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 might be enjoying all of this a little too much.

The US navy detected the implosion of Twitter 3 days ago

I for one think this kind of humor represents how we’ve really sunk to the bottom of the barrel here

I mean, come on, hasn’t this just crushed your spirits?

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I would be enjoying it more if it wasn’t bought, paid for, and orchestrated by Saudi Arabia in an effort to suppress free speech and democracy.

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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.

Love to see this but the article is written by a kid

Odds are it was written by ChatGPT or similar A.I. Been seeing a LOT of articles with odd mistakes or written in "A.I. voice" lately.

Do you mean to tell me that a website called “boing boing” isn’t only written by the utmost professional of journalists?

Boingboing has been around since the earliest days of the web, and used to be one of the biggest sites and well respected. Scrolling through it now is pretty sad.

I mean, it is to be good, like a decade ago.

This is it….after a year of waiting for the implosion of twitter..the other shoe is finally dropping

Why does that page read like a personal attack? Don’t get me wrong, with his latest blunders, I don’t like Elon either; but this “article” seems too unprofessional to cite here to me.

Are you really questioning the journalistic integrity of boingboing. net?

What is this world coming to...

boingboing used to be excellent when it was Cory Doctorow.

Bro, what’s Twitter? I only use Mastadon instances

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

That's exactly what is happening now.

Intercom turns on

"Great people of the first Mars settlement, your glorious leader comes to you from Earth with an important message about this month's oxygen supply."

It feels like the internet is on fire but the firemen hooked their hoses into a gas pump

I refuse to click this link purely for the AI-generated macho-man thumbnail alone. The internet is turning into a series of weird stylised God-figure portraits, and I am not enjoying it.

As for Twitter, I suspect that the ham-fisted emergency rate-limiting implementation probably didn't remember to allow SEO spiders. This would be an expected consequence of preventing the platforms you rely on for traffic from providing their users reasons to give you traffic.

The part that annoys me about all of this is that Musk will experience no consequences from stomping all over Twitter like a selfish mean child with a sandcastle. I feel badly for the people who worked there and sacrificed their time to work there.

These big pretty thumbnails, they're all broken.

What the fuck is wrong with these billionaires releasing pictures of them in "jesus christ" pose.

That's an AI generated image created in MidJourney by BoingBoing.