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13 minutes In the Academy Award-nominated film Food Inc, filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals how the varied choice of items we see on the shelves of supermarkets is actually a false presumption. Instead, that seemingly endless variety is actually controlled by just a handful of companies. Today I’m going to reveal how the huge diversity we perceive in Google search results is once again a few large corporations controlling what we assume to be choice. More specifically I’ll reveal how just 16 core companies are dominating the most popular industries online and how that situation is going to get a whole lot worse. To begin our journey down the rabbit hole together, I want to take you through a series of events which uncovered something I had never considered before about the industry in which I operate: Are the Google rankings I aim to get for myself and my clients actually controlled by just three hands full of companies?

Around two weeks ago I came across a on Reddit about Hearst Media. I was unfamiliar with Hearst Media but very familiar with the brands they own such as Esquire, Elle and Cosmopolitan. The Reddit outing, which was shared on a new account, claimed that Hearst were using their powerful brands to “game Google” and rank a new website of theirs very quickly, using slightly shady practices. Being an inquisitive marketer I had to check it out for myself. The quick summary is that Hearst clearly were (and still are) using their authoritative brands to point links to their latest venture, BestProducts.com. While I expected BestProducts.com to be receiving a lot of traffic from the brands linking to them – which also include Marie Claire and Woman’s Day – I didn’t expect Google to have taken such a huge liking to them.

Especially when the site in question had zero reason prior to be ranking so well (it was owned previously then the domain dropped a few years ago). To give an overview of what was happening for those who are skimming this article, the situation looks like this.

The arrows in this picture represent links. There are far more brands involved in this network, but we’ll get to those in a second. As I stated earlier, I was far more surprised by how Google reacted to this. Launched in October, They Now Receive More than 600,000 Visitors from Google Per Month Here’s the graph that kick started the countless days of research I did for this blog post. As we can see, the estimated traffic to BestProducts has shot up dramatically in the last few months. SEMRush is showing similar numbers, as we’ll get to in a second.

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With 62% of their traffic estimated to be coming from Google, that’s at least 600,000 organic (free) website visitors for the month of April. I expect the data for May will be significantly higher, but I have to wait until June 10th to see (that’s when SimilarWeb confirm they’ll update their reporting). So Why Am I Surprised? Tons of authoritative sites linking to you is obviously great for SEO. But as anyone who has been involved in search engine optimisation for a period of time might wonder, surely getting so many sitewide links in a short timeframe should raise a bit of a red flag?

Even if the links in question are from some of the biggest media brands in the world. Here’s a few examples. Esquire.com (Product Reviews) Elle.com (Beauty Reviews) Cosmopolitan.com (Beauty Reviews) MarieClaire.com (Reviews) PopularMechanics.com (Product Reviews) Now, I will say that 90% of me thinks there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, you’ll see the majority of this post is focused on why I’m surprised Google give the resulting website so much traffic.

Quite simply if I owned a lot of websites, I would be fine linking them together. If for nothing more than from a usability standpoint. That being said, 10% of me is a little surprised that these link texts and locations are constantly changing. I think it’s a bit risky on their part. As of publishing this post, Cosmopolitan use ‘Beauty Reviews’ as the anchor text of their footer to the site.

Previously it was in a different placement and used the anchor text ‘Style Reviews’. These are not static footer links that have been left alone (and not just on one site). They’re changing to different pages – and using different words – on a fairly frequent basis. To me this takes the situation away from “they’re just linking to their own site” to “they’re doing a lot of tweaking to see which results in higher rankings.” You could argue they’re testing it for usability reasons, but you’ll see in a moment why I think they know a thing or two about SEO. Before I get into that, I wanted to see if I could figure out when these links were added to their network.

Were they all thrown up at once and it took a while for them to have an impact, or was there some clear plan behind the links from Hearst Media’s various brands? Here’s some of the data I managed to uncover on when each site first linked to BestProducts (I bolded those that linked on the same day).

• PopularMechanics.com – November 5th • Esquire.com – November 5th • Cosmopolitan.com – January 1st • Seventeen.com – January 12th • RedbookMag.com – February 23rd • Elle.com – March 15th • CountryLiving.com – March 18th • WomansDay.com – April 5th • MarieClaire.com – April 5th • RoadandTrack.com – April 13th For my own curiosity, I was glad I took the time to trawl through every screenshot on Archive.org to find these answers. It’s now obvious that the people working for Woman’s Day, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics and Esquire had some conversion that went along the lines of, “Don’t forget, today’s the day we have to put those links to Best Products in the footer.” As I said earlier, I don’t really care too much about what Hearst media are doing with their “link network” of magazine brands.

I don’t see anything wrong with it and don’t think Google should either. That being said, because I’ve done more research for this blog post than any other, I do want to add that they purchased the most successful SEO agency on the planet just a few years ago. If you can’t read that because of my small post width (I’m working on a redesign), they paid $325 million for an agency that generated more than 60% of their revenues from SEO clients.

