Most content gets no traffic from Google | Hacker News Reader

Most content gets no traffic from Google

ahrefs.com

14 pointscmogni115 comments

"Brought to you by Ahrefs, a data-driven marketing toolset powered by a huge index of backlinks, keywords and content"

"90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. And How to Be in the Other 9.37% [New Research for 2020]"

Given the context, the recommendations aren't surprising. That said, there is a huge amount of content that probably shouldn't be getting traffic from google, as it isn't interesting/relevant/whatnot.

My experience with google when searching for specific items is that often it tries to direct me many places that are not connected at all to what I'm looking for. From that perspective, perhaps 10% getting traffic from google is actually too high?

Someone should start an anti-google. Like petittube.com, but for websites. Don't really know how to get the least viewed pages on the internet, but it would be an interesting site for sure.

I don't think the results would be much interesting. Lots of sites will be default homepage/about/contact, where the author never started the site. Then a ton of useless pages like auto-generated indexes and summaries, that humans don't care about. An endless amount of duplicates because query string ?arg=value can crawl infinitely. And last but not least, copies of major sites and spam pages trying to fill search results.

I personally made a few websites and in my opinion it is fairly easy to get indexed by Google. If you open a pizzeria in small city, should be trivial to be top result in google for "pizzeria in town" after a week.

Despite all the critics Google is incredibly good at finding readable relevant content.

Yeah... Until a country-wide food delivery company starts an advertising campaign and floods the results with their website even though their services aren't available in that town.

This barely affect search results. The company will waste a ton of money and only get one line at the top. Only to vanish a week later having run out of ad budget.

Meanwhile Google will still be listing all the pizzerias in the first page and will still try to geolocate the user to show a map of pizzerias around.

Yeah, you make a good point, millions of pages could quite possibly be from the same domain and basically have the same content.

Search by domain, rather than pages, and I think it would be kinda interesting. What kind of websites are up that get barely any visitors? I would be interested in visiting the sites that aren't making any money, and why/how someone is paying for it.

I think this site is basically what you're describing: wiby.me

It's got some interesting stuff, but theres a lot of websites that get millions of pageviews.

https://millionshort.com

Thanks for sharing this; I will be trying this out for searches that don't work well on Google.

Millionshort allows you to remove the top n most visited sites from your search results. I'm expecting this to be useful for surfacing more blogposts and fewer SEO-optimised websites.

I’ve started picking the bottom result of google on page ten for fun...you get some really wacky content that clearly isn’t optimized for SEO or isn’t relevant at all.

Example: last night I searched “Robin Williams bipolar” and got a page ten result that was a conspiracy theory on Taylor Swift being a psychopath.

Eh, I think I found the one you're talking about, and it still looks like a somewhat legitimate looking news site, and according to other sources still gets thousands of pageviews a day. Also, that's such a specific topic, by page 10 most of the results are just somewhat related news articles. Try searching something more general, and the results on page 10 are things that could easily be on the frontpage, probably just don't have dedicated SEO. I want to see what the other 90% of the internet looks like. But also, I think they should break traffic down by domains, not pages. For example, does each article on HN count as a new page?

I've found that a good way to show up in Google results is by writing the best content available on the web about a particular topic that people are likely to search for.

Google is the gate keeper of what can be discovered and new properties will get no visibility is a fact. Doesn’t help that the first page is all ads and there’s no good competitors that can truly replace google. The government does not care, their view is out dated and based on one thing, does it keep costs low for consumers? Yes? Ok nothing to see here. Free market capitalism. Welcome to web FAANG 3.0

Sorry there 's just not enough space for your site after all those ads.

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