Slashdot Mirror
On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google
Paul Fernhout (109597) writes "MetaFilter recently announced layoffs due to a decline in ad revenue that started with a mysterious 40% drop in traffic from Google on November 17, 2012, and which never recovered. Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand explores in detail how MetaFilter 'serves as a poster child of problems with Google's penalty process, despite all the advances Google has made over the years.' Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post puts it more bluntly: 'That may be the most striking, prescient takeaway from the whole MetaFilter episode: the extent to which the modern Web does not incentivize quality.'"
If you depend that heavily on ad revenue from Google then you really need to re-think your business model
We lost our ad account when Google accused us of hosting porn. The "porn" they pointed out were links to fairly vanilla pictures posted by some of our long-time forum members. We weren't even hosting it. I appealed, they pointed out two more links like that one. Links.
I refused to remove content that really wasn't that offensive, posted by members and complied with our forum rules. It did open my eyes to how Google could be a giant, inflexible jackass.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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A company that relies upon one customer for a great majority of its sales will always be beholden to that customer. That is why companies diversify their customer base.
Websites should diversify their traffic generators instead of just relying on good ole google to generate traffic for them.
$haw$hank
#truvadawhore
"Everyone On Wall Street Is A Dick."
Hello My Sweaty Pink Parts
Ronald McDonald gets reincarnated
You are disgusting.
I've never had a particularly strong desire to browse metafilter and my visit today has confirmed that no mistakes were made. These are actually just a few of the titles listed today, but probably some of the better ones for demonstration purposes. It just strikes me that the tone that is set with these types of choices just doesn't represent the articles. In particular, the shawshank piece was a very light fluffy piece of writing with no real substance. However, I was expecting something a bit more impressive or even just a biased opinion piece. These types of choices coupled with a site design that makes slashdot look damn near futurisitic don't feel like a winnin combination. My first thought was, "Wow, someone was actually get paid to work on this?"
I can definiately see their depdendence on google as a huge factor. I don't want to go back!
I agree. I also research extensively with Google and have never seen Slashdot articles. But I disagree with Google's choice on this.
Maybe it is more a matter of Google drowning in information and have no practical way of filtering it all out.
To that end, Google seems to love Expert Exchange. I don't understand that. Seems like they make choices, and stick to them, at least for a while.
Search is a truly large space. I doubt I could manage it any better. I never tire of hitting enter and having a page of results before I have time to reach for the mouse. I'll cut them some slack on this one.
I come here for the love
For various (often stupid) reasons most brands don't want to be associated with "porn" even in a very passing way. So advertisers will pull their ads if you have what they deem to be porn.
Fark had this problem. They used to run stories now and again with a "boobies" or "wieners" tag to denote photos/videos of either women or men respectively that others might find attractive and want to look at. They were always clearly marked, and flagged NSFW if that was an issue. It wasn't a large part of the content
However advertisers kept complaining and pulling ads, and so Fark spun that content off in to a separate site. It was that, or watch ad revenue dry up.
This sort of thing is also why ads on places like the Pirate Bay and such tend to be so scummy: Most brands aren't willing to associate with those sites so they have to take whatever they can get.
I have seen this in a few sites I run. One is a business site, another is a special interest with specific demographics, and the third is a blog.
It all started with Google shuffling their algorithms, with Panda then Pengiun.
I saw traffic drop on all three sites. Some coninciding with Panda, and the other coninciding with Pengiun.
One site was the top site for certain search terms for many long years. Not anymore. That site saw a 7.5X drop in pageviews per month traffic. Another site saw 3.5X drop, and the third was 2.5X.
What is weird is that Google de-indexed one site because of "un-natural links". When I contacted them, I asked what the links are, so I can remove them. They never came back with any definitive information, and sent the same template email saying site de-indexed because of un-natural links. It took 3 or 4 tries, and then they reinstated the site back in the index. They never told me what the links are, and never explained why they de-listed the site nor why they reinstated it.