At the time of acquisition iCrossing were also the biggest search agency in the world based on revenue numbers. In other words, the staff at Hearst Media comprises of a large number of people who know a lot about SEO. To me this explains the slow buildup of network links and the semi-frequent changing of URL’s and link text in their website footer. I Have No Problem With What Hearst Are Doing. Google’s Reaction Is What Really Interests Me I’ve said it a few times but I’ll say it once more for anyone skimming the post: This is by no means an attack on Hearst Media. They own the websites so they’re welcome to do with them as they please. They also made BestProducts a rather attractive looking website.

Then again, I’m surprised at how well their strategy is working. I’m not naive – I know that authoritative links equal a good chance of increased search rankings – but I didn’t expect they would be outranking some of the biggest brands on the internet for search terms that can make them a lot of money. From Zero to $583,000 in Free Search Traffic We’ve already looked at the data from SimilarWeb, but the stats from SEMRush are interesting as well. SEMRush pips BestProducts at ranking for over half a million dollar’s worth of search queries (if you were to buy them via Google Adwords) in a very short space of time. That was a really interesting blog post. I knew the day would come when the large companies would start to dominate SERPs like they do traditional print but I didn’t realise how quickly they’d start doing it.

The 6 weeks deployment time for a huge corporation is really amazing. These things normally take months due to internal bureaucracy, politics, etc. This means that they’re fucking serious about dominating the SERPs and I can only see them trying to get more and more of a strangle hold. It will be interesting (well, kinda scary actually) to see how much they’ll use this power to try and shape opinion online like other large online media corps do, eg Gawker. This reminds me of the big arguments about net neutrality, and the impact of FCC relaxing regulations that would have allowed telecom firms to favor some sites over others. Money talks, and with governments being either agnostic or favoring such firms, I can only imagine what would happen to smaller website despite better content/features. We have just started to build up SEO efforts at our financial platform, and such news is discouraging – one can only hope that good, smart content and irresistible features still pay off (if people actually get to see it).

Great Post Its interesting to see the results vary (back into sellers) and away from these media brands the minute search terms omit words like review, best, etc so as always the battle for businesses seeking people that transact rather than tyre-kicking / browsers is to find the right mix of SEO techniques that make the business seem relevant but not so relevant as to be penalised by Google etc in its drive to encourage PPC growth And doing all that whilst achieving an ROI, never easy! Stuart Haining MD Seriously Helpful Online Marketing UK. Great post Glen as always, my friend and have been following the same changes for a few years now. Google lost his mind when it comes to ranking the sites that matter, like you said they need to make money for their shareholders. But this is all screwed up right now, search results are Bought* these days not deserved* I like that you mentioned the France, the same thing is going on with facebook advertising, they manipulate our budgets for the ad campaigns, and facebook is afraid so much that they give you a question ” Are you from France” before even setting up your marketing campaign.

My $1 is not worth the same as the one from Switzerland for example. But France will not succeed on it’s own to fight Facebook and Google, we all need to help.

One step at a time. We all chase the profits of the first pages, that’s for sure, but what’s happening right now with Search Results is just a fight between small businesses who are trying to survive and big corporations who are winning the game. And honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google sold those positions on the first page to those corporations and big media companies. (not talking about ads) Have a great day and keep up the amazing work. Vini, we all know Google will do what they want but it bothers me that they meaning Google puts up articles telling us the little people not to put up site after site with links to our main site as they are tracking the owner or host or what every they said they will track to see if one person owns them all and stop us from doing that.

How is it right for a multi million dollar corporation to get away with exactly what Google tells us not to do? I could understand if they were paying Google but they are not, so will Google again change up there algorithm to fight this kind of dominance or do they even care. Great post Glen! I don’t think people realize the power of these brands. I encounter a similar situation but slightly different in the web hosting space: Out of the top 10 not including paid, on average 7 of the sites ranked are hosting brands owned by EIG or Endurance International.

If you Google reviews in the space, they don’t own the properties, but you can see they have pretty good dominance there too. If a brand ranks well, or competes in the affiliate space, they have been known to buy them. Hi Glen, Firstly good to get your mail and read your next informative post. I’ve been looking out since Jan.

The insights from this was worth the wait! Congrats on a deeply insightful investigative piece revealing how the BIG big gets bigger and dominate so extensively and quickly because they have the resources, huge brainpower and manpower to strategise the loopholes and move quickly to implement and conquer.nothing wrong with thathope it shakes Google a bit that this loophole strategy is now out in the open.and they may have to think harder to manage ramifications. A thoughtif you could create your insights into an infographic, I bet that would get pinned like crazy I recently saw Visual capitalist.com. Pretty strategic too with their business model Lastly I did notice the purple eharmony link being clicked.is that’s what you’ve really been busy with all these months Hey keep up the good work, and THANK YOU for this intelligent insight Cheers, CL. Hey Glenn, Does this mean that combo of PR + sitewide links with aggressive anchor text spread on major media guarantees results in specific vertical? I am asking because for my site I’m ranking for keyword “umbrella” on 2nd page purely on organic PR – no anchors whatsoever – does this mean if I get into 30-50 top level sites with exact anchor I would rank on page one?

