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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.
I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in... And then it just... Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to "crawled but not indexed" for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.
I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising... I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn't even care to explain themselves.
I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for... Its dead. Killed by capitalism.
Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.
That's heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
Thats so sad, especially as someone who regularly tries to find small forums like that. But i always have such a hard time finding them unless i already know the site name :(
Its so hard now for a regular person to find content made by other people without it being tarnished by the profit motive. Forums are all pretty much on reddit or dead. Even a good blog that isnt just seo trash is hard to find now days. Social media sites are mostly influencers trying to sell products and attract followers.
I just wanna see the cool stuff other humans are doing and thinking without ads and low effort garbage 🥺
I wont lie, it hurt to shut The Den of Amateur Writing down. That place was a product of the heart. So many good memories.