[wickedsight]

Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched.

At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could work together. They invited us because the content was incredibly useful for their visitors and they preferred our calendar over the official one for ease of use.

So clearly, our site was adding value for the target audience we had in mind. We were also consistently getting visitors through different search engines that were looking for the info we provided. The number of visitors was growing consistently and pretty much all the feedback we got was positive.

In March, Google rolled out a new algo which all but completely removed us from search results. Out visitors dropped about 80% and growth has disappeared. What was a fun project that we spent many hours on is now a waste of computing resources.

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

[sharpshadow]

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

[sct202]

OP's website is heavy with affiliate link listicles, which have been recently heavily downranked in favor of forums and content like Reddit and Quora.

[jacobsimon]

To the parent commenter - have you set up google search console and reviewed what pages and keywords were affected? There could be other reasons why your pages aren't being indexed properly. If it's a small site, it could have been something as simple as changing an image or page title.

[dazc]

If this were true then every site would implement adsense. Most don't.

[ibic]

This reminds of "Bidding Rank" from Baidu decades ago (and I think it pretty much still applies for Baidu) - Google was not only better technologically, but ethically because their search results were not that profit driven as "Bidding Rank" which was (and still is) very much despised. Now it seems Google only cares about profit and started to do things more or less the same way.

Sick.

Disclosure - I was so pissed by the degration of quality (an money-thirstiness) of the search results from Google that I switched to a non-profit search engine as my default for both desktop and mobile. The daily search experience doesn't have much noticible change to me. I do admit sometimes the Google search result could be better sometimes, but those occasions are quite rare for my needs, like maybe once a week.

[wyldfire]

If this were really the case, wouldn't it be a painfully obvious anticompetitive move?

[thih9]

Are there reasons to believe this is what actually happens? Did anyone document this?

[pyinstallwoes]

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

[mft_]

I've been through this thought-process many times.

1. Google isn't working well any more.

2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages.

3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.

4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.

5. Forget it.

---

Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)

[perlgeek]

> How might you see solving this problem?

Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.

[isodev]

I don’t know, webrings?

[swarnie]

Pivot to paid search engines where you are the customer not the product.

Thanks @Kagi - I attribute three solutions last week directly to you.

[flipbrad]

Plurality of search engines?

[CuriouslyC]

The fix is a decentralized search network with nodes linked to people or legitimate businesses. You manually distribute trust to friends and businesses you like, and you can manually revoke that trust, with some network level trust effects occurring based on spammy/malicious behavior.

[pembrook]

You’re writing this comment on a site with an upvote/downvote based algorithm.

The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal.

As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.

[corn13read2]

We are working towards this if you'd like to get in touch. I feel like "web3" as an interface/discovery platform is a very good topic.

[elorant]

This was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.

[turtles3]

Honestly I think Google needs to be broken up. It's not a novel idea but the more I think about it the more I like it.

So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam.

It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so.

Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.

[nsokolsky]

A friend of mine owns _the_ best website by far on how to become a student in Czech Republic. 15 years of effort, hundreds of excellent articles, all the content is regularly updated, etc. Google's ranking for "education in Czech Republic" (in Russian)? Not even in the top 100.

The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.

[entropy47]

I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).

Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.

[darkwater]

That would have been a good excuse/explanation in the days before Chrome existed. But since Chrome is THE browser, users have a hard time escaping Google. So, GP is right.

[criddell]

Are you saying that people would search for congressional apportionment on TikTok?

[gcbirzan]

I'm curious now, can you give me a link to the site?

[xwat]

https://nring.info/

[p3rls]

Even with the latest update blogspam from India still dominates my niche. Welcome to the internet of the 2020s where investing in your product means jackshit because wordpress idiots can press a button and yoast an article.

If you're a creator-type why on earth would you ever build a web product in this type of environment? Join a corp or create trash and ride the wave -- at least then you'll have some semblance of a normal life instead of a living like a starving artist into your 30s

[dsq]

Did you any problem building a site on a proprietary subject like Nurburgring? Its private. Dont they have copyright, etc.

Did you get an agreememt with them or is it not an issue in Germany?

[wickedsight]

You can write a web site about Coca Cola if you want. If it's just factual information that's all within fair use.

As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Are you for real? Honest question.

[steve1977]

To be fair, it’s not Google who is gatekeeping the Internet, but the “dumb masses” who are using Google.

Google is just gatekeeping Google.

[pineaux]

Do you have a god alternative? I am interested.

[carlosjobim]

> I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.

[neocritter]

It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but last time I did, social media traffic was some of the worst quality. Search traffic was seen as golden because it came with intent. Social media traffic was wandering and aimless, so converted poorly even if it was 1000x search. Search still got more conversions and it was no contest. Did something change?

[donkeyd]

We made this site for people who search. We were those people, searching Google for where to watch cars racing on the Nürburgring and then getting nothing but cryptic route descriptions on forums.

So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.

We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.

[xnx]

What type of site took your place?