So far we have (totally organic) around 200 referring domains, including some major publishers like Telegraph, Wired, Gizmodo Any advice is most welcome! This is an eye opening report for me. I was familiar with the dominance of Pepsico in beverage world and the likes of P&G but never thought the same could have been true for organic results. I can’t help relating to the dominance of Endurance International Group in the world of Hosting. Their acquisition of Several key web hosting brands is something I find very similar to this study.

Keep the good stuff coming. And might I ask the author’s name and Twitter handle?

I can’t really see a bio here, on mobile. Glen, Fantastic post! Makes me wonder if many other acquisitions that are happening are for the digital real estate to continue to propel their other properties on the SERPs.

I’ve been following some local developments with some convenience stores and the same thing is happening at the brick and mortar level as well. 7-11 has gotten on a buying spree and at least here is Texas, is aiming to dominate aka Walmart in the convenience store niche. There was an article post in the San Antonio Business journal just a few days ago about yet another battle for some acquisitions between 7-11 and Circle K big players with lots of cash to throw around. Thanks for the great post. I’ll be sure to read your follow up next week. That post took a TON of time and work – such value! Thank you SO much for sharing all your collected data and research with us.

I subscribe to the “why rank one when you can rank 10” mentality when working online, but sadly, the “little folks” like me tend to get NAILED when attempting to pull off backlinking like these big dogs do. Like you, I have zero problem with a web property linking to other web properties it owns/controls. To me, it SHOULD be done that way. I want to go back and read all this again (and probably again) – it really feeds my Google SERPs Geek brain cells.

Again, THANK YOU! This post took a boatload of work, time, and effort, and I know I am not the only one who really appreciates you sharing. Jennifer ~PotPieGirl. Great research.

It makes you wonder if we will see more SEO firms get bought up by publishing brands, in the effort to duplicate the success some of the brands you mentioned above have had. I work with a client in a particular niche who has recently learned the benefit of being able to use the DA of their multiple web properties in order to give new sites a boost.

They are now looking at the benefits of deploying sites across multiple verticals, by leveraging their existing network of sites. I imagine we will only see more of this consolidation in search rankings as things go forward. I actually don’t mind for *some* of the keywords.

The big companies have funds to hire quality writers and editors to put out genuinely good content. Of course, not saying all are great (ie Demand Media). If I were to generalize, many of the marketers online trying to rank for the example kws you posted are affiliates with, at times, biased reviews based on the commission they will make. Even the the arbitrage sites – Its the marketers killing the browsing experience.

When I want to see the 20 best performances of Britney Spears, I don’t want to have to click through 20 single pages that are surrounded by ads. Even on Amazon.

Knowing what I know about private labeling, it sometimes takes me 30 minutes longer just to research a product to make sure it’s not some cheap re-branded productanalyzing the copy, looking at reviews, checking alibaba, etc. That’s a great piece of content you wrote man. It is really not a new concept however you probably the first to dig into this like that. I’m a bit surprised by reactions where some say it’s unfair. Why is it unfair??? It is BUSINESS with a big B, period. Eitheir you dominate or you go home.

I dont think anyone would complan having 10 sites on page one, would they! Let’s learn from this and start to dominate our own markets. It is a learning lesson, hopefully people will take it like this. Thanks Glen for the good work. Hi Glen, Thanks for a great article. I ran across bestproducts.com a couple of weeks ago when a fellow blogger mentioned that he liked their site.

I did a bit of digging around and came up with similar, but less in depth findings than yourself. The results from semrush shocked me and then digging around with whois made me want to pack my bags and head for the seo cemetery! My conclusion was that the shareholders of the big players inc Google are probably all members of the same “Gin and tonic mafia” and are working together to limit choice and make Google results similar to a walk in Mandy’s Moreofthesame Shopping Mall. Same Big players, same narrow selection of choice, but with the illusion of a wide range of vendors. In effect an oligopoly.

I have now moved my focus to social media to drive traffic as I feel that I have more of a chance of being seen in this arena. RIP diversity in Google serps. Oh and also, I’ve noticed this for years but more so in recent months (6 months) mainly from Purch & Hearst, prior to that it was iAC, and About.com who purchased ConsumerSearch all those years ago for about $30 million. It’s also worth noting, as I mentioned in my article that it’s not just that these companies are beginning to realise how powerful and easy it is to leverage their network to launch new sites but also how non-competitive it is in the ‘best xxxx’ and ‘xxx review’ type of world and how much money can be made from affiliate marketing. A few years ago these companies were completely ignorant to affiliate marketing, they couldn’t care less because they were making big bucks from their display revenues. However, todays a different world and DSPs have made things significantly different, driving down CPM revenues, whilst their clients have also questioned the effectiveness of display and their competitors have begun trying to create more effective/measurable types of display advertising to appease their clients demands. Basically, these media companies have realised they needed a new revenue model and figured affiliate marketing might be it – they tried it and obviously it was a big success.

