Check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ if someone says its not dead, that means it is already dead.

hmm, does it work vice-versa, i.e. `if someone says dead, that means alive and kicking`.

Not dead doesn't mean useful. Best case, it is providing partially correct information.

From what I see the old Google is dead from self inflicted wounds. In an effort to destroy spam they removed lots of good sites and changed things for the future webmasters and users.

sadly the only game in town for new sites these days is likely facebook traffic, snapchat and youtube.

Google has been looking more and more like the yellow pages in my experience. They serve fast local results because so many people crowd source the info as it's used a lot.

As far as finding useful things outside of local results, the quality varies and the things that are censored are more due to their war on spam than any regulations.

The good thing is that people can still share cool things via snapchat, fbook and their future replacements. The need for google is not the same as it once was.

Sure people will continue to use it as it's convenient for many local searches and accurate enough for that, and its default choice on many mobile devices.

as for web sites and their creators, trying to please google's changing pleasure zones is an unending game without clear rules, taking time and money without an end in sight. Their war an spam has crushed many that were not trying to fight it.

Between mysterious penalties (algorithmic of course, the manual ones are not so mysterious unless it's the google plus network), negative seo, and competition that uses inside info, there is little hope for new sites in many categories to get top placement.

I suggest to either establish local brick and mortar to get those kind of local results with google, or give up fighting google's algorithm and the competition - just buy some ads with them, but consider that you'll likely get more quality visitors with ads and engagement with fbook, snap and others.

Given the search results I had today when looking for a particular model of samsung cell phone - I would guess that page rank is playing a bigger role than one might have guessed - even though it said results effected by your neighborhood location (my neighborhood listed) - I sure had lots of results for phone companies in the UK and other abroad places that offered no helpful information to me about the unlocked phone and how it worked with various lte bands here.

Of course, selection bias and all that, other people's experience will vary. If most of your searches are for stack exchange info you might feel they are relevant and awesome. I prefer to use search engines to search for multiple different sources of info about things to get a bigger picture.

I feel like I find fewer interesting (or odd) little websites these days through Google..Either they no longer exist, or Google ignores them. It is strange and disheartening.

Google is ignoring these sites, using Bing, Qwant or DuckDuckGo works much better for queries where uour looking for that obscure site thst is a treasure trove of info.

Part # are another area where Google Search has notably gotten worse over the past half decade. I've emailed multiple Googlers who claim to want to fix these crap results, but I have yet to have one bother to respond (despite them replying to my comments asking me to contact them!)

Obscure searches is what I use "!g" for. DDG is horrible with them, especially with the change of ignoring forced terms.

Ah, its been a while since I tried forced terms on DDG. Been using Qwant for a while now...

I haven't heard of that. Any good?

Its sufficent to keep me off Google, which neither DDG or Bing could ever achieve. I do occasionally get imposter syndrome, and search something on Google too, but the results are generally more accurate on Qwant (for me at least).

Where Google kills it is built-in currency conversion, wikipedia previews and such.

but consider that you'll likely get more quality visitors with ads and engagement with fbook, snap and others.

Was there not a recent scandal of Facebook metrics being inflated, and erring positively in their favor?

top of mind example: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...

sadly the only game in town for new sites these days is likely facebook traffic, snapchat and youtube.

I disagree. I started a new site last year for work, it's an educational site that contains resources for teachers and parents supporting children with a variety of special educational needs.

SEO isn't a big deal for us, but I did all the basics, made sure pages were structured properly and the content is good. 12 months later virtually all our traffic is from organic search, and we don't use Facebook, Snapchat and only use Youtube to host a few videos.

It seems to me like Google is still doing its job OK.

12 months later virtually all our traffic is from organic search

That is a very dangerous position to be in. If all your traffic comes from a single source you are essentially one algorithm change or a penalty away from non-existence.

Sure, just like university pages die out because students stop visiting them... Oh wait they don't. Despite most being terrible and badly indexed.

See, there are secondary deeper sources like word of mouth, aggregators like reddit etc. They do not direct a lot of traffic but they will make a good site (esp. specialist) resurface every now and again. There are also mailing lists and forums which are too diffuse to count in many cases.

