My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
goodcheapandfast.com
goodcheapandfast.com
My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone provider and NOT google.
My mailserver is marked as spam by gmail, a helpful HN commentor pointed out it may be my lack of ipv6 which appears to be the cause. I have no idea why ipv6 would indicate that I’m not a spammer, I can’t ask google because they don’t have a support line.
I understand others have far more expensive (read: >1m$) problems with google specifically, and I know I’m not alone here.
I just hope that by continually airing grievances with lack of (useful) customer service by major providers, they end up caving and investing in customer support.
Until then, fuck you google.
I just had the same problem with my dad and even though he can send and receive email from his gmail account they still won't tell him the password. All he has is the fragile oauth token on mail.app on his apple smart phone that can only connect via wifi due to the loss of the old phone number.
Additionally, my mail from my independent mailserver just started being marked as spam by google (exactly when I sent mail to noaa.gov and fireeye's internal system was borked due to their solarwinds problems http://superkuh.com/spf-google-fuckery.txt). I signed up for google's postmaster tools set my DNS TXT records but apparently I don't send enough mass mail to not be a mass mailer.
The Google support people should have mentioned it, but hopefully, they wouldn't be able to tell him the password without investing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cracking the hash.
I'd hope the phone tech support understand the goal was to regain access to the account, through a reset or whatever mechanism, and not to just know the password. But maybe if my dad worded it like I did the same confusion could've happened.
We're talking about giving out a forgotten password, not getting access to email contents.
I used to work on the indexing system, not GMail, but my vague recollection is there are some master private keys (necessary for lawful intercept, etc.) locked in hardware modules for email storage, where very few binaries are able to get the hardware modules to perform public key decryptions. There are strong safeguards on humans using some of the binaries that do have access. Access to these encryption keys is orthogonal to access to the account password. My recollection of the Aurora attacks is that the intruders got access to some systems that were able to decrypt/display senders and subjects, but we believed they were unable to get at the email bodies.
They can do a password reset, however would need sufficient proof of account ownership. Having access to the account is unfortunately not enough proof to show ownership, as that could be achieved with access to someone else’s device.
And I have a theory. My theory is they did the risk benefit analysis of all this and decided this was the best way to go. I think the the hole that opens up when you are open to appeals and special cases is too great, the bad press from one bad case is so bad that it's ok to ignore all the folks who have lost their accounts. I mean, what other explanation, what other reason can there possibly be for this?
[edit: I wonder how many of the down voters have actually sent email to a government agency using Gmail or dealt with some of NSF email issues firsthand?]
If it was, then someone forgetting to log out on a machine they didn't own could be a much more serious problem than it is. Rather than just temporary access to the account that the true owner has the ability to revoke, it could result in a completely stolen account.
Edit: also consider setting up a mail forwarder to another address you own if you can from the app UI, I would do this on a test account first in case it forces you to reauthenticate, as it can be a suspicious action.
I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘suspicious login prevented emails’ at the recovery address. I tried working through google support and was given a form to fill out but never heard back.
I should have kept that number until I updated it yes... but I thought knowing the password and having the recovery email would be enough.... guess not.
But yeah... fuck you google.
I wish that there was a way to disable those "protections".
Do not use Google! It's as simple as that. I have never had a Gmail account until an Android device sort of forced it on me, because I definitely didn't want to link things up to my real email address, so I just signed up for the whole thing. Do I ever use that email address? Definitely not! Why would I?
What happens if I ever loose access to that account? I have to register a new one for my Android device(s). Boohoo.
Some of this obviously requires 'abstinence' and not having the same 'cool toys' as other people. I.e. if I buy lots of fancy apps that I actually rely on for my daily life, then loosing this Google Account will hurt. No longer have a PC and do everything including your banking, gaming etc. with the tablet (i.e. things you really need or things you paid a lot of money for)? Well, welcome to the walled garden where Google practically owns you.
Pleco is a necessity for me, but it's not tied to the Google account. It has its own registration system.
Same goes for WeChat.
The Android Kindle app isn't really a necessity, but it's desirable. It, too, has its own registration system. It's certainly tied to my Amazon account, but not to my Google account.
I do the same actually and don't use apps or services that will only allow you to "Login with Facebook", "Login with Google" etc.
I do think there is substantial room for a kind of "major provider reset" service, similar (at least) to what banks do physically. Lost your account access? You need to GO to a place, be on video, have an ID check done, multiple forms of whatever identification. It costs to do this kind of thing, and as a last resort I'm pretty sure most people would want to pay it, instead of losing account access.
Your argument seems to be "It would be massively inconvenient to lose access to these things so instead I will not have these things."
I really need to transition more things off of the Google ecosystem.
If you loose access to the account for that 'thing', sure you're screwed with regards to that 'thing'. But it's just one of the eggs in your basket.
If you do _everything_ through Google, then Google is your basket full of eggs and if you don't play ball with the basket, it will take away all your eggs.
(This isn't a defense of Google's behavior, just a comment on things that are actually within the end user's control.)
This doesn't work for services that send SMS 2FA codes and the like from a shortcode (as Twilio does not support receiving those), but Google appears to send from a longcode, so it works there.
Just ignore the fact that almost every option is vulnerable to real time MitM via phishing if a user doesn't understand they're at the wrong URL. So what does Google do? They deemphasize the URL and train users to randomly enter their 2FA codes everywhere a million times per day. Brilliant!
No, there's 1 way which existed with just the email/password. But it's reduced by the number of people who do realise it's not the right page.
They also support FIDO/U2F, which does the site verification for you, and 2nd device auth which I don't believe you can trigger from a spoofed site.
When you set up MFA, it doesn't provide TOTP as an option. If you enable it with a phone number/SMS MFA, you can go back into the MFA options and add a TOTP device then remove the SMS option.
Of course, at that point they still have your phone number...
Not saying that this isn't at least partly on Google, they should have responsive customer service that can verify accounts - but you could have easily prevented that by being less lazy with keeping your data up to date. Security and account recovery is the one thing you shouldn't cheap out on.
In the UK you can take your mobile number with you between network providers and they're not tied to your location.
That way, you can keep your old number for as long as you keep the SIM topped up (once per year where I lived).
And I don't think this is unreasonable. The country code and phone number format is different (10 vs 8 numbers). Most non-spam calls I get are from somewhere else in Norway. I'm going to guess you could keep the same base number so long as the format is the same (between Canada and US, for example) - but that country code would still change
Maybe I'm on thin ice..
This, btw, is what I think caused me to lose a Google account.
It was an old one I was checking very rarely, someone reset my (strong!) password from a phone. I reset it again, along with the questions, thought I was fine.
They once again reset it and then Google's recovery page was not letting me do anything, apparently I was the suspicious person. Oook Google.
Building proprietary, impossible-to-understand Rube Goldberg mechanisms based on associations between accidental aspects of my life (location:phone number pairs, for instance) is not a security system, it is a design for randomly fucking me over. If your system is designed to fuck me over, I would prefer to use something else, thanks.
I'm going to try and onboard this thinking into my life.
The capriciousness that one often finds on a company like Google that means whatever they allow now isn't necessarily going to be honored in six months.
It is a system for building better profiles of potential targets for advertising. Gathering data is a means to improve online advertising services to Google's customers. The more data you volunteer, the more their online advertising services can potentially improve. That is one way to look at it.
From another perspective, all the "security" measures are a red flag for me that Gmail accounts are high risk if using for important, personal matters. (And that people are increasingly using it for such things.) The available solutions to that problem from the user's perspective should include the option to stop using Gmail, not simply to support Google's rollout of the next set of Kafkaesque "security" processes that incidentally always require more privacy sacrafices.
Giving me a notice that a User-Agent header changed (by suggesting they have detected a "new device") is not my idea of "security", but it reminds me that this data point is among the ones they are collecting for their online advertising services. It makes me wonder what assumptions and proclamations someone might be making based on such "evidence". I did an experiment where I saved a session cookie for an account I registered and used it outside the browser weeks later, without any User-Agent header. It worked flawlessly and I got no warnings of a "new device". Makes one wonder what is in that cookie and how long it will last. Is it restricted to IP address/location. If it never expires, then if an attacker ever gets a session cookie and the user never logs out of that session, the attacker will be able to "silently" use the account, forever. Yikes.
What is the alternative to Gmail? Genuinely interested. I'd be willing to switch if I found a future-proof email solution for both personal and business usage.
All in all I've enjoyed their services. Their security/E2E Encryption support is nice (could still use a bit more functionality though) and they are definitely a lot more FOSS friendly than Google when it comes to actually using their services.
I actually pay for ProtonMail now and I'm in the process of moving all my communication to it. My Google account will stick around, but I'm diversifying my dependencies and it feels so good.
