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My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

goodcheapandfast.com

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Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#211

Post by s17n »

santoshalper wrote: post #197
creato wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think this is vetted? There's no way this guy has actually tested all of these things. He's just reading Amazon reviews instead of you.

No, specifically I think he does not do any manual vetting or reviewing. I think he essentially gets a ton of products in a given category, then takes the average review and price and runs some kind of formula to find a value sweet spot. I've done this same thing dozens of times myself in excel and it's kind of cool to see someone do it systemically. Combine this with something like wirecutter that does vetted review…

I think the key difference between this and the Wirecutter is less that the Wirecutter looks at fewer products (although that might be true) and more that the Wirecutter model is for an expert to form their own judgements about what is important whereas this guy focuses purely on deriving a consensus from the user reviews without using any priors or first party research.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#212

Post by jsdalton »

weisbaum wrote: post #141

Taking a look at your site, it seems quite clear where all your traffic went. You have a pretty great backlink profile compared to other affiliate sites ive seen but the content is incredibly thin. Based on this, me or anyone else who visits the site just sees an advertising site. There are no personal experiences with the products, the products are not related and the UX does not make the user want to continue explo…

The person who wrote the article is named John DeFeo, while the username of the HN submitter is josephjrobinson. While it is possible they are the same person, it seems unlikely.

This seems to be a common mistake on HN, and I point it out because you and others in this thread seem to have invested a fair amount of time in crafting a personal response to the author that may never actually be read by them.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#213

Post by sleepy_keita »

dmix wrote: post #207
ryan29 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think reviews, especially something honest like the site in this article is aspiring towards, might be an ok market because the quality of those sites has declined so much in the last decade that I think there's room for a much better product. However, it's the affiliate based monetization that I was calling tough. At least for me, an affiliate link is an untrustworthy link because that link is working for the manu…

> Just look at the whole Hardware Unboxed / Nvidia thing that happened recently. Can you expand on this? I hadn't heard of this. I recently watched a new video on "playthrough” of Cyberpunk and it was a heavily advertising the power of a NVIDIA graphics card as he jacked up the raytracing settings and mentioning the card (which the comments section said was mean because it was impossible to find in the marketplace an…

Nvidia cut Hardware Unboxed off from review samples because they weren't happy with the editorial. Nvidia specifically said that "should your editorial direction change, we will reconsider..."

It's not text, and it's pretty long at 40 minutes, but it's a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIvuWdxClSs

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#214

Post by ReaganFJones »

Interestingly, I've tried to find this exact website through Google before. It was very hard because the search terms "good", "cheap", and "fast" are common and used together frequently.

It may be an affiliate link farm but it's one that's done the most basic level of analysis to find an acceptable item in a category.

It's not great but it's a time-saver compared to me reading potentially fake Amazon reviews myself.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#215

Post by jsnell »

OJFord wrote: post #26
yongjik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can already create your own search engine, and have Google serve the same ads on it as they would for their own search. I don't know what the product is called, or what the requirements for signing up for it are, but it is how a lot (most?) of the smaller search engines monetize.

(I just checked Ask Jeeves and Startpage, and they were both serving ads from Google.)

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#216

Post by tehlike »

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…

Ex google employee here.

I used to have two email accounts, one something I registered for fun (and my main email), other with my name+lastname@gmail. I set up forwarding from second one to first one, then I forgot the password.

I tried to login probably a decade later last year. Couldn't remember the password. Asked internally if someone could help. They said they can't(they can easily verify who I am if they wanted). I asked them to send a password reset to the same email (name+lastname@gmail.com gets password reset email for name+lastname@gmail.com), they said they can't do. This would have worked for me due to forwarding, but no...

Something's at google are great. Support is not one of them.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#217

Post by axegon_ »

Many many years ago I used to own and maintain a site which was getting a good amount of traffic at it's peak(that was around 2010-2011). It was getting something along the lines of 25-30k visitors per day, and much like the post here, it had no ads, no analytics, no share buttons or any of that. And mind you, a substantial amount of that traffic was coming from google searches. In all honesty I have no idea what I did, but I got it right. But, just like the post, overnight, the 25k daily users dropped to less than 100. I was scratching my head and trying to work out what had happened and when I googled some of the content of the website, it was nowhere to be found. Not on the second, third or even the 20th page. I never figured out why. I was very strict about every word that comes up on the site, every link, the rights of each image that appeared and everything but...

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#219

Post by eecc »

I wonder if this has to do with the kind of workforce that infests these big corporations. In my freelancing stints in mega-corps, I often bump into a kind of incompetent and fearful employee, often replaceable contractors processing low value tasks, who’s only purpose in life is to mitigate their monumental risk of being thrown off into the dirt by the next reorg.

These people’s psychology is to claim competence in some higher kind of logic allegedly embedded in this spontaneously emergent bureaucracy. Of course it’s just smoke and mirrors, there is no logic nor understanding. None

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#220

Post by Syzygies »

alvah wrote: post #174
weisbaum wrote: post #141

Taking a look at your site, it seems quite clear where all your traffic went. You have a pretty great backlink profile compared to other affiliate sites ive seen but the content is incredibly thin. Based on this, me or anyone else who visits the site just sees an advertising site. There are no personal experiences with the products, the products are not related and the UX does not make the user want to continue explo…

This. Google has had it in for affiliate sites for as long as I can remember, and they specifically dislike thin content. While the site has ~250 words of value editorial at the top of the pages I've looked at, the descriptions of the products themselves are extremely thin (~30-50 words), and would likely fall foul of this Google policy: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline... "Pages of produc…

Agreed. I used to loathe the experience of trying to Google an Amazon alternative, and the first fifty links would be Amazon affiliates. I'd pay Google a subscription to simply block all affiliate links. I'd call these changes in Google's algorithms progress.
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