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Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

examine.com

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Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#161

Post by data_required »

0xffff2 wrote: post #149
jgmmo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you did a very cursory, cosmetic look at the site and judged it by its subject matter and web design choices. If you would've bothered to look under the hood, you would see that they reference tons of scientific sources and provide a level of transparency and knowledge-base to the sports supplement industry that is unrivaled. To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.

>To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter. To be clear, no one has presented any actual evidence to back that up yet.

Why not do some research yourself? What do you think are some other contenders for best websites to see compiled research on individual supplements (especially unusual supplements)?

And once you've done this research, will you still believe that Examine's pages rarely deserve to be in the top 10 results on relevant search queries?

It's easy to compare something to abstract perfection, and find it wanting. But if you compare things to actual real alternatives, it's often easier to get a more realistic perspective. (General life principle, in my experience.)

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#162

Post by sdoering »

Waterluvian wrote: post #126
jgmmo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you did a very cursory, cosmetic look at the site and judged it by its subject matter and web design choices. If you would've bothered to look under the hood, you would see that they reference tons of scientific sources and provide a level of transparency and knowledge-base to the sports supplement industry that is unrivaled. To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.

I checked out examine.com and it's not as bad as the previous comment had me expecting. But it still looks like a boilerplate front page that I would pretty much immediately back out of and keep looking. I'm not a fan of "don't judge a book by its cover." The purpose of the cover (other than to keep garlic mayo off the pages) is to be judged. It's at the peril of the website to have such good content diminished by po…

There is a (German) tool for evaluating the quality of websites regarding nutritional information.

The QWEB tool[1]. It might help in comparing the neutrality and quality of different sites. I stumbled upon it when my SO started to study again after so many years in a dreadful job.

[1] https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/fileadmin/Ernaehrungs-Ums...

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#164

Post by tomp »

andreitp1 wrote: post #156

Got curious and decided to go through their SEO. - First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it's the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let's move on - Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most…

> their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1,

Wouldn't this simply be a result of them having tons of (presumably trustworthy) references?

> They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin"

What would a better anchor text be? It seems to me to be very informative ("what is curcumin? maybe I'll find out by clicking a link that says 'curcumin'...").

I'm no SEO-er, but these would seem to me to be normal for a "reference-style" website. I wonder how Wikipedia would score according to these metrics...

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#165

Post by habitue »

_ptgt wrote: post #160
andreitp1 wrote: post #156

Got curious and decided to go through their SEO. - First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it's the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let's move on - Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most…

This completely misses the point of a search engine. The ability to game SEO has nothing to with relevance or content quality. If a random supplement information website's most lucrative monetization path would be to game SEO instead of doing what they're nominally supposed to do (i.e. provide quality content), the problem doesn't lie with the the content owner but rather with the search engine and the incentives it…

I think the point is that they apparently have spent a bunch of time on SEO, and it's backfiring.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#166

Post by yifanl »

zuuow wrote: post #71
yifanl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Google always was, even in the PageRank days. Even if you can perfectly recreate the numbers as to why so and so site is ranked higher in your system, its still your system choosing to rank so and so site higher.

I see your point, but in this case they are blacklisting domains by hand because of their content, which they don't agree with. And that is very bad. Maybe it was my mistake, thinking that their organic search was holy, which no longer is the case it seems.

See, I don't think there's much difference between writing a deterministic mathematical algorithm to have X site on top, hand-curating a list to have X site on top or writing a magic spell that consults 4 neural nets, a space dragon from Jupiter and the Canadian Prime Minister for weightings that results in X site on top.

That's all implementation details, at the end of the day site X is on top and site Y is not, and Google decided that.

And as mentioned in the sibling thread, that's the value of Google Search. If you disagree that X should be on top, then find an alternative search engine that has some different ranking algorithm, but there's no such thing as an objective search engine.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#167

Post by piva00 »

1123581321 wrote: post #64
jgmmo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you did a very cursory, cosmetic look at the site and judged it by its subject matter and web design choices. If you would've bothered to look under the hood, you would see that they reference tons of scientific sources and provide a level of transparency and knowledge-base to the sports supplement industry that is unrivaled. To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.

That doesn’t matter. If a cursory visit doesn’t inspire confidence, users will back out and that will look like low engagement/low value to Google’s ranking analysis. It’s actually a more helpful analysis for this topic to do a cursory, cosmetic look.

So how you go by applying this reasoning to this very website where you are commenting?

Hacker News would never be, for me personally, on the top of the list of websites that inspire confidence by its looks, it's only when you delve into it and realise the content is actually great that you can appreciate it.

Such a shallow evaluation is quite strange coming from technical people who are used to mailing lists and all sorts of badly designed (or at least aesthetically unpleasing/neutral) pages...

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#168

Post by pbhjpbhj »

enlyth wrote: post #106
OJFord wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 2. I see click-bait titles like "The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019". > It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people. Nobody that successfully gets my attention does that.

The front page of BBC is filled with clickbait headlines every day

For shame, they've really jumped head long in to being more 'tabloid' and less of a serious news source.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#170

Post by blobster »

tester233 wrote: post #128
blobster wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They changed it with "Do the right thing", which is equivalent to saying "Evil is sometimes the right thing"

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ "And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
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