17 ms·

Google Update Tanks Traffic

144 points by iamjdg 6y ago

hn_check 6y ago
The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" -- it will yield very close to zero natural click through. People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint. We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.
tlarkworthy 6y ago
Glitch? Post was Aug 11th matching : "Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!" https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921985 https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921... Edit: author says no https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1293988184716607488 https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...
cblconfederate 6y ago
Web content makers have to realize their days of monetizing are numbered. Free web content is free food for NLP algorithms , which have already become impressive. In one of the next Google updates, they will eliminate web results compeltely and just give you the predicted answers. We're bound to see original content trying to hide themselves from google in order to remain relevant.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Given how often I get top results that are clearly machine-generated content, I anticipate a lot of broken overfitting will happen in the near term. If you train NLP on text generated by NLP, you're gonna have a bad time.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Now I’m curious: what would happen if one repeatedly trained GPT-3 on text generated by a “previous generation” GPT-3? (Similar time successive JPEG saves)
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure it would drift further and further from something a human would recognize as intelligible.
      - datameta 6y ago
        It would be a kind of DeepDream for NLP
- eloff 6y ago
  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.
  - idoh 6y ago
    The point is that SEO itself is not a long term strategy.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      "SEO" has worked for 20+ years. What SEO is changes but it will always be a viable strategy.
kobbad 6y ago
This was posted by me earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  No, this is a link to a different post about the same change/glitch, not the same article. Is this a weak attempt to drive people to your blog?
  - kobbad 6y ago
    not my blog :) This was the first source and wanted to share
kartayyar 6y ago
I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results. And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
- asadkn 6y ago
  It's perfectly normal to react and criticize failures of an almost monopolistic search engine, when the good content is outranked by inferior content.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Who decides what is good and what is inferior?
    - xapata 6y ago
      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.
      - pb7 6y ago
        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.
        xapata 6y ago
        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.
zelly 6y ago
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 culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives. The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.
- marcrosoft 6y ago
  I would like to take the opportunity to point out that your comment could be exposed to thousands more viewers. We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    Imagine a down-voting button for search results. Had it not been so easy to abuse this might be a solution to this conundrum.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  There's plenty of legitimate SEO that does work. Figure out what your audience is struggling with, and publish articles explaining how your product solves that.
- weisbaum 6y ago
  This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic. I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.
john_moscow 6y ago
Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on. Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs. P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.
- RyanOD 6y ago
  The time has come to finally finish Zork!
nickreese 6y ago
I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing. As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions. A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  > [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
  - zo1 6y ago
    Doesn't google penalize websites for having too-many outgoing links? That would explain why you're seeing so few links to sources.
    - nickreese 6y ago
      Google doesn't penalize for too many outbound links, but SEO is a zero sum game. Being conservative or even stingy with links is higher reward strategy than being generous.
- qppo 6y ago
  > struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing. If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line. Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.
aresant 6y ago
Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" - somebody have that link handy?
- hbcondo714 6y ago
  Maybe you are remembering this? Matt Cutts answers the question: "Does Google consider SEO to be spam?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151352
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Of course Google considers SEO a bug. The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Google's goal isn't to always show the page with the best SEO, it's to show the page the searcher is searching for. Google has been in a continuous battle to stop SEO since it's inception.
  - Veen 6y ago
    > The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Many SEO professionals help businesses by writing the content people search for. Their goal is not to trick Google, but to write content that deserves the top spot. A mattress retailer may not have the first clue how to write content that is useful to people who want to buy mattresses, but SEOs and professional writers can do it for them. Additionally, Mr. Mattress Retailer has no idea about the technical aspects of content that help Google to understand it: site navigation, meta data, schema data, and so on. Technical SEOs can help them out. The result is content that's relevant to the right audience, informative, and published with all the extra stuff that helps Google to make sense of it.
tus88 6y ago
These people who think Google owes them something for free...
system2 6y ago
When will people learn? From the article: "partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years" Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead. This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
- tgb 6y ago
  What's the alternative for content like this?
  - adventured 6y ago
    A newsletter format perhaps, meant to eventually make the website merely a side bonus. Depending on how they're done, newsletters can be wildly lucrative, far more so than a site like PainScience. I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing. 100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter, again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic source vanishes. He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick free. As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.
jl6 6y ago
Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.
- debacle 6y ago
  How many of those narrative travesties are serving Google ads every other paragraph?
sjs382 6y ago
> POST REMOVED > With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
- argonix 6y ago
  Find the archived version here: http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc... I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.
- adventured 6y ago
  They got spooked that Google will finish the job out of spite now that the post is getting so much attention. The focus shifted to fear of losing what's remaining (they mentioned it's still just barely paying the bills).
mef 6y ago
This article no longer has any content: "POST REMOVED"
- mef 6y ago
  wayback link https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...
soulofmischief 6y ago
They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link
weisbaum 6y ago
It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here... Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice. You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus. The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content. When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity. Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index. Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
Sangama34 6y ago
This advice is a bit stale in 2020 but I have learned it the hard way so I will write it nevertheless. - Do not depend on google for most of your traffic. If you have alternate organic sources of traffic Google will automatically give you more importance. - You need to have a social media presence. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are important. It is okay even if it is just some automated posting. - Your content must be shared by people. If you are not writing share-worthy content please reconsider. (Of course a click bait article will be shared more and a well thought research article will be shared less, compare yourself with your competitors on this metric.)
justcomments12 6y ago
A botnet is attacking the site in question (domains include xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc) Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies. It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money. When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true. Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking. Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.
- ssvss 6y ago
  > When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true. Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google ranking ?
  - justcomments12 6y ago
    It's because the botnet pages themselves contains data which Google considers spam (unrelated topics, link farms, ad pages, porn etc). Google then lowers the rankings (or removes the blogs from Google). All they have to do is run an update script to update all the domains with the blog link, and Google lowers their rankings.
Ijumfs 6y ago
>blogspammer loses free clicks Oh wow, what a shame! This just isn't fair. Who will produce content if people can't get impressions?
obilgic 6y ago
Author removed the post, so: http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...
neonate 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...

