SEO Lessons From a De-Indexed Blog

Mike
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SEO Lessons From a De-Indexed Blog
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In this article, I cover some SEO (search engine optimization) lessons I learned from having a small humor/creative writing blog de-indexed by Google.

Let Google in on the Joke

It’s great to write funny stuff for readers online, but when you do that, if you care at all about having people find and enjoy your work, you have to

  1. Let your readers in on the joke.
  2. Let search engines know you’re joking as well.

This is probably common-sense to most people, but I, on the other hand, had to learn that lesson the hard way. Fortunately, the site wasn’t that good, and it only had five entries, so no big loss.

Example: A Bad Travel Entry

The site had some dry humor on it, and because of that, it didn’t say anything at all about being humorous. This meant that what a reader landing on a page of the site saw was definitely not what they wanted.

This is something I never thought about when creating that article. I had been reading up on some blog entry ideas and they included things like travel and minimalism. I had a little fun with that and was thinking that if someone stumbled upon my entry, they’d get a kick out of the humor. It never occurred to me that this is a pretty ridiculous idea. I should have, instead, thought about why someone might be reading my obscure blog that’s ostensibly about travel and/or minimalism. They’re not on the site looking for a joke, because they don’t know they’re on a humor site. They would have searched for something involving travel and maybe a blog, because without tagging it as humor, Google wouldn’t have known the page was joking, either.

So, a reader would show up to a page about travel that even had a location tagged in it (that had nothing to do with the article at all – for fun) only to find an article that makes fun of the genre and also pokes fun at the reader for wanting to read an article about travel. One of the main jokes was about blending a minimalism blog and a travel blog into a blog entry about not traveling (minimal travel). It’s not what they were looking for, as they were probably looking for traveling-on-a-budget tips, and that was the joke, and it was also what made the entry a bit terrible.

Example: An Entry that Complains About SEO

Another entry just whines about how tough SEO is. And, it is tough. However, whining about SEO serves no purpose online. This should have been obvious to me, if I had only thought it through. Think about intent! Nobody searches for stories of other people whining about SEO. What do they search for? How tos? Google is looking to serve its users with useful content. They will only serve up stories of whining if that’s what a user is looking for and that doesn’t seem to happen all that often. Not enough to merit keeping my blog indexed anymore, at least! On the other hand, though, I never even tagged it as “whining about SEO” / “SEO whining” / etc… So, who’s going to find it?

That entry ended with a joke list, because (apparently) good SEO practice (at least at one point in the past, maybe it’s not in vogue anymore) often involves lists. Here’s a quote of the list (notice it has four entries – for fun)

Three Surprising SEO Techniques That Work (Really)

  1. Use parentheses! They work, they (really) work! People love them. At least I do, and that’s enough research for this entry.
  2. Create a list. Readers can’t get enough of them. When it comes to lists, the longer the better. This list is waaay too short. It will never attract any readers. But what about you? You’re reading this, aren’t you? No, you’re not. That’s because the list is too short, so it won’t create any excitement, so nobody will ever read this (and that’s a fact!).
  3. Support your claims with real research. Don’t just quote your own gut feelings. They’re terrible. Your guts aren’t great at writing compelling strings of words. They’re simply too busy extracting life-sustaining nutrition from whatever you’ve eaten lately.
  4. Mention niche diets, like “Paleo Intermittent Fasting Carb Loading” diets. They’ll be sure to attract readers interested in losing fat and gaining muscle – i.e. everyone.

Ultimately, reading and writing about SEO can get tedious. However, what I wrote, is actually fairly pointless, other than poking a bit of fun at some fads in writing and culture. When you stop to think about it, it’s often better to be tedious than pointless, isn’t it?

The title of the entry was A Write-Only Post, which became a self-fulfilled prophecy.

The Rest

The two above were the bad ones. There were three other entries. One was short and explained the domain name (a math pun!), another was one I enjoy reading occasionally. It’s about meditation, and I wrote it while trying to meditate. Finally, there was one about some of the physics of relativity. It did not fit in with the rest of that site.

The Meditation Post

Although I enjoy the meditation post a bit, it ultimately serves no purpose for the internet. It doesn’t explain how to meditate, or anything like that. For example, the piece’s title is

This Title has Nine Words (When We Add “Meditation”)

The title is one of the best parts of the article. But aside from that, there’s really not much else to it. It’s very brief, and mostly details how I keep getting distracted from trying to think about nothing. However, it never mentions this directly, since it’s written as stream-of-consciousness.

