26 ms·

My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

• H8crilA 6y ago
  [joke] I am guessing RankBain finally understood humor: https://fastgood.cheap/ https://fastgood.cheap/
• exabrial 6y ago
  Every subdivision of Google needs to be broken up, advertising and search especially. Too much in our economy is at stake.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    How would that address this situation?
  • KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
    Why would a smaller company be any more responsive to issues like this? This seems like a technological problem rather than a political one.
    • c0nsumer 6y ago
      Because it's easier for competition to arise for the smaller company when it doesn't have the clout of a behemoth behind it.
  • xenihn 6y ago
    I consider myself anti-monopolist but lately I've been thinking...wouldn't breaking up American big tech companies put the US in a worse position to compete against Chinese tech companies?
    • f430 6y ago
      Not if you remove China's swiftcode which the USGOV can do and China is very nervous because it would lead to mass unrest. How do you compete when nobody is buying Yuan and the demand disappears overnight in the foreign exchange markets?
    • wolco2 6y ago
      Not in search or advertising.
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      Being in a more competitive industry generally reduces margins but increases the size of the market. Vertically integrated companies lose to aggressively competitive non-integrated competitors when they exist (and a monopolist is proscribed from buying them all up), because the existence of that competition means they can't be abusive or collect monopoly rents. Vertically integrated monopolies are sticky because you can't replace any individual part of the stack by itself. You can't compete with iMessage just by creating your own messaging app, because to be on a level playing field you would also have to create your own mobile operating system and design your own phone hardware and microprocessors and convince all the customers to switch despite the existing network effect. If we made it to a market where anybody could create a new OS and have it run on the existing installed base of hardware, or create a new app in a write once run anywhere language and it could run on every existing device, vertically integrated competitors are at a disadvantage because they have to be best in class in all of their individual markets or else customers find themselves better off to have the ability to mix and match.
      • bcrl 6y ago
        I'll give an example of a Canadian vertically integrated monopoly: BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE grew out of the incumbent phone company (Bell) in most of Ontario and Quebec. Over the years it has used the massive profits from telecom to extends its reach into other sectors of the economy. Over the past 10-15 years, it has made quite a few acquisition of various content producers. Most notably to me was the purchase of CTV and Discovery Channel. Back in the 1980s, Ottawa had a local independent broadcast named CJOH. They produced their own local news at 6pm and late night. The CJOH news team was well respected and an active participant in the community. CJOH eventually got purchased by CTV and ultimately landed under the control of BCE / Bell Media. Shortly after Bell Media gained control a few years ago, they laid off longtime anchor Carol Anne Meehan. Not a good move in my view, as they brought on an entirely new and young team. Further cuts to the news staff have happened over the last few years as increasing use of technology has allowed further staff cuts -- everyone from camerapeople to editors and technical support staff. Each cut means one less means by which the news organization can learn about things that are happening in our community. The acquisition of Discovery Channel was even worse in my opinion. From 1995 to 2018 Discovery Channel ran a show called Daily Planet, which was one of the only daily science news shows. This was a wonderful way to find out about all kinds of cool things going on in the world of science and technology. It aired on weekdays at 7pm after the 6 o'clock news. Bell Media cancelled the show on May 23, 2018. The loss of Daily Planet is, in my opion, worse than that of a local news channel. Daily Planet was part of the reason for the existence of Discovery Channel. There are no real replacements being broadcast that I know of. The reason I bring all this up is to show how the priorities of a monopoly impact existing services that are a public benefit. In my opinion, the BCE layoffs were not the result of the company losing money. The reasons were to free up cash flow to pay for Bell Canada's massive investments in building out its Fibre To The Home network. Bell has spent billions of dollars thus far building out FTTH across Ontario and Quebec, acquired the incumbent in Manitoba. Purchasing content producers that were once separate entities, then gutting them and using the savings to pay for FTTH construction is a brilliant strategy. Money that was previously an expense gets turned into capex that builds a new asset. Sadly, our phone and TV bills don't go down in price despite us getting less new content. I had the chance to speak to folks at Discovery Channel at a conference back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, and their enthusiasm about bringing real science content to the public was amazing. I'm sad this has been lost at the alter of corporate greed.
  • ekianjo 6y ago
    If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.
    • contravariant 6y ago
      At the very least it would solve the massive conflict of interest where a service that you can pay to make people find your webpage is strongly intertwined with another service people use to find webpages.
      • benlivengood 6y ago
        It's impossible to remove that conflict of interest. The search engine maximizes expected utility when serving ads: argmax(predicted-click-through-rate * cost-per-click). That's the only rational thing to ask for from an advertising network, and it's what the advertiser optimizes for as well by running the ad auction in the first place. It doesn't matter who computes the ad-quality score (the predictor of click-through rate); rational actors with sufficient information will agree on the value. One could artificially prevent the search engine from e.g. sending keywords and viewer profiles to the ad network, but that is a completely separate regulatory approach from monopoly-busting. While we're stumbling around the regulatory possibility landscape why not just ban advertising altogether? It's a ~1% drain on the economy that people who know better go out of their way to block.
    • bcrl 6y ago
      AT&T / Bell was broken up in the 1980s into multiple entities. Splitting local and long distance services resulted in significant competition for long distance, while local phone service remained / remains heavily regulated in many markets. Here in Canada I remember having to pay $0.34 per minute to Bell in the 1980s to call a friend that was a 30 km drive away. Overseas long distance was in the dollars per minute ballpark. This wasn't without some losses. Bell Labs lost a lot of funding once the Bell monopoly was split up. The amount of R&D that the telecom giants funded over the years resulted in massive public benefits, creating the tech industry we all know and love.
    • 6y ago
  • ma2rten 6y ago
    How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.
      • ma2rten 6y ago
        So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?
        • KMag 6y ago
          Yes, they'd be allowed to use other ad providers, and hopefully it would be illegal to penalize them for constantly running some multi-armed-bandit trials across multiple ad providers.
          • ma2rten 6y ago
            Then AdWords would draw the short end of the stick because their product would become commoditized. Google would still hold the same market power as before. Ad quality might go down because there are multiple providers. Overall I don't see the upside. Maybe something that would make more sense is if Google was split into two or more search engines, each of them would get a copy of the current source code and data.
    • contravariant 6y ago
      The existence of google adwords on other webpages suggests otherwise.
    • 6y ago
  • m1117 6y ago
    Google should reveal it's algorithms to make it transparent and fair to everyone. So we can game the system. [not really!]
  • remram 6y ago
    Search is not making profit and only exists to show ads.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      ...isn't showing ads what makes it profitable? Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do. This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad networks on the web while also running massive ad-supported properties in house.
      • bcrl 6y ago
        Ad networks were separate years ago! Strangely enough they were acquired. Google bought AdSense and Sprinks in 2003, dMark Broadcasting in 2006, AdScape and DoubleClick in 2007, AdMob in 2009, Invite Media in 2010, mDialog in 2014, Red Hot Labs in 2015... I'm sure there are more.
