[HN Gopher] Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying ...
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Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its
Host
Author : greg_V
Score : 236 points
Date : 2024-09-19 10:44 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (larslofgren.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (larslofgren.com)
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
| thmsths wrote:
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is.
| If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7
| to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and
| you find out that the last page was page 3.
| jajko wrote:
| That was there for many years
| thrance wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
|
| Also discussed on HN earlier
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
| nick3443 wrote:
| One of the commenters on wheresyoured seemed insightful:
| "wonder if organic search results being worse generates more
| ad clicks, as the ads are more likely to be more useful than
| the actual search results".
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| fillskills wrote:
| Google team has long given up its user's needs for
| incremental revenue goals. See the 10 ads that come before
| any result
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| google search result can be shit and they will still make
| tons of money from 3rd party/publisher ads and youtube,
| cloud, gmail, atc.
| scottyah wrote:
| 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?
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain
| ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them
| up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the
| brand dry.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. I get offers for my decades-old domains every day or two
| now.
| paulpauper wrote:
| bingo. this is 100% the reason
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if
| you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want.
| So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.
| charlie0 wrote:
| It's getting closer to the point where we will compare Google
| to Kagi like web-browsing without an ad-blocker. It's hell
| surfing the web with ad-blocking off.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Reading this comment just above your comment is funny:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594450
| charlie0 wrote:
| Lol, guess you can't really escape. One benefit of Kagi is
| you can block websites from appearing. Maybe website
| blocking lists will appear similar to ad blocking lists.
| Maybe Kagi already lets you do this.
| burkaman wrote:
| Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at
| the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you
| should be aware that most of their results come from Google.
| bloopernova wrote:
| You can block Forbes in Kagi search, but not in Google.
| itissid wrote:
| Actually googling some of the terms from his post and seeing
| Forbes up there is oddly surprising, even after reading it all.
| davidu wrote:
| This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It
| should make the WSJ though.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Yes, this is a big deal, but most of us have simply stopped
| using Google and moved on to other tools.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > most of us have simply stopped using Google
|
| Citation needed
| crote wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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."
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want
| to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a
| lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion
| long before that).
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > 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.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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.
| CM30 wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop
| giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.
| erehweb wrote:
| Sure, and Google and FB have killed businesses before by
| changing algorithms. But what is fair prioritization? Non-
| trivial Q.
| coliveira wrote:
| And then get negative press from Forbes for the next few years!
| Is that something useful for Google? No, better let them keep
| part of the money.
| roughly wrote:
| > negative press from Forbes for the next few years
|
| Who the fuck reads Forbes anymore? You seen the garbage
| they're shilling on their website these days?
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| 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.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| About 10th in the UK with that search, so probably this isn't
| across every geography.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I miss the days of a searchable internet
| neves wrote:
| Cory Doctorow article nails it https://doctorow.medium.com/the-
| specific-process-by-which-go...
|
| It is Google "do no evil" to blame.
| tempfile wrote:
| he really never misses
| vgeek wrote:
| 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...
| stackghost wrote:
| >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".
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| 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.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think Wirecutter is still a decent source; they
| probably won't steer you too far wrong if you're not
| _too_ picky. But nothing, including your trusted friends,
| is an all-knowing oracle if only because their tastes and
| priorities are probably different from yours. Certainly
| pre-Internet there were few enough reliable sources of
| recommendations--maybe some specialist magazines but even
| those were far from perfect.
| frontiersummit wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not it started that way, yes, it makes sense
| to recommend brands that New York Times subscribers are
| familiar and comfortable with. I'll buy a GE Profile
| refrigerator or Bosch dishwasher. Not some Chinese brand
| I've never heard of and have no idea what the service
| situation will be with. Makes perfect sense to me and I'm
| in that demographic. Especially with major appliances and
| things I can buy at the local big box store seems to make
| perfect sense to not buy things you have to go to Alibaba
| to obtain.
|
| It's not about being price insensitive but recommending
| things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem
| risky, especially for major purchases that have to be
| installed and potentially serviced.
|
| (Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile
| refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-
| brainer.)
|
| But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly
| doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially
| bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position
| either.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The only signal I use is warranty. So I tend to go to Costco,
| and avoid Samsung.
| perks_12 wrote:
| Try naplab.
| Krasnol wrote:
| How do we know you're not an ad?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Investopedia is another one. Same for bankrate.com Other ones
| included wikihow and genius.com
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| 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.
| janesvilleseo wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I suspect that's how geeksforgeeks got so dominant with their
| student written drivel.
| ericmcer wrote:
| "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.
| 55555 wrote:
| Many types of sites get ~$1 per visitor from search engines.
| Quite possible, yeah.
| cyost wrote:
| Seems likely that the articles in question include affiliate
| links to the products they're advertising
| rwmj wrote:
| When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but
| then major travel agency, we'd pay PS10 or more to Google for a
| single click sometimes. (Full story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
| ren_engineer wrote:
| if they are doing affiliate marketing than it's realistic
| OptionOfT wrote:
| 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.
| EricE wrote:
| 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!
| zeusk wrote:
| and pinterest; scourge of the web
| kstrauser wrote:
| I had honestly forgotten it existed until you mentioned it.
| Thanks, Kagi!
| gman83 wrote:
| You can do a similar thing for Google with the uBlackList
| extension:
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| In Turkey, all searches hits to newspaper sites. Its like a sad
| joke. Related page is full of repetitive garbage where
| information is hidden somewhere.
| throwawayl3ll wrote:
| Just start browsing search results from the second page.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I need the author to tell me again who runs Forbes Marketplace. I
| assume it's Forbes. It's not?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
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