They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link
Google Update Tanks Traffic
51–60 of 106 posts
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#52If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero su…
>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.
I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#53It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#54I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
> A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommendations, then you get (1) a feed of recommendations from people you follow, (2) an Explore page that gives you algorithmic recommendations (collaborative filtering, currently via an off-the-shelf SVD library).
Right now the curation is a little basic, but today I'm adding filter controls to profiles so you can see a person's recommendations for a specific content type. Eventually, I'd also like to add custom tags so you can have recommendation/awesome lists for anything.
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#55I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
> [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
Doesn't google penalize websites for having too-many outgoing links? That would explain why you're seeing so few links to sources.
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#56I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
Follow up thought here.
There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.
Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.
Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.
This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.
Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.
Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.
- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.
- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.
- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.
- I was one of the people who caused this change...
- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?
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The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.
We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero su…
>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfar…
That assumes there is no progress, convergent thought, or evolution in your field and its entirely static. As an expert you should want to figure out and identify new ways to explain or communicate your field - again - sitting static is never a good idea, in any industry, ever.
With that being said, google can recognize brands, influencers and leaders in a given industry - but if they dont actually explain their content or choose to do it in textbooks rather than online, why do you feel that their overly complicated expert opinion deserves to rank over some new site who tries to approach and explain the topic in a more simple way? Furthermore how can this unquestionable expert prove to a new user on their site they actually are an expert? Who cares if the other academics in a field look to this person as a leader, the general user needs to be convinced in a way that leverages experience, authority and trust.
You have to DESERVE to rank. It has always been that way. Yes there will be people who try and game the system, and that game will work for a set period of time, but not forever. They want to display the best content to the user. Just because someone is an expert does NOT mean they automatically have the best content or explain it in the most user friendly way. This has always been Google's M.O. and will be and is also how it should be.
EDIT: Content farm gibberish can outrank unoptimized better content - because its created specifically to game the system, and often those content farms spend more time building links or promoting the content. The bigger worry here is GPT3 and how that begins to erode the trust of content as a medium over time.
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#58If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero su…
[deleted]
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#59I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously s…
Follow up thought here. There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates. Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business. Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and peo…
Continuing this thread.
My buddy Greg Isenberg constantly is talking about the unbundling of Reddit and honestly he is on to something. [1]
As Reddit continues to unbundle, how can we shape these into curation engines so at least our algos can get some usable data out of communities instead of them being an endless popularity contest.
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[1] https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-...
Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero su…
>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfar…
You're missing the point here. Regardless of the causes of the decline, there are invariably things you can do to improve your content or just generally change your approach.