"We do need a competitor"
I think that's the core issue here. I run a portfolio of sites, did a series of experiments on Google's quality guidelines. Frustratingly, they are nowhere closer to finding the quality content as humans do, but they think they know it and implementing it.
My experimental sites(the contents that I made sure they are crappy in the eyes of humans) with cheap content ($3/100 words) without any editorial control marked as quality sites and perform well in searches. While the sites that we spent thousands of dollars with strict editorial control were punished for some reason.
At one point a scrapper site that picks up one of our sites partial feed with 150 words excerpt out ranked us in the search results. What kind of quality guideline is that, a 750 words post is bad quality while a 150 words excerpt of that is good.
Google's motive may be good, observing it for the past 7 months, I found their approach is wrong.
As you do I use BIng/DuckDuckGO these days. Google has so much market share (around 85% in my observation ), if it goes down to 30% then we don't need to worry about pleasing Google, but focus on pleasing our customers/visitors like normal business do.
My experimental sites(the contents that I made sure they are crappy in the eyes of humans) with cheap content ($3/100 words) without any editorial control marked as quality sites and perform well in searches. While the sites that we spent thousands of dollars with strict editorial control were punished for some reason.
At one point a scrapper site that picks up one of our sites partial feed with 150 words excerpt out ranked us in the search results. What kind of quality guideline is that, a 750 words post is bad quality while a 150 words excerpt of that is good.
Google's motive may be good, observing it for the past 7 months, I found their approach is wrong.
As you do I use BIng/DuckDuckGO these days. Google has so much market share (around 85% in my observation ), if it goes down to 30% then we don't need to worry about pleasing Google, but focus on pleasing our customers/visitors like normal business do.