8 ms·

Well, to be fair the website looks like it does the most it can possibly do to avoid good SEO and search engine visibility. It uses `<meta keywords` and other

by inglor 8y ago

Well, to be fair the website looks like it does the most it can possibly do to avoid good SEO and search engine visibility. It uses `<meta keywords` and other techniques that apparently search engines like Google do not take into account. On the other hand the HTML of the page (view-source:https://antipolygraph.org/ https://antipolygraph.org/ ) does not contain any guidance as to what's the page's focus. No header tags are present, everything is `<table>` based and contains deprecated markup and almost all of the links it contains are internal. The markup is HTML4 which might be an indication to Google the page has not been updated in a while. The website can easily be found in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.4647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aantipolygraph.org&oq=...) - it just appears to not be ranked very high as it aged. Don't forget Google tends to favour newer and updated content to older content. The website also doesn't have a sitemap as far as I know which doesn't help with the problematic markup.

contravariant 8y ago
Then again it's the third result on DuckDuckGo when you search for 'polygraph' so it's not like it's that hard for search engines to find it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nkozyra 8y ago
None of these are particularly red flag SEO issues. The page is clean, mobile friendly, served over HTTPS. Google doesn't need to assume content update frequency based on the style of markup used, it literally spiders sites and reads their content, likely multiple times a day.
FreeFull 8y ago
Unfortunately all these changes mean that it's now tougher to find old websites with specific information that you're looking for on Google nowadays, in general. It feels like Google used to be much more useful for that ten years ago than it is now.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pmichaud 8y ago
  It's much more adversarial than it was at the beginning.
- insulanus 8y ago
  This may be a good thread to let people know about a hidden setting I found out about recently called Google Verbatim. I thought certain sites I used to search for had fallen off the Internet, but the change was how Google ranked its search results. Try the two searches below to see the difference: https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language&tbs=li:1 Enjoy!
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    How do we use it? Just append &tbs=li:1 ?
    - cafxx 8y ago
      In any search result page, click Tools > All results > Verbatim. That is also how you restrict e.g. the temporal range of results (Tools > Any Time > ...)
- brian-armstrong 8y ago
  Yes! It is time for someone to disrupt Google. Please, we need a better search.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  We really need good, alternative search. I miss Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo and the days where if you didn't find someone in one place, you checked another. Searching for things took real work and you could find a lot of different rabbit holes. Today, rarely do we go past the 2nd page of results. About 1/3 of the time, I get frustrated with Duck Duck Go and add !g.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Nonsense, seo doesn't matter (as per Google) when people come or seek your site. The more likely explanation is that Google and its 3/4 quarter-of-a-trillion valuation depends of having good relations with the Feds, anti-trust and all. See At&T how it manages to screw everyone when it comes to protecting their own interests. They do what the Feds and NSA asks them to do. Your 20 year old site doesn't age in months to go from #1 to page #3 (dead!). The fact that the site has gotten press is even better, it should help your rankings. But by now Google is not longer a fair engine. Their rankings are manipulated to boost their bottom line, directly or indirectly.
- janoc 8y ago
  Nobody has any illusions about Google being fair but if the first thing people do to "solve" this is to bring out all the hairy conspiracy theories instead of fixing the stupid site, no wonder the ranking still sucks. facepalm Only once that is fixed and the rankings are still bad is complaining about "feds" and what not maybe warranted.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    ">> instead of fixing the stupid site" Fix what? If Google wants to demote you, doesn't matter what you do. See https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/insider-threats/article24752116.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/insider-thr... What happened that it went from #2 to page 3? Nothing. Page 3 is a black hole, used to be called a page 3 penalty (get zero traffic, might as well be banned.) The site is accessible and readable. A lot of sites are old fashioned...see Drudge.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    This tendency to characterize the recognition of basic aligning interests as "conspiracy theory" is really odd. I personally don't think GP's theory passes Occam's Razor, but that does not refute the underlying contours of the situation.
dingo_bat 8y ago
All of what you said the website doesn't do is exactly what a decent website shouldn't need to. Google should index it according to the user-visible content, not hidden metadata.
- tgtweak 8y ago
  Google does crawl "the way you see it" and not via raw html parsing. They interpret JavaScript and CSS. Try putting display:none on a div with some text in it, or putting the font-size to 1px. It will not rank for that and you will probably trigger a penalty of some sort if it's egregious.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    Invisible or near invisible text can be discerned without rendering the page. Google does execute JavaScript but as best people can tell it doesn't happen all the time, just periodically. It would be computationally expensive to do this for every request on every spider view for every web site.
    - tgtweak 8y ago
      Less than encoding millions of hours of video per day? Libchromium is quite fast and Google has lots of resources for this. They had rendered screenshots of every result with the matching section highlighted... almost 5 years ago.
      - nkozyra 8y ago
        I'm not saying they don't do it - everyone knows they do. I'm saying for many, many cases there's no reason for them to do it for every page and every site.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Metadata defines what is the content, the sections and the titles. A blob of text is worthless without context.

