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> I think the answer is because it’s not in their best interest to do so. They like that most consumers will look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and

by jsnell 5y ago

> I think the answer is because it’s not in their best interest to do so. They like that most consumers will look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and make their purchase with little hesitation. I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches.

mrobins 5y ago
I think it’s less in Google’s long term best interest and more a marriage of convenience. Hopefully a temporary one. Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm. One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.
nuker 5y ago
> There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. But they do? IMHO some of the SEO techniques use direct payments to Google for keywords, results placement, etc.
- mminer237 5y ago
  You can buy an ad, but those are shown differently than actual results. You can't pay Google to improve your SEO.
  - nuker 5y ago
    I stand corrected, thanks
  - BrianOnHN 5y ago
    But those ads can increase the number & frequency of pages crawled by Google.
cat199 5y ago
agree on that front - but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
- jsnell 5y ago
  But again, the author's theory is that what's being optimized for is to get people to mindlessly click through an Amazon affiliate link and making a purchase. If people are doing that, they clearly aren't doing more searches like you suggest. "The search results are intentionally bad to make people search more and click on ads" would be a viable conspiracy theory in isolation, but seems to directly conflict with the complaint of the search results driving people to make purchases via the pages that showed up in the organic results.
JohnBooty 5y ago
And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches. Yeah, I came here hoping somebody would have an answer to this seeming non-sequitur. Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason. The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google. The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information. Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.
donmcronald 5y ago
> Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more. It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.
- jsnell 5y ago
  So we've an "if", a "might", a "might", and one more "might" with no supporting evidence, and that's directly contradicted by the screenshots in the article. Specifically, if the goal here was to bury the good content so that people would be forced to buy ads for it *there should be some ads pointing to said good content*. There aren't in the screenshot. I would suggest that you didn't really think this through. You've decided who the villain is, spent 10 seconds coming up with a illogical narrative where that is true, and then just state it as some obvious fact. Just like the author of the original article.
  - navane 5y ago
    The first hit he gets is a website plastered with ads. Boosting sales of ads is still a plausibele explanation. "But I bet it has something to do with the fact that all of the bikes they review are sold on Amazon and that every link uses an Amazon affiliate tag. It goes quite well with the dozen or so ads plastered across the site (some of which are autoplaying videos with sound)."

by jsnell 5y ago

mrobins 5y ago

I think it’s less in Google’s long term best interest and more a marriage of convenience. Hopefully a temporary one. Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm. One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.

nuker 5y ago

> There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. But they do? IMHO some of the SEO techniques use direct payments to Google for keywords, results placement, etc.

mminer237 5y ago
You can buy an ad, but those are shown differently than actual results. You can't pay Google to improve your SEO.
- nuker 5y ago
  I stand corrected, thanks
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  But those ads can increase the number & frequency of pages crawled by Google.

cat199 5y ago

agree on that front - but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...

jsnell 5y ago
But again, the author's theory is that what's being optimized for is to get people to mindlessly click through an Amazon affiliate link and making a purchase. If people are doing that, they clearly aren't doing more searches like you suggest. "The search results are intentionally bad to make people search more and click on ads" would be a viable conspiracy theory in isolation, but seems to directly conflict with the complaint of the search results driving people to make purchases via the pages that showed up in the organic results.

JohnBooty 5y ago

And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches. Yeah, I came here hoping somebody would have an answer to this seeming non-sequitur. Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason. The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google. The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information. Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.

donmcronald 5y ago

> Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more. It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.

jsnell 5y ago
So we've an "if", a "might", a "might", and one more "might" with no supporting evidence, and that's directly contradicted by the screenshots in the article. Specifically, if the goal here was to bury the good content so that people would be forced to buy ads for it *there should be some ads pointing to said good content*. There aren't in the screenshot. I would suggest that you didn't really think this through. You've decided who the villain is, spent 10 seconds coming up with a illogical narrative where that is true, and then just state it as some obvious fact. Just like the author of the original article.
- navane 5y ago
  The first hit he gets is a website plastered with ads. Boosting sales of ads is still a plausibele explanation. "But I bet it has something to do with the fact that all of the bikes they review are sold on Amazon and that every link uses an Amazon affiliate tag. It goes quite well with the dozen or so ads plastered across the site (some of which are autoplaying videos with sound)."