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DailyMail: fifty percent drop in traffic after Google update
- welly 7y agoThis couldn't happen to a more deserving publication.
- gargarplex 7y agoAgree ?
- rvnx 7y agoSearch engines should be loyal to newspapers. Agree ?
- gargarplex 7y agoI hired the applicant who came late to the interview and had no professional experience. He spit on my face but his great aunt was in the hospital. Always understand, expect the best and people deliver! Agree ? </s>
- EGreg 7y agoAnd Alex Jones got what’s coming to him. But what about dissidents in countries? https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog
- tialaramex 7y agoAll the web sites that go with British newspapers (and for all I know, other newspapers in the world, but I live in Britain) have been doing grey-SEO stuff that's bound to get hit by algorithm changes. By "grey SEO" here I'm thinking of articles that are intended to get "natural" traffic as a result of people asking questions, e.g. "When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?" An encyclopedia is often the natural result for questions like these, or some sort of specialist fact database, IMDB for example, or a TV channel's own listings site. But the newspapers decided they could get some of those clicks. If some people who were wondering if that's the same girl in Godzilla (yup) click through and see four adverts and read speculation as to whether Kate Middleton hates her brother-in-law's new wife (probably not, also who cares?) that's more profit for the publisher. Anyway, Google's thing has always been trying to put the answers you wanted at the top. In defiance of Babbage's oft-cited remark, Google wants to give you the answer you were looking for even if you ask the wrong question. This may often mean that a Daily Mail article trying to get you to click through to more slop about nothing is NOT the best answer when you asked a mundane question and Google may tweak their algorithm to prefer say, the Netflix video trailer for this season of Black Mirror, higher than a Daily Mail article speculating that Charlie Brooker might be gay when users ask it "When is Black Mirror new series?" even if the Daily Mail team worked really hard setting metadata tags and fiddling with the layout.
- stordoff 7y ago> "When is the new Avengers movie out?" "Which channel is The Crown on?" "Was Michael Jackson a Paedophile?" "Who is that girl from Stranger Things?" What I'm increasingly noticing in the results for these is title:"Avengers movie release date", body:"No release date has yet been announced for the Avengers movie" (but not in the search engine snippet).
- EGreg 7y agoOnce again the problem is centralization - centralizing the power in the hands of one corporation with one algorithm because they have all the good software and hardware. Facebook - social Google - search Amazon - shopping And so on.
- KirinDave 7y agoIt's also the case that folks like those that run the Daily Mail have over-specialized their revenues in ways that depend on Google. They didn't have to do this, but they chose to. I doubt it will change, but hopefully it'll be a lesson to other folks in the business.
- EGreg 7y agoThis seems a lot like the “personal responsibility” talk from Republicans when informed that many people are struggling. Well they made their choices! Hmm, could it be that the system is set up in a certain way that most would make these choices? And does that benefit society? If DailyMail had not made those choices but someone else did, then THEY wouls be the subject of the news. Unless you are saying that there is absolutely no reason why there is a monopoly in those areas.
- KirinDave 7y agoYou seem to believe that these two points of view are mutually exclusive. I used the word "also" intentionally because I believe they are compatible. I firmly believe we can and should build non-exclusive non-silo search engine options. Data salary for general search use is probably a bad thing overall. I'm excited to see a world where competitors to the major search engines that are more open exists. But at the same time, we're not talking about individual consumers. Individual consumers don't have much market power and dust can't express much choice. The daily Mail is a massive corporation and a massive publication. They could have made other choices, and elected to use other business models. They didn't. And to be honest I don't have much sympathy for them in this. If a single source of revenue dominates everything else that you do you are not an effective news organization. You're probably not even effective corporation is a whole, as most people who run companies Tell you not to overconcentrate your income in one source.
- Quarrelsome 7y agoAny ideas _why_ it lost so much traffic exactly?
