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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.
This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get <i>any</i> legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc. These tag your links as nofollow/ugc, so they don't count towards SEO.<p>The net effect is that pretty much the <i>only</i> link signal is from link farms and paid media. If you don't crap over the internet with shady tactics, you will not appear in search results.<p>We lost our vote, by our own choice.
The internet is an SEO landfill (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764</a>)<p>This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.
It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:<p>> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.<p>At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.<p>The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public).<p>Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such.<p>This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actually crazy how there is literally no quality alternative.
Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? I laughed out loud multiple times. Kudos to the author for making such a depressing topic so hysterical.
Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them.<p>Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.<p>But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.<p>Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.<p>Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?<p>Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?<p>The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.<p>To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
Have you thought about alternative monetization methods like Buy Me A Coffee? A good "this work is done for free <i>pleading emoji</i>" message can get you some decent cash. Maybe selling your site to someone that can monetize it is your best bet. Yeah your site isn't what Google Ads wants, that's a shame, but then that's on you to come up with an alternative.
I ran into this as well about 2 years ago. I thought it’d be cool to create a site that’d algorithmically estimate the snowpack for mountains based on observations and elevation. It was a very rough estimate, but still better than using 1 square mile observations, which obviously could vary by 10k+ feet of elevation.<p>When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.<p>It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?
Yep, that sounds about right.<p>The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.<p>It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.”<p>Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter.<p>They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.
On one hand I totally agree with the Luddite.<p>On the other hand, why do we need Google for recipes. Everyone eats multiple times per day. You only need to host text, really. How come the world hasn't come together to create this. How can the world ever come together if we can't even create this.
It happened to me too, with my simple site for generating acrostic poems [0].<p>It would only show the poems create. I tried Adsense, was rejected for lack of content (probably, because they are mysterious about the reason they reject you). Then I tried adding lists of words starting with the letters used as initials for the acrostics. Rejected again.<p>Then I gave up, and decided to use affiliate links.<p>[0] www.acrostic.ai
I had to do a similar thing for my gif maker <a href="https://gifmemes.io" rel="nofollow">https://gifmemes.io</a> when I've tried monetization through ads. Luckily for my users, the revenue was less than 10% of what it makes through watermark removal sales, so I've removed ads and dummy content all together.
Wow, roughly 50% content, 50% ads.<p>Who controls this ratio? Is it configurable? I.e. could OP choose minimal ads and reduced monetization? Or does everyone always get the firehose?
The author has a very valid point about recipe websites. If you don't have a couple hundred words of prose and some multimedia, even if it's complete nonsense, it may as well not exist according to search engines. It's not just ad sales, though. It's also search rankings and even organic traffic.<p>I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:<p>- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes<p>- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)<p>- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.<p>- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.<p>What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.<p><a href="https://some-natalie.dev/recipes/grill-bread/" rel="nofollow">https://some-natalie.dev/recipes/grill-bread/</a> for easy grilled bread.<p>If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).
A website that does not display any of the article text without JS is not "perfectly good" IMO in the first place! Most inappropriate for a site called The Luddite!<p>I had a site that used to make me a useful side income. Its mostly lots of short pages explaining specific things, on average in a few hundred words. <a href="https://moneyterms.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://moneyterms.co.uk/</a><p>It lost its Google rankings many years ago.<p>It used to have adsense on it, but when I reapplied after moving countries they refused it on similar grounds to those mentioned in the article.<p>I am thinking of adding some fluff at the top of each page an seeing how it does.
We have in some respects done this to ourselves. We've created a funding model such that watching ads is the primary way we pay for the content and services that we consume. Then, our desire for privacy causes us to restrict the data that websites can collect about us, leading to less targeted and therefore less valuable ads.<p>So now we have to watch ever more ads which are ever less valuable.<p>For me, I'd rather that companies had better tracking and could therefore show me fewer, more personally relevant ads. And maybe some strong laws that prevent them from sharing my data with the government.
Honestly, the actual Luddite blog looks almost as AI-generated as the actually AI-generated blogspam he added.<p>>VW told law enforcement they would "not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen," according to the sherrif's office. Perhaps it should be unsurprising from a company that started during the Third Reich and used forced Jewish labor.<p>Wut?<p>(Seriously, they're trying to claim that there's some connection between two events that involved the same company but happened around 80 years apart on different continents and people speaking different languages, with an intervening war? Not to mention that the linked article says that Volkswagen has a process for cooperating with law enforcement and that this was just a mistake. And I do <i>not</i> believe they are lying about having such a process.)
