Why Is Google Displaying Reddit Posts in Search Results?

A2O Digital meets with hosts Tim Coleman and Justin Bencsko to discuss why Google is showing Reddit in search results. SEOs are reporting Reddit to become more prominent in the SERPs and they have sky rocketed. Google has taken action to partner with Reddit and work with the company to gain more access to their data. Find out why Google is pushing this new initiative and how it can impact your home service business.

Transcript

Tim  00:19

Hi again, I'm Tim Coleman, and I'm your host today. I'm also the managing partner of A2O Digital, a full service digital marketing agency working exclusively with home service businesses. My co host today is Justin Bencsko, and we have Katie Marchbank from our team joining us today, Justin and Katie, welcome. We're here today to talk about Reddit showing up much more in search results than it used to. So why are we talking about this? What's going on with Reddit that we want to talk about this?

Justin  00:58

Thanks, Tim. Yep, thanks for thanks for having us excited to kind of talk about this, this is something that we have started to see come up more and more actually, like in the home services vertical with our customers where we're seeing Reddit search results show up. In many places, a lot of times, it's theards from a particular metro area. So let's just say you're located in the Columbus metro area, right, and you search, garage doors or garage door repair. Within that first page of the search results. There are Reddit, there may be a Reddit thread from the Columbus metro area where someone's asking, Hey, did anybody use a plumber or a garage door company or whatever your service may be, I'm looking for a recommendation. And then you start to get that Reddit thread of people talking about who they used to they've had a good experience with. So we've started to see that across many different markets where this is this is showing up. On top of that, there's also been other chatter about Reddit in search results and having a bigger presence in Google. In the SEO community, in particular, it's been talked about and people kind of track different sites and how much they're showing up on search results. So just in general, on Google, Reddit is showing up more on there's a lot more talk about that in recent times. And then there's actually been stuff in the news, where Google is partnering with Reddit more so like all of the signs are indicating that, you know, Reddit is having a stronger presence here. And it's probably something to that's going to stay here. Google actually struck a deal with Reddit where they're paying Reddit 60, I think the number was $60 million for access to Reddits data and more access to data within within Reddit. So Google sees and feels like there's value coming from Reddit and wants to highlight that more. And so it's something that I think is going to only become more important as time goes on. And something that's kind of here to stay.

Tim  03:20

So let's talk a little bit Justin about why we think that's happening. What, what, what $60 million isn't that much at Google, but it's still a lot of money. So why are they giving Reddit $60 million for Firehose to their content? What are they? Why do you think they're doing that?

Justin  03:40

So I mean, we can talk and there's been articles where Reddit has, or Google has commented on this. They're literally saying they like the information and content from Reddit, I can pull a couple quotes from some of the articles were Google's commented on this. They said, "Reddit plays a unique role on the open internet as a large platform with an incredible breadth of authentic human conversations and experiences. And we're excited to partner to make it easier for people to benefit from that useful information" that's been saying like, hey, Reddit's got really good information there that we want to highlight more. Another quote that I kind of pulled from an article that kind of highlights this. "Over the years, we've seen people increasingly use Google to search for helpful content on Reddit to find product recommendations, travel advice, and much, much more. We know people find this information useful. So we're developing ways to make it even easier to access across Google products. This partnership will facilitate more content forward displays of Reddit information will make our products more helpful for our users and make it easier to participate in Reddit communities and conversation. So just two little snippets where they're saying like, this is great information. We need to figure out how to highlight it. Google sees people go to Google and specifically want to search on Reddit threads. Right? So like all this Google seeing and saying, ultimately, Google's goal is we want to whatever that person is searching, we want to provide them the best answer. And if people are liking the answers on Reddit, right, Google wants to provide more of that. So I mean, that from like a high level.