Step 2, Fastmail, Protonmail M$, ... will be happy to offer you email for few € a month. If you'd desperately need to save money on that, there is Czech provider Seznam.cz that offers email on custom domain for free. Only issue is that the registration is in Czech, but Google Translate your friend: https://emailprofi.seznam.cz/login It's like a biggest local internet company, not totally random provider, so should not just steal data or disappear right away and works reasonably.
Never had a problem, and allows up to 3 aliases at a time that can actually be completely different instead of Gmail's useless HeyLookAtMyRealAddressEveryone+Alias@gmail.com
Apple iCloud for personal use.
(&yes, I use Gmail for junk or transactional stuff; need the acct for an Android mobile, and their UI is a horrific kludge of UI conceits trying to showcase their 'mad design skilz' - yuk!)
I would just suggest people think about what might happen if Fastmail gets enough of a userbase to be the next Gmail.
I honestly think it's a much better approach to email. One of the key issues with having an email address is that anyone who knows it is granted permission to get your attention, whereas with HEY you get rid of that problem for the most part but without having to 'program' your inbox.
[0]: https://hey.com
This is what iNUM was supposed to solve. Sadly it didn't take off.
I know nothing about voip providers and this makes the setup sound scary to me.
Fuck you google.
It's been about a month.
I have a very short list of companies, the collapse of which I'd celebrate with a party, and Google is vying very successfully for that top spot against some pretty reprehensible competitors.
I'm pretty sure I even have the correct password, but it thinks my login is suspicious since it's from a new/unfamiliar device so requires me to further authenticate myself except I no longer have access to the phone number associated with it. I'm fairly sure I have the answers to the security questions as well as have succeeded at the other recovery options, but best I've been able to get is "try again later".
The email is being forwarded to another address of mine, so I can still receive email I just... can never actually get into the account ever again. Thankfully I don't/didn't ever use it for anything all that important.
This has also happened to me when using MVNO carriers (Cricket, for example).
It can be set up to forward inbound texts to another number, or you can see them via the app.
I haven't had the "blocked" issues others have, and.. in the case of the IRS, I do have someone who files my paperwork for me.
(In Newpipe you can subscribe to creators' channels, see the comments and their other videos. You just can't comment from there.)
Depends on what you're searching, there is also the perspective that YT is a vast library of content that would never have appeared on TV, such as lectures, talks, conferences, courses, demos, gameplay, cooking, home improvement, product reviews, obscure music. It's the library of Alexandria of modern age. I would be devastated if I lost access to it. Wikipedia and Arxiv are complementary collections.
That's just the algorithm. There's still some amazing content on Youtube, but the algorithm will always try to offer you junk food. There are various ways to avoid this, but it becomes a problem for ditching Youtube. The positives are too enticing, and don't yet, at least for me, outweigh the negatives.
I generally hate suggesting a browser plugin to solve a problem with a service, but give this a try: https://github.com/SeinopSys/YTMySubs
You can no longer visit the home screen. Any attempt always redirects you to the subscription view. And from there, it simply becomes a matter of only subscribing to worthwhile channels. I've found it improves my Youtube addiction quite a bit.
They requested to send the confirmation code to a phone I do not have anymore. I replied the "security question" correctly. Then I had to provide the recovery email I once set up. Which I forgot.
So yes, I should have kept that up to date but it would not be difficult to prove I own the account (my usual google account pulls from that unavailable on for years) - it is just that there is nobody at Google to contact and have a look.
I will seriously look into fastmail or protonmail, despite being with Google for 14 years
Happy Edit: Following your post and just for the fun I tried to log back in and instead of the usual error message Google asked me to enter my full recovery email address. Then, I had to enter a valid phone number and to create a new password. I HAVE ACCESS TO MY ACCOUNT AGAIN!!!!! I don't know how the fuck it worked but if you're in the same position try to log again in a few weeks. What I did the past few months: fill out the Gmail recovery form. (no impact). Bought Google One and asked for support at least 3 times (no impact). Tried to log back in multiple times over the course of a month or two (no impact). Thought the account was toast, I was looking to alternative solutions but I tried again and it fucking worked!
How would you split Google into entities that won't go bankrupt within a year? ( And you wouldn't want that because it would piss off people and would help the cause of the anti-regulation and anti-government uneducated people). Maybe GCP, Android foundation, YouTube, rest of Google could work, but the "rest of Google" is still too big and too powerful.
Forcing them to open their data and platforms ( e.g. allowing other ad networks to access Google's tracking data and to serve ads via them) could diminish their monopoly, but it could also diminish their profits and force them to cut some less profitable parts of the company even more ( and that might be good).
Same thing with Facebook, just a bit easier - splitting off Instagram and Whatsapp will absolutely improve things, but the remainder is still to big and powerful. Twitter is even worse, you can't split anything.
Anti-monopoly laws and frameworks need to be updated for the modern world, because the logic that worked for physical assets, sales and infrastructure ( e.g. the US split oil companies and telcos along physical lines) no longer works for Internet companies.
Many power companies have government enforced monopolies across the US. They also are heavily regulated and limited in what they can do to prevent them using their monopoly to extort, abuse, or neglect consumers.
An unencrypted token is just as vulnerable as an unencrypted password.
But if the stream isn't encrypted then it doesn't matter. A robot can easily collect the token and utilize it before the token expires.
It's likely not about ipv6, but instead it's about your ipv4 having bad reputation in the past. Basically you changed your source address to a cleaner one.
My current IP shows "0 - low risk" with that tool. Grabbing a random PIA IP shows "93% - Abusive IP" with a warning about being a high risk proxy connection. The random VPN IP is also on SPAM blocklists.
I'm guessing a huge portion of cheap shared hosting is the same.
Edit- The IP my employer uses as its outbound nat IP that we vpn from while WFH (so it actually is a proxy) gets a clean bill of health while our corporate email server (not a proxy at all) is tagged as one.
It very well could be. That wasn't an endorsement by any means. The problem from what I can see is if services like that are convincing CTOs to use their lists it becomes relevant (even if the info isn't accurate).
If you're running a serious mail service your IPs don't change that much. Not only will you have a pool of IP addresses just for that reason, you'll also likely need a few unused ones for when one of your users tanks your reputation and you have to roll them.
Nobody taking real money for email will use a randomly assigned IP as source. (unless it's randomly selected and then tested for reputation before use) Mailgun and other services even allow you to book a dedicated IP just for your outgoing emails.
I've seen this before too. A huge problem right now is the massive tech companies want an unreasonable view into your life. They want your identity, phone number, photo id, location history, credit history, etc. before they'll treat you like a real person.
If you think I'm joking, spin up a transient environment, connect to a VPN, and try to participate online without linking all of your accounts to a piece of real world identity information that, in turn, can be linked to all the other things I listed above. You can't even get an email address without a phone number.
Part of the issue there is the huge tech companies are abusing their market positions to assign bad reputation to the IP blocks owned by everyone else. You can't use a VPS for ANYTHING but incoming connections because the IPs are flagged all by Google et al. How do you run an API server that needs to make any outbound connections if Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. all consider the IP block tainted? I guess you just need to buy your IPs from Google, right?
That's exactly the same tactic Google used with GMail. The original spam filtering was super aggressive and shitty and the solution, according to Google, was to use GMail instead of other providers. "Get a big provider" is a very poor answer to a question that has a technical solution IMO.
> My mailserver is marked as spam by gmail
Have you tried GSuite (or whatever they're calling it these days)? /s
Now, a scammer is trying to access your e-mail account. What level of proof do you want them to have to offer Google to get ahold of that e-mail?
These tech companies are not asking for an "unreasonable view" into your life as long as people are using these products to interact with the real world. They are trying to strike a balance between convenience and security that meets real-world needs. And they are trying to set that balance point somewhere where it works reasonably for the majority of their non-technical users, not for the edge-cases and not for people who think LARPing as a 90's cyberpunk novel is the most important usecase. So, yes, so long as the vast majority of GMail users are using their GMail account in a number of ways that intersect with the real-world financial system, they are going to want some way to verify your real-world identity if you lose the log-in credentials to your account.
If you need to reset your bank credentials (not solely a password - some form of second factor is universally required), it can't happen electronically without involving the real world; either you come to a branch with proper ID or you get mailed them to your registered physical address.
I mean, no matter what you do, you have to have some root of trust / root of identity, and it needs to be backed by (and verified in) the physical world - so you either have to do it yourself or delegate it to someone whom you'd trust a lot (i.e. not a random email provider). If a trustworthy universal government ID is available (which is a problem in some places, like USA) then that is a natural solution to that.
Alternatively, an institution is free to trust people remotely, putting effort into fraud monitoring, and taking on whatever risk their trust and processes enable - e.g. we've had some financial institutions verifying passports over videochat in such cases; I have no strong opinion on how safe or risky that is, but presumably the institution has considered the risks very carefully and found them both acceptable and necessary (in that case, sending a scan/photo/picture of the same document was not allowed, it was specifically about live videochat) - which is the key part of the whole thing, the alignment of incentives and responsibility for that risk.
