For technical queries it's gotten even worse in the past years. It flat out ignores string matches or decides that I wanted something else. What's even stranger is that there are sites that match these strings 1:1 and they are helpful but they don't show up. I discovered that while scrabbling through Stackoverflow answers and then trying to find a site I knew had all the specific keywords. It's also not robots.txt or something like that, most of these were just regular blogposts on either github oder blogger. They probably drank too much AI kool-aid.

At this point, I'm starting to use duckduckgo not for privacy concerns but because they literally work better for stuff like this

Unfortunately, it isn't reliable and DDG is much more willing than Google to say "I've got nothing". I default to DDG but often it is this type of situation (searching for error messages) where Google works when DDG didn't.

Agreed.

I used to run a very tiny phone number directory, where I provided big company’s actual phone numbers, unlike their websites that provided everything but.

For a while, I would rank on the first page, and provided clear and quick results.

Then around 2012, they really dropped, and your search result just became 10 different pages on the domain of the corporation.

Well it kind of makes sense. I would not trust some third party website with a phone number of my bank for example. You don’t want to call someone if that number is not listed on the official website

Then you end up in a no-man’s land where the official website makes it hard for you to find their support number too.

Though to your point, one Canadian ISP changed its support number. And my website even recommended people print it out in case their internet goes out and they can’t look up phone numbers...

Our reputation is pretty damn solid - that's what makes this even more perplexing.

High profile edge-case where Google is clearly getting it wrong? Just talked to the partners at the search firm I work for and assuming you'd let us make a case study out of it, we'd be willing to take a look and potentially offer our services gratis for the prestige and referral business alone that a recovery of this magnitude is likely to drum up for us. Let me know if you are interested.

How can you help? It sounds like this is something that needs Google’s direct attention.

I am just noticing that you own/manage this site and are getting a lot of grief about subjective design opinions from many random developer types that do not consume content in the same manner as your audience or live in reality, so can see the frustration.

The May to present drop in positioning is catastrophic.

The content is fantastic for your space and design aligns more with journal websites than health/nutrition space. That may not be beneficial to keeping users more accustomed to image heavy,popular health space.

Contrast/Accessibility is poor - What standards were you following in a redesign?

After the redesign and as your organic positioning started plummeting - did you identify any increase in 404's and/or do visitor recordings of the traffic you do have?

Most of the titles being identified as "clickbaity" should be your OG titles and it is true that there is a weakness in on page optimization decisions and general architecture across the site. The backlink profile IS problematic! but with on page and general architecture concerns that could be improved that would be the first order of business if I was trying to restore this to former glory.

Seeing the WEB Md and drugs.com / health.com that appear in positions that your site and content are much better qualified for is concerning. You are being screwed.

Just looking at your "white kidney bean extract" article from your profile and then seeing the Livestrong article and other crap that is better positioned points out the terrible weaknesses in the last 4-5 years of Google's improved positioning for bigger brands and move away from exact matching. Livestrong hides their references in a dropdown and sticks an adblock there.

I point that out because in the end - the white hat quality guidelines are garbage and propaganda and rarely reflect reality in the enterprise/brand space .

Make the site more accessible to the average reader and those who are first researching supplements and improve your social channel. Google is not reacting logically in your positioning in comparison to the structure,positioning and quality of your competitors. But the site could be much better composed and structured.

> image heavy

Yup - we eschew that.

> Contrast/Accessibility is poor

Not sure I follow - it's black text on white, 400px weight, 20px size.

> After the redesign

Our rankings actually spiked up 2 days after new design.

No 404s - it was a superficial change. Time on site went up. Delivery of content was faster (eg we moved to Cloudflare).

> clickbaity

I keep telling this to people - 90% of our traffic was to our supplement pages. They all had the same format that was very matter-of-fact. We only tried "emotional" title tags in the past year, and they didn't do anything.

> that there is a weakness in on page optimization decisions and general architecture across the site.

I'm honestly not sure I follow. Everything is under the /supplements/xxx or /nutrition/xxx format, and the index is fully available on both root folders. We interlink heavily, and we have our own internal wikicode (so eg creatine is linked as [creatine]) so the link is always accurate as is the tooltip quick summary.

> The backlink profile IS problematic!

We haven't bought a single link ever. We get random links all the time - eg Orlando Sentinel today: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/health/os-ne-health-fake-vit...

> Livestrong

King of crap :)

> But the site could be much better composed and structured.

I'm being honest here - I don't see how. We've asked our users, and the HEM is more popular and should be higher, but we've done tests on usabilityhub, we track user behaviour (eg crazyegg), we've hired UX and UI experts (and other SEO experts). Our customer retention is great. I feel like I'm missing something.

"We Eschew That"

Then you eschew the massive audience of lazy gym goers, bodybuilders, referrals from the latest Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Ferriss ..basically the entire casual health crowd that want's to pretend they do hardcore research but is jumping away from you due to the text heavy layout.

I read code,I like minimalism, I am not being personal here, your designing outside of a greater potential audience and leaning towards an academic/journal design. Any UX expert that has not pointed that out, is just a job title, Go back to them and demand an example or case study where their recommendations did anything .. the industry is wrought with fools

In years past, If you were to be searching anywhere in the nation for audits relating to whether your website was legally compliant under ADA guidelines (accessible) you would run into my team quickly. Stepped away from that angle, it's boring, but still necessary, You pointed out your body font color and it's relationship to the background, now examine all the other options - particularly link colors and your choices for fine print,citations and small text. There are plenty of easy scan tools that will show you deficiencies in contrast choices including your Chrome browser.

Neither of those comments relate to your loss in rankings though -- but are deficits in your previous partners decisions and whoever made final approvals and whatever "experts" you trusted. Fairly basic stuff there. Im on your side,impressive content, I would be a reader, I am just offering some fairly simple fixes.

