New Report Shows Google Seems to Favor User Generated Content, With Reddit Rising in Search Visibility

2024 was a year where SEO experts were trying to keep up with website ranking strategies on Google. According to a new IndexWatch report by SISTRIX, 2024 was a year of user generated content (UGC), large e-commerce brands and AI tools. Reddit also saw a big growth in its search visibility, often being seen in top rankings on Google search and this raises questions about Google’s practices. The report highlights that Reddit almost tripled its visibility in Google’s US search results for a number of keywords, niche discussions and product reviews.

Reddits’s website saw a 190.9% increase in its search visibility growth, followed by Instagram’s growth mostly because of its video and visual content. YouTube was also one of the top websites in search visibility because of its video SEO and Spotify gained search visibility because of music-related searches, followed by Wikipedia.

According to Google’s policies, websites should not publish content outside of their establishment tropical authority. It is because of scaled content and site reputation so the sites cannot rank based on unrelated keywords. But Reddit’s rankings seem opposite to the rules even though it contains many different keywords and doesn't operate only under one area of expertise. This makes the SEO community and other people think about why Reddit gets ranked for everything on Google. It is also worth mentioning here that Reddit has a deal with Google for broader search and it makes us think if Google is being fair in its ranking system or not.

ck12.org (+602.59%) was the fastest growing site on Google in 2024, followed by VirginAtlantic.com (+509.74%), Quillbot.com (+490.70%), Hardrock.com (+436.63%) and TheKitchn.com (+300.40%). Most of the fastest growing sites on Google used programmatic SEO strategies to grow in rankings. The report shows that user-generated content (UGC) like the ones on Reddit, Stack, Quora, GitHub and Exchange saw a breakthrough in 2024. Many HubPages with topics like pet advice, jokes and music also grew in rankings on Google search results. Overall, it seems like Google favors UGC even if it contains a variety of keywords and content. E-commerce sites also gained transactions after a few years of declining as many retailers focused on keyword targeting and SEO-friendly updates.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World