If the consequences of these security risks fall on the users, then the users have to worry about security while financial institutions just wiggle their ears and blame "identity theft". If the consequences fall on the institutions, then the users can stop worrying about the things they mostly can't influence, and the institutions magically design their processes and workflows carefully so that they actually prevent fraud (since it's their own money at stake) and they're forced to implement decent solutions to any tradeoff between usability and security, since their profits depend on both.
Incidentally, in my country, there is a government-mandated (everyone has it) single sign-on solution that companies can use if they want to really know who someone is. The implementation isn't perfect and unfortunately they're starting to nudge people into using an app (that can only come from an app store, creating a sort of catch-22) instead of one-time pads, and there's a lot to complain about there. But I think the principle is completely reasonable, that just like we have passports, birth certificates etc., governments absolutely need to enter the digital era and provide modern forms of identity services. This is yet another area where everything moving to the internet has led to privatization through the back door, and I fear the world where some American company can turn me into a digital unperson much more than one in which my government can.
The password reset also supports a backup email along with a ‘when did you sign up for this account’ question - for me the backup email was not working. I was able to derive the creation date via an email to my account (which was the backup email address). For me, the backup email function wasn’t working, thus sniping the mobile number from a provider was the solution.
I recently started using the startup https://hanami.run to forward my mail. It's a brand new startup that I read about here on HN and the creator is super helpful.
Edit: I realize that parents Mom and my Mom are not going to do this, but us Hacker News types should.
At the moment I'm with Fastmail, but the pricing isn't so competitive
Not according to this page:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-your-own-doma...
I used to have two email accounts, one something I registered for fun (and my main email), other with my name+lastname@gmail. I set up forwarding from second one to first one, then I forgot the password.
I tried to login probably a decade later last year. Couldn't remember the password. Asked internally if someone could help. They said they can't(they can easily verify who I am if they wanted). I asked them to send a password reset to the same email (name+lastname@gmail.com gets password reset email for name+lastname@gmail.com), they said they can't do. This would have worked for me due to forwarding, but no...
Something's at google are great. Support is not one of them.
Made an account about 10 years ago with email address x, mobile telephone number y, bank debit card z with some security questions thrown in.
I cannot remember my password from 10 years ago so I need to reset it.
If I try to reset it, they want to send me an sms otp to the mobile number from 10 years ago which I no longer have. Obviously I cannot update the mobile number if I cannot log in.
Another option they give me is to enter some portion of the debit card number that was linked to the account. I no longer have that account from that specific bank, nor have the old cards laying around.
Another thing they offered was for me to fill out the answers to the security questions, but I absolutely hate these and always fill in random characters by mashing my keyboard, so no go here.
In their help guide they say you can contact support if you cannot log in at all, but you have to log a support ticket.... which requires me to log in. Last time I gave up after 30 minutes of poking around their site to try and find a way to speak/email a human that can help me get back into the account, since almost every path leads back to the login screen which wants my debit card number from 10 years ago.
So I've started ignoring paypal now. All their emails that I still get goes in the trash and I will never use them again. Keep in mind this was a business account linked to a business bank debit card (it was the only way back then to link to an account in my country, and only one bank offered the integration, since then things have become much more reasonable (cheaper business credit cards = international ease)).
I'm fully willing (well not anymore) to send them a copy of my national id card to unlock my account while we speak on the phone, but they seem to have no path to support their clients unless logged in. Maybe its been fixed by now but I no longer care about it enough. If you build systems with an auth mechanism, please cater to all the unhappy paths your clients might fall into. I'm not one of those people who will go scream on twitter to get help, I just silently walk away and you lose a client. It's that simple. I'm not expecting them to treat me like a king, I just wanted to log into their site, that's all.
> Another thing they offered was for me to fill out the answers to the security questions, but I absolutely hate these and always fill in random characters by mashing my keyboard, so no go here.
This should go as a cautionary tale to always use a password manager. I, too, hate insecurity questions. But instead of mashing keys, I generate unique passwords for them and use the question as a username. Then save them in there as well.
On principle I will not ever supply Security Questions with real answers, they are rubbish. Most of them you have to answer exactly correctly (spelling/casing), so you are biased to use simple one word answers that any of you family members or close friends can guess.
I prefer 2FA, but back then offline 2FA wasn't that big of a thing and most sites only supported 2FA via an sms otp, if they even supported it (aka justified the financial costs).
I've been burned by that logic at several companies. It's really infuriating. I've even had one where they had a phone number to call for support, but the phone number was locked away behind a support login screen.
My friend dropped her phone in the Uber vehicle about 1.5 years ago, so we phoned Uber support whom insisted that we log into their website to log a support ticket... BUT, in order to log into their site, you have to enter the otp sent via sms.. to the phone that is in the car. Took the support lady a few attempts to understand that we cannot log in.
We rand her phone twice, within 10 minutes of realising the phone is missing. First time it rang, second time he switched the phone off.
Eventually we managed to talk to the driver, but he insisted that there was no phone in his car. We never got the phone back. When we asked Uber support again what can we do, they rambled stuff about drivers being Independent Contractors etc. I personally haven't used Uber since that day. She still uses Uber.
We couldn't track her phone because it took 6 days to do a sim swap, again, needing to receive an otp from Google to login to track the phone, but by then it was off.
I used Uber Eats earlier this year and an order took 2 hours (it was obvious the guy is using more than one delivery app), same story from Uber support. Haven't used it since.
You tried calling the phone, and it didn't work. I guess the next step is going to the police.
I was very happy with the proceedings. This happened twice over the last 10 or so years.
Kind, professional, knowledgeable & acting according a strickt rulebook that tries to prevent social engineering as good as possible.
I love google :)
Now I use GMail as secondary email address along with my other emails, and avoid to use google docs.
On my home network I installed PIHole and it works quite well.
I live with no fear of banning and I am free to express my idea on my self hosted wordpress blog, and decide what to advertise in total freedom.
Turns out, when you use free services, you don't get support, but when you pay them even just like ~$1/mo (I think my Google One for more photo space in the cloud is $15/yr?) they'll pick up the phone and answer anything.
But that's true of nearly all consumer level support in all industries. Businesses pay big dollars for consultants and service level agreements for access to the higher level folks.
It's actually a very old problem [0] introduced by Google in 2013. There are different workarounds depending on the MTA you use. Whenever you set up a new mail server you need to go through an increasingly longer checklist and it includes dealing with this issue.
[0]
The other comments here mentioning cheap as a flag word are somewhat accurate but not entirely. Its possible to rank a site using the word cheap assuming you're supporting it correctly with related content about a specific product and proper explanation as to what makes it cheap.
Honestly, I am very sorry that you lost all your traffic and your revenue but this seems like a VERY fixable problem considering your backlinks. Take your best performing posts, and dramatically increase the word count, add more photos, add overviews of each product instead of just a single line or two pulled from reviews.
Happy to help with additional pointers if you want to shoot me a PM.
While this isn't necessarily bad to make money, it definitely doesn't do anything for a visitor.
After reading the blog post, I was expecting something like consumer reports or some intricate posts, but it's obviously little tid bits of information that looks like it was posted by some virtual assistant he was paying $2 per post or something.
The site needs more focus. Make some actual recommendations and tell us why we should trust them. I think wirecutter has a good formula for this. I've bought several products after reading wirecutter articles.
I don't know if this has anything to do with google's algorithm, but it did actually feel to me that the site was coming close to the line between "here is some helpful information for you" versus "here are a lot of extra links that will help me get a little bit more revenue".
It's definitely something I'll keep in my toolbox.
"Pages of product affiliation where the majority of the site is made for affiliation and contains a limited amount of original content or added value for users."
Also, the site may not comply with this policy: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
"Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it"
While I have seen much poorer quality affiliate sites than this ranking in Google, IMO this model is on borrowed time. I think the way to survive in this market is by increasing the value:affiliate ratio, and diversifying income sources, so affiliate revenue isn't the sole focus.
Ironically, I know of a scraper site that mirrors Amazon's bestsellers list, reformatted as blog posts: https://gistgear.com - and it's growing like gangbusters.
For now...
As for "dramatically increase the word count, add more photos, add overviews of each product instead of just a single line or two pulled from reviews"... don't do this! If I wanted all that junk I'd just read the Amazon page. I agree that there is probably room to add a bit more information about the products without ruining what makes your site cool but don't abandon your vision.
Combine this with something like wirecutter that does vetted reviews (but probably looks at fewer products as a result) and it seems like a good complement.
Off-Label Usage - Customers rate a portable jump starter 5-stars, even though they have only used the product to charge their smartphones, not to jump start a vehicle.
Self Validation - Customers rate a carbon monoxide detector 5-stars because they feel a sense of relief and validation that their purchase will protect their families.