Now they have the power, the money and the technology to completely dominate the SERPs and they’re all jumping in on it. I am massively tired as I’ve just flown back to the UK from South Korea, so if this comment doesn’t make complete sense don’t blame me 😀. Brilliant research Glen. I’ve been suspecting something similar being afoot not because I’m as informed as you are, but know just how much power and influence major brands have. The age of the mega-corp is full on top of us (as conspiracy nuttty as that sounds) and just like that documentary which I also watched, the notion of choice and being informed is an illusion. A while back I noticed how people were getting their news from Facebook and Google services that people liked, doing some digging on that topic showed me how this practice results in the subscriber getting a very distorted view of reality because all they get fed as “news” is only what they “like” and hence reinforces their beliefs and worldview.

Over time, anything that they wouldn’t “like” is filtered out, and thus effectively censoring their perceptions to where “their” news is the only reality they know and believe is true. Nothing that can challenge or conflict with what they understand and know shows up in their feeds, making them unable to carry a actual informed conversation because their worldview is so biased.

At any rate, I am on the edge of my seat in anticipation as TBH, though expected on some level, you revealed just how heavy that hand is against which my own SEO struggles must contend with. Though deeply depressing to have it confirmed to this extent, I value what you have shown us greatly and look forward to your advice. Thanks for the insightful post, Glen.

As always your research gold. I think it’s naive to think that big brands don’t leverage a bit of shady SEO to get them that extra bit of exposure, after all, like you mentioned it all comes back to shareholders and profits. The SEO SERP race has never been more competitive. However, on the bright side, increased competition allows us as marketers to grow and become even more creative and innovative with our strategies. Marketers and SEO who don’t adapt quickly will get left behind and the ones who do preserve will be rewarded. Looking forward to your state of link building 2016 report.

Wow Glen, this was insanely interesting and really captivating! While I always new big brands dominated the search results (and rightly so), I was thinking of “Big Brands” as individual brands that are exceptionally strong meaning if we put in the effort to build up our own brands, we could theoretically stand a chance. I didn’t realize though that so many of these big brands were all owned by the same media companies. Very hard to compete against them in these verticals I would think. I’ve actually given up (lost interest) in all my content websites (sadly), mainly because of the amount of work required to keep them going, and even then it’s hard to make enough money to make them viable, but your findings really do make me glad that I’m no longer barking up that tree BTW: You were the reason I originally started building content websites many years ago LOL Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the small guy can’t be successful with a content website if he puts the work in and persists, but I’m just saying that it isn’t for me as it turns out.

Thankfully I’ve found easier ways to make money from websites that don’t require being a huge powerhouse media brand As always you’re a legend for uncovering this, and thank you for all the hard work you put into researching it. Great post Glen. Personally I find this depressing as hell. Because it seems to be part of greater economic and political trends towards concentrations of power and wealth inequality. Insane amounts of money and thus power are being concentrated at the very top, and so the illusion of choice presented by Food Inc companies and media companies is just part of a clever plan to keep people pacified, believing everything is balanced and they do have free choice. In actuality, (from an American perspective) power is concentrated in the hands of a very few corporations and the politicians they donate to, media to a few billion dollar companies, food, telecom companies, automotive companies, clothing everywhere I look I see monopoly and oligarchy.

Is this anything new? Back in the day Vanderbilts, Rockafellers, Rothschild, dominated. Now there are different faces playing the same game of monopoly. Perhaps this is just capitalism on capitalism on capitalism. The aim is to consolidate. But where does that leave everyone else?

I like seeing Vox pop up in search because they hire good writers, however they can’t hire everyone. In a day where everything is dominated by the few, what is the average working Joe (or average Amazon affiliate marketer in this case) supposed to do? Work for bestproducts.com? Super depressing post Glen, but great nonetheless. I didn’t realize online media was so consolidated and I’m gad I do now.

Keep them coming! Hi Glen, First, I would like to thank you for sharing such a detailed and much informative post with us. This post took my 20 mins to read it completely. God knows how much time you invested in drafting this post!

Also, you have stated in your post “Side note: If anyone has the skills to make a similar graphic with the brands I covered here I would include it” How about if I give a complete infographic on this? Would you publish it on your blog? If yes, I will design one and send it to you. Once again for such a great post.

Great post, Glen. For me this goes back to 2012 when Google basically said: “we can’t stop these pesky little guys from gaming our results so we’ll only return the big brands for the important spots in the results because they’ll presumably have decent content.” And they didn’t think that the big brands would eventually be 10x worse than the little guys for their users. I find Google really crap when I’m looking for something specific or technical that I know some independent blogger would answer really well but instead I get bland general stuff from big brands.

Hi Glen, Really interesting post, I wonder if these big brands will ever get penalised for these tactics – would Google even dare penalise this big brands? Probably not!

It’s scary to think how easy these big brands are cornering the SERPs, from using a tactic that should really be snuffed out by Google. It seems just like a high powered private blogging network to me. It will be interesting to see if any smaller brands try this method and see similar results as the big brands, or if they in turn get penalised.

