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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?

#281

Post by raynr »

tallanvor wrote: post #49
darawk wrote: post #20

I was going to say that "examine.com is one of the best sites on the internet for information about supplements/nutrition". But it's not. It's the best site on the internet for that sort of thing. It's great that Google is attempting to fix the issue of bullshit nutrition sites ranking highly, but I sincerely hope someone at Google sees this and does something to help out Examine, which is a tremendous resource.

I don't think I've come across the site before, but at first glance it doesn't look reputable at all. --I realize that looks aren't everything, but I see the following that look like red flags to me: 1. They show logs for news sources such as The New York Times, BBC, etc., but they don't actually link to those sites, let alone to articles that actually mention this site. 2. I see click-bait titles like "The top 19 nu…

I can't find the reddit comments now, but /u/AhmedF and /u/silverhydra have actually spoken about this before as a challenge they faced when starting examine.com. Nobody will accept strength training advice from a skinny dude, nobody will accept dietary advice that isn't endorsed by Doctor X, MD and Dietician, nobody will read your content if it is not phrased in terms of "The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019".

They have accepted that examine.com must have some of these "red flag" features, else it will never be able to do the good that it was created to do.

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

#282

Post by JimWestergren »

AhmedF wrote: post #28
adrr wrote: post #19

I'd move off Cloudflare. Cloudflare hosts a bunch of sites that are penalized by google. Google is known to penalized sites in bad neighborhoods. Spend the money and get dedicated IPs and don't share certs. Examine.com is sharing a cert with an online gambling site(reengame.com).

Oh damn - will check into that. With that said - we've been using CF since April or May. The hits happened well before.

I very much doubt that to be an issue. The IP ranges from CF has been classified as CDN by Google back in 2011 [0] to not affect geo and crawl (and reputation?).

BUT, if I would be you I would definitely go for the Full SSL option so you don't share the cert with random other sites on CF.

Of course if nothing else works you can turn off CF to see if anything changes.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo/

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

#283

Post by JimWestergren »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #30
ve55 wrote: post #18

>Let’s be clear: Google owes us nothing. They are a private organization, they can do whatever they want. This is a surprising thing to hear. I think given Google's influence, they owe them at least some fairness.

And, as an entity more powerful than any living thing on this planet (with the power to kill or support nearly any online business), they owe the world quite a bit of fairness: Otherwise, they can watch as their search business drops to nothing overnight. Facebook and Amazon and most B2Bs have quite a bit of lock in. But google, if they piss everyone off, we'll we're just one tab away from using something else: and o…

There is another more effective way to kill Google if they would turn evil. It just takes a number of the biggest and most important websites such as wikipedia, newspapers, stackoverflow and so on to block google in the robots.txt. Users will then think Google is broken because those websites are missing and use another search engine.

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

#284

Post by JimWestergren »

zaroth wrote: post #253

I will say, I miss the days when the first comment here would be “Paging Mr. Cutts...” followed by actual insight from Matt on what’s happening here! Is there any other double-digit employee at Google around now who can take up the mantle?

Even if there would be, is it even possible anymore? Or is the algo so controlled by AI and ML that it is not even possible anymore?

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

#285

Post by JamesBarney »

Semiapies wrote: post #172
data_required wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the claim of you and others here that this is "the" best site on the topic online. It's up to you to back that claim up, not for other people to run around to get evidence to disprove it.

Here's some evidence. Anyone who has spent enough time researching supplements, that they could even conceivably name a better supplement site has agreed examine is the best.

And the only people who disagree are people who never done any serious supplement research

If you have a bunch of hockey fans arguing Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player of all time against a bunch of people who've never watched a game and can't name a single hockey player it's pretty obvious who's right.

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

#286

Post by JamesBarney »

LordAtlas wrote: post #264
data_required wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No, simply pointing out that it's your job in this discussion to present that evidence" I have provided evidence. (I've even included the unique evidence of personal experience. Hundreds of hours of research & experimentation- research on multiple websites- from someone with no vested financial interest, should count for something.) I am also asserting that skeptics should also provide evidence. It's like in a court…

You're clearly not familiar with the "burden of proof" principle. Go ahead, google it, especially given that you mention legal cases. The person who makes a particular assertion has the onus of proving the same. Like one of the previous posters said, we are flooded with people making bullshit claims of how something like homeopathy "works" because they know it from personal experience, and we shouldn't have to be the…

Supplements aren't homeopathy. The research done on then and linked to on examine is scientific research. It's just not great scientific research, similar to the entire field of psychology.

Also "supplements work really well" is a very different argument than this is the best website on supplement research.

There is not a single person in this thread of 100's who can name a single source of better information on supplements.

How would you prove that a psychology text book was the best even if it was so obviously the case that anyone who had ever read multiple psychology textbooks agreed with you. And everyone who disagreed with you had never more than a skimmed one?