        • 8note 6y ago
          Sounds like theres a good business in making ad networks and selling them to google
    • bcrl 6y ago
      Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies. To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a couple of dozen separate paths, I end up at a different news site that I don't have a subscription to. Should I really have to have 100 subscriptions to news sites that I only read 1 or 2 articles from each month? Some entity needs to aggregate this into a single convenient $30/month subscription. Ideally it would be standardised and be added on to my monthly internet bill (IETF standards ftw).
• hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
  I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone provider and NOT google. My mailserver is marked as spam by gmail, a helpful HN commentor pointed out it may be my lack of ipv6 which appears to be the cause. I have no idea why ipv6 would indicate that I’m not a spammer, I can’t ask google because they don’t have a support line. I understand others have far more expensive (read: >1m$) problems with google specifically, and I know I’m not alone here. I just hope that by continually airing grievances with lack of (useful) customer service by major providers, they end up caving and investing in customer support. Until then, fuck you google.
  • superkuh 6y ago
    Wow. I'm you in both respects. I just had the same problem with my dad and even though he can send and receive email from his gmail account they still won't tell him the password. All he has is the fragile oauth token on mail.app on his apple smart phone that can only connect via wifi due to the loss of the old phone number. Additionally, my mail from my independent mailserver just started being marked as spam by google (exactly when I sent mail to noaa.gov and fireeye's internal system was borked due to their solarwinds problems http://superkuh.com/spf-google-fuckery.txt http://superkuh.com/spf-google-fuckery.txt). I signed up for google's postmaster tools set my DNS TXT records but apparently I don't send enough mass mail to not be a mass mailer.
    • KMag 6y ago
      > they still won't tell him the password The Google support people should have mentioned it, but hopefully, they wouldn't be able to tell him the password without investing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cracking the hash. https://plaintextoffenders.com/ https://plaintextoffenders.com/
      • 6y ago
• pcdoodle 6y ago
  I love your website. Google sucks.
  • m1117 6y ago
    That's not true. Google is amazing. But they have issues. 1. I'm sure you google a lot 2. I'm sure you use google products 3. Google is a great company, they pay a lot of taxes and have good values, such as 100% renewable.
    • OJFord 6y ago
      It's hardly far-fetched that someone might not use Google (search) or other Google products. Just use DuckDuckGo, an iPhone, and Fastmail, say, and nothing else Google offers is that prevalent that it's hard to see, surely? (I assume we're not counting visiting a site with Google-provided ads as 'using Google'.)
    • shiftpgdn 6y ago
      January 1st, 2020 I made a vow to ditch google entirely. I would guess 99% of my searches are now done in DuckDuckGo and Yandex and have been so for the last year. I only turn to google if I have a technical search I'm not getting any luck with otherwise.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      'they pay a lot of taxes' Firstly, they are 'minimising' their tax base[0], and second, is not committing crimes an achievement these days? [0] - https://developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/08/tax-google-dodged-uk-last-year/#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20Google%20paid%20just%20%C2%A367%20million%20in%20corporation%20tax.&text=Following%20a%20public%20outcry%20in,130%20million%20in%20backdated%20taxes https://developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/08/tax-google-dodge....
      • judge2020 6y ago
        Everyone is doing it so investors expect it - not doing so would be a competitive disadvantage. A better and more permanent solution should be changed with legislation, not by asking individual companies to maximize their tax base, since this would also equally apply such a rule to everyone and not just companies under the public microscope.
• zaroth 6y ago
  Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisting political sites, and feature hyper-partisan political infighting as a core tenant of their employee training and advancement practices. GoodCheapFast alleges they have a 7% conversion rate from visitors to purchases. That’s insanely high, and indicates Google should be sending them as much traffic as possible if their goal is serving the end-user. But since the site doesn’t advertise with Google, and in fact fosters a beautiful ad-free experience, its essentially an indictment of everything Google stands for and therefore must be eliminated.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    suppose google was reducing traffic to websites that are not using their analytics and add network. How would we know, and how could we get recourse? The algorithm is secret and does what it wants.
  • mullingitover 6y ago
    > Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.
    • type0 6y ago
      > Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly. The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.
• jpeg_hero 6y ago
  We are all at the mercy of “The Algo” even people that think they are immune. Have you looked at dumping the “wellness”? > Your Money or Your Life”? YMYL is Google’s nickname for health and wellness websites. https://radialgroup.com/google-ymyl-medic-update-health-wellness-business/ https://radialgroup.com/google-ymyl-medic-update-health-well...
• z3t4 6y ago
  Google has taken upon themselves to become the gatekeepers of the web, yet they have not taken the burden of responsibility that comes with such powers. You will argue that Google is just a product, that you choose to use, but the users of the author's site do not choose to use Google, it's the only alternative (Google pay big money to platforms/browsers to make sure any search goes via them). Google has the power to kill any business, so it would be fair if they where required to tell you exactly why a site was unSERPed.
• manfredo 6y ago
  This is one of several posts I've seen on HN lately following a similar trend: sudden and unexpected drops in search engine traffic. On the one hand it must be jarring to suddenly have a drop in traffic. But is it necessarily indicative of a bad administration of a search engine? Popularity of sites shift. People's tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant. And algorithm changes do shift attention to sites that previously weren't getting traffic. Would the world better with static search traffic? The incumbents always win, and newcomers have a tough time getting a foothold. That's what it would take to avoid situations like these, and I'm not sure if it's an improvement over the status quo. Between living in constant worry that the algorithm might change and shift search traffic, and a world where the algorithm never changes and search traffic remains rather static I'm not sure which is really better. In the latter goodcheapandfast.com might never even have existed. Bing's blocking mechanism seems pretty crude, though, and not sharing why it was blocked seems particularly wonky. Sure it's a cat and mouse game between scammers and devs, but it'd be nice if they at least vaguely alluded to why the false positive happened.
  • jbman223 6y ago
    You’re saying that user preference shifted, but in reality, Google’s preference shifted. That, to me, is the problem highlighted by this story and others.
    • dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
      Google shifts their algorithm also in response to people gaming it. Affiliate websites (such as this one) have been gaming the SEO system with AI/India-written articles for a long time. It seems the dude is honest and writes the content himself, but it is obviously nearly impossible to tell them apart, so they all get the chop. Sucks for him, but perhaps we're all better off.
      • johnwdefeo 6y ago
        I agree with this in concept, but it has been a bitter pill to see my site overtaken by scraper/outsourced content that I consider to be pure spam. Google doesn't always get it right (regardless of my own situation).
• nordic-nomad 6y ago
  Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use. And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thing getting crushed. Unfortunately it seems like he's the one person out there making a site like this honestly and over optimized for a search algorithm that was inevitably going to change. Building a brand and using a more personal voice instead of thinking you can win at SEO is always going to be the way to go.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    Also his website is just affiliate link garbage. I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow. I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products are not good, but this page is content that's designed to match for certain search terms and not something that's organically good content. I'm fine with Google ranking this content straight to zero. Edit: The author is a nice guy and a decent writer. Emotionally, I want to feel for him. But not for content like this. You can have all of the best intentions and still contribute negative value to the world.
    • jeffbee 6y ago
      He's competing with a huge army of auto-generated spam sites that are in the same business. Best LED strip lights? Good luck getting on the front page of that one. The results are dominated by sites using superficially respectable, popular domains to push the same affiliate spam.