144 points by iamjdg 6y ago

The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" -- it will yield very close to zero natural click through. People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint. We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.

tlarkworthy 6y ago

Glitch? Post was Aug 11th matching : "Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!" https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921985 https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921... Edit: author says no https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1293988184716607488 https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...

cblconfederate 6y ago

Web content makers have to realize their days of monetizing are numbered. Free web content is free food for NLP algorithms , which have already become impressive. In one of the next Google updates, they will eliminate web results compeltely and just give you the predicted answers. We're bound to see original content trying to hide themselves from google in order to remain relevant.

hinkley 6y ago
Given how often I get top results that are clearly machine-generated content, I anticipate a lot of broken overfitting will happen in the near term. If you train NLP on text generated by NLP, you're gonna have a bad time.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Now I’m curious: what would happen if one repeatedly trained GPT-3 on text generated by a “previous generation” GPT-3? (Similar time successive JPEG saves)
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it would drift further and further from something a human would recognize as intelligible.
    - datameta 6y ago
      It would be a kind of DeepDream for NLP
eloff 6y ago
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.
- idoh 6y ago
  The point is that SEO itself is not a long term strategy.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    "SEO" has worked for 20+ years. What SEO is changes but it will always be a viable strategy.

kobbad 6y ago

This was posted by me earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881

hundchenkatze 6y ago
No, this is a link to a different post about the same change/glitch, not the same article. Is this a weak attempt to drive people to your blog?
- kobbad 6y ago
  not my blog :) This was the first source and wanted to share

kartayyar 6y ago

I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results. And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.

asadkn 6y ago
It's perfectly normal to react and criticize failures of an almost monopolistic search engine, when the good content is outranked by inferior content.
- pb7 6y ago
  Who decides what is good and what is inferior?
  - xapata 6y ago
    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.
    - pb7 6y ago
      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.
      - xapata 6y ago
        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.

zelly 6y ago

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 culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives. The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.

marcrosoft 6y ago
I would like to take the opportunity to point out that your comment could be exposed to thousands more viewers. We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  Imagine a down-voting button for search results. Had it not been so easy to abuse this might be a solution to this conundrum.
john_moscow 6y ago
There's plenty of legitimate SEO that does work. Figure out what your audience is struggling with, and publish articles explaining how your product solves that.
weisbaum 6y ago
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons... 1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea. 2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does. 3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic. I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.

john_moscow 6y ago

Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on. Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs. P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.

