Well folks- the heartless, faceless search team at Google has spoken… The March 2024 Core Update has officially been completed. And the result? An online ecosystem that is significantly more hollow, less diverse, and less helpful than ever before. Small, independent voices have been nearly erased from the search results, while big corporations are now ubiquitous. Information is now being controlled by a small number of players who are providing thin, general, impersonal and mainstream content. This is all happening in an election year, too. What could possibly go wrong? Here’s some context: since last fall, Google has been systematically penalizing small independent sites who monetize with ads and affiliate marketing. For years, this business model has been mutually beneficial for websites and consumers, allowing bloggers and niche sites to provide high-quality content to readers for FREE in return for some in-content ads/affiliate links on their sites. However, Google and a handful of institutional investors have now chosen to go down the war path against any and all small websites who stand in the way of them achieving maximum profits. To achieve this, they are using a “manual classifier” to penalize all parts of these websites, making it impossible to compete against the big players who are financially tied to Google, including e-commerce giants that use Google Ads & user-generated content platforms like Reddit, which lack the EEAT (expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness) that Google claims to value. PR spokespeople for Google have gone to great lengths to avoid conversation about this issue. They have done nothing to help out small creators to rebound their traffic and understand why they have been hit so hard while big publishers have taken over all the search results. This is pretty evil in my opinion, and it doesn’t just harm small creators, it harms everyone. Without a free, fair, and open internet, people will be left in the dark. In the travel industry that I’m in, it means that internet users will now see lower quality advice. Big sites like Forbes, Travel + Leisure, and Conde Nast do not have a financial incentive to provide high-quality tips and hacks that saves people time, money, and hassle while traveling. Their content is generally lean/thin and doesn’t provide much nuance. And without small sites like mine to compete with, you can bet that their content will get a lot worse. If diversity and innovation truly matter to Google, then it’s time to stop sidelining the small, the independent, and the innovative. You have an ethical and legal obligation to make the internet an even playing field once again. Do the right thing, or face the karmic consequences. @googlesearchc