Thanks for the great post! I think that Google has awful double standards. Their methods of evaluating websites are completely non-transparent. Furthermore, just try to talk to somebody at their products forum.

I have never seen more arrogant and aggressive representatives or the so called “top contributors”. The last thing you should expect there is seeing professional attitude. I also think that the most valuable thing for Google are people who use the search engine and the business that pay to reach these people. However, Google seems to forget why they became so big – because people love them. Things are changing very fast nowadays and I won’t be surprised if Google’s paranoid behavior and double standards for big and small companies soon or late turn against them. Personally, I stopped using their search engine.

I got enough results from only huge brands. Let’s admit it – Google doesn’t give a *** about somebody else but those who pay them. And I had enough with their double standard policy. Well, sometimes the results are not that great but I am trying to understand how can I find what I am looking for. Great, insightful read Glen. As you stated, I don’t fault companies for doing this, I think it’s a smart and logical tactic.

With that said, being an affilate marketer in some of those above mentioned niches can be a pain in the ass because of the monopoly of keywords/phrases some of the companies have online. I’ve gotten into the Rank and Rent method because of you. Shit, If I ever throw up enough niche related geo service sites using R&R that have some decent authority/rankings I’ll do the same as these 16 companies, why not.

Google has at least 2 patents that should not allow this to happen. Supposedly links from your own web properties should be worth very little (to limit voting for your own stuff).

That’s one reason PBN’s hide ownership. Additionally, multiple links from affiliated websites you don’t own should be devalued too to a single link (to prevent a single entity over-voting for a site, so that sites with many independent links are pushed up). Apparently, Google’s web property affiliation detection algorithm is shite. Great article and thank you for the work you put into it. Footer and site wide links are not an issue if they come from an authority site, especially those named in this article. If we look at verywell, the sheer volume of content it kicked off with would have taken a while to get fully indexed, the 301’s from about would have gone a long way to speeding that up and adding the domain authority required to rank. Interestingly if you look up about.com on 123-reg.co.uk you see this Whois Server Version 2.0 Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars.

Go to for detailed information. ABOUT.COM ABOUT.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM ABOUT.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM ABOUT.COM.

I actually just stumbled upon this article from a *cough* certain webmaster forum (not mentioning any names), and after first glancing over everything, then going back to read it all, all I can do is let out a surprised, girly gasp. I honestly had no idea how many websites were owned by the same companies LOL.

I have to say, I’m very, very surprised. Although at the same time, it makes sense. Much like the offline world, large companies dominate every aspect of commercial life. So naturally it would follow online. It’s a shame really, but what can you do.

We, the little guys, just have to strive that much harder! “Hearst’s New Site for Recommending ‘Best Products’ Is Called BestProducts.com” Wow! Could they be more transparent about writing a post purely for SEO purposes? Great post as usual, Glen! This whole brand/trust ranking factor with Google really irritates me, both as a webmaster and a searcher.

I guess I’m the exception, but when I’m searching for something, I couldn’t care less whether or not Google sees a site as a brand and/or trustworthy. I’m looking for an answer to my question and don’t care where I get it from.

If I do, then I’ll go directly to that site. I’ve never paid much attention to most of my searches, but I know I definitely get crap results when searching for phrases related to food/nutrition and music. When I search for something food related, I get mostly magazine-style sites (most of which you highlighted in this post) and they’re all the same. Generic (at best) content, in list form, spread out over multiple pages.

Not surprisingly, I use the back button a lot with searches like that. Music related searches are even worse.

Lots of similar content (artist/album content from the AMG database) and in some cases, no content. It’s just an ad/crap-filled page that says something like “we don’t have anything for this artist yet, click here to add something.” Gee, that’s helpful. How does Google not categorize that as a soft 404? Hey Glen, Great Research!

If these companies continue on this track, I see why it can be scary for smaller companies. But, I also see it as a motivator, suggestion or strategy that we can all use. Built a strong, authoritative site- then create brands/sites based off sub niches in your authority site- and do what these companies have done- shamelessly announce and launch new site on their main site. I was thinking about selling my main site in January, but this article has me second guessing that.

Or we can all just run away screaming lol. What do you think about that?

I think it is now time, based on this information, to think tank again, there must be something we can do about this. This post simply blew my mind and this has set me up to start a new series of experiments and discover how I can ever mimic this.

I know it sounds like its impossible but some ideas have come to mind. What is also very interesting is that the links that give you the mega juice are coming from the WHOLE site (because of the footer).

So it does not seem to be only just the main domain. It also gets me to think about the whole idea of link velocity we are always scared about that but reality is that if something goes viral these days you can get tons of links instantly which is actually part of the things that Google wants to detect and rank for these days I have made sites rank with ZERO links above Wikipedia just based on MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF TRAFFIC that google can detect Im not talking about 1-2 clicks per day but over 30k clicks per day to the webpage Like I said I have to test many things now it is almost absurd what we think we know but dont know really LOL 🙂. Glen, I literally stumbled upon this post doing research for a sales letter I am writing about Domain Authority and how it affects everything you do with Google today. I’ve been standing on my soap box shouting out how this is happening. Have organized it and wrote so eloquently all in one place explaining what is really happening beyond Domain Authority and Brand Domination.