Customer Service Uprating - A 1-star rating is later updated to 4- or 5-stars because the manufacturer offers the customer a replacement product (and suggests altering the review).
Misunderstanding - A customer leaves a negative review because he or she didn't read the product description carefully and is consequently disappointed with the product.
Ideology or Spite - A positive review is paired with a negative rating because the customer disagrees with the business practices of the manufacturer (e.g. It's a great product, but Widget Corp. is a POLLUTER!).
Wrong Model - A review for one variation of a product is lumped in with reviews of another version of the product. (Hard drive failure rates can differ by 900% depending on the size of the drive.)
Wrong Product - A product page is repurposed by a seller, thereby mixing the reviews of one product with a completely different one. E.g. A page about a protective phone case contains reviews about a wireless charger.
Shipping Issues - Customers leave negative reviews because their packages arrived late or damaged in a way that reflects negatively on the shipping carrier, not the manufacturer.
Joke Reviews - A customer uses his or her review as a platform for comedy. Sexual wellness products, or those that are gender-based, seem to be disproportionately affected.
Empathy or Pity - A customer has a bad experience with a product, yet he or she leaves a positive rating (typically, 4-stars) because "someone" might like the product.
If the concept is to attract the 'satisficers' which by the way, i love that word and that book also, there needs to be some other kind of optimization on the pages. Going after 'best of' for everything looks spammy. And that spammyness is amplified by the lack of content when compared to the other sites ranking for the terms he's optimizing for.
There are other ways to attack this problem. Instead of having it be best of everything - it really should be a statistics site for popular products. Add in some kind of ranking system or some kind of kayak-like search and BOOM - new unique concept that provides real value to people. As the site is right now, its gimmicky, thin on content and is NOT going to rank in today's SERPs the way it is now. Sorry.
I skimmed a couple product categories that I've looked at recently, mainly gaming keyboards. The information felt a bit mediocre, but I also thought it did a pretty good job of picking out decent value products. I can see the value in it as a short list of products to look into, but there's not enough info for me to make a choice without leaving the site.
This seems to be a common mistake on HN, and I point it out because you and others in this thread seem to have invested a fair amount of time in crafting a personal response to the author that may never actually be read by them.
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-noise-cancell...
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-gaming-keyboa...
I know Google says they are all about the algorithm, but I'm convinced they are relying heavy on manual review farms. Of course admitting it would damage their brand, and disincentivize people from coding "to their algorithm". But I'm pretty sure a manual reviewer thought "yep, spam site" and penalized it.
One other thing, the landing page is basically a search engine / portal. In my experience, google also hits everything in this category. (I built a small search engine for a specific vertical in the past - no longer online - and it too showed strange search behavior after a while.) Maybe replace the landing page with a blog / magazine like feed?
How much does image actually weigh in the site's score? What about the text only websites e.g. PG's essays, not including forums like HN. I would presume PG's blog has great backlink score but would a similar site with same number of backlinks but with several images rank more?(hoping for clarification from an anonymous Googler).
I'm asking this because my text only blog content titled 'Startup ideas vs Problems'[1] was the featured snippet when the search term is 'Startup ideas vs Problems'[2] until recently as the current featured snippet features another website with a featured image within the blog post.
Although my blog is still the first result, but google now suggests 'Did you mean: Startup ideas and Problems' which buries my blog post effectively killing my traffic.
[1]https://hitstartup.com/startup-ideas-vs-problems/
[2]https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Startup%20ideas%20vs%2...
There is no one silver bullet for SEO. Its many things combined.
It seems that thanks to this policy of Google most cooking/recipe sites are full of fluff. Not always 'more content' means the content.
I wonder if the same thing would work for you: organize your site with more content per page. You could add value with lists organized by some principle, or just borrow Amazon's catalog tree.
For that matter, would the same notion work for recipe sites? In addition to the main recipe per page, add several other related dishes -- compatible side dishes, similar main dishes, cocktails, etc. Reduce the blurb to please readers, but still produce content.
I'm far from an expert in SEO so I apologize if I'm telling you something you already know (or already know doesn't work). I'm just spitballing.
I agree that the spirit of my site is closer to "a statistics site for products" than a typical review site. Adding more content, photos, etc. may help to remedy my situation, but I would feel like I was abandoning my original purpose. I designed the site with "satisficers" in mind, i.e. allow people to make a decent decision as quickly as possible. No frills.
Until recently, I worked for product review sites like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, and I'm not equipped to compete with them head on. My hope was to create a new niche by using data analysis, which is more of my skillset: https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis
I could make the case that targeted paid search for low comp, buy ready keywords would work well. Your content is what would push someone over the edge to buy. If you think about it, your site is much further down the funnel than other affil sites because you've vetted reviews, instead of just copy/pasting/spinning from other sites. You should also retarget the people who come to those pages with ads specific to the products they're looking for urging them to "not make a decision without all the facts" which is what you've done by mining all of the review data.
I do very much like the approach and the original idea but sadly google likes what google likes. If deeper authoritative content is not what you want to be doing, that's fine, but you shouldn't have the expectation you are going to be able to compete with the big dogs who operate in that way.
Im happy to take this convo offline as you're getting a lot of weird advice in this thread that are just random people's opinions. Shoot me an email at m@darkmatter.io if you want to keep chatting.
Popularity of sites shift. People's tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant. And algorithm changes do shift attention to sites that previously weren't getting traffic. Would the world better with static search traffic? The incumbents always win, and newcomers have a tough time getting a foothold. That's what it would take to avoid situations like these, and I'm not sure if it's an improvement over the status quo. Between living in constant worry that the algorithm might change and shift search traffic, and a world where the algorithm never changes and search traffic remains rather static I'm not sure which is really better. In the latter goodcheapandfast.com might never even have existed.
Bing's blocking mechanism seems pretty crude, though, and not sharing why it was blocked seems particularly wonky. Sure it's a cat and mouse game between scammers and devs, but it'd be nice if they at least vaguely alluded to why the false positive happened.
And it's also unclear whether algorithm changes - "Google's preference" as you put it - is a problem. Unchanging algorithms would likely trend towards a small set of incumbents collecting most search results. A shifting search algorithm landscape means users are more likely to see results that were previously buried. This story highlights one loser of this change, but not all the aspiring websites that would be eager to get even half of goodcheapandfast's traffic. These search results went somewhere. One site's lost traffic is another site's opportunity. Algorithm updates changing things up is not altogether an undesirable factor in a search engine.
Those whose traffic benefit from these changes attribute it to their outstanding abilities as an internet entrepreneur.
Those whose traffic suffer write blog posts like this one.
It sucks for this guy, but this is just how search engines work.
I think that (affiliate based monetization) is a really, really tough market to be in right now because Google and Bing are absolutely _dominated_ by low effort, garbage affiliate marketing blog spam sites. There are days where I'd pay per search if I could filter out sites that have affiliate links on them.
The review / product discovery market as a whole is a disaster right now. The last good review site (IMO) was JonnyGURU and there hasn't been a new PSU review there since early 2019 (since Corsair hired him?). The thing that made that site great was that shitty products got shitty scores. It's not like the affiliate marketing reviewers nowadays where everything is 9.5 stars with the primary goal of getting you to buy _anything_ they can slap an affiliate link on. Even the site in this article is a bit guilty of that. "Here's a list of good value products that you can just buy without thinking," right?
Off topic... If the site owner is lurking, I'd love to know why sites like Anandtech, or almost every review site from what I can tell, stopped doing endurance testing on SSDs now that manufacturers are packing them with shit quality TLC and QLC.
However, it's the affiliate based monetization that I was calling tough. At least for me, an affiliate link is an untrustworthy link because that link is working for the manufacturers and retailers, not me.
I can't think of a decent way to monetize a review site without relying on a revenue stream that's susceptible to corruption (product access, affiliate links, advertising, etc.). Just look at the whole Hardware Unboxed / Nvidia thing that happened recently. The whole review industry must be completely FUBAR for Nvidia to think they could get away with that.
Can you expand on this? I hadn't heard of this.
I recently watched a new video on "playthrough” of Cyberpunk and it was a heavily advertising the power of a NVIDIA graphics card as he jacked up the raytracing settings and mentioning the card (which the comments section said was mean because it was impossible to find in the marketplace and/or costs thousands).
So I'm curious what you mean by this.
It's not text, and it's pretty long at 40 minutes, but it's a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIvuWdxClSs
I can. Something like the Patreon model might work.
Not sure about why Anandtech stopped endurance testing, but I would assume cost cutting. I left the company in Sept. 2018 which was right after it was acquired by Future PLC. They're a frugal lot.
I'd probably be your target market. I'm usually looking for products that are good value. Ignoring the fact that I'm from Canada and all your links are US, I'm also the kind of person that would make an effort to buy via one of your affiliate links if I used your site as a source for products I want to research more in depth. However, I don't think most people would make that effort and maybe that'll be a problem.
