Topic: Google partial blackholing of Bitcointalk? (Read 765 times)

That could be it as it offers internet services like remove news articles from google which proves useful in ensuring reputations are maintained.

I doubt this forum would be affected since it's not offering any services that's under Google's scrutiny such as licensed exchanges.

Definitely. The majority of the users registering, and landing on this forum would have been directed here via word of mouth or through Google. I can't deny that. My angle of my reply was that alternatives to Google are becoming better, and therefore we should see more, and more users using different search engines in then next couple of years, so targeting each search engine for ranking is important. Although, I'm not going to deny that Google will likely have the monopoly on searches for quite some time.

While I agree completely that Google is not good for privacy, I'd say that my statement was not about how good, bad or evil google (and its search) is, it was more to bring the news that Bitcointalk gets indexed a bit better again. And since most users do search with Google, this should be a good news.

Generally, DuckDuckGo isn't as good at indexing, and finding what your searching for, and sometimes you have to revert to using Google or another search engine. However, if you can avoid that, and find it manually its a much better improvement in terms of privacy. Also, I've used DuckDuckGo for a long time, it used to be absolutely awful a few years ago, and it was hard to keep using it despite the obvious benefits to privacy, but nowadays its much better, and returns the expected results about 90% of the time. Google in terms of indexing, and technical searching is better, but I expect DuckDuckGo to keep getting better, and be much more closer to Google given enough time.

I haven't read too much into it because it doesn't really apply to me much, but I assume by the way you phrased it that this is offering an incentive to those that are following the Know Your Customer (KYC) guidelines. So, might not have any effect on the forum.

Starting today on August 3rd google is again allowing crypto and bitcoin advertisement so my speculation is that this may also have a positive effect on bitcointalk forum.
This only applies for US customers for now, and works only for products like crypto exchanges and wallets that are registered with FinCEN or a federal/state chartered bank.
I am not sure if this applies on forums like bitcointalk but we can monitor situation and see if something changes in next few weeks.
Source: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/10688110?hl=en&ref_topic=29265

Note that I totally stopped using google search and I am using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Brave search that I started testing recently.

It has been discussed on other forums that part of the issue is forums like this themselves.

If I search for how to do something with my car, instead of winding up on a forum, I get links to other sites. Blogs, youtube, medium posts. Almost like G is penalizing forums.
And lets face it, that might be a people problem, they are thinking don't TELL me how to reset the oil warning light, give me a 1 minute video.

Since G does give links that have been clicked more times more weight in a search (or at least they did) it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Nobody clicks on the 10 step how to, so it gets buried, then you can't even find it. Just the videos on how to do it.

If more people search for something about BTC and wind up clicking on github, or medium, or wherever then links here become harder to find.

-Dave

Some update on the situation.

Since this thread was made, I've switched from Google (which I've used basically since its inception) to DuckDuckGo, which was sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Today I've been searching (with DuckDuckGo) for something I knew it's on bitcointalk, still DuckDuckGo didn't find it for me.
I thought "what if?" and I tried with google this time and it worked. Surprise-surprise.

So I came back to this topic and clicked on Greg's example in the starting post. First page didn't return the correct page, but after clicking the
"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." link it has returned the "missing topic" (as the second result!).

I find it an improvement - not the best, but still closer to what should be - hence I thought it worth telling.

Website admin here. Structured data really only helps your search results if you also have a high pagerank (I'm sure you already know this).

Structured data is only an addon as far as Googlebot is concerned and doesn't influence your search results much. A site's not going anywhere without a ton of backlinks.

Edit: After checking your post history it's apparent that you are another alt of humanrightsfoundation so I'm not surprised at your dislike of BTCT.

Links that are posted on bitcointalk tend to rank well on google search results. This is why there have been so many spambots posting links on threads, and even creating accounts that never get used with links on their profiles.

Maybe theymos can provide some insight as to if google's crawlers are visiting old threads at rates less frequent than usual.

Well, it does.. and least for some definition of mobile.
Not the point, the issue I'm raising is that chunks of the site aren't indexed at all, not just poorly ranked.

One possibility is that the site is being targeted by parties trying to keep information out of google.  For example, after forum user cy ph er doc (spaces to avoid the same fate for this thread) participated in a scam that ripped off a lot of people he ended up in court over it which resulted in his bitcoin address being posted Bitcointalk.  Although his bitcoin address is still on bitcointalk you can't find any of those pages in google.  So maybe he paid some service to vanish the information from the internet and they're doing something shady to get bct pages removed from google indexes? -- and stuff like that.  Maybe the cumulative effect of various scammers trying to keep pages on bct that expose them out of google might be hurting the sites visibility?

