E565: Did Google & Reddit Kill Blog Marketing?

In this episode, Mike and Dave evaluate the impact of Google's September 2023 Update on EcomCrew's and other websites, and talk about the new challenges that have popped up because of this update. 

Ever since September 2023, ranking on Google as an affiliate site has been harder than ever. 

We've seen websites (including ours) decline in organic views from 20% to 80%, while Reddit has started to rank for every keyword. 

If Google continue towards this trend of giving big websites all the ranking juice, what happens to affiliate websites? And by extension, what does that mean for all digital media outlets? 

Dave and I discuss all these topics and more in this episode. Here are some timestamps to help you along. 

Timestamps

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:26 – Economies of Scale and Content Sites
• 04:20 – Google's Helpful Update and Content Sites
• 08:07 – The Rise of Reddit
• 19:29 – Challenges of Self-Promotion on Reddit
• 23:36 – The Future of Content Sites and Digital Media
• 24:06 – Conclusion

As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested. 

Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can. 

Thanks for listening!

Until next time, happy selling!

Transcript

Ecomcrew (00:00.078)
Ready to start and grow your own profitable e -commerce brand? This is the Ecom Crew Podcast, the web's most transparent podcast where we don't hide our brands, our products, or our failures. From creating stellar products to selling both on Amazon and off Amazon. Keep listening for authentic stories, practical advice, and tactical tips for starting and running your own e -commerce business.

Ecomcrew (00:32.152)
This is Mike. This is Dave. And welcome to this edition of the e -comm crew podcast. Dave, it's almost like we're recording two podcasts in one day, like technology, they'll go out in two weeks apart. Well, could be weeks apart as well. weeks apart. Okay. Yeah, here we are. We're stacking our podcasts. We're getting more efficient with our time, giving economies of scale. We're doing well. at Dave pulling out the big corporate lingo. Economies of scale. Yes. I remember the first time I heard that in

when I was in university, it was like, wow, that's such a cool word. And I made a note of it and I use it, I make a goal to use it every week now. tell you what did not have good economies of scale was these aggregators. They thought they were going to have economies of scale pulling all these Amazon businesses together and then feel miserably. So I think that this was like one of these terms that you read about in a college one on one course, but it practiced, maybe it doesn't work quite as well as, as you expect it.

I mean, man, if you're an investor and you hear the word economies of scale, you're like, here, take my money. Take my money, shove and take my money. We got economies of scale, baby. Let's go. Okay. Well, can we tie this into content sites at all? Economies of scale, actually it does tie in content sites. Google's massive hit to them last year, people trying to achieve huge economies of scale by rolling out tons of content sites and just falling flat on their face with one Google helpful update.

Yeah, I I started doing this in December of 2003. So this has not been my first rodeo with Google smacking me around. So not tying economies of scale on this at all, because this is not applicable. You're just joking around. So let's shift into just the day in the life of running a content site and dealing with Google. And I think that it's applicable, even though this is an e -commerce podcast, we have been huge advocates for a very long time of creating a content site to piggyback along.

with an e -commerce site. And in concept, I absolutely love this. It pulls in my previous expertise of doing SEO again since December of 2003. So 21 years now, or 20 and a half years. And things have changed quite a bit like over the years. Like, I mean, at first you could game Google in any way you wanted to with Black Hat SEO, and they've gotten more sophisticated on how to prevent that. And there's always a trend of the day to kind of outsmart Google and try to get ahead of the curve.

Ecomcrew (02:56.31)
And Google is always trying to admin flow to combat this stuff and provide the best results. you know, still to this day, Google provides the best results. Like no one goes to Bing, no one goes to Yahoo. Those search engines are printing irrelevant. And so Google's results for the most part are great. You know, I use Google many times a day and for the most part, the results come out great. But as a content site, you you live and die by that algorithm. And one day you might be ranking number one and getting a hundred thousand visits from one search term. And the next day you might be…

buried on page 10 and go almost like literally to zero. And it doesn't feel good when it happens. And so certainly that's happened to us recently on several sites. And this time around, we don't have any winners. Usually you have a one thing wins and one thing loses. The thing I see that's winning is the site that we sold last year, their traffic is way up, which is an actual e -commerce store. And it seems like that's what's winning this time around. And pure content slash affiliate sites are the big losers.