      • busterarm 6y ago
        So because he generates functionally-equivalent output, but in a way that passes some vague moral purity test he's the good guy underdog then?
• partingshots 6y ago
  They don’t even make any money. Break Google up.
• thrower 6y ago
  Advertising is a scam. It’s all fake anyways. The house of cards is going to come crashing down any day now.
• ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  this is terrible, and the lack of accountability is astounding. However, working with what we've got, has the author considered: Creating a second domain that's basically a mirror to see if it's related to the domain Attempt to 'recreate' the same content a standard platform like workpress to see if it's something about the presentation / etc. that the search engines are hating I wish you all the best
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Thanks, I appreciate the support. I haven't mirrored the content, but I did republish/redirect a few pieces elsewhere and they fared much better. The issue is tied to the domain.
• swiley 6y ago
  Google has problems of scale. They require practically everyone in the world to hold an account and then provide zero support and near zero human moderation. Someone is using gmail to send porn via mms gateways to an iterated list of numbers neighboring (and including) mine, some of which claim to be held by children. I looked but couldn't find the appropriate complaint form.
• alphadevx 6y ago
  For me, Google only sends organic traffic to my posts that are 10-20 years old (no joke). My newer content, while verified by me as indexed by Google, receives zero traffic. For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons. It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is it doing the same more broadly? I don't believe it is providing a good search experience to its users anymore.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    Start embedding links in the text of your old content that point to your new content (when contextually appropriate, of course). Not as warnings, but if for some reason you mention a topic or word that's relevant to a newer article...
    • alphadevx 6y ago
      Thanks for the tip, will try that where appropriate content relationships exist, but suspect it's minor occurrences (when you blog for 20+ years, your output varies considerably in terms of topics over time!). Google does not like my new topics it seems, starting around 2012, but thankfully unlike the OP who I have a lot of sympathy for, my blog is for fun and not livelihood. We write for bots, so they can decide to share with our fellow humans (or not), such is our lot...
      • busterarm 6y ago
        Depending on your blog software, you might be able to automate it. ;) Seems like something a Jekyll or Hugo plugin could do quite well.
    • macintux 6y ago
      Which reminds me, I was really impressed with Justin O'Beirne's blogs on Apple & Google maps, specifically that older blog posts are explicitly flagged as being no longer accurate. And his design is so clean that the flags are obvious without being obnoxious. https://www.justinobeirne.com/cartography-comparison https://www.justinobeirne.com/cartography-comparison
• devcamcar 6y ago
  I can't send mail via smtp.gmail.com over my AT&T connection on my phone. Wifi works fine. I am at a loss. Just wanted to also complain about Google.
  • cat199 6y ago
    this sounds like a port 25 block by AT&T - have you tried 587/465 (smtp submission-only ports)
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• charliebrownau 6y ago
  * Google Search >> SearX / SwissCow / mojeek * Google Email >> Protonmail * Google Maps >> OpenStreetmap Also check out DNS watch (uncensored DNS) - https://dns.watch/ https://dns.watch/ ------ Self Hosting and Community hosted servers is the future not Multi Million dollar corporations + Centralisation + Big Tech
• Thaxll 6y ago
  I mean does the content of the website is of good quality?
• Imnimo 6y ago
  It feels like there's two possible explanations here. One is that somehow the website has been incorrectly flagged or blacklisted, like the example he mentions with Bing. In that case, it seems like it'd be at least nice for Google to be able to look into it, but it also might be the sort of thing where Google just decides it's not worth the effort. The other possibility is that Google just updated their search algorithm in a way that happens to not like this website as much as it used to. Not because anything is wrong with it or because of any bug in the algorithm, just it now prefers different attributes, and that changes where this site ranks. If this is the case, there's really nothing to be done. There's no ground truth result ranking for any particular query - if Google feels its new results are better, that's their business. If your entire business depends on an arbitrary algorithm preferring your website over other very similar ones, and you will lose everything if that arbitrary algorithm happens to change, eventually it's going to happen. It sucks, and it's maybe unfair in a cosmic sense, but there's really nothing to be done.
  • dannyr 6y ago
    The problem is that there are very few viable distribution channels that we are forced to rely on companies like Google. What other viable choices does this site have aside from Google?
    • Imnimo 6y ago
      Well, if there were no Google-like companies, what would this site do?
      • mdoms 6y ago
        Whatever he would do in a universe that does not exist is irrelevant. We live in this universe.
        • Imnimo 6y ago
          The point I'm making is that if his business is only possible because of Google, it's silly to ask what his alternatives are. It's not like he'd have a thriving business if only Google didn't exist. Instead, he's reliant on Google choosing to rank his page highly enough to get traffic for search queries that will result in people clicking on his affiliate links (who he's also reliant on). Google doesn't owe him any particular ranking. If people search for his example "cheap portable generator", does Google have some ethical responsibility to put his site at the top? Or even on the first page? Or to never change where they rank it once it reaches the first page?
• cagenut 6y ago
  Seemingly random and dramatic swings in who wins and loses the SEO game is an awful lot of how Google (helped) kill the newspaper industry. This guy is living through one example, but they all tried to live through a dozen, always scrambling to recover from the sudden loss in order to not suddenly need to lay off (more) ppl. I don't think it was any scheme or malice, far more like Lenny petting the rabbit, but the rabbit got very dead.
• ajsharp 6y ago
  I noticed the site isn't using Google Analytics, or any tracking pixels for that matter. Wonder if this is in any way connected to the ranking algo.
• oliv__ 6y ago
  It's really messed up that people like you who take time and effort to do things right and play the SEO game fair and square get stripped of their livelihood overnight but black hat SEO sites and spammy ad-filled sites thrive...
  • busterarm 6y ago
    Or maybe playing the SEO game for its own sake is not something we should stand for and for the scumbags & cheaters it is only a matter of time. If somebody asked nicely to shit on your lawn, would you say yes?
    • oliv__ 6y ago
      It seemed to me like his site was providing value. I meant SEO in the strict "do the best you can as far as google is concerned" way.
• jere 6y ago
  I have no clue about this topic and this comment isn't representative of my employer whatsoever, but... Since you've never experienced this with other domains, does the word cheap have to do with it? When I think domains, "cheap" instantly reminds me of those early quasi-legal online pharmacies and if I see it in an email almost certainly it's spam of one sort of another. I could see being problematic in spam filters.
  • blunte 6y ago
    It's a fairly common English expression that's used especially when giving a quote for development of some product or service to a client (or manager): "Good, cheap, and fast: pick two". Cheap is just the everyday word for low cost. It can also mean low quality, but that connotation depends more on context. Besides, there are many other successful companies with "cheap" in their domain names.
    • jere 6y ago
      I'm well aware, but a bayesian spam filter probably is not. If you look up lists of words most likely to trigger spam filters, "cheap" will be in every one of them. I can't say that is what's happening here but it seems plausible at least. I would also argue that spam messages aren't really trying to convince you something is low quality, it's precisely the low cost aspect that they're to convince you of even if the product is actual low quality. I'm sure there's other companies with cheap in their domains/headers, but none stand out and I would have no idea if they depend on SEO anyway.
