
Google Update Tanks Traffic - iamjdg
https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html
======
zelly
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 SEO is a really an outdated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.

~~~
weisbaum
This isn't accurate for a few different reasons...

1\. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and
organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad
idea.

2\. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need
to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing
that traffic to someone else who does.

3\. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top
spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer
box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.

I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to
your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of
telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity
metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at
communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.

~~~
xamuel
>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to
improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that
traffic to someone else who does.

I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche
field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be
really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an
adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a
no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of
the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of
irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?

~~~
cbsmith
You're missing the point here. Regardless of the causes of the decline, there
are invariably things you can do to improve your content or just generally
change your approach.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Improving your content to optimise for SEO is not the same as improving it for
the user. I hope that fact was made bloody obvious by SEO-hugging websites
full of garbage occupying top spot of many google searches.

In fact i might google a spesific product, like a Monitor, and the top result
will be "but Monitor XYZ on Amazon". When i click on the link, turns out they
don't actually sell or stock that product at all!

~~~
sowbug
You clicked an ad. Amazon is happy to have paid for you to land there.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Please, I not a genius but even I can tell apart an ad from a search result.

------
nickreese
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.

~~~
nickreese
Follow up thought here.

There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006
and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.

Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were
passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a
business.

Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam
was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.

This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal
brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative
experts instead of absolute experts.

Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative
experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of
domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.

Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.

\- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my
email list, and was going to sell an info product.

\- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of
things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the
smaller guys out.

\- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.

\- I was one of the people who caused this change...

\- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?

\---

The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.

We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to
directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to
do with them?

~~~
nickreese
Continuing this thread.

My buddy Greg Isenberg constantly is talking about the unbundling of Reddit
and honestly he is on to something. [1]

As Reddit continues to unbundle, how can we shape these into curation engines
so at least our algos can get some usable data out of communities instead of
them being an endless popularity contest.

\---

[1] [https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-
unbundling-...](https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-
reddit)

------
john_moscow
Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the
end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly
declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the
Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on.

Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't
changed. People _are_ genuinely searching less for serious topics. There _is_
definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting
regular software jobs.

P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old
computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work
from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or
two since the boss isn't watching.

~~~
RyanOD
The time has come to finally finish Zork!

------
justcomments12
A botnet is attacking the site in question (domains include xxxcommitted,
pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc)

Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data:
[https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png](https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png)

This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes
9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of
others companies.

It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target
and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing
governments lots of money.

When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging
income. Sad but true.

Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets
that decide on the Google ranking.

Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope
someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the
way things are.

~~~
ssvss
> When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging
> income. Sad but true.

Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google
ranking ?

~~~
justcomments12
It's because the botnet pages themselves contains data which Google considers
spam (unrelated topics, link farms, ad pages, porn etc).

Google then lowers the rankings (or removes the blogs from Google). All they
have to do is run an update script to update all the domains with the blog
link, and Google lowers their rankings.

------
tlarkworthy
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...](https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921985)

Edit: author says no
[https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...](https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1293988184716607488)

------
sjs382
> POST REMOVED

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

~~~
argonix
Find the archived version here:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-
strikes-again.html)

I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be
interested in knowing what the updated views are.

------
kartayyar
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.

~~~
JungleGymSam
Did you read the article?

~~~
dkersten
> _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even
> read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article
> mentions that."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
cblconfederate
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.

~~~
eloff
Except nobody wants to click on something produced by an NLP algorithm.

I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO
technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam.

At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only
viable long-term SEO strategy.

~~~
rchaud
Aren't Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant etc all providing answers
generated by NLP algorithms? People seem to be using them pretty frequently.

Google already provides no-click search answers by scraping data from a
website and bolding a paragraph that may answer your question. The branding of
the original site is removed on these snippets.

How long before Google decides not to link out the website altogether?

~~~
eloff
I don't use those products, they only work for very specific types of queries.
While I expect they will make it more broadly useful, I don't see it replacing
content sites altogether.

------
jl6
Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the
most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.

~~~
debacle
How many of those narrative travesties are serving Google ads every other
paragraph?

------
weisbaum
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?

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

~~~
mef
wayback link
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-
strikes-again.html)

------
hn_check
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.

------
aresant
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?

~~~
colinmhayes
Of course Google considers SEO a bug. The entire point of SEO is tricking
google into thinking a page should be the top result. Google's goal isn't to
always show the page with the best SEO, it's to show the page the searcher is
searching for. Google has been in a continuous battle to stop SEO since it's
inception.

~~~
Veen
> The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be
> the top result.

Many SEO professionals help businesses by writing the content people search
for. Their goal is not to trick Google, but to write content that deserves the
top spot. A mattress retailer may not have the first clue how to write content
that is useful to people who want to buy mattresses, but SEOs and professional
writers can do it for them.

Additionally, Mr. Mattress Retailer has no idea about the technical aspects of
content that help Google to understand it: site navigation, meta data, schema
data, and so on. Technical SEOs can help them out. The result is content
that's relevant to the right audience, informative, and published with all the
extra stuff that helps Google to make sense of it.

------
obilgic
Author removed the post, so:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-
strikes-again.html)

------
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-
strikes-again.html)

------
system2
When will people learn? From the article:

"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to
diversify over the years"

Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on
search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats
you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or
blacklist you then you are dead.

This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of
income.

~~~
tgb
What's the alternative for content like this?

~~~
adventured
A newsletter format perhaps, meant to eventually make the website merely a
side bonus. Depending on how they're done, newsletters can be wildly
lucrative, far more so than a site like PainScience.

I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary
mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those
years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make
Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what
to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing.

100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent
newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built
out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it
to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real
business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and
anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter,
again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're
not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage
of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic
source vanishes.

He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a
newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock
from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick
free.

As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.

------
tus88
These people who think Google owes them something for free...

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

------
kobbad
This was posted by me earlier here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881)

~~~
hundchenkatze
No, this is a link to a different post about the same change/glitch, not the
same article. Is this a weak attempt to drive people to your blog?

~~~
kobbad
not my blog :) This was the first source and wanted to share

