On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer

128 点作者 _pius大约 11 年前

21 条评论

pessimizer大约 11 年前

This is the problem with using associative reasoning to detect bad actors. Bad actors are attempting to look like good actors, but good actors aren't trying to avoid looking like bad actors. Bad actors will target a stereotyped set of good actor attributes, and your filters will mostly catch unique or idiosyncratic good actors, who aren't targeting anything.Unless your good actors are willing to conform to a published set of (nerfed) behaviors that don't have the possibility of being bad, or are willing to register and be vetted by you individually, you can't help but be overwhelmed by false positives. It's the same reason why the most intricate, pervasive, and technologically flexible surveillance system in history can't find a terrorist.edit: I think the entire endeavor is doomed. The bubble associating your current searches with your past searches, and attempts to eliminate spam and eHow through algorithms have just resulted in eliminating most sites from the searchable internet. You don't realize how bad its gotten from all of the search engines until you spend an hour on something like millonshort (which looks like it's down now.)

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pradocchia大约 11 年前

I'm glad I experienced the old internet back in its heyday, when high quality sites linked to other high quality sites, and Google exposed this natural topology for all to explore. Google's success eventually led to the end of the old internet: AdSense captured its value and then SEO perverted it with noise.I expect within 5 years some crotchety old programmer will have build a search engine that penalizes sites for anything more than basic markup. No JS, no CSS, no hints of a CMS. Maybe it's already been done. "Old Skool Search"And it will still be a poor imitation, because if there is one thing you can't recreate and experience for yourself, it is an internet gone by.

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stopcodon大约 11 年前

MetaFilter at least has the advantage of being old and respected enough in tech circles to get the attention of Hacker News and Matt Cutts himself when something like this happens. For the vast majority of legitimate websites who see their traffic drop or become non-existent when google pushes an update to their ranking algorithms, there is virtually no recourse. I understand it's a necessary evil and there will always be collateral damage when trying to combat spammy websites, but at the same time it's scary to know that there are people whose sole source of income is web traffic and overnight it can disappear without explanation.

morbius大约 11 年前

It's amazing how crappy Google results are nowadays. It's all Buzzfeed, Crackle, Mashable, Y!A, WikiHow, eHow, and other garbage results akin to those garbage sites. True information like you'd find on MeFi or some of the more interesting subreddits is now completely buried. There's no other alternatives, either. DuckDuckGo pulls info from less popular sites, and you can find real gems with the right search parameters and hashbangs, but the relevance is not nearly as good as Google's.I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think since we started getting blog/aggregator/quizlet-type sites on the web back in 2009-2011, the quality of search results has gone far, far down the river.

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jere大约 11 年前

>At last, it’s time to dig into what happened with MetaFilter. The short story is that I don’t know.

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jljljl大约 11 年前

Man, the use of Vine in this article is awful. It made the point he was trying to make so much more confusing vs. just posting the diagrams.

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dminor大约 11 年前

This is what's so frustrating about Google. I don't want to spend time poking your black box to try to divine why my company's site has dropped in rankings. Especially when that means major architectural changes with no guarantee of any sort of payoff.The small online retailer I work for experienced a 1/3 drop in Google traffic a year and a half ago. No discernible reason. Thin content? Maybe - we do have a lot of filters to make it easier to browse products.Of course, these are things we built for our customers, not Google. I'm not going to spend a month or two rearchitecting them just to see if Google likes it.

prawn大约 11 年前

From Haughey's Medium post (<a href="https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0</a>) about it all:"Advice online was to scale back the "top heavy" ads... I removed most ads to the absolute minimum of just 1 or 2 per page..."Also mentions first running ads that blended with the content to then running ads that stood out from the content.Funny thing is that if you are an AdSense publisher, you get emails from Google all the time telling you what you should do. If you aren't using your full allocation of 3 ads and 2 LUs per page, they will often email to remind you to run more ads. And they'll encourage you to run ads in prominent positions towards the top of the page. And to run ever-larger ads. And then change from text-only ads to image ads.I have had AdSense-monetised sites for around 10 years and have had seemingly automated emails as well as personal emails from account managers about these things.

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lauradhamilton大约 11 年前

Perhaps it's a "thin content" penalty.Looking at the site, the posts have low wordcount. No images. Lots of links.That's kind of consistent with the other trends we're seeing from Panda 4.0.Thoughts?

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jrochkind1大约 11 年前

Even let's just assume for the sake of argument everyone agrees on who's the good guys and who's the bad guys.There's still no way for an algorithm to correctly exclude all bad guys and avoid excluding all good guys. And trying to improve in one area often decreases in the other. (Before even getting to the fact it's a dynamic system where the bad guys are constantly trying to adapt to avoid exclusion)> Often, there is an inverse relationship between precision and recall, where it is possible to increase one at the cost of reducing the other. Brain surgery provides an obvious example of the tradeoff. Consider a brain surgeon tasked with removing a cancerous tumor from a patient’s brain. The surgeon needs to remove all of the tumor cells since any remaining cancer cells will regenerate the tumor. Conversely, the surgeon must not remove healthy brain cells since that would leave the patient with impaired brain function. The surgeon may be more liberal in the area of the brain she removes to ensure she has extracted all the cancer cells. This decision increases recall but reduces precision. On the other hand, the surgeon may be more conservative in the brain she removes to ensure she extracts only cancer cells. This decision increases precision but reduces recall. That is to say, greater recall increases the chances of removing healthy cells (negative outcome) and increases the chances of removing all cancer cells (positive outcome). Greater precision decreases the chances of removing healthy cells (positive outcome) but also decreases the chances of removing all cancer cells (negative outcome).<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall</a>

harrystone大约 11 年前

Obviously, what happened to metafilter isn't right.But it should also be obvious why Google doesn't say what needs to be done to remove a penalty. The sites that should receive a penalty will just use that information to further game the system.

