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Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

750 pointsby cyrusshepardalmost 6 years ago

40 comments

darawkalmost 6 years ago
I was going to say that &quot;examine.com is one of the best sites on the internet for information about supplements&#x2F;nutrition&quot;. But it&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s <i>the</i> best site on the internet for that sort of thing. It&#x27;s great that Google is attempting to fix the issue of bullshit nutrition sites ranking highly, but I sincerely hope someone at Google sees this and does something to help out Examine, which is a tremendous resource.
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andreitp1almost 6 years ago
Got curious and decided to go through their SEO.<p>- First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow &#x2F; nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it&#x27;s the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let&#x27;s move on<p>- Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most of them are just single keywords, like &quot;ashwagandha&quot;, which point to the page optimized to rank for that exact generic search. The entire website is targeting single-term searches, which are notoriously hard to rank for and attract a lot of spam websites. This falls into anchor text over-optimization. They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text &quot;curcumin&quot;, same with &quot;catechins&quot;, &quot;creatine&quot;, &quot;caffeine&quot;, &quot;vitamin d&quot; and the list goes on for all the keywords they are trying to rank for. This is not just unusual, it&#x27;s literally impossible for it to just happen naturally. This has the Penguin penalty written all over it. Moving on...<p>- Their backlinks are for sure interesting. Among their top backlinks, we have pages such as: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.herbalsupplementreview.com&#x2F;retro-lean-forskolin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.herbalsupplementreview.com&#x2F;retro-lean-forskolin&#x2F;</a> - with a URL rating of 46 for a website with zero traffic. In SEO terms these are called “PBN links”. Not that unusual for the health niche, but definitely not white hat. Here’s another one with the same identical metrics as the previous one (this time, it’s a homepage link), also from a dubious website with zero traffic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;best-testosteronebooster.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;best-testosteronebooster.com&#x2F;</a>.<p>All of these with exact match anchor texts leading to their corresponding Examine.com pages.<p>- Mind you, I’m not saying that they don’t have great editorial content, and I’m not sure who helped them with their SEO, but I’m not the least bit surprised that Google might have penalized them multiple times for several reasons. There&#x27;s probably more stuff but this is what I was able to find with a quick analysis.
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cyrusshepardalmost 6 years ago
For additional context, Google has &quot;disappeared&quot; 100s of alt-health sites - some bad, but some very good. The site Self Hacked was one, and detailed it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;selfhacked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google-censorship-of-health-websites-is-taken-to-the-next-level&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;selfhacked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google-censorship-of-health-webs...</a><p>Some, like Mercola, peddle highly-controversial, near anti-vax content.<p>But on the other end of the spectrum, Examine.com should be the gold standard. Quality Raters should use it as an example of a site to emmulate. Much higher quality content and informative content than WebMD, IMO.
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pascalxusalmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;ve noticed that Google search results prioritize reputation above search matching. If you search for something, even if there&#x27;s a blog out there with the exact thing your searching for, it won&#x27;t show up, even in the top 100 search results, unless the site has a high enough page rank&#x2F; or some other generic metric google is looking for. This is unfortunate because there&#x27;s a lot of great information out there that never sees the light of day due to this problem. Google still has a long way to go before they solve the search problem.
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DidISayTooMuchalmost 6 years ago
My website has a number of articles that talk about anxiety health issues. I was getting steady traffic of at least 100-150 users per day. Now I get about 10&#x2F;day. The traffic didn&#x27;t gradually slow down. It dropped by almost &gt; 50% on two separate days and continued that trend.<p>No idea what is going on. My DR has also dropped on ahrefs. I am nowhere near examine.com, but my articles are honest and of good quality I believe.<p>I am on the first page of DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing for my keywords. I&#x27;m on page &gt; 10 on Google for the same keywords.
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nabnobalmost 6 years ago
It seems like Google is de-ranking independent websites, rather than actually analyzing whether a website provides good information or not.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that this is happening intentionally - it&#x27;s probably way more difficult to figure out a way to automate a &quot;quality of information&quot; rating, rather than just prioritizing websites for companies that make lots of money.<p>However, this has the unintended effect of narrowing the overton window for &quot;acceptable&quot; opinions. I&#x27;ve found that it&#x27;s really difficult to find good results for niche topics on Google nowadays.