- analogmemory 7y agoDaily Mail is the sort of “paper” you use to line a bird cage with
- Quarrelsome 7y agooh sure, I know cause I used to deliver it as a paper boy, got a good grounding but that doesn't explain why it dropped in Google rank.
- spookthesunset 7y agoIt got dropped in rank because Google decided something else should be higher ranked. How do you propose google rank things? Don't forget people will always game whatever your ranking algorithm, so please elaborate how you'll deal with that too.
- okket 7y agoBecause they perfected the exploitation of Googles search algorithm? Have a look at the site. It is literally a clickbait content farm.
- ptah 7y agoit's a pearl-clutching misogynistic and *phobic tabloid. wikipedia doesn't allow citations from them either https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia-bans-daily-mail-as-unreliable-source-for-website https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia... https://stopfundinghate.info/2018/02/21/online-advertisers-daily-mail/ https://stopfundinghate.info/2018/02/21/online-advertisers-d...
- dev_dull 7y agoAlright sounds good. By the way where do we go to find out whether a publication is misogynistic and *phobic? We need to make sure we keep the internet safe!
- camillomiller 7y agoI am conflicted. I think that Daily Mail deserves it all. At the same time I don’t think it should be Google’s duty to limit the reach of a bad publication by means of algorithmic changes to its opaque Search product.
- daleharvey 7y agoYou think it should be googles duty to promote bad publications by means of the algorithm it generated?
- creaghpatr 7y agoIt should be their duty to be transparent about the matter.
- spookthesunset 7y agoAnd how to you propose this be done? Google has to order its results somehow. How do you propose they order them?
- tomohawk 7y agoThat is not the issue. There is a claim that Google manually intervened to DEmote the "bad publication". Should that be Google's duty? If so, what is Google's responsibility with regard to transparency and accountability?
- sam0x17 7y agoMuch more likely that they made some global changes, and dailymail happened to be one of the hardest-hit high profile sites, because the amount of click-baity untrue stuff they publish.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoGoogle has to do some sort of curation, or we're left back in the early 2000's where people are just throwing keywords up for the google crawler to find. Is there a difference between those sites and the daily mail? Oh yeah, but I don't know where it sits on the spectrum when compared to those old sites and more reputable news agencies.
- mabbo 7y agoGoogle's aim in recent changes is to promote quality, reputable content rather than tabloid, 'fake news'/propaganda and content farms. If we take a quick look over at DailyMail.co.uk, one can quickly identify where the problem might be located.
- dazc 7y agoThe Daily Mail is hardly unique in terms of fake news and propaganda, especially in the UK. Give me an example that proves otherwise instead of downvoting?
- iron0013 7y agoNo thanks, I prefer to downvote.
- zimpenfish 7y agoBut then surely the answer there is that other bad actors (The Sun, Daily Express, etc.) should suffer the same penalties from Wikipedia, Google, etc.; not that one should slide because others are just as bad.
- kofejnik 7y ago"reputable content" as defined by GOOG's own ideological bias
- sergiotapia 7y agoCorrect but you will be downvoted here of course. Edit: and now this comment is flagged.
- sctb 7y ago> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 7y ago
- sergiotapia 7y agoSo is google a publisher or a search engine?
- basch 7y agogoogle is an index of information sorted by what it thinks is most relevant to the searcher, and always has been. pagerank was a information quality and importance evaluater. pagerank is what made google google. I would argue that dailymail fails the SPIRIT of the original pagerank, even if its heavily linked to, the information they hold is paparazzi stew. They have every right to choose to derank something so worthless.
- Shivetya 7y agoworthless to who? seriously, who decides what I value? Should I decide for you what is worthless? don't dismiss this is as a flippant comment because people with this belief will walk us straight into the hands of the political class who will jump at the opportunity to tell us what is and what is not. You can be damn sure they will use all the marketed tested FUD to have people climbing aboard. Punch all the right buttons, have the correct statement to any challenge, and next were back the day of where the message is wholly managed. We already see regimes which operate this way but many just laugh it off "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE", well this is how you get there , by giving the power to decide to someone else.