Yeah. And when we give it, we give a little bit of history of what happened and the history of what happened is around September of last year. So 2023 Google rolled out what they called the helpful update and the helpful updates. Their goal was to provide more helpful content. And basically who was in their crosshairs, at least according to Google was kind of the affiliate low quality content sites. We've all come across them where you're looking for a review of.

a bread oven and the first thing that comes up is some affiliate site who's never touched a bread oven in their life. And they're giving more or less very, very low quality reviews of bread ovens based on Amazon reviews and just other content that they can scrape from the internet and not actually testing out these bread ovens and doing their own review of it. So that was what was initially in the crosshairs, but it does seem that all content sites across the board

Any content site basically with any affiliate offer on it was being targeted very heavily by Google and traffic drops went somewhere from probably 20 to 80 % for almost all content sites that relied on affiliate marketing or advertising to any degree. And it's interesting cause I can barely remember what I had from lunch yesterday. Probably couldn't actually remember what I had from lunch yesterday, but there's certain things I remember really clearly. And I remember being out on a hike in Oregon years ago as we were driving up the Pacific coast highway.

Ecomcrew (05:17.768)
And just kind of thinking about what I want to do with my life and just where things are going. I being out of nature is very therapeutic in this way. And, you know, at the time, you know, there wasn't really podcasts or a bunch of other stuff to distract you. So was just a lot of just thinking time. And at the time, you know, I had just gotten out of online poker affiliate marketing, you know, maybe a year or two before this, and I was doing like website hosting, affiliate marketing, online degrees. And one other thing that's not coming to mind right now and just, I don't know, like I was thinking to myself.

Google eventually is going to do something about this. mean, realistically, the things that we're always ranking back in the poker industry and these other things I'm doing at the top are almost all predicated based on who's paying me the most. had very little to do with what actually was the best thing. And the FTC actually stepped in and did something about this well before Google did. They started making people disclose this, which we've done on our other sites now. But my thought was that Google eventually is going to like…

smack the crap out of these types of sites and you'll need to be selling something or doing something directly with customers and providing value to rank. And it's actually how I got into e -commerce. You know, it was just like, can't rely on, this type of content any longer. And it's funny how long it's taken like to really see it come to fruition. Now Google has done things over the years to combat this and that was partially right in the past, but like really this is like kind of coming full circle to this thought process of like,

I need to be selling something directly on the internet and not be doing affiliate marketing any longer. And that's actually how we started treadmill .com. We owned that domain at the time. We had started developing it as an affiliate site. We had not quite launched it yet and decided to do a 180 and just start selling fitness equipment. And the rest is kind of history. Now we've run these content sites in parallel with other things and done quite well with them over the years.

but it does seem like the chickens have come home the roost as they would say in Wiffle Wall Street with that kind of concept because certainly those sites now are struggling mightily. Yeah, the interesting thing with the helpful update too was that there was number one, there was one particular site that was just an absolute massive winner and it was Reddit. So again, I've been doing SEO for a long time too and this is my first time seeing one particular site just be a hands -on winner.

Ecomcrew (07:37.494)
And it was definitely Reddit. So I'm trying to pull up Reddit's before and after stats. So before and after the Google update, the internet is not cooperating with me, but it is. more than 10X. Yes. It's crazy. Like Reddit shows up for everything. I actually typed in, I was actually just curious, best bread oven and Reddit's ranking for that. It's it's so funny. Yeah. I mean, I guess Google's thought process is that like, there is no spam on Reddit and therefore whatever people are saying there is more valuable.

people than any other affiliate site, which I don't know. I kind of think is rubbish. I I'm frustrated by this is because I agree with Google's concept and the things that we were doing, you know, let's just say in the tactical space before us, soldtactical .com, you know, let's just say we were reviewing the best tactical gloves. Well, we literally purchased the top 10, seven, whatever number we decided to pick gloves, actually bought them, took our own photography.

tested them in a Consumer Reports S type way, did the same type of thing with each glove and provided the results of maybe it's heat resistance or puncture resistance or maybe other categories or whatever, tested the strength of the fabric, et cetera, documented all of this, put up our own photography, our own video. I think that we provided something that was actually helpful, but all the sites in this regard got kind of swept under the rug at the same time.

