Gagan Ghotra

I posted this video on LinkedIn last week, below is the transcript of this.

By the way Reddit is becoming a problem for my SEO work but I still post over there and usually I like r/SEO, helping folks out there or sometimes just reading what’s going on. Yes its more real than SEO conversation on LinkedIn or X LOL.

Hello, LinkedIn. I wanted to make a quick video regarding my earlier Reddit post today. In that post, I mentioned having to let go of a client because Reddit was outranking them for all their targeted keywords.

To provide more details about the site, it was purely informational—not a business site selling products or services. Think of a news publisher, similar to those in Australia like Channel 7, The Age, or the Australian Financial Review. This client was a medium-sized publication (not as large as the examples mentioned) and based in the US. They employed 80 freelance writers across various countries, creating human-written content based on experience and knowledge, not AI-generated material.

Before Google’s Helpful Content Update last September (2023), they were getting excellent traffic from Google Search. The update, which impacted thousands of sites, caused their traffic to drop.

However, things took another turn after February, when Google made a deal with Reddit. This deal granted Google direct API access to Reddit’s data and permission to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) on it.

Putting aside the specifics of the Google-Reddit deal, the past three to four months I have seen Google prioritise ranking Reddit content, even low-quality comments or posts. It seems Google deems even casual Reddit comments useful for specific keyword searches, ranking them above other page types.

For publishers, I highly recommend analysing content overlap with Reddit. If significant overlap exists, minimize it. Google, for reasons unknown, favours Reddit content, even over high-quality material from other sources.

Therefore, your content strategy must be “Reddit-proof“.

Consider how to mitigate Reddit’s impact, as outranking it is becoming increasingly difficult. As an SEO Consultant, my focus isn’t solely on traffic growth, but also on preserving existing traffic.

If Google priorities Reddit, we must adapt. Whether through SEO, Google Ads, or other methods, we need strategies to maintain traffic and revenue.

Reddit must be a factor in your strategy.

Implement measures to counteract the impact of Google’s preference for Reddit on your business.

I just wanted to share this quick update. Let me know if you have any questions, or if there are specific topics you’d like me to discuss. I’m happy to create more videos on LinkedIn. Bye.