Google has taken upon themselves to become the gatekeepers of the web, yet they have not taken the burden of responsibility that comes with such powers. You will argue that Google is just a product, that you choose to use, but the users of the author's site do not choose to use Google, it's the only alternative (Google pay big money to platforms/browsers to make sure any search goes via them). Google has the power to kill any business, so it would be fair if they where required to tell you exactly why a site was unSERPed.
My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
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Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#22I love your website. Google sucks.
That's not true. Google is amazing. But they have issues.
1. I'm sure you google a lot
2. I'm sure you use google products
3. Google is a great company, they pay a lot of taxes and have good values, such as 100% renewable.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#23I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…
Wow. I'm you in both respects.
I just had the same problem with my dad and even though he can send and receive email from his gmail account they still won't tell him the password. All he has is the fragile oauth token on mail.app on his apple smart phone that can only connect via wifi due to the loss of the old phone number.
Additionally, my mail from my independent mailserver just started being marked as spam by google (exactly when I sent mail to noaa.gov and fireeye's internal system was borked due to their solarwinds problems http://superkuh.com/spf-google-fuckery.txt). I signed up for google's postmaster tools set my DNS TXT records but apparently I don't send enough mass mail to not be a mass mailer.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#24This is one of several posts I've seen on HN lately following a similar trend: sudden and unexpected drops in search engine traffic. On the one hand it must be jarring to suddenly have a drop in traffic. But is it necessarily indicative of a bad administration of a search engine?
Popularity of sites shift. People's tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant. And algorithm changes do shift attention to sites that previously weren't getting traffic. Would the world better with static search traffic? The incumbents always win, and newcomers have a tough time getting a foothold. That's what it would take to avoid situations like these, and I'm not sure if it's an improvement over the status quo. Between living in constant worry that the algorithm might change and shift search traffic, and a world where the algorithm never changes and search traffic remains rather static I'm not sure which is really better. In the latter goodcheapandfast.com might never even have existed.
Bing's blocking mechanism seems pretty crude, though, and not sharing why it was blocked seems particularly wonky. Sure it's a cat and mouse game between scammers and devs, but it'd be nice if they at least vaguely alluded to why the false positive happened.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#25Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use.
And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thing getting crushed.
Unfortunately it seems like he's the one person out there making a site like this honestly and over optimized for a search algorithm that was inevitably going to change. Building a brand and using a more personal voice instead of thinking you can win at SEO is always going to be the way to go.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.
Exactly. That's like saying Tesla should be divided into a part making cars, and another part taking payments from buyers.
More like car manufacturer and car purchase loan provider (if that were something it were offering in-house).
We could create our own search engine, funded by showing Google Ads, today; the suggestion is that that Ads business be separate to Google's own Search business which happens to use it, but which might easily (except obviously it doesn't) use Facebook Ads or whatever instead.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#27They don’t even make any money. Break Google up.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#28Every subdivision of Google needs to be broken up, advertising and search especially. Too much in our economy is at stake.
I consider myself anti-monopolist but lately I've been thinking...wouldn't breaking up American big tech companies put the US in a worse position to compete against Chinese tech companies?
Not in search or advertising.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#29Advertising is a scam. It’s all fake anyways. The house of cards is going to come crashing down any day now.
Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
#30I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…
> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this.
I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘suspicious login prevented emails’ at the recovery address. I tried working through google support and was given a form to fill out but never heard back.
I should have kept that number until I updated it yes... but I thought knowing the password and having the recovery email would be enough.... guess not.
But yeah... fuck you google.