Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

cringely.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#81

Post by wmf »

grey-area wrote: post #63
mkhaytman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd contend you're the one talking out of their ass. Relying on another company for all your business isn't a sound business strategy. The person in the article put all their eggs in one basket and this is the result.

In principle, I'd agree that relying on another company is not a sound business strategy, but Google has a virtual stranglehold on organic traffic to websites, something that is outside the control of most web companies. How do you suggest a web-based company should counter that and not rely on google for much of their business?

Marketing? You know, advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#82

Post by DanHulton »

bmelton wrote: post #10
mikeash wrote: post #2

Really, "mugged"? Google walked up to her on the street and threatened her with a weapon?

The sad part is that I was expecting that maybe there was a snafu with Google's NFC payments, or the Wallet, or maybe Google Shopping algorithm or something. Google used to give her a bunch of web traffic, arguably for free, and now they apparently have stopped, possibly with good reason, possibly without. And that is somehow stealing? I'm sympathetic to the plight of having lost revenue, but that revenue was never g…

"Allowed Google to have been her sole source of traffic?"

It's one of the realities of the world we live in that Google - if you're popular on it at all - will likely dwarf any other traffic you're pulling in, despite any other efforts you may make.

Further, it's important to note that effort spent on optimizing your Google ranking is usually an order of magnitude more effective than time spent optimizing for any other search engine. For people with very limited time outside of their primary activity, you've got to prioritize.

(That said, the rest of your comment was spot-on. I just felt the last part of the last sentence didn't really reflect a few key realities, is all.)

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#83

Post by shobhitverma »

trevin wrote: post #72

Spent a few minutes looking at the site. Looks to me like it was hit by Google's Penguin 2.0 update [1] that targeted sites that had low quality links pointing in to their domain (in particular inner pages). Probably not the sisters fault, but the site has done a lot of reciprocal linking in the past which Google really frowns upon nowadays. There's prominent page on her site featuring some of those links: http://www…

That is insightful

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#84

Post by bmelton »

DanHulton wrote: post #82
bmelton wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad part is that I was expecting that maybe there was a snafu with Google's NFC payments, or the Wallet, or maybe Google Shopping algorithm or something. Google used to give her a bunch of web traffic, arguably for free, and now they apparently have stopped, possibly with good reason, possibly without. And that is somehow stealing? I'm sympathetic to the plight of having lost revenue, but that revenue was never g…

"Allowed Google to have been her sole source of traffic?" It's one of the realities of the world we live in that Google - if you're popular on it at all - will likely dwarf any other traffic you're pulling in, despite any other efforts you may make. Further, it's important to note that effort spent on optimizing your Google ranking is usually an order of magnitude more effective than time spent optimizing for any oth…

Compared to free traffic, I'd agree. What I was trying to say was that, if traffic is so important to one's business, one should try securing it... but even that isn't really valid since, why would you spend money on something that you're getting so much of already, but for free, especially in a business that doesn't scale.

Either way, Google's organic traffic results are probably replaceable through purchased clicks, and I'm guessing the proprietor appreciates the value of it more than what they otherwise might have, so who knows? Maybe all the free traffic is just Google's upsell.

"You remember all that traffic you used to get? You can have it all again, for just $149 a month."

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#85

Post by MichaelGG »

Systemic33 wrote: post #70
gagege wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I own a single store and it happens to be in a space in a mall. Also, the mall is letting me do business there for free. I get exposure, electricity, easy access, all kinds of good stuff, for free. (The mall is Google) Suddenly the mall wants to extort me by charging me money to use their space, electricity, water, etc. Those jerks!

Completely missing the problem. The problem i'm talking about is more in the case of some company distributing a large phonebook for the city, which includes all stores and people, information they gathered by downloading public city records. So people start using this phonebook all the time, and for most citizens, it's the only way they can find your business. But on day the phonebook company, decides for an uknown…

That's not accurate at all. The phonebook doesn't provide any useful ranking - it's an alphabetical sort usually. It's closer to a factual database than anything. Google could solve all criticism of its results simply by returning all URLs in alphabetical order -- but they'd lose all their users, too.

The situation is much more akin to a hotline to call up and ask what a good place is for Q. And usually the hotline refers people to your business for Q, but now they don't. And since the hotline is part of a massive organization and answers are generated by a massive, complicated, AI, it's hard to find out why the hotline decided to not refer people to your business anymore.

