Technology Musings

I feel like a few people are missing the point as to why MetaFilter dropped in their rankings. It was likely not a manual penalty but rather a change in regards to the Panda algorithm. According to this article (https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0) the drop happened in November of 2012. It doesn't say which date, but November 5 and November 21 were both days that Google refreshed the Panda algorithm.

Panda was created to filter down poor content and filter up good content. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but generally if a site is being filtered down it's because there are too many pages of the site in the index that are apparently not helpful to users.

I do think that the design has a lot to do with MetaFilter's demise. I have landed on this site, and, not knowing what I know now after reading articles about the quality information that is on MetaFilter, I have immediately clicked away because it looked like a spammy page. If enough users do this then this shows Google that users don't want to engage with this site.

I haven't had a deep look into the technical structure of the site but there's a good possibility that with a redesign and a review of their architecture, the site could see a return to normal levels with the next Panda refresh.

From Haughey's Medium post (https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0) about it all:

"Advice online was to scale back the "top heavy" ads... I removed most ads to the absolute minimum of just 1 or 2 per page..."

Also mentions first running ads that blended with the content to then running ads that stood out from the content.

Funny thing is that if you are an AdSense publisher, you get emails from Google all the time telling you what you should do. If you aren't using your full allocation of 3 ads and 2 LUs per page, they will often email to remind you to run more ads. And they'll encourage you to run ads in prominent positions towards the top of the page. And to run ever-larger ads. And then change from text-only ads to image ads.

I have had AdSense-monetised sites for around 10 years and have had seemingly automated emails as well as personal emails from account managers about these things.

Ah, I think you're operating under the misapprehension that it was metafilter.com that was attracting the Google clicks & so you're reasonably looking at posts to metafilter.com & wondering how they could ever have ranking in Google searches in the first place.

As I understand things, it's the ask.metafilter.com Q+A sub-site that was the main source of Google search clickthroughs & thus ad revenue (Yup, 90% according to Matt Haughey's essay on medium.com: https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0 ). The main metafilter.com site is pretty much irrelevant in revenue terms, although it may be affecting the overall ranking of ask.metafilter.com pages in Google search results for internal Google voodoo reasons of course.

NB. Let me know where that link to the Indian pharmacy is & I'll flag it.