And I agree, the other stuff that was out there, our competitors to these types of reviews were absolute crap. mean, as you were saying earlier, they were just taking Amazon's stock photos. So stealing other people's photos from Amazon, reading the bullet points and just regurgitating really thin content and putting up Amazon affiliate links. Now, I mean, you could also argue that we're just as guilty because like the main reason we were doing this is we disclosed and talked about we would want to be ranking our products.

there and trying to get sales for our products. So, as objective as we maybe should have been, and was Google right if you become an adult and take responsibility for yourself, maybe we were just as guilty in this regard. so, yeah, I mean, it's been a struggle. You put a lot of effort in these types of things. mean, e -comm crews also fall under this category of things that have fallen. And in this case, trying to be objective, even though it is our baby and we put a lot of work in it, so we're going to be biased.

Ecomcrew (10:02.094)
It isn't just our site. look at my friend Steve who runs my wife quit her job, has had similar problems and other people in the industry where I think it actually really is helpful content. mean, e -comm crew has always been about, you know, putting up real case studies and real content about what's going on in e -commerce. We have very little affiliate revenue. It's like ever come through e -comm crew. It's always been like promoting the tools that we use, like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout or like refunds manager or whatever it might be.

And so of course, you get people that are going to sign up for those things almost just through happenstance, but even really legitimately good content sites have been smacked down as well. so what's the long -term result? I don't know. I do believe just because of the years of doing this, that there's always an ebb and flow. And I think the actual higher quality stuff shall return. So I think e -comm crew will probably bounce back at some point, will tactical bounce back.

Probably not, I don't know. It's hard to say. Well, the e -commerce site that we sold that's now like doubled or tripled on traffic go back down at some point because it's been over hyped probably. I think, again, it all kind of ebbs and flows, but the days are just running an affiliate site to just get the affiliate revenue or promote your own products. It's probably going to be a struggle moving forward. Well, I guess the question is too, when you search for something like best

Bread oven. Gotta be careful. That's tricky word. When you search for Well, you put chicken breast in the bread oven and cover your chicken breast up. There we go. So when you search for best bread oven, do you want to see something like the wire cutter or do you want to see user generated content from some social media website like Reddit and see a cumulative kind of synopsis of those bread ovens? Like what do you want as a consumer? And it's a tricky question, right? Like I know often –

And this is probably what happened with Google and why they made this change is pre helpful update. would often find myself doing something like best bread oven Reddit to see what people are thinking there because I know they're relatively trusted reviews. know, Reddit does a really good job of sniffing out the BS and the spam bots a lot better than Amazon does with their reviews. So I definitely trust Reddit a lot more. Maybe that's, maybe that's what people want though. They want to see, you know, the cumulative voice of hundreds of Redditors and

Ecomcrew (12:25.624)
They trust the upvoting process on Reddit and the fact that, you know, the best comment and the best review is going to filter its way to the top. And maybe that is just what people want. And maybe it won't come back. And that's one of the things that I've kind of been debating is did Google just basically kill content websites in that regard? Maybe this is what people want. Yeah. So one thing I can guarantee you, but I will bet all my money and now and in the future on is you have the people that were once getting the revenue from.

these types of content sites or affiliates or whatever it might be. And they see Reddit now ranking there. The wave of the future is like, how do we implant our stuff on How do we game Reddit? How do we game Reddit? Right. And so like, this is, I guarantee you already happening. And within a year or two or three or whatever it takes, Reddit will be infiltrated with a bunch of BS. Like people promoting their products there, whether people do it as a long -term game or like they make their own Reddit account and like season it and like,

you know, post actual helpful content for their first 10 or 20 posts and then start sprinkling in their own products or going to a Redditor that already has an established account and paying them to recommend their bread oven or whatever it might be. I can guarantee you that this will be manipulated like probably relatively quickly, you know, just because again, Reddit already is just like just capturing all these results. And if you can get a voice in the best bread oven thread on Reddit that ranks number one,

you know, it's a high value product and it can certainly get you a lot of results. So I see this becoming a cesspool as well. It's just only a matter of time. It's a really good point. know, everything's good until the marketers ruin it as the old cliche goes. And you're absolutely right. Like if you sell treadmills and best treadmills on Reddit comes up some thread there, like you have every treadmill seller's goal is going to be to have their treadmill be the top ranked treadmill in that thread.

Yeah. Like Reddit is relatively rudimentary compared to a lot of the other social media networks, especially Facebook, but less so Twitter and some of the other ones. You know, Reddit's pretty rudimentary. Like you can even sign up, you can make a hundred accounts on Reddit under one email address. Now, of course they're going to know those are all interconnected, but I don't think Reddit overall has the safety mechanisms that especially Facebook has. So Facebook went through that whole 2016 election drama where they really tightened up their ship.

