Personally, it's much easier for me to be invested in a task when what I'm doing is 'interesting' to me.
Almost always and ironically, when something's interesting to me it's usually more difficult work and thus, contains far more unknowns, hence making estimates that much less reliable.
Id like to propose an alternative to the alternative posed in the article:
Years ago I was tasked with building dozens of basic web forms. Immediately recognizing the inherit silliness of this task (boring, error prone etc), I built a form creation tool, which all these years later lives on as RackForms.
Over the years the feature set grew organically to accommodate an ever growing set of demands. Yes we still build forms, but we also call into web services, display data, and so on.
Point being, RackForms and any number of other form builders are the blindingly obvious choice for this task -- it would be down right silly to code forms by hand in this era.
And yet that's what we do with the web as a whole.
Once again Microsoft seems to have had the right idea in the good old Web Forms days. Instead of coding app's you'd simply drag and drop components and add wiring code to do what you needed.
Sure it was never that easy, but it's really hard to see how it couldn't have been better given more time.
Fast forward to today and as much as I adore say, VS Code, it's really nothing more than a hyper-powerful text editor. It has none of that tolling to allow for drag and drop development, Id propose that;s the real solution to this issue - Better Tooling.
"according to several online customers" - This phrase or a close variant is used in almost every review and it's really distracting. It feels too robotic and repetitive.
In general, it seems like "build quality" is a common complaint, which at these price points is likely always going to be an issue. I guess what I mean is with cheap prices I'm not expecting build quality to be great so repeatedly calling it out in a general sense isn't all that useful. Far more useful is when a specific part is called out, which in one case it is, the wire being flimsy. More of that!
In general, it would be nice to have more specifics instead of the constant generalities one associates with low/er-cost goods.
The phrase "noise cancelling" is used about 44 times in the article. From what I recall this may be considered "keyword stuffing", which is used to be (and almost certainly still is, a big old no-no). Of course how do you create an aggregate content page without mentioning the topic repeatedly? Well my friend that's the Google content paradox! - talk about something without actually mentioning it by name.
On general mission: it would be really nice to have the top "pick" better called out.
I read the first review and was ok, that sounds like an option I wouldn't have considered, good job site! But then said "Mpow hmmm... not a brand I've heard of", so I scanned down and came to the JLab's. I said "I've heard of them!" and read the blurb.
That's where the problem starts: For almost the same price the blurb makes the Jlabs sound "better" or at least more attractive than what I thought was the "top pick / best value".
I think some of this may have to do with the fact that in the Mpow's have two negative aspects pointed out "Others say that the battery life and microphone are disappointing", whereas the Jlabs only one: "pinch their ears". Mind this isn't about count so much as what's being called out: one may have bad battery life and the other may actually hurt my head lol.
The reason I say "problem" is sites like Wire cutter take a stand and proclaim "this is the best", even though in most cases the top 3 or more would all be just fine. As it stands, we have many low cost options presented and all with what appears to be potentially deal-breaking flaws; the end result is I don't really feel any better prepared that if I had just gone to Amazon and scanned reviews myself.
What's more, if I see something with 20 total reviews at 5 stars and a similar product with 40k 4 stars, I'll usually just go for the one with more reviews. In short, number of reviews is a strong signal for me, and I think / hope it would be trivial to add that as a metric to your site.
On Google: So in closing hopefully some of those thoughts are useful in some way, but I did want to close by saying I absolutely feel your pain.
Someone like you posts a traffic drop off story and we all rush in to say this is why, but what we forget is Rome wasn't built in a damned day. If this traffic penalty sticks it's pretty safe to say you're business and dream is dead. No google means no traffic means no site. Business is hard but what we need to agree upon is the promise of the internet was to democratize and incubate. The early internet certainly did, the modern, not so much.
I think we can all agree that the best ideas should rise to the top and be rewarded. We should also agree that a single company shouldn't have that power, but the Internet's users. Legislation is the only cure here, so far as I can see, as this exact scenario plays out time and again and it's always at our expense, both business owners and internet users.
Great feedback but yeah, big picture we're talking pretty small numbers.
The 10 (or so) spam accounts posted about 30 times. The longest lasting survived a weekend, after which I enabled manual account activation. From start to finish the spam issue lasted around 3 weeks. Eventually, I got rid of the forum altogether.
Alas I tried all the usual things, from the disavow tool to Webmaster forums and dozens of site changes, sadly nothing helped. My penalty felt back then and still appears to be, permanent.
It may help to know pre-penalty my rank was quite high, first page for most relevant search terms. (immediately after page 20 or lower, now around page 10).
Ironically, while the rank was nice to have I never actually did anything for it.
I simply built a fast, human first(!), site that inadvertently followed Google's site quality guidelines.
For example, my software generates web forms. One common growth tactic my competitors use is placing a link at the bottom of every form back to the parent site.
Me -- I never did that. I strongly felt that under no circumstance should the output of my software be used as a marketing tool. Sure it may harm growth, but it felt right, and that was enough for me.
Years after my penalty I read just that. Google frowns upon and may penalize sites for using such "widely distributed site links".
My focus was and always has been on user, so of course I'm the one who gets penalized lol.
Anyway, I think the most damning part of the process was not having a reasonable path for knowing what exactly happened and what I could do to help.
If I were crafting legislation that's where I'd start. I can't help that Google has the market-share it does, but it does mean we all have to play within their world.
All I ask is the rules, wherever they are, are fairly, justly, and evenly applied.
Yuuuuuuup lol, under penalty for almost a decade now.
In my case I had a forum (remember those!) in support of my software product.
Bots would occasionally create accounts and post links to knockoff handbags and watches. I'd tolerate (and swiftly kill!) them because our users really loved having a place to meet. (This was back in 2011, ironically, reCAPCTAHA landed in 2012)
Unbeknownst to me those links were part of a larger spam network where thousands of low-quality links pointed back to my site, presumably to those fake accounts(?).
When the penalty hit the process of trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and trying to do something about it -- identical.
In short, I've been penalized out of existence because of an obvious and in my humble opinion, easy to identify spam campaign. Sadly Google placed the cleanup burden on me, and try as I did nothing actually helped. The article's mention "hidden" penalties feels...accurate.
I often tell folks when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve. My site and goodness knows how many others have been placed so far below the fold that if we're not outright killed, we never reach the users and potential we should.
No biggie if the search market were more diverse, sadly, that is simply not the world we live in.
It's been absolutely fascinating to watch the YouTube v. community drama play out. I think many forget the exact same situation has been and continues to play out for Alphabets other major community, website owners.
The difference of course is we don't really have active and vocal "followers" in the way YouTube creators do, so for the most part, when a website owner like myself gets penalized for some abstract and out of my hand reason, or a algorithm change destroys your business overnight, it happens silently, beyond the headlines.
I can't stress this enough -- Google has been a powerful, often positive force for the wider Internet. But they're also a cruel, heartless, and often maniacal source of pain and sorrow.
Almost always and ironically, when something's interesting to me it's usually more difficult work and thus, contains far more unknowns, hence making estimates that much less reliable.