Here at Cointelegraph, we were as shocked as everyone else in and around the crypto-sphere when we learned about the abrupt closure
of stalwart crypto media outlet CCN. Established at around the same
time as Cointelegraph and CoinDesk, CCN spent years competing for the
crypto audience.
However, just a couple days later, as many others, we were relieved to hear that CCN was back
— although we couldn’t help but feel sceptical regarding several
aspects of the story and puzzled by so many questions swirling around
it.
How come a key player in our own industry could go down
overnight — and then come back so conveniently after a few days? How
could a three-letter-dot-com domain commanding millions of monthly
visits be so hooked on Google-fed traffic that a single adjustment in
the search algorithm, albeit a major one, cost it 90% of ad revenue
momentarily?
What was it, really? A targeted, politically
motivated character assassination on behalf of the tech giant (as CCN’s
founder claimed)? An unfortunate alignment of circumstances with no one
in particular to blame? Possibly a PR stunt, or something else? We felt
we owed it to the entire industry to take a sober look into this case to
find out whether something similar could happen to any of us at any
point in the future.
What happened to CCN?
CCN Markets, established
in 2013 by the Norwegian entrepreneur Jonas Borchgrevink as
CryptoCoinsNews.com, is currently part of the media company Hawkfish AS,
which also operates Hacked, a publication that provides analysis on
“future assets” like cryptocurrencies and tech stocks; MoneyMakers, a
self-identified “tabloid that produces news with a special focus on
money”; and HVY.com, a news platform that is designed to promote
journalists rather than news stories. One of the largest global
crypto-related news outlets, the majority of traffic
to ccn.com comes from the U.S. As of early June 2019, the publication
reportedly employed more than 60 full-time, part-time and freelance
contributors.
On June 10, CCN founder Jonas Borchgrevink addressed the readers with an extensive post,
declaring that the website took a massive blow from Google’s June 2019
Core Update and saw mobile traffic from Google searches drop by 71%
overnight, as measured by Sistrix’s Visibility Index (the same graph
also showed a 53% decline in desktop traffic). This, Borchgrevink
claimed, resulted in an immediate 90% decrease in ad revenue. He added
that, although CCN had reached even lower visibility scores on a few
occasions throughout the past year, the latest dip proved the most
devastating because of the recent expansion of its team.
Borchgrevink
suspected a possible “general crypto crackdown by Google,” citing
smaller but substantial losses on the same metric allegedly sustained by
CNN’s competitors — i.e., CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. However,
regarding Cointelegraph, the data Borchgrevink cites is inaccurate,
based on conversations with Cointelegraph’s SEO team and public data
that shows no reversal or even a slowdown around June 10. On the
contrary, it reveals a steady upward trend in Cointelegraph’s Alexa Rank
dynamics that is visible since mid-May. According to a Forbes article,
other prominent publications in the crypto space, such as Coindesk and
The Block, also reported insignificant effects from Google’s update.
CCN’s
director went on to discuss other potential reasons for the website’s
visibility collapse, including Google’s guidelines for additional
scrutiny applied to “Your Money, Your Life” websites — in other words,
outlets that provide information related to either health or personal
finance and are therefore subject to more stringent content quality
requirements. Borchgrevink then ruled out the possibility of having been
taken down on the grounds of quality, listing all CCN’s well-deserved
awards, quality seals, and editorial and business practices that speak
in favor of the publication’s blue-ribbon status.
Finally, CCN’s
boss turned to politics as an explanation for Google’s allegedly
unfavorable treatment of his website. He noted that, despite being
pro-free speech and providing a floor for opinions from all over the
ideological spectrum, CCN has recently featured a lot of specifically
“Pro-Trump” op-eds, which, he implied, was in line with the
publication’s “anti-elite, anti-centralization” stance, which Google,
according to him, allegedly opposed. He also pointed out that, as a
result of the recent update, some right-leaning British newspapers saw
their Google traffic decline, while some of their left-leaning
counterparts enjoyed gains.
While there are no direct accusations of Google being politically biased in the text, in the accompanying video,
rather fierce language is abundant: For one, Borchgrevink calls it a
“fascist corporation” that is trying to censor anyone who “remotely dips
its toe out of the left-leaning bubble.” This was followed by calls for
everyone who cares about free speech to wake up and rally against the
“Googlémocracy” and disrupt the overwhelming corrosive corporate power,
along with a list of demands for Google.
The meltdown concluded,
rather unexpectedly, with a statement of CCN shutting down in the wake
of revenue losses incurred thanks to Google. Reluctant to downsize the
team, Borchgrevink announced redeploying everyone to HVY.com.
What is a Google Core Update?