• kazinator 6y ago
  Good, Cheap and Fast (let's call it GCF) appears to be a search engine. When you visit this domain, you get a search box. It looks pretty cool, and all but ... Why would/should Google's search engine send users to another search engine? What GCF needs to do is become well-known, "like DuckDuckGo, but for shopping". Then people will save a bookmark (like I'm doing now). EDIT: Unfortunately, bookmark removed. This site doesn't appear very useful. I typed in numerous search queries, starting with generic categories like "bluetooth speakers" and "baby bib" and whatnot, and it came up with "Your search did not match any documents.". I tried some very specific products found in various online sites. Again, "Your search did not match any documents." Finally, I got some results by just using "bluetooth". Hooray! Some other single-words are working. The results appear to just be some product advice, followed by some links to selected products and price information on sites like Amazon. I see now that there are links to categories below the search UI, but I don't see anything there I would be interested in looking for, and if any other categories exist, I have to guess what they are through the search box. I tried doing some "site:www.goodcheapandfast.com ..." tagged searches in Google to confirm that the GCF pages are being indexed. They are in the index; just when you remove the site: syntax, they disappear; maybe they show up in the long tail of the search if you dig far enough, who knows.
  • depressedpanda 6y ago
    I don't think it's a search engine at all, the site just happens to have a search box. It looks more like a (manually?) curated list of products that fulfill the criteria of "good, fast & cheap", within various categories.
    • kazinator 6y ago
      It looks like a clean search engine when you first land on it. https://i.imgur.com/mtqISep.png https://i.imgur.com/mtqISep.png Scroll a bit down and you see what looks like a footer giving testimonials. The links to curated categories are off the screen on desktop. No idea what mobile looks like. Next to the search box, it states that this is by a data scientist. If that is in any way relevant other than in the sense "this is by a smart person", what it means to me is that there is a massive amount of data here which is intelligently filtered and subject to a decent quality search. The Venn diagram on the left promises good results, eliminating the problem that good, cheap items are needles in haystacks, buried in fake reviews. Turns out that the data scientist is just writing consumer education advice columns and reviewing some products he has not actually tried himself. E.g. 4K projectors: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-4k-projectors?rq=projector https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-4k-projectors... There is no way he owns all of those. I would much rather read the Amazon reviews or whatever from people that bought those things, especially from people who had issues. That's in spite of the issue of fake reviews; oh well.
• jcims 6y ago
  This comment is way too verbose. First two paragraphs summarize my feelings and the rest is honestly for the site author's consideration as to the experience of a complete stranger to their site. I wish them the best. I was actually moved by the author's plight. Their current situation seems very helpless and I truly respect the effort to swim upstream with a principled approach to delivering a service in a market that is rife with shenanigans. I personally tend to get sucked into analysis paralysis when purchasing new products and any quality signal I can get outside of what is placed in front of me is extremely valuable. Probably to amplify the author's point, I can't say I've ever heard of his site and it's not recognizable to me. One of my favorites for quite some time, Wirecutter, has lost all of my faith after a few buys based on their findings wound up being garbage. I say all of that to try to underscore the fact that I'm only trying to be productive, but without this backstory and the author's attestation to everything they do to maintain integrity, I wouldn't find this site remarkable or memorable or compelling in any way. I appreciate the design, it's clean and fast, but in reviewing several of the product areas that I've actually been looking at recently I can't find anything compelling in the content that the site brings to the table. To be blunt, it's not obvious to me what the author does with their time if this is their bread and butter. One example. A few months ago I decided I wanted to upgrade the microphone I use for videoconferencing. I wanted something that was fairly directional as I didn't want to have the microphone in the view of the camera and I was hoping for a relatively flat frequency response. I was also on the bubble about going with a USB microphone vs getting an XLR mic and USB audio interface, and comparing them by pivoting on that feature was useful to me. Here is the list of Good Cheap and Fast streaming microphones (which seems relevant) on goodcheapandfast.com: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-streaming-microphones https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-streaming-mic... Let's assume I get to that URL from a Google search result and this is my first an only impression. Right off the drop I notice a few things (i'm on a PC): - Design is spartan and the site loads quickly. I can't actually tell that there are no ads b/c my ad blocking game is on point. - There isn't an obvious brand, the site logo is understated and loses the battle with the headline for any attention. - My eyes instead fall to the blue badge on the right 'Real Customer Reviews & Ratings [VERIFIED]'. This primes my expectation that I'm going to be seeing some verified reviews. Maybe this is just me, but I don't start by reading the text. I start scanning down the page . . . Omnidirectional I see this, see Cardioid is next and realize it's just a mini tutorial on pickup patterns, not going to read it. . . . Dynamic v Condenser more tutorial stuff (let's be honest, in my head i'm thinking more copy/paste) . . . How much does a good...cost. Not really interested in reading a paragraph on this...i have no idea what it says. . . . Pyle USB PC Recording Condenser Microphone (PDMIUSB50) Pyle? Interesting pick for the top of the list. Solid value brand in amplifiers but not really known for anything in recording...but maybe they have a sleeper in this microphone, let's see those 'verified reviews' . . . Fifine K669B USB Metal Condenser Recording Microphone . What? The next microphone already? This is where I stop scrolling. My eyes turn up and I see the entirety of the assessment of the Pyle microphone Good Value: $56 | Great Deal: $50 Check Current Price on Amazon | Check Current Price on Walmart Pyle's plug-and-play USB microphone is durable, sensitive and clear, according to several online customers. Some reviewers warn that the mute button makes an audible pop; others wish the stand was more durable. In my mind i hear 'what the hell?' Where are the verified reviews? Where is the detail? All I see is an unsupported price range of good and great deal, affiliate links and a throwaway blurb that indicates they read a few reviews. OK, I click around a bit looking for a more detailed review of this product. Nothing. I grab the scroll bar and drag up and down the page, more of the same. And then I leave. Sorry. Again, I really empathize with the authors situation and respect their philosophy, but without some reason to really really drill into what is being presented the site is a non-starter.
• x87678r 6y ago
  The website is a bunch of affiliate links, I'm not convinced this is a loss to the world. https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/ https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/
• nandreev 6y ago
  Once again HN gets baited into sending massive traffic into an affiliate link farm! Adding this particular tactic into my repertoire of headlines
  • bilekas 6y ago
    This is a curious one.. Especially seeing as the Alex info on it seems to show that it's been doing very well the last 90 days, 45 specifically. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/goodcheapandfast.com#trafficstats https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/goodcheapandfast.com#traffics...
    • nandreev 6y ago
      Regardless I'm impressed that he's going for very competitive search terms e.g. "best robot vacuums" and "best gaming chairs". This game is dominated by big brands and aged domains, so if you can squeak in to page 1 for just a single one of these search terms you're well in the money. The backlink profile is instructive, some solid link building from established domains (esquire, seekingalpha, etc.)
  • Hnrobert42 6y ago
    How do you k ow this is an affiliate link farm? What do you mean once again? I read WAY too much HN, and this is the first time I’ve read about this issue with someone whose site focuses on affiliate marketing. Are posts like this common if you read “new” HN articles?
