Curious to hear people's thoughts....
There is a clear issue with Reddit results on the SERP.
My question is - how does this play itself out?
I don't think Google can do nothing - there's a clear issue that is impacting brand perception at this point.
They also need to double down on first-knowledge content for a variety of reasons. There is not a lot of said content outside of social media.
It seems to me that Google is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't.
How do you think they resolve this issue?
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Google may tweak it a bit.
Think QDF instead of showing a decade old Reddit posts.
Yet it's not a problem for them. It's a problem for SEOs.
Average people rejoice. Especially the sexist male geek crowd loves the site despite the bad press for more than a decade!
Dunno what you mean, Mordy. This looks like a great result to me?
While challenging, this issues seems to continue to escaluate. Right now my search on "the Google Reddit issues" surfaces:
People also ask
How do I disconnect from Reddit?
Why does Google search not work well anymore?
Why is Google not as good as it used to be?
How do I unlink my Google account from Reddit?
IMO Google is not doing a 'great' job in showing more and more Reddit threads in the SERPs. I am seeing reddit threads for almost every kind of query now irrespective of the intent, which is making it worse.
Giving visibility to Reddit threads in the name of upliftment of the UGC content seems very biased. The fair chance to appear in the SERPs based on quality and helpfulness of the content should still be the primary criteria.
If Google focuses more on intent and helpfulness to show results that will be much better.
I agree that with you saying that Google can’t do that much, also because of the agreement they signed.
Apart from the over-exposition of Reddit in the SERPS, with all the spam issues it arises, there’s also another problem I don’t see that much discussed.
Reddit is very popular, but its popularity is no equally distributed worldwide, so what I fear, and start seeing, is Reddit shadowing the visibility of local forums that are more relevant for the local audience than Reddit.
hi Aleyda & Mordy,
In my opinion they have just opened a nasty can of worms by giving so much visibility to Reddit. I also agree with the fact that Google never had a reputable "first hand" source of truth, but publicly announcing this partnership made lots of people go: what have Google done behind the scenes? Besides you can bet there's SEOs that are going to spam and try to rank on Reddit (if they haven't done already).
Google is giving way too much power to one single outlet and that's not really a balanced approach, just like everything else in the world these days we have such polarized views on things, just like giving so much visibility to Reddit now. Should that be only Quora? Not really. Why not both, etc - at least it would give us the perception of a different view on things.
Plus also, what if Reddit starts going crazy all of a sudden? It seems they took this decision without really thinking.
I would want a more balanced approach where other sources are also allowed to be there, and let's not forget that the SME that many of us have helped during the years, they've been crushed down with the hammer now. Many with pretty good information.
my 2 cents
Hi Mordy,
This is a great question! We have been quick to point out the lower search experience Reddit inclusions provide but don't see many discussions about alternatives.
Let's start with the beginning: There's no doubt there's a need for "first hand experience" -that can be obtained through UGC in forums and social- in search results to satisfy users need across a high share of queries, especially decision making related ones. There's a reason why many (myself included many times) go to social media to take into account others experiences and validate the information you can get from the businesses themselves.
Sadly Google was never able to evolve their own social platform to have first-hand access to that sort of UGC, and now needs to rely on third party whose quality they don't control. It's tricky. Bigger UGC focused platforms like Reddit or Quora might facilitate access/scale to obtain that sort of information, however, the level of spam/low quality information in there can be non-trivial for certain topics.
This is something they need to identify how to filter/weight, to avoid giving so much visibility due to their overall authority to "overall UGC generalists" with higher levels of spam and give more to "niche", specialized ones.
Another thing to do here would be to better assess for which topics it's actually useful/relevant to surface these types of UGC results, I see them now everywhere for many commercial queries at a stage of the journey where the user really want to finally buy, not look for more opinions.
Additionally, the format/feature that they use to showcase these sort of results, as "traditional" organic ranked pages/threads, or the "forums" search features or also the "perspectives" filter surfacing more social results too... my hope here is that they're collecting data and testing UX here to better understand how to integrate results in a way that the experience is actually better supported, rather than just "more noisy" with them.
Finally, the elephant in the room: Feels like if Google really needs to be able to better access and surface social information, the type of TikTok or Instagram give at the moment, but with really good relevance/content quality filters. I would expect we see more of this.
Looking forward to hear what others think!