From the Editor: Google Has Made it Harder to Find Indie Sites Like Ours. Here’s How You Can Help.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Like all posts on this site, this post is the opinion of its respective authors. In addition, because of the nature of this topic, we do not have any ads or affiliate links running on this post.

It’s no secret that Google is, and long has been, the king of search. Google search accounts for more than 90% of all searches worldwide. (Bing holds a distant second place at a little more than 3%.) “Googling” became a household verb in the early 2000s and the company has never looked back.

It’s also no secret that the search landscape is changing. Change is the one constant in this world, and it is no more true than when it comes to technology. The emergence of artificial intelligence, which both Bing and Google continue to develop, promises to remake the search landscape. Google rolled out AI overviews in the U.S. just this week, and in the not-too-distant future, AI may drive search more comprehensively, at least once the bugs are worked out. The impact of AI remains to be seen, but it does pose challenges for both users and writers.

Another ongoing change is the way search engines tweak how they rank what sites users see in a search. Google uses a complicated algorithm to serve up search results, and it weighs various factors to decide what websites rank highest. Some of those factors we know, and some we don’t. Those factors can and have changed over time … and they can have a big impact on websites.

Google Shakes Things Up

The search giant rolled out two big adjustments to its search algorithms in 2023 and 2024. The first took effect in September of 2023, while the second one rolled out in March of 2024. Describing all the finer details of these updates would take up a whole post in itself, but here’s the impact we and others have seen, and you’ve likely seen it, too:

1. Large media sites are getting a lot more search love. Where in the past independent sites like ours could compete with corporate conglomerates, the new updates seem more likely to reward large media sites, regardless of how much of an authority or not those big media sites are on whatever they’re writing about. Some bloggers have pointed out high-ranking posts written by big media sites that aren’t necessarily of the best quality. We tend to agree.
2. Reddit is getting a lot more prominence. If you thought you were seeing a lot more Reddit (and Quora) in your searches, no, you’re not seeing things. Reddit posts have ranked higher since the recent updates, sometimes within minutes of being posted. This is on purpose, the result of a partnership between Reddit and Google.
3. E-commerce sites are being pushed above content sites. In the past, sites that wrote about products could compete with sites that sold products. That’s shifted, with the recent updates pushing up more sites that sell products at the expense of product review sites.

Many observers are concerned about the state of Google search, and these recent changes have only fueled those concerns.

How It Impacts Us

For a long time, our site has done well when it comes to Google searches related to Aldi. Why? Because we specialize in covering the grocer and we try to write content that is relevant and comprehensive. We live and breathe Aldi coverage, including through extensive hands-on reviews of more than a thousand different Aldi products, several hundred posts about Aldi’s distant cousin, Trader Joe’s, and thousands of features, news pieces, and other coverage of the Aldi universe.

Google is not our only traffic source: we get readers from the likes of Bing, Pinterest, Facebook, and other places. We are also privileged to have many readers who follow our work through our newsletter, some of whom may be reading this right now.

That said, Google remains, for us, a major source of readers. If people in the past have searched for information about Aldi products, there’s a decent chance they saw us.

Google’s recent changes have made it where fewer people now see us when searching for Aldi than before. It’s not as catastrophic as some sites have experienced, but we’ve felt it. And our site is not alone: we’ve interacted with and read about numerous other independent bloggers like us who work hard to write quality content and have nevertheless seen their search rankings slide.

How You Can Help

The good news is there are simple ways you can continue to support us. What you can do for us also applies to many other independent sites.

One thing we are not asking for is money. Some sites are reader-supported through paywalls, subscriptions, or donations, and while we have no problem with that, it is not our current vision for this site. Our site remains supported by a mix of ads and affiliate links. We do not ask readers to pay money to support our site.

Instead, here’s what readers can do:

1. Subscribe to our newsletter. If you have not yet subscribed to our newsletter, you can do so right here. It’s free, it goes out twice a week, and it contains a roundup of our latest posts. We don’t sell or give away your information to anybody. And if you are a subscriber: thank you.
2. Feel free to share our content in groups or message boards when appropriate. If you see a social media thread or message board thread about a product and we’ve covered it, you can give us some love by linking to our pieces in the comments of those groups. If it’s not relevant, don’t — we aren’t looking to spam people, but instead to spread the word about the work we do in authentic ways.
3. Follow us on social media. You can track us down on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Thank you for reading, and for your support!