    • judge2020 6y ago
      > How do you k ow this is an affiliate link farm? This site's 'reviews' are based on existing product reviews and the descriptions of the products. A real review site will purchase the product to review it then post one or two short paragraphs on their experience using it. And it's definitely affiliate links since all Amazon links have ?tag=gcaftext-20, which seems to be their affiliate tag.
      • 6y ago
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  This site looks like typical review spam. Why should Google index a site with single paragraph blurbs taken from product descriptions? Despite his effort level, there is no differentiation from the sites doing the same with ML and third world labor.
  • bilekas 6y ago
    I agree with this, as bad as it is for the OP, this really should have just been a side earner.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    That perception is an understandable one, yet a bitter pill all the same.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  I'm really torn over the author's website. On one hand, the design is much less ad-ridden and well-written than other SEO/affiliate link-driven websites.. but I don't see much value from it. * the reviews for products are too short and vague * until you actually read the top part and realize it was written by a human being, it looks exactly the same as all the other affiliate websites that get deranked (probably the reason he's getting 0 traffic) * the "real reviews verified" badge screams SCAM to me, although I know less technical-minded people are persuaded by stuff like that
  • creato 6y ago
    What is the real honest use case for affiliate links? It basically seems like a way for Amazon and other affiliate program operators to deniably outsource black hat SEO. Not that this particular site is using black hat SEO (as far as I can tell), but many affiliate link farms are. This particular site seems like it is less offensive, but still something that would be annoying to get in search results.
    • matt_heimer 6y ago
      Maybe if affiliate links only functioned for products that an affiliate was verified as owning? I think there is a need for in-depth product reviews but people need a way to be compensated for them without being paid off to provide good reviews. Highly targeted recommendation services like pcpartpicker also provide value.
    • judge2020 6y ago
      There is a good carve-out where affiliate links are good. Actual review sites (eg. cnet and techradar, for all they're worth) and YouTube-based reviewers can do very well for determining what products are actually relevant, and can ultimately drive the customer to purchasing a product. Without such assurance from these people/publications, there's a chance Amazon loses out on the sale (either from choosing not to impulse purchase or using another competitor) so paying these reviewers out gives them incentive and drives purchases. Although, from a anti-consumerism/anti-waste standpoint, encouraging impulse purchases at all is probably a net negative.
• bilekas 6y ago
  I'm sure you have a good idea yourself what is going on here, given you have some good experience in online marketing etc. Most likely, one or multiple of the algo's to determine value within results has been modified, which is a regular occurance. Has picked up the content on your site as not really beneficial / trustworthy for whatever the results are and so it has demoted your position. Given almost every page of your site has at least 1 external referal link, its easy enough to imagine it being picked up as an auto generated site, with slapped in affiliates. Infact im surprised it hasnt happened sooner. I'm not sure what you can do about it, other than reworking your entire site, obfuscating the referal links somehow and then hoping for the best. Or branch out into other methods of content and earning if this is the only source of income for you, its rough, but that google algo and others are black boxes that you cant really depend on.. Eventually it will clear everyone off that's not investing in staying on top of these things.
  • Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    Adding product and review markup might be a start. But as you say its questionable what value affiliate sites have for the searcher which is why sites like Foundem's arguments against Google are weak - they just had freinds in teh traditional media / government.
• blunte 6y ago
  Here on HN we see articles and posts on a regular basis of how the big tech companies have squashed or simply blackholed users. There are two common issues in these stories: 1. it's vague or entirely not stated why the event occurred, and 2. there's nobody to contact in the big company to discuss the situation. Google seems to behave like a hybrid Borg collective which spawns mini collectives, isolates them from the hive, allows them to go explore and mature somewhat, and then either absorbs them (assimilate!) or kills them if they don't fit back in. While surely there are some humans at the top making strategic decisions, it feels to an end user that they are utterly soulless. The collective works to observe processes and outcomes (based on metrics which don't include human concerns or at least weight them very low), and then it makes changes and iterates. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already elements within the Google-beast which are unknowable to the humans working there. The concepts or goals and results may be knowable, but the path taken may not. It should be obvious that the current "internet" (easy name for the state of online-anything these days) system is unsustainable. Perhaps it will go the way of the AI operating system in Her (2013 film), simply ignoring humans (whereby the humans will be able to use whatever of the services are accessible until they become inaccessible or non-functioning); or maybe it will determine that the best path which results in the best outcomes is to do absolutely nothing - thereby ending all operation. Naturally the humans with access to the source and the systems can attempt to correct the errant course once it is recognized, but short of a complete rewrite with a new approach, it will fail. They will go the way of all giant companies (and countries) who have sat at the top of the hill for too long and lost the values which led them to the top. Facebook will hopefully go the way of reality TV (or is that still a thing?). How or why? Who knows. Perhaps another few rounds of global lockdowns will make everyone so desperate for actual human contact that they eschew social networks and take up dancing, casual sporting, dinner parties, and other great life activities. (Or more likely, their ads will get worse and worse until the stench is so bad that no respectable company would be caught with an ad on Facebook; the money would vanish, the talent would bail, and eventually they would get bought by a Comcast and rebranded as AhOLe or somesuch.) Amazon will eventually ONLY sell cheap knockoff products up until the original creators stop creating, and the copycats are left to try to imagine and make their own unique products (the result of which will be a physical form on par with the nonsensical text they currently put on boxes and in instruction booklets). Microsoft will still make and sell Office and Windows, forever and ever, because humans will never collectively choose to get educated on technology; it's easier to just keep using what you've always used. (Not to say that Windows or Office is bad, but it's often not the best choice.) Still, MS will outlive Google. Apple will continue to exist and maybe hold a high place until eventually the designers, wild-thinkers (there must still be some there) get replaced with stock market drones with one monitor dedicated to the current quarter revenue projection spreadsheet. Then it will be a slow decline. MS will outlive them. Almost forgot Twitter. The orange monster will fade into the history book which nobody wants to read, and the followers of orange monster will predictably be so poor as their local economies dry up (except for the private prison jobs, but there are only so many positions to fill) that they won't be able to afford the shoddy Comcast internet that is the officially sanctioned local monopoly internet. Besides, words will have been replaced with PopTop or whatever the latest 3 second video service is. They'll be too late to pivot to GIFs only since Imgur has been lying in wait for this moment. Well, what a bit of fun this was. Might be that we're worrying about nothing, or perhaps worrying about entirely the wrong thing. Surprise, asteroid!
• wallawe 6y ago
  As others have mentioned it could have something to do with cheap being in the domain name. At this point since you don't have much to lose, it might be worth buying a new domain and 301'ing everything from goodcheapandfast.com to the new one. You'd pass on most the link juice but lose the bad name.
