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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?

#211

Post by AhmedF »

tgtweak wrote: post #209
AhmedF wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be clear - we have never bought a single link. We get direct links similar to what wikipedia does - aka direct to a supplement. For example, creatine: https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/ You will not find a more in-depth page on creatine anywhere on the net. https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-... - here's a simple example of direct links. We're also considered the authoritative s…

Disavow the bad backlinks via webmaster console, you'll notice a huge penalty for letting these bad sites link to you without disavowing them. It looks like (to Google) you're buying backlinks, and in this case ones on sites that are slammed by the latest updates. Try this on a few of the worst offenders and you'll see a noticable difference. In your space you have the most aggressive blackhat seo actors (supplements…

Ugh - I did disavow for the first time ever.

> lost over 100,000

Sucks. You'd think G would be smart enough to ignore, not penalize.

Negative SEO shit has been going on for over a decade now...

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

#212

Post by tus88 »

cyrusshepard wrote: post #140
tus88 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is who is examine ? Take this random page for exmaple. https://examine.com/nutrition/lemon-water/ It's written by some guy called "Wyatt Brown". Who is he? Is he a scientist? A doctor? A university professor. Oh - I don't need to worry about that, because: > Our evidence-based analysis features 42 unique references to scientific papers. Right then. Quoting papers makes you a reliable expert and able to ma…

Perhaps you don't know who Examine.com is, but they are cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia pages all over the world, and over 12,000 other websites. I assume they did more homework than you.

> New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia page

I would take one reputable medical journal over all of them.

I mean the MSM covers all sorts of trivial things all the time.

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

#213

Post by jonas21 »

tr3ndyBEAR wrote: post #109
nwienert wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that examine is an excellent site, and their cursory look was actually more of a "motivated reasoning look". If you land directly on an examine page for a supplement, it's quite clear the site is really well done. I'm a designer as well, not just a developer, and it's layout is really well done: clean, straightforward, clearly presented, and the data is easy to find. They link to studies and always err on the…

They also recently went through a redesign and I think it's really clean. But yeah, idk about their homepage and stuff, but go on any of their pages for a specific supplement and every sentence is thoroughly cited. It's also a great resource for finding relevant studies if you wanna do your own research.

> They also recently went through a redesign

In my experience, this is often the cause of mysterious drops in search ranking. It's very easy to inadvertently introduce changes that negatively impact your ranking without even noticing.

At a quick glance, I noticed that many articles on examine.com link to hundreds of external references (e.g. more than half the page of https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/). In Internet Archive snapshots from before the redesign, these have the rel="nofollow" attribute, but on the current site, they do not. I'm not saying that's the cause, but it might be worth looking into exactly what changed in the redesign.

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

#214

Post by data_required »

tus88 wrote: post #212
cyrusshepard wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you don't know who Examine.com is, but they are cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia pages all over the world, and over 12,000 other websites. I assume they did more homework than you.

> New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia page I would take one reputable medical journal over all of them. I mean the MSM covers all sorts of trivial things all the time.

Why would a medical journal cite Examine? Examine just compiles and analyzes research, they don't generate it.

Has any medical journal ever cited any supplements website? What would there be to cite??

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

#215

Post by CriticalCathed »

root_axis wrote: post #197
CriticalCathed wrote: post #190

Perhaps we need government regulation to stop near monopoly indexes like these from curating results so heavily.

Why? If google finds that curating their index in a particular fashion aligns with their business objectives, why should the government dictate how they do it? It sounds like what we really need is a government maintained search index that is accountable to the people in a way that corporations are not.

At the end of the day it's an ideological argument. Google has an almost immeasurably large influence on the public commons and society. In my view anything that has such a large influence needs to be regulated to ensure the public interest and good.

Capitalism serves society which serves the people. In that order.