I immediately wrote a post on my blog and sent it off to my mailing list to immediately read this post and see how someone else understands what is happening in Google all because of what Google considers a change called Vince’s Change (not an update) It really should of been labeled Google’s dirty little secret similar to a magicians way of sleight of hand of redirecting you to focus on something else and not what really matters. I have to admit Google successfully pulled this off with very little to do about it and kept you focused on the latest updates of Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird etc Studying this update in detail, Google even called out the damage control squad with Matt Cutts in control down playing it all the time. Well Glen glad to know someone else is paying attention I promise you have a dedicated reader of your blog, one of the few out there that can think for themselves and not afraid to say what matters.

Good luck with your blog, you’ve got my attention Ed. One thing is for sure–the days of the 5-page keyword-targeted niche site are long gone. Domain authority is all (and I mean ALL) that matters. Just like the sites you listed above dominate content-based searches (how-to’s, tips, etc.), Amazon, eBay and other mega-retailers dominate product-based searches for the most part. I started noticing this about a year ago, and it slowly dawned on me that small players were eventually going to get completely crowded out by the 800-lb. Gorillas of the Internet world. This whole theme of “content is king” is pretty much a bust at this point.

Again, it’s all about domain authority. I’ve seen black-hatters use hacked pages placed on.edu domains to rank things that are completely unrelated to anything the school would offer, including Louboutin red-bottoms.

Google’s algorithm appears “smart” until you see how they’ve geared it so heavily in favor of authority domains that quality of content is just an afterthought. Great post and insight. This is a very in depth article from a very fair and noble perspective, I have been in seo and marketing for many years, and yes, I can agree with you and see how interesting it is to watch proof of how it works, but so much faster for the large companies, but more than that is how they are starting to have the ability to control the media even more now with information which makes us subject to dis-information. How many people will know to question what they search for and read in the results, I pray that we dont jump to believe the data just cause its on Google and continue to discern the information thats out there even more.

Thank you for this great info and insight. Another one to look into is MODE media fka GLAM media. They own Ning & others. They also seem to be connected with Hubpages, though the only connection I can find is the badge on Hubpages in the bottom corner, and this page about advertising with Mode: Hubpages used to own a lot more SERP real estate, but they have been slammed over and over by updates and I doubt buying and absoring Squidoo really helped them much. So what did they do? They’ve diversified. They’re moving their content out from Hubpages to niche websites and redirecting search engine traffic to these sites.

I’ve found at these 21 properties that appear to be part of their new network, and if you look in your rank checkers, you’ll notice the most recent Google updates have been very kind to some of these fresh unpenalized new domains that are borrowing traffic from Hubpages. ReelRundown.com LevelSkip.com soapboxie.com/ Just something to look into, if you’re still doing research into this media consolidation thing. Hey Glen you mentioned that the VeryWell site started with 50,000 content pages. I need to understand how much time did it take to write 50,000 content pieces OR Was it the same content that was hosted on various sub-domains of About.com and when this content was moved to the new domain and links (permanent redirects) were pointed from old sub-domains to the new domain the entire ORGANIC traffic was sent to the new domain. But then in that case SimilarWeb would have shown this traffic under referral traffic. Is there a way to show SimilarWeb? But I m still stuck at 50,000 content pieces before launch.

Glen, thanks for this heads-up. A really good read!

Sure, if you think about it this is a natural move for the big brands. I guess we would all do similar stutt if we had the authortiy sites to do so. But I did never really think about what you are laying out here. As others have pointed out, I do think this facts will force Google to change their algorithms somewhat. Will I be happy when they do?

Probably not. It would affect the ranking of a lot of seo’d sites for sure. And that could be spooky. Let’s see how this will play out 🙂. Unfortunately, Google’s algo is tailored to big companies. The SEO blogs of today are tailored to big companies. I recently got into a debate with a “content marketing strategist” on GrowthHackers, who suggested it to be easy to spend 50 hours on one piece of content and then promote it – Erm.

No, Mr Average Joe who runs a local business isn’t going to spend 50 hours with a Word doc open, nor is he going to ever be able to effectively promote it to get organic backlinks, nor is he going to have the $10k/mo minimum budget spends your agency require. At the end of the day, whoever has the most money to spend on effective SEO campaigns will win because Google appreciates “authority” too much, it’s also why parasite SEO still works and probably will for a while. Hey Glen, That’s how corporate companies conquer in every part of the life. They already have such a vast networks with authority. Xbox 360 320gb Hddss.bin Download on this page. So it’s a matter of the time they increase it 10X. For the small publishers, they can focus on collaborations to move above SERPS. One thing I observe is, Recently one of my articles got published in the PBS, within a couple of days, a lot of websites started linking back to my site.

It’s more like content syndication with authority level. That’s a good read for sure. Cheers Suresh. Glen, as always crazy insightful. As you were relating your findings – I immediately thought of Food, Inc. And then saw you made the same link!