As
Google’s numerous products and services, from Gmail to Chrome, have
come to dominate their respective market segments, the company’s
fundamental value proposition lies in fast and relevant search output.
In response to a query, the search engine uses a complex system of
proprietary algorithms and filters to furnish the user with lists of web
pages ranked by relevance, also called search engine results pages
(SERPs).
In order to improve the quality of this output, Google
introduces hundreds of subtle tweaks to this system every year — of
which, most are barely noticeable — and sometimes rolls out major
updates that affect the core algorithm’s functionality. The latter often
become milestones for entire businesses reliant on Google-generated
traffic, severely affecting their bottom line for better or worse.
The Google June 2019 Core Update is the second large-scale adjustment so far this year, and also the first one ever to be announced by the company in advance. The previous update in March focused
on areas where the so-called EAT factors (i.e., Expertise,
Authoritativeness, Trust) are deemed the most important, resulting, for
example, in massive fluctuations in health care-related websites’ search
visibility.
In the wake of that update, Google specifically pointed out
that, while improvements are focused on website content, its quality is
not a primary criterion, and there is nothing “wrong” with websites
that took a dip in visibility rankings. At the same time, there is
nothing that could be done to “fix” such websites. With regard to the
June update, the precise focus of the adjustment remains unclear, as
websites from a variety of regions and subject fields found themselves
affected.
As Glen Allsopp, founder of SEO firm Detailed.com, noted to Cointelegraph:
“Past
Google updates could certainly be described as targeting certain
industries, with an August 2018 update being dubbed ‘Medic’ due to how
many health sites were impacted. Health and finance sites appear to have
seen big swings once again, as have quite a lot of news sites. That
said, this one feels broader to me.”
There are
numerous criteria at play when the algorithm determines the rank of a
particular web page in search output. Perhaps most prominent in the last
few major updates are the aforementioned YMYL and EAT guidelines that
prescribe varying quality standards for different categories of
websites. In addition, Google routinely locates and takes down various
schemes, which shrewd webmasters employ in order to boost traffic and ad
revenues.
This Medium post,
for instance, describes one such mechanism that large trusted portals
use to game the algorithm and profit from the additional unrelated
content on their domains. Cointelegraph’s SEO specialists observed that
many financial media who took a hit from the June update saw their
coupon schemes cut.
Webmaster forum development and CCN’s resurrection
In response to an inquiry from Forbes’ Benjamin Prius, a Google representative reiterated a statement
from March 2018 that some websites may experience traffic fluctuations
due to a core update. Moreover, the boost for the pages that come to
perform better might stem from the fact that they have been undervalued
previously. They also pointed to Google webmaster forums as a place to seek advice on issues that arise in the wake of algorithm adjustments.
Indeed,
in the original post, CCN’s director reported seeking guidance from the
webmaster community but said that their theories explaining the CCN
situation did not “appear to be entirely accurate.” Meanwhile, one of
the considerations that emerged in that thread
around the time of the closure announcement could well be the key to
understanding what happened to CCN’s search visibility. Some of the
community members noticed that pages from the old domain,
cryptocoinsnews.com, resurfaced in search output, redirecting to the
current CCN home page — a behavior that one of the webmasters called “a sure fire way to confuse search engines.”
Two days after the closure announcement, Borchgrevink followed up with yet another statement
in which he acknowledged the glitch of the old domain showing up in
search results — even in search results for recent CCN articles. He also
sounded less convinced that the core update was the root of the evil:
“Whether
or not the Google June 2019 Core Update is to blame, we are fixing it.
[...] There’s still a good chance that this won’t correct our visibility
on Google overnight, but I’m hopeful we are on the right path to
figuring it out.”
And then, even more abruptly than the announcement of CCN shutting down, the announcement of CCN coming back arrived:
“Enough said. CCN.com is back.”
Versions and reactions
Granted, CCN’s own core readership was
deeply saddened by the news of CCN’s demise and rejoiced when it was
reversed. Some crypto blogs subscribed
to the “evil Google” narrative unconditionally; others tried to test
their own hypotheses as to what the search engine update could mean for
the industry. One of them, Inside Trade, ran an experiment
to assess whether the improved algorithm favored websites on Google’s
own Adsense network, which yielded mixed results obtained from a tiny
sample.
Some of the crypto industry’s experts, though, did not
find Borchgrevink’s account of the events all that compelling. “What
Bitcoin Did” podcast host Peter McCormack tweeted:
I suspect the closure of CCN is more than just down to a change in the Google algorithm. If the rollout was June 3rd and the decision was a week later, I assume they had bigger problems.