- basch 7y agogoogle does. thats literally the point of pagerank, was for them to decide. thats what differentiated them from other search engines, was evaluating link quality differently. I know they have taken over the market, but it used to be, if a search engine didnt do a good job of sifting and ranking information, people would move to a new one. infoseek, webcrawler, yahoo, lycos, altavista, hotbot, ask jeeves, msn, alltheweb, teoma. Youre arguing against the business model itself, which is that the company is RANKING content. It CANT be unbiased. Think about it not as pushing things down, but choosing what to surface to the top. Hopefully cream. They have two tasks, find good content bring it to the top, and detect bad content impersonating good content and punish it for fraud.
- jonatron 7y agoHow many trackers and other third party scripts are on daily mail pages?
- Lev1a 7y agoThe last time (~6 months ago) I was on one of their article pages (via direct link in a new tab, not via their homepage), the uBO icon immediately showed something like 50 or 60 elements blocked. That value rose every other second as I scrolled, so yeah...
- cagenut 7y agonearly all news sites, from infowars to nytimes, are borderline sharecroppers off the daily flow of traffic from google search. its usually only a fifth to a third of their traffic, but its their single biggest source usually. the cornerstone of the business. daily mail just basically got evicted by the landlord. I'm super curious to see where they drew the line.
- Matsta 7y agoHaving a brief look at their traffic on Ahrefs; They've lost a bit of traffic, but it doesn't look like it's halved: 59 million to 49 million. https://i.imgur.com/fB1z5aq.png https://i.imgur.com/fB1z5aq.png Having a look at what their organic search movements are, most of them are just for celebrity names. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png It seems in this update, and Google is putting a lot less emphasis on the word count. Instead, they are putting more emphasis on having the exact keyword in the title tag and coming from a domain with a lot of authority. Google could have also struck DailyMail with a Manual Action (aka a penalty for breaking their TOS) which would vastly affect their organic traffic. Manual action is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
- nthuser 7y agoNo offense, but you clearly did not read the article.
- dang 7y agoWould you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? This comment breaks them. If you read the article, it would be helpful to mention specific relevant info.
- Bartweiss 7y ago> They've lost a bit of traffic, but it doesn't look like it's halved: 59 million to 49 million. The article is very sloppy about this, with a clickbait framing, but the actual claim is "we saw a massive drop in Search traffic from Google (lost 50% of daily traffic)", which I'm almost certain means 50% of Google search traffic.
- Matsta 7y agoYes - Ahrefs only measures Google search traffic. If you were to use something like Similarweb, it will give you a estimate of overall traffic from all platforms: https://www.similarweb.com/website/dailymail.co.uk https://www.similarweb.com/website/dailymail.co.uk
- jacknews 7y agoTo me that demonstrates the click-baitish nature of the content that this publication pump out
- frou_dh 7y agoIt's the premier middle-class British pastime to be forever proclaiming how much you hate the Daily Mail. A: No, I hate it more. B: No, IIII really do despise it more. C: Oh my gawwd, the Daily Mail. Groooan!
- dev_dull 7y agoYet many of them read it.
- jacknews 7y agoThe Mirror, Star, Express, etc used to be the 'awful' lower-class newspapers. Times change. Or perhaps there's some kind of 'class inflation'. But really, today's Mail is all celeb ad-photorials(tm) and drivel.
- mft_ 7y agoI always perceived that it was split along class lines (this is the UK, after all). The true working-class tabloids were the Sun, Mirror, and Star. The Mail and the Express seemed to be more for people who were doing a little better, were often (correspondingly?) a bit older, but were rooted in right-wing/small island mentality, and who would probably have been uncomfortable with the image/implications of moving to a broadsheet.