Tim  05:22

I think that's partially true, Just. I think Google's PR machine never really tells you the reason they're doing anything. I don't have a tremendous amount of trust in what Google's PR machine is telling me. Reddit has been providing great information to its users for 20 years and Google never care before. Now all of a sudden Reddit's great. My opinion is this is in direct response to the threat created by Chat GPT and other AI. The limitation that AI will have is the ability to provide direct experience. Google does not want to have anything in its search results that was written by Chat GPT. I think we I think all SEOs would agree with that. I think Google's at the point right now, where they don't want anything that could be written by Chat GPT, you see Danny Sullivan, that's Google Search liaison, talking about over and over again, how Google is looking for great content, they have ways of measuring great content, they are not just basing the rankings on authority anymore. There's popularity, and they have the ability to measure great content. And they want to be able to provide their users with unique experiences. If you want a restaurant, do you want an article summarizing, you know, steak? Or do you want to hear about somebody's experience at a steak restaurant, Google has clearly made the decision that it wants user experience. And it there was a there was a study recently that content that used words like I and we and our was getting a boost in rankings. And I'm not surprised by that. Chat GPT cannot write anything in the first person Chat GPT has no experience, you will never see Chat GPT, like I went to a restaurant, Chat GPT has never been to a restaurant. It'll never need a plumber. That's the way Google has decided to compete. And I think that's a lot of what this Reddit thing is. Reddit has been around a long time, and all of a sudden Google's finding their content very valuable. And Google's never going to come out and just admit it.

Justin  05:22

What would be their reason for not like I think we're kind of saying the same thing. Right? Like, yeah. Wants actual useful information for the end user. If someone's going to Google and doesn't find their results useful, right? And they're going to stop using Google. And that's ultimately they want to make sure that they're satisfying the searcher with AI, right? That's a new thing that's come out. And yeah, you people can create an article in two seconds of, you know, the best blah, blah, blah, and it goes and scours the internet. But that's not actual real good data. So Google is looking at this and saying, These are real people on Reddit threads talking about real experiences, right? That's what Google really wants.

Tim  07:57

Exactly. Yeah.

Justin  07:57

That's what I would want as a searcher. Right.  Tim, we were down in San Antonio on a work trip. And you know, this was we started, we were talking we've been talking about, hey, we're seeing Reddit show up. And we're at this place right next to the Riverwalk, which is really nice if you're ever in San Antonio, really cool place, and you're trying to figure out where to go to dinner, right. And we went on Google and we searched best restaurants on the Riverwalk, and there were multiple search results. And we both did this separately, but both of us ended up on a Reddit thread. Where it was talking about restaurants, on the Riverwalk, and there's people up voting, you know, different things. And you saw multiple people talking about their great experience at x restaurant, right? Those are real people that had real experiences. It wasn't just some random article written by AI. So I think we're all talking about that.

Tim  09:31

That's fair.

Justin  09:33

And so yeah, I mean, I think it is, if you get those genuine, you know, genuine threads of genuine people that have experienced whatever it is that you're searching for, like that is a good result. That's the one that I gravitated towards. That's the one that you gravitated towards Tim right. And we actually dined at a restaurant because of that.

Tim  09:53

It wasuseful content, right? Like there was a guy who lived in San Antonio who said, I've been here like five years and I go to the river Riverwalk, you know, a couple times a month. And these are the three restaurants you want to do if you want to accomplish this. I just took a picture of the of the what the guy said. And then each night, I chose the restaurant based upon what the guy had said, like, it was like, yeah, it was very useful. 

Justin  10:14

Yeah, and like when you think about this in the trades to like, if I'm a consumer, it's the same thing as the restaurant situation, right? Like, you know, I searched Garage Door Repair in Columbus or whatever your you know, whatever, you know, HVAC service, plumbing, whatever your thing is, a thread comes up of people that had real experiences with companies, and they're talking about it, and there's multiple people and, like, that's the type of stuff that I probably want to see as a consumer where I, that gives me confidence to potentially call someone.