Put another way, it looks like a great site to use as a starting point for products I don't know much about, but I'm going to jump to other in-depth review sites before buying anything and might convert through their affiliate links instead. Add in sweet (get it?) industrial scale affiliate link hijackers plus price watching services like CamelCamelCamel and all of a sudden there are a lot of ways I can use your site and never give anything back (unintentionally).
I'm also not sure I'll remember your site to go back to it (sorry). I wonder how a browser addon would work out. The no ad, no tracking design of the site lends a lot of credibility in terms of being trustworthy, so I'd consider installing an addon for the type of data you have. If you can build a reputation as the brand that filters Amazon down to the X% of products that aren't garbage, that might get some traction.
For example, if I'm browsing Amazon and could click on a GCAF addon that showed me a curated list of similar products that aren't complete trash, that would be helpful to me because there's too much garbage to sort through manually on Amazon. Once I'm on the product page (via your affiliate link in the addon), I might open a new tab to read other reviews, but I'm not going to click back through to the product page when I already have it open in another tab. Or if you sort by products that are currently on sale I might just open tabs for the ones on sale and just buy something right there.
I also manually jump from Amazon to BestBuy before buying stuff. If the pricing is close enough I buy it at BestBuy instead. If I could click an addon that linked me directly to the same product page at other stores I think you could capture that too, at least from me.
Anyway, good luck! I hope it works out for you.
The other possibility is that Google just updated their search algorithm in a way that happens to not like this website as much as it used to. Not because anything is wrong with it or because of any bug in the algorithm, just it now prefers different attributes, and that changes where this site ranks. If this is the case, there's really nothing to be done. There's no ground truth result ranking for any particular query - if Google feels its new results are better, that's their business.
If your entire business depends on an arbitrary algorithm preferring your website over other very similar ones, and you will lose everything if that arbitrary algorithm happens to change, eventually it's going to happen. It sucks, and it's maybe unfair in a cosmic sense, but there's really nothing to be done.
What other viable choices does this site have aside from Google?
It's not like he'd have a thriving business if only Google didn't exist. Instead, he's reliant on Google choosing to rank his page highly enough to get traffic for search queries that will result in people clicking on his affiliate links (who he's also reliant on). Google doesn't owe him any particular ranking. If people search for his example "cheap portable generator", does Google have some ethical responsibility to put his site at the top? Or even on the first page? Or to never change where they rank it once it reaches the first page?
Also, if your site is thread the line of review-spam-without-actual-content-or-actual-review-site, then this bound to happened sooner or later.
The only question is whether this site is one of these or not - and even if it's not, a certain number of 'false positives' is acceptable and less strict filters definitely are not. If you're running a site that's skirting the line between spam and not-spam, then either you take on the risk that you might be dropped by google and others, or (perhaps preferably) stop doing that thing and do something substantially different.
That's a real issue - there is no rigorous and systematic monitoring of Google's results. There could be horrible biases and we don't measure, don't hold them accountable. There has been a recent spat at the Google AI Ethics department where a researcher accused Google of being biased because it uses language models trained on biased internet text (thinks doctors are men and nurses are women). I'd say - before going so deep, first check the actual page results for bias, it's 1000x easier to do that and gives much more useful results.
And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thing getting crushed.
Unfortunately it seems like he's the one person out there making a site like this honestly and over optimized for a search algorithm that was inevitably going to change. Building a brand and using a more personal voice instead of thinking you can win at SEO is always going to be the way to go.
I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow.
I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products are not good, but this page is content that's designed to match for certain search terms and not something that's organically good content.
I'm fine with Google ranking this content straight to zero.
Edit: The author is a nice guy and a decent writer. Emotionally, I want to feel for him. But not for content like this.
You can have all of the best intentions and still contribute negative value to the world.
I was really expecting good content and a single recommendation or two that would replace hours of reading crap reviews, reddit threads, etc. but instead was met with what could be auto-generated list of monitors with scraped descriptions and links
I can really see why this would be flagged as just search front-running for affiliate money
My own sense of spam smell got triggered by the name of the site, too. Sounded like a gimmick; you can have all three, after all.
A rebranding might solve his issue.
It could be very interesting to see a sort of A/B test between the current site and a clone of the site but with a different name.
This game is dominated by big brands and aged domains, so if you can squeak in to page 1 for just a single one of these search terms you're well in the money.
The backlink profile is instructive, some solid link building from established domains (esquire, seekingalpha, etc.)
What do you mean once again? I read WAY too much HN, and this is the first time I’ve read about this issue with someone whose site focuses on affiliate marketing. Are posts like this common if you read “new” HN articles?
This site's 'reviews' are based on existing product reviews and the descriptions of the products. A real review site will purchase the product to review it then post one or two short paragraphs on their experience using it.
And it's definitely affiliate links since all Amazon links have ?tag=gcaftext-20, which seems to be their affiliate tag.
Good, Cheap and Fast isn't meant to be a substitute for lab-tested product reviews, but I hope it's a complement. I like Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports. These publications buy products, test them and cover their costs by charging a subscription. This is the best business model for protecting readers.
There are plenty of “free” websites that also test products, but visitors to these sites end up paying in less obvious ways:
Ad Bloat - The websites have great content, but it's hard to enjoy it because of excessive advertisements, autoplay videos (with sound) and third-party networks that hijack your browser and redirect you to pop-up ads claiming that you’ve won a free gift card.
Price Creep - The websites are great at reviewing products, but in order to cover costs, the tested products are more expensive than necessary. Many publishers do this (unwittingly) because the affiliate commissions that they receive are based on a percentage of a product's sale price.
These phenomena are common on legitimate websites. Nevermind sites that:
Rent studio space to stage their "lab testing;"
Don't know how to use lab equipment properly;
Fail to disclose pay-to-play relationships;
Give inflated reviews to maintain relationships with PR people; or,
Fail to investigate the issues that products have after extended use.
I’ve seen these trespasses throughout my career: Hucksters are everywhere.
At the time I was very much not happy about it. Now I'm happy it happened before I had scaled it too far and come to depend on that income too much. It made me realize that it's not only my work that my income depended on, but the whims of a single giant company. And that that's a position I don't want to find myself later down the road.
It's a sad truth that any internet business that's not yet a strong brand in itself is reliant on Google and their AI in a very unhealthy way. I have no idea how to fix this.
* the reviews for products are too short and vague
* until you actually read the top part and realize it was written by a human being, it looks exactly the same as all the other affiliate websites that get deranked (probably the reason he's getting 0 traffic)
* the "real reviews verified" badge screams SCAM to me, although I know less technical-minded people are persuaded by stuff like that
It basically seems like a way for Amazon and other affiliate program operators to deniably outsource black hat SEO.
Not that this particular site is using black hat SEO (as far as I can tell), but many affiliate link farms are. This particular site seems like it is less offensive, but still something that would be annoying to get in search results.
Highly targeted recommendation services like pcpartpicker also provide value.
Although, from a anti-consumerism/anti-waste standpoint, encouraging impulse purchases at all is probably a net negative.
Have you looked at dumping the “wellness”?
> Your Money or Your Life”? YMYL is Google’s nickname for health and wellness websites.
https://radialgroup.com/google-ymyl-medic-update-health-well...
1. Your product seems useful, so useful in fact I bookmarked it.
2. However you hardly had any Google traffic to begin with - maybe Google traffic is not something you should optimize for - except for when people specifically search for your product
3. with which your landing page might not help.
Let me expand:
1. I tried a few searches on your site and it generally came back with good results. I like that the articles are short, to the point and didn't waste my time. Some commenters here recommend to make those articles longer for SEO - don't. Making users read long articles is the opposite of what your site promises.
2. Google traffic is way less important for useful websites than SEO people would make you believe. If your product is good, people will come - and come back. SEO can actually hurt the usefulness of your product, and thus its long-term growth. Never ever listen to SEO people who want you to make your product worse. I may be suffering from survivorship bias, but less than 10% of my site's traffic comes from search engines, and 99% of that search engine traffic was just people searching the name of my sites. I can't tell you whether any site could survive on this, but I can promise you that this "independence" comes with peace of mind (I don't care whether I show up on Google at all).
3. It took me a moment to figure your product out. "This website exists to make shopping less time consuming" did not help at all - there's hundreds of ways I can imagine one might make "shopping less time consuming" after all. My confusion ended when I read "Find above-average products selling for below-average prices". Maybe that should be at the very top with the search field directly below it - which can also contain text other than just "Search.". Check the mockup at the beginning of this post. You could place the "less time consuming" text somewhere else, I just was too lazy. Some things besides "less time consuming" that people might search are "best budget products", "best value for money", etc. - so you could make sure these show up on your landing page too. Except after the text that explains the site for the human visitor.
Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would.
Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisting political sites, and feature hyper-partisan political infighting as a core tenant of their employee training and advancement practices.
GoodCheapFast alleges they have a 7% conversion rate from visitors to purchases. That’s insanely high, and indicates Google should be sending them as much traffic as possible if their goal is serving the end-user.
But since the site doesn’t advertise with Google, and in fact fosters a beautiful ad-free experience, its essentially an indictment of everything Google stands for and therefore must be eliminated.
Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.
The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.
Barrier to entry and startup costs to a competitor have never been lower. I believe recent court wins make “unauthorized” scraping more openly available, and anti-trust regulations should look at allowing competitors to ignore a Google-only robots.txt as long as reasonable throttling is enforced.
If I didn't block any search bots, I bet the bots would make up at least 95% of the traffic.
On my larger sites I don't mind serving a million page views a day to random search bots, but on that smaller one it doesn't make sense.
As others have pointed out this site is nearly indistinguishable from crap to a human much less a crawler. Thus Google trying to clean up the crap get's yelled at by you for hitting other sites (which is unavoidable). And if they didn't try to clean up the crap you'd yell at them for that.
I'm not quite sure what Google's "core responsibility" here is, besides to make money while meeting some bare minimum threshold for not harming society. They certainly don't owe you a perfect search service for free, just like you don't owe it to them to use their search service.
That 7% conversion rate is legit (and was equally surprising to me). On top of that, my return rate is lower than typical. I know that my site isn't for everyone, but the people who do happen across it seem to get value from it.
Since you've never experienced this with other domains, does the word cheap have to do with it? When I think domains, "cheap" instantly reminds me of those early quasi-legal online pharmacies and if I see it in an email almost certainly it's spam of one sort of another. I could see being problematic in spam filters.
Cheap is just the everyday word for low cost. It can also mean low quality, but that connotation depends more on context.
Besides, there are many other successful companies with "cheap" in their domain names.
I would also argue that spam messages aren't really trying to convince you something is low quality, it's precisely the low cost aspect that they're to convince you of even if the product is actual low quality.
I'm sure there's other companies with cheap in their domains/headers, but none stand out and I would have no idea if they depend on SEO anyway.
Today's hilarity came from a search for "portable hf antenna reviews" - (a pretty niche topic - Ham Radio related) this brought up so much crap even as the first five (or two!) results. It is no surprise that Google is flexing some muscle in this area and people are ending up as collateral damage.
Even on the free plan you can create "Firewall rules" (up to five). Create one that just logs the traffic from known bots. Claim the domain in Google Search Console (no script needed on page) and see the stats for that domain and match those with the Cloudflare traffic. This will help identify if there's something going on - are the Bingbot and Googlebot visiting or not at all? What pages are they looking at?
The robots.txt file is complex - repeated paths that shouldn't really be there. Perhaps create a Cloudflare rule to block access to those paths to everyone but the owner on a static IP address?
After this is done then the OP would know a bit more about what's going on.
Some fluctuations are explainable: a bit over half my traffic is from the US, so you can clearly see the effect of Thanksgiving. Most of the rest of my traffic is from the UK, western Europe, and Australasia, so holidays such as Christmas and New Year stick out like a sore thumb.
But sometimes I've seen pages disappear from the search index, or be heavily deranked for a week or two, before popping back up again. Often this has happened after I've published a (relatively speaking) large amount of new content to the site, but sometimes it's not easily explainable.
I also, every few months, get "invalid traffic" warnings in Adsense, even though the majority of my traffic is organic search traffic that Google itself is sending me. Generally revenue will drop to zero for a week or two before climbing back up, and shortly after the warning will disappear. Every time this happens I check Google's policies and sometimes have to fix the odd problem. Mostly though, I have no idea why this happens.
The site makes so little revenue it doesn't even cover its own hosting costs so it's not a big worry. However, I do see the potential for it to earn more were I to invest more in it. Still, I've realised that I'd have to be out of my mind to rely on Adsense revenue from this website as my sole source of income.
I'm not complaining at Google for this - any money the site earns is a bonus and, as I say, at the moment it doesn't even cover its own hosting (which at least keeps my tax return simplier). Still, if I were going to build some sort of indie business around it I'd have to think pretty hard about ways I might be able to get multiple channels for revenue. Unfortunately, like goodcheapandfast.com, the reality is that the source of every one of those streams would likely originate with organic search traffic.
For my old content, I have started to place warning banners for my users that they are reading old, and sometimes outdated content, that I only leave online for archival reasons.
It makes me wonder if Google is doing this with my little blog, is it doing the same more broadly? I don't believe it is providing a good search experience to its users anymore.
Google does not like my new topics it seems, starting around 2012, but thankfully unlike the OP who I have a lot of sympathy for, my blog is for fun and not livelihood.
We write for bots, so they can decide to share with our fellow humans (or not), such is our lot...
Seems like something a Jekyll or Hugo plugin could do quite well.
And his design is so clean that the flags are obvious without being obnoxious.
If small sites want to compete they have to specialize and go deep - it's hard to beat incumbents at the thing they've been doing for decades - and with paid staff/journalists writing the articles!
It's not so much the tech side of SEO, it's about the content.
The website is another run of the mill affiliate website built with the sole purpose of making the owner some money.
The same old rubbish "here are 5-10 products that we've selected because we will make money." that other websites do - Where is the website actually helping or providing the visitors any value? It isn't.
The only research they seem to do on products is 1) Will I get commission if I send customers to it 2) Is it cheap. 3) Do the reviews look fake/real.
That's not helping anyone and provides no value. Hence why Google removed it's ranking. It provides literally no value or true content to visitors. Their product lists are all "The Best X products" - Best based on what? They're not buying the products and actually checking their good, they're just pulling products out of their backside from Amazon/Bestbuy.
How can this website honest create hundreds of "Best X products", without even using/testing any of them and think they've providing value to customers? The owner is kidding himself.
This is the exact opposite of every principle that I believe in. If that were true, at minimum I would have:
-Placed ads on the site -Opted into Skimbit's data sale program -Hyperlinked titles and images with affiliate codes -Written about huckstery things like CBD oil and salt lamps.
I feel bummed to read this take, but if you're interested in learned more about my process, here are some links:
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/about https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/value-award-winner... https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/amazon-review-analysis
Most likely, one or multiple of the algo's to determine value within results has been modified, which is a regular occurance. Has picked up the content on your site as not really beneficial / trustworthy for whatever the results are and so it has demoted your position.
Given almost every page of your site has at least 1 external referal link, its easy enough to imagine it being picked up as an auto generated site, with slapped in affiliates. Infact im surprised it hasnt happened sooner.
I'm not sure what you can do about it, other than reworking your entire site, obfuscating the referal links somehow and then hoping for the best.
Or branch out into other methods of content and earning if this is the only source of income for you, its rough, but that google algo and others are black boxes that you cant really depend on.. Eventually it will clear everyone off that's not investing in staying on top of these things.
But as you say its questionable what value affiliate sites have for the searcher which is why sites like Foundem's arguments against Google are weak - they just had freinds in teh traditional media / government.
Someone is using gmail to send porn via mms gateways to an iterated list of numbers neighboring (and including) mine, some of which claim to be held by children. I looked but couldn't find the appropriate complaint form.
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cloth-masks
You will get dislisted because you are profiting from a pandemic. get rid of this content.
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-bourbons
Alcoholic content is a huge red flag and will cause blocks and delisting. get rid of this content.
once you remove the content, resubmit your sitemaps to both Google and Bing Webmaster tools and you will start to see traffic again.
Also, this might seem really stupid, but it would be nice to have a link to your homepage from the footer. it's annoying to have to scroll to the top of the page to click your icon to go to your homepage.
I redirected the cloth mask page to the CDC's website. It was something that I created at the behest of friends and family members (and then forgot about). It's worth noting that I did not profit from that page when masks where in high demand. (In the early days of the pandemic, I actually spent a good chunk of time trying to wrangle available PPE and get it into the hands of first responders. I had a big moral issue with the publishers who were profiteering by selling consumers things that they didn't need at the expense of those who did.)
Didn't consider a homepage link from the footer, but it's a fair point. Added.
If SEO is your strongest channel, use it to build your other channels. The more direct the channel the better.
If SEO is your weakest channel, use it to build your other channels.
These people’s psychology is to claim competence in some higher kind of logic allegedly embedded in this spontaneously emergent bureaucracy. Of course it’s just smoke and mirrors, there is no logic nor understanding. None
It may be an affiliate link farm but it's one that's done the most basic level of analysis to find an acceptable item in a category.
It's not great but it's a time-saver compared to me reading potentially fake Amazon reviews myself.
I don't think it was any scheme or malice, far more like Lenny petting the rabbit, but the rabbit got very dead.
Either way, very risky to quit your job for what is basically a content website with as few as 500 visitors daily average, if even that.
