My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero • Hacker News Board

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#61

Post by Guest19023892 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #41

zaroth wrote: post #16

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisti…

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search eng…

I blocked a number of non Google search bots on one of my smaller sites the other day, increasing the number of bots I have blocked from about 20 to 30. That reduced the load on my database server by over 80%. It's a small site that only generates about $5/day from AdSense, so I need to keep the expenses down on it, and I don't want all of the revenue paying for bots that don't bring in any significant traffic.

If I didn't block any search bots, I bet the bots would make up at least 95% of the traffic.

On my larger sites I don't mind serving a million page views a day to random search bots, but on that smaller one it doesn't make sense.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#62

Post by ajsharp » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

I noticed the site isn't using Google Analytics, or any tracking pixels for that matter. Wonder if this is in any way connected to the ranking algo.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#63

Post by oliv__ » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

It's really messed up that people like you who take time and effort to do things right and play the SEO game fair and square get stripped of their livelihood overnight but black hat SEO sites and spammy ad-filled sites thrive...

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#64

Post by jjcon » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

meibo wrote: post #53

jjcon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘su…

They ask you regularly if the data is still up to date and have disclaimers about situations like this when you register the phone number as an actual authentication factor. Not saying that this isn't at least partly on Google, they should have responsive customer service that can verify accounts - but you could have easily prevented that by being less lazy with keeping your data up to date. Security and account reco…

I moved across a border like 20 minutes away and got a new number - it is extremely common that both things change at the same time for people. It wasn’t a months old number or anything.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#65

Post by bcrl » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #7

exabrial wrote: post #3

Every subdivision of Google needs to be broken up, advertising and search especially. Too much in our economy is at stake.

If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.

AT&T / Bell was broken up in the 1980s into multiple entities. Splitting local and long distance services resulted in significant competition for long distance, while local phone service remained / remains heavily regulated in many markets. Here in Canada I remember having to pay $0.34 per minute to Bell in the 1980s to call a friend that was a 30 km drive away. Overseas long distance was in the dollars per minute ballpark.

This wasn't without some losses. Bell Labs lost a lot of funding once the Bell monopoly was split up. The amount of R&D that the telecom giants funded over the years resulted in massive public benefits, creating the tech industry we all know and love.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#66

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

nordic-nomad wrote: post #25

Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use. And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thi…

> Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use.

My own sense of spam smell got triggered by the name of the site, too. Sounded like a gimmick; you can have all three, after all.

A rebranding might solve his issue.

It could be very interesting to see a sort of A/B test between the current site and a clone of the site but with a different name.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#67

Post by Wowfunhappy » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

bcrl wrote: post #37

remram wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is not making profit and only exists to show ads.

Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies. To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a co…

I think there might be psychological issues at play here, sadly. If you click onto a news website from a search engine, and it ends up being for the wrong thing, people feel cheated and will want their money back.

This is probably silly, because if you're paying a couple cents per view, you should be concentrating on the value you receive in the aggregate... but people aren't rational, and personally, I don't think I'd be immune to feeling a sense of regret when I spent money on the wrong link.

I'm not going to remember the episode, but I'm pretty sure Planet Money said this is what happened when micropayments were tried in the 90s.

I subscribe to Scroll.com, and I think they've probably got a better model down. Make agreements with lots of sites from different companies, and then offer a bulk subscription which removes ads from all of them. It doesn't let you through paywalls, mind you, but you could imagine a variation on the concept which did.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#68

Post by busterarm » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

oliv__ wrote: post #63

It's really messed up that people like you who take time and effort to do things right and play the SEO game fair and square get stripped of their livelihood overnight but black hat SEO sites and spammy ad-filled sites thrive...

Or maybe playing the SEO game for its own sake is not something we should stand for and for the scumbags & cheaters it is only a matter of time.

If somebody asked nicely to shit on your lawn, would you say yes?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#69

Post by judge2020 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

type0 wrote: post #52

mullingitover wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search eng…

> Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly. The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.

Why?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#70

Post by busterarm » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

alphadevx wrote: post #42

For me, Google only sends organic traffic to my posts that are 10-20 years old (no joke). My newer content, while verified by me as indexed by Google, receives zero traffic. For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons. It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is…

Start embedding links in the text of your old content that point to your new content (when contextually appropriate, of course). Not as warnings, but if for some reason you mention a topic or word that's relevant to a newer article...