46 people are talking about this
Elad Mor, CEO of MarketAcross and co-founder at InboundJunction — a
content marketing, SEO & PR agency for startups — told Cointelegraph
that the Google search algorithm might indeed be a headache for
publishers, but in this case, it was likely not the only factor:
updates can be vicious. We've seen businesses go from hero to zero
after massive Google algorithm updates. ‘Notorious’ updates such as
Google ‘Panda’ or ‘Penguin’ have left scorched territories behind them
and were real game-changers for SEOs and publishers relying on organic
traffic.
“We've been working with CCN's news department for a
while, their attitude of straight shooting investigative journalism and
compromised quality makes me think that this "penalty" is a very
technical one and could be sorted by working closely with Google support
and adhering to their strict guidelines. There might also be more to
the story, since a big website like CCN doesn't close overnight or
changes its decision the day after.”
Trey Ditto, CEO
of Ditto PR, a full-service communications firm with crypto and
blockchain practice, suspects that more systemic determinants could be
at play:
“The media landscape in crypto is shrinking.
Either media outlets need to step up to fill the void, or crypto and
blockchain projects need to recognize that getting media coverage is a
tactic and not a strategy. Most people I’ve talked to don’t seem to be
buying the narrative that Google is at fault for CCN’s shutdown. A more
logical explanation is that a lot of crypto media outlets are struggling
to adapt and mature with the market. If you have a high burn rate or
lack a way to monetize outside of ads, you won’t last through the
remainder of crypto winter. The same goes for crypto projects: Evolve
quickly or die off.”
So, it may appear that at least
one of the immediate reasons behind the CCN’s search visibility nosedive
was in fact not triggered by the Google June 2019 Core Update, but
merely coincided with it. From conversations with Cointelegraph’s SEO
team, it emerged that the old domain’s sudden comeback was likely
prompted by its 301 redirect — a tool used to establish a permanent
redirect from one URL to another — breaking down, which resulted in old
pages appearing in the search index again. As two sets of pages with
identical content surfaced, Google’s algorithm identified them as a
dishonest attempt at gaining visibility and began lowering their ranking
accordingly.
Not all SEO professionals subscribe to this view.
Glen Allsopp observed to Cointelegraph that the redirect seems to be in
place still:
“This is not common, unless the old
domain is resurrected in some form, which doesn't appear to have been
the case for CCN and their previous domain, cryptocoinsnews.com. You can
check Archive.org and all June mentions show their domain redirect
still in place. I saw the comments regarding their old domain now
ranking in search results but two premium third-party analysis tools I
use - Ahrefs and Sistrix - both fail to show any search visibility at
all for their old domain name. They may have missed it, but I would be
very surprised by that”
The confusion around what has
really happened to CCN’s traffic, of course, does not mean that
Google’s enormous and unchecked power over online search, advertising
and publishing industries is not a pressing issue — or that online
journalism’s dominant ad-based business model is not flawed.
Acquisition attempt
Shortly
after the news of CCN’s shutdown hit the press, unverified claims of
the publication’s attempted acquisition began to circulate online. The
alleged benefactor was also specified: Stankevicius MGM, a global PR and
advertising firm headquartered in the UAE. If the validity of these
talks is not unfounded, the timing of the events would be crucial to
understand whether the attempted deal had any influence on the general
plot line.
Roma Stankeviciene, Stankevicius MGM’s executive vice
president, confirmed that the negotiations did indeed take place. In
fact, it turns out that CCN received more than one offer in between
shutting down and coming back:
“CCN CEO’s message was
quite convincing, so yes, our CEO approached them to discuss whether a
sale or an M&A. We were willing to offer 7 digits net for the media
site. We didn’t keep this as a secret, and told colleagues and business
contacts about our interest in CCN, and so the talks spread.
“We
noticed once our story hit the news, another media company decided to
make an offer as well, and it was kind of a copycat move in a way
because we actually approached the CCN first right after their
announcement and we were serious about it, and having another company
drop into the deal with a new offer only make things complicated.
“However,
later we heard that CCN was not selling anymore as they got their
traffic back from Google. It’s unfortunate, we would have done something
great with the site.”
The statement therefore
suggests that the acquisition negotiations did not prompt the shutdown.
If anything, they could only trigger CCN’s decision to go back up
defiantly. Meanwhile, Stankevicius MGM executives remained unconvinced
by the publication’s own version of the story:
“They
claimed that they lost traffic, still even if they lost it, they had
more than enough traffic and brand awareness to keep the business going.
[...] We still think internally that their announcement was not true.”
Amid all the uncertainty, InboundJunction’s Mor aptly summarized:
“Whatever the reason is, we're happy they are still in the game.”
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