Ecomcrew (14:50.08)
I don't think Reddit is there yet. And I think they are ripe to be manipulated. And yeah, well that eventually made people less trustworthy of Reddit and maybe, you know, Reddit is going to see a big traffic hit from this. Maybe what looked like a great thing for them, all of a sudden getting this huge traffic surge. Maybe that could actually be overall long -term and negative for them when the marketers start to kind of attack the platform. Yeah, that would be my prediction for sure.

So do you think though, you know, short to medium term that Google has killed content sites? Like if there's less incentive from a monetary standpoint to create these content sites, to create content, because you're not getting rewarded, you can't rank anything. And so therefore there's going to be less content sites being generated. Did Google kill content sites with the helpful update? Like, is there going to be some follow -up from this? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a double whammy. I think it's not only this, but AI and the future of search results. So I think that's like,

You're already not ranking content sites because of this helpful update. Even the good ones, like legitimately good ones. I mean, again, I think there's a lot of crap that they did sweep away, which is probably good. But again, I would look at e -comm crew, very biased, and my life clear job and other sites like this as premier content sites in their space that have been helping people for years and have legitimately good content. You know, we'll be forced to have fewer writers and put out less content and…

and do as many in -depth pieces and all this stuff. mean, it's just math is math when it comes to running a business. And so, you know, I think that it actually can hurt the industry. Like who's going to replace that content? Like Reddit's not going to be that source. Like that's more short form type stuff and, you know, kind of a little bit scattered. And then of course you have the advent of AI type search results that are coming up where Google's basically crawled the entire internet and replaced the responses that are going to be coming out with AI generated.

stuff where you don't need to click through to a website anymore to read the content. What is the incentive for people to do this? And this is not any different than why newspapers have started to fail over time, because people stop reading newspapers, and so newspapers are going away left and right and struggling. And there's less journalistic integrity, less in -depth stories that people take two years to uncover at a newspaper, because they just can't afford to do this stuff any longer. I feel like it's interesting to see

Ecomcrew (17:09.326)
the internet now kind of succumbing to the same fate and what's left now to do this work. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve. Unfortunately, also in society, there isn't the same demand for this stuff that there once was. It's kind of wild. mean, 180 character completely false statement on Twitter gets a lot more weight than something the Washington Post spent two years uncovering.

and running a three page story on page one four. It's pretty wild. Really. It's wild to see how things have changed over a relatively short period of time. Yeah. It's a really interesting point. You're right. Like digital media surpassed print media and it happened pretty quickly. And that killed off a lot of that long form investigative journalism that you're talking about Mike and maybe chat GPT has done the exact same thing now to digital media. So we're seeing this whole evolution where, you know, digital media maybe is

slowly being killed too and then what's left. I feel like it's a devolution. Yeah, well, that's a good way to look at it too. It's kind of scary actually, but you can't stop progress in the way that the world is. So I mean, it is what it is. So an interesting kind of background on Reddit too. So a lot of people listening to this might be thinking who run e -commerce brands. Man, Reddit is going to be my gateway to higher rankings and selling more products on Amazon through my website. And I remember we had a common friend.

And somebody posted about this on a forum that we're both a part of. They're like, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to use Reddit. I'm going to, this is going to be the source of all my traffic going forward. I'm just going to kind of game that system. And our mutual friend, she sells t -shirts and she comes in and says, basically, have you ever tried to use Reddit? Have you ever tried to promote a product on Reddit? They're the most snarky group of evangelists on the internet. they basically don't say.

They will rip apart any self promotion. And just overall, like just snarkiness gets rewarded on that platform. It's weird. It's kind of a little subculture of Reddit. So that would be my cautionary tale to anyone who's listening to this and thinking that they're going to game Reddit is that, yeah, think twice because you can get some pretty heavy backlash. And that's not just from personal experience, which I have a lot of it's others personal experience too. Like, and you can probably see that as a user too, is that one of the top comments that

Ecomcrew (19:29.836)
filter up. It's normally it has a little bit of a snarky critical tone to them. So just be aware if you are thinking of using Reddit as a self -promotion tool for your products. Yeah. And this has been like this well before Reddit. I mean, I think back to the poker days when two plus two was the largest poker forum and pocket fires was the second largest. And eventually we ended up buying pocket fires and running that for a number of years and

