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Apparently Google hates us now

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Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#51

Post by zeitg3ist »

computomatic wrote: post #47

A wiki with only 11 pages? Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues. Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet. Edit: and the most likely answer would be that their current robots.txt disallows virtually all indexing. I’m no SEO exper…

In the first image you can see how indexed pages go from 40k+ to 11 in the matter of days. Further down the thread I show how 114k+ pages are marked as “crawled but not index” and we can’t understand why. The rest is stuff that is (correctly) blocked by robots.txt.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#52

Post by xp84 »

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #13
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #10

Title could be: Apparently Google hates Pokémon Central Wiki now (to be clearer what the source of the post is)

No, I think "us" is apt, considering this will eventually affect all sites that rely on traffic from Google search, which is basically every text heavy site. All we can hope for is that people will stop using search (after eventually having enough of the AI wave) for these sort of niche sites and will bookmark and access them directly in future. I don't have much hope.

I spend a lot of time wondering about the true role of search in people's lives in 2026. When I watch people use the Internet, it seems like most of them perform searches simply as fuzzy-matching navigation to the websites they use. Like the way many people use Spotlight to launch desktop apps.

I think this is because

(A) bookmarks lists are inconvenient - scrolling to find a bookmark is slower than typing "youtube" or (cringe) "bank of america" in the URL bar

(B) typing URLs directly requires precision of memory with TLDs being numerous and even things that were once predictable are now mere suggestions (e.g. is your city or town at cityofwhatever.com? city.org? city.gov? Could be anything!)

(C) related to (B) if you screw up a full URL you may well end up at a phishing site that looks like the site you wanted.

I really believe that 90% of Google and Bing searches today are probably for the names (or misspelled or partial names) of the top 100 websites.

If the dominant browsers weren't Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (who gets paid by Google for every search) browsers would build bookmarks for you of your frequently-used sites, and ordered by frequency of visits, present those for direct navigation when you type a word in the search bar, and not send any query to a search engine if you chose one of those. But all incentives point very strongly against doing that and toward sending you to a SERP with 13 ads and an "AI Overview" above the organic results.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#53

Post by WarmWash »

righthand wrote: post #20
hungryhobbit wrote: post #18

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…

Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.

Now you just created a market for farmed "legit" accounts.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#54

Post by hamdingers »

kokojambo wrote: post #49

It appears for me when I search for it. Even Gemini is cool with looking for it. Here is a part of the Gemini result I got which was directly above the regular result link. "Pokémon Central is a major community network and independent Italian encyclopedia for everything Pokémon-related" Honestly, the title is super clickbait and it doesn't even reflect reality. Its so easy picking some giant entity far away and creat…

Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#55

Post by spiderfarmer »

dylan604 wrote: post #35
righthand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.

Depends on how in-house you want to go. If you go full in-house, you'll need sales staff to make deals with advertisers. You'll then need a way of hosting the media provided. You'll need a way to deal with media that does not match what you've requested. You'll need a system to allocate ad space accordingly to contracts with ad clients. It's like a whole new department in your company.

I don’t have a sales staff. I just call a company, tell them why I’m calling and what’s the opportunity, crack some jokes, get serious and make them an offer. It helps that I’m in a niche, thoroughly know the sector and that they most likely already know my websites. As long as I can get to the owner of the company, then I’m golden.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#56

Post by sitebolts »

Google's always adjusting its search rankings, but it's rare for a legitimate site to suffer such a sudden massive hit without reason.

My first thought would be that they accidentally blocked Google's crawler (maybe through some kind of anti-AI setting?) or that Google believes that the site is serving malware or spam. Either scenario can have that kind of effect. I can see that their forum at least appears to have strong Cloudflare anti-bot rules in place, so that might be the case.

They're also using a subdomain for both their wiki and forum, which Google has been observed to punish. They might consider moving each of those to their own separate .com domain.

But aside from that usual stuff, there's one more possible reason that's specific to this site. In November of last year, the Pokemon Company rebranded their "Pokemon Trainer Club" to "Pokemon Trainer Central", which is the first result that comes up when you search for "Pokemon Central".

That change was made a few months before the sudden drop in traffic, but could still be a viable explanation here. Google does routine re-ranking on a daily basis along with occasional major re-ranking, which happens maybe a few times a year, so the delayed hit that they saw could have come from Google finally recognizing that most people who search for "Pokemon Central" are no longer looking for the wiki like was once true in the past.

https://gonintendo.com/contents/54863-pokemon-trainer-club-r...

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#57

Post by arjie »

Wikis are just high-risk for SEO. Getting my own personal wiki to be indexed was such a challenge that I'd just about given up when a friend who is more acquainted with the whole thing helped me make sure I had all the bits and bobs in the right place. If you're not careful, people can easily put spam all over your site and then it'll really ruin your presence on a search engine.

Google is really big, though. Really really big. They're so big that not even all the people inside Google are trustworthy to them on a subject like this.

But they don't universally hate wikis and so on. It's just you have to do a lot of work and make sure you don't have spam on your wiki, and then fill in all of the information in your meta tags, and have a sitemap.xml, and all that. Here's my wiki for example: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/8/89/Screenshot_-_Goo...

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#59

Post by [deleted] »

zeitg3ist wrote: post #51
computomatic wrote: post #47

A wiki with only 11 pages? Perhaps they will investigate why 541,000 pages aren’t being indexed. In my experience, Google provides adequate tools for identifying and resolving indexing issues. Google won’t serve pages it hasn’t indexed. Seems they left a lot of relevant details out of that tweet. Edit: and the most likely answer would be that their current robots.txt disallows virtually all indexing. I’m no SEO exper…

In the first image you can see how indexed pages go from 40k+ to 11 in the matter of days. Further down the thread I show how 114k+ pages are marked as “crawled but not index” and we can’t understand why. The rest is stuff that is (correctly) blocked by robots.txt.

[deleted]

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#60

Post by bigstrat2003 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #23
frouge wrote: post #9

I can even tell you that Google hates us all

Google neither hates nor loves any of us, the only thing it cares about as an institution is cramming as many advertisements in front of as many people as it can get away with to generate increasingly ridiculous piles of money. This is not meant to be a defense of Google, which is (like virtually every large corporation) completely sociopathic.

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Google, as a wise man once said.
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