I read through to the end, skipping swathes of GPT-3 nonsense, and I don't really want to use the wider internet anymore.
Of course I will for awhile yet, buy these feelings add up, I'm getting older, and I have the luxury of being able to go without it except in service to others (medical portals, work email and related websites). If I hadn't opened HN I'd be out preparing the garden that much sooner, but The Luddite looks resonant, and I appreciate learning about it.<p>Like quitting caffeine and related decaffeinated drinks (no coffee or tea is grown in WA that I know of, and I sleep better now anyway), and eventually chocolate (ditto, but much harder to let go of), quitting the internet is happening in fits and starts.<p>Going to put the next layer of compost onto our wee garden bed, longing for unfenced, ecologically-balanced land instead, with the massive centuries-old Douglas-fir still standing. I am reminded every day of our short-sightedness, by the huge stumps and fairy-ring encircled low spots.
"I don't have unique content, and/or my content is unoriginal. Or, my content is low quality."<p>I experienced it myself when I tried adding Google AdSense to <a href="https://techinterviewexp.site" rel="nofollow">https://techinterviewexp.site</a>.<p>Google folks don't even see what the site is about.
Depressing. Would be interesting to see if once he'd established a record with Google for attracting users, if the site owner were to slowly drop the ruinous features, whether Google would turn a blind eye and in time it would be back to how it used to be (except with ads)
If the presence of Google ads on a site is a negative signal then a search engine that down ranks sites with ads might be a good alternative? is this what Kagi does?
If you want to rank high (search, stores) you need to spend money on adwords and implemented adsense/admob. Approximately 30% on what you earn wiyh Adsense needs to be spend on Adwords. Only by completing that circle you can become part of the eco system.
Its very hard to rank high organically. Only if your name is Ronaldo or Coca Cola you have a chance. But otherwise you need to buy yourself in.
"Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! We're Alex and Taylor, and we're on a mission..."<p>This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.</rant><p>i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.
Is there a public resource recording past google search results?<p>Reason for asking is because even 10 years ago, I’d think the top recipe site results were like they are now, but there’s no way to actually know that without an archive.
So Google Search sends people to this (originally simple popular) site, but it’s not ad worthy?<p>They would rather send people to large piles of crap?<p>So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.
"anticapitalist" complains about a capitalist company doing something that capitalist companies are obligated to do because their purpose is to serve their shareholders, not cater to every unique situation of every person that uses the Internet. "I want my website to show Google's advertisements and give me money, but if Google is going to make it difficult for me then I want to complain about it!" excuse me while I rub my thumb and index (haha, search engine play on words!) together to play a sad tune on the world's smallest violin. billions of websites work fine without having anything to do with soulless Google.<p><a href="https://snigel.com/blog/top-adsense-alternatives" rel="nofollow">https://snigel.com/blog/top-adsense-alternatives</a><p>positive outlooks work better than negative ones, and embracing challenges with vigor rather than a sense of "injustice! here I am nailed upon a cross!" is the way to have a more spiritually rewarding life, imo.
I mean it's hard to keeping growing 10 % every year if you're already one of the biggest companies in the world, so I think it's unavoidable that at some point you will prioritise revenue over user interest if those are misaligned, which they seem to be for search. People using search engines and companies wanting search traffic have vastly different incentives, so it's even surprising to me that the system worked so well for such a long time. Recently it just seems that the whole thing starts to come off at the seams, there's just too much pressure from all sides that squeezes against user interest. The last 10-20 years were characterised by strong growth of the web and with that revenue per user icnreased as people did more and more stuff online, but maybe now we're reaching a saturation phase were revenue per user won't increase naturally anymore, so you have to start hacking user attention to squeeze out more revenue. Seems very similar to the streaming platforms, all was great when their growth was fuelled by user growth, but as that seems to saturate companies switch gears and monetise individual users more agressively as a growth driver.
You decided to ruin a perfectly good website by adding ads. Google did not force you to do that and the enshittification required to get Google to approve the ads is peanuts compared to the ads themselves.<p>> I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.<p>"Legit" ads can have much worse outcomes on people's lives than downloading a virus.
Trying to read it and I find it quite ironic that a website called "the luddite" requires you to have Javascript (which I don’t have in my default browser)