Another thing of note: some sites no longer show up in Google searches. For example, here in Canada we have a restaurant review site called Restaurantica. It used to show up in the first few searches for restaurants in the area (Southern Ontario). Now, I don't see it at all on the front page. Seems Google decided that Trip Advisor and Urban Spoon are the authoratitive ones for restaurant, and Restaurantica is third class or something.
I also noticed that the search quality for Google has gone downhill starting in 2011. Really stupid matching of terms, some partial strings even. I've never seen Google's search that bad before.
They are for sure dumbing things down, a general trend in the industry in the name of "user experience" and such. You see this in Firefox with the dumbed down Australis, which requires Classic Theme Restorer to undo some of the damage.
Sigh ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Ah yes, the "good old days" when we had a thousand crappy search engines. Now all we have is a thousand crappy search engines, a few half-decent ones and a good one. Maybe you should write the second good search engine and give Google some competition.
Still beats me why reddit is getting a single pageview.
One common scenario leading to delisting is that you hire an SEO, or an SEO decides to "gift" you their "service", or one of your competitors decides to "gift" you an SEO's "service". It's very hard, as an ordinary business, to know that this is the cause of your problem.
Complicating this is that the #1 "Wordpress" exploit, for the longest time, was to present the ordinary site *unless* the request was coming from the IP address of a search engine bot. If it was coming from a search engine bot, then you present the regular content of the site, interspersed with link farm data. The Wordpress site doesn't know that it's being link-farmed, since they come in from non-bot IP addresses.
One of the things Google does internally is make all web traffic from employees desktops originate from the bot IP address; that way if there is variant content based on it recognizing the bot IP, you end up getting the link-farm version of the page, if you, as an employee, visit the site. One of my coworkers discovered that his daughter's school site had been compromised and turned into this type of link farm when he went on from his desk in order to give permission for a field trip, and ended up with a bizarro version of the site in his browser.
So if you see a sudden drop in traffic, you should probably compare your current site contents to the site contents that are supposed to be there according to your CMS (and if you don't have a CMS - get one so you can make this kind of comparison).
Another fairly recent phenomenon is that these "stealth" link farms are now being provided as forum postings. If you look at the forum posting link yourself, it's going to show up as whatever content is supposed to be there, but, again, if the bot goes there, it's going to see a link-farm. So if your site has a lot of links to link-farm sites, you're going to appear to be part of the problem (a fair assessment, since you *are* in fact a part of the problem).
For secondary drive-by stealth link-farm postings, there's really no way to check that the link that you're publishing is a stealth link-farm link. The problem with exposing this information is that an exposed site recruited to this purpose is no longer valuable to the link-farmer, but an unexposed one remains valuable input to the filtering algorithm. So exposing just means that the link-farmer is going to sell the site on the open market to someone else, who will then use the same exploit that the link-farmer used to get it to be a stealth link-farm, only they are going to do other nasty stuff with it, from hosting malware, to actively recruiting the site for a botnet.
So in reality, it turns out to be a net benefit to everyone for Google to say nothing, particularly if there's no way to understand what exploit was used to establish the stealth link-farm in the first place. Clearly, the site administrator at that site was not competent enough to not be p0wned in the first place, so they're unlikely to be competent enough to fix the problem. If they're using Wordpress in the first place, they probably don't understand the software well enough to understand the exploit in any case. So no programatic verification by Google that a given link might cause you to lose ranking because it links to a link-farm, since link-farmers would just use the service themselves to get the list of their link-farms they need to "recycle" by selling to other people.
It's a pain in the ass all around, but eventually people will have to start taking their site security a bit more seriously, or find themselves swept into the corner.
The bottom line is that Google Search doesn't work very well - at least, not anymore. While it previously supported search expansions which could be taken advantage of by skilled searchers, it's since been focused on quick, lowest-common-denominator responses to the most common questions. As a result, searching for slightly abstract notions is virtually impossible, and some searches which should be straightforward also fail.
One example of a simple failure: "fireworks today" or "fireworks today san francisco" returned nothing after I chanced to see fireworks the other night. Using the date ("fireworks san francisco may 21 2014"), the only relevant result was a set of Coast Guard and DHS documents describing safety precautions for the event (Giants game). Of course, fireworks games are well publicized outside of interntal government safety documents.