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sandycheeks大约 11 年前

We had a site get hit hard by Panda 4.0 but we are not surprised. About a 35% drop overnight May 20th.An observation that we have made over the years is that significant changes to Google's algorithms always seem to soften in the subsequent months for us and we return to a high level in the Google SERPs.The site in question is a site where we curate free crafts projects and patterns which my spouse and I began in the 90's with our family and friends. The idea was to gather together excellent crafts projects on little known mostly small sites with the criteria that they are free, complete, usually require no email/login and are within two clicks of us. We still update it every week.Over the years we have used user feedback to make design decisions. For example, when Pinterest became popular we got a lot of feedback to use masonry instead of tables for our images/links and lately we've been moving to make it fully responsive because we get a lot of feedback from tablet users.The only time we were manually penalized by Google involved an issue where we had ignored our user's complaints about so they were right and we were wrong. We fixed it.Our site looks thin to an algorithm and we almost always get hit by large algorithm changes but over the subsequent months, the site always moves back up and ranks very well. We can only imagine that this means the algorithm is somehow tempered by our visitor's behavior (we use adsense and analytics so they see all) and is not simply a switch that is thrown and left on.I have to wonder how much MetaFilter has done to gather user feedback. The answer to their problem may be there.Disclosure: The site described is AllCrafts

dchuk大约 11 年前

Anyone with any experience in the SEO world knows that Danny Sullivan doesn't have a fucking clue anymore. He's no different than a talking head reporting on the daily ups and downs of the stock market on your local news.

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onewaystreet大约 11 年前

MetaFilter's real problem is that on a web that is currently built around sharing, its audience shuns social media. I've never seen a MetaFilter link in any of my feeds. I've never seen a story on one of the major blogs use MetaFilter as a source (expect for this Google story).

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blauwbilgorgel大约 11 年前

MetaFilter should definitely nofollow their external links in the comments. That makes sure that spammy/unnatural links do not count as a vote (which turns MetaFilter into a bad neighborhood as far as search engines are concerned, and attracts the spammers).... <a href="#">Sample</a>, an Indian online pharmacy. I have not ordered from them myself. ...They should look real hard at their site structure and which pages they allow to be indexed. Too many vague subdomains, and 'posts tagged with...' in the index.I wonder what their user metrics show to Google. I don't think Google is penalizing sites based on a mere hunch, or won't notice that a site like MetaFilter got hit by an algorithmic update.This site is someone's child, so it's hard to be too critical, but the view that MetaFilter hosts the quality content of the internet is far too rosy.Pages full like: <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/67307/Gampoumlmbampoumlc" rel="nofollow">http://www.metafilter.com/67307/Gampoumlmbampoumlc</a> Which are veiled spam pages. Pages full of inane babble about medical issues or personal drama, with the credibility and authority of a Yahoo Answers page. Just because people paid MetaFilter to post, and a site is heavily moderated, does not mean it adds anything to the search results for most generic search terms.Then most links or interesting stories are from elsewhere on the web. MetaFilter is kinda like trying to rank with the old Digg comments: not the best place on the internet to read a discussion surrounding a topic. Why deserve to rank for linking to a funny or controversial news article, and riling up 15 comments or so?In the end there may be far more natural reasons for this. The user signals showed something was wrong with the site. People bounced a lot (be it the design, be it because you can't comment without paying, be it because 15 random internet comments have little value). In the meantime Reddit and other sites grew to large communities. You don't see Reddit comment threads ranking all too high either, unless they are really special, popular or significant, like the president doing an AMA.

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Istof大约 11 年前

If Google ends-up fixing this, I hope that they don't add metafilter to a white-list and call it a day. The results nowadays almost seem like a hand curated list that would only help the person that made that list.

gdeglin大约 11 年前

As someone who's not familiar with MetaFilter, my initial impression is that the design feels outdated and I can't quickly identify how the site works or the value it provides.I'm sure that over time I could grow to love MetaFilter, and possibly even find value in the qualities that give me this impression. But perhaps Google has an algorithm that lowers the rankings of sites that scare away casual users who stumble upon it from a Google search result (High and/or quick bounce rate maybe?).

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minusSeven大约 11 年前

Fact: I didn't know anything about Meta Filter until I read the blog about it yesterday.

whoismua大约 11 年前

Useless article by Danny Sullivan, his columns have offered zero advice for years now. He knows nothing special these days.So MetaFilter has been getting some "help" from Google's public relations squad, as is usually the case with sites that hit a nerve with HN. What about the thousand or million other sites that lost their traffic?

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wnevets大约 11 年前

tbh I hate it when MetaFilter shows up on my search results.

recursion1133大约 11 年前

Sounds like illegitimate backlinking. If you don't know why your page isn't showing up in searches, then look up the blacklists...