Detecting Parasites

So, before we get started, I have to talk about something. I decided to do a really bold thing and it ended up screwing up my writing schedule. But I had a good reason for it. The good news is that it’s (mostly) done and the thing is good to go.

That thing is the most ambitious redesign of Tedium in its decade-long history, one that does a lot of crazy things. The front page (for desktop users) is a massive interactive mosaic with hundreds of clickable issues. On top of that, we have an article shuffle mode, so you can get lost in the site really easily.

This kind of blew up our annual posting schedule, and I’m sorry about that. But we will post our year-end thing soon.

But since I have you, I just wanted to say one thing: Thanks. It’s our tenth anniversary. We have been doing this for ten freaking years. I’m not sure how we did it either.

Anyway, let’s talk about our favorite blog post of 2024.

As you might have heard, we have thought a lot about the way Google is breaking the internet, and we’ve even created some tooling to call it out.

But I think the conversation didn’t start with AI-generated slop, and it won’t end there. Rather, it comes down to motives and how search engines are using their deep influence on our culture to create perverse incentives.

A couple months before I stumbled upon udm14, the air-purifier review site HouseFresh decided to call out a practice that was actively threatening the future of sites like theirs. The husband-and-wife team of Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton, who run HouseFresh as a part of NeoMam Studios, had seen their site’s fortunes drop precipitously in the span of only a few months, despite their approach clearly being in the spirit of how SEO is supposed to work.

“We know that at the end of the day, Google will reward us if our readers find our articles useful,” they wrote in a piece titled “How Google is killing independent sites like ours.”

How is Google doing the murder? Here’s a top-level explainer: Recently, large publishers with big brand names and prominent domains, like Rolling Stone and Forbes, have taken to publishing content that essentially got the end-results of what a site like HouseFresh does (make recommendations based on research, bring in affiliate revenue) without doing any of the work. And this has allowed large companies—or platforms with prominent user-generated content, like Reddit—to essentially overtake Google search results.

Which sucks if you’re putting in the work, as Navarro and Ashton note:

As a team that has dedicated the last few years to testing and reviewing air purifiers, it’s disheartening to see our independent site be outranked by big-name publications that haven’t even bothered to check if a company is bankrupt before telling millions of readers to buy their products.

That isn’t helpful content. Especially considering the work of air purifiers can’t be assessed by the naked eye.

Users won’t be able to tell if their air purifier is actually working without subject-matter knowledge and the help of tools to measure air quality. That’s when actual testing and firsthand data become indispensable.

I had a chance to connect with Navarro in the wake of my udm14 insanity (it still averages more than 100,000 unique visitors per month, more than 5,000 of which stopped by just today), and I feel an appreciation for the challenges that indie sites have. I don’t work in quite the same realm that Ashton, a clearly talented reviewer, does. But I am an independent publisher who has been doing this for a while, and I have a ton of respect for people who are willing to take these kinds of risks, because they are heavy. It is an art to make the challenges of trying to do quality work only for large, lazy publishers to do an “I drink your milkshake” on websites that aren’t trying to dominate the internet.

While HouseFresh doesn’t quite have the presence it once did in search, the team ruffled a lot of feathers and created an outsized impact. Both The Verge and The New Yorker gave this post the attention it deserved. At least one shade of the activity that Navarro and Ashton called out, called “parasite SEO,” was effectively banned by Google about a month ago. And by the end of the year, Forbes was cutting freelance staff as the negative attention surrounding their traditional domain overuse had finally caught up to them. While there was reporting along these lines before HouseFresh spoke up, most notably from Futurism, I think their blog post was the thing that tipped the apple cart.

Another post in this genre that I refer to constantly is “We need your email address,” by my pals at 404 Media. It does an excellent job of breaking down why sites like theirs ask for emails and put up regwalls, and how bigger-picture changes to the digital ecosystem are forcing publishers into making difficult choices that may seem consumer unfriendly. They have to do this, because if they don’t, the value will be siphoned.

As Tedium turns 10, I think long and hard about how difficult it is to be an independent publisher on the open internet. We may be trying to own our audience, but the ugly underlying systems are still there, and we must struggle to work around them.

I deeply appreciate that folks like Navarro and Ashton and teams like 404 are speaking up.