Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

This post sits wrong with me. They&#x27;re not entitled to increasing traffic forever, and when traffic drops, it&#x27;s not always due to an external force being exerted onto you.<p>I actually subscribe to RetroDodo on Youtube and noticed that I don&#x27;t view their content anymore. This has less to do with any &quot;algorithm&quot; but rather the fact that their &quot;voice&quot; seems to have changed (both figuratively and literally... a lot of their videos have a new &quot;host&quot; altogether) and that they&#x27;re directing more energy at different things (books, discussions about the industry, more gimmicky videos, etc) that aren&#x27;t giving them the same return.<p>The founder used to post about gaming-related &quot;SEO plays&quot; (some wikipedia for Pokemon or something if I remember correctly?) on his personal YouTube channel. With this in mind, I get the feeling that SEO has become more of a focus than what brought in his audience in the first place.

I&#x27;ll start by saying, I&#x27;m sorry this is happening to the retrododo team, I hadn&#x27;t heard of them before this article (I&#x27;m not really intro retro games) but it seems like they make genuinely good and useful content for the community.<p>On the other hand, more and more these days I see articles &amp; videos that I (possibly unfairly) summarize as &quot;My content deserves to be prioritized by &#x27;the algorithm&#x27; and $BIG_CORP is against me&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not a full time content creator so again maybe that factors into the mentality - but I honestly don&#x27;t understand why so many people seem to believe that their content not doing well by some arbitrary standard means some force is against them. To me it seems more like building your brand organically, publishing via &quot;open&quot; platforms (and yes, I&#x27;m aware that&#x27;s getting harder and harder) and encouraging your supporters to interact with you on platforms you control would be much more sustainable than expecting &#x27;the algorithm(s)&#x27; will provide you with your expected growth.<p>I don&#x27;t even use google, so if I were interested in getting &quot;the best arcade cabinet&quot; as one of the examples the author used - I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use, which are the places I would expect to hear about Retro Dodo

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic.<p>The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.<p>The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine.<p>With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

It&#x27;s frustrating to see a post like this just blaming Google for their issues, when perhaps their reporting&#x2F;reviews might be at fault? Many people who look up reviews for products reviewed by Retro Dodo often criticize the reviews for lacking substance or getting very basic facts wrong.<p>I know that I added them to my personal filter list when I found them providing mis-info or just click-farming off of unannounced products.

For a while now, I have been wondering what it is that a small search provider like Kagi can do to have such an advantage over the R&amp;D behemoth Google, measured in terms of blocking garbage results. This is eye-opening:<p>&gt;<i>And to rub salt into the wound, it was discovered that Google is paying some media companies “five figures” to use their AI to automatically scrape content from other publishers’ work (who have paid expert humans to produce) and publish it as news twice a day on their websites.</i><p>For every one thing you hear about, there are nine you don&#x27;t. Apparently, the difference in quality is about what Kagi is <i>not</i> doing.

I left the article being like &quot;oh it can&#x27;t be that bad&quot; and left my little Kagi oasis to try out some Google searches similar to the article and I&#x27;ve completely changed my tune. What in the hell happened? There&#x27;s nary an organic result to be found, 80% of the page is shopping garbage and sponsored links, the few organic results are blogspam, and there&#x27;s banner ads in the middle of results now?<p>The folks here in the comments are missing the forest for the trees here, sure algo tweaks reshuffle winners and losers but there&#x27;s almost no results that aren&#x27;t Google&#x27;s own scraped content and ad spots. No amount of &quot;make better content&quot; can push you above the fold.

Every site in the world considers the Google algorithm &quot;fair&quot; when they are highly ranked and &quot;illegal&quot; when they are not. Ultimately you are not owed a spot in their top 10. The answer is to find other avenues for marketing and not rely on a single corporation to act as a free funnel for user growth.

While it is simple to blame Google for traffic surge, the thing is that I have them on my RSS reader for years and I barely visit the site even once a month.<p>Articles are not interesting to me at large, 99.9% of the time, there is no comments sections to correct them or engage and challenge authors or other readers, seems like owners so not care about what their audience has to say. They only care about views. There is no community at the site, so they are at mercy of a search engine without spending a dime on advertising.<p>There is only room for a few &quot;best top 10 Pokemon ROM hacks&quot; articles... It was good when it last, but all comes to an end...

(this is a response to a comment that has been deleted while i was writing it<p>i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author).<p>if this is not ok, then i&#x27;ll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a good reason to not have it posted, you may contact me by email (see profile))<p>the comment:<p><i>I think this is a feature, not a bug. The economic precariousness that the author describes is what makes the opinions of small outfits like his suspect. It&#x27;s just too easy for companies to influence them with special treatment or outright payments. Reddit, for all of its faults, is hard to bribe. That is by design. We built mechanisms to intentionally cultivate diverse and redundant communities. Even if you try to control the mods of some particular subreddit, you are probably just shifting where the definitive&#x2F;highly ranked conversations on a topic end up happening.<p>The author seems to decry Reddit as &quot;not expert&quot;, but I think what its ascent has proven is the collective opinion of disinterested amateurs is often the best available.</i><p>my response:<p>that implies that every independent content producer is corrupt and only caters to the highest bidder.<p>how does reddit help here? each community is independent even on reddit. there are good and bad ones. a small community on reddit would be just as susceptible to manipulation as would a small community of the same size on an independent site.<p>and reddit is hard to bribe? well, maybe in specific cases, but reddit needs to cater to its advertisers just as well.<p>reddit, youtube and any other large site will only be able to represent the majority views because they can&#x27;t cater to minorities that conflict with those views. advertisers won&#x27;t have it.<p>an independent site can be completely onesided and be under the influence of some financial interest. or it can remain independent and actually represent the interests of its members in a way that reddit et al. can not.

