the algorithm.
What Forbes and the like have proven, however, is that it does pay off to write for the algorithm, so long as it seems like you’re writing for humans.
It’s impossible to know what the disconnect is. Are the search quality graders, the number of which is being greatly diminished (see link below), not up to snuff? Or is it the algorithm itself that overrides whatever these human graders are telling Google about the content? Or a combination of both?
We don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter.
What’s important is that Google solves this problem. Not for its own sake – their revenue probably doesn’t directly change one bit depending on who ranks where – but for the sake of independent (and non-independent but still quality) publishers. If it cares about supporting the content industry as much as it says it does, it will clean up this mess.
With Google boasting more than 90 percent of global search share, the “Little Guy” doesn’t appear to have much leverage at the moment. Here’s to hoping the ones who do – at pay grades much higher than Sullivan’s, apparently - have some sympathy and make the necessary changes.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gerick News(letter) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.