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#86

Post by adam12 »

trevin wrote: post #72

Spent a few minutes looking at the site. Looks to me like it was hit by Google's Penguin 2.0 update [1] that targeted sites that had low quality links pointing in to their domain (in particular inner pages). Probably not the sisters fault, but the site has done a lot of reciprocal linking in the past which Google really frowns upon nowadays. There's prominent page on her site featuring some of those links: http://www…

Another site that was intended to raise her page rank, but in the end got her site blacklisted:

http://www.linkstrategy.com/links/home-furniture-specialty-u...

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#87

Post by shobhitverma »

jenno wrote: post #25

Has this sister ever engaged in any dubious SEO practices, such as hiring "backlink providers" on fiverr, spamming her link on unrelated websites, or too much prolific use of using the anchor text of "portrait quilt"? Any of those will signal to Google that they are unnatural links and as a result, the site can be penalized and show up less in results, sometimes being removed altogether. I apologize if this comment i…

This is pretty interesting. So I can theoretically bring down a competitor's rank by creating spammy websites and providing unnatural backlinks ? Even if the competitors figure it out from the webmaster tools, they will have no way to remove the backlinks. Right ?

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#88

Post by cyrusshepard »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank. Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get comp…

A quick 2-minute check shows that yes, indeed the site violates Google guidelines. If you check the backlinks using any number of checkers (Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO) you can find a number of over-optimized 'unnatural' backlinks residing on spammy link-exchange pages in clear violation of Google's guidelines. The only reason to place links on these pages would be to try to rise higher in Google's search results.

Yes, it feels unfair when Google drops you in search results, and Google has changed the rules over the years and it's hard to keep up with shifting guidelines.

In truth, the website can recover from this. The same people who placed spammy links on 3rd party sites in order to manipulate rankings are probably savvy enough to mount a clean up effort to get those links removed and/or file a disavow request with Google (which basically tells them to ignore those links)

Ironically, Eric Schmidt once tried to scrub Google of unfavorable search results about himself, and he was told they do not do that for individual results. ;)

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#89

Post by drhayes9 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #78
drhayes9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty unrealistic moral in the face of the reality of how the consumer web works. I mean, I get the whole "don't depend on another company for your revenue" (e.g. apps in the Apple app store), but you're saying "don't count on Google sending traffic to your site". Plus, her ranking didn't change -- her site vanished out of the index. EDIT: Unless you mean "don't depend entirely on organic traffic"? I can so…

What's wrong with Google's search results? If I search for any of these terms, I get plenty of relevant results. The article is just idiotic in its accusations. Google wants to provide the best search experience for customers. If it makes a mistake, it hurts Google, so I'd imagine they sorta try to keep their results as good as possible. Complaining that you moved in indexes seems sorta pointless. Google's algorithms…

That was never my point. In fact, I didn't say anything was "wrong" with the results at all. I just pointed out that saying "that's what you get for depending on Google for organic traffic" is more like saying "that's what you get for depending on oxygen" web-wise. It just ignores the reality of the web today.

It's safe to say, at this point, that we don't know why her site isn't showing up for the common terms it showed up for before.

EDIT: This comment has some good info on why her site might've been penalized: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6891141

Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

#90

Post by genericuser »

maaaats wrote: post #57
BlakePetersen wrote: post #38

Dude, that site is riddled with out-dated and now black-hat seo tricks. It was just asking to be blacklisted. Get that cheater off my SERPs, I wanna go with the honest portrait quilt providers.

any examples?

First off I know nothing about SEO as will likely be apparent from my comment, that said.

As someone who knows nothing about SEO it looks to me like it could of triggered duplicate content detection portion of a google algorithm.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Looking briefly at the source she has the entirety of the following in the title of every page other than the main page I looked at Portrait Quilts - Memory Photo Quilts with up to 96 Photos! Personalized Memory Quilts, Picture Quilts and Photo Blankets

info - Portrait Quilts - Memory Photo Quilts with up to 96 Photos! Personalized Memory Quilts, Picture Quilts and Photo Blankets

and half of it in the title of the main page

It seems like some maintenance could be order for the site.

Post reply on HN