Twitter seeing 52% of its links removed on google after user requirement change

jestyr@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 564 points –
DOOM: Twitter's panic-driven rate-limiting gets them dropped out of Google Search | Boing Boing
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I don't think google is doing that on purpose. Search engines are supposed to remove dead links once in a while. And twitter redirecting all links to the login page, so it's effectively making duplicate results on google, which are removed. I think that's why google doesn't have too many Linkedin results.

I remember the fear as a web developer in making sure changes were good before going live for this very reason. "Please don't screw up the Google bot crawler and drop the search placement." I'd love to know if Google searches hitting private Reddit pages did a similar thing.

No. Private subs still showed the topic part of the body and like 4 words of the first comment I think before clicking to see you couldn’t read more. I think r/Homekit is an example of this at one point….

Think they also did all the other SEO stuff like put in extra data with meta tags and all that open search stuff.

That's what I figured. However perhaps Google is still looking at how long one stays at a link, and a click right back is still negative.

Google does measure bounce rate and preferences sites which don't turn away users quickly, it's a decent measure of search saliency. Whether the effect is significant or lasts long enough to bother Reddit's accountants is another matter. It also may not be enough to affect their SEM bid multipliers by much or rankings in structured content sections.

I suspect the extended protests hurt quite a lot more than they let on though.

I read elsewhere too that part of googles automatic pruning of results also looks at if a web page responds and at one point Twitter was ddos itself so they think a no reply may have auto taken it down like a webpage suddenly going offline.

Well yeah, it wouldn't be 52% if they were doing it on purpose.

How did the twits possibly not foresee this happening? Surely they have someone with some SEO experience left, anyone.

It'll take a while to recover from this - google aren't going to add half a billion pages back in nearly as quickly as they take them out.

It really doesn't matter if they have anyone left that knows anything about anything. All reports thus far is that anyone not giving the ol' "aye captain" any time Elon says anything gets shitcanned. I'm sure there is someone there that probably went "but, sir..." before immediately getting shut down.

I wish they would drop dead links faster, I feel like 20% of the results I click on get 404 or the server is straight up down.

There is a lot of Internet to crawl

True, maybe just a report dead link button on the results page would be the way to go.

That would get abused. You click it and it gets queued to check its status and you're right back to crawling.