• freitasm 6y ago
  Doing a reverse IP lookup you can see there are more than 1000 domains hosted in a single IP address (the domain has four IPv4 addresses). Search engines will sometimes lower ranking based on your "neighbours" - perhaps the OP could start using a service such as Cloudflare (which still have multiple domains per IP but would automatically get a bunch of new IPs, so perhaps "start fresh" on that aspect. Even on the free plan you can create "Firewall rules" (up to five). Create one that just logs the traffic from known bots. Claim the domain in Google Search Console (no script needed on page) and see the stats for that domain and match those with the Cloudflare traffic. This will help identify if there's something going on - are the Bingbot and Googlebot visiting or not at all? What pages are they looking at? The robots.txt file is complex - repeated paths that shouldn't really be there. Perhaps create a Cloudflare rule to block access to those paths to everyone but the owner on a static IP address? After this is done then the OP would know a bit more about what's going on.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Good suggestions, thank you.
• weisbaum 6y ago
  Taking a look at your site, it seems quite clear where all your traffic went. You have a pretty great backlink profile compared to other affiliate sites ive seen but the content is incredibly thin. Based on this, me or anyone else who visits the site just sees an advertising site. There are no personal experiences with the products, the products are not related and the UX does not make the user want to continue exploring the page they landed on. The content here seems more like a statistics site for products than it is a reviews site. The other comments here mentioning cheap as a flag word are somewhat accurate but not entirely. Its possible to rank a site using the word cheap assuming you're supporting it correctly with related content about a specific product and proper explanation as to what makes it cheap. Honestly, I am very sorry that you lost all your traffic and your revenue but this seems like a VERY fixable problem considering your backlinks. Take your best performing posts, and dramatically increase the word count, add more photos, add overviews of each product instead of just a single line or two pulled from reviews. Happy to help with additional pointers if you want to shoot me a PM.
  • love_anddd 6y ago
    Exactly my thoughts looking at the site. It screams affiliate link farm where the only purpose is just to make money from product affiliate links. While this isn't necessarily bad to make money, it definitely doesn't do anything for a visitor. After reading the blog post, I was expecting something like consumer reports or some intricate posts, but it's obviously little tid bits of information that looks like it was posted by some virtual assistant he was paying $2 per post or something.
  • tunesmith 6y ago
    I agree - I hadn't heard of the site, but after reading the OP's blog post I was excited to check it out. However, after finding a bunch of categories I was interested in and opening them in a series of tabs, I started to review them and was disappointed. It just felt like a long list of products, and I felt like it was putting more work on my shoulders, not less. The site needs more focus. Make some actual recommendations and tell us why we should trust them. I think wirecutter has a good formula for this. I've bought several products after reading wirecutter articles. I don't know if this has anything to do with google's algorithm, but it did actually feel to me that the site was coming close to the line between "here is some helpful information for you" versus "here are a lot of extra links that will help me get a little bit more revenue".
• jgurewitz 6y ago
  This is brutal. No easy answers here. The affiliate economy is rife with spam and will continue to deteriorate. My recommendation to content creators is to become explicitly ad supported, i.e find real companies to sponsor your site, not plug in a network, or to find a paid membership. Both are harder, but both are more sustainable.
• josephjrobison 6y ago
  My take on the site by the author - he's great at the tech side of websites, and SEO, but needs to go more in-depth on his articles. The Wirecutter, Healthline, NY Mag Strategist are the baseline now - high quality, in-depth articles. If small sites want to compete they have to specialize and go deep - it's hard to beat incumbents at the thing they've been doing for decades - and with paid staff/journalists writing the articles! It's not so much the tech side of SEO, it's about the content.
• throwaway4good 6y ago
  I have had somewhat similar experience (as have many others). My suspicion would be that the site is explicitly, manually banned by some person at Google. There is nothing to do about it except maybe start over with a new domain name, new server, preferably not under your own name (what name the domain name is registered under). Short of that: Maybe implement Google Amp, Analytics etc ... but probably too late for that.
• ReaganFJones 6y ago
  Interestingly, I've tried to find this exact website through Google before. It was very hard because the search terms "good", "cheap", and "fast" are common and used together frequently. It may be an affiliate link farm but it's one that's done the most basic level of analysis to find an acceptable item in a category. It's not great but it's a time-saver compared to me reading potentially fake Amazon reviews myself.
• axegon_ 6y ago
  Many many years ago I used to own and maintain a site which was getting a good amount of traffic at it's peak(that was around 2010-2011). It was getting something along the lines of 25-30k visitors per day, and much like the post here, it had no ads, no analytics, no share buttons or any of that. And mind you, a substantial amount of that traffic was coming from google searches. In all honesty I have no idea what I did, but I got it right. But, just like the post, overnight, the 25k daily users dropped to less than 100. I was scratching my head and trying to work out what had happened and when I googled some of the content of the website, it was nowhere to be found. Not on the second, third or even the 20th page. I never figured out why. I was very strict about every word that comes up on the site, every link, the rights of each image that appeared and everything but...
• mro_name 6y ago
  sadly the page visitor's traffic not. The page loads stuff from google domains. Sigh.
• eecc 6y ago
  I wonder if this has to do with the kind of workforce that infests these big corporations. In my freelancing stints in mega-corps, I often bump into a kind of incompetent and fearful employee, often replaceable contractors processing low value tasks, who’s only purpose in life is to mitigate their monumental risk of being thrown off into the dirt by the next reorg. These people’s psychology is to claim competence in some higher kind of logic allegedly embedded in this spontaneously emergent bureaucracy. Of course it’s just smoke and mirrors, there is no logic nor understanding. None
• zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Only very recently I discussed with a friend, that we have come to a situation, in which the search engine dictates, what the content of a website should be or what it should be designed like. Such a thing can only happen with quasi monopolies, which make traffic from the search engine too valuable to miss out on, for people, who depend on that traffic.
• 6510 6y ago
  Not knowing what you do besides reading this: Maybe do a subscription for badges that merchants can put next to their products. (The services I've seen of that kind were horrible and they do not inspire confidence. The best some do is give the buyer some hope it isn't a fake webstore.) I think the web badly needs some primordial review mechanism.
• zelphirkalt 6y ago
  The website is not particularly well designed. I have to scroll down a 2/3 of the whole page filling _button_ first, to get to any readable content. Perhaps that is why it is treated as spam to Google. Reader mode in Firefox helps of course to repair the page. Aside from that, yes, this is what happens, when we rely on Google traffic. Only advice I can give besides designing well (not necessarily according to Google wishes though), is to not get too dependent on Google.
• manub22 6y ago
  This 2020 year even my google traffic reduced by 80%. On my blog SQLwithManoj.com I used to get decent 3k-4k hits every day for last 4-5 years. But since Jan 2020 hits got reduced below 1k. And when I checked google webmaster I couldn't see my blog meta entry. Don't know how it got removed from there. Now since I've added it back the hits are still at around 1k, and this has cased good revenue loss for me too.
• janmo 6y ago
  My advise: try to open a Adsense and Adword account for the website and run some ads. If there is something wrong with your site it will be rejected and they usually provide the reason.
• hasa 6y ago
  I'm in impression that a data scientist would have lot of potential job offers to places where he/she could generate real added value and get paid well for that. Am I wrong?
