Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June | Hacker News Reader

Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June

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39 pointspeter12339 comments

In the past some of my search results took me to Scribd pages where the only relevant result was a previous search query of mine that they took and listed on the right as part of the related sarches section.

If they are moving away from this you've got to applaud their efforts--they take a big hit in traffic but improve the oveall quality and reputation of the site.

Thank you Scribd.

I don't think they're moving away from that practice because it makes them feel good.

I can imagine if they continue down their current path they'll take a huge pagerank hit before long - if they aren't on googles radar for SEO dodginess it's only a matter of time.

and also, people will visit once, see that the results are completely irrelevant, then next time avoid clicking on it and grow to hate it.

Great, can't wait till it reaches 0%

Wow. Not many people would willingly say "I hope your startup fails and all the employees (fellow HNers) become jobless." Keep it classy, man.

There's enough people here who say that sort of stuff about non-YC, non-HN startups all the time. Why the double standard?

Alright, that was a bit harsh (rough friday)...

Actually, what he's technically saying is he hopes their traffic goes down 0%.

There are many people who would rather not have to fuss with a flash player just to read a text document.

On the other hand, I love the pirated textbooks. If that's the only format that I can get them in, then I'll live with it.

He said he can't wait until their traffic is down 0%...

It's surprising watching the up/down votes for jcapote's comment. I assumed it'd be downvoted to -8 within minutes, but it's been swinging back and forth b/w -1 and +2 for the past 15 minutes. So there are others who also wish to see scribd get down to 0%?

For the record, I haven't voted either way.

My (a?) typical scribd workflow:

  a) Interesting document posted somewhere, say HN
  b) Visit scribd, click download link
  c) Click pdf
  d) *Grrrrr*
  e) Visit bugmetnot, search scribd
  f) Cut and paste u/p
  g) Download and read pdf

The anti scribd sentiment here doesn't surprise me.

I voted up and would do so multiple times if I could. I don't like those slideshow sites that want you to login either or those embeddable slides! They all break page on the web, IMHO.

Voting up or down isn't supposed to be a statement of agreement but rather one of quality; I believe.

I certainly don't wish ill on them, but I must admit I've never really gotten the point. Isn't "social publishing" just "the Web"?

No. Not any more than social videos are just the web and not You Tube.

In my view, social publishing is not the same as the "web". Scribd, in my view, represents the emergence of a new wave of article-based content publishers.

Recently, there's been a new wave of text-based content sites that are on the rise:

* Scribd

* HubPages (where I work)

* Squidoo

* InfoBarrel

* Helium

As far as Quantcast/Alexa, scribd is still on top in terms of global unique visitors.

I guess that's sort of my point. "Article-based content publishers"? Sounds like, well, most of the internet! Guess I just don't see the value added but hey, to each his own.

To you, there probably is no value added. To someone not so much "in the loop", there probably is.

Anyone could upload a video they made on their own site, even before Youtube. Plenty of people did. Yet, Youtube changed a lot of things for a lot of people.

Bandwidth for video is expensive. Bandwidth for text is not.

To be clear, my point is that people are flocking to these article-based web sites so there must be something there beyond just being text on the web.

The traffic has been growing. At HubPages, we were at 8 million unique visitors in Nov, 2008 and now we are approaching 14 million unique visitors in Aug, 2009.

I would argue that these article-based sites are popular because of the web tools available on them, the community of writers and readers to interact with, and the growing traffic. People want these types of places to add their information.

Sure, they could open a blog account by itself or write anonymously on Wikipedia but it's not the same.

Scribd seemed to be the first of these sites to go mainstream. That was my main point to your question. If there's nothing there, what accounted for Scribd's popularity?

It took me a long time to understand why Twitter was an improvement over RSS. Sometimes, these trends are not obvious until you have the experience of participating with the web site that is growing in popularity.

I hope that better explains my original point.

upped because I hate it when every time i try to search for something, there's a scribd link for something TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to what I'm looking for on the front page of google masquerading as real content. I don't like their SEO practices and I think the company should change its tactics.

possibly you should blame Google if you don't like the search results, not Scribd...

Well, its like saying that you should sue the police when your house got robbed instead of the robber. Scribd is the one with the intent of gaming the system, Google just wants to provide relevant search results, so its clear to me who should shoulder the blame.

no, its not clear at all, the failing is with Google for preventing what you call "gaming the system", and your analogy is flawed for the same reason. Using your analogy lets say you hire a security firm to protect your most valuable asset, then you get robbed. Who would you blame? Clearly the answer is a function of both.

However, I'm not even convinced of that Scribd have managed to game anything. Can you provide a link to google search results that backs up your claim?

From the article: "2) reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results"

The real question is whether or not they got Google smacked before making the changes.

Come on dude... they did change their tactics, is what the article says.

Dare I ask how Scribed got to a point where their SEO is too well done?

Super high page rank + lots of pirated content + well optimized site. I think that's it.

That, and, if I am not mistaken, incorporating search terms of previous visitors into the page. Somebody would search for 'iPhone widgets' in Google, click on the Scribd link about totally unrelated'wooden widgets', and Scribd would put 'iPhone' on the page, making it much more likely for the next person to be misdirected.

the word they ad are invisible or visible? If visible where do they put it? in tags? description?

I wonder who one feels like as a CEO if customers wish you so much well (assuming the people at Scribd actually read things like this).

Maybe people have finally realized that their interface sucks? The whole scroll through a flash based viewer embedded in my perfectly good web browser has never appealed to me.

Plus the fact that they ignored their piracy problem for way too long.

Non-piracy use of Scribd will evaporate entirely when Google gets around to making their brilliant pure-javascript PDF viewer (currently only used in Gmail for attachments) available in general form.

I tend to avoid Scribd results in Google because most of the time the document is irrelevant when searching for technical terms. You'll get lots of patents, research papers, resumes, etc but not much practical content. I guess it's not really Scribd's fault it just seems like their content is almost never what I'm looking for. I'm also not too keen on the inability to use my browser's built in search-in-page function. Given the choice of a Scribd link or a plain ole' PDF I'll always pick the PDF.

maybe more people are starting to realize that PDF is total shit, furthermore hard-paginated formats are obsolete and ridiculous today

I think it might be an SEO reason too. I remember they had a "people on this page searched for" box which was quite clever.

Academic year effect?

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