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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#221

Post by tim333 »

zrobotics wrote: post #167
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this: https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5... This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to…

Googling "tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt" gives the drill size in the first line of the results page.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#222

Post by Nemo_bis »

navane wrote: post #166

On one hand I totally agree with the Luddite. On the other hand, why do we need Google for recipes. Everyone eats multiple times per day. You only need to host text, really. How come the world hasn't come together to create this. How can the world ever come together if we can't even create this.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#223

Post by prmoustache »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #209
jopsen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything. The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad. Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it? Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.

But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden.

Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.

And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#224

Post by sumedh »

hsnice16 wrote: post #196

"I don't have unique content, and/or my content is unoriginal. Or, my content is low quality." I experienced it myself when I tried adding Google AdSense to https://techinterviewexp.site . Google folks don't even see what the site is about.

To be fair your site just looks like a link aggregator.

If you think there is value then start charging money from your visitors.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#225

Post by VBprogrammer »

reddalo wrote: post #213
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

We need to collectively stop using Google, but the alternatives are just not as good for some things. The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.

Google was a decent search engine until the gold rush years.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#226

Post by mft_ »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205
wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I've been through this thought-process many times.

1. Google isn't working well any more.

2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages.

3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.

4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.

5. Forget it.

---

Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#227

Post by jwr »

This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc. These tag your links as nofollow/ugc, so they don't count towards SEO.

The net effect is that pretty much the only link signal is from link farms and paid media. If you don't crap over the internet with shady tactics, you will not appear in search results.

We lost our vote, by our own choice.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#228

Post by xigoi »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #209
jopsen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything. The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad. Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it? Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.

Nowadays, there are numerous free hosting services for static sites.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#229

Post by echoangle »

jwr wrote: post #227

This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos lik…

Are you sure that search engines don’t count nofollow links at all? I know that’s kind of the purpose but I would be surprised if they would really completely ignore them.

Edit: On this page https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n... it even says that they use all links to rank websites, even if you set them to nofollow.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#230

Post by entropy47 »

wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).

Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.

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