😀 Here’s where my curiosity and dare I say anarchist black hat comes out – Assuming the logic of DA and important valuable links is what is pushing these new properties immediately up in the SERPS and that Google is not hand manipulating the results (i.e. The algorithm is truly determining it) Would it hold true that if the new properties were deliberately, consistently and in mass linked with spam links with a whole variance of spam anchor text that it would have the typical negative SEO results? Not advocating neg-seo just curious if this would be a possible way to combat the potential Big Corporation dominance? Thank you for sharing this very thorough and insightful research. Its a sad day indeed that Google has allowed this. Compared to 18 years ago, the Internet is no longer a place where small business (Mom and pop type businesses) and big business were on an equal footing – i.e. If you produced good content and had a good site, you were rewarded with reasonable rankings.

Thanks to the way the big G has changed over the years, the Internet now seems to belongs to Big Business, much like everything else in this world. Looking forwarf to your next post. Good reasearch and like you say, it’s easy to frame this as Google (the people and business) catering to big corporations. What really is happening is Google setting and algorithm, and big businesses having the resources to feed it the data Google (the search engine algorithm) wants. Sculpting site authority has been a common practice for at least a decade. We know that linking out to a site “leaks SEO juice” to that site.

These companies are doing what many of us have done, cross linking at first, and more sophisticated strategies that involve choosing winners and losers before sites are crawled. Of course big companies have an advantage. They can buy smaller sites with authority, and now are learning to borrow authority from corporate cousins. When they decide to add new value with a new site, they tell everyone in their circle.

The reason it’s not a Panda penalty is due to the content not being shallow and designed for search bots. I see what they did there! According to the current rules, yes.

But is it moral? The thought struck me, link juice is good, and usually gives a fair reflection on site quality. And the way things stand, more link juice = more traffic, but suppose there was a ceiling placed on it? That way small quality sites have an even chance with the big boys. It would be easy for Google to do, just place a maximum on ‘link juice value’ in the algorithm, and use some other metric (time on site?) to sort out rankings.

But perhaps Google makes more profit from the big boys. Absolutely fantastic report. Just goes to show what a total SCAM the SERPs are. The whole idea is that Google is “supposed” to find the best quality search result. Your excellent research proves beyond doubt that Google’s algo can no more detect quality than it can smell a rose.

Google is not catering to the big corps. Google just suck at recognizing and ranking quality content. They are supposed to be serving quality results, not just the results of those with the deepest pockets. The whole idea behind search engine ranking was that it was supposed to be a meritocracy – delivering the best quality, most relevant result. Having the best quality article or whatever should get you to the top of the results. Sadly, Google has created / enabled a situation where there is more money to be made gaming the system than there is delivering merit.

And they wonder why people do it. In parental tones they will say “Now now children, always play by the rules, never cheat.” What’s left for the small business owner? Not a chance of competing with that kind of muscle. I’m so glad I got out of SEO and focused on social media. Small business owners can still rock a big Facebook page. Glen, Great article and well done. It’s funny how big G says one thing and what works is another.

I gave a talk just last week to a room of local business owners stating much about what you are showing here, now it’s nice to see this data backing it. It’s important for the local businesses to be diverse in their SEO and drive traffic from multiple sources. The part that stuck with me was, the part about these sites changing out their anchor text several times, that was very interesting. I was under the impression this was (or could be) a red flag, but maybe that was just false data. This article, wow, sent chills down my spine. Working as a webmaster for both a personal website and a company, I wonder what it takes and what should we do to get up there in the search results.and fighting amazon and other humongous companies that use their online influence to spin out content and websites is not going anywhere And now this. I also noticed that more and more results are being owned by the big companies, and many articles are written NOT for the user but for the search engine.and one big website links to another website to pull its rankings up.

When will the new google, with voice search, contextual search, social search, and more updated human-looking-like and human-centered search engine be ready? I think it’s time to rethink the purpose of the search engines, the way we search, what we search for, etc – because the google search as it is right now, as good (not great) as it is, can be gamed! The travel sector is also one that seems to be dominated by the same 3-4 big brand domains that are almost always at the top for tours and travel searches – Trip Advisor, Viator, Lonely Planet, Expedia etc. Trip Advisor own Viator (leading online seller of tours) and actively push their tours on their site. And Lonely Planet and some other guide books seem to only sell Viator’s tours on their websites. I am shocked to see IAC mentioned as owning/previously owning Trip Advisor & Expedia (not sure if they still do according to Wikipedia) showing the potential scale of this pyramid. But in this way the diversity of finding real local tour operators in other countries is replaced with a few selected operators very quickly, dominating the travel results for most tour, travel, cruise type of searches.

Anyway really enjoyed your detailed study and making us question the big G. Unfortunately the range of results seems to be only getting narrower and narrower! Good article though comes as no surprise to me. Google need to evaluate how they return searches. In shopping terms rather than information, these should be the priorities: Firstly and foremost it must be relevant to the consumers search.