Tim  10:47

It's going to be influential, right? It's gonna be influential, especially if folks in that thread are very credible and local, it's gonna be it's gonna have an influence.

Justin  10:57

So we'll talk about that a little bit more, a little bit later, right? When, right now, we look at those threads. And we say, okay, that's, that's credible. If this keeps getting more heat and light, and more people Reddit showing up more, it's having more influence on people that have the potential to be manipulated, and all those types of things. We can talk about that in a little bit. Which is an interesting conversation to see the level of evolution of, of where this goes. Anything else on that on why Google's doing it? Or can we should we start talking about, you know, what can we do about it? Right? This is happening, we feel like this is gonna stay? Let's talk a little bit about Okay, so what do you do about it at this point?

Tim  11:46

Yeah. So what do you do? Where do we start? If you're a business owner, where do you start Just.

Justin  11:51

I mean, the number one thing, obviously, is make sure you leave every single customer happy, right? Customer satisfaction, like this goes along with everything. Make your customers happy. Hopefully, if you do that consistently, naturally on these threads, right, you're giving a good experience for customers, naturally, people will happen to be Redditors, and will happen to comment on there, and you'll naturally show up, that's the kind of hope I wouldn't only leave it up to that. But like, from a base standpoint, do that make everyone happy, and this will organically naturally happen. We've seen that in some of these where you know, our customer is the one that shows up and is recommended. And that's, that's awesome. That said, I don't I don't think you should leave it just to that it's like, it's like reviews in general on Google. And wherever else. Like, if you leave customers happy, eventually they will leave good reviews, you'll have a good reputation. But you shouldn't leave it just to that you should have a proactive strategy to try and, you know, facilitate it even more and get people to share their experiences and proactively ask for it. So like from, from my mind, isn't that much different from Google reviews? Right? You have to you have to ask your customers to do it and share their experience. So I mean, there's different ways you could go about that, right? With reviews, a lot of times leaving, you know, getting the technician or whoever's in the home that's going to who's going to have the most influence, and that's where you're going to have the best chance. So can you train your technicians to just like asking for review on Google? Hey, you know, bring up Reddit, right? Like are you know, do you use Reddit? Like, that's a place where, you know, we're all about referrals, and you know, sharing if you have to, like we want you to share your genuine or have you ever been on Reddit, so when not everyone's going to be on Reddit. So some people will say no, okay, move on, and have them give a review somewhere else. But ask, if you get that person that is active on there. Ask them like, Hey, can you share your genuine experience and figure out a way you obviously you're going to have to direct figure out how to direct them to the forum or wherever you want them to share their experience. But, I mean, ultimately, I think you got to have a practice tried to ask customers to do this, right? And we're not asking them to lie or anything. We want your genuine feedback and share your experience. 

Tim  14:30

Yeah and you want to be your technician should be training to be transparent with customers. That reputation is important to you. You can do that right at the beginning. You know, at the end of this call, you know, at the end of the service today, I'm going to ask you for to judge my performance. So I want to do a great job for you. And ask them like, you know, what sites do you use? Do you use Yelp? Do you use Reddit like I think a technician can ask that question right and then that can trigger the the relationship to head in the direction that you kind of need it to from both a consumer and business perspective, right? I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about here.