This is opposed to relatively less worthy news sites or ones depending on ad income to run.

Or perhaps the page has very specific content, requiring specific search which means there is little competition except from junk like Quora...

If you're not gaming the system there is very little risk.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Individual employees within Google can arbitrarily kill a website by turning on a manual penalty against the site and marking that penalty as hidden from the site owner.

Do you have an example of that happening without cause?

Yes. There has been a hidden, manual penalty in place against one of my websites for years.

I was only made aware of it when a whistle-blower inside Google informed me.

That's grounds for a lawsuit if true. Maybe you should substantiate such a strong claim, it is rather poor form to make such a definitive statement without proof or some legal action to go with it. How much worse could it get, after all, according to you they've already done the deed, might as well make it stick now.

Funny, I heard a similar thing from someone who had access to insiders in that group, except it was explained something like: someone inside the search or spam team and put a downrank signal on a site with their name on it - and only if the person who put their name on it was consulted, could it be removed.

No way to prove that's true, or an issue with one of my sites, however I think it would be really evil for them to do something like that and still accept disavow lists from us. IT would also be impossible to fix a site if Matt Cutts had put his name as a downrank blocker on a site and he was no longer at the company and able to take his block off of one - of if his pet sites we assigned to someone else who had no interest in de-penalizing a site that had fixed it's issues and such.

To think of all the hours we have spent creating and uploading disavow lists over the years with the google promise it could help - only to find out there may be a hidden curse that is impossible to remove, I mean, it's unfair and they set people up to waste even more time trying to please google knowing that it will never happen.

I always wondered if it's some things like this that would of caused mr Cutts to walk away from google as it seemed that they decided to take the penalties too far. Just a gut feeling, I don't expect there to ever be proof of anything like that, and I have given up on big G changing for the better.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. About 60% of traffic is direct visits, the remaining 40% is via search engines.

Exactly this!

Seems like the original comment is complaining about something he knows nothing about.

Search algorithms are hard, and Google is doing a good job at it. If not, I dare anyone to make a better search engine.

The people I attract to my site also mainly come from Google. People searching for something and finding it. It's very strong.

If you want your article to be shared on social media, you better make sure you have a clickbait title that makes people upset and angry. If you want to be ranked on google, make sure you have a good article.

My site is ranked pretty high on important keywords, and I didn't use any of the SEO hacks. My strategy: make good web content, and rely on the search engines that their algorithms need to be optimized to present good web content.

So far that has been working out really well.

I seriously never saw any quality links on my Facebook feed.

"he knows nothing about." - I don't know everything about google or seo, but I have been semi-professionally paying attention to these issues with multiple sources for many years. Back "in the day" webmasters associated the google index update with moon phases and a mysterious "googleguy" would occasionally confirm new indexes are now live.

So I've watched many keywords and sites and used google for many results for a long time. I've read a lot of other professionals and tried to keep up with things.

Dare anyone to make a better engine? Google had one prior to panda and whatever other animal spam eater around that time. Of course this is an opinion and they will vary - as a user I felt google was better at delivering less censored results long ago, as a user I admit their local results are better than ever - but the censored ones are certainly worse for my use cases.

I am glad you search is very strong, I hope that continues for you.

I really don't care for the long posted advice "have a good article" and google will rank you high. I could write a great article, I could pay Nobel writers and scientists to write a good article. Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time. In competitive search phrases if you have not gotten placement in a certain group of online portals, then you won't stand a chance.

The whole "bad backlinks" can cause you to lose your position has been weaponized for a long time. The time it takes to create the right utf encoded link disavow things is a bad joke, and if you are in a competitive area, you may find yourself trying to figure out how someone gets 100 bad links to your site each month when you can't get 10 good or bad links with lots of trying.

You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!

I rarely see good quality links on fbook, since I only check it a few times a year. However I have watched the trends, and I can say that depending on google as a webmaster or a user is not a wise idea - you have no way to know when they change things and affect what you can show and what can be seen.