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    I'm fortunate enough to have a kind and supportive professional network.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  Perhaps it has something to do with various resources not loading? https://sourcemaps.squarespace.net/universal/scripts-compressed/cldr-resource-pack-3e6d18ccbc01a401a2e61-min.en-US.js.map and a couple of others... (reason: doesn't resolve for me)
• thrownaway561 6y ago
  I worked for a marketing company for 3 years and can see what is making your traffic fall: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cloth-masks https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cloth-masks You will get dislisted because you are profiting from a pandemic. get rid of this content. https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-bourbons https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-bourbons Alcoholic content is a huge red flag and will cause blocks and delisting. get rid of this content. once you remove the content, resubmit your sitemaps to both Google and Bing Webmaster tools and you will start to see traffic again. Also, this might seem really stupid, but it would be nice to have a link to your homepage from the footer. it's annoying to have to scroll to the top of the page to click your icon to go to your homepage.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Thanks for the response. I created best bourbons page for fun after my traffic had collapsed, so that can't be the culprit. I redirected the cloth mask page to the CDC's website. It was something that I created at the behest of friends and family members (and then forgot about). It's worth noting that I did not profit from that page when masks where in high demand. (In the early days of the pandemic, I actually spent a good chunk of time trying to wrangle available PPE and get it into the hands of first responders. I had a big moral issue with the publishers who were profiteering by selling consumers things that they didn't need at the expense of those who did.) Didn't consider a homepage link from the footer, but it's a fair point. Added.
• jraby3 6y ago
  Seems like if you had an easy to find email list you could own your customer and prevent google from creating these huge swings. I read the whole post on my phone and didn’t see a place to add my email.
• chmod775 6y ago
  First off: https://i.imgur.com/GlJqoYf.png https://i.imgur.com/GlJqoYf.png 1. Your product seems useful, so useful in fact I bookmarked it. 2. However you hardly had any Google traffic to begin with - maybe Google traffic is not something you should optimize for - except for when people specifically search for your product 3. with which your landing page might not help. Let me expand: 1. I tried a few searches on your site and it generally came back with good results. I like that the articles are short, to the point and didn't waste my time. Some commenters here recommend to make those articles longer for SEO - don't. Making users read long articles is the opposite of what your site promises. 2. Google traffic is way less important for useful websites than SEO people would make you believe. If your product is good, people will come - and come back. SEO can actually hurt the usefulness of your product, and thus its long-term growth. Never ever listen to SEO people who want you to make your product worse. I may be suffering from survivorship bias, but less than 10% of my site's traffic comes from search engines, and 99% of that search engine traffic was just people searching the name of my sites. I can't tell you whether any site could survive on this, but I can promise you that this "independence" comes with peace of mind (I don't care whether I show up on Google at all). 3. It took me a moment to figure your product out. "This website exists to make shopping less time consuming" did not help at all - there's hundreds of ways I can imagine one might make "shopping less time consuming" after all. My confusion ended when I read "Find above-average products selling for below-average prices". Maybe that should be at the very top with the search field directly below it - which can also contain text other than just "Search.". Check the mockup at the beginning of this post. You could place the "less time consuming" text somewhere else, I just was too lazy. Some things besides "less time consuming" that people might search are "best budget products", "best value for money", etc. - so you could make sure these show up on your landing page too. Except after the text that explains the site for the human visitor.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Thanks for this. Good suggestions here.
    • MauranKilom 6y ago
      If I may briefly add a minor point: It somehow irks me that the Venn diagram on the landing page and in the icon are not the same orientation (they are rotated by 180°). Any specific reason for that? :)
• erikbye 6y ago
  I wonder at which point did he quit his job and make this website his sole income. How much money was the site making him at that point? Either way, very risky to quit your job for what is basically a content website with as few as 500 visitors daily average, if even that. It does not seem to work well either, or at least contain very few products, I searched for steinberg ur-12 and got no match. A very popular entry level audio interface.
• franze 6y ago
  The goal of SEO is not better SEO but that you do not need SEO any more. If SEO is your strongest channel, use it to build your other channels. The more direct the channel the better. If SEO is your weakest channel, use it to build your other channels.
• jgilias 6y ago
  I used to run a content website many moons ago. No spammy articles, focused onto a single tech topic, a moderate amount of ads (Google), well researched articles. Then one day my organic Google traffic fell by some 80%. If I remember correctly it bounced around very wildly during the following months as Google updated their algorithms. At the time I was very much not happy about it. Now I'm happy it happened before I had scaled it too far and come to depend on that income too much. It made me realize that it's not only my work that my income depended on, but the whims of a single giant company. And that that's a position I don't want to find myself later down the road. It's a sad truth that any internet business that's not yet a strong brand in itself is reliant on Google and their AI in a very unhealthy way. I have no idea how to fix this.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Sorry to hear that. I've heard a saying that "rejection is protection," and the way that you rationalized your experience lends credence to that.
    • jgilias 6y ago
      I was pretty salty at Google at that time. But in hindsight I'm really happy it panned out that way. I'm now in a lot more comfortable situation with respect to having much wider options of what I can do professionally than it would've been had I stayed on that course.
  • acegopher 6y ago
    It's not so much being a strong brand, but becoming known in a small niche that is key to avoid becoming reliant on Google. You only need to be reliant on Google if you don't know who your audience/niche is. Once you know that, you don't usually need Google to reach them.
• Havoc 6y ago
  The relevant subreddits have stories like this weekly. Basically amounts to don’t quit your day job. Google and amazon are fickle friends
• reactchain 6y ago
  There is a recurring lesson with these type of threads: don't build a business that is dependent on an unstable, black-box algorithm of a mega-corp. If your business is so fragile that an algorithm update by Google causes you to have no customers, then you should have built a business with a bigger moat, brand recognition, etc. It sounds like this business was more of an SEO hack.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    Even with brand recognition, it's hard to build a product review business that doesn't rely on Google. Until 2018, I was the head of insights at one of the largest online publishers in the U.S. 90% of the company's revenue was tied to organic search. Sure, branding helped to prevent huge impacts like the one that I saw, but plenty of our competitors suffered big drops that resulted in 100s or 1,000s of layoffs.
    • reactchain 6y ago
      True, but I think it points to an inherent weakness in the business model. The reason it's so hard to build these businesses without relying on Google (and playing cat and mouse with their ranking algorithms) is because customers fundamentally don't care whether they get their content from you or someone else.
• DrNuke 6y ago
  Servers and/or algos undergo some sort of periodical or occasional reset maybe? Same fall happened to me a couple of times, only to pick up again and back to normal in a few days. And it’s not Google only, in case, also Amazon ads!?
• beprogrammed 6y ago
  Had never seen this site, actually seemed useful. Several of the categories I have bought from recently, and trying to sort through the products and reviews is a nightmare.
• Teandw 6y ago
  Just taking 2 minutes to look at the website, shows why they lost the traffic and the website deserved to lose the traffic. Sounds harsh but it's true. This is a website that was built with no consideration of truly providing value to visitors. The website is another run of the mill affiliate website built with the sole purpose of making the owner some money. The same old rubbish "here are 5-10 products that we've selected because we will make money." that other websites do - Where is the website actually helping or providing the visitors any value? It isn't. The only research they seem to do on products is 1) Will I get commission if I send customers to it 2) Is it cheap. 3) Do the reviews look fake/real. That's not helping anyone and provides no value. Hence why Google removed it's ranking. It provides literally no value or true content to visitors. Their product lists are all "The Best X products" - Best based on what? They're not buying the products and actually checking their good, they're just pulling products out of their backside from Amazon/Bestbuy. How can this website honest create hundreds of "Best X products", without even using/testing any of them and think they've providing value to customers? The owner is kidding himself.
