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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)

#461

Post by tonyarkles »

devsda wrote: post #145
tonyarkles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't. After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites. [1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual rec…

That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.

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

#462

Post by tonyarkles »

itsoktocry wrote: post #351
tonyarkles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter. The recipe loo…

> I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam". This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours? Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredi…

You should try viewing the site without your ad blocker turned on. Here's a preview: https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i. The red arrow is where ad #4 was when I checked it out last night.

Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.

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

#463

Post by elorant »

layer8 wrote: post #409
elorant wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?

You refuse because visibility of an article shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most money to push its visibility.

I suggest you read the following. Because it's pretty obvious that a lot of you guys live in some parallel universe where things are just black and white.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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

#464

Post by elorant »

cess11 wrote: post #441
elorant wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plastic surgeon is a legitimate business. How on earth would a business like that promote its site and gain visitors? By paying exuberant fees on keyword auctions on AdWords? It's way more affordable to just pay a PR firm, or a SEO company to publish an advertorial on a news site. And no, not all companies that sell SEO are spammers. Grow up, please. Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and rea…

Personally I don't think for-profit surgery, or for-profit medicine generally, is a legitimate business. It might open up as a possibility when every person has access to the medical care they need, but that seems far off. Email spam is cheaper than news paper adverts, does that make it "legitimate"? Because that seems to be your argument here.

Personally I don't think for-profit surgery, or for-profit medicine generally, is a legitimate business.

Sorry, but I'm not willing to have this discussion. As I said, you'd better grow up and face the realities of the world you live in.

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

#465

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

bitnasty wrote: post #310
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." 1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing? In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from. 2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to ext…

Advertisers are the ones paying to have their ads shown. Google is not an advertiser in this context.

You are correct. And your observation is useful.

It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.

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

#467

Post by [deleted] »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #448

We have in some respects done this to ourselves. We've created a funding model such that watching ads is the primary way we pay for the content and services that we consume. Then, our desire for privacy causes us to restrict the data that websites can collect about us, leading to less targeted and therefore less valuable ads. So now we have to watch ever more ads which are ever less valuable. For me, I'd rather that…

[deleted]

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

#468

Post by rustcleaner »

albumen wrote: post #312
calgoo wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.

I'd argue that most web users have a higher tolerance for ads than HN users, so they put up with the scrolling. And if it results in a tasty recipe, then they'll do it next time too, since that's seemingly the (tolerable) price to be paid for good food. But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is…

Look it's not OK to milk humans like this. It's manipulative and rapey. Just because the NPC meme is true does not mean you get to hack their programming for a buck and call yourself a good community member and businessman.

Enough has to be enough!

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

#469

Post by rustcleaner »

prmoustache wrote: post #223
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We need to find a metric for anti-profitability. I think that index could yield much higher quality results.

Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.

*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.

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

#470

Post by layer8 »

elorant wrote: post #463
layer8 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You refuse because visibility of an article shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most money to push its visibility.

I suggest you read the following. Because it's pretty obvious that a lot of you guys live in some parallel universe where things are just black and white. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I disagree about having PR other than on the entity’s own website, newsletters and such. There is nothing parallel-universe about that.
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