[vectorpush]

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

Well, besides the fact that it's his prerogative to care about his blog's search ranking, I think the implications are pretty obvious; he's suggesting that if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, including someone who does have a commercial interest.

[antjanus]

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write.

What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lost revenue", no one is looking at "quality content going down the drain". Good search results disappear and are replaced by someone who has a ton of cash backing them whose content is meant to convert and monetize, make cash off the user and nothing else.

At least in my case, I want people to primarily read my stuff.

And it seems ridiculous to me that someone would say, "Who cares if people read your blog, it's not as if you're making any money off it!"

Can you imagine some of the most popular devs that have non-monetized blogs all of a sudden disappearing from google search with their insights and answers? Among others, there's Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman both of whom rank well but have non-monetized sites.

[jacquesm]

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it.

What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you because they found your content useful, engaging you audience and so on.

In contrast with that (which takes a long time to build up, that I will readily admit) google traffic seems so fickle.

[spankalee]

As a Google _user_ I care a lot about this issue. A lot of the technical topics and questions I search for are answered best by blog posts from people who've solved the same issue, or are an authority. I don't want them thrown out with the spam, and I don't want all such content to have to be hosted on sites like Stack Overflow to be findable.

[jacquesm]

Yes, now we are in agreement. For the users of google it matters, but those are not the people that are currently screaming blue murder, it is the webmasters who had a ton of traffic from google before and that lost it (fairly or unfairly is a case-by-case thing).

If users no longer find relevant content then that is a real problem but I think that in this particular respect your goals and google's goals are very much in alignment. In other words, if they could do better they would.

[jshen]

This is a rather arrogant comment. Why assume that everyone fits the same niche as you? I once ran a site/blog where I blogged about a particular disease that I have and all of the research I did as I tried to understand it. This means that my content was typically found by people who have just come down with this disease and turn to google to search for information. I did not have a relationship with these readers prior to them getting this disease.

[jacquesm]

That's an interesting use case where search traffic and blog posts are an essential complement. Thank you for pointing that out.

[graeme]

There are plenty of other use cases. Tech is a bit unusual in that:

  * People stay in it permanently
  * People link to others freely
  * People have many non-commercial posts

Many other niches are temporary. For example, I work in LSAT prep. The LSAT is an exam north Americans have to take before entering law school. For 3-6 months, people are extremely interested in the LSAT, then they forget about it. There is a constant stream of entrants searching for information. Informational articles and search traffic is essential.

Similar cases:

  * Making a will
  * Selling a house
  * Writing a resume

I'll give one personal example. Recently, I wanted to read a King James Version of the Bible, for literary reasons. But it's hard to find a readable bible.

So I searched, and quickly found many articles by a site called Bible Design Blog. It's an incredible resource for bible printing and typography. I learned what I needed and got a bible.

And now I don't care about bible design, so I don't go to the site. I imagine he gets many similar visitors from organic traffic.

[jacquesm]

So you as a user were well served in your searches. That's the bit that google cares about most I would assume. Whether or not you went to 'bible design blog', 'design bible blog', 'bible typography.info' and whoever else they compete with (I just made those up) is of secondary importance.

The problem sits there where you would not find good content to serve your needs. And if you feel that this update impacts that goal in a negative way then I think there is a good case to be made for this being a net negative. I see no evidence of that for now though.

[moistgorilla]

When I search for an article on some new tech or a tutorial for some library or such I almost always get a few blogs with good content. Many of those blogs have books written by the owners which they advertise on the subject they blog about. I buy those sometimes. Basically, google is a good source of traffic for blogs.

[watwut]

"Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it."

The biggest source of traffic on my blog is google. Links from elsewhere cause spikes at bests, but that is it. Search engine is what drives clicks.

[squeaky-clean]

I've found dozens of good blogs through Google. You've never had a problem that you googled and found a solution on someone's blog before?

[jacquesm]

You have switched the perspective to the user now. That's fine with me but the original complaint was by the website owners.

If google no longer finds solutions on blogs that's a problem but that shifts the debate from the one that we originally had, which is that some blogs no longer receive the traffic they did in the past. If that means other blogs with relevant content receive that traffic instead then from the users perspective there is no change.

If the other blogs are less relevant then that is a problem, both for the users and for google.

[squeaky-clean]

I never said it was a problem for the users. Just that I, as a user, find many blogs that I now follow because I googled a result. It's very unfair to a website if a user searches for something, and finds someone else's blog because my website dropped in google's ranking because of something beyond my control.

I was just showing that Google certainly is not the last traffic source for bloggers, it's probably the largest traffic source. Sure a devoted userbase gets you traffic, but it doesn't really grow traffic. Having your articles on other outlets grows traffic. And Google is a very good outlet when someone is trying to find relevant information.

[tobltobs]

Are you trolling?

[jacquesm]

Is it possible that if someone has a different point of view about some issue after having given the matter some thought that they are not trolling?

If that's a possibility then you already have your answer, I would not put this much time and effort into a discussion if I were merely doing this to piss other people off.

Trolls typically don't go around with their name and reputation in full view on controversial topics.

[jacquesm]

I miss the bit where we have a right to traffic. That's maybe naive, but just like I don't expect customers to beat their way to my door through some act of magic I don't expect visitors to come to my website either. If I want them there I have to go and engage them. That's marketing, building customer relationships and so on. Hard work, and definitely not easy money but it is very hard to assail that from the position of a competitor or even Google.

