How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results - [wsj.com...]

More of an eggshell than a "bombshell" article, IMO. I've read it over a few times now, and it feels more like a sloppy hack job each time I read it... changing fine tuning auto-complete to eliminate hate speech into siggestions of engineers running amok to make clandestine adjustments.

The description of how quality raters work to rate and rerate algorithmic changes to satisfy quality raters' guidelines becomes a more sinister "pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests".

If you're frustrated with your Google results, and right now many are, the story is sure to strike a sympathetic chord somewhere... but the article IMO is short on analysis and heavy on invective. YMMV.

How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results - [wsj.com...]

I file this as totally irrelevant, since I must pay $1 to read it. No.
You read it.

Seeing this all over the place now, even my local tiny newspaper. Either pay up, or remain blind and ignorant.
It is newspapers trying to be profitable, in a changing world.
They need to find some other formula.

It is much easier, cheaper and time-saving to read the analysis of others, and have them sort through all the BS for me. FREE!

Where is the best place to read a detailed nutshell analysis by experts? RIGHT HERE! Also free.
.

[edited by: goodroi at 3:47 pm (utc) on Nov 18, 2019]
[edit reason] thread formatting [/edit]

Group:
Sort of lengthy, but a very good WSJ article published last Friday about how Google is slanting the results to favor a few big companies like Amazon. Takes a while to churn thru the article but worth it including how Google shares info with big advertisers to resolve algo changes.

[msn.com...]

Kind regards,
Bill

[edited by: goodroi at 3:48 pm (utc) on Nov 18, 2019]
[edit reason] thread formatting [/edit]

More of an eggshell than a "bombshell" article, IMO.

I agree. Some SEO's ( Glenn Gabe ) were entirely misquoted and the authors clearly cherry-picked and manipulated
their "evidence". Obviously The Goog isn't perfect but this article was quite biased.

Those bombshell revelations are as old as Googe is itself. So what is new?

Nothing. The believers continue to believe, the rest just observe what is happening. :)

Mod's note: I'm adding here some information to this thread which takes it beyond just the original WSJ article, to include an SEO rebuttal to a lot of misinformation that the WSJ may have tried to get right, but they didn't. IMO, the WSJ really fell very short in places.

The addition of the rebuttal to our discussion is also prompting my addition to our thread title reflecting that. I felt the rebuttal and the report of the original story belonged together here, rather than in separate threads....

The WSJ's journal article, which we actually haven't named, was titled...
How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results

Some sinister overtones in this, and while not everybody is happy with Google right now, and probably never will be, the rebuttal explains why the inaccuracies of the article bothered a lot of us in the online marketing community.

Search is a difficult subject to get right, and SEO Sam Ruchlewicz has clearly worked his tail off in the past few days to answer the Journal article, mostly point by point. It's a long piece, mostly extremely well reasoned and documented, that's worth the read.

I also think it's an excellent reference piece which contains a lot of useful information that might clear up some misconceptions that I see often in the forums here. I don't think it's perfect... nothing like this put together in a few days could be... but I'm very impressed.

Helping Sam Ruchlewicz with additional input were (twitter handles) @glenngabe, @schachin, and @bill_slawski, a very impressive group.

34 Ways the Wall Street Journal Got Google Wrong
by Sam Ruchlewicz
[warschawski.com...]

My thanks to them all. They've done the community a large service.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:06 pm (utc) on Nov 19, 2019]

It sound like the authors of the article made many mistakes and has a number of things completely wrong but at least the WSJ article is out there to help continue the discussion on how something needs to be done with search.

Google's lack of transparently and their total dominance over search needs to be address. Not to mention the Ad machine it has become and the content it takes from others and displays like it is its own (search widgets). It's very complex and everyone from Google, the Government, Media, and SEO Experts are going to be needed to eventually address the issue.

I find a lot of these SEO experts quoted in the article who are now complaining are more worried about protecting their contacts within Google since a lot of their businesses I am sure also rely on the company. I wish more of the experts would hold Google's feet to the fire on a continuous basis until things improve.

JesterMagic, have you read the rebuttal? I ask because it sounds like you are making some of the same assumptions the WSJ had made, and I'm assuming that we overlapped in posting.

I've read the article (in Italian), and, to me, It lacks an essential point. As a search engine, Google became flawed essentially the same day they moved their "ad suggestions" from the sidebar to the main body of the SERP. Manually tuning the algorithm, knowledge graph, censoring certain words, and so on, are in no way as important as directly manipulating the SERP by replacing organic results with paid ones to make (more) money.

[edited by: riccarbi at 3:15 pm (utc) on Nov 19, 2019]

From a source such as the WSJ, this is a poorly researched and compiled article.
It does no justice to the the publication and the respect it normally carries. It's worse than conspiracy theories because there is no evidence to back up the wild and confused claims.

Just to re-link for those that missed it, you can read it here [msn.com...]

WSJ is well known as a partisan rag and the Google article in reference is testament to those roots. Far too many misleading and outright lying claims. How can anyone take anything the WSJ posts as accurate is beyond me.

I found the rebuttal pretty uninspiring. It is a lot of Google talking points. It seems to stop at, "This is what Google says is the truth so it's true," & "We can't really know bc correlation/causation". I am not praising the WSJ article by any means. Both read like opinion pieces. In one Google is evil and the other Google is a very transparent search engine with a few small issues (he actually uses extremely transparent several times). It's honestly probably somewhere in the middle.

@steffanlv LOL, you clearly haven't read the article or the warchawski piece.

Regarding the warchaski piece, it is as terrible as the WSJ article. The warchawski article is littered with typos and other errors and claims that you can get a manually penalty if you site doesn't conform to Quality Raters Guidelines, the basic message is Google can do no wrong.

The biggest issue facing Google organic search results which isn't addressed in either article is Google's continued and progressive obfuscation of difference between, organic results, Google's own content, and Google Ads.

The biggest issue facing Google organic search results which isn't addressed in either article is Google's continued and progressive obfuscation of difference between, organic results, Google's own content, and Google Ads

True. That's the point. Yet, when Google started adding paid results above organic ones, many so-called "SEO experts" took it as an opportunity (namely, to get their clients ranking high in SERP easily by simply making them pay Google for it), while it was the end of SEO, actually.

I got this far:

“To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to <snip>”

Two things here:
Google pays Quality Rates [sic] about $13.50 an hour – which seems halfway decent, at the very least. McDonalds (on the other hand) only pays people an average of $9.45 an hour.
<snip>

Ooookay, then.

Google pays Quality Rates [sic] about $13.50 an hour

$13.50 an hour is "living with your parents High School kid burger flipping wages" -- In 1984 I was making $10 an hour -- Anything less than $25 an hour these days is totally Abysmal



/rant

claims that you can get a manually penalty if you site doesn't conform to Quality Raters Guidelines,

People seriously believe that? That's plain wrong. QRG is just a handbook for the purpose of standardizing how third party raters rate. That's all it is. Has nothing to do with how Google actually works.

As for the article, Glenn Gabe said he was misquoted and it's been reported that the reason they misquoted him was to fake news the article to push their agenda.

Barry wrote a good article that illustrates who the WSJ article is riddled with false assumptions throughout.

Read Barry's article before forming an opinion:

[seroundtable.com...]

Always two sides. :)

Read the articles above, THEN form an opinion! :)

At the same time look at your site metrics and see which way the wind is blowing.

@martinibuster thanks for sharing the article from Barry Schwartz it hits the nail on the head. I agree with everything that was said.
@rustybrick (Barry Schwartz) Great article!

Just as bad as the other response article. A lot of people talking about things that they cannot know. Let it go.