My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#41

Post by mullingitover » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #16

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisti…

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low.

Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#42

Post by alphadevx » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

For me, Google only sends organic traffic to my posts that are 10-20 years old (no joke). My newer content, while verified by me as indexed by Google, receives zero traffic.

For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons.

It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is it doing the same more broadly? I don't believe it is providing a good search experience to its users anymore.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#43

Post by devcamcar » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

I can't send mail via smtp.gmail.com over my AT&T connection on my phone. Wifi works fine. I am at a loss.

Just wanted to also complain about Google.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#44

Post by Triv888 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #30

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’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 ‘su…

I've had that problem too, multiple times, where I knew the password but Google wouldn't let me use it (I almost lost my account). Google doesn't like users that clear cookies, block trackers, etc...

I wish that there was a way to disable those "protections".

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#45

Post by KMag » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #30

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’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 ‘su…

As someone who occasionally moves countries, this is horrifying. Did you enable 2FA and still need to authenticate via text? I used to enable 2FA, but got worried about phone loss/damage.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#46

Post by ClumsyPilot » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

m1117 wrote: post #22

pcdoodle wrote: post #15

I 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.

'they pay a lot of taxes'

Firstly, they are 'minimising' their tax base[0], and second, is not committing crimes an achievement these days?

[0] - https://developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/08/tax-google-dodge....

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#47

Post by charliebrownau » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

* Google Search >> SearX / SwissCow / mojeek

* Google Email >> Protonmail

* Google Maps >> OpenStreetmap

Also check out DNS watch (uncensored DNS) - https://dns.watch/

------

Self Hosting and Community hosted servers is the future not Multi Million dollar corporations + Centralisation + Big Tech

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#48

Post by Thaxll » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

I mean does the content of the website is of good quality?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#49

Post by charliebrownau » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

KMag wrote: post #39

superkuh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> they still won't tell him the password The Google support people should have mentioned it, but hopefully, they wouldn't be able to tell him the password without investing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cracking the hash. https://plaintextoffenders.com/

If it was important

People would WRITE IT DOWN

People would RECORD IT

People would BACK IT UP

Its not the job of companies, corporations or tech repair stuff to remember stuff for you

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#50

Post by Imnimo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

It feels like there's two possible explanations here. One is that somehow the website has been incorrectly flagged or blacklisted, like the example he mentions with Bing. In that case, it seems like it'd be at least nice for Google to be able to look into it, but it also might be the sort of thing where Google just decides it's not worth the effort.

The other possibility is that Google just updated their search algorithm in a way that happens to not like this website as much as it used to. Not because anything is wrong with it or because of any bug in the algorithm, just it now prefers different attributes, and that changes where this site ranks. If this is the case, there's really nothing to be done. There's no ground truth result ranking for any particular query - if Google feels its new results are better, that's their business.

If your entire business depends on an arbitrary algorithm preferring your website over other very similar ones, and you will lose everything if that arbitrary algorithm happens to change, eventually it's going to happen. It sucks, and it's maybe unfair in a cosmic sense, but there's really nothing to be done.