by inglor 8y ago

contravariant 8y ago

Then again it's the third result on DuckDuckGo when you search for 'polygraph' so it's not like it's that hard for search engines to find it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nkozyra 8y ago

None of these are particularly red flag SEO issues. The page is clean, mobile friendly, served over HTTPS. Google doesn't need to assume content update frequency based on the style of markup used, it literally spiders sites and reads their content, likely multiple times a day.

FreeFull 8y ago

Unfortunately all these changes mean that it's now tougher to find old websites with specific information that you're looking for on Google nowadays, in general. It feels like Google used to be much more useful for that ten years ago than it is now.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pmichaud 8y ago
It's much more adversarial than it was at the beginning.
insulanus 8y ago
This may be a good thread to let people know about a hidden setting I found out about recently called Google Verbatim. I thought certain sites I used to search for had fallen off the Internet, but the change was how Google ranked its search results. Try the two searches below to see the difference: https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=java+vm+language&tbs=li:1 Enjoy!
- forapurpose 8y ago
  How do we use it? Just append &tbs=li:1 ?
  - cafxx 8y ago
    In any search result page, click Tools > All results > Verbatim. That is also how you restrict e.g. the temporal range of results (Tools > Any Time > ...)
brian-armstrong 8y ago
Yes! It is time for someone to disrupt Google. Please, we need a better search.
djsumdog 8y ago
We really need good, alternative search. I miss Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo and the days where if you didn't find someone in one place, you checked another. Searching for things took real work and you could find a lot of different rabbit holes. Today, rarely do we go past the 2nd page of results. About 1/3 of the time, I get frustrated with Duck Duck Go and add !g.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Nonsense, seo doesn't matter (as per Google) when people come or seek your site. The more likely explanation is that Google and its 3/4 quarter-of-a-trillion valuation depends of having good relations with the Feds, anti-trust and all. See At&T how it manages to screw everyone when it comes to protecting their own interests. They do what the Feds and NSA asks them to do. Your 20 year old site doesn't age in months to go from #1 to page #3 (dead!). The fact that the site has gotten press is even better, it should help your rankings. But by now Google is not longer a fair engine. Their rankings are manipulated to boost their bottom line, directly or indirectly.

janoc 8y ago
Nobody has any illusions about Google being fair but if the first thing people do to "solve" this is to bring out all the hairy conspiracy theories instead of fixing the stupid site, no wonder the ranking still sucks. facepalm Only once that is fixed and the rankings are still bad is complaining about "feds" and what not maybe warranted.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  ">> instead of fixing the stupid site" Fix what? If Google wants to demote you, doesn't matter what you do. See https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/insider-threats/article24752116.html https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/insider-thr... What happened that it went from #2 to page 3? Nothing. Page 3 is a black hole, used to be called a page 3 penalty (get zero traffic, might as well be banned.) The site is accessible and readable. A lot of sites are old fashioned...see Drudge.
- mindslight 8y ago
  This tendency to characterize the recognition of basic aligning interests as "conspiracy theory" is really odd. I personally don't think GP's theory passes Occam's Razor, but that does not refute the underlying contours of the situation.

dingo_bat 8y ago

All of what you said the website doesn't do is exactly what a decent website shouldn't need to. Google should index it according to the user-visible content, not hidden metadata.

tgtweak 8y ago
Google does crawl "the way you see it" and not via raw html parsing. They interpret JavaScript and CSS. Try putting display:none on a div with some text in it, or putting the font-size to 1px. It will not rank for that and you will probably trigger a penalty of some sort if it's egregious.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  Invisible or near invisible text can be discerned without rendering the page. Google does execute JavaScript but as best people can tell it doesn't happen all the time, just periodically. It would be computationally expensive to do this for every request on every spider view for every web site.
  - tgtweak 8y ago
    Less than encoding millions of hours of video per day? Libchromium is quite fast and Google has lots of resources for this. They had rendered screenshots of every result with the matching section highlighted... almost 5 years ago.
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      I'm not saying they don't do it - everyone knows they do. I'm saying for many, many cases there's no reason for them to do it for every page and every site.
user5994461 8y ago
Metadata defines what is the content, the sections and the titles. A blob of text is worthless without context.