Of course it could happen to anybody. That is the one reason why you should never ever run a business that is dependent on a single source for customers. If you do that you don't have a business at all, just an extension of the ecosystem owned by someone else at whose whim you live or die.

[jshen]

I'm really shocked by your naive arrogance in this thread. You can't see beyond your own niche and use case. There is an enormous space of good content where the best method of finding that content is searching the internet, not having a previous relationship with a client/customer. In an earlier comment I gave one of many examples, medical conditions that people don't care about until they get it, and at that point they turn to google to search for information.

Google is effectively a monopoly on this front, and at some level should have an obligation to the common good.

[jacquesm]

The problem here is not that 'good content' is not going to be found, it seems to be that in spaces where there is a ton of competition that the competitors are all in some kind of state where they all feel they and they alone have a right to be the ones to engage with the searchers on topic 'x'.

I highly doubt that in the use-case that you envision (which is indeed not one that I had in mind when reading the comment above) where you are providing to the point information about something you care about you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine.

Remember how altavista was spammed to death with on-page trickery and google came and it all suddenly was much better. At the time we did not realize that this would come at the price of the destruction of what made the web great, the links that would lead you from one place to another.

The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them and because - for now - they are still the best way to get to relevant content.

The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all. But that can't really be true since we're theorizing here from the point of view where there is a glut of relevant content competing for a limited number of slots and then regardless of what the criteria are some of those sites will simply miss out on potential visitors.

The only real worry I have here is that the users would not find any relevant content or places to engage at all. And that's far from being proven.

Google does not have an obligation to the common good other than an ethical and a moral one, a real obligation is a legal one and I - in spite of being fairly harshly critical of google on lots of fronts - have no doubt that if they could solve the spam problem in an effective way would not need any prodding at all to go and do that immediately.

Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?

[jshen]

"you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine."

Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types.

"The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them"

This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible.

"The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all"

No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them.

"Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?"

I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.

[jacquesm]

> Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types.

I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines. Not that anybody will listen to that because after all it is easy money but it is very unwise from a business perspective. Do you see Apple spend time on checking their 'link profile' (new term I learned today)?

> This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible.

No, anti-trust is about anti-competitive behaviour by a monopolist (or a de-facto monopolist), it is not about forcing companies to act in the public interest. They probably should but that's a totally different problem.

So anti-trust would be google squashing duckduckgo.com through some trick using their de-facto monopoly to get rid of a nasty little upstart.

> No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them.

Yes, and that's exactly the sort of thing that google is finally addressing. I loathe demand media and all the sites operating on that principle.

> I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.

We agree on that they are dodging the question of negative SEO, and it is bad they do that but I can see that Google's image will take a nosedive if they admit that the issue is beyond their technical capabilities. They're essentially lying about this, but what else is new in corporate country?

I wished someone would find a way to make a search engine that uses a completely different aspect to rank pages than the link graph (maybe back to on-page?) and that that search engine would take away 50% of googles' share. That way the SEO dudes would be in for a much harder time.

>

[tripzilch]

> I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines.

You are aware that there are large (enormous) swathes of Internet users whose primary mode of navigation is typing whatever they want to visit into Google, trusting it'll correct their (terrible) misspellings, and click one of the first few links of the first result page?

There will type URLs there. Like "Apple.com". Because they don't know what URLs are for, any more.

It sounds to me, if you really suggest to stop making sites for these people, you're not actually aware how numerous they are. They are both the old, and the new generations.

Yes it's sad this is the case. But they are people. What if they are searching for some niche information (like a disease, as another poster already pointed out), but the honest blog post that'd be useful for them has been torpedoed out of the water with this "negative SEO", in favour of some scummy SEO site trying to sell them ineffective fake medicine (or whatever).

Is that too far-fetched? I don't know, but it seems to me that giving evil SEOers the power to blast sites from Google's index by abusing "negative SEO", is a bad thing in general. Your argument seems to be that it'll give SEOers a taste of their own medicine, which I agree that will probably happen. But there will be collateral too, and I don't think that's worth it.

[jshen]

anti-trust is broader than your definition. From wikipedia.

"United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws, which regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. The main statutes are the Sherman Act 1890, the Clayton Act 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act 1914. These Acts, first, restrict the formation of cartels and prohibit other collusive practices regarded as being in restraint of trade. Second, they restrict the mergers and acquisitions of organizations which could substantially lessen competition. Third, they prohibit the creation of a monopoly and the abuse of monopoly power."

[dllthomas]

"Do you see Apple spend time on checking their 'link profile' (new term I learned today)?"

Honestly, I'd be a little surprised if they didn't.

[vectorpush]

I get what you're saying, but as far as business goes, it's just not very pragmatic to ignore the monumental impact that google can have on your hits/conversions. Your competitors certainly aren't ignoring it.

[ameister14]

I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business.

It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.

[jacquesm]

Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business.

And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.

[ameister14]

I'm not saying it's unfair. I'm saying you can enter into a business where you have a competitive advantage based on location and run said business profitably, and that's not a mistake.

If it didn't work, we would have no gas stations. I don't know about you, but I'm not so loyal to a particular gas station that I would drive farther to reach it if there were others more convenient to me that offered the same service for the same price. That doesn't mean it's a bad business. It means there is competition with fairly exact substitutes, and location is a big part of success.

[chrismcb]

It isn't just about the web site owner and their traffic... It is also about you. Don't you want Google to give you good results? Wouldn't you be unhappy if the best result got hidden on page 50 because someone link spammed them?