Justin  15:11

Yeah, you you're asking them, you know, where do you frequent where? Where do you go? Can you share your experience there? Like you just said, There's Yelp, right? It's the same thing. If someone's you know is a Yelper, could you leave a Yelp review, but you got to ask them, and not everyone's gonna be not everyone's gonna be on Reddit. There's, you know, local Facebook groups, that's another place where, you know, similar type of threads, you know, I know, in my town, there's one and people ask, Hey, can I get a recommendation on a good plumber or on a good electrician, whatever the service may be, and people go and give recommendations. If someone's active there, ask them to share their feedback there, right? You got to kind of, you know, ask and just like you said, the other thing that we're going to be looking at too, is can we help in some way, with like, text messaging, we're working on some stuff with text messaging customers. So can you have something where, you know, it sends out a text as well after the job and like, hey, we genuinely appreciate your feedback, here's places where you can share your experience, and you got to figure out the, we got to figure out the wording of it, but list those right, you can list directly the Reddit form. So it's easy for them to click and go to that forum and leave it you know, list your Yelp profile, or the you know, Facebook group where you would want someone so working through that, where, if you can attack it on multiple fronts, right, the technician asking for a text message goes out to the customer asking for that feedback afterwards, there's many ways that you can kind of do that and facilitate is you're going to have, you can kind of try and stack the deck a little bit to you know, not just rely on it to organically happen. You got to be careful, you don't want you know, you don't, you're not sharing genuine experiences, you're not asking someone to you're not doing anything, there's no foul play there, you're just proactivally asking them. 

Tim  17:18

So this is gonna be more important right now. Or, or a little more urgent, let's say, in your main keyword, your main geography, there's a Reddit thread showing up now, right? So if you're a business owner, the first thing you're gonna want to do is do that search, go through the organic results and see if there's a Reddit thread there. And then if there is that's going to provide the URL, or close to it, of what you want to then provide your customers where they can leave feedback, right?

Justin  17:46

Yep, exactly. And in some places, there isn't, there isn't one, it's not showing up? Maybe there is, but Google hasn't chosen to show up, chosen for it to show up. So like, Yeah, this isn't gonna, you know, this isn't a thing that necessarily is going to affect every single person that this moment, but I think it's going to continue to expand and have more presence. The other part to this like? Asking your customer? You know, should you be like proactive in these threads? Should you as a business, be commenting in those threads that was, you know, my other like thought? Is there anything that like, not just relying on your, you know, on your customer to do it? Like, should you practically be going in there and saying something, which I think is tricky. I don't know the answer to that.

Tim  18:37

I think it's a great conversation to have. So if I was a Reddit user, and I'm not a big Reddit user, but my initial reaction to that would be like, that's not the place. I want to see you. However, if you are there responding to what somebody else said, I would find that appropriate and helpful.

Justin  19:01

Yeah, and Katie, maybe you can comment on that a little bit. You know, we brought kind of you on here, you're active on Reddit, like, what would you think from that perspective is like the business went on and said something? I kind of agree with you, Tim. Like, if you're providing there was a question and you're providing some helpful feedback to answer it, that's great. But you don't want to like, get in there and like, choose us. You know, like, where? Do you hear that Katie?

Katie  19:27

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today, guys. So this sort of gets into a bigger question, you know, of, of how Reddit really works, if you're unfamiliar with it. But to answer your question more directly. Yeah, I don't think that most of the time Reddit users are looking for people to directly self promote, and that's the case in most subreddits you're not allowed to self promote. It's a lot of using Reddit is being familiar with individual's subreddit's rules, there are some subreddits, where they say, okay, yeah, you can self promote, but you have to be otherwise an active member of the subreddit, you can't just be there to self promote, or your, your posts are just gonna get deleted. And, you know, one of the things that Reddit has in place is its karma system. And that's basically your reputation on Reddit, like your own individual account reputation, and you get karma from people voting your posts and your comments. And, you know, if you're posting absolute nonsense, and every two seconds, you're like, look at me, look at my business, people are just gonna downvote you, your comments are gonna get to the bottom.

Tim  20:41

You get negative karma.

