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Google Update Tanks Traffic

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Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#21

Post by marcrosoft »

zelly wrote: post #16

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…

I would like to take the opportunity to point out that your comment could be exposed to thousands more viewers.

We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#22

Post by datameta »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #10
colejohnson66 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I’m curious: what would happen if one repeatedly trained GPT-3 on text generated by a “previous generation” GPT-3? (Similar time successive JPEG saves)

I'm pretty sure it would drift further and further from something a human would recognize as intelligible.

It would be a kind of DeepDream for NLP

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#23

Post by john_moscow »

Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on.

Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.

P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#24

Post by nabilhat »

Reedx wrote: post #14
eloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except nobody wants to click on something produced by an NLP algorithm. I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam. At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.

A possibility: Parent comment generated by GPT-3

See also (comment on same parent): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146991

Will the ELIZAs learn to know each other somehow and throttle input, or will we someday approach the critical mass necessary for endless GPT-3 comment chains? Is there a similar term for Kessler Syndrome, but applied to comments?

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#25

Post by john_moscow »

zelly wrote: post #16

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…

There's plenty of legitimate SEO that does work. Figure out what your audience is struggling with, and publish articles explaining how your product solves that.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#26

Post by nickreese »

I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.

This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.

Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.

As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.

A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#29

Post by system2 »

When will people learn? From the article:

"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"

Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.

This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.

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