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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#231

Post by echoangle »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #209
jopsen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything. The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad. Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it? Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.

Websites are practically free to build and run (if you treat it as a hobby and don’t count your time). I agree on the rest though.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#232

Post by graemep »

A website that does not display any of the article text without JS is not "perfectly good" IMO in the first place! Most inappropriate for a site called The Luddite!

I had a site that used to make me a useful side income. Its mostly lots of short pages explaining specific things, on average in a few hundred words. https://moneyterms.co.uk/

It lost its Google rankings many years ago.

It used to have adsense on it, but when I reapplied after moving countries they refused it on similar grounds to those mentioned in the article.

I am thinking of adding some fluff at the top of each page an seeing how it does.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#233

Post by agileAlligator »

chillfox wrote: post #204
kqr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. This is the Long Click metric. Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for? If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up? The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for…

I feel like the problem is trying to turn human experience into a metric. Probably the better approach would be to have a well staffed QA team.

I honestly don't think it's possible to have a QA team large enough to handle the gajillions of websites that come up and disappear every day. They just have to come up with better and better metrics until they find one that approximates the human experience the best.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#234

Post by tuukkah »

aragonite wrote: post #207
Tommix11 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragicomic is used often in Swedish (Tragikomiskt). There is a nuance difference between tragicomic and bittersweet. Bittersweet is when you daughter moves out to her own place,it's sad that your kid grew up but also great, it's bittersweet but not tragicomic. Tragicomic is when something is so screwed up that the only thing you can do is laugh at it.

Right. Bittersweet is about something that affects you personally, some experience that blends joy and sadness. Tragicomic is about some external going-on that you observe and react to like an audience member. There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.

There is no laughing and crying emoji: there are two emojis about laughing so hard that tears come out of your eyes (no sadness implied).

For bittersweet, there's one about smiling with a tear.

For tragicomic, I don't know. It's not a feeling. Maybe the upside-down smiley or the smile with sweatdrop?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#235

Post by stareatgoats »

the_other wrote: post #211
rats wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.

FWIW, I tried a few recipes too and they came out just fine, without the usual clutter. I further anticipate that this is the direction we'll be going in general, "search" as we know it was a ~30 year period where Google reigned supreme. The world since moved on.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#236

Post by Nevermark »

dylan604 wrote: post #64
Nevermark wrote: post #22

So Google Search sends people to this (originally simple popular) site, but it’s not ad worthy? They would rather send people to large piles of crap? So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.

What do you mean? The logical thing is $. That's it. Nothing hidden here. Google knows how many times it sends people there. I can't imagine that it's any significant numbers in Google terms of numbers. The author says it "gets a steady stream of traffic", but no definition of what that actually means. It's probably a rounding number of a rounding number to Googs. With that in mind, yeah, it's not worth it to Googs e…

If a simple useful site already gets a high percentage of clicks from Google Searches for its functionality, and wants to show ads, that’s $.

Right?

Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it?

I can’t come up with a sensible reason.

All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are dropping the ball on engagement with simple quality, even when it leaves money on the table. I.e. this is an oversight.

But it is a very dysfunctional oversight.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#237

Post by darkwater »

entropy47 wrote: post #230
wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok). Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a whi…

That would have been a good excuse/explanation in the days before Chrome existed. But since Chrome is THE browser, users have a hard time escaping Google. So, GP is right.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#238

Post by nmstoker »

Depressing. Would be interesting to see if once he'd established a record with Google for attracting users, if the site owner were to slowly drop the ruinous features, whether Google would turn a blind eye and in time it would be back to how it used to be (except with ads)

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#239

Post by cole-k »

prmoustache wrote: post #223
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.

But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden. Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind. And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.

While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free.

I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#240

Post by flipbrad »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205
wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

Plurality of search engines?
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