Google and The Online Slang Dictionary (2020)

The site has definitely been nuked as you can see here,

https://i.imgur.com/GadzIiz.png

It has gone from 3.2M traffic in 2020 to 172k today.

I'm just having a hard time with the timelines mentioned in the article. He says the site was manually penalized in 2011... but between 2016 and 2020 the site was super healthy as far as positions (traffic) goes.

The site started losing most of its traffic around June 2021, which is also when Google did a big Core Update,

https://searchengineland.com/google-june-2021-core-update-ro...

and I definitely know that this one has been talked about a lot in SEO circles, even being mentioned to this day.

But yes.. I don't get why this article is worded the way it is because it is contradictive to what is actually going on.

While Google does have manual penalties, I do not believe that is what is going on here.

There are a few problems with the site, for example, it redirected me to use HTTP instead of using HTTPS: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2014/08/https-as-r...

Matt Cutts and the early era of SEO and spam. If you are into SEO history, feel free to google "Matt Cutts John Chow" as an example of how things evolved when the Google SPAM boss himself was approachable directly.

I remember many interactions between them and at the time, Matt was pretty open about the then-new SPAM filter team at Google and penalties. Here is a blog posting for context: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/something-is-wrong-on-the-int...

John Chow was a blogger back then and prominently gamed google ("Made for Adsense") using - and enter Matt Cutts: abusing - Pagerank to boost his website.

They had many interactions and several bans were lifted because of these interactions.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/comments-on-our-webmaster-gui...

Discussion three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822080

If this is true, it is truly horrible: know someone at google and just sink the competition in one fell swoop. Although one has to say that serving via http certainly is not helping.

I'd expect simple signals like the strapline being bracketed (suggesting lower importance for those words) and the lack of use of "American Slang, English Slang, and Urban Slang" and hence missing keyword phrases to make a difference, especially if the title and strap are then used in link slugs?

Are these sorts of signals moot nowadays, is there any on-page aspect left?

Definitely has something to do with the giant warning banner that the site doesn't have https://

If these were separate companies, There is a case to be made against Youtube for the excessive pre-roll ads that take up a lot of screen space.

This has been posted repeatedly over time. The problem with the site is that it has the structure of a shallow content farm and Google hates those.

Most of the pages are being properly drilled with a shallow content penalty. The pages are easily 90-95%+ constructed of repeating content farm linking or text repeating structures (the biggest piece of content on a given page is a content farm structure, this: "Slang terms with the same root words"). That's garbage filler that once upon a time was abused by content farms to fake a full page of content (which is exactly what this site is trying to do). Google destroyed that approach to luring traffic via SEO abuse a very long time ago.

To say nothing of the fact that it's just not a valuable content segment today. It's not novel, it's not in any way superior to its competition. 15 years ago a slang online dictionary might have been an amusing entertainment source for a couple of minutes. The interest in properties like this has imploded over time. Broadly these types of farms have no future and they have been dead for nearly a decade.

It'd be like being shocked that your shallow content recipe index with 25,000 recipes no longer gets the Google traffic & love that it did in 2005. Or a famous quotes site. Or a lyrics site. Well no kidding.