@Micha
To me it looks more like the leading media outlets have too much trust from Google and the automated rating systems downgrade the trustworthiness of other sites because of this. But of course I can only speculate.
Could be. A contact of mine is complaining that Reddit is outranking the source content in their observations.
@EditorialGuy
My experience has been the opposite. In the current update, and especially in the last couple of weeks or so, our informational travel site's top pages seem to focus even more on "topical authority" than usual. Currently, the top 10 pages are almost always about [Destination 1] + [our most popular subtopic] and [Destination 2] + [our most popular subtopic].
A travel related site that I monitor uses a similar technique. It is ad heavy to the point of being a pain to enjoy reading the good content, but the content itself is about [Destination 1] + [popular subtopic's]. The traffic to this site grew very strongly since 2018 as content was added. Articles did not all rank straight away, but let's say 1 in 3 or 4 went straight into the top 10 within days or a few short weeks.
I wonder if these types of sites could be vulnerable to the ongoing march on AI where images, and subject matter can be written on all subjects and referenced to "headline authorities" (ie brand, Reddit's etc). Topical authority may be playing 2nd place to just "authority" in the eyes of G.
Again, just me saying as I don't know.
PS I think the current guidance from G is way too vague. Folks deserve not to be blindsided by this incredible life changing effect on business without a better level of accountability for webmasters to respond to. G is so pervasively dominant in the business World it needs to be brought into line with a better level of transparency IMO.
[edited by: not2easy at 12:28 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2024]
[edit reason] April thread split cleanup [/edit]
