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My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

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Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#271

Post by visarga »

Imnimo wrote: post #50

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 algor…

> There's no ground truth result ranking for any particular query - if Google feels its new results are better, that's their business.

That's a real issue - there is no rigorous and systematic monitoring of Google's results. There could be horrible biases and we don't measure, don't hold them accountable. There has been a recent spat at the Google AI Ethics department where a researcher accused Google of being biased because it uses language models trained on biased internet text (thinks doctors are men and nurses are women). I'd say - before going so deep, first check the actual page results for bias, it's 1000x easier to do that and gives much more useful results.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#272

Post by Spearchucker »

dsnr wrote: post #258
_jal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason I will not give out a phone number for the vast majority of services. If that means I can't use something, so be it. Building proprietary, impossible-to-understand Rube Goldberg mechanisms based on associations between accidental aspects of my life (location:phone number pairs, for instance) is not a security system, it is a design for randomly fucking me over. If your system is designed to fuck me…

> I would prefer to use something else, thanks. What is the alternative to Gmail? Genuinely interested. I'd be willing to switch if I found a future-proof email solution for both personal and business usage.

I use Office365. Yes it costs money, and yes they provide good support. I also use Outlook so ALL my mail, both sent and received are stored locally and remotely. If my mail bombs I lose max a couple hours' worth of email.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#273

Post by xer »

I think there is another side to this story which is that referral marketing is having a bad name these days. It's considered fraudulent by many sellers since sometimes these referral sites rank higher than the sellers themselves. I suspect this is part of an effort from Google to put the sellers higher than the referrers in the search results.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#274

Post by jsnell »

OJFord wrote: post #247
jsnell wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yes, that's what I said.

Sorry, your use of "could" instead of "can" made it look like a hypothetical.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#275

Post by johnwdefeo »

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…

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

I agree that the spirit of my site is closer to "a statistics site for products" than a typical review site. Adding more content, photos, etc. may help to remedy my situation, but I would feel like I was abandoning my original purpose. I designed the site with "satisficers" in mind, i.e. allow people to make a decent decision as quickly as possible. No frills.

Until recently, I worked for product review sites like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, and I'm not equipped to compete with them head on. My hope was to create a new niche by using data analysis, which is more of my skillset: https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#276

Post by CuriousCosmic »

dsnr wrote: post #258
_jal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason I will not give out a phone number for the vast majority of services. If that means I can't use something, so be it. Building proprietary, impossible-to-understand Rube Goldberg mechanisms based on associations between accidental aspects of my life (location:phone number pairs, for instance) is not a security system, it is a design for randomly fucking me over. If your system is designed to fuck me…

> I would prefer to use something else, thanks. What is the alternative to Gmail? Genuinely interested. I'd be willing to switch if I found a future-proof email solution for both personal and business usage.

Protonmail is a really solid solution as long as you have your own domain. It's pretty privacy focused and has worked well for me for a decent while. They've got a decent VPN service as well (I think it comes bundled with Protonmail at some tier level) and they just recently rolled out a beta for their Google Drive replacement.

All in all I've enjoyed their services. Their security/E2E Encryption support is nice (could still use a bit more functionality though) and they are definitely a lot more FOSS friendly than Google when it comes to actually using their services.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#277

Post by sofixa »

dandare wrote: post #34
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…

Anti-monopoly laws exist for a reason. Splitting Google (and other IT monopolies) is the only remedy their monopolistic behaviour.

In theory, yes, but in practice, especially in Google's case, that won't work. YouTube could probably survive on its own ( due to the astronomical costs associated we can't be sure unless Google share more numbers), but no other part of Google's consumer-oriented services, and even some of their business oriented ones ( G Suite/Workspace/whatever it's called this week) can't be profitable, ever, and are only subsidised by data at scale and ads.

How would you split Google into entities that won't go bankrupt within a year? ( And you wouldn't want that because it would piss off people and would help the cause of the anti-regulation and anti-government uneducated people). Maybe GCP, Android foundation, YouTube, rest of Google could work, but the "rest of Google" is still too big and too powerful.

Forcing them to open their data and platforms ( e.g. allowing other ad networks to access Google's tracking data and to serve ads via them) could diminish their monopoly, but it could also diminish their profits and force them to cut some less profitable parts of the company even more ( and that might be good).

Same thing with Facebook, just a bit easier - splitting off Instagram and Whatsapp will absolutely improve things, but the remainder is still to big and powerful. Twitter is even worse, you can't split anything.

Anti-monopoly laws and frameworks need to be updated for the modern world, because the logic that worked for physical assets, sales and infrastructure ( e.g. the US split oil companies and telcos along physical lines) no longer works for Internet companies.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#278

Post by exyi »

dsnr wrote: post #258
_jal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason I will not give out a phone number for the vast majority of services. If that means I can't use something, so be it. Building proprietary, impossible-to-understand Rube Goldberg mechanisms based on associations between accidental aspects of my life (location:phone number pairs, for instance) is not a security system, it is a design for randomly fucking me over. If your system is designed to fuck me…

> I would prefer to use something else, thanks. What is the alternative to Gmail? Genuinely interested. I'd be willing to switch if I found a future-proof email solution for both personal and business usage.

Step 1, get a custom domain so you can migrate providers easily. It costs like 6€ a year, definitely worth it.

Step 2, Fastmail, Protonmail M$, ... will be happy to offer you email for few € a month. If you'd desperately need to save money on that, there is Czech provider Seznam.cz that offers email on custom domain for free. Only issue is that the registration is in Czech, but Google Translate your friend: https://emailprofi.seznam.cz/login It's like a biggest local internet company, not totally random provider, so should not just steal data or disappear right away and works reasonably.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#279

Post by johnwdefeo »

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…

Fair points. I don't scrape/spin any content, and I would argue that it's easier to write 500 words than 50, but I can see how my content might run afoul of an automated system. Plenty of the comments on this thread make similar points.

Ironically, I know of a scraper site that mirrors Amazon's bestsellers list, reformatted as blog posts: https://gistgear.com - and it's growing like gangbusters.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#280

Post by g051051 »

johnwdefeo wrote: post #279
alvah wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair points. I don't scrape/spin any content, and I would argue that it's easier to write 500 words than 50, but I can see how my content might run afoul of an automated system. Plenty of the comments on this thread make similar points. Ironically, I know of a scraper site that mirrors Amazon's bestsellers list, reformatted as blog posts: https://gistgear.com - and it's growing like gangbusters.

> it's growing like gangbusters

For now...

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