Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content — but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.
Online businesses have been left considering layoffs and even site closures after Google’s massive upgrade in March and April caused catastrophic drops in traffic.
Gisele Navarro is one of the unlucky ones whose website got caught up in Google’s dragnet.
The 37-year-old Argentine runs the HouseFresh website with her husband, and they had been building a healthy niche in product reviews for air purifiers since 2020.
There were no ads, no product placements and no soft-pedalling — if a product was bad, the site’s reviewers would say so.
They earned commissions from clickthroughs to Amazon.
But Google’s update changed all of that.
“We found that we went from ranking number one — because we were one of the only people who had actually done a review — to not even showing up,” she told AFP.