Does the content match the search terms used and is it an authority on the search term. ( Image, Content, a decent selection for ranges or generic terms.) Next. What do other customers think of the product. Does the product have reviews on the site. Finally what are the customer service reviews like? Links are not relevant to the searcher. The above we feel is the only true way forward that Google ultimately will have to prioritise as they challenge all old established SEO thinking which in my view has been for the most part about ranking rather than providing a better consumer experience.

We too have noticed how the ecommerce company that dominates our market in the UK called Lovehoney.co.uk are linking to themselves to the tune of nearly 50% of their backlinks. For example, of their 165,000 backlinks, 65,000 approximately are from 5 of their own country specific websites i.e. In the US it’s.com, Canada it’s.ca, then.de,.fr,.eu and.com.au.

The topbar on all these sites link to ALL the other country sites – dofollow. These country specific sites carry the same products and content right down to product descriptions so are all identical for the english speaking sites and the only different for France and Germany are translation differences. Otherwise they are all the same.Majestic counts them all as being backlinks – so every page on every country site is a backlink to the equivalent page on every site they own. So in one fell swoop by having these 7 sites with aroundd 10,000 pages each with sitewide backlinks to each other, they just gave themselves approximately 70,000 backlinks. No way is this natural link-building or earned backlinks.

This has not stopped Google ranking them above everyone else. Looks like we need to create a few country specific websites of our own i think.

Gail Storm at Sinfulthrills.co.uk (and soon to be.com,.com.au..eu..ca and more) 🙂. Wow, excellent analysis. This article does a great job of explaining the current state of Google’s search and how a select few B2C companies are exploiting the current environment.

I was curious and spot checked the search terms you included on some other search engines such as DuckDuckGo.com and Bing.com. The results are dramatically different – BestProducts doesn’t do nearly as well. This behavior appears to primarily be an associated with Google search. Also, what’s interesting is that we’re seeing some of the same strategies used in B2C search now being applied to B2B.

These strategies will no doubt impact B2B. While there are a lot of differences in the marketplace, strategy does cross over. Great stuff here Glen!

I’ve seen something very similar happen in the real estate vertical over the last few years. Huge aggregator sites like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin as well as big authority websites like Realtor.com started dominating the SERPs, leaving most realtors fighting over scraps. I had one client who persistently would show up on the first page in his city. He paid $100K per year to sponsor his cities NFL team, in turn getting a sitewide link from their main website and links from the many other websites they owned.

The large majority of realtors don’t have a large budget for link acquisition, so where they end up putting their budgets into PPC. Google for the win! Thanks again for the awesome article. Hi Glen I knew it all along but you nailed it big time with this awesome research!

Now I caught that line where you write google can’t catch on to this yet However I have a ‘conspiracy theory’ about what’s happening here: google places the ‘big guys’ at the top on page 1 so that the small guys feel pushed into spending more cash for adwords. Since there are million times more small guys, google can make way more money this way, exploiting the small peasants 😉 also pushing the big guys up on the search results makes the results ‘more relevant looking’ as the avg joe who doesn’t know anything about SEO would recognize the big brands at the top. Never mind google showing stuff you aren’t looking for and don’t want.

Who said google is a search engine anyways 😉. This exact formula, well almost exact is used by one other, a SINGLE Dutch developer who has one editor and one assistant, he created over 12 sites so far each selling for multi-million range with 500K-1M daily visitors and around $225,000 in PPC revenue a month all built and finished within 12 months. He has a feature on if you go to their feature section its called the ” The Dutch Formula”, creating these large scale websites with tons of authoritative content and then ranking them for highly competitive keywords, same exact strategy he just sells them whereas Hearst keeps them in quasi giant PBN.

I read this 1 month ago and keep thinking about it constantly and check the SEMRush rankings for BestProducts.bs. Now it is double, up to $2M and basically any article they seem to write gets automatic #1 spot in Google. I’ve always built quality links to the /page itself but I am guessing just by the mass of authority they have from their other sites linking to their /Category links that this makes it so any post under the /Category doesn’t need to be linked to individually, it just falls under the DA umbrella. My next question and sad thought is, then in 1 year from now we can expect this company to compete against itself and have 10 ‘best products.com’ websites to dominate the full 10 organic SERPs. And it kills the ‘niche’ sites too because once you get the big hard competitive keywords hundreds of smaller long tail get ranked easily for it too.

Yes, super niche will always be around but now I’m just a little hesitant with the review sites I have been rocking. Great article but it makes me sick inside to keep seeing them grow leaps and bounds. The only way to stop these larger brands is to build a crapload of high authority PBNs to your money site. You may or may not get slapped – it’s a gamblebut it’s the ONLY way to compete with them. You can do as much on-page optimization and “high quality content” as you’d like, but it won’t help. I would say 70-80% of it is links, and authoritative links at that. But even building high authority links slowly – this won’t get you anywhere b/c these massive brands are building links at the same time.

The only way to do it is to use a LARGE PBN network. You may get slapped – you likely will. But if you don’t do this, you sure as shit won’t rank. And you are right – it will only get worse over time.