Glen Allsopp’s Post

I put a ton of work into this, so I really hope you find it valuable.

Another super interesting and invaluable piece of work Glen, an absolutely fascinating read. I agree with your conclusions on how long this current situation will prevail - I can't imagine that Google will want to tolerate so much indirect spam, and I can't imagine that Redditors will want to stick it out either. Having let the genie out of the box they'll almost certainly be trying to cram it back in, and that in itself might not be great for the Reddit IPO if the market decides to price this in. Interestingly I can't see any lift in traffic from Reddit to any of the sites I manage (and we certainly haven't engaged in any spamming to capitalise on this wave of visibility), but then when I went searching for any insight into how to accurately spot reddit as a referrer in your GA data, what I got in the SERP was a page of.....Reddit results.

Some great insight here Glen Allsopp - do you have any thoughts on why Google is favouring 'forum' sites and platforms like Reddit and Quora so much? Have they messed up the HCU and EEAT signals so much that they are relying on these sites in the short term while they fix the algo, for instance?

Reddit has the same issue as Twitter comments - filled with AI spam with links. As a user, I much prefered just adding “Reddit” to the end of search query to get valuable results. This is ruined now.

Thank you Glen Allsopp for the work you put into this! Reddit (and Quora) is way over represented now. I thought Quora lost a bit of its domination after a HCU follow up update. Sad to see independent sites marginalized to such an extent.

Fantastic insights. I'm not incredibly surprised by the outcome. The result of the overweighting of forums in SERP has now led to a poor experience for consumers who are searching and for the forums who are now dealing with an unprecedented level of spam. I also find it rich that Google is favoring forums in 2024 after having killed most of them off with Panda.

This is Gold, brilliant, accurate and fascinating. Glen Allsopp Thank you, I already shared it with my folks.

Glen Allsopp This is a great piece of analysis, thank you. I'm sure it's also not remotely surprising to anyone producing affiliate-related content. It really does blow your mind that Google could create such a back door into the SERPs for black hat folks to exploit AND allow this problem to persist for so long (the signs have been clear since at least August 2023). Here's a question for people likely to read this thread with intimate knowledge of Reddit's huge visibility increase... Google presumably has some code that force injected Reddit into the SERP, usually between positions 4-6. The same applies to SERP features that are proliferating at an extraordinary rate. Do people think these injections cause havoc with their rankings beyond just moving an article one or two places? I've certainly seen countless examples where an article is suddenly languishing in 37th or 53rd position in the SERP after ranking consistently on 'page one' for years. Every time this happens and I check the SERP an abundance of SERP units are found, including those big deal blocks Google inserts (sometimes two pages of scrolling). Are we seeing otherwise healthy pages being 'torpedoed' out of the SERPs by these changes?

Forums are really interesting to learn from. Looking at this post (its ranking), we'd never search Google like this, providing such detailed information. And look at the top response...most product descriptions aren't that good when professionals write them. Short, concise, and high on information. Albeit, I know SEOs are spamming these now. But I do think it's interesting that these sites are being rewarded (for now). There's probably a lot of learning points from studying forum content.

Looking forward to this one!