Ah, I think you're operating under the misapprehension that it was metafilter.com that was attracting the Google clicks & so you're reasonably looking at posts

Ah, I think you're operating under the misapprehension that it was metafilter.com that was attracting the Google clicks & so you're reasonably looking at posts to metafilter.com & wondering how they could ever have ranking in Google searches in the first place. As I understand things, it's the ask.metafilter.com Q+A sub-site that was the main source of Google search clickthroughs & thus ad revenue (Yup, 90% according to Matt Haughey's essay on medium.com: https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0 https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0 ). The main metafilter.com site is pretty much irrelevant in revenue terms, although it may be affecting the overall ranking of ask.metafilter.com pages in Google search results for internal Google voodoo reasons of course. NB. Let me know where that link to the Indian pharmacy is & I'll flag it.