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nesadialmost 6 years ago
This is tragic. Examine.com is probably the best site I know with a focus on determining the science behind any food or supplement one might be interested in. They should be at the top of every Google search.
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limejuicealmost 6 years ago
I think examine.com needs to redouble their efforts on SEO, because if I search for something like &quot;creatine benefits&quot; on duckduckgo&#x2F;bing, which is a more raw search than google, I see examine.com is way down the list at #26. Some of the other sites mentioned in this thread are high on duckduckgo&#x2F;bing (selfhacked.com #4, lifextention.com #11)<p>So, I think examine.com&#x27;s problems could be beyond google&#x27;s search algorithm&#x2F;de-ranking.<p>www.healthline.com must be winning the SEO game because they are showing up #1 on google, duckduckgo, bing, etc.<p>A very simple observation is that examine.com is not using good titles for their articles. &quot;Summary of Creatine&quot;. It is too generic, and that is causing it to be ranked lower that these other websites which have more specific titles like &quot;Anti-Aging Benefits of Creatine&quot; (lifeextension), or &quot;12 Creatine Benefits + Dosage &amp; Side Effects&quot; (selfhacked).<p>So, maybe a better title. Or , because this &quot;Summary of Creatine&quot; article is so long, maybe you need multiple summary pages tailored to different purposes, e.g. &quot;Benefits of Creatine&quot;, &quot;Side Effects of Creatine&quot;, which link into the Creatine research.<p>I have never been to this examine.com website before, but if every article is like &quot;Summary of X&quot;, then I would say you have a problem. You need to match your articles titles to the most likely search <i>phrases</i>.
LinuxBenderalmost 6 years ago
I find this concerning. I use examine.com quite a bit. They have references to all the studies for each topic whereas other health sites like webmd do not always have reference links. Examine have saved me a bit of time trying to search through all the studies on nih.gov &#x2F; PubMed. I still do manual searches to ensure they are not cherry picking, but I have been happy with Examine thus far.
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CryoLogicalmost 6 years ago
If we are banning sketchy medicine sites could we ban healthline and webmd?<p>Those websites use scare tactics to push users through 10+ page &quot;top 10 illnesses based on your symptoms&quot; list which are often not even researched to the point of any accuracy and only written to drive ad revenue.
Arrezzalmost 6 years ago
There seems to be an increasing problem with automated content filtering systems that filter out legitimate actors. This seems like a very broad problem that is hard to generalize, but perhaps I&#x27;m wrong. It also seems like the problem will only get worse as the Internet grows even larger. I wonder what the end result will look like, if this will just magnify the effect of walled gardens.
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IfOnlyYouKnewalmost 6 years ago
I remember reading Google&#x27;s instructions for their manual page quality reviewers. It had two special sections, one on financial info, and one – you guessed it – on <i>medical</i> information.<p>Within those two categories, called &quot;Your life or your money&quot;, reviewers were asked to pay special attention to a site&#x27;s trustworthiness, with a special focus on &quot;traditional&quot; credentials, such as association with a known, trusted institution.<p>Edit: Found it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterhub.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterh...</a>
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Endyalmost 6 years ago
There&#x27;s a very cynical part of me that is considering whether this might be a planned action by Google to cycle the FP, and try to get the &quot;disappeared&quot; sites to pay Google for pay-per-click advertising. I wish that was completely unbelievable, but Google has proven to be entirely focused on profit when it comes to monetizing search; and of course intentionally starving sites from getting hits&#x2F;leads&#x2F;conversions seems like the best and fastest way to generate profit from their desperation.
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adrralmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;d move off Cloudflare. Cloudflare hosts a bunch of sites that are penalized by google. Google is known to penalized sites in bad neighborhoods. Spend the money and get dedicated IPs and don&#x27;t share certs. Examine.com is sharing a cert with an online gambling site(reengame.com).
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ve55almost 6 years ago
&gt;Let’s be clear: Google owes us nothing. They are a private organization, they can do whatever they want.<p>This is a surprising thing to hear. I think given Google&#x27;s influence, they owe them at least some fairness.
