Selling links is a multi billion dollar industry that no one ever has dared to put a finger on. If you want, you can get editorial links from sites like The New York Times, Forbes, etc. so as long as you have a few thousand dollars to spare.
For an average scenario, let's say - an article about "AI tools for text-to-speech", if that article ranks well in Google - you can easily sell top spots in it for $999 and no one will be any wiser. This isn't something that Google can ever control, but it is a thing. And because it is a thing, it has also highly contributed to the well-known SEO problem.
Google has said it takes links less seriously these days, but the prices for buying sponsored posts / guest posts haven't really fluctuated much in the last 10 years.
Publishers like Forbes, who at one time was considered the 'de facto' source for all things business, are able to capitalize from their strong "domain authority" to pump out articles in any given category: business, tech, drama, pop news, web dev, etc. So as long as there is a potential for a small affiliate income - Forbes will make itself an expert on the matter.
This pushes out small publishers who might be experts on the topic, or at the very least have direct day-to-day interaction with the topic, who will never be able to compete with Forbes (or any other such site) because inherently the Google system is broken. The small publisher simply doesn't stand a chance, and what Google is doing now is a band-aid fix that will avoid penalizing the entire domain and focus on 'specific sections', yet it's the site itself that is responsible for these actions.
Forbes got so scared of this update they 410'd their entire coupons directory[0][1], so what will Google do about this? Give them a pass? It's blatant manipulation.
Forbes.com is basically a blogging platform with a small number of journalists and an army of random contributors, quite a few of whom are scam artists. All those random blogs are not terribly different from medium.com in essence, but Forbes.com presents them with a veneer of authority, when they’re really just unvetted, unedited garbage for the most part. I’m surprised the domain isn’t in the gutter yet.
It's like being a speaker at lots of conferences, the slot comes with a sponsorship package, people think they're watching an invited talk but it's a paid ad.
Off-topic: It’s really sad to see all the low effort, ChatGPT written, informationless posts on Medium these days.
If this becomes the norm then you might as well cut out the middleman and just go straight to ChatGPT and ask it to generate an article on the subject you’re interested in.
Oh. Thinking about this right now, that’s an interesting concept - soon you’ll be able to generate your own content for personal consumption. Forget going online to learn about a topic or read about recent events, just have a conversation with ChatGPT. Mind blown
For an average scenario, let's say - an article about "AI tools for text-to-speech", if that article ranks well in Google - you can easily sell top spots in it for $999 and no one will be any wiser. This isn't something that Google can ever control, but it is a thing. And because it is a thing, it has also highly contributed to the well-known SEO problem.
Google has said it takes links less seriously these days, but the prices for buying sponsored posts / guest posts haven't really fluctuated much in the last 10 years.
Publishers like Forbes, who at one time was considered the 'de facto' source for all things business, are able to capitalize from their strong "domain authority" to pump out articles in any given category: business, tech, drama, pop news, web dev, etc. So as long as there is a potential for a small affiliate income - Forbes will make itself an expert on the matter.
This pushes out small publishers who might be experts on the topic, or at the very least have direct day-to-day interaction with the topic, who will never be able to compete with Forbes (or any other such site) because inherently the Google system is broken. The small publisher simply doesn't stand a chance, and what Google is doing now is a band-aid fix that will avoid penalizing the entire domain and focus on 'specific sections', yet it's the site itself that is responsible for these actions.
Forbes got so scared of this update they 410'd their entire coupons directory[0][1], so what will Google do about this? Give them a pass? It's blatant manipulation.
[0]: https://www.seroundtable.com/forbes-completely-removes-coupo...
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/coupons