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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)

#531

Post by account42 »

cole-k wrote: post #239
prmoustache wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free. I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competiti…

Not engaging in fraud also puts you at a competitive disadvantage to those that do. Doesn't mean we have to be happy to be defrauded.

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

#532

Post by account42 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #469
prmoustache wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really just removing all sites with ads would be a huge improvement. Regular old websites trying to sell you something are usually not nearly as bad as those that want to monetize you while pretending to be free.

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

#533

Post by gtfiorentino »

VelesDude wrote: post #504
gtfiorentino wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I work at DuckDuckGo - thanks for the feedback. Nothing much has changed in the past few weeks on our side, and so would love some more info so we can investigate. Do you mind sharing what country you are searching from, and whether you noticed on desktop or mobile? Also just FYI — you can turn ads off completely in settings if you want.

I am based in Australia. I am not sure if it is the quantity has increased, but their size definitely has. I usually have to scroll a full screen down before I start seeing non-paid results. I am on a desktop machine, mobile has been absolutely fine. Also didn't know you could turn them off. I don't mind ads to support businesses when it is reasonable and DDG is a decent business. I just hope you folks don't try to k…

Got it, thanks for the follow-up, and for your support! It should be pretty rare that you would see no organic content above the fold. But we'd like to take a closer look, and if you have any particular queries where the ads are surprisingly tall, it would be useful to know.

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

#534

Post by sanroot99 »

sct202 wrote: post #406
sharpshadow wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

OP's website is heavy with affiliate link listicles, which have been recently heavily downranked in favor of forums and content like Reddit and Quora.

Website link?

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

#535

Post by pyinstallwoes »

mft_ wrote: post #226
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

I think a distributed del.icio.us could work, a p2p version not based on crypto. Something like https://veilid.com would be perfect actually.

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

#536

Post by pyinstallwoes »

corn13read2 wrote: post #525
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

We are working towards this if you'd like to get in touch. I feel like "web3" as an interface/discovery platform is a very good topic.

What are you working on?

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

#537

Post by cutemonster »

kubanczyk wrote: post #305
withinboredom wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That stake can be anything, time, work or money. I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.

Then web of trust. Means SSO (as a way to link the review to the trust). In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure: - unique human, or - resource spend

Doesn't stop nation state troll armies though

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

#538

Post by withinboredom »

kubanczyk wrote: post #305
withinboredom wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That stake can be anything, time, work or money. I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.

Then web of trust. Means SSO (as a way to link the review to the trust). In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure: - unique human, or - resource spend

> unique human

Here's the thing. A sovereign nation can "generate" as many "unique" humans as it wants (via printing "fake" but official identities). No one would be on to them until there were more users than probable people in the country.

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

#539

Post by nsokolsky »

wickedsight wrote: post #197

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched. At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could wor…

A friend of mine owns _the_ best website by far on how to become a student in Czech Republic. 15 years of effort, hundreds of excellent articles, all the content is regularly updated, etc. Google's ranking for "education in Czech Republic" (in Russian)? Not even in the top 100.

The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.

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

#540

Post by throwup238 »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #475
throwup238 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once…

Where do you find out about metrics like this?

There are SEO industry nerds that scour Google patents for clues (this long click metric was an early 2010s patent that was granted in 2015), and Google lets information slip from time to time, either officially or unofficially.
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