Who are these guys? Oh they wrote a book for example, ok let&#x27;s search for that topic: <i>handheld history</i>.<p>15 results of book stores (including the publisher they released on), reviews, other news sites, all covering their book, and then near bottom, their own page on the book. That doesn&#x27;t seem off really, their product is still reachable. Whether they should be considered the authority, or the <i>store</i> selling it should be, is up for debate.

It&#x27;s time to relaunch curated content in any form, directories, tagging etc.<p>2023 and 2024 has demonstrated handily that the entire web is at risk if we trust large corporations with everything.

A lot of youtubers who run full time travel channels have started their own backup streaming video system. A lot of these guys have half million dollar sailboats or catamarans and getting demonetized would be disastrous.<p>If you hitch your wagon to the google bus, and the bus crashes, you don&#x27;t have much recourse.

I&#x27;ve been into retro gaming for a while (primarily consoles) and this is the first I&#x27;ve heard of this site. I&#x27;ve also not actively searched for &quot;best ds games&quot; or similar in the past 10 years as I just know to go to Racketboy [1] (which is currently down, so not a great look).<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240320154449&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.racketboy.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240320154449&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.racke...</a>

First you become value creating, then value extracting.<p>On a deeper note: Search is challenged. With the advent of first niche communities and now LLMs the traditional idea behind search engines is a left over from the 00s. Google need to earn by ads.<p>Retro Dodo probably need to focus on a niche community and retention over organic traffic like so many other small &#x2F; indie shops.<p>Personally I use Kagi who are also in the business of disrupting them selves using LLMs - at least they have a business model that absorbs it.

Using the free version of the checkbot browser extension to scan 100 pages from your site shows that your HTML is not valid (0% - all pages have an error) and CSS is 90% valid. Correcting this might change your search traffic.

I see some comments here regarding Google or Meta market dominance, but the root issue is the open web&#x27;s transition to controlled platforms. The rise of discord, twitch, or TikTok point to a continued trend and not a reversal. If I am a leader in content discovery or information aggregation, then I will have to work with the existing platforms like reddit to surface information. If Discord made itself discoverable, then search engines would instantly drive organic traffic to discord servers. But it is a closed platform. Forums fell in popularity for platforms with mobile apps that offer consistent interfaces, single user names, and easy-to-use community tools. The market is wide open for new content discoverability solutions but one would have to solve for the closed platforms dominating internet discourse today.<p>I cite Discord because it is text-first compared to Twitch. As an elder millennial, I find myself using Discord to interact with niche communities. For example, I care about a specific synthesizer emulation project. They have a discord server where we can discuss feature releases or music in general. Twenty years ago this community would be its own forum or a thread on a larger forum. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsp56300.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsp56300.wordpress.com</a><p>Lastly, if discoverability is monopolized by one player, then why and how did TikTok explode in the last five years? It is not the front page of the internet for all, but it is for certain age groups.

&quot;blogging&quot; is not as profitable as it used to be, episode 12512

I would be interested to know why Google has presumably identified this site as spam. Too many SEO gimmicks that have flagged the site?

tbh I trust a small dedicated subreddit more than a website I just heard of today.

Kagi small sites FTW.

When you drink from the Google firehose it&#x27;s not IF but WHEN you drown. I gave up on Google and their SEO metrics and crap almost two DECADES ago as it was clear where their DONT BE EVIL was going. Sheeple just put up with line after line of SPONSORED search results because the honestly have no clue, so it&#x27;s NEVER been a level playing field. It just took you longer to join the ranks of the shafted. Now if you spend some time ENGAGING with your clients instead of &quot;organic search growth&quot; you may do better. I&#x27;ve dropped Reddit as well but you know GROUPS.IO? DISCORD? (useful but Im not a big fan), BLOGS - i.e build a community and give Google the digit.

This is really sad and upsetting to see.<p>The real valuable content created by regular people is being obfuscated by useless AI white noise and nonsense content mill shit from giant corporations.<p>Things just keep getting worse and worse for media.

This sucks, I’ve enjoyed some of their YouTube videos.<p>But why is every link on their website purple like I’ve already read it? Oh because their brand is purple.<p>Really sucks as a reader.

A lot of SEO influencers on twitter have been bragging their tactics to get traffic by using AI spam and other gimmicks. Now they come crying. Not saying this is the case with this specific site, but if you provide actual useful content you will send signals to G and you will rank. spam sites, content farming, and other SEO gimmicks should rightfully be deranked.<p>Also people who keep insisting on building solely and relying exclusively on SEO do not run a business but a franchise where the franchisor is Google and the franchisee’s conditions are reviewed and changed at moments notice with no recourse

The main culprit is this:<p>&gt; Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.<p>&gt; Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.<p>Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people&#x27;s sites for 7 straight months now.<p>You can read about that here,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seroundtable.com&#x2F;no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-recoveries-37144.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seroundtable.com&#x2F;no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-r...</a><p>and also this tweet:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;glenngabe&#x2F;status&#x2F;1775495481604358363" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;glenngabe&#x2F;status&#x2F;1775495481604358363</a><p>--<p>This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the &quot;Helpful Content Update&quot;) that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and&#x2F;or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.<p>From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.

Google is going to shit. Bring back Matt Cutts. Google&#x27;s AI is unfinished and they&#x27;re forcing it into search.