Google Is Making It Harder For Sites Like Moral Fibres To Survive

Big changes at Google are making it harder and harder for small independent sites to survive. Some sites, like Retro Dodo, a site devoted to retro video games have lost all of their readers. Meanwhile other sites are going out of business.

Moral Fibres is still surviving, but not exactly thriving. The number of people reading Moral Fibres has dropped – readers are down around 40% compared to this time last year, plummeting on 6th October 2023. Despite making huge investments and changes to the site, it’s not picking up.

Why has this happened? Most sites are reliant on Google to send potential readers to their web pages. Handling over 90% of the world’s internet search queries, as the gatekeeper and organiser of the internet, Google was good at pointing you in the right direction when you typed in a query, with very little bias. But things have changed.

Here’s what’s happened, and the impacts of these changes.

The Big Changes At Google

Every so often, Google changes how it calculates the results displayed for each query you search for. There have been several updates since September 2023. This started with the ‘Helpful Content’ update in September 2023 and finished with the March Core Update, which despite the name, ended in May 2024.

I’ve been writing Moral Fibres for over 11 years now. I’ve ridden through multiple updates – sometimes I’ve gained readers and sometimes I’ve lost readers with the updates, but I’ve not seen anything like this before. The last six months or so have been a rollercoaster. I’m not going to get into the details of these updates – unless you run a website then there’s no need to. However, it’s more than likely you’ve seen the impacts of these updates when you’ve done any searching on the internet.

Here are some of the biggest impacts of these cumulative changes:

Reddit Is Prioritised In Google Search

Seeing more Reddit in your searches? It’s not because Reddit user CheesyPants347 is an authority in their field. It’s because Google recently agreed to pay $60 million a year to Reddit so that it can use posts from the online discussion site to train its artificial intelligence models. This means Reddit is often in the top spot for searches, where other sites once were.

The situation is so bad, that an article complaining about being outranked on Google by Reddit, was outranked by Reddit.

Quora, Mumsnet and other user-generated sites have also seen an uplift.

E-commerce sites Have Also Been Prioritised

Google has decided that retailers and providers of commercial services have more authority than purely educational and informational sites like Moral Fibres.

For example, search for anything to do with sustainable gardening and the top result could be gardenbenches.com – a site that sells, you guessed it, garden benches. Search for ideas on how to help bees, and the first result is mrwasp.com – a pest controller.

Whilst it’s great that sites like these are educating their customers on sustainability, I don’t think these sites should be at the top of Google’s results, over any educational site. What makes gardenbenches.com a key educational resource for learning about sustainability? Is a pest controller really the best place you can learn about helping bees?

Sustainability isn’t either of these sites’ key missions. This makes it frustrating for sustainability sites to see their work demoted in favour of sites like this who are at best, trying to educate consumers on making more eco-friendly choices, and at worst, writing vaguely related blog posts because they heard it drives clicks to their sites.

Big Sites Are Given More Priority, Regardless Of Their Focus

Prior to these updates, small independent sites like mine could compete with some of the big-name publishers on a semi-level playing field. Now any big media site could write about anything, and get to the top of Google – regardless if it has any authority in that topic or not. What Forbes – the business site – has got to do with sustainability is beyond me, yet it’s often in the top spot of any query.

Hiding Results From Searchers

Finally, one of the things I’ve hated most about these updates is hiding results from searchers, even when you use Moral Fibres as one of the search terms.

For example, if I try to search for my post on eco-friendly party bag fillers, adding in the site’s name, Google decides that no, I don’t want to see anything from Moral Fibres. Instead, it lists three e-commerce stores as the result. This isn’t a new post (sometimes new posts can take time to show up in results). This post is around two years old and was updated in September.

Consider these four changes, and you can understand why people visiting independent publishing sites, like Moral Fibres, has dropped with little chance of recovery.

The Worst Is Yet To Come

Unfortunately, these changes aren’t the worst of it all. Google has just rolled out what it calls ‘AI Overviews’ in the US. They’ll be rolling them out across the globe in due course. Designed to answer our queries quicker, search for something and it will generate a response on the page – often multiple paragraphs long. The results are paraphrased from other sites, without having to click on to read any websites.

Sounds good in theory. The reality is it many are warning that it may well break the internet. Even the BBC are warning about what these AI overviews mean for the web.

Why is Google’s AI a problem? Well, publications rely on money from advertisements to keep them in business. Switch off a large part of their audience, and what happens to the sites? There’s simply no incentive to keep publishing. We could potentially lose most small sites and many big sites too. Many newspapers are reliant on advertising to keep themselves afloat in times of declining print sales. We could potentially lose massive publications.

What we find out on Google could ultimately be provided by just a handful of large corporations. At a time when unbiased reporting on climate change, and action on climate change is so very needed, it’s a potentially disastrous step.

Google’s AI overviews are also giving out potentially dangerous advice. So far US users have been told to add glue to pizza to stop cheese from sliding off, and a user asking how to clean a washing machine was given a result that if followed would release deadly mustard gas.

What Can You Do

If you want to help support Moral Fibres, and other sites you love, in these challenging times there are several things you can do:

• Sign the Open Letter to help protect the rights of content creators – The advertising agency Raptive has created an Open Letter that anyone can sign, that they will be taking to the House of Congress in the US. Whilst in the US, any changes there will benefit websites around the world.
• Subscribe to the newsletter. If you aren’t already a subscriber, you can sign up here. It’s free to receive, it goes out once a month and means you always get the latest posts straight to your inbox, without the middleman. Look out for your other favourite sites’ newsletters too.
• Follow on social media. Social media can be a useful place to keep updated on new posts from your favourite sites. You can find Moral Fibres on Facebook and Pinterest. Social media used to be a good way to reach readers for many sites. But the social media giants changed things a few years ago. Instead, they are now trying to keep people on their platforms for as long as possible, rather than directing them to external sites, so do check your favourite site’s pages. Don’t rely on them coming up in your feed.
• Share content in groups or message boards when appropriate. If any online discussions you are in – for example on Facebook or Reddit – are relevant to any posts you’ve read and enjoyed on Moral Fibres, or other independent sites, then feel free to share a link to help spread the word.
• Switch to an alternative search engine. Not all search engines are equal – there are more ethical search engines out there. I’m a fan of Ecosia – which helps plant trees with every search. It still relies on Google and Bing, but it feels like giving less dominance to Google, which is only a good thing.
• Bookmark your favourite blogs. If you’ve got some favourite recipe blogs, bookmark their sites and visit their sites directly to look up recipes. Likewise, if you rely on travel blogs to help plan trips, bookmark their sites and visit them directly. And if you are looking for sustainability tips and advice, bookmark sites like Moral Fibres, Sustainable Jungle, or Curiously Conscious and visit them directly – utilising the search bar to find what you are looking for. Don’t rely on Google to find articles. They’ll likely be hidden by forums, e-commerce sites, big corporations, or hidden from view entirely.

Together, with your help, independent sites can thrive.