#Media#News#Journalism#SEO#Google#Search#SearchEngines: "In our experience, each rollout of the Products Review Update has shaken things up, generally benefitting sites and writers who actually dedicated time, effort, and money to test products before they would recommend them to the world.
That said, most searches for specific product models don’t just magically start with users searching for specific devices off the top of their heads. There is an immediate step before this: the hours of research reading through lists of product recommendations.
If you have been reading HouseFresh for a while, your first encounter with us was likely a list like this one or this one recommending the best devices for a specific issue you were trying to solve. That is how most of our readers find us.
Unfortunately, we’re getting less and less traffic from those pages, and it’s endangering the future of our site.
"Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"
They broke the deal.
Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right."
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