Katie  20:43

Oh, yeah, you can get negative karma. People are gonna downvote you your, your posts are gonna get hidden, once they hit a certain threshold. Some subreddits even require your account to have a certain amount of karma in the first place to even post or comment. So, you know, subreddits are moderated by the community that they're in. And, you know, sometimes your posts and comments have to be approved, it depends individually, and people will look at your account and see what you've been doing. If your first post on a subreddit is, oh, my business does this were amazing. You're gonna say no, get out of here. But if, you know, if it's a community that allows self promotion, and you have posts, you know, say, across Reddit, you know, talking about your favorite video games, or, you know, advice, giving somebody who's dying plant needs advice, and then you also happen to be in a, you know, Home Improvement subreddit, and somebody is saying, you know, like, I have tried a million times to change my garage door spring, and I can't figure it out. Does anybody know a local company that does this? Because I've given up, then maybe you can say like, Hey, yeah, I work for Precision or whatever company.

Justin  22:03

You want to make sure anything your company is providing actual value and self promoting.

Katie  22:08

Yeah, exactly. And just in your whole account can't just be self promotion, or it's going to be, people are going to know immediately.

Justin  22:19

And it's kind of more it's frowned upon in the community too right?

Katie  22:25

And that that leads into, like, the conversation of, you know, you brought up earlier Justin, can this be spam? Can Is this gonna get abused? Because, you know, we, you know, Google has a lot of spam, and it's reviews and everything. And I think people are starting to know that too, on the broader scale, not just, you know, the SEO types know, that there's a lot of spam. But I think a lot of you know, people that aren't involved in the community are starting to know, there's a lot of spam and Google reviews. So you know, people have been people type in showerhead reviews Reddit, like they don't they skip past the Google reviews, the Amazon reviews these days, because there's no, they know, there's so much spam.

Justin  23:04

Katie, I guess I have a question around this. And if I just know spam is going to happen, right, the more Reddit is highlighted, the more potential opportunity there is to get something from it right to get leads. And once as that continues to grow, there's gonna be people looking to manipulate it. So what's to prevent someone let's just say, creating 100, fake Reddit profiles and going into these threads and saying, oh, you know, my ABC Company is the best, my ABC Company is the best. And like, how is that? Do you think that that has a potential to happen? Or with this, like, system of karma and all that, like, Do you think that's gonna be hard to do? Like, what is your take on that? Because people on spam is sophisticated. 

Katie  24:04

Yeah, I think people are definitely going to try that when you know, people first start getting the idea that Reddit is going to be in the SERP more often, I don't think that it's going to work. For the most part, there may be a special case, you know where it does, but like I mentioned, you, a lot of subreddits require your account to have some level of karma already. If you make a brand new account, and you try to make a self promotion post, it's, it might not even show up at all, if you it'll just get automatically deleted. And even if there's the subreddit doesn't have a Karma requirement, if again, if that's the first thing you post, these communities are self moderated by people who care about it, for the most part. They're going to see it they're going to look at your account and they're going to be like this is this is garbage and it's it's going to get down voted. You know, people when on Reddit when they see somebody being malicious or otherwise spammy, they're just going to downvote you and it's just going to disappear. It's not, it's not going to be there. And and there's also a sense I think of longevity on Reddit. You know, a lot of the posts that I have seen show up on the SERP are slightly older posts, they're not posts made yesterday. There, there's a very popular meme on the internet about like, people, you know, with a niche question, and the superhero that comes to save them as a is a Reddit user from 10 years ago with the same exact question. And it's because that, you know, there's a sense of, of Reddit being, you know, it's it just important that this sticks around, it's not just trending, it's not, you know, and a lot of communities, you know, it depends on their activity level, if you are posting to a niche town subreddit that gets one post every two weeks, like, Google's not going to rank that you we know, Google likes sites that have content that updates. But if you know, you're posting to the entire New Jersey subreddit, that's very popular, and your first thing is just self promotion, it's gonna get drowned out by other people that are posting things that are actually relevant, anyway. 

