Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#61

Post by skilled » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 9:37 AM UTC

The main culprit is this:

> Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.

> Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.

Google is flat out refusing to lift this penalty on people's sites for 7 straight months now.

You can read about that here,

https://www.seroundtable.com/no-hcu-yes-core-google-update-r...

and also this tweet:

https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1775495481604358363

--

This is absolutely insane and Google is putting 100% of its faith into an LLM algorithm (the "Helpful Content Update") that in of itself has a token limit and thus cannot read the entire page. On top of that, seven months is a long time and a lot of people will have worked on their sites to remove and/or update their content to have less fluff, etc. And yet Google is refusing to push an update.

From what I have seen in various places, Google has ruined thousands of livelihoods without giving people a second chance, all of which has been done automatically without human supervision. If this were to happen to big publishers, you know for a fact that where would be a class action lawsuit ready to go by now.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#62

Post by zapt02 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:20 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #33

(this is a response to a comment that has been deleted while i was writing it i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author). if this is not ok, then i'll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a good reason to not have it posted, you may contact…

> and reddit is hard to bribe?

It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#63

Post by hankchinaski » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:58 PM UTC

A lot of SEO influencers on twitter have been bragging their tactics to get traffic by using AI spam and other gimmicks. Now they come crying. Not saying this is the case with this specific site, but if you provide actual useful content you will send signals to G and you will rank. spam sites, content farming, and other SEO gimmicks should rightfully be deranked.

Also people who keep insisting on building solely and relying exclusively on SEO do not run a business but a franchise where the franchisor is Google and the franchisee’s conditions are reviewed and changed at moments notice with no recourse

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#64

Post by em-bee » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

zapt02 wrote: post #62

em-bee wrote: post #33

(this is a response to a comment that has been deleted while i was writing it i am not sure what the rules on this are, but i think the comment makes an important point that i believe should be discussed, so i am reposting it together with my response (without naming the author). if this is not ok, then i'll get it removed. if the original author of the comment has a good reason to not have it posted, you may contact…

> and reddit is hard to bribe? It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.

fair point. but the same mechanism also suppresses minority views. which for them makes reddit worse. with independent sites everyone has to make their own judgement whether it is genuine or not. i can't say if that's better or worse, but i find the ability to express and share minority views to be important.

Re: Google Is Killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites

#65

Post by techcode » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

edude03 wrote: post #21

beejiu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would actually be looking to either reddit, or gaming YouTubers or gaming sites I already use In my mind, this is actually the problem. Over the past 15 years, the "web" has become increasingly platformized, and it's getting more platformized every year. The web is, for all intents and purposes, at the control and direction of Google, Meta, YouTube and a few other players. When you do finally get into the "indepe…

So, I agree with you, but as a counter anecdote - I was subscribed to Nebula for ~2 years, and I barely used it because there was no algorithm telling me what things it thought I'd like. Even when I had a topic in mind that I was interested in (mega projects as a random example) I'd get low 100s of results, many from creators I had never heard of, and the ones I chose to watch would typically be from creators I knew…

Similar experience when I tried using DuckDuckGo as default on recently bought Android phone.

I'm all in for privacy - and actively dislike many of Google/YouTube moves (which seem intentional part of plan and not so much accidental or with technical reasons) - e.g.:

YouTube doesn't allow parents to limit their young kids to only whitelisted channels ...

Even worse, if you block YouTube.com domain - kid can't sign into school account (Google classroom stuff) because signing into anything Google actually goes through something like accounts.youtube.com.

And yet after 20th or 30th time when I was not finding things though DDG and manually typing "google.com" to do a search there (browser and other android search boxes were defaulting to DDG).

I just switched default browser and search engine back to Google :(