How Google took my job — and how yours could be next
Hi everyone,
As you may know, up until this month, I was editor-in-chief of GGRecon, a small but growing publisher in the UK focusing on gaming and esports.
In August last year, we hit record numbers of visitors to the site. As of today, the entire staff has been laid off and we’re ceasing operations, and it’s all down to a Google algorithm change that comes from a company that’s either wilfully ignorant or downright evil.
I like to think it’s the former, but here’s how Google took my dream job, and why GGRecon won’t be the last.
Disclaimer: I’m publishing this on Medium as this is about my personal experience, and doesn’t reflect the views of the wider, now departed, GGRecon team.
How we got here
It’s worth going back to cover just what brought us to this point. For years, Google has been a system that could be ‘gamed’ using search engine optimisation techniques (SEO).
These included stuffing extra paragraphs where they’re not needed, adding bundles of links, and more. The thing is that this wasn’t just a few sites, this was every site that wanted to grow.
It’s the reason headlines became word soup, why you’d ask a question and have to read 300 words to get a “yes” or “no”, and why you’d see articles promising a release date for something that didn’t have one yet. Rightly or wrongly, it just sort of became part of working in online publishing.
If you’re not working in games, it’s also important to note that Guides do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to traffic. News can take off, sure, and it’s important to cover, but a news story is “one and done”, and when it comes to things like reviews many people cherry-pick from Metacritic or OpenCritic and will then just scroll to the score.
Guides are what keep people coming back, but it’s a sort of ‘transactional traffic’. You want a promo code for Roblox, so you Google it, get the code, and continue on your way. As long as you get what you’re looking for, you don’t care whether you’re going to GGRecon, IGN, or anywhere else.
As big as some of the biggest sites are, their backbone will almost always be guides because that’s what keeps people coming back, and while some onlookers may look down on guides with a “well, that’s SEO content” mindset, guides writing is not only difficult but essential for sites to survive.
Think of it in terms of a restaurant. There’s an expensive steak on the menu, sure, but if you’re there for one thing, and that one thing isn’t the steak, you’d be annoyed if the restaurant only sold the steak. Your favourite gaming site works the same way, attempting to offer a little something of everything, but knowing most people come for the most popular menu items, not necessarily the ones that take the most time to make.
Google rewarded this, for years, but in September last year decided it would roll out a ‘Helpful Content Update’ (the HCU) that would start to crack down on sites leveraging these tricks. In many ways, I think the intentionality was pretty sound — Google wanted sites to write for humans, not for a search engine, and that makes a lot of sense.
Only that’s not really what happened.
The September 2023 HCU
While sites (including ours) did see huge traffic drops, others (noticeably larger brands) could still get away with things. I’m not specifically calling out Esquire here, but when this was shared in March 2024, there was no Dune 3 release date — and that remains the same seven months later.
Considering the number of things Google has shoehorned in at the top of search pages (and its very questionable deal with Reddit), sites needed to scrap for every pixel below it — and because of a classifier, Google had basically stopped showing GGRecon anywhere near the top few pages. Now consider how many times you really go further than the first page of results, and you’ll see why this is a problem.
AI articles? Sure, those could go to the top. Articles that literally copied GGRecon’s content and occasionally watermarked images? Yep, those too! AI articles ripping from GGRecon? You betcha.
So, while our traffic nosedived the moment the HCU rolled out, Google was still happily feeding people a lot of content bastardising our own. At the time, we conducted a thorough content audit, and it raised a lot of genuine concerns.
Duplicate articles, content stuffed with extra keywords, and guides lacking in personality were all cited, and we set to work fixing thousands of pages. When I say thousands, I mean well over ten thousand, with some being updated and many older ones being removed.
Throughout all of this, we stuck to what Google was telling us — “write for your audience”. Guides became more personal, and, genuinely more helpful. News remained conversational and light in tone, but still with enough detail early in an article so as to engage users from start to finish.
Despite this, the classifier (essentially a big hand pushing us down the search rankings) persisted. We couldn’t get stories into Google News, meaning our only real news traffic came from social posts, and we literally put out world exclusives that wouldn’t be seen by anyone. If it was a boxing match, we were fighting with one leg and one arm both tied behind our back.
