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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)

#371

Post by CuriouslyC »

pixl97 wrote: post #357
CuriouslyC wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix is a decentralized search network with nodes linked to people or legitimate businesses. You manually distribute trust to friends and businesses you like, and you can manually revoke that trust, with some network level trust effects occurring based on spammy/malicious behavior.

You know why you don't see systems like this at any scale Because they don't work.

Decentralized communication absolutely works, and we have plenty of decentralized tools now. Decentralized search is a legitimately hard problem, both because it needs strong protocols (which are getting there but still WIP) and user adoption (which isn't really happening).

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

#373

Post by neocritter »

carlosjobim wrote: post #335
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 hate that Google gatekeeps the internet. They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.

It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but last time I did, social media traffic was some of the worst quality. Search traffic was seen as golden because it came with intent. Social media traffic was wandering and aimless, so converted poorly even if it was 1000x search. Search still got more conversions and it was no contest. Did something change?

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

#374

Post by elorant »

wildrhythms wrote: post #361
elorant wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?

Never thought I'd see a pro-advertising industry "hacker" on this site.

I'm not affiliated with SEO in an way. I just understand how things work. Advertorial articles existed decades before the emergence of the web.

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

#375

Post by neocritter »

yifanl wrote: post #362
elorant wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?

Correct. If you're offering me money to link you, then presumably you believe your content is not of high enough quality for me to link you otherwise.

It's not even hypothetical. I've seen these offers. Every single article is hot garbage.

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

#376

Post by miohtama »

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.

The earlier 2019 discussion about how Google deliberately worsened search results to make people see more ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40138486

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

#377

Post by zaphar »

Twisell wrote: post #359
pixl97 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know why you don't see systems like this at any scale Because they don't work.

Except the whole fediverse... ahem...

Yep, create a small closed off community that shames outsiders and you can have what you want. Everything in it will be local and very much a bubble. It won't have the failure modes of a Google or Facebook though. So I guess pick your poison.

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

#378

Post by IX-103 »

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…

It's not nofollow links. It's content behind a login wall. If the content can't be found with a crawler it might as well not exist. So sites like Facebook and Xitter that block a significant amount content for non-logged in users are the problem.

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

#379

Post by steve1977 »

pineaux wrote: post #309
steve1977 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it’s not Google who is gatekeeping the Internet, but the “dumb masses” who are using Google. Google is just gatekeeping Google.

Do you have a god alternative? I am interested.

To what? Search engines or using the Internet in general?

You know there is this nice idea of hyperlinks. These don't have to come from Google. Just as an example, I use HN as a source of new sites to discover quite often.

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

#380

Post by jacobsimon »

sharpshadow wrote: post #348
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…

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

To the parent commenter - have you set up google search console and reviewed what pages and keywords were affected? There could be other reasons why your pages aren't being indexed properly. If it's a small site, it could have been something as simple as changing an image or page title.
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