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Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

journal.james-zhan.com

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Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#31

Post by dazc »

leoedin wrote: post #21
cyberrock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past I've heard that TripAdvisor has 60% market share for local reviews in the UK. Did Google Maps really climb that quickly? Are Instagram and TikTok not shaping tastes in London too? I feel like she might be assigning too much power to it just because that's what she used. That's not to say I don't have gripes with how Google Maps works, but I just don't know why the other factors were not considered.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything! I just checked a few local restaurants to me in London that opened in the last few years, and the ratio of reviews is about 16:1 for google maps. It looks like stuff that’s been around longer has a much better ratio towards trip advisor though. Almost certainly Instagram/tiktok are though. I know a few places which have been ruine…

'I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything!'

Counterpoint: I have met people in the UK who's lives revolve around doing nothing but.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#32

Post by firefoxd »

bootsmann wrote: post #26
firefoxd wrote: post #22

Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified. 1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking. 2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my se…

Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?

So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param:

    example.com/search?q=text+scam.com+text
On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams.

Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So the moment i fixed it, I allowed spammers to have their links displayed on my page.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#34

Post by chii »

bootsmann wrote: post #26
firefoxd wrote: post #22

Traffic to my blog plummeted this year and you can never be entirely sure how it happened. But here are two culprits i identified. 1. Ai overview: my page impressions were high, my ranking was high, but click through took a dive. People read the generated text and move along without ever clicking. 2. You are now a spammer. Around August, traffic took a second plunge. In my logs, I noticed these weird queries in my se…

Sorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?

i imagine the search page echoed the search query. Then, a SEO bot automated search(s) on the site with crypto and spam keywords, which is echo'ed in the search results - said bot may have a site/page full of links to these search results to create fake pages for those keywords for SEO purposes (essentially, an exploit).

Google got smart and found out such exploits, and penalized sites that do this.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#35

Post by ozozozd »

baq wrote: post #15
echelon wrote: post #4

We need a P2P internet. No more Google. No more websites. A distributed swarm of ephemeral signed posts. Shared, rebroadcasted. When you find someone like James and you like them, you follow them. Your local algorithm then prioritizes finding new content from them. You bookmark their author signature. Like RSS but better. Fully distributed. Your own local interest graph, but also the power of your peers' interest gra…

Centralization is simply more efficient. Redundancy is a cost and network effects make it even worse. You’d have to go the authoritarian route - effectively and/or outright ban Google and build alternatives, like Yandex or Baidu.

For a lot of things we don’t opt for the cheapest solutions that also lack redundancy for a lot of things. Why not for the “information highway”?

Most efficient = cheaper. A lot of times cheaper sacrifices quality, and sometimes safety.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#37

Post by mariusor »

cabirum wrote: post #33

In 2025, is it still prohibively expensive to run some community-supported crawler & search engine? Without Google censorship, ads, and ai.

Based on marginalia's work I would say no, but maybe you're thinking of a different scale than they work at.

Re: Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why

#39

Post by paganel »

leoedin wrote: post #21
cyberrock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past I've heard that TripAdvisor has 60% market share for local reviews in the UK. Did Google Maps really climb that quickly? Are Instagram and TikTok not shaping tastes in London too? I feel like she might be assigning too much power to it just because that's what she used. That's not to say I don't have gripes with how Google Maps works, but I just don't know why the other factors were not considered.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything! I just checked a few local restaurants to me in London that opened in the last few years, and the ratio of reviews is about 16:1 for google maps. It looks like stuff that’s been around longer has a much better ratio towards trip advisor though. Almost certainly Instagram/tiktok are though. I know a few places which have been ruine…

Not in the UK, but from Romania, I last checked Tripadvisor back in 2012, and that was for a holiday stay in the Greek islands. Google Maps has eaten the lunch of almost all of the entrants in this space, and I say that having worked for a local/Romanian "Google places"-type of company, back in 2010-2012 (after which Google Places came in, ~~stole~~ scrapped some of our data and some of our direct competitor's data and put us both out of that business).
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