We don’t quite understand why, but looking at our traffic results for the past month seems like Google hates seniors. To be more specific, Google hates our website Suddenly Senior, which is mostly read by senior citizens. This could just sound like sour grapes and maybe it is. We just don’t understand why other search engines treat us so much better than Google.
Bing absolutely loves Suddenly Senior right now. Actually, Bing loves our subscribers. Bing pays attention to social signals. It notices that seniors trust our site and look to us for guidance. They pay attention when you comment and share our articles on Facebook or Twitter.
Google doesn’t care about these things. It wants to tell you what’s important based on its own algorithm. Maybe Google is just indifferent and hate is too strong of a word.
We’ve compiled a list of common search results to demonstrate our claim.
Popular Senior Search Results
Here’s how each search engine performed in our site’s top searches. We had a hunch we’d find results like this. Some of the results surprised us in a bad way.
| Keyword | Bing | Yahoo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| will seniors get a check for coronavirus | #34 | #1 | #2 |
| will retirees get a stimulus check | #70 | #2 | #4 |
| coronavirus guide for senior citizens | #10 | #1 | #11 |
| senior shopping hours | Not Ranked | #4 | Not Ranked |
| activities for seniors | #6 | #4 | #3 |
| disney movie trivia questions | #3 | #1 | #2 |
| best dogs for seniors | #2 | #5 | #5 |
Google Hates Suddenly Senior
Bing was the clear winner and Google obviously came in last. The disparity in rankings between Google and Bing proves how little respect senior-related content on our site gets from Google. We knew some of our rankings in Google were bad, we just didn’t realize how awful. Yahoo only failed to rank for a single top keyword we researched. Every keyword we researched was in the top 5 results on Bing.
| Number of Top Results | |||
| Place | Bing | Yahoo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 5 | 1 | 1 |
| 2nd | 1 | 4 | 1 |
| Total | 6 | 5 | 2 |
We could have calculated averages, but that would have looked even worse for Google. Median is a better representation of how we rank with each search engine.
| Median Rank | ||
| Bing | Yahoo | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 3.5 | 8 |
MOZ Gives More Proof That Google Hates Suddenly Senior
We wanted to check back just to see how deep Google’s hatred runs for our site. As of May 8, 2020, we have lost 36% of our visibility. With over 106 keywords dropping out of the top 3 and 498 keywords dropping in total, our site traffic has taken a huge hit. What the below graphic doesn’t tell you is how far these keywords dropped. Most of these keywords didn’t simply drop a few spots, most of them dropped off the first page.
All of our content and keywords are senior-related articles that meet the search intent of the reader.
Conclusion
If you never see our articles when you search senior-related topics, you’re probably using Google. Give Bing a shot the next time you’re unhappy with the results Google gives you. We definitely prefer them now over Google. We’re not sure if it means that Google hates seniors, but it sure does feel like it to us.
Thanks to our readers and Suddenly Senior Facebook page subscribers, we get recognition from sources other than Google. We couldn’t make it without all of you.