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fluidcruftalmost 6 years ago
Are there any curated directories left? It seems like they were all killed off by search, but this sort of thing underscores that curation itself actually has value.
bad_useralmost 6 years ago
The folks at Examine.com should also analyze what inbound links they have scattered on the web.<p>An easy way to sink your competition is to place their links on shady websites. It&#x27;s common SEO practice.
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tylerjwilk00almost 6 years ago
Examine.com is the most legit and reputable place to get information on niche supplements especially some of the ones at the fringes.<p>It would be a huge disservice to the internet and those seeking research information if they dropped from Google indexes.
oarabbus_almost 6 years ago
Google has also made disappear &quot;harm reduction&quot; drug-related websites, such as Drugs-Forum.com on relevant searches; IMO, a travesty and an affront to &quot;Don&#x27;t be Evil&quot;
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macinjoshalmost 6 years ago
Use duck duck go, yippy, gibiru, qwant, or any other of the many alternatives. Google&#x27;s search is probably the most over rated product of our time when you look at the full cost of being a Google user. I haven&#x27;t used Google search for more than 5 years and I am not missing anything.<p>Google search keeps the rest of the Google machine afloat. If consumers showed their distaste for Google&#x27;s problems by using alternative search products they would get their act together faster than the average query time.
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8bitsrulealmost 6 years ago
I never use google. On searching Bing for &#x27;nutrition supplement&#x27; I found examine.com on page 4.<p>I also found the NIH&#x27;s &#x27;medlineplus&#x27; on page 4. It is certainly authoritative. So, in a way, that&#x27;s a compliment.<p>But apparently &#x27;authoritative&#x27; is not the only significant factor at Bing. Yes, I found &#x27;nutrition.gov&#x27; and &#x27;fda.gov&#x27; on page 1, as well as &#x27;wikipedia.org&#x27; and &#x27;supplementwarehouse.com&#x27;.<p>I suppose that &#x27;authoritative&#x27; ought to be a primary factor in a search algorithm. But then, I think &#x27;accurate&#x27; ought to be a primary factor in &#x27;translation&#x27;.<p>It&#x27;s no surprise to me that machines are no better at distinguishing science-based authority than they are at translation. You have to consider the culture the machines have grown up in.
raspasovalmost 6 years ago
Examine.com is rock solid in my opinion. Best summary of research (with direct links to each published paper) that I’ve seen.<p>I often use examine.com directly without going through Google but I hope Google will realize they have made a mistake in this case.
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Yizahialmost 6 years ago
On the other hand when I run &quot;Astaxanthin&quot; query in the DDG (I never searched for this item or other supplements previously) I see Examine result on the first page, 5th position from top. At the same time there are results from scummy resources on the same page: 1. Webmd 2. Wikipedia 3. Healthline 4. Mercola 5. Examine 6. Draxe 7. Drweil 8. Antioxidantsforhealthandlongevity 9. Amazon 10. Webmd<p>Hard to say what should be a proper way to deal with misinformation but looking at human history it is probably not censorship, mostly because any and all censorship systems are abused and corrupted eventually.
zarothalmost 6 years ago
I will say, I miss the days when the first comment here would be “Paging Mr. Cutts...” followed by actual insight from Matt on what’s happening here!<p>Is there any other double-digit employee at Google around now who can take up the mantle?
