DOOM: Twitter's panic-driven rate-limiting gets them dropped out of Google Search | Boing Boing
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Fisticuffs enthusiast and noted “Pedo Guy,” Elon Musk announced drastic rate-limiting policies on Twitter last week. Purportedly rate-limiting is evidence of Tekonoking battling with &#…
  • dotfiles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    124·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Rhaedas@kbin.social
      37·
      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.worldEnglish
        11·
        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.socialEnglish
          4·
          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
          2·
          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
            3·
            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.worldEnglish
            2·
            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.

    • grahamsz@kbin.social
      17·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • whofearsthenight@kbin.social
        9·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • MangoPenguinEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • nobodyspecial@kbin.social
      12·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Cordoro@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

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

      • Axellon@lemm.eeEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • voodooattack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • polizeros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

    That’s exactly what is happening now.

  • Griffith@kbin.social
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.”

  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    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.