Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks I’ll try looking it up! Yeah extension does sound weird.
Oh, you're Jailbroken? Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile), there's one thing that's a little tricky...
Okay cool I will!
Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
501–510 of 531 posts
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and some other crap I don't get why google thinks it's acceptable to critique my site without prompting. It honestly just feels rude. They want me to do a whole bunch of micro-optimizations on a site that already works fine because it doesn't fit their standard of "h…
Google has grown into a cancerous middleman.
The transition from search to content delivery was deliberate and not necessary.
Google has every right to pivot in any direction but it's when spread too thin that missteps like this are bound to happen.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
First you have to find a way to prove it’s your data which isn’t trivial. Genius had to invent a watermarking system for texts: https://betanews.com/2019/06/17/google-genius-com-lyrics/
You don't have to prove anything to opt out of indexing.
And in the lyrics case, it wouldn't have helped because Google wasn't scraping the lyrics. Google was paying a third party that copied the Genius site.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was asking because I have been thinking if there are any convincing arguments or incentives for avoiding such tactics, besides moral and integrity. I'm afraid that if's all depend on moral and integrity it is unlikely we are going to win this battle.
Morals and integrity are foreign concepts to marketers. I used to think that marketing had a place, if properly used. After working with marketers for a decade, I just consider them and their whole wretched field a lost cause. I have no sympathy, no empathy, no compassion for any of them. Nowadays I make every effort to use only paid services whenever possible. (If any Fastmail devs are reading... I frickin' love you…
This is great but it ain't gonna fix my internet
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
No content on Google is posted there by 3rd parties. Google does select what is displayed and, in the case of snippets, they go out of their traditional way to promote that content.
The use of the word "post" is my own colloquially imprecise language, the law actually states > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. So content indexed by google absolutely falls under the definition of "provided by another information content provider"
Providing links is indeed within this definition. However, cards go beyond that: by selecting one out of the many results promoting it and possibly alterating its meaning by selecting which parts, and how it is displayed goes far beyond merely displaying content provided by others.
Of course, there is plenty of room for google attorneys to wiggle, but in the end the objective for them is to 1) give credibility to a source and 2) to get the benefits of being the providers of information.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#506Funny, the article says a CTR of 4.42% is average. Yet my 5% CTR for my own domain name, Google Adwords charges me upwards of $0.50/click, and says I'm penalized (higher cost) because of low engagement.
This is for keywords with no competition, which makes me a bit bitter because I have a substantial negative ROI. I can understand that Google wants to prevent arbitrage spam, but I just last week decided to cut my adwords spend to almost nothing because it's not getting better over time.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google seems to see robots.txt as "more what you call guidelines, than actual rules". Sites that block googlebot or all bots with robots.txt still turn up in google searches, just without a description, and are obviously still indexed.
robots.txt is a tool to control crawling, not to specify how you would like your site to be displayed (or not) in search results. If you don't want search engines to include your site, set: while to block just Google do: See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710 If Googlebot is not respecting robots.txt, and is crawling something it's been instructed not to crawl, let me know and I can file a bug? (Discl…
I sent you an email, and I'm posting it here but without identifying info:
---
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your comment, I'm replying via email to send some info I'd rather not share on HN, but will post the same redacted in HN. I used to (back when starting my web-dev career) run a one man show development team of a web agency and all our development/pre-prod sites (that had to be unauthed) had robots.txt to disallow all bots, but they still popped up in Google. Searching some of the old domains in google I found an example here: http://***.***/***, and attached is an example of it showing up in a SERP and a what the robots.txt looks like (and I'm pretty sure that the robots.txt has looked like that since that page was created).
In this case it is just one page that nobody will care about, and since I'm not working on projects that are open but "robots.txt hidden" anymore I don't know if it is as bad as it used to be, but I regularly see pages with the "No information is available for this page" whose domains have robots.txt's that disallow all bots but still show up in Google.
Please let me know if I missed anything :)
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
>with seemingly no opt out (on the consumer or publisher side) I though AMP was opt-in for publishers? As in you have to write the front-end spec and pick a CDN to cache with.
> pick a CDN to cache with. Every link aggregator that indexes your AMP page will cache it, including Bing and Baidu. That's what makes safe prerendering possible.
I was referring to the registered CDNs so you could get the icon in search results.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're looking for legal loopholes. Which is absolutely fine for a business to do. Just don't use phrases like "from a moral standpoint..." when you really mean "from a legal standpoint..." . Moral and legal aren't the same thing.
I don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic to the sites that appear in its search results, any more than a book has an obligation to be bought or borrowed from the library by the readers of a short quote from that book in another book. So, for me, it is a moral question as well.
In your analogy of books, google is a book too. If google as a book dictionary was just a copy of your book dictionary, that would be illegal and wrong. You the reader are only looking at a single definition, which could be a plausible fair-use quote. But when google's entire dictionary is just fair-use quotes of your book, then they've just copied your book.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#510For those who skipped the article, this data is exclusively from users who installed Avast "security" products, which apparently are sufficiently invasive that they get this sort of data and sell it to third parties. The article thinks this dataset is close enough to representative to present their conclusions as more or less facts. I'm not sure I'd make the same conclusion.
I don’t trust the avast data. According to Microsoft bing has 9% market share. While avast data shows it as 1.4%. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...
You trust Microsoft's number here? 33% market share in the US? I