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seshagiricalmost 6 years ago
Bing does not have this problem (yet): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;search?q=is+diet+soda+bad+for+health" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;search?q=is+diet+soda+bad+for+health</a>
privateSFacctalmost 6 years ago
I took a look at the page and have to agree with another poster - the landing page at least looks like a lot of trash websites.<p>They say they are recommended by:<p>The New York Times Washington Post BBC Guardian Forbes Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics<p>But do not link to any of these sites showing the endorsement (the the icon of Men&#x27;s Health does turn color when hovered over). That&#x27;s classic bad behavior scammers use.<p>Ask yourself, why would be the BBC of all places be endorsing this site? Oddly googling for examine.com and BBC get&#x27;s a link to &quot;The food supplement that ruined my liver&quot; which makes no mention of examine.com<p>I then followed the links to the scientifically proven &quot;super-food&quot; - Spirulina. This links to a paper and I picked one random name and found they were a lecturer at a university in Romania - where they also received their degree. Ok...<p>The whole scientifically proven &quot;superfoods&quot; with dramatic health benefits invented by &quot;NASA&quot; is already so scam buzzword filled how does google not push this down?<p>Now google is supposed to be promoting this type of health info over more standard health info? I&#x27;m all for folks exploring the edges of things, but... at least a quick read of the page doesn&#x27;t inspire huge confidence in this landing page as an authoritative source for health info.<p>I may also have found the MD who recommends examine.com . His website is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikehartmd.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikehartmd.com&#x2F;</a> no issue with cannabis, but again... lifestyle &#x2F; single topic medicine vs a normal internal medicine dr.<p>Edited: Interesting to see the quick downvoting for what is a relatively content oriented comment.
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SpaceManNabsalmost 6 years ago
What is an alternative to Google search that has better search results than DDG? If I use Bing, will it use my data to customize my searches (I don&#x27;t mind this too much anymore)?<p>Google sucks now for technical, science, math, and philosophy searches...<p>I haven&#x27;t vetted or researched this at all, but I get a feeling that I am just getting advertisements or google sanitized reputation rankings on Google.
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sak5skalmost 6 years ago
As someone who casually came across Examine.com a while back, I left quickly simply because the website didn&#x27;t seem credible. As others have pointed out here, the website&#x27;s design (while looks nice) does not send all the right signals that this is a well-established research website. I know it&#x27;s not good to judge a book by its cover, but online, the cover is everything.<p>I know this sounds anal, but if they were to simply clean up the site a bit like by removing all the excessive icons and cleaning up their button text, they would come across as more credible.<p>Perhaps if they came across as more credible, people wouldn&#x27;t be leaving and google wouldn&#x27;t get the wrong signals.<p>Simple and quick list of changes that would make their site feel more trustworthy:<p>1. Remove most if not all of the icons 2. Do away with borders on non-white background - basically just make background white. 3. Tone down your button text. &quot;I&#x27;m ready to learn&quot; sounds really shitty and obnoxious. 4. Stop screaming with all caps buttons 5. Consider a different logo entirely. 6. Consider different color palette entirely 7. Do away with old button styles 8. Restore normal font size to sources - right now it makes me feel like you are hiding them. 9. List author credentials on every content page 10. Do away with ugly callout styles and excessive icon usage 11. Re-work all the weird &quot;Scientific Research on ___&quot; tabs so that they do not require so much clicking to find basic info.<p>Overall, the site is just over-designed. I realize everything I say would make the site look more WebMD-like, but that&#x27;s what triggers trust when it comes to medical info sites.<p>Lastly, I fully expect to be downvoted for this as design is not something that&#x27;s very respected around these corners of the web, but I felt it was important to make that point since this is a perfect example of a website that while looks great, does the opposite of creating a trustworthy browsing experience.
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maxanderalmost 6 years ago
I wonder if the issue is liability- people suffering from various ailments are liable to Google their symptoms in hopes of finding an at-home cure instead of going to a doctor[0], and if this turns out badly they could conceivably turn around and try to sue Google for providing harmful medical advice[1]. De-ranking sites that provide medical advice, which aren&#x27;t whitelisted well-known sites like Mayo Clinic or WebMD, might prevent this- or at least provide a better defensive position in the courtroom.<p>[0] Especially likely in countries with badly-structured healthcare systems, such as the U.S.<p>[1] Especially likely in countries with badly-structured legal incentives, such as the U.S.
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gildasalmost 6 years ago
Even though your website serves static pages, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a good idea to hide all the contents when JavaScript is disabled... I&#x27;m surprised the &quot;SEO analysts&quot; did not notice that.
qwerty456127almost 6 years ago
I never knew examine.com and now I&#x27;ve taken a look. I&#x27;ve found a lot of pieces of information which are, as far as I know, legitimate and good to know.
unixheroalmost 6 years ago
What about Duckduckgo.com results?