RyanOD 6y ago
The time has come to finally finish Zork!

nickreese 6y ago

I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content. Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing. As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions. A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.

dna_polymerase 6y ago
> [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content. This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.
- zo1 6y ago
  Doesn't google penalize websites for having too-many outgoing links? That would explain why you're seeing so few links to sources.
  - nickreese 6y ago
    Google doesn't penalize for too many outbound links, but SEO is a zero sum game. Being conservative or even stingy with links is higher reward strategy than being generous.
qppo 6y ago
> struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing. If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line. Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.

aresant 6y ago

Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" - somebody have that link handy?

hbcondo714 6y ago
Maybe you are remembering this? Matt Cutts answers the question: "Does Google consider SEO to be spam?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151352
colinmhayes 6y ago
Of course Google considers SEO a bug. The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Google's goal isn't to always show the page with the best SEO, it's to show the page the searcher is searching for. Google has been in a continuous battle to stop SEO since it's inception.
- Veen 6y ago
  > The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Many SEO professionals help businesses by writing the content people search for. Their goal is not to trick Google, but to write content that deserves the top spot. A mattress retailer may not have the first clue how to write content that is useful to people who want to buy mattresses, but SEOs and professional writers can do it for them. Additionally, Mr. Mattress Retailer has no idea about the technical aspects of content that help Google to understand it: site navigation, meta data, schema data, and so on. Technical SEOs can help them out. The result is content that's relevant to the right audience, informative, and published with all the extra stuff that helps Google to make sense of it.

tus88 6y ago

These people who think Google owes them something for free...

system2 6y ago

When will people learn? From the article: "partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years" Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead. This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.

tgb 6y ago
What's the alternative for content like this?
- adventured 6y ago
  A newsletter format perhaps, meant to eventually make the website merely a side bonus. Depending on how they're done, newsletters can be wildly lucrative, far more so than a site like PainScience. I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing. 100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter, again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic source vanishes. He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick free. As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.

jl6 6y ago

Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.

debacle 6y ago
How many of those narrative travesties are serving Google ads every other paragraph?

sjs382 6y ago

> POST REMOVED > With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.

argonix 6y ago
Find the archived version here: http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc... I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.
adventured 6y ago
They got spooked that Google will finish the job out of spite now that the post is getting so much attention. The focus shifted to fear of losing what's remaining (they mentioned it's still just barely paying the bills).

mef 6y ago

This article no longer has any content: "POST REMOVED"

mef 6y ago
wayback link https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...

soulofmischief 6y ago

They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link

weisbaum 6y ago

It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here... Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice. You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus. The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content. When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity. Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index. Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?

Sangama34 6y ago

This advice is a bit stale in 2020 but I have learned it the hard way so I will write it nevertheless. - Do not depend on google for most of your traffic. If you have alternate organic sources of traffic Google will automatically give you more importance. - You need to have a social media presence. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are important. It is okay even if it is just some automated posting. - Your content must be shared by people. If you are not writing share-worthy content please reconsider. (Of course a click bait article will be shared more and a well thought research article will be shared less, compare yourself with your competitors on this metric.)

justcomments12 6y ago

A botnet is attacking the site in question (domains include xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc) Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies. It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money. When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true. Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking. Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.

ssvss 6y ago
> When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true. Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google ranking ?
- justcomments12 6y ago
  It's because the botnet pages themselves contains data which Google considers spam (unrelated topics, link farms, ad pages, porn etc). Google then lowers the rankings (or removes the blogs from Google). All they have to do is run an update script to update all the domains with the blog link, and Google lowers their rankings.

Ijumfs 6y ago

>blogspammer loses free clicks Oh wow, what a shame! This just isn't fair. Who will produce content if people can't get impressions?

obilgic 6y ago

Author removed the post, so: http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...

neonate 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...