It does not seem to work well either, or at least contain very few products, I searched for steinberg ur-12 and got no match. A very popular entry level audio interface.
Creating a second domain that's basically a mirror to see if it's related to the domain
Attempt to 'recreate' the same content a standard platform like workpress to see if it's something about the presentation / etc. that the search engines are hating
I wish you all the best
I haven't mirrored the content, but I did republish/redirect a few pieces elsewhere and they fared much better. The issue is tied to the domain.
My suspicion would be that the site is explicitly, manually banned by some person at Google.
There is nothing to do about it except maybe start over with a new domain name, new server, preferably not under your own name (what name the domain name is registered under).
Short of that: Maybe implement Google Amp, Analytics etc ... but probably too late for that.
Basically amounts to don’t quit your day job. Google and amazon are fickle friends
It looks pretty cool, and all but ...
Why would/should Google's search engine send users to another search engine?
What GCF needs to do is become well-known, "like DuckDuckGo, but for shopping". Then people will save a bookmark (like I'm doing now).
EDIT:
Unfortunately, bookmark removed. This site doesn't appear very useful. I typed in numerous search queries, starting with generic categories like "bluetooth speakers" and "baby bib" and whatnot, and it came up with "Your search did not match any documents.". I tried some very specific products found in various online sites. Again, "Your search did not match any documents."
Finally, I got some results by just using "bluetooth". Hooray! Some other single-words are working.
The results appear to just be some product advice, followed by some links to selected products and price information on sites like Amazon.
I see now that there are links to categories below the search UI, but I don't see anything there I would be interested in looking for, and if any other categories exist, I have to guess what they are through the search box.
I tried doing some "site:www.goodcheapandfast.com ..." tagged searches in Google to confirm that the GCF pages are being indexed. They are in the index; just when you remove the site: syntax, they disappear; maybe they show up in the long tail of the search if you dig far enough, who knows.
It looks more like a (manually?) curated list of products that fulfill the criteria of "good, fast & cheap", within various categories.
https://i.imgur.com/mtqISep.png
Scroll a bit down and you see what looks like a footer giving testimonials.
The links to curated categories are off the screen on desktop. No idea what mobile looks like.
Next to the search box, it states that this is by a data scientist. If that is in any way relevant other than in the sense "this is by a smart person", what it means to me is that there is a massive amount of data here which is intelligently filtered and subject to a decent quality search.
The Venn diagram on the left promises good results, eliminating the problem that good, cheap items are needles in haystacks, buried in fake reviews.
Turns out that the data scientist is just writing consumer education advice columns and reviewing some products he has not actually tried himself.
E.g. 4K projectors:
https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-4k-projectors...
There is no way he owns all of those. I would much rather read the Amazon reviews or whatever from people that bought those things, especially from people who had issues. That's in spite of the issue of fake reviews; oh well.
https://sourcemaps.squarespace.net/universal/scripts-compressed/cldr-resource-pack-3e6d18ccbc01a401a2e61-min.en-US.js.map
At this point since you don't have much to lose, it might be worth buying a new domain and 301'ing everything from goodcheapandfast.com to the new one.
You'd pass on most the link juice but lose the bad name.
I was actually moved by the author's plight. Their current situation seems very helpless and I truly respect the effort to swim upstream with a principled approach to delivering a service in a market that is rife with shenanigans. I personally tend to get sucked into analysis paralysis when purchasing new products and any quality signal I can get outside of what is placed in front of me is extremely valuable. Probably to amplify the author's point, I can't say I've ever heard of his site and it's not recognizable to me. One of my favorites for quite some time, Wirecutter, has lost all of my faith after a few buys based on their findings wound up being garbage.
I say all of that to try to underscore the fact that I'm only trying to be productive, but without this backstory and the author's attestation to everything they do to maintain integrity, I wouldn't find this site remarkable or memorable or compelling in any way. I appreciate the design, it's clean and fast, but in reviewing several of the product areas that I've actually been looking at recently I can't find anything compelling in the content that the site brings to the table. To be blunt, it's not obvious to me what the author does with their time if this is their bread and butter.
One example. A few months ago I decided I wanted to upgrade the microphone I use for videoconferencing. I wanted something that was fairly directional as I didn't want to have the microphone in the view of the camera and I was hoping for a relatively flat frequency response. I was also on the bubble about going with a USB microphone vs getting an XLR mic and USB audio interface, and comparing them by pivoting on that feature was useful to me.
Here is the list of Good Cheap and Fast streaming microphones (which seems relevant) on goodcheapandfast.com: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-streaming-mic...
Let's assume I get to that URL from a Google search result and this is my first an only impression. Right off the drop I notice a few things (i'm on a PC):
- Design is spartan and the site loads quickly. I can't actually tell that there are no ads b/c my ad blocking game is on point.
- There isn't an obvious brand, the site logo is understated and loses the battle with the headline for any attention.
- My eyes instead fall to the blue badge on the right 'Real Customer Reviews & Ratings [VERIFIED]'. This primes my expectation that I'm going to be seeing some verified reviews.
Maybe this is just me, but I don't start by reading the text. I start scanning down the page
.
.
. Omnidirectional I see this, see Cardioid is next and realize it's just a mini tutorial on pickup patterns, not going to read it.
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. Dynamic v Condenser more tutorial stuff (let's be honest, in my head i'm thinking more copy/paste)
.
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. How much does a good...cost. Not really interested in reading a paragraph on this...i have no idea what it says.
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. Pyle USB PC Recording Condenser Microphone (PDMIUSB50) Pyle? Interesting pick for the top of the list. Solid value brand in amplifiers but not really known for anything in recording...but maybe they have a sleeper in this microphone, let's see those 'verified reviews'
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. Fifine K669B USB Metal Condenser Recording Microphone
.
What? The next microphone already? This is where I stop scrolling. My eyes turn up and I see the entirety of the assessment of the Pyle microphone
Good Value: $56 | Great Deal: $50
Check Current Price on Amazon | Check Current Price on Walmart
Pyle's plug-and-play USB microphone is durable, sensitive and clear,
according to several online customers. Some reviewers warn that the mute
button makes an audible pop; others wish the stand was more durable.
OK, I click around a bit looking for a more detailed review of this product. Nothing. I grab the scroll bar and drag up and down the page, more of the same.
And then I leave. Sorry.
Again, I really empathize with the authors situation and respect their philosophy, but without some reason to really really drill into what is being presented the site is a non-starter.
Aside from that, yes, this is what happens, when we rely on Google traffic. Only advice I can give besides designing well (not necessarily according to Google wishes though), is to not get too dependent on Google.
If somebody asked nicely to shit on your lawn, would you say yes?
Just wanted to also complain about Google.
I am guessing RankBain finally understood humor:
"according to several online customers" - This phrase or a close variant is used in almost every review and it's really distracting. It feels too robotic and repetitive.
In general, it seems like "build quality" is a common complaint, which at these price points is likely always going to be an issue. I guess what I mean is with cheap prices I'm not expecting build quality to be great so repeatedly calling it out in a general sense isn't all that useful. Far more useful is when a specific part is called out, which in one case it is, the wire being flimsy. More of that!
In general, it would be nice to have more specifics instead of the constant generalities one associates with low/er-cost goods.
The phrase "noise cancelling" is used about 44 times in the article. From what I recall this may be considered "keyword stuffing", which is used to be (and almost certainly still is, a big old no-no). Of course how do you create an aggregate content page without mentioning the topic repeatedly? Well my friend that's the Google content paradox! - talk about something without actually mentioning it by name.
On general mission: it would be really nice to have the top "pick" better called out.
I read the first review and was ok, that sounds like an option I wouldn't have considered, good job site! But then said "Mpow hmmm... not a brand I've heard of", so I scanned down and came to the JLab's. I said "I've heard of them!" and read the blurb.
That's where the problem starts: For almost the same price the blurb makes the Jlabs sound "better" or at least more attractive than what I thought was the "top pick / best value".
I think some of this may have to do with the fact that in the Mpow's have two negative aspects pointed out "Others say that the battery life and microphone are disappointing", whereas the Jlabs only one: "pinch their ears". Mind this isn't about count so much as what's being called out: one may have bad battery life and the other may actually hurt my head lol.
The reason I say "problem" is sites like Wire cutter take a stand and proclaim "this is the best", even though in most cases the top 3 or more would all be just fine. As it stands, we have many low cost options presented and all with what appears to be potentially deal-breaking flaws; the end result is I don't really feel any better prepared that if I had just gone to Amazon and scanned reviews myself.
What's more, if I see something with 20 total reviews at 5 stars and a similar product with 40k 4 stars, I'll usually just go for the one with more reviews. In short, number of reviews is a strong signal for me, and I think / hope it would be trivial to add that as a metric to your site.
On Google: So in closing hopefully some of those thoughts are useful in some way, but I did want to close by saying I absolutely feel your pain.
