Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by johnny_reilly on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @06:42AM
(#36860416)
Again anecdotal, but I lost the majority of my SEO traffic late last year around the time of a core update. I've spent the best part of a year attempting to repair it, on the assumption I'd committed some heinous SEO crime. The more time that passes, I'm starting to think that the issue isn't mine so much as Google's. It's baffling. I wrote about it here:
Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by DeusExMachina on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @07:22AM
(#36860698)
Looking at your post and the HN discussion, I am also of the same impression.
I don’t see what you did wrong, it must have been the algorithm change. My parents had a business that was killed by a Facebook algorithm change. Building a business around any of the big tech companies seems very risky.
I think Google search has just declined a lot. I guess they’re losing the constant cat and mouse game with SEO. It seems worse than it has ever been, I’m relying more on ChatGPT and copilot now.
I can only imagine that LLMs will be the end of any content based search ranking. I don’t know how they’ll adapt to that.
Maybe Google (semi/permanently?) penalized your domain when spammers started using your GA4 tag?
Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by johnny_reilly on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:57AM
(#36874819)
Gosh that would suck. Sounds plausible though
If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.
I looked into it and some other websites benefited from the update, so who knows what changes they made and why.