Google search and the little blog

Many small websites are going dark like the sands of the desert at nightfall - License our images here. 

Little blogs are dying. They are jailed in a dark and remote dungeon of Google organic search, the non-index dungeon. The mighty gatekeeper, like Saturn, is devouring its children. Betrayed for money, the good old-fashioned blogs are the collateral damage of their "helpful" content update. Long gone is that 2004 when Loren Baker wrote:

Google likes Blogs. Blogs do well in Search Results Listings on Google. This is because Blogs contain fresh content and are richly interlinked, despite their relatively small audiences. Some would go so far as to say that Google over-represents Blogs.

(Source: What if Google didn't like blogs?")

That's ancient history. A jump to 2022 shows a different picture. According to Sandy Maguire:

The Internet is dominated by a few big websites. Out of social, the amateur opinion is vanished.

(Source: "Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.)

Google grew and became part of the elite. It's just another big corporation. Another power player. Their big business doesn't need amateurs anymore, less yet the little blogs. But the big irony is that in 2024 Google is paying big money for content created by amateurs. Go and take a look to their deal with Reddit. The true colors of greed are on display. 

Today, the banner of Google search is all about "authority". You must be popular, or you must be "helpful" - whatever it means. The new potion of their algorithm brought a flood of content full of elaborateness, embellishment, insincerity, unneeded complexity, and, of course, boring long texts. With the new playbook of smart SEO, a lot of nonsense is written to look authoritative. But looks are deceiving: our web is full of "authoritative" regurgitation. 

Like Sandy Maguire also pointed:

...have you noticed how every website begins with a stupid paragraph overviewing the thing you’re searching for?

And this will grow more with the advances in generative AI. Aren't ChatGPT, Gemini, and the others AI brands regurgitating creations of someone else? 

In the topic of content length, I believe that long texts are a contradiction for simple stuff. The expert in a topic is often good at explaining the matter of his expertise in simple terms - except when his/her ego is sick. If there is no plan to impress others or play search algorithm games, they can cut the superfluous. They can cut the B.S. - the "bollocks" if you are British, and I'm not talking of "testicles" here. 

Funny when Google says that they "Want To Reward The Best Content No Matter Site Size". Sure! The analysis made by Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton in "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" points otherwise. All is about advertising. All is about money. 

(Get more in What Google Search isn't showing you.)

Perhaps is true that Google search is dying, like Dmitri Kyle Brereton proposed in this post. Maybe they are just trying to survive in the new age of AI - is this the reason for investing in Reddit content? But like it or not, Google was sincere since its beginnings. One of its founders warned long ago the dangers of advertising funded models for a search engine:

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers.

Bingo! Search quality never was the main goal. Money was. If you pay you will show up in the first page of Google search. 

The future looks grim for little blogs and small personal websites. Most will become monologues. They won't "exist" if most of their pages are not indexed by Google search, in the same way that a town doesn't "exist" for most people if doesn't appear in a map. 

The creators of short posts - a common feature of the old-style blog - also will become outcasts. Those betting for a zettelkasten style of prose are out of luck with Google search. Short and condensed posts are the domain of the regurgitating AI. You must create "original" content exuberant in the number of words. And also forget about covering a variety of dissimilar topics. "Experts" don't have time to be everywhere.  

Hideo Kojima was right: 

Ours is now a life of passive acquisition. But the joy of finding is gone, as is the catharsis of going to great trouble in searching for something and finding it.

Indexed or non-indexed by Google, I will keep writing because I like it. It helps me think and learn. On this, I will bring the view of Charles Bukowski:

it will do it by itself

and it will keep on doing it

until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

(Fragment from the poem "so you want to be a writer.")