Justin  26:19

Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting. Because like, you just think of the example. Okay, we saw, let's just say garage door, someone says, I want a garage door company in Columbus, Ohio. And there's, you know, a bunch of comments on that. If I just go and create five or 10 accounts, and all I do is go and comment on that. Is that not going to show? Or will it still show up? Like if I come in, oh, I used ABC garage door company. And then I have my next account and go, Oh, yeah, I use them too. And then I have another account that goes in up votes that, like, how I'm trying to, I guess I don't totally understand that. I have to learn more about how Reddit works. But like, how are they going to catch? How are they going to catch that?

Tim  27:03

Just you've been fighting spam too long. And like you said how to do it?

Justin  27:08

Well, I know what these people do. And I know what I'm saying. I guess it remains to be to be seen. I hope that it doesn't become something that turns into that. I just yeah, maybe, I've been seeing it and you know, over the past 10-15 years of what happens. And so I don't know, it'll be interesting. Hopefully, all that stuff that you said, Katie Does, does help make it be a hard thing to manipulate. But we will see.

Katie  27:44

Yeah it'll definitely be an interesting journey, I think. But like I said, even if you do spam like it, by the time that Google, you know, crawls it and decides that it might be useful information, you probably would have been downvoted by the community anyway, because again, they're going to look at this account, see, it has no posts, see, it doesn't interact with the community, or any community, any subreddit in any meaningful way, you're gonna get downvoted, you're gonna get banned, your posts are gonna get deleted.

Tim  28:19

I think what I just learned is that if I want to have some influence in Reddit, I'm going to need to invest some time in that platform and provide some value to that platform. 

Katie  28:32

Absolutely. 

Tim  28:33

That's what it sounds like. So I think that's a great takeaway. What do we think about the future of Google SERPs with Roundup? Do you think this is? Do you think this will go away? Do you think this will increase? Do they kind of stay the same? Where were we at? What do you think Katie?

Katie  28:48

Um, I don't know, I guess it could go either way. I mean, if we do end up with some spam, it could end up the same way as like Google, where people start not trusting Reddit anymore, and then they stop searching, you know, showerhead review Reddit, they they just stopped they look start looking somewhere else. I think it'll be a lot of, you know behavior driven. You know, a lot of people still say they trust Reddit, they, like you mentioned, it's, it's real people's experiences. And if people stop trusting Reddit, they're just going to stop searching. X reviews, X recommendations Reddit, and then Google is going to see that that trend, you know, that search volume is down, they're going to stop ranking it but if you know, if it does work, if people are searching more and more, it's going to go up and then you're going to want to be a part of your local community subreddits. You're going to want to be a part of subreddits of other things that you care about just to have a an account with high karma with that people trust and then you know, if your subreddit allows self promotion, and you do a Post that people are like, okay, that's fine. Maybe it gets on the Google SERP.

Tim  30:06

What do you think Justin? Is this going to accelerate? Stay the same go away? What's gonna happen? 

Justin  30:11

Yeah, I mean, obviously, we don't have a crystal ball. So there's no way to tell you, for sure. But if I'm looking at all the signs, I'm saying it's only going to have a bigger impact into the future. That's, you know, Google, striking a partnership of seeing it more SEO seeing it more Google saying that we see people like this, you know, information, like that's all indicators that this is only going to be a bigger influence moving forward. But again, like, there's no way to guarantee that, but that's why we're talking about this today. Right? If we thought that this showed up a couple times that it's going to die down, we probably wouldn't even spend the time thinking about it talking about it. So yeah, I mean, in terms of like, takeaway, like you said it, Tim, look in your area, is there something currently right now showing up in the search results in Google, right? If it is, start to figure out how you can stack the deck in your favor and get people to share their experiences there, right? If it's not showing up in your area, maybe you don't have to worry about this for a little bit. Maybe you go on Reddit and see if there is something that Google hasn't necessarily picked up and shown yet. And maybe you start working towards it proactively, but especially if it's showing up right now. That's, you know, figuring out your game plan. 

Tim  31:34

That's right. All right. So this was a lot of really useful information for me. And I think for our listeners, so thank you guys very much. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time.