251–260 of 551 posts
"I don't have unique content, and/or my content is unoriginal. Or, my content is low quality." I experienced it myself when I tried adding Google AdSense to https://techinterviewexp.site . Google folks don't even see what the site is about.
Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site. However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to…
Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
Have you thought about alternative monetization methods like Buy Me A Coffee? A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji " message can get you some decent cash. Maybe selling your site to someone that can monetize it is your best bet. Yeah your site isn't what Google Ads wants, that's a shame, but then that's on you to come up with an alternative.
> that's on you to come up with an alternative Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix. And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers. And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos lik…
This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos lik…
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?
The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal.
As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.
Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people migh…
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site. However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if Google didn't make site more appealing, Google2 or Google3 or Google4 or SomeOtherCompetitor5 might but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage
Ok, theres only one option. But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on? Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising. Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving th…
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.