Earlier this week I came across an article on SEO blog Viperchill about how 16 companies are dominating the world’s Google search results. I found it quite eye-opening as well as a bit disconcerting. Brands/websites that most of us think as separate are actually owned by the same parent company and are not really offering us totally separate opinions. Apart from that, they can interlink between them in order to dominate the search results.
Out of curiosity, I checked whether this is already happening in the WordPress world as well, and sure enough, it is. I remember a year or two ago the search results for “best WordPress hosting”, just to go for a popular keyword phrase, used to be dominated by WordPress blogs and some hosting companies.
But now we see top entries that are part of the 16 companies mentioned in the article. In this case, Techradar is owned by Future and PCMag and Mashable are owned by Ziff Davis. As can be expected, their articles are quite generic and don’t really offer much info on the topic, however they manage to rank very well and undoubtedly bring in a lot of money through affiliate commissions every month.
It’s a trend I expect to see more of in the coming years, also because we are seeing a lot of actual consolidation and company acquisitions within the WordPress space itself.
4 Responses
You really think Google cares…
I hope it will happen, but I don’t think Google cares. That’s one of the problems with the internet today. Earlier this week I listened to a great podcast episode on related topics: https://samharris.org/podcasts/136-digital-humanism/
Makes it very hard for new players to enter the ranks for medium density keywords like this.
To me, this is a big failure on Google’s part to be providing the very best results for a query like this. Rather than pull the site that has the best information on the topic they’re weighing the popularity of certain sites far too heavily.
Hoping that they realise this soon and we’ll see a shuffling of results in these types of keywords (it’s happened before and it will happen again).
Agreed, I do hope that will happen soon.