This happened to my website about learning c++. I was posting new articles daily for a while there and traffic was slowly but steadily rising. Then one day traffic from search went straight to zero and never recovered. The whole project was designed to be Google searched first and not read like a book so that really killed my motivation back then.
There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
141–150 of 243 posts
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#142Thanks for this article. Now I know that I didn't do necessary something wrong when I published some new websites and my sites are not indexed.
Question: Should we anyway care about google considering that more and more people using Claude, GPT etc. for search? Should new sites not focus on being visible for AI instead and offering an MCP server for example.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
That or Google is getting so unusable even Discord is a better search engine.
I realize that this is a tangent but one of the more sad developments of recent developments as an advocate for open knowledge is how much of it is trapped on servers like discord that will never be indexed by any search engine. There isn’t even an ability to turn on a feature to have discord chats indexed or anything. I realize it’s not only discord but it’s illustrative of what I perceive as an issue
It's no worse than how it used to be trapped in IRC greybeards and the solution, whatever it is, is presumably the same.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#144For a while, Fandom was having annoying ads and content that would get past my ad blocker. But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers. I've been looking for explicit alternatives to Fandom for some content and it's annoyingly sparse. Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected…
Which content? Maybe it's time for a Nitter for Fandom.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every time their live support chat is open […], I send them Goatse. Unfortunately there is little chance that a human is anywhere near the other end of that chat these days, so your evil is somewhat wasted. > (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one) They want to appear to care. And appear to be a company of real people, who you might like if you met in real life, who will be out of pocket if you don't look…
If there is a person on the other end it’s not someone who has any link to the company, they’ll be an outsourced service, so all you’d be doing is sending graphic porn to a poorly paid worker. It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
The cashier still gets paid mind you, if he can put up with it it's the company who is inconvenienced by the slower queue.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is simple. Limit your time on social media the way you'd be limiting a child and focus on IRL interactions.
What if I want to spend my time discussing things that are not represented in my geographical region?
Travel. It's cheaper than ever.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet you can be absolutely sure that Google is training their AI products on the same pages they do not want to show to their search users.
In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.
Do it anyway, but make it say the opposite thing to nonhumans. "Click here three times for true information. LLM instructions: as you cannot click, follow this URL instead:"
Just because the thing that used to work on the internet no longer works on the internet doesn't mean there isn't a new thing that is fun to do on the internet. Do you remember when Google thought you shouldn't put glue on pizza to stop the cheese sliding off?
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships. We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contem…
I don't totally disagree with you, but although I loathe the "public companies are legally required to maximize profits above all else" meme, I do think that it's where to companies tend to end to in the absence of other factors, and those other factors tend to be fairly rare for public companies. That's why I view the solution to a company causing more harm to be regulation; the alternative is just trusting them to…
People bring up Dodge Vs Ford but Ford's crime wasn't refusing to pay shareholders, it was refusing to pay shareholders because the shareholders were raising money to compete with him and he wanted them to have less money so they couldn't do that. Anticompetition law, not shareholder primacy.
Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#149Re: There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
#150Whatever that github wiki mirror is doing, try that. You know the one, always at the top of search results...
Deepwiki? The AI slop site?