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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

theluddite.org

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

#451

Post by churchill »

not_me_ever wrote: post #245

Google has been ruining the internet since 1998. So no news here.

Hi @not_me_ever

I know this is totally unrelated and probably won't see it, but I read your comment about German solar farms sometime ago and I was wondering if you could throw light on that. I can't find any email to contact you by except the one you shared like a year ago (hnr@webhome.de) which I figured belongs to your friend. Please, what's a good email where I can reach you? Mine's in my profile. Thanks and hoping to hear back.

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

#453

Post by jonahx »

bruce511 wrote: post #146
jonahx wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice. There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits... There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claimin…

I completely agree as a general statement. Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?

No, I was replying the general principle.

At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."

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

#454

Post by sehro »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #370
wildrhythms wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that these probabilities are based on any real calculated heuristic?

They're consistent to the model, particularly if you ask the model to rationalize its rating. You will get plenty of hallucinated answers that the model can recognize as hallucinations and give a low rating to in the same response.

If the model can properly and consistently recognize hallucinations, why does it return said hallucinations in the first place?

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

#455

Post by behringer »

ben_w wrote: post #187
behringer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is much simpler than all that. Just make the idea of the public corporation illegal.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car. We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole tra…

And yet out planet will be destroyed, the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.

The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.

I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.

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

#456

Post by conradfr »

madcoderme wrote: post #157

> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such. This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actuall…

AdSense also has semi-scams that trick people into subscription through their ceil carriers.

And they are hard to block as a site owner as they seem to constantly have new accounts.

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

#457

Post by kadoban »

pembrook wrote: post #429
shotnothing wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret tbh this is just a bandage, its just going to get botted once people discover the pattern (a lot of premium bot farms do offer mature or hacked gmail accounts anyway) and its going to be worse for legitimate discovery

Then you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again. The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found. Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top…

> Then you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again.

You won't though, unfortunately. Too many people know the rules to keep it a secret, especially given that corruption exists.

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

#458

Post by lukeschlather »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #350
ploum wrote: post #177

Trying to read it and I find it quite ironic that a website called "the luddite" requires you to have Javascript (which I don’t have in my default browser)

If your default browser has JavaScript disabled, you have surely noticed that >90% of the websites you visit appear to be broken. And today you again visited another website which appeared to be broken for you with JavaScript disabled. You were so surprised by this incident that you decided to write a comment on the internet about it.

Most websites actually appear more broken with Javascript disabled. For example the Gluten-Free Apple Crisp recipe mentioned in this article - it's not as easy to read as with the recipe extractor, but it is significantly easier to read with Javascript disabled.

It is surprising that someone who complains about such things and understands them requires Javascript for a simple blog post.

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

#459

Post by jacobsimon »

dotancohen wrote: post #432
dazc wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never found search console useful for anything other than random 404's and one-off server errors. When a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty there is never any clue as to why.

This is my experience as well. If someone could mention how to examine the console to improve a site after an algo change, I would absolutely love to hear it .

I also find it mystifying and I’m not a SEO expert, but one way I use it is to compare ranking positions over time for specific pages and queries. That will help you identify where exactly the traffic came from and where you lost it. A lot of times this has to do with gaining or losing the #1 spot to a competitor.

If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external events. If your website is brand new, this could be hard to detect otherwise. For example, recently I saw a traffic spike for a random blog article, and search console help me see that people were searching for that topic because Elon Musk tweeted about it the day before.

Another helpful feature is to inspect particular URLs and make sure they are indexed—sometimes if you have multiple similar pages and set the canonical URL incorrectly, Google will try to de-dupe the results.

Hope that helps!

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

#460

Post by beretguy »

codetrotter wrote: post #355
beretguy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tragicomic - of, relating to, or resembling tragicomedy —— I hate it when i see such useless explanations

I’m referring to the second definition > manifesting both tragic and comic aspects

Yes, i understand, just pointing out how useless the first one is.
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