[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.

[graeme]

Well, maybe. If someone destroyed bible design blog's ranking, then I wouldn't have known I missed a superior option. I would have found stuff, but no competitors were as good.

The main incentive for negative SEO would be to let inferior content win, no?

I do agree in general that google works extraordinarily well for the user in most cases. Your point is clearer now.

[jacquesm]

> If someone destroyed bible design blog's ranking, then I wouldn't have known I missed a superior option. I would have found stuff, but no competitors were as good.

For all you know a superior option existed but you don't know about it because 'bible design blog's SEO guy torpedoed them. I know that's reaching, especially given the subject matter but you get the point.

> The main incentive for negative SEO would be to let inferior content win, no?

I'm sure the SEO proponents would claim the exact opposite. We trust in Google to do the right thing here and I'm all for letting it be that way, but google is under no obligation to actually let the best content win. We hope they do, and we assume that our goals are aligned in this respect but frankly I have no idea how for the top 1,000,000 searches the actually achieved precision is. I would expect it to be quite high, but I have absolutely no way of verifying that and for all I know the results are junk. We will only know that that was the case when something better comes along and finds/ranks the content much better than Google does now. Comparing to Bing Google is doing ok, comparing to DDG is not fair given the relative sizes.

But I'd be one very happy person if a new search engine appeared that would give me exactly one page of results with all of them super relevant, even if it indexed only 10% of the web I would probably use it with some regularity. Quality is far more important than quantity.

FWIW I actually built a small search engine along those lines about 7 years ago, I never launched it because I simply don't have the resources to undertake such a project but I learned a ton about how hard the problem is that google tries to solve and even though I'm 100% at odds with them on the joint subjects of privacy and the way google+ gets rammed down my throat I do appreciate the difficulty of their position and the technical challenges involved in operating a search engine at this scale.

[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.