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

#287

Post by pbhjpbhj »

AhmedF wrote: post #185
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #182

Edit: I since looked at the MSG page linked as there first example in the OP, which was exactly what I expected based on the "for" comments. My original comment below: --- Well I read a few comments here saying it was click-baity and such, and other comments pushing back hard against that saying it's a detailed, trustworthy, researched site with citations. So, I visited via an "about" link, then clicked through the m…

Uhh - what? https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/ - just scroll down. https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/#effect-matrix - that's not selling anything. https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/#scientific-researc... - click on 'fully expand' - there's all your science + citations. And the references themselves have carrots next to each reference so you can click and see what is being referenced... Here is an…

I was on mobile. I just re-checked. No citations show on the page I'm looking at https://examine.com/nutrition/do-you-need-to-cycle-creatine/.

Apologies, [on desktop now] the entire visible prose section of the page has no citations _visible_. The weird expanding section hides all the citation links and somehow _I_ missed the references at the bottom of the mile long page because scrolling down and following links showed no references, and the pages linked showed no references.

Once you come to the second call to action button "send me the fact sheet" that wants an email address, I gave up looking for source-cited material (having already gone through a few links).

https://ibb.co/jRYBRQD -- circle the references on that one for me?

You say ~"not selling anything" but the page above has a call to action button to get the info which links to this:

https://ibb.co/RT4F87H

Which is a massively long call to action page -- which also isn't the supplement guide with the creatine citations that one might have expected when following the FAQ link -- trying to sell me a pile of reports for $150 (which is fine, but again if I got there from a google search I wouldn't ever go back to your site looking for similar info).

FWIW I've never been to the site before, have absolutely nothing against it, was on mobile (with standard plugins, ublock) and just called it as I saw it as a user coming to your site fresh with no preconception other than that seemingly half the people here felt it was junk and half the people felt it was the best thing since sliced bread (ie really good).

>literally has 7 references right at the bottom //

My opinion from a UX perspective: Your page structure needs changing, you have the vitally supporting info that gives credence to the info buried below the "other junk" parts that signal the end of the pages relevant content. You'd probably do well to break down the page completely, shorten the summary info and provide banner links to pages with un-collapsed content. The short summary page would include some primary citations in a highly visible manner (the first lines of the content having superscript links) OR would have have links to a full -- default visible -- page with highly prominent citations.

The other way to go would be to flag right up front "this bit has no citation links in" by providing an index to the page content -- the pages are super-long --right below the info box. This is the page structure:

* non-cited summary

* get a fact sheet (requires email)

* Things to Know & Note: links to other pages

* Cautionary notices

* Use notices

* get the same fact sheet (requires email)

* FAQ (citations on some linked pages)

* Human Effect Matrix (citations linked in titles of study names in the modals * Scientific Research on Creatine (this is the actual detailed info -- the page that was promised -- but it's all hidden [on mobile] for some reason).

Unless you're on hand to point out everyone's mistakes ;o) ... maybe it's just me that missed the good content, but I think your structure is at least in part to blame, YMMV of course (my email is in my profile if it's helpful). Perhaps you've looked at the site so long it all seems obvious and natural to you; that happens to me when making much simpler sites.

HTH.

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

#288

Post by AhmedF »

jonas21 wrote: post #213
tr3ndyBEAR wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I…

We removed rel=nofollow AFTER the rankings went down.

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

#289

Post by pbhjpbhj »

stordoff wrote: post #242
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #182

Edit: I since looked at the MSG page linked as there first example in the OP, which was exactly what I expected based on the "for" comments. My original comment below: --- Well I read a few comments here saying it was click-baity and such, and other comments pushing back hard against that saying it's a detailed, trustworthy, researched site with citations. So, I visited via an "about" link, then clicked through the m…

I think you may have missed it - it's at the bottom of the page, and they're used inline: > Hyperhydration strategies (creatine plus glycerol) appear inefficacious as drug-masking strategies.[1] https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/#citations There are 746 citations, and all appear to link to the relevant ncbi.nlm.nih.gov page: > 1. Polyviou TP, et al. Effects of glycerol and creatine hyperhydration on doping-rel…

You're right I did miss it.

Short version the page has a few "false ends" where the structure and content indicate the end of the page-specific content has been reached but there are definitely pages without any citations showing for me on mobile.

Long version, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684636.

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

#290

Post by AhmedF »

JimWestergren wrote: post #282
AhmedF wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh damn - will check into that. With that said - we've been using CF since April or May. The hits happened well before.

I very much doubt that to be an issue. The IP ranges from CF has been classified as CDN by Google back in 2011 [0] to not affect geo and crawl (and reputation?). BUT, if I would be you I would definitely go for the Full SSL option so you don't share the cert with random other sites on CF. Of course if nothing else works you can turn off CF to see if anything changes. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo…

Thanks!
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