I spend a lot of time analyzing different projects. What do I do, in simple terms? I take a keyword and examine the top 10 search results to see what Google offers users for that query. Who am I to tell Google which websites it should rank? I understand that, and I’m not even saying that my own websites should be there. I simply put myself in the position of someone who searches for something on Google and wants to satisfy a particular need.
In other words, the results should at least meet basic relevance. I can confidently say that a third—and for some keywords, even half—of the results fail to satisfy the search intent. Put simply, they don’t answer the user’s query. Either I can’t find the answer there at all, or finding it is extremely difficult 🙂
Here are a few examples:
For a query related to a particular slot, two or three websites rank in the top 10 with their homepages, where that slot simply gets lost among hundreds of others. Why not rank the dedicated page for that slot from the same website instead? 🙂
For a single-brand query, one of the top results is a website whose name merely sounds similar to the brand and contains part of the brand keyword.
For a “slot + play” query, two of the websites ranking at the top have no demo, meaning you can’t actually play there. They don’t even have affiliate buttons linking to advertisers where users could go and play.
For a brand query, the results include hacked or deleted pages from government, educational, and other official websites. There has been nothing useful on those pages for a long time, yet Google continues to rank them.
For a “slot + play” query, the first and second results are YouTube videos about the slot. Why do I need a video if I want to play? Is Google simply pushing its own products?
For a brand query, one result leads through a chain of three or four redirects and eventually sends the user to some unrelated casino rather than the brand they were searching for.
And there are countless examples like these. Sometimes, for a single keyword, almost half of the top results are complete nonsense. I genuinely don’t understand how they got there. It would be one thing if they were slot catalogues or authoritative—or even non-authoritative—review websites that at least satisfied the search intent. But in reality, roughly a third of the top 10 results seem completely random. Judging by the volatility of the SERPs, the results are constantly changing: Google throws certain websites into the top positions and then removes them again.
And that’s without even getting into the visual quality of the relevant websites that do rank in the top 10. There are plenty of questions there too. How can some of these websites rank so highly if we take Google’s own guidelines and website optimization recommendations into account? Meanwhile, more attractive, user-friendly, polished, and faster websites are sitting somewhere around positions 30–50.
In my opinion, the quality of Google’s website search results has declined significantly lately, and everything has become overly complicated and confusing. I’m probably referring mainly to Tier 2 and Tier 3 GEOs here. It feels as though randomization plays a major role.
Or what exactly is going on? 🙂
Wishing everyone plenty of backlinks and top rankings!
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Need backlinks? Send me a private message on Telegram: https://t.me/andrey_soroka
CIS and international markets (gambling, casinos, dating, crypto, and white-hat projects)
My channel about SEO, link building, and iGaming: https://t.me/info_site