  • johnwdefeo 6y ago
    The website is another run of the mill affiliate website built with the sole purpose of making the owner some money. This is the exact opposite of every principle that I believe in. If that were true, at minimum I would have: -Placed ads on the site -Opted into Skimbit's data sale program -Hyperlinked titles and images with affiliate codes -Written about huckstery things like CBD oil and salt lamps. I feel bummed to read this take, but if you're interested in learned more about my process, here are some links: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/about https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/about https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/value-award-winners https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/value-award-winner... https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis
• xer 6y ago
  I think there is another side to this story which is that referral marketing is having a bad name these days. It's considered fraudulent by many sellers since sometimes these referral sites rank higher than the sellers themselves. I suspect this is part of an effort from Google to put the sellers higher than the referrers in the search results.
• lanevorockz 6y ago
  Do you hold any political views that Google considers haram ? If so, they are banning people that disagree politically with them so it's not surprising.
• bartread 6y ago
  On a much smaller scale I've seen similar strange/hard to explain patterns with a site I run. It's really only started getting any traffic at all in the last 12 months or so, and it's now a few hundred sessions per day, up from a handful per day a year ago. (Granted, I don't invest a whole lot of time in it.) Some fluctuations are explainable: a bit over half my traffic is from the US, so you can clearly see the effect of Thanksgiving. Most of the rest of my traffic is from the UK, western Europe, and Australasia, so holidays such as Christmas and New Year stick out like a sore thumb. But sometimes I've seen pages disappear from the search index, or be heavily deranked for a week or two, before popping back up again. Often this has happened after I've published a (relatively speaking) large amount of new content to the site, but sometimes it's not easily explainable. I also, every few months, get "invalid traffic" warnings in Adsense, even though the majority of my traffic is organic search traffic that Google itself is sending me. Generally revenue will drop to zero for a week or two before climbing back up, and shortly after the warning will disappear. Every time this happens I check Google's policies and sometimes have to fix the odd problem. Mostly though, I have no idea why this happens. The site makes so little revenue it doesn't even cover its own hosting costs so it's not a big worry. However, I do see the potential for it to earn more were I to invest more in it. Still, I've realised that I'd have to be out of my mind to rely on Adsense revenue from this website as my sole source of income. I'm not complaining at Google for this - any money the site earns is a bonus and, as I say, at the moment it doesn't even cover its own hosting (which at least keeps my tax return simplier). Still, if I were going to build some sort of indie business around it I'd have to think pretty hard about ways I might be able to get multiple channels for revenue. Unfortunately, like goodcheapandfast.com, the reality is that the source of every one of those streams would likely originate with organic search traffic.
• stevespang 6y ago
  I can count on all finger similar stories I have read where someone had to rely on big tech like Google or Facebook for their income, and it failed. These bastards could care less about you/us. Now I feel fortunate I still have my service business, none of my 2 or 3 major competitors even use Adwords at all, I tried it for like 2 years, did not see any gain in customers, always paid with prepaid credit cards no more than $200 each, finally Google sent me a message they were no longer accepted prepaids - - I said "See ya later Google". I still get the same amount of business without wasting money on Adwords. Anyone has to be a fool to give any of these FANG sites a REAL credit card with wide open ability to charge you what they want and screw you. Plus all the stories I read lately about fraudulent clicks on ads and such - - the rest of the world can HAVE all that crap. I am still earning over $100K gross annually from my service business, now mostly word of mouth from my reputation - - old school style.
• alibarber 6y ago
  I've said it before, but googling '$anything reviews' is a tire fire and probably a risky area to be in - I'd think long and hard before even seriously considering launching anything in this space... Today's hilarity came from a search for "portable hf antenna reviews" - (a pretty niche topic - Ham Radio related) this brought up so much crap even as the first five (or two!) results. It is no surprise that Google is flexing some muscle in this area and people are ending up as collateral damage.
• JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  As it should. This is, essentially, a spam site.
• rackforms 6y ago
  Ignoring the odd turn of this topic turning into a grievance for login and account access lol, from my read of https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-noise-cancelling-headphones?rq=noise%20cancelling https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-noise-cancell... I'd offer: "according to several online customers" - This phrase or a close variant is used in almost every review and it's really distracting. It feels too robotic and repetitive. In general, it seems like "build quality" is a common complaint, which at these price points is likely always going to be an issue. I guess what I mean is with cheap prices I'm not expecting build quality to be great so repeatedly calling it out in a general sense isn't all that useful. Far more useful is when a specific part is called out, which in one case it is, the wire being flimsy. More of that! In general, it would be nice to have more specifics instead of the constant generalities one associates with low/er-cost goods. The phrase "noise cancelling" is used about 44 times in the article. From what I recall this may be considered "keyword stuffing", which is used to be (and almost certainly still is, a big old no-no). Of course how do you create an aggregate content page without mentioning the topic repeatedly? Well my friend that's the Google content paradox! - talk about something without actually mentioning it by name. On general mission: it would be really nice to have the top "pick" better called out. I read the first review and was ok, that sounds like an option I wouldn't have considered, good job site! But then said "Mpow hmmm... not a brand I've heard of", so I scanned down and came to the JLab's. I said "I've heard of them!" and read the blurb. That's where the problem starts: For almost the same price the blurb makes the Jlabs sound "better" or at least more attractive than what I thought was the "top pick / best value". I think some of this may have to do with the fact that in the Mpow's have two negative aspects pointed out "Others say that the battery life and microphone are disappointing", whereas the Jlabs only one: "pinch their ears". Mind this isn't about count so much as what's being called out: one may have bad battery life and the other may actually hurt my head lol. The reason I say "problem" is sites like Wire cutter take a stand and proclaim "this is the best", even though in most cases the top 3 or more would all be just fine. As it stands, we have many low cost options presented and all with what appears to be potentially deal-breaking flaws; the end result is I don't really feel any better prepared that if I had just gone to Amazon and scanned reviews myself. What's more, if I see something with 20 total reviews at 5 stars and a similar product with 40k 4 stars, I'll usually just go for the one with more reviews. In short, number of reviews is a strong signal for me, and I think / hope it would be trivial to add that as a metric to your site. On Google: So in closing hopefully some of those thoughts are useful in some way, but I did want to close by saying I absolutely feel your pain. Someone like you posts a traffic drop off story and we all rush in to say this is why, but what we forget is Rome wasn't built in a damned day. If this traffic penalty sticks it's pretty safe to say you're business and dream is dead. No google means no traffic means no site. Business is hard but what we need to agree upon is the promise of the internet was to democratize and incubate. The early internet certainly did, the modern, not so much. I think we can all agree that the best ideas should rise to the top and be rewarded. We should also agree that a single company shouldn't have that power, but the Internet's users. Legislation is the only cure here, so far as I can see, as this exact scenario plays out time and again and it's always at our expense, both business owners and internet users. Good luck, and keep at it!