This article is reprinted from Bill Dembski, design theorist William Dembski’s Substack, with his permission.

It also seems that Google has quid pro quo understandings with certain sites, which lead it to rank them highly for certain searches. Google and Wikipedia have a tacit agreement that Google will highly rank any Wikipedia entry when it appears as a keyword in search. Recently, Google agreed to pay Reddit $60 million annually to use its content to train its artificial intelligence. One benefit to Reddit has been that it now rises high for searches in the educational space. For instance, near the time of this writing, it came up in organic search as number three (third spot on the first SERP) for the keyword “best liberal arts colleges.” Here’s the Reddit article, which is just a brief opening paragraph and some comments, none of which is all that insightful.

Here’s an article from AcademicInfluence.com that actually answers the query about which are the best liberal arts colleges in the US. Back in 2021, this article appeared high on Google’s first SERP, but now it resides in search-engine oblivion. Last I checked, in a Google search on the keyword “best liberal arts colleges,” the link to the AcademicInfluence.com article on best liberal arts colleges appears not until the eighteenth SERP, buried so deep that most people searching for that keyword will never find it.

Instead of a comparison, the user gets a list

Most of the high-ranking SERPs for this keyword simply list the websites of colleges that offer a liberal arts education. Ask yourself if listing such schools answers the query implicit in the keyword search “best liberal arts colleges.” Obviously, such a query is asking for a comparison of different liberal arts colleges. To list actual liberal arts colleges, as Google does, is simply to have schools testify to their own excellence at offering a liberal arts education. And what use is such testimony? What’s needed is an outside party doing a fair-minded evaluation of the quality of different liberal arts colleges. In the past, Google searches mainly listed such independent websites for the query “best liberal arts colleges,” and the article cited from AcademicInfluence.com was for a time in the number one or two spot in the Google rankings.

Google’s power vs. Walmart’s power

Google’s power over online businesses is not just monopolistic but also extravagant. When I try to make clear to people Google’s power over online businesses, I ask them what would happen to brick and mortar businesses if the roads on which they’re located could suddenly be completely altered with the push of a button. Consider Walmart. Walmart stores tend to be placed on busy streets and near highways. But what if by pushing a button you could turn the highway next to a Walmart into an obscure dirt road? Suddenly, no one can get to it any longer, and that Walmart store is out of business. That’s the power of Google: to create digital roads that enable online businesses to thrive and then with the push of a button to destroy those roads, causing them to wither and die.

With physical roads, we can count on them staying in place and being maintained. A brick-and-mortar business by a physical road may suffer some loss depending on the economy as a whole or on some competitor setting up shop close by. But such a business is unlikely simply to collapse in the way that online businesses do because a Google update relegates them to oblivion. I’ve seen websites completely destroyed by Google updates. I’ve seen entire web portfolios lose 80 percent of their revenue stream overnight on account of a Google update. Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil.” But my own sense is that its extravagant power on the web has thoroughly corrupted it. Of course, Google can always rationalize that it built the digital roads in the first place and so it can do what it likes with them. But search is now becoming a public good, and Google’s extravagant power is bringing instability to business, so much of which is now online and depends on search.

Organic search results are increasingly getting lost

In the years since I sold my main educational website, Google has made life tougher on such websites. It is increasingly using AI-generated summaries, stuffing its search engine results pages with sponsored content, and offering sidebar knowledge panels. Consequently, organic results from keyword searches are increasingly getting lost from view. Whereas in the past you could still hope to generate income from pages that appeared even below that top ten search results, now if you’re not in the top five of the first SERP, your income from such a page will be minimal to non-existent. It’s as though Google is doing everything in its power to throttle organic traffic that would otherwise go to content sites, driving that traffic instead to their sponsored ads and thus to increasing its bottom line.

Whereas things used to feel more like a win-win with Google, now it feels more like an extortion racket. SEO sites depend for their lifeblood on search, and that means Google. Yet the irony is that Google could not be a search engine except for those sites (search engines after all need something to search). To be successful, these sites now increasingly need to pay Google directly or indirectly to get the high intent traffic from which to generate revenue.

Paying for visibility

Thus, they can pay Google directly by bidding on keywords and appearing in paid search results. But they can also pay third parties to create backlinks that Google may then credit to their sites. But there are no guarantees here. Google touts its PageRank algorithm as modeled on the citation index, where more citations to an article make it more influential. And so Google claims to value webpages and websites by the backlinks to sites from other sites, the backlinks serving the role of citations (in this regard, self-citations or internal links don’t count). But note, Google is not to be held to its stated standards. At times, it is only too happy to violate its PageRank algorithm. Take what Google did with the CBD oil industry. Many small businesses selling CBD oil and posting articles about CBD oil played the SEO game and were able to make good money by ranking highly in Google’s search results (one of my colleagues was a player in this arena). But then Google disrupted the CBD oil industry by implementing algorithm updates (contrary to PageRank) and ad policy changes that severely restricted the visibility and advertising of CBD-related products. In 2019, Google deindexed or significantly downranked many CBD-related websites, making it much harder for consumers to find CBD businesses through organic search. As a result, numerous small independent CBD businesses saw dramatic drops in traffic and revenue, allowing only a handful of larger, well-connected companies to remain in the market.

Next: How Google search rank disrupted the alternative health industry

Here are the previous instalments: The evilization of Google—and what to do about it Part 1: Understanding Google’s dominance over the internet. Nothing is totally evil. Still, there’s enough evil in Google that it is, for now, more on the side of Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The utter dependence of online businesses on Google. Part 2: An SEO business needs to please Google or else it is dead in the water. Google’s re-presentation of information created by others makes it less likely that users will visit them. Thus Google’s business expands at their expense.

A potential chink in Google’s armor: Loss of legal immunity Part 3: Currently, Google is legally protected from the consequences of frequent copyright violation. One outcome of the resulting ad clutter is that, unless you are top of the search, you’re likely wasting time trying to make money off organic search.

and

Becoming a slave to Google: How it happens Part 4: After an update, you always have to second guess what Google did. You become a reverse engineer who never sees under the hood. This leads to a mentality that always tries to second guess whether Google will favor some piece of content or way of expressing it.