I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.
This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.
Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.
As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.
A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.
Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on.
Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People are genuinely searching less for serious topics. There is definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.
P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.
A botnet is attacking the site in question (domains include xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc)
Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png
This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies.
It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money.
When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true.
Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking.
Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.
Glitch? Post was Aug 11th matching :
"Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!"
https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921...
Edit: author says no https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...
> POST REMOVED
> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on this topic.
I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results.
And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.
Web content makers have to realize their days of monetizing are numbered. Free web content is free food for NLP algorithms , which have already become impressive. In one of the next Google updates, they will eliminate web results compeltely and just give you the predicted answers. We're bound to see original content trying to hide themselves from google in order to remain relevant.
Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.
It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...
Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.
You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.
The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.
When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.
Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.
Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?
This article no longer has any content: "POST REMOVED"
The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" -- it will yield very close to zero natural click through.
People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an answer as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.
We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will rightly get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.
Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" - somebody have that link handy?
Author removed the post, so:
http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...
When will people learn? From the article:
"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"
Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.
This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
These people who think Google owes them something for free...
They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link
This was posted by me earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881
If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives.
The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.