Most search engines offer an advantage in ranking results to those pages that are optimized for mobile devices. And Google is the first to make such changes to its algorithm. Accordingly, since Bitcointalk does not have a mobile version of the site, all search results will be displayed after those pages that are optimized for mobile devices.

Neil Patel has some good tools and advice, just that the consultation fees are a premium to begin with. But for someone to invest so much effort in building his brand, that's justifiable.

On a side note, I've seen alot of hate for that fella on another discussion forum. It seems like that poor fella keeps getting flak over his looks

That appeared on the top because you searched using the main title "Turing completeness and state for smart contract". What OP highlighted is specific post within that page. This is the issue of SEO and how this forum SMF is designed. It's not related to old or new results. I have a suggestion for theymos to solve this....

Well here is a small suggestion what i think can be done in terms of SEO.. not sure how much work need to done by theymos to do this. But i believe this will be very effective and might solve this current issue where google not showing the results. I have faced similar issue and i was able to solve it. I will try to explain it here..

Since the main topic have unique URL with topic id and each post have their own unique URL with msg number. This is good, but it's not good enough for search engines

Main topic:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/turing-completeness-and-state-for-smart-contract-1427885


Specific post in topic:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/turing-completeness-and-state-for-smart-contract-1427885.msg14601127


If you notice in both cases page title and content remains the same (at least for the first page 20 posts), so there's no way google going to keep track of the full page (#msg14601127 part of url will be resolved on client side to scroll to specific post)
 
However these days its a normal practice to include the relevant page title for each post or reply. This can be seen in twitter. Twitter changes the title of the page to specific tweet even if its a reply.

Main tweet and notice the title
https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1388231761096847364
Title of the page

Subsequent reply and see how the page title changes
https://twitter.com/LastCoinStandng/status/1388233347520897026
Title of the page

Twitter adding main tweet's handle + reply handle + reply tweet in Page Title.

Similar thing can be seen happening on many other website quora is another example.


Suggestion to show different page title for specific posts:

If the page is accessed using specific ".msg14601127" in the URL
then bitcointalk should show the different "Page Title" and add some text from the post itself in this case google and search engines will keep separate index of it.

Yes there can be other solutions too but this is the easiest one.. another solution could be starting the page content from the specific post mentioned in the URL. But this will be complex specially in the current SMF.

So when user is accessing the page using this URL https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/turing-completeness-and-state-for-smart-contract-1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127

Page title should also change like below, google shows 60 characters on the result page but there is no specific limit to characters to be included in the title.

Yes, but when people search exactly "bitcoin price" they do not have other intent but to find out the latest price. There might be other articles that cover various topics but people who search for bitcoin prices have no interest in them. This is what I meant.

Not exactly true. Pretty much every article you read about Bitcoin's price or stock performance is technically a "bitcoin price" keyword.

My guess: Either Greg is right and it's a Bitcointalk problem, or Google is AB testing. I kinda doubt they would do a carpet update totally killing search traffic for old content, but hey, who knows.

that's why I suggested analyzing these keywords and creating relevant pages with valuable content. The forum has everything to compete for these "heavy" keywords: age, authority, traffic, backlinks, etc.

that particular keyword (bitcoin price) doesn't make any sense to have a rank on, I guess. People search it to find out the price, nothing more, don't they?

that's right. But another fun fact is in most SEO communities people get that guy not seriously, he talks general stuff, not really technical/factual information. Seroundtable.com is a go-to source when it comes to G updates.

Yes, it does. But as I said, I've fixed the problem: switched to DDG.
Since I search for information and not own websites, Google changes in algo usually didn't affect me. As I said, as long as the result is there, I don't care that much if it's the first or 75th. If it's 75th I may refine the search and still find it.

But what Greg has shown was that no matter what you do, you will no longer get that page as result. And that's imho a radical change.

You can thank the ancient 2009 domain and the thousands of backlinks from other sites for that  


The bitcoin keywords are HEAVILY competitive and there's swathes of web pages optimizing for all those above keywords which is why you don't see BTCT anywhere close to there.

Fun fact: all the bitcoin keywords have a volume of like <5000, except for "bitcoin price" which has a whooping 250,000 volume which shows just how many more people search for that than anything else (including investors, nocoiners, journalists and such). I'd show you a pic of the LSIgraph of the keywords but they want me to pay $1,000 a year for the access.

SEO is, as I found out, one hell of an expensive job.


If that annoys you then wait until you hear that neilpatel.com site (a well-known SEO agency) told me that Google makes around 8 algorithm changes a day!