I have watched facebook and others increase their usage and can say after running more than $100k in google ads and fbook ads, that at one time google was king for quality traffic, however I strongly believe fbook is much better for quality leads / customers for the time or money spent.

I stand behind what I said about my experience and current state of thinking in my original comment. I am glad your experience is not the same.

I still feel like google is today's yellow pages, and if not for their forced defaults in android would be fading in usage, and if not for their purchase of youtube would be worth much less today and in the future.

There was a time when many businesses had to out spend each other in the yellow pages to get business, now you can't give away the thick books. I have the last yellow pages I saw in my city, it's from 2013 and it's quite tiny.

Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time.

In my case that is definitely not true.

I will tell you my specific use case: if you search for "make my own rpg" on google, my site rpgplayground.com is at #1. It's above the most well known product for this: RPG Maker.

If you look at the links to my site, they are nowhere near RPG Maker. Everybody in that world knows that product, all links go there. Nobody know about my product. Yet I'm at #1.

If you search "make your own rpg", RPG Maker is the top one, mine 2nd.

How did I get there? I wrote some decent blog articles explaining how to make your own RPG.

You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!

I am not, English is not even my native language. But I provide valuable content for people who search for "how to make an RPG" and other related searches.

Congrats on the rankings! It appears from my search here that you may have 2 sites that are both in the top 10 results for that search phrase!

I am guessing that those keywords are not highly competitive money wise, just a guess, as I would assume there would be lots of competition and articles via mashable, tech crunch and similar pushing links around, along with a fair amount of negative seo phishing bad links from multiple pbns to different sites.

I'm sure others have faster access to tools that show what the keyword is worth for adword clicks, what the estimated traffic is and value of such sites.

I have stopped using the seo type tools like the one the article is from, as I have determined that the more valuable spaces to be in are already saturated with players in the index and the cost for time and money is not really worth the expense of the tools and the stress.

I've had a hundred or so domains sent to my email to add to a disavow list, but it seems no one really reads the notes I put in there, so I've lessened my focus on google obviously - the time and money spent elsewhere has bigger rewards for me and those I try to help promote.

I can see how your particular niche is likely to do better with google and not have as many groups of interested people on facebook or snapchat - again just a guess.

Maybe you are someone with faster access to a backlink checker can explain how many quality links you have gotten to your articles just by publishing.

If it's just sitewide links in your header pointing to your other site along site a few hundred blog posts written by you, that would be so funny.

Glad it's been working out for ya, seriously. Google is a fickle friend who can be generous at times, enjoy.

It's true that every niche and business is different.

Those search phrases I'm referring to, are probably too niche to make advertisement revenue from them. But if you sell a product, it definitely helps to be on top there, especially since people really search for what you have to offer. So in that sense they might not be listed among "popular keywords".

I don't use a backlink checker, and don't really do anything specific for SEO, except for the more general advice. I also don't have a few hundred blog posts, but just a few good ones.

This is just a guess, but google also tracks how long people stay on your page. Since I offer what they are looking for, they might stay longer and google lists me higher. I don't know, maybe I was just lucky. But it shows that it's definitely possible to rank high for your specific niche.

My sincere apologies for my snappy "he knows nothing about.", that was uncalled for. You seem to know what you're talking about, only from a different perspective than me.

Phone arena has all of the details about every phone.

The good thing is that people can still share cool things via snapchat, fbook and their future replacements. The need for google is not the same as it once was.

These platforms are also overrun with spam and users are rapidly becoming disinterested in them, too.

Although it has some content, this article is generic enough to make me think is is a SEO strengthening article from ahrefs for certain keywords...

No replica of PageRank exists. Period.

But there are a few similar metrics around, one of which is Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR).

There you have it folks, the article in a nutshell. While somewhat interesting and still vaguely informing, the primary goal is to sell you something. TLDR: "Pagerank as a single metric to track your sites ranking for Google is dead. Use my single metric to track your sites ranking for Google"

Even tough it's a plug, it's a nice one and the content IMHO is pretty good...

I think the PageRank patent is finally expired, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. If so, that's just one less roadblock in the way of anyone who wants to enter the search engine market and challenge Google and Bing.