Went to YouTube to find the George HW Bush baseball meme. The search term pops up but the result is nowhere to be seen. Eight videos of bush doing the first pitch and then snl sketches. Went to google, similarly no results. Went to duckduckgo and got it immediately.
Like shits unusable, if someone dislikes a video and has money they absolutely can get it taken off the search systems most people use.
As someone with knowledge in the area, SEO has been in a terminal spiral for 18 months. We've seen a couple of these before, but this is the worst one since the days of Yahoo and Altavista. Marketers are eating their own seedcorn, Google is sacrificing it's algorithm to maintain ad spend, and it's all in a massive race to the bottom. I reckon we're about 8 months out of a major reset of Google on at least a Panda/Penguin level.
This is far too interesting a thing to hear about for you to not go into more depth. What’re the major changes that are unique to the past 18 months?
Nothing unique, just a continuation of SEO tactics of the last decade. Link buying is universal and google can't stop it, content mills now have high-quality writers and can fool algorithmic attempts. Spammy sites get more ctr and influencer advertising has completely fucked up search volumes and such. Display Advertising is dead, finally, and search ad volumes are decreasing as well. Google is basically floating on shopping ads and attempting to support them in organic results, which has resulted in "wish-itis". YouTube ads are barely paying server costs, and businesses advertising on online channels are seeing low ROI due to market fatigue.
On the Social Front, Facebook is in terminal decline, and influencer advertising is dying at a rapid rate. Major businesses are pulling out of Social and sometimes out of Digital.
what will happen?
From what I've heard (and this is hearsay), a massive overhaul of both SEO and SEM rankings from the ground up, integration of the search algorithm with SEM to improve search ad quality. Hammering of dropshipping and similar spammy e-commerce, and an attempt, probably futile, to put mid-size e-commerce sites front and center. Links will become less important relative to long-form content and interactive elements. Site age and update rate will continue to grow in importance.
Further integration of AI-driven natural language analysis to stop content mills. There have, apparently, been discussions about manually boosting high content sites as well but not sure about that.
Basically actually doing what they've been threatening to do for 10 years.
Social Media is also in trouble with major brands starting to bail entirely. Influencer advertising is in freefall in terms of profitability.