- jacknews 7y agoAh yes, forgot the Sun! But true, the Mail was always targeted at the 'aspiring', 'twitching lace curtains' class.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThe Daily Express used to be a broadsheet, and was always thought middle market. It went tabloid after Beaverbrook died - in the 70s I think. Somehow, it had a reputation for decent, honest but right of centre reporting. Quite how I'm not sure as Beaverbrook had infamously told a 1948 enquiry into the press that he ran the paper "purely for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive". He may have been Murdoch's role model. Ever since it went tabloid it's been downhill all the way, and right down the toilet after Desmond.
- kazinator 7y agoThe Google UI seems to have changed also. No more numbered pages you can navigate back and forth, just a button to reveal more search results on one page. So for instance, you can jump straight to the "long tail" of a search for the less important results; you have to click through umpteen "more results".
- rchaud 7y agoThis entire conversation is about the Daily Mail itself, when the facts of the story are that in a forum post with no replies, the SEO person at the Daily Mail complained that traffic dropped for a whole 2 days. Numerous sites are impacted when Google's algorithms change. The Daily Mail is not popular because of Google, it's popular because it's a low-brow tabloid and there are many people who love low-brow tabloids.
- Bartweiss 7y agoThe story is also a clickbait headline from an SEO-discussion website, who presumably know a thing or two about driving traffic to themselves. Despite the headline and lede, this isn't a 50% traffic drop for the Daily Mail, it's a 50% drop in Google search traffic specifically. Without some more context, like which other sites this hit and what's changed (ranking drop? fewer search matches?), this is basically a non-story.
- zone411 7y agoThe Semrush shows that they were getting 15 mil visitors from google per day before the update and 11 mil after. The absolute numbers might be wrong but they definitely were hit hard and they were getting a lot of traffic from Gogle.
- Nursie 7y agoGood! It's a worthless rag full of content designed to get a rise from its readership, with scant regard for the truth.
- dev_dull 7y agoI see a lot of people citing their personal dislike of the site as a reason to wipe it from polite society. Why? What test did it fail and where is the evidence? Can you apply that test evenly to other websites? Am I the only one here that sees these types of moves as a problem and doesn’t dismiss them purely because of my own personal attitudes toward the content?
- mft_ 7y agoWell, we don't know why it happened. If it's pure censorship, sure, that's a bad thing. But if it's just that Google is updating its algorithm to pay less attention to sites which are heavily optimised/click-bait/sensationalist... that's not so bad.
- iamnothere 7y agoI've finally come to the understanding that when times get tough, people are all for naked power grabs that support "their side", regardless of the broader consequences. You could see it as a flaw in humanity, but I think it's an adaptive trait, ensuring that your tribe secures adequate resources and all that. The real flaw is how we're unable to escape these sorts of evolutionary pressures and replace them with cooperative behavior across tribal boundaries. (In my opinion, this is what will lead us into devastating global resource wars when climate change and peak oil really come home to roost.)
- viraptor 7y ago> What test did it fail and where is the evidence? You'll find the answers here https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/statistics-show-that-daily-mail-was-by-far-the-most-unreliable-uk-paper-in-2017/ https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/statisti... with a follow-up from this year in https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/daily-mail-tops-list-of-ipso-offenders-for-third-year-running/ https://tabloidcorrections.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/daily-ma... This includes great quotes like: > The paper reported in its front page story that an Iraqi man “caught red-handed with a bomb” had been awarded £33,000 in compensation “because our soldiers kept him in custody for too long”. In fact, the man in question was found not guilty and the reason he was awarded compensation was for unlawful and degrading treatment while in custody (he was beaten by guards) as well as unlawful detention.
- FatDrunknStupid 7y agoSuper circle jerk! Bad content site reports drop in traffic after algo updated to not promote bad content.
- tomohawk 7y agoSome people so badly want Google to be a source of truth, and not just a source of information. Be careful what you wish for...