We were guilty of originally posting our stuff and they're trying to promote our stuff. And it's like immediately like backlash. then once we own the platform, like trying to squash that stuff over period of time. Cause like, it's so funny. People like have no patience. I just want to come right in and like impose, but like even on something like Reddit, like I was saying, if you like kind of make a seasoned account, if you, you you take your time, you post 10 to 20 helpful things and like start talking about yourself. Like I also have this business and you're

transparent about it and like, you you've provided some value in these snarky threads and become friends with some of the people, then they'll work with you and almost like help you promote your stuff. And so the average person isn't willing to put that effort in, but yeah, if you just show up on Reddit with a brand new account and your first or second post is like, goodbye my bread oven, good luck to you. Yeah, it's totally true. But at the same token too, I think the way to approach it, if you are thinking about it is if you do have helpful content on your website,

Reddit does seem to reward that. They hate self -promotion of products, but actual useful content, which kind of in a backwards way is promoting your product, you know, a little bit deeper down the funnel that seems to slip through a little bit less tainted by the Reddit audience. So I think if I was approaching it from a marketing perspective or Reddit, that's how I would approach it. So never post a product link, but you know, helpful content, which goes to your e -commerce website and indirectly kind of

promotes your products is the way to go, not direct product promotion. That will just get you blamed left, right, and center. And there will be nothing worse for a product than if you search for best bread oven and Mike Jackson says bread oven is like blamed left, right, and center. Right. But I mean, I think it's a legitimate, you know, if you're talking about e -commerce business model at this point, or a thing that you would spend effort on to go on a Reddit into the, baking subreddits. mean, there's probably multiple of them. There's probably even one on making bread specifically, I would not be surprised.

Ecomcrew (21:46.846)
And being an advocate in there and, or, you know, helping people answer questions that they have, posting your recipes or things that like in ways to make bread and like slowly talk about your brand, you know, eventually it's like, you we, we like, kind of put it maybe in the footer of, you know, I have experienced, we run this other bread making company or whatever, slowly pointing to some of your own videos and content. I do think that you can make inroads there over, you know, three, six month period and become kind of a trusted member of that community. And again, then maybe start.

slowly promoting your products. I don't know, but you gotta be very careful. Cause like Dave said very quickly, can be, you're only here to promote your stuff. Your product sucks. You're going to draw more attention in the Reddit community. Someone's going to actually buy your thing. If it's not legitimately good or they have a problem with it, you're going to be hearing about it. So tread lightly. We're spread out the number. Yeah. You do not want that. Yep.

Yeah, so I guess we'll see what happens. Google does seem to have a habit of doing these types of updates once a year, very similar to Amazon actually, where Amazon rolls out a big fee update and some major policy change once a year. It's not this gradual incremental thing. It seems to be on a cadence of once a year. And we're getting close to that kind of one year mark right now where the helpful update first rolled out. So I guess we'll see what the next big update achieves and whether maybe they make some changes to the favoritism towards Reddit and

less so to e -commerce sites, but e -commerce sites were the other big winner in the helpful update. So we'll see if things do change in that regard. you know, start to be that three years now, Reddit does not have the same variability and Google results. What they do now, all things being equal. Cause like, think Google could have changed completely as a platform probably over the next three years. Cause all these AI results, but all things being equal, I would say that Reddit will not, this is not a permanent thing. Yeah. mean, Reddit could be facing their own

Facebook moment at some point in the future. And we all know what Facebook went through right after that election scandal. So we'll see maybe Reddit has a Facebook moment in their future. Yeah. I mean, Facebook has managed to survive. You know, so we'll, you know, who knows, who knows what happens from here? Cool. All right. Well, I think we're at the top of the hour here. Our double podcast. We, we achieved amazing economies of scale on this. We should do a third Dave. We could, but I think you have lunch plans. I do have lunch plans.

Ecomcrew (24:06.318)
So we'll save it for another day. All right. Well, until the next one, happy selling everyone. We'll talk to you soon. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the eCom Crew podcast. If you haven't done so already, please head over to iTunes and leave us a review. It helps more than you know. Did you know that eCom Crew has a ton of free content, including eCommerce courses? Head over to eComCrew .com slash free to check it out today.

That's going to do it for this episode of the Ecom Crew Podcast. Until the next one, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.