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Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

Except that examine is an excellent site, and their cursory look was actually more of a "motivated reasoning look". If you land directly on an examine page for a supplement, it's quite clear the site is really well done.

I'm a designer as well, not just a developer, and it's layout is really well done: clean, straightforward, clearly presented, and the data is easy to find. They link to studies and always err on the side of caution in their descriptions.

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They also recently went through a redesign and I think it's really clean. But yeah, idk about their homepage and stuff, but go on any of their pages for a specific supplement and every sentence is thoroughly cited. It's also a great resource for finding relevant studies if you wanna do your own research.

> They also recently went through a redesign

In my experience, this is often the cause of mysterious drops in search ranking. It's very easy to inadvertently introduce changes that negatively impact your ranking without even noticing.

At a quick glance, I noticed that many articles on examine.com link to hundreds of external references (e.g. more than half the page of https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/). In Internet Archive snapshots from before the redesign, these have the rel="nofollow" attribute, but on the current site, they do not. I'm not saying that's the cause, but it might be worth looking into exactly what changed in the redesign.

We removed rel=nofollow AFTER the rankings went down.

There are almost always drop offs when you redesign and Google reevaluates your content, sure add back in no follow if you like but Google is really clever. It sees every page on the site has changed to something else; if that is a recent change we’ll go with Occam’s razor here.

I guess I meant recent as in about 3 months ago. But hey maybe you should notify them of the issue

Ah a redesign - I wonder if they had some migration issues it is possible to tank your traffic if you don't know what your doing.

Nope - if anything traffic slightly went up after it went live.

except, how does one just magically land one of these specific pages? usually, that would be from a search result page, but that's the point of the post. after that, it's using their site's main landing page, and then browsing/searching/etc. so the main page still has to be usable, and not just the individual articles

With the big search box right on the homepage?

Not everyone is being hostile. I think you've been beat up on this thread, but I wasn't being aggressive to you. I quite clearly stated that you use the search page on the landing site to find stuff locally. The original post was specifically about not getting results in search engines, and that's what I was attempting to support.

For me, I've never even heard of the website in question. Why would I, as it's not a field of interest for me. However, if I were to search for it, it would be a search engine result, not a search field on some website I have never knew existed.

I mean he’s right. The home page is fine too it has a big clear search box. I think he’s just pointing out there’s really no “there” there. The examine site is legit, information packed, easy to navigate and parse, and it’s primary use case is landing via search results so it’s best pages are the ones you see most.

Sidebar: examine is one of two sites I regular use the google site filter for: “site:examine.com (supplement name)”. A good search engine would put it first for basically any supplement.

Except everyone is missing the point that you can't find it in a search engine. Has anyone RTFA? That's the entire point of the article. Using a website's local search ability is irrelevant to people that have never heard of the website to visit. The search engine is where people go to find something they don't know where to go for the information they seek. Hell, parental units still go to google first (as in browser default for new window/tab) and type in facebook.com in the search field rather than directly into the browser's location field.

Also, the main page has 2 search boxes if we want to get pedantic about it. Why? I'm assuming as a dev type mindset that they will do the same thing as one is always there while the landing page disappears with use.

The point then is if you search for creatine, you end up on that page not, not the homepage.

And so if you end up on https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/ it pretty much blows away all other pages on creatine.

So at the end of the day, you still end up on useful information.

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