MetaFilter reported on the State of MetaFilter a couple of days ago, and Matt Haughey expanded on that at Medium, writing On the Future of MetaFilter; David Auerbach has now also written about this at Slate in Deranked.
Basically, they report:
I've noted my annoyance with Google repeatedly -- both in where complete review pages show up, as well as in using it to find links to other review and book-information to link to (in essence: there's generally little rhyme or reason -- at least in terms of value-of-content, in my eyes -- to what gets ranked high, and what gets buried way, way down the results-lists). A recent update of all the sites' Geoff Nicholson-review pages (new review coming soon) was frustrating proof again of how awful the results lists can be -- though they did spit up a seemingly endless number of sites where I could apparently illegally download the titles I was looking for information/review-links to; I block these with a Chrome extension so they don't appear in future searches, but Google helpfully seems to constantly find hundreds more .....
Adding insult to injury, my trawling for links has fairly frequently been interrupted in recent months by Google warnings that: "Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service" and so they want to ascertain: "it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot". I understand that there might be something robotic-maniacal about the way I search for links -- scrolling through endless 100-results-per-page pages (since, as noted, Google does not rank useful review/information links very highly, and if I stuck to the top ten search results would basically be linking to ... Amazon and not much else) -- but it does really make me wonder what the 'human' search behavior they're looking for looks like (and how anybody who just looks at the top few results of a given search finds any actual information ...) .....
The Internet has changed over these many years, and there's a lot that might contribute to/cause the decline in overall traffic: there are a lot more book review sites (and, especially, book review weblogs) out there now, so often there is a lot more content to choose from/search for (though of course I think the linkage you find with each review at the complete review makes it slightly more useful than most review-only offerings ...), there are alternatives such as Goodreads which seem to be popular, and there's presumably a lot of other (non-book(-review) content that folks are flocking to (instead). The complete review is also very different from, for example, MetaFilter; still, this shared fate suggests to me that Google has chosen to tailor its results to ... well, not to the most useful information/content. (Given their market dominance I can't say they doing it wrong -- after all, they still seem to be faring very well.)
Basically, they report:
Unfortunately in the last couple years we have seen our Google ranking fall precipitously for unexplained reasons, and the corresponding drop in ad revenue means that the future of the site has come into question.Regrettably, the story strikes much too close to home -- the total ad revenue graph Haughey shares bares an eerie resemblance to the rise and fall of (total) revenue for the past few years at the complete review (though it peaked earlier here), a site that is coincidentally also fifteen years old (and also very much (or even more so): "from 'two or three Internets ago'"). Here, too, the cause is largely Google-based, since Google continues to be the source of (the no longer so large ...) vast majority of traffic to the site and complete review-results have, for several years now, fared far, far worse on the almighty search engine.
I've noted my annoyance with Google repeatedly -- both in where complete review pages show up, as well as in using it to find links to other review and book-information to link to (in essence: there's generally little rhyme or reason -- at least in terms of value-of-content, in my eyes -- to what gets ranked high, and what gets buried way, way down the results-lists). A recent update of all the sites' Geoff Nicholson-review pages (new review coming soon) was frustrating proof again of how awful the results lists can be -- though they did spit up a seemingly endless number of sites where I could apparently illegally download the titles I was looking for information/review-links to; I block these with a Chrome extension so they don't appear in future searches, but Google helpfully seems to constantly find hundreds more .....
Adding insult to injury, my trawling for links has fairly frequently been interrupted in recent months by Google warnings that: "Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service" and so they want to ascertain: "it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot". I understand that there might be something robotic-maniacal about the way I search for links -- scrolling through endless 100-results-per-page pages (since, as noted, Google does not rank useful review/information links very highly, and if I stuck to the top ten search results would basically be linking to ... Amazon and not much else) -- but it does really make me wonder what the 'human' search behavior they're looking for looks like (and how anybody who just looks at the top few results of a given search finds any actual information ...) .....
The Internet has changed over these many years, and there's a lot that might contribute to/cause the decline in overall traffic: there are a lot more book review sites (and, especially, book review weblogs) out there now, so often there is a lot more content to choose from/search for (though of course I think the linkage you find with each review at the complete review makes it slightly more useful than most review-only offerings ...), there are alternatives such as Goodreads which seem to be popular, and there's presumably a lot of other (non-book(-review) content that folks are flocking to (instead). The complete review is also very different from, for example, MetaFilter; still, this shared fate suggests to me that Google has chosen to tailor its results to ... well, not to the most useful information/content. (Given their market dominance I can't say they doing it wrong -- after all, they still seem to be faring very well.)