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

#216

Post by sh1mmer »

cyrusshepard wrote: post #6

For additional context, Google has "disappeared" 100s of alt-health sites - some bad, but some very good. The site Self Hacked was one, and detailed it here: https://selfhacked.com/blog/google-censorship-of-health-webs... Some, like Mercola, peddle highly-controversial, near anti-vax content. But on the other end of the spectrum, Examine.com should be the gold standard. Quality Raters should use it as an example of a…

Based on this link I wouldn't trust the critical thinking of the content of this site.

> We also know about Google firing James Damore and their ideological echo chamber.

They are already displaying their own bias based regardless of what they think Goolge's bias is.

Damore was fired because he violated California labor law. But the post continues with lines like:

> Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist

...

> But it seems like they decided that there’s no way to algorithmically penalize certain sites — so instead they do it manually, behind the scenes, without telling anyone.

Without any evidence of this what-so-ever.

It's one thing to say "Google are not doing a good job of filtering out mis-information/commercialization without penalizing high quality information from smaller sites/institutions" it's another to say that this is a conspiracy from the "echo chamber bias" of their employees to suppress the speech of people who don't agree with them.

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

#217

Post by AhmedF »

tus88 wrote: post #212
cyrusshepard wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you don't know who Examine.com is, but they are cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia pages all over the world, and over 12,000 other websites. I assume they did more homework than you.

> New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia page I would take one reputable medical journal over all of them. I mean the MSM covers all sorts of trivial things all the time.

I mean, we were straight-up plagiarized.

Which is linked in the article.

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

#218

Post by kragen »

sachdevap wrote: post #193
kragen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people. I don't. Nobody I respect does. None of the scientific papers they cite do. Nobody in my friends list on Fecebutt does. Nobody I follow on Twitter does, to my knowledge. Slatestarcodex doesn't. HN doesn't. Wikipedia doesn't. Library Genesis doesn't. The Pirate Bay doesn't. JSTOR doesn't. Sam Zeloof doesn't. Ken Shirriff doesn't. The only sites I've visited…

I am not on Twitter, I am not on Facebook. I am not on Instagram. And I am in academia. Thanks for your concern for me. The filter bubble based on headlines is your own, where you might actually be missing out on useful content, just because they used a particular headline to grab eyeballs.

What was the title of your last paper? And the last paper you read?

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

#219

Post by nwienert »

dylan604 wrote: post #210
AhmedF wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the big search box right on the homepage?

Not everyone is being hostile. I think you've been beat up on this thread, but I wasn't being aggressive to you. I quite clearly stated that you use the search page on the landing site to find stuff locally. The original post was specifically about not getting results in search engines, and that's what I was attempting to support. For me, I've never even heard of the website in question. Why would I, as it's not a fi…

I mean he’s right. The home page is fine too it has a big clear search box. I think he’s just pointing out there’s really no “there” there. The examine site is legit, information packed, easy to navigate and parse, and it’s primary use case is landing via search results so it’s best pages are the ones you see most.

Sidebar: examine is one of two sites I regular use the google site filter for: “site:examine.com (supplement name)”. A good search engine would put it first for basically any supplement.

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

#220

Post by nesadi »

andrekandre wrote: post #90
nesadi wrote: post #5

This is tragic. Examine.com is probably the best site I know with a focus on determining the science behind any food or supplement one might be interested in. They should be at the top of every Google search.

isn’t this one of the classic reasons monopolies are bad? [edit] please let me clarify the reason i wrote the above is because examine.com basically has no recourse but to appeal to google since they are basically a monopoly in search results, which is one of the reasons people consider a monopoly to be bad... they can’t just “pay more to bing” and get all their lost traffic back can they?

You're right, yes. It seems search is one of those winner-take-all markets where the data Google has ensures that they'll stay years ahead of everybody else.

With 92% of the global search market (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share), that gives them an incredible amount of power and influence over countless business and people. And they've repeatedly shown little regard for casualties of their policies or the Algorithm.

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