[HN Gopher] Google and The Online Slang Dictionary (2020)
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Google and The Online Slang Dictionary (2020)
Author : xrayarx
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-09-05 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onlineslangdictionary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlineslangdictionary.com)
| xrayarx wrote:
| If this is true, it is truly horrible: know someone at google and
| just sink the competition in one fell swoop. Although one has to
| say that serving via http certainly is not helping.
| bliteben wrote:
| https://nypost.com/2022/05/19/onlyfans-star-claims-she-had-s...
| rasz wrote:
| Wouldnt be the first time cough pinterest cough.
| adventured wrote:
| This has been posted repeatedly over time. The problem with the
| site is that it has the structure of a shallow content farm and
| Google hates those.
|
| Most of the pages are being properly drilled with a shallow
| content penalty. The pages are easily 90-95%+ constructed of
| repeating content farm linking or text repeating structures (the
| biggest piece of content on a given page is a content farm
| structure, this: "Slang terms with the same root words"). That's
| garbage filler that once upon a time was abused by content farms
| to fake a full page of content (which is exactly what this site
| is trying to do). Google destroyed that approach to luring
| traffic via SEO abuse a very long time ago.
|
| To say nothing of the fact that it's just not a valuable content
| segment today. It's not novel, it's not in any way superior to
| its competition. 15 years ago a slang online dictionary might
| have been an amusing entertainment source for a couple of
| minutes. The interest in properties like this has imploded over
| time. Broadly these types of farms have no future and they have
| been dead for nearly a decade.
|
| It'd be like being shocked that your shallow content recipe index
| with 25,000 recipes no longer gets the Google traffic & love that
| it did in 2005. Or a famous quotes site. Or a lyrics site. Well
| no kidding.
| dazc wrote:
| I would agree but, just out of interest, I got #1 on DDG for
| 'slang dictionary' and #2 on google uk? That's really
| unexpected for any site not using https.
| sublimefire wrote:
| Dunno it might be more interesting to compare actual slang
| searches. In my case "slang mula" returns:
|
| - no5 in DDG
|
| - page 3 in google
|
| Having said that I keep being disappointed with Google search
| results in general and use DDG these days instead. It might
| be related to their algo becoming shittier with time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's the #1 for my searches at DDG, but I can't find it on
| the first 3 pages on google. (How do I tell ads apart on
| google nowadays? The 3rd link is for Urban Dictionary, but I
| think it's an ad.)
|
| Remember that google results are completely personalized.
| Nobody else sees what you see.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >This has been posted repeatedly over time. The problem with
| the site is that it has the structure of a shallow content farm
| and Google hates those.
|
| Are we using different Googles or something? Google search
| absolutely _adores_ shallow content farms, at least on topics
| that are typically discussed on HN.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'd expect simple signals like the strapline being bracketed
| (suggesting lower importance for those words) and the lack of use
| of "American Slang, English Slang, and Urban Slang" and hence
| missing keyword phrases to make a difference, especially if the
| title and strap are then used in link slugs?
|
| Are these sorts of signals moot nowadays, is there any on-page
| aspect left?
| eek2121 wrote:
| While Google does have manual penalties, I do not believe that is
| what is going on here.
|
| There are a few problems with the site, for example, it
| redirected me to use HTTP instead of using HTTPS:
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2014/08/https-as-r...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Why is that a problem?
| callalex wrote:
| This article explains in an approachable way. See especially
| the section on https "myth-conceptions" about why you need to
| use it even on webpages that don't handle sensitive data.
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/why-use-https/
| JHorse wrote:
| Apart from just generally being insecure, I believe google
| penalizes what it classes as misconfiguration/bad practices
| on the server side
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Matt Cutts and the early era of SEO and spam. If you are into SEO
| history, feel free to google "Matt Cutts John Chow" as an example
| of how things evolved when the Google SPAM boss himself was
| approachable directly.
|
| I remember many interactions between them and at the time, Matt
| was pretty open about the then-new SPAM filter team at Google and
| penalties. Here is a blog posting for context:
| https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/something-is-wrong-on-the-int...
|
| John Chow was a blogger back then and prominently gamed google
| ("Made for Adsense") using - and enter Matt Cutts: abusing -
| Pagerank to boost his website.
|
| They had many interactions and several bans were lifted because
| of these interactions.
|
| https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/comments-on-our-webmaster-gui...
| skilled wrote:
| The site has definitely been _nuked_ as you can see here,
|
| https://i.imgur.com/GadzIiz.png
|
| It has gone from 3.2M traffic in 2020 to 172k today.
|
| I'm just having a hard time with the timelines mentioned in the
| article. He says the site was manually penalized in 2011... but
| between 2016 and 2020 the site was super healthy as far as
| positions (traffic) goes.
|
| The site started losing most of its traffic around June 2021,
| which is also when Google did a big Core Update,
|
| https://searchengineland.com/google-june-2021-core-update-ro...
|
| and I definitely know that this one has been talked about a lot
| in SEO circles, even being mentioned to this day.
|
| But yes.. I don't get why this article is worded the way it is
| because it is contradictive to what is actually going on.
| jsnell wrote:
| Discussion three years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822080
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Google 's penalty against The Online Slang Dictionary_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822080 - Oct 2020 (69
| comments)
| biogene wrote:
| If these were separate companies, There is a case to be made
| against Youtube for the excessive pre-roll ads that take up a lot
| of screen space.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Definitely has something to do with the giant warning banner that
| the site doesn't have https://
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(page generated 2023-09-05 23:02 UTC)