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Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is

Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them. Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call. But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense. Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context? Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad? The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding. To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.

datascienced 3y ago
Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.
lupire 3y ago
What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?
- carl_sandland 3y ago
  Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?
  - bruce511 3y ago
    We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible. But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      Temu. But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads. Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
    - kuschku 3y ago
      > Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator? Political ads? Campaign ads? Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news? People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
      - bruce511 3y ago
        Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway. So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site. Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
        kuschku 3y ago
        Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it. But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation. Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content. Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites". Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it. To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8note 3y ago
    Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even. If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site? Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
      - bitnasty 3y ago
        I would think this tool is useful for students or journalists. Grammarly and other writing tools would be relevant. Obviously, people who are interested in government or politics, so political ads are hugely relevant.
- Brybry 3y ago
  Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best. Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game. I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right? Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Because these ads are less effective than targeted programmatic advertising so you'll get bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.
icehawk 3y ago
Google has been sending me emails about how things are preventing them from indexing my websites,and recently I've stopped caring. My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
- magicalist 3y ago
  You literally have to sign up and do extra work to confirm ownership to get those emails in the first place.
  - icehawk 3y ago
    Yeah and I did that 10 years ago when the math worked out differently. 'Recently' is doing some work in that comment.
Repulsion9513 3y ago
> Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context? Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
- bruce511 3y ago
  Do you think this site gets enough traffic to make that sort of advertising appealing to any actual advertisers? Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
  - Repulsion9513 3y ago
    If it doesn't get enough traffic to make advertising appealing to any actual advertisers then how is Google advertising on it? Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.
dools 3y ago
Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator. EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
albru123 3y ago
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
keepamovin 3y ago
Interesting take on the backstory. Also, > Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!" Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice. But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too. If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bruce511 3y ago
  >> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising. Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it. The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
  - antihipocrat 3y ago
    Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers? My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent). Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
blargey 3y ago
> Quite who uses this site is unclear. Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site. > Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program. Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid. On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views. I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
  - bitnasty 3y ago
    If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    > a few cars a day That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this: > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
sundvor 3y ago
Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff. There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not? By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved. This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly. See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).
- bruce511 3y ago
  He got it -approved- did it actually make any revenue?
nitwit005 3y ago
You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.
- bruce511 3y ago
  My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google. Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on. The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google. The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
  - RoyalHenOil 3y ago
    Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives. The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business. If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently. Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
antihipocrat 3y ago
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site. However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place. Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted? The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
- 7734128 3y ago
  It's not only Adsense. Things which are not visible on Google search do not exist, these things are of course tied together.
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  > However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
- LeonB 3y ago
  Google paid them for making the changes.

datascienced 3y ago

Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.

lupire 3y ago

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics. Why are words so important?

carl_sandland 3y ago
Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?
- bruce511 3y ago
  We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible. But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    Temu. But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads. Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
  - kuschku 3y ago
    > Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator? Political ads? Campaign ads? Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news? People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway. So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site. Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
      - kuschku 3y ago
        Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it. But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
bruce511 3y ago
Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation. Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content. Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites". Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it. To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 8note 3y ago
  Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even. If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site? Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
    - bitnasty 3y ago
      I would think this tool is useful for students or journalists. Grammarly and other writing tools would be relevant. Obviously, people who are interested in government or politics, so political ads are hugely relevant.
Brybry 3y ago
Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best. Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game. I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right? Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
renewiltord 3y ago
Because these ads are less effective than targeted programmatic advertising so you'll get bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.

icehawk 3y ago

Google has been sending me emails about how things are preventing them from indexing my websites,and recently I've stopped caring. My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.

magicalist 3y ago
You literally have to sign up and do extra work to confirm ownership to get those emails in the first place.
- icehawk 3y ago
  Yeah and I did that 10 years ago when the math worked out differently. 'Recently' is doing some work in that comment.

Repulsion9513 3y ago

> Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context? Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?

bruce511 3y ago
Do you think this site gets enough traffic to make that sort of advertising appealing to any actual advertisers? Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
- Repulsion9513 3y ago
  If it doesn't get enough traffic to make advertising appealing to any actual advertisers then how is Google advertising on it? Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.

dools 3y ago

Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator. EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.

albru123 3y ago

> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.

keepamovin 3y ago

Interesting take on the backstory. Also, > Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!" Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice. But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too. If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bruce511 3y ago
>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites. Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising. Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it. The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
- antihipocrat 3y ago
  Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers? My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent). Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.

blargey 3y ago

> Quite who uses this site is unclear. Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site. > Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense. It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.

bruce511 3y ago
Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program. Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid. On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views. I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
- bitnasty 3y ago
  If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  > a few cars a day That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this: > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.

sundvor 3y ago

Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff. There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not? By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved. This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly. See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).

bruce511 3y ago
He got it -approved- did it actually make any revenue?

nitwit005 3y ago

You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.

bruce511 3y ago
My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google. Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on. The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google. The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives. The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business. If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently. Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.

antihipocrat 3y ago

Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site. However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place. Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted? The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.

7734128 3y ago
It's not only Adsense. Things which are not visible on Google search do not exist, these things are of course tied together.
yau8edq12i 3y ago
> However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements. Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
LeonB 3y ago
Google paid them for making the changes.