"moved to cloudflare"

I use cloudflare. I use cloudflare on dozens of sites, I have never personally seen a correlation of a negative impact, or really see the bad neighborhood impact as being as significant as your drop was - but there are a lot of case studies and forum posts from people who swear by a cloudflare correlation to significant drops in positioning. It's worth testing what removing it will do.

I didnt call your titles "clickbaity" - im just referencing past comments and pointing out there is nothing wrong with them, but they should be page titles and OG titles, not meta titles.

If you dont know what I mean on document structure and on page optimization options - then I really have no idea what manner of SEO opinions you could have received, "we" all have different strategies and positions, but this certainly should have benn discussed with you.. as I kind of referenced, the printed "white hat" dont over-optimize crap is only good for selling enterpise seo consultations .. your superfoods article has 4 images named superfoods_*, you have wasted opportunities throughout the site. Anyone with a basic SEO background should be able to pick out page by page and show you missed opportunities (but would have nothing to do with the dramatic drop) The directory structure you are highlighting as good, is what I am highlighting as bad, it does not align with queries, it aligns with your own encyclopedic concept of data organization ala journal websites

A hint I would make is that you seem to drop the categories in your breadcrumbs/visible architecture from the page urls in favor of shorter urls. I never would have done that myself. /supplements/pyritinol/ should be in /cognitive-function/ or even better /cognitive-function-brain-health/

The backlink profile is problematic

I am not pointing fingers, just agreeing with a previous commenter, it is not an unusual backlink profile, it looks exactly like what my own would have looked like 8 years ago on hastily made affiliate sites that could generate 5 figures a month...in there first months (those days are gone), it just does not follow what the average "natural" site looks like.

As an authority site as you rightly pointed out, crap sites will link to you to mask their crapness, but why is the volume of off page anchors so perfectly matched to exactly what "you" would it need it to be> That would be a very sophisticated attack against you

I suspect your user testing was for an intelligent crowd or done by hacks, but usability is a legit platform - how big was the sample?

You will be moving up the ranks for "Adrafinil" shortly, for that term, Look at your search competition for the term, how do you stand out?

I cant believe i am saying this, but there is such a thing as too much interlinking and excess outbound links.

You just experienced the horror of google's nonsense. your site is far superior to the sites currently earning better positions - both in quality and traditional metrics we have all bee chatting about - you got hosed... so why do you seem to have such an organic focused strategy?

One post on Facebook a day? A cover image that is not optimized for mobile, little use of video content (you have tons of it in google's index)

You might not have purchased links ..would Sol? Lots of references to examine.com and it's rise to 7 figures in the entrepreneur/marketing/growth blogs - exactly the space full of people that do this type of quick and dirty link building.

Just wanted to try and answer your response, I realize this is a very stressful time and general jabs arent helpful, so was pecking out the most useful response I could on a phone ...and other than possibly the cloudflare option, nothing should be an immediate fix, but if your going to be digging into recovery

1. Open up new channels - minimize google reliance 2. Social space is perfect for supplements, get a social team 3. Find a middle ground between minimalism and "popular science" to make your site more attractive to a larger audience. 4. Try some actual optimization around queries instead of building around a sterile encyclopedia directory 5. Bribe a Googler 6. If all else fails, even the playing field and pay blackhatters to fill your crappy competition with unnatural backlink profiles, because if you didnt do it, someone did it to you, and they had money and a reason and Google is seemingly not following their own rules in how your being assessed 7. Look at the hubpages example - the site deserved it's destruction, but watch the desperation and poor decisions made trying to "fix" it for Google and the complete lack of feedback from Google they ever managed to get

Hopefully, Sullivans comment holds true and the algo gets tweaked just right to restore you to where you belong - and the tiny list of concerns I pecked out becomes meaningless for you.

I am Sol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Orwell (see previous name).

i think all of us should start promoting alternative search engines. Google has indeed become impenetrable , and gamed by seos , and with amp they are becoming outright evil. Does DDG offer website search box?

Yes, it does: https://duckduckgo.com/search_box.

Yeah that seems to give rise to sites like Medium where folks post because they know they'll get seen. Even people who are fairly high profile for the given topic.

Considering the risk of that data getting locked away behind paywalls that doesn't seem good.

> Google still has a long way to go before they solve the search problem

For any search query, there's only two results: 1, what you're actually looking for 2, what Google wants you to see

Unfortunately Google has 'solved' the search problem by always optimising for 2, and most times it's never what you want to see. That's not just health results either, for most anything outside of 'pop culture' Google is garbage.

For any given query there are thousands of people giving that same query with slightly or largely different intent and a universe of results that suit different portions of the users better or worse.

Reducing this to a singular desired result and "what google wants you to see" is absurd. Google still provides pretty good results for most things for most people. Pretending otherwise is a waste of breath.

Statistical matching results in platforms helping con artists find victims and helping crazy people spread their poisonous crazy. If you try to avoid noxious end results you will be accused of interfering. If you don't you will be declared complicit.

Where does the appropriate middle ground lie?

Sounds like we need a new search engine, a better search engine. One that returns the things you're actually searching for.

Duckduckgo?

I just checked duckduckgo and examine doesn't appear to be censored there. I then switched my default search engine.

I hope that this means duckduckgo is indeed not going to censoring. I'd like keep websites for adult who can judge for themselves alive.

Isn't that just a wrapper for the same search engines?

I believe duckduckgo uses bing for search results. (See https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1). If you compare searches on bing and duckduckgo, they are very similar.

The main advantage of duckduckgo is that they aren't tracking you and the ads they show are just based on the search keywords not based on a digital profile they have compiled like google and facebook.

Never mind the bad search results, consider the narrative-shaping power they wield.