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NilsIRLalmost 6 years ago
The other related issue is that no one can judge for something&#x27;s legitimacy because it all comes down to opinion and &quot;root beliefs&quot;.<p>This applies to any organization.<p>It also links with free speech and private companies.
Ice_cream_suitalmost 6 years ago
The content seems reasonable.<p>However, it looks really dodgy.<p>The layout, titles of articles, illustrations and just about everything makes it look like part of a cheap ad farm.
CriticalCathedalmost 6 years ago
Perhaps we need government regulation to stop near monopoly indexes like these from curating results so heavily.
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nybsopalmost 6 years ago
because google is following their bottom line. they&#x27;re getting paid push healthline and webmd to the top.
pbhjpbhjalmost 6 years ago
Edit: I since looked at the MSG page linked as there first example in the OP, which was exactly what I expected based on the &quot;for&quot; comments. My original comment below:<p>---<p>Well I read a few comments here saying it was click-baity and such, and other comments pushing back hard against that saying it&#x27;s a detailed, trustworthy, researched site with citations.<p>So, I visited via an &quot;about&quot; link, then clicked through the menu to supplements (arbitrarily) then randomly to &quot;creatine&quot;: lots of links in the claim-heavy content, but the two links I followed were to definitions, not to proof of the claims being made.<p>At the head it gives a researchers name, says their work was reviewed. Looks great so far.<p>&gt;&quot;Our evidence-based analysis on creatine features 746 unique references to scientific papers. &quot; &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>Wow, I&#x27;m expecting a massive citation section.<p>But, nothing, it&#x27;s just a sales page, it doesn&#x27;t _have_ citation supported information but it tells me it sells such information ...<p>Am I missing something, people Googling &quot;creatine&quot; are looking for the info, not a sales page offering to hook them up to the info. If other sources have the info directly then that would be a huge reason that Google wouldn&#x27;t rank this examine.com site highly?<p>How many people google something looking for a for-pay resource that they, it seems, can&#x27;t even sample first?<p>I&#x27;m not googling looking for a site to sign-up with to get emailed a factsheet either, even if it&#x27;s free (which is a common fraud that I&#x27;m hugely wary of).<p>Ok, so now I&#x27;m looking at the questions, cool, click through - something about caffeine interactions with creatine, surely the link is to the cited scientific paper, nope just to another uncited page by the same person.<p>I&#x27;m not impressed upon that this is a site that should be high in google rankings; it seems low value unless you&#x27;re looking to sign up to a resource -- like if I search online for &quot;Steven King novels&quot; I actually want the list, not a link to a library I can sign up to in order to find out at some time in the future some of the novels that could be on that list.<p>FWIW the summary given was good, readable, seemed like it might be true, but there&#x27;s no reason to trust it at all. I&#x27;d rank it below even Wikipedia for the content I was presented. Whatever content they&#x27;re selling behind those pages could be incredibly good, but that&#x27;s not what SERPs are linking to so of course they don&#x27;t rank for that, they rank for the shallow sales page with the same generic info on a million other pages.
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intricatedetailalmost 6 years ago
Google has no problem promoting government sanctioned media outlets promoting lies about drugs e.g . That cannabis is a gateway drug or it makes your brain shrink. Hypocrites.
Causality1almost 6 years ago
Why does there seem to be a pack of Examine employees swarming this comment section? That&#x27;s not a good look, guys.
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bageldaughteralmost 6 years ago
The core problem with examine, in my opinion, is that it embraces the attitudes that:<p>1. A wide range of subtle personal, emotional and health problems can in principle be solved&#x2F;mitigated by taking supplements and unregulated drugs.<p>2. Positive effects from small-group trials are akin to mild recommendations to take a supplement, rather than to attempt to reproduce the effect in a larger trial.<p>The very premises upon which people base their visits to examine and other sites is flawed. Examine has zero incentive to address or repudiate them.<p>The success of their business is dependent on there being a perceived efficacy for supplements and unregulated drugs, and the idea that reading online about more varied and obscure supplements will eventually find you the one that fixes your problem. But for a lot of perceived problems, there will simply be no supplement-based solution.
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