Are Listicles for SEO Dead/Banned Now? Like Top 10 Products, etc.

[contract]

Seeing basically ZERO in search results; one or two here and there, but it's generic info, not classic product heavy anymore.

Even non-spam, genuine reviews/round ups do not appear in my searches. Yes, there's results for like "best toaster" from huge brands, but get into the smaller terms and it's 1-2 results out of the first 20.

Basically, what I'm seeing now is instead of product review sites, it's just actual product sites by the product brand who aren't even doing reviews, just listing the word best in the keyword.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Anything of the formats that would appear on informational sites have been intentionally de-ranked to get people to adopt the AI stuff Google is pushing in the SERPs. They're keeping some plausible deniability with their white list of maybe 100 big magazine sites.

You might find normal sites in the SERPs if you search some underserved query, but don't let that fool you. The magnitude of the traffic isn't there any more. I read some study where it was determined upwards of 70% of searches now result in no clicks outside of Google's ecosystem. I'd like to look up reports or wait on financial statements and see if this is affecting Adwords. I imagine CPC is going up and # of clicks are going down.

 

[chubes]

I think this style of content is surely dead, yes.

For me, the way forward for squeezing remaining SEO juice out of Google is:

1. Full automation at high volume
2. Interactive content (quizzes, games, etc)
3. Removing friction for users to increase engagement time
4. Creating unique value (free tools, community)

Part of this is the rise of AI, but another part is dwindling attention spans that started long before AI. If you can find a way to work a blog article idea into an interactive piece of content, you have a better chance of capturing attention.

 

[BakerStreet]

What I'm seeing is that a lot of informational queries are now navigational. So "Omegle alternative" doesn't show an informational article but it just shows homepages of apps.

Before, people went to the informational article and then to the app.

Now, Google realized that it is better to just rank the apps for this keyword.

So the intent switched from informational to navigational.

My hunch is that you can do CTR manipulation to get your homepage there. You need to show Google that users who search for "Omegle alternative" search again for your brand.