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Google Update Tanks Traffic

painscience.com

91–100 of 106 posts

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't met a single person that prefers the current state of things. Every time my friends and I search for a recipe we are constantly annoyed by having to scroll through a story that appears to be there simply for ad placement or SEO.

I have zero issue with finding a basic recipe if that's what I want. I prefer background and context.

You prefer, but is it useful?

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#93
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is that "deserved"? It may be deserved because that's what many people want rather than a plain vanilla list of ingredients and instructions.

I haven't met a single person that prefers the current state of things. Every time my friends and I search for a recipe we are constantly annoyed by having to scroll through a story that appears to be there simply for ad placement or SEO.

This is a common issue for more people than you may imagine. Having to scroll through stories and ads is beyond deplorable. My wife and I have gone back to books as they are timeless curated sources of information.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#94
post #16

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another.

Yes. Also, Google is cracking down on off-brand sites pushing medical advice.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#95
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, of course. And they're trying to please both their consumers and customers, but more focused on consumers, because there's always another customer.

Someone will always lose in a competition for limited top spots. The Internet continues to rapidly expand every single day but there are still just 10(ish) spots on the front page. I got what you meant but I think you have the words flipped. Google's customers are advertisers and the consumers of their products are users like you and me.

I assert that a long-term profit optimization will short-term appear to be a focus on consumers (users), and that Google, Facebook, etc. are aware of this. Unless they think their business model is dying and they should just milk the cow as fast as possible before it falls over, which I really doubt.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#96
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except nobody wants to click on something produced by an NLP algorithm. I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam. At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.

I agree to an extent but there's more varieties of search than ever before. There's product search, local search, organic search, image search, etc. You can absolutely "win" at some of those without kingly content.

Lol, love the people downvoting me. I work in SEO and content.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#97
post #43
post #16

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing cultur…

There are multi-million dollar businesses that run entirely on content + SEO (eg https://sleepopolis.com/ ). Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no. Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a sig…

The opportunities to start businesses like that are shrinking every day, by design, by the way that search engines are supposed to work. There is more content produced every day, some of it very good, and there can only be one (1) first page of search results. Your doom is essentially guaranteed. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's just not an innovative or forward-thinking field to get into. The only way this risk would not exist is if search engines were inherently corrupt and you had some reverse engineered way to rank at the top. That ship sailed 5+ years ago[1] when the top search engines switched to machine learning.

[1] Unless you're w3schools, for some reason.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#99
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't met a single person that prefers the current state of things. Every time my friends and I search for a recipe we are constantly annoyed by having to scroll through a story that appears to be there simply for ad placement or SEO.

I have zero issue with finding a basic recipe if that's what I want. I prefer background and context.

I don't mind background and context, I just mind them being placed in a way that makes it difficult to locate and use the other information.

Re: Google Update Tanks Traffic

#100
post #81
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except nobody wants to click on something produced by an NLP algorithm. I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam. At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.

Aren't Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant etc all providing answers generated by NLP algorithms? People seem to be using them pretty frequently. Google already provides no-click search answers by scraping data from a website and bolding a paragraph that may answer your question. The branding of the original site is removed on these snippets. How long before Google decides not to link out the website altogether?

I don't use those products, they only work for very specific types of queries. While I expect they will make it more broadly useful, I don't see it replacing content sites altogether.
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