We waited for the next core update (Google rolls these out multiple times a year), and when it began in March 2024 we felt sure we’d done enough. After all, we had a full-time team of staff doing great work in rebuilding pretty much every aspect of our articles — how could we not see some sort of recovery?
As you can imagine, that didn’t happen. After six weeks of rolling out, Google informed everyone the update was complete, and no one recovered from the HCU. We were forced to lay off some unbelievable team members.
We continued with a smaller team, working to continue improving just about everything about the site, all the while knowing if things didn’t improve we’d all be gone. The site even saw a huge refresh, and we switched off adverts entirely.
For every false dawn, there was a realisation that we weren’t going to recover without another core update, but we felt sure we would eventually. Hey, maybe we’d even be able to bring back those we lost!
After all, Google’s channels consistently said if a site improves it should see an uptick in the next core update, even as their foremost Search personalities moved away from Twitter, seemingly because of the heat from HCU-hit sites.
Some sites even started to recover from the latest core update, even HCU-hit ones like Retro Dodo (you really should read Brandon’s explanation of things here). We didn’t recover, but we figured “Hey, if some sites are, our time will come!”.
After all, we were doing all the right things. Sadly, as Retro Dodo will tell you, some of those recoveries began to reverse course, putting HCU-hit sites back in the mud.
With that, we lost investor confidence and, naturally, that leads us to here — October 18, and GGRecon is closing its doors.
Malice or Incompetence?
Throughout this entire process, I’ve tried to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Search algorithms are likely a very hard thing to manage, and there are no doubt millions of moving parts at any one time.
“We’ll recover,” I reassured myself, “because we’ve done everything asked of us”.
I’m not sure if I was naive or just stupid to think that, but now I’m full of what I can only describe as impotent rage. I’m angry at a trillion-dollar company and I can’t do anything about it.
I’m not just mad for me, a man with a mortgage to pay and a young family to support, but I’m mad for my team who have worked tirelessly to rebuild GG in the image Google wanted, only to be cast aside regardless. I’m mad for our co-founders, who fostered an environment of trying to do right by people with full-time contracts and a genuine effort to build gradually, not at the expense of the team.
There are thousands of things Google could’ve done differently here. 12 hours before we were informed we were closing down, I was invited to the company’s HQ to take part in a creator event to give feedback, and had it not been for my wedding just days after I may have done so.
But to offer an olive branch of sorts 13 months after destroying thousands of businesses is bordering on cruel.
At this point, I’m not sure if Google is being negligent or intentionally harmful to publishers, but the company that once made it part of its mantra to “do no evil” has made thousands jobless, decimated an entire industry, and offers no real understanding of how best to pick up the pieces.
And while I’m sure Google staff aren’t twirling moustaches at their HQ seeing the fallout from the last few updates, it feels like last September’s HCU has caused issues that they don’t know how to fix, or that they want to cover up by burying more content under things people don’t need.
I recommend checking our Mrwhosetheboss’ video for more, and it’s worth noting that its 2.3 million views suggest this concern could finally leave the echo chamber of publishers and SEO experts and finally reach the more casual Google users.
What is certain is that Google search is flawed, and the company has lost the trust of publishers and users alike. With so many sites being owned by just a few huge companies, it’s getting harder for teams that do things a little differently to stand out.
Whether it’s gaming searches, or anything else, Google has an awful lot to answer for — and I hope they find a way to sleep at night.
A moment of thanks
I don’t want this to be entirely negative, because I want to say something about my time at GGRecon.
When I joined from Dexerto, I’d never been an editor-in-chief before. I learned a lot on the job, and I’ve become a better manager, writer, and editor through that.
Most of all, though, I’ve become a better person having worked with the team, all of whom are out of work now. If you can support them, please do — you can find them in this thread.
We went from being relatively small-fry to being Game Awards jurors twice, releasing some incredible interviews and indie spotlights, getting our reviews on Metacritic, and before Google’s meddling, reaching a whole new audience.
Whether you came for the latest news, read our reviews, used our guides to walk you through a tricky section of a game, or just wanted to play Guess The Game, I’m grateful you visited.
The team at GGRecon is so full of passion and enthusiasm, as well as talent, that I feel like my life has been immeasurably improved by being part of it. We’re not just colleagues, we’re friends, and I will always look back on what we achieved with fondness.
