• Rhaedas@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Bushwhack@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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….

      • jecxjo@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

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

      • Rhaedas@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • Bushwhack@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.