Has Google's algorithm been demoting one-person sites?

[aristotle]

One impression I get from reading these threads is that one-person sites (also blogs) are steadily losing out in google against larger operations. Most likely google's algorithm can usually identify a one-person site from various clues.

As a hypothetical example, why would google send more traffic to a 3-year-old one-person general news site than to the site of a large well-known news organization that's been around for decades?

Of course there can be exceptions. I know of a "news blog" started by one person about 20 years ago that's still doing pretty well. But after its initial success, several new writers and regular contributors were added. So it's no longer a one-person site.

But I think this trend also applies to various other types of sites, both one-person e-commerce sites and informational sites.

[tangor]

Could our CMS and/or SEO plugin be leaking those stats to Google unbeknownst to us?

Ya think?

</thesethingsworkbecauseofg>

[EditorialGuy]

Our mom-and-pop site is doing just fine in Google. It wasn't so many years ago that big corporate sites and Wikipedia outranked us for our most popular queries. Now, we nearly always outrank them.

IMO, it stands to reason that in some categories (news), big-name sites are going to have an advantage over mom-and/or-pop sites if only because they have more resources and a track record of credibility. But for information niches like ours (involving travel destinations), there's no reason why a small site can't be competitive.

[Steven29]

I would say they are looking the other way for big corporation websites and allowing them to do whatever they want. Ive reported obvious webspam for years now and believe ive found out why nothing has happened, its reddit creating a subforum and trying to take over the niche. They are allowing them to bot and spam 1 person websites in an attempt to get them to stop posting content for free [only posting content to big brands] and trying to force them to pay for advertising. How? By posting on multiple domains until one of them outranks your article within the hour of posting it. Makes posting content almost pointless. If you are being attacked i woukd look into blocking all non usa and Canada traffic [clouds and hack3d pcs] and then blocking all usa cloud hosting ip addresses. Ive got new domains in my niche that will make back the cost of the domain in 20 years...

If you ever get a response all google will say is "we are not the police'.

[tangor]

I'm not gonna post the obvious reply to that! :)

[EditorialGuy]

They are allowing them to bot and spam 1 person websites in an attempt to get them to stop posting content for free [only posting content to big brands] and trying to force them to pay for advertising.

Most information sites don't buy advertising, and many of the competitive informational SERPs that I watch don't even have ads.

Content marketers and click arbitrageurs may buy ads, but genuine informational (a.k.a. editorial) sites? Not so much, for simple ROI reasons.

[Mark_A]

@tangor

One might say there are too many destinations out there these days. (sigh)

Indeed, and too much social media for us perhaps also. I now daily look at a general forum, two specialist forums, WebmasterWorld, LinkedIn, twitter, fb, bbc news etc - it is all I can do to keep up after a fashion far less to actively contribute or get the most of it!

[Bluejeans]

Our mom-and-pop site is doing just fine in Google

Congrats. But mom-and-pop is two people, not one. Big difference.