Google are displaying significantly more results from forum website such as Reddit and Quora recently. This not only changes the appearance – and potentially the quality – of the search results. It also brings to light some questions about the future of digital marketing.
The Value Of Personal Experiences & Ideas
It’s likely that forums are being pushed up the search engine results pages (SERPs) because searchers are looking for personal experiences. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the substantial increase in AI generated content on the internet. Forums offer a unique service for searchers, in that they can discover and learn from the experiences of multiple users. There’s a sense of authenticity and community that forums have which other websites simply cannot replicate.
So what does this mean for your average website? If you run a blog, you may want to focus on sharing personal opinions. This offers something unique, and could send similar signal to Google that forums do. As well as that, if you’re able to open up a comments section, you could encourage user contributions to mimic the group discussions that forums have to offer.
A Need For Moderation
Although user contributions and comments may be adding value, they could also decrease it. Allowing free reign for commenters to say what they please is risky. Not only could this encourage trolling behaviour, bullying and abuse, it could also mean that false information and lies are made available to your users. Therefore, it’s probably going to become very important to have good moderation.
Successful forums such as Reddit foster a community spirit by electing moderators from their users. These people are tasked with enforcing rules and ensuring negative behaviour is not allowed. The benefit of having users carry out these tasks in a place like Reddit is that it allows each forum for each topic to set their own boundaries.
Reddit Searches
More and more users are adding ‘reddit’ onto the end of their search queries, particularly when they’re looking for personal experiences. This means things like honest reviews and experiences. We think this is happening because many shoppers have grown tired of reading marketing material that doesn’t necessarily reflect the honest truth. However, that might not be the only reason.
Reddit’s internal search engine is frequently touted as being unfit for purpose. Many seemingly simple and innocent searches bring up NSFW forums and posts, and its exact-match model means that it’s not very nuanced. If you know exactly what you’re searching for, it’s useful enough. However, if you’re searching around a subject and want to include semantic terms, a Google search with ‘Reddit’ tacked on the end may produce a better outcome.
The Power Of Reddit
On the 1st of July 2024, Reddit’s robots.txt file was updated to prevent search engines from crawling its site for data. That is, all search engines except for Google. This means that only Google can scan the site for data and index it. If you search for Reddit in Microsoft Bing now, you won’t get any new results from reddit.com.
The consequences of this could be massive. Reddit have allowed Google to crawl their site because they’ve agreed to pay out on a $60 million deal. This deal allows Google to train their AI models using Reddit’s data API. We’re talking about huge sums of money here, so this data is clearly very valuable, and Reddit know that. They tried to negotiate with other search engines, including Microsoft Bing, but did not reach the agreement they wanted. As a result, they’ve introduced the crawl block.
Putting a price tag on data is one thing, but to make indexing new content from a huge website like Reddit chargeable is huge. This sets the precedent that all websites with power or popularity could try to negotiate search engines to pay them to remain in their index.
We’re keeping a keen eye on any further developments on this interesting topic. Meanwhile, we hope that Reddit use their power responsibly. We hope they ensure their future decisions keep the value of search engines at heart. After all, we live in an age where information is free and easy to access – we hope this isn’t about to change.
