https://xcancel.com/pokemoncentral/status/205712380740463825...
Thank you
Apparently Google hates us now
11–20 of 272 posts
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#12Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything. Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well. It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or rev…
Its better off if ads go away. Just use ad blockers.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#13Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now (to be clearer what the source of the post is)
No, I think "us" is apt, considering this will eventually affect all sites that rely on traffic from Google search, which is basically every text heavy site.
All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#14Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything. Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well. It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or rev…
It’s why I moved to in-house advertising. It’s a lot of work, but I hope it is the right decision.
Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some
off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#15Pokemon Central runs ads (Google AdSense at that!), which is probably how they pay for everything. Google is likely their biggest inbound source of traffic, so they're probably experiencing a marked revenue drop as well. It's unfortunate that so many livelihoods are subject to the capricious whims of a single company. A company that is increasingly seeking to keep users on their engine without sending eyeballs or rev…
Its better off if ads go away. Just use ad blockers.
We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#16[dead]
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#17The same thing happened with my blog a few weeks ago. It was well referenced for years and suddenly almost all of my entries are not indexed anymore. The Search Console indicates that the URLs were crawled but are currently not indexed, and contrary to technical problems, there nothing I can do to fix it, I just have to accept that most of my articles cannot be found via Google anymore.
EDIT: I don't actually think it is related, but now that I think of it, the timing corresponds with when I started setting up TDMRep to forbid using my content to train LLMs.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#18They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now.
Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as a source of such malware.
I imagine the fix for the OP is a thorough audit/cleansing of all malicious content on the wiki, followed by some sort of appeal to Google (which will no doubt take months, if they even respond at all, because ... Google).
Really OP's only hope is that the Google team responsible for this has an Italian Pokemon fan; otherwise they are probably screwed.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#19To be honest it's probably just jank on Google's end.
There's a lot of delayed cause and effect in search, and it's much easier to make a minor mistake that excludes 0.1% of websites from crawling or indexing than it is to detect that it's happened except from affected websites telling you about it.
Like in marginalia I've had a bug that affected websites in the condition that if the root path didn't support HEAD, but did support GET with a `Range` header, and it correctly responded with a HTTP 206, then the website wouldn't be indexed because some code that was testing the root document for issues as an initial probe handled that as an error state. Most websites that support range requests also support HEAD (as this usually means the document isn't generated). Except a handful of Caddy-based configurations, about 0.3% of servers.
Re: Apparently Google hates us now
#20They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…
Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.