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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)

#261

Post by cess11 »

elorant wrote: post #255
jwr wrote: post #227

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…

So if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?

No, you refuse because affiliating with spammers is a bad thing to do.

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

#262

Post by geraldwhen »

zrobotics wrote: post #167
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this: https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5... This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to…

I find myself using yandex more and more. They’re like old Google, but obviously based in Russia.

https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/

That was the first result.

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

#263

Post by holoduke »

If you want to rank high (search, stores) you need to spend money on adwords and implemented adsense/admob. Approximately 30% on what you earn wiyh Adsense needs to be spend on Adwords. Only by completing that circle you can become part of the eco system. Its very hard to rank high organically. Only if your name is Ronaldo or Coca Cola you have a chance. But otherwise you need to buy yourself in.

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

#264

Post by elorant »

cess11 wrote: post #261
elorant wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?

No, you refuse because affiliating with spammers is a bad thing to do.

Who said they're spammers?

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

#265

Post by entropy47 »

criddell wrote: post #259
entropy47 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying that people would search for congressional apportionment on TikTok?

Probably not, but I reckon they'd have a crack for Nürburgring holiday planning.

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

#267

Post by rvnx »

pembrook wrote: post #257
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You’re writing this comment on a site with an upvote/downvote based algorithm. 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…

Google Maps reviews are working like that and are often gamed.

If you pay close attention, you can spot fake reviews because they usually come from “Local Guides” (so supposedly the most trusted users).

Reddit is somewhat better at ranking and filtering spam, due to local mods, like there were in the times of web directories and webrings.

One of the former bosses of Google search explained that the key metrics they follow to consider the success of “Search” are the number of page views and the total revenue.

So if a user doesn’t find what he needs but keeps coming back it’s a win for them.

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

#269

Post by Galanwe »

mft_ wrote: post #226
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money.

If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand without missing it (so that barrier of review is low), while being prohibitively expansive if an actor want to cheat the system and generate millions of reviews.

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

#270

Post by alextingle »

rats wrote: post #206
tonyarkles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

[dead]

lol. "Cups"... No serious recipes there.
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