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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

#291

Post by BatteryMountain »

Semaphor wrote: post #245
BatteryMountain wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this problem with paypal: Made an account about 10 years ago with email address x, mobile telephone number y, bank debit card z with some security questions thrown in. I cannot remember my password from 10 years ago so I need to reset it. If I try to reset it, they want to send me an sms otp to the mobile number from 10 years ago which I no longer have. Obviously I cannot update the mobile number if I cannot l…

> I cannot remember my password from 10 years ago > Another thing they offered was for me to fill out the answers to the security questions, but I absolutely hate these and always fill in random characters by mashing my keyboard, so no go here. This should go as a cautionary tale to always use a password manager. I, too, hate insecurity questions. But instead of mashing keys, I generate unique passwords for them and…

I do now, I have hundreds of logins stored as of today.. but back then, password managers were not as user friendly as they are today, and the ones that were, did not have sync/online storage, thus I have no credentials stored for paypal. I think my credentail store has items from about 2015 and newer. I remember those days where I had a text file with passwords that I would then encrypt as a zip file with the strongest encryption that the zip tool allowed.

On principle I will not ever supply Security Questions with real answers, they are rubbish. Most of them you have to answer exactly correctly (spelling/casing), so you are biased to use simple one word answers that any of you family members or close friends can guess.

I prefer 2FA, but back then offline 2FA wasn't that big of a thing and most sites only supported 2FA via an sms otp, if they even supported it (aka justified the financial costs).

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#292

Post by johnwdefeo »

ryan29 wrote: post #153
manfredo wrote: post #24

This 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.…

I'm not really sure what to think of that site. I think it's above average for an affiliate marketing site, but I also wonder how reliable the recommendations are if they're derived from automated analysis of other systems like reviews, pricing, etc. when we know those are garbage systems that are constantly gamed. Even filtered, it's still garbage in garbage out, right? I think that (affiliate based monetization) is…

I spent my first year scrubbing the seed corpus to minimize the GiGo effect: https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis - I also review all the pricing data manually to flag and discard outliers.

Not sure about why Anandtech stopped endurance testing, but I would assume cost cutting. I left the company in Sept. 2018 which was right after it was acquired by Future PLC. They're a frugal lot.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#293

Post by Razengan »

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've been using iCloud Mail for 10 years now.

Never had a problem, and allows up to 3 aliases at a time that can actually be completely different instead of Gmail's useless HeyLookAtMyRealAddressEveryone+Alias@gmail.com

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#294

Post by johnwdefeo »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #105
jbman223 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that user preference shifted, but in reality, Google’s preference shifted. That, to me, is the problem highlighted by this story and others.

Google shifts their algorithm also in response to people gaming it. Affiliate websites (such as this one) have been gaming the SEO system with AI/India-written articles for a long time. It seems the dude is honest and writes the content himself, but it is obviously nearly impossible to tell them apart, so they all get the chop. Sucks for him, but perhaps we're all better off.

I agree with this in concept, but it has been a bitter pill to see my site overtaken by scraper/outsourced content that I consider to be pure spam. Google doesn't always get it right (regardless of my own situation).

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#295

Post by johnwdefeo »

manfredo wrote: post #123
jbman223 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that user preference shifted, but in reality, Google’s preference shifted. That, to me, is the problem highlighted by this story and others.

I'm saying both user preferences and search algorithms change. Even absent an algorithm change, it's not reasonable to expect search traffic to stay high over time. A drop in search traffic is always a potential, and one that exists regardless of any change in the search engine. And it's also unclear whether algorithm changes - "Google's preference" as you put it - is a problem. Unchanging algorithms would likely tre…

Changing algorithms also favor a small set of incumbents. The stock of my former employer is up more than 2,000% in the last 5 years. That's amazing growth for any publisher and it's largely based on SEO.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#296

Post by johnwdefeo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #92

This site looks like typical review spam. Why should Google index a site with single paragraph blurbs taken from product descriptions? Despite his effort level, there is no differentiation from the sites doing the same with ML and third world labor.

That perception is an understandable one, yet a bitter pill all the same.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#297

Post by BatteryMountain »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #254
BatteryMountain wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this problem with paypal: Made an account about 10 years ago with email address x, mobile telephone number y, bank debit card z with some security questions thrown in. I cannot remember my password from 10 years ago so I need to reset it. If I try to reset it, they want to send me an sms otp to the mobile number from 10 years ago which I no longer have. Obviously I cannot update the mobile number if I cannot l…

> In their help guide they say you can contact support if you cannot log in at all, but you have to log a support ticket.... which requires me to log in. I've been burned by that logic at several companies. It's really infuriating. I've even had one where they had a phone number to call for support, but the phone number was locked away behind a support login screen.

Uber!

My friend dropped her phone in the Uber vehicle about 1.5 years ago, so we phoned Uber support whom insisted that we log into their website to log a support ticket... BUT, in order to log into their site, you have to enter the otp sent via sms.. to the phone that is in the car. Took the support lady a few attempts to understand that we cannot log in.

We rand her phone twice, within 10 minutes of realising the phone is missing. First time it rang, second time he switched the phone off.

Eventually we managed to talk to the driver, but he insisted that there was no phone in his car. We never got the phone back. When we asked Uber support again what can we do, they rambled stuff about drivers being Independent Contractors etc. I personally haven't used Uber since that day. She still uses Uber.

We couldn't track her phone because it took 6 days to do a sim swap, again, needing to receive an otp from Google to login to track the phone, but by then it was off.

I used Uber Eats earlier this year and an order took 2 hours (it was obvious the guy is using more than one delivery app), same story from Uber support. Haven't used it since.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#298

Post by PeterisP »

cwyers wrote: post #177
donmcronald wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've seen this before too. A huge problem right now is the massive tech companies want an unreasonable view into your life. They want your identity, phone number, photo id, location history, credit history, etc. before they'll treat you like a…

Flip it around for a second. You sign up for online banking. You use your GMail account as your e-mail address. You get banking statements in your e-mail, you can reset your password to the bank with that e-mail address, etc. Now, a scammer is trying to access your e-mail account. What level of proof do you want them to have to offer Google to get ahold of that e-mail? These tech companies are not asking for an "unre…

"you can reset your password to the bank with that e-mail address" - wait, what? That's not plausible at least where I live, since (a) this would be massively abused to drain people's banking accounts and (b) the bank would be fully on the hook for compensating these losses (above an initial 50 eur risk IIRC), so none of the banks would even consider permitting a risk like that, since that would cost them so much money.

If you need to reset your bank credentials (not solely a password - some form of second factor is universally required), it can't happen electronically without involving the real world; either you come to a branch with proper ID or you get mailed them to your registered physical address.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#299

Post by johnwdefeo »

busterarm wrote: post #51
nordic-nomad wrote: post #25

Seems 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 thi…

Also his website is just affiliate link garbage. I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow. I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products a…

I'm surprised to hear this, not because I think my recommendations are infallible, but because the user return rate is lower than average. Are there any specific products that you think are junk?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#300

Post by johnwdefeo »

wp381640 wrote: post #152
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also his website is just affiliate link garbage. I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow. I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products a…

I clicked on the gaming monitor category because it's actually something i've been shopping for. I was really expecting good content and a single recommendation or two that would replace hours of reading crap reviews, reddit threads, etc. but instead was met with what could be auto-generated list of monitors with scraped descriptions and links I can really see why this would be flagged as just search front-running fo…

You've stoked my curiosity. Which sub-$200 144Hz monitors are your favorites?
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