Someone like you posts a traffic drop off story and we all rush in to say this is why, but what we forget is Rome wasn't built in a damned day. If this traffic penalty sticks it's pretty safe to say you're business and dream is dead. No google means no traffic means no site. Business is hard but what we need to agree upon is the promise of the internet was to democratize and incubate. The early internet certainly did, the modern, not so much.
I think we can all agree that the best ideas should rise to the top and be rewarded. We should also agree that a single company shouldn't have that power, but the Internet's users. Legislation is the only cure here, so far as I can see, as this exact scenario plays out time and again and it's always at our expense, both business owners and internet users.
Good luck, and keep at it!
Google seems to behave like a hybrid Borg collective which spawns mini collectives, isolates them from the hive, allows them to go explore and mature somewhat, and then either absorbs them (assimilate!) or kills them if they don't fit back in.
While surely there are some humans at the top making strategic decisions, it feels to an end user that they are utterly soulless. The collective works to observe processes and outcomes (based on metrics which don't include human concerns or at least weight them very low), and then it makes changes and iterates. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already elements within the Google-beast which are unknowable to the humans working there. The concepts or goals and results may be knowable, but the path taken may not.
It should be obvious that the current "internet" (easy name for the state of online-anything these days) system is unsustainable. Perhaps it will go the way of the AI operating system in Her (2013 film), simply ignoring humans (whereby the humans will be able to use whatever of the services are accessible until they become inaccessible or non-functioning); or maybe it will determine that the best path which results in the best outcomes is to do absolutely nothing - thereby ending all operation. Naturally the humans with access to the source and the systems can attempt to correct the errant course once it is recognized, but short of a complete rewrite with a new approach, it will fail. They will go the way of all giant companies (and countries) who have sat at the top of the hill for too long and lost the values which led them to the top.
Facebook will hopefully go the way of reality TV (or is that still a thing?). How or why? Who knows. Perhaps another few rounds of global lockdowns will make everyone so desperate for actual human contact that they eschew social networks and take up dancing, casual sporting, dinner parties, and other great life activities. (Or more likely, their ads will get worse and worse until the stench is so bad that no respectable company would be caught with an ad on Facebook; the money would vanish, the talent would bail, and eventually they would get bought by a Comcast and rebranded as AhOLe or somesuch.)
Amazon will eventually ONLY sell cheap knockoff products up until the original creators stop creating, and the copycats are left to try to imagine and make their own unique products (the result of which will be a physical form on par with the nonsensical text they currently put on boxes and in instruction booklets).
Microsoft will still make and sell Office and Windows, forever and ever, because humans will never collectively choose to get educated on technology; it's easier to just keep using what you've always used. (Not to say that Windows or Office is bad, but it's often not the best choice.) Still, MS will outlive Google.
Apple will continue to exist and maybe hold a high place until eventually the designers, wild-thinkers (there must still be some there) get replaced with stock market drones with one monitor dedicated to the current quarter revenue projection spreadsheet. Then it will be a slow decline. MS will outlive them.
Almost forgot Twitter. The orange monster will fade into the history book which nobody wants to read, and the followers of orange monster will predictably be so poor as their local economies dry up (except for the private prison jobs, but there are only so many positions to fill) that they won't be able to afford the shoddy Comcast internet that is the officially sanctioned local monopoly internet. Besides, words will have been replaced with PopTop or whatever the latest 3 second video service is. They'll be too late to pivot to GIFs only since Imgur has been lying in wait for this moment.
Well, what a bit of fun this was. Might be that we're worrying about nothing, or perhaps worrying about entirely the wrong thing. Surprise, asteroid!
Just use DuckDuckGo, an iPhone, and Fastmail, say, and nothing else Google offers is that prevalent that it's hard to see, surely?
(I assume we're not counting visiting a site with Google-provided ads as 'using Google'.)
Firstly, they are 'minimising' their tax base[0], and second, is not committing crimes an achievement these days?
[0] - https://developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/08/tax-google-dodge....
How do you compete when nobody is buying Yuan and the demand disappears overnight in the foreign exchange markets?
Vertically integrated monopolies are sticky because you can't replace any individual part of the stack by itself. You can't compete with iMessage just by creating your own messaging app, because to be on a level playing field you would also have to create your own mobile operating system and design your own phone hardware and microprocessors and convince all the customers to switch despite the existing network effect.
If we made it to a market where anybody could create a new OS and have it run on the existing installed base of hardware, or create a new app in a write once run anywhere language and it could run on every existing device, vertically integrated competitors are at a disadvantage because they have to be best in class in all of their individual markets or else customers find themselves better off to have the ability to mix and match.
Back in the 1980s, Ottawa had a local independent broadcast named CJOH. They produced their own local news at 6pm and late night. The CJOH news team was well respected and an active participant in the community. CJOH eventually got purchased by CTV and ultimately landed under the control of BCE / Bell Media. Shortly after Bell Media gained control a few years ago, they laid off longtime anchor Carol Anne Meehan. Not a good move in my view, as they brought on an entirely new and young team. Further cuts to the news staff have happened over the last few years as increasing use of technology has allowed further staff cuts -- everyone from camerapeople to editors and technical support staff. Each cut means one less means by which the news organization can learn about things that are happening in our community.
The acquisition of Discovery Channel was even worse in my opinion. From 1995 to 2018 Discovery Channel ran a show called Daily Planet, which was one of the only daily science news shows. This was a wonderful way to find out about all kinds of cool things going on in the world of science and technology. It aired on weekdays at 7pm after the 6 o'clock news. Bell Media cancelled the show on May 23, 2018.
The loss of Daily Planet is, in my opion, worse than that of a local news channel. Daily Planet was part of the reason for the existence of Discovery Channel. There are no real replacements being broadcast that I know of.
The reason I bring all this up is to show how the priorities of a monopoly impact existing services that are a public benefit. In my opinion, the BCE layoffs were not the result of the company losing money. The reasons were to free up cash flow to pay for Bell Canada's massive investments in building out its Fibre To The Home network. Bell has spent billions of dollars thus far building out FTTH across Ontario and Quebec, acquired the incumbent in Manitoba. Purchasing content producers that were once separate entities, then gutting them and using the savings to pay for FTTH construction is a brilliant strategy. Money that was previously an expense gets turned into capex that builds a new asset.
Sadly, our phone and TV bills don't go down in price despite us getting less new content. I had the chance to speak to folks at Discovery Channel at a conference back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, and their enthusiasm about bringing real science content to the public was amazing. I'm sad this has been lost at the alter of corporate greed.
But, I'd be surprised if many science-minded people from Gen-X or later, were still watching cable in large numbers. Same for the local 6:00 news for that matter.
I despise Bell as much as the next Canadian, but this shift is likely more due to the increased competition (internet, wireless phones) for mindshare.
>Sadly, our phone and TV bills don't go down in price despite us getting less new content
I was thinking about this recently. Every other area of technology gets cheaper and cheaper (relative to their capabilities) but internet keeps getting more expensive. At least in Canada.
One could artificially prevent the search engine from e.g. sending keywords and viewer profiles to the ad network, but that is a completely separate regulatory approach from monopoly-busting.
While we're stumbling around the regulatory possibility landscape why not just ban advertising altogether? It's a ~1% drain on the economy that people who know better go out of their way to block.
This wasn't without some losses. Bell Labs lost a lot of funding once the Bell monopoly was split up. The amount of R&D that the telecom giants funded over the years resulted in massive public benefits, creating the tech industry we all know and love.
Maybe something that would make more sense is if Google was split into two or more search engines, each of them would get a copy of the current source code and data.
We could create our own search engine, funded by showing Google Ads, today; the suggestion is that that Ads business be separate to Google's own Search business which happens to use it, but which might easily (except obviously it doesn't) use Facebook Ads or whatever instead.
(I just checked Ask Jeeves and Startpage, and they were both serving ads from Google.)
Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do.
This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad networks on the web while also running massive ad-supported properties in house.
To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a couple of dozen separate paths, I end up at a different news site that I don't have a subscription to. Should I really have to have 100 subscriptions to news sites that I only read 1 or 2 articles from each month? Some entity needs to aggregate this into a single convenient $30/month subscription. Ideally it would be standardised and be added on to my monthly internet bill (IETF standards ftw).
This is probably silly, because if you're paying a couple cents per view, you should be concentrating on the value you receive in the aggregate... but people aren't rational, and personally, I don't think I'd be immune to feeling a sense of regret when I spent money on the wrong link.
I'm not going to remember the episode, but I'm pretty sure Planet Money said this is what happened when micropayments were tried in the 90s.
I subscribe to Scroll.com, and I think they've probably got a better model down. Make agreements with lots of sites from different companies, and then offer a bulk subscription which removes ads from all of them. It doesn't let you through paywalls, mind you, but you could imagine a variation on the concept which did.