For the past 20 years, probably even longer, the debate about Google giving preferential treatment to large sites over small sites has been a huge topic in the SEO world and that has not changed in 2024 from 2004. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, recently said on X, “yes, we should be rewarding the best content, regardless of site size.” He added that he hopes Google will get better at that, saying, “I hope we’ll get better here.”

This response came after a piece named How Google is killing independent sites like ours was published on House Fresh by Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton. Go read it, I know many of you have already.

Danny Sullivan responded to the criticism saying, we will do better. Yea, Google has been saying that for a long long time now and we are still waiting for that next update. Sullivan wrote:

Gisele Navarro responded saying:

Danny Sullivan responded again, hope to do better:

It reminds me a bit of when Matt Cutts, former Google spam cop, a decade ago, asked SEOs to tell Google which small sites should rank that aren’t ranking.

That form is still open but I doubt anyone has access to it anymore.

I know a lot of you are tired of hearing the “we will do better” from Google’s search team:

Heck, last night when I covered this at Search Engine Land I showed how Reddit outranked the original article from HouseFresh!

And then as expected:

Sad to see…

Forum discussion at X.