https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/google-now-defaults-to-not-indexing-your-content/
Sounds like Google is sowing the seeds of it's own destruction.
G is currently taking flak for the AI-gen crap ranking well. I think they've hit Pause.
>own destruction
Debbie says that G knows that people want EASY and will switch to easy mode in a heartbeat even if it is inferior. (Most will not even know that it is inferior anyway.) AI search is going to be easy. Pair it with voice control & response (Alexa, Siri) and serving visual ads ain't gonna pay the bills.
AI is shaping up to be a lose-lose situation for G.
Would hate to be Google nowadays. They now have to reverse engineer "what's the colour of shite" and differentiate the six other colours.
This is a compelling read, but I can't tell if its a true reflection of the "new reality" as Vincent puts it.
Most of the sites I work with are in the "recognized brands" category that he describes as exempt from selective indexing.
Would be interesting to know what the funnel looks like from (crawling to indexing to ranking). Are sites not getting crawled? Crawled but not indexed? Indexed but not ranked? Nothing new on this last one, but the thrust seems to be more on the indexing side.
>> seeds of it's own destruction.
Maybe. On the other hand, Google is not really for you. Forget organizing the world's knowledge. I think it's better to think of Google as the world's largest ad-driven scraper site. A lot follows from that:
- you feed sales to large brands with the ability to spend a lot on ads
- you don't feed sales to small sites and index them just because - their willingness to pay for ads becomes a signal of "quality" in this case because people won't generate 200,000 AI content farms and then buy ads for them
- you focus your appeal on users who are also shoppers. All other users are a waste of your resources
- you keep news and fun content just barely clean enough to keep those shoppers who coming back when they want a list of all the movies Kevin Costner has been in.
The last one is becoming harder, since ChatGPT or Claude will give you that list currently with a lot less chaff