Post by @David@setouchi.social

Oh fuck Google! (yes, that's nothing new)
The traffic for the page of my site that brought me the most readers, the most subscribers and also some actual local "clout" in the real offline world (the one about the Setouchi Triennale) has collapsed a few weeks ago (from 100-300 visitors a day to... 1 or 2!)

I thought it was because of fucking AI and I'm sure it plays a part, but I also realized today that it went from being one of the top 5 links on page 1 to the bottom of page 2. Why? No idea.⤵️

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Jay Cinder

@la_lettre_j@phalanstere.social 2 hr. ago

@David kanpai managed to steal more than your content ?

David B. :SetouchiExplorer:

@David@setouchi.social 2 hr. ago

@la_lettre_j Not that I'm aware of.
And that's the English site. I gave up on trying to popularize the festival with French speakers, all they care about is Naoshima, they're oblivious of the rest and don't want to learn (because they're going there to be able to say "I went there" back home, not to actually discover and learn about it)

I really don't know what happened. I heard that back in the day, you could "attack" a website by linking to it from sketchy spammy sites, not sure if that's it.

Jay Cinder

@la_lettre_j@phalanstere.social 2 hr. ago

@David are the sites listed on the first page mostly AI slop ?

If you haven’t made updates to the page recently, that’s also a factor in declining ranking.

Though your drop is not something I ever heard of

David B. :SetouchiExplorer:

@David@setouchi.social 2 hr. ago

@la_lettre_j No, they're all legit sites. OK, the drop is not as bad as I thought in the sense that the page is now ranked 11, it's that Google only shows 5 sites on page one now.

Still, I'm looking at stats from Google search console, the drop in impressions happened in March (that's how closely I follow my traffic over there right now).

It seems that Google is now prioritizing "official sites" in addition to "big sites." I used to be #3 or 4 when you search "Setouchi Triennale" ⤵️

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David B. :SetouchiExplorer:

@David@setouchi.social 3 hr. ago

I haven't made any changes to the site in a while (I even transitioned it from a blog to a static site). The only "change" I made was to activate a "AI bot blocker" on Cloudflare. I'm not even sure how efficient it is. The traffic for my other pages/posts is unchanged (so some random posts now have more traffic that this page that was my "flagship page")

I'm not sure what to do, but I've been thinking about moving this page to my blog/newsletter, maybe I should???