A more abstract example: try to design a search for articles about names which are or have become insults, such as "Dick."
.: Semper Absurda
It's interesting (and not coincidental) to note that perhaps the very best of the best of the moderators is stepping down and several of the younger newer and frankly less ... ummm ... rock solid of the moderators are remaining.
.... not so much.
I tried MeFi some years back and grew disaffected with the environment. I was initially attracted because of the very heavy attention to keeping things on topic and keeping the crazies away but soon grew disenchanted when it became apparent that the uber-heavy moderation was not applied uniformly. Friends of the site were granted far more leniency than others and the sheer amount of what I am forced to label as misplaced political correctness from the younger staff (staff who are staying on) was outright annoying.
Google did not kill MetaFilter. Metafilter did that to themselves by allowing disparity in their moderation and substituting hipsteresque faux-concern for alleged dubious subject matter to prevail over true conversation. I have dropped in from time to time to watch the membership decline and have seen the conversation stagnate.
Buy-bye Mefi (and Boing-Boing) - you were great when you were great but now
The world moves on.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
... if I'd ever heard of MetaFilter.
Thanks for pointing this out (article submitter here). People make points in other comments about MetaFilter's business strategy, varied content, or grousing about the moderation. Your comment instead emphasizes the positive about how how MetaFIlter is one of the longest running online communities and it is trying to sustain itself. One comment I saw on MetaFilter compared these donations to the end of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
http://metatalk.metafilter.com...
I've never been a MetaFilter member. Nor have I paid much attention to it anytime recently other than seeing stories on it now and then found by whatever random process. But a couple months ago I added it to my list of interesting news sites. Every day it has some interesting and generally pleasant (non-trollish) discussions linked to on the main page as the best of the discussions. I can see the value in that and the work that goes into it. As I wrote to someone just before hearing this news, Slashdot is like the discussions I had in college around the computer center and the engineering buildings; MetaFilter is like the more randomly varied discussions I had in the dorm hallways, dining halls, and maybe the social science buildings.
Having recently "discovered" this jewel that reminds me of the better part of what the internet was in the late 1990s, it is sad to see it struggling. Slashdot is a community I have long enjoyed and participated in, and itself may itself be facing some of the same general issues. It's a bit surprising to me to see in some of the comment here a lack of acknowledgement of the parallels. Why do they think "Beta" is being pushed? People may say MetaFilter is not "original" content like a news articles. Nonetheless, I feel discussions about new articles are themselves important content. I read Slashdot not so much for the articles but for the discussions which often point out how the articles are wrong or misleading, or add lots of details to the articles, or put the articles into a broader context. Discussion has its own value, both for participants and for lurkers. I don't know if it is true, but I did find interesting the speculative comment by someone that the fall in traffic could reflect that maybe Google does not want competition with its own Google+?
Another story has a link to a video where Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, explains the size of the site and the moderation infrastructure and its history:
http://newstorystudio.com/why-...
http://vimeo.com/21043675
Matt sounds like someone who really cares about his community, sort of like a town mayor (and a founder who never "sold off" from the early internet days, unlike Slashdot getting sold off to various new owners). Guestimating from their staff size and their revenue loss and member base (on the order of 10,000 active members), it must be take at least US$20K - US$40K a month to keep that community humming along for staffing costs (mostly for moderation I would think)? Or guessing on the order of about US$2 to US$5 per active member per month? Computers and bandwidth for hosting used to cost something significant, but nowadays for a text-mostly site I would not think those matter much?
It seems to me that the financing of all this has been for the past few years mostly that people not in the community (non-posters) drive by via Google and generate ad revenue, and that revenue then supports the community. The people who actively participate in the community must be a much smaller percentage of views. It looks like with MetaFilter, the people who funded the community were not the people who actually inhabited the social process of it.
That reminds me a bit of where I live in the Adirondack Park. Much of the money coming into the community is from summer tourists or summer residents when the population swells
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.