The Physics Post

The site also had an out-of-place entry on physics. Years ago, after watching a few series that covered some physics on youtube, I had a thought experiment about how to calculate the gravitational time dilation caused by relativity – but with just special relativity. This worked if you didn’t care about motion, so it cannot be used as a theory of gravity, like general relativity. However, I think it’s similar to a line of reasoning used by Einstein to anticipate what parts of general relativity would behave like. The reasoning went like this

If something that has mass is launched upward, it loses energy by losing speed. However, if it has no mass it always has to travel at the speed of light. Therefore, the only way a particle of light (photon) could lose energy if launched upward – leaving a gravity well – would be to slow its frequency. You can use the drop in frequency to calculate the drop in the rate of the flow of time outside of the gravity well. It gives you the correct answer.

Why it works, though, is what I probably didn’t explain correctly, because I don’t really understand what’s going on beneath the equations. I knew what answer I wanted to get, and that this line of thinking will get you that answer, but all I could do was ramble as I attempted a physics “proof”, through a thought experiment.

So, it’s possible that entry got labled as “fringe”, or “crackpot”, because the idea of using only special relativity and Newtonian physics to calculate time dilation – something very often associated exclusively with general relativity – could have been viewed with a high degree of suspicion, especially given the nature of the rest of the articles on the site.

You can find the article that derives it with equations by going to: alephgoogol.com/its-relatively-simple/

(and if you really care to, you can find the other “gems” available on that site to read as well)

I feel it’s a bit of a shame that that article got burried, but it’s because overall the site had no coherent tone, so that entry loses credibility by being associated with the other low-quality content of the site. Why would someone take the time to work though equations on a site that doesn’t seem to take itself seriously. A reader would probably expect that it would just be a waste of time.

Takeaway

To sum up, and add a bit, I learned

  • Lesson 1: Be Overtly Clear – When you have a site, it needs to loudly and clearly signal what it is about. This site does not actually do this optimally. I think it says something about “hoping to be entertaining some day.” That’s sort of self-deprecating, but this site is really supposed to be about providing useful information.

  • Lesson 2: Intent Validation is Survival – Every piece of serious content on a site must validte the searchers intent within the first few seconds. If a serious post has a confusing intro, this can also trigger negative user experiences.

  • Lesson 3: Contextualize Your Tone – What this means is that whenever you use humor you should try to make sure it serves, rather than replaces, the core value proposition of the content.

The Good News

With Google and Bing (Microsoft) getting increasingly better at AI, their ability to understand content today is at a level where they genuinely can spot quality. This means that gimmicks to game the system and artificially rise to the top aren’t as effective as they used to be. This is good for people who create quality content. It means you get to focus more on creating material that adds value, instead of worrying about keyword stuffing, and other tactics, which can sometimes detract from the overall quality of your site.

Also, there’s still room for humor sites, you just have to follow lesson 3 from above and contextualize it. Mention on your site that it is a humor site. Because, unless it’s already famous, how will people know? This doesn’t apply to all jokes, but it does apply to some, especially those that riff on a genre.

A Better Example

This site, in contrast, while far from perfect, does a much better job at fulfilling reader intent. For example, the entry Spheres, Distances, Maps and More!

  1. Has an interactive map app that fits lines to points on the globe
  2. Explains most of the math used by the app

In fact, one of the biggest drawbacks to that page is that it’s not well-promoted. Even in the article, it hardly mentions the fact that there is an interactive map app, although the page’s description text does mention it

… We’ve also implemented a tool that uses those calculations to fit a great circle to two or more points on the globe. Check it out!

In all fairness, I should point out that the interactive map app uses javascript that I wrote. I’m not a very good software engineer – especially with javascript, so the app is a bit slow (but not that slow).

Tips for Moving Forward

Here are some SEO tips I got from Gemini

  1. Actionable Title/Intro Check:
  • The 5-Second Test: Could a user figure out the article’s topic and tone (serious vs. humorous) within the first five seconds of landing on the page?
  • The Search Term Echo: Does the introduction immediately echo the search terms a user would have likely used to find the page?
  1. Don’t just write for your readers: write for the Google user who hasn’t become your reader yet.
  2. Modern SEO isn’t about keywords: it’s about being the most direct, clear, and valuable answer to a user’s question.

Conclusion

Marketplaces change as they mature. When they’re new, they’re not as well understood, so people will search more and also try things out more than they will later on. The internet is no longer new and people have been writing on it for a long time now. However, there’s always room for improvement on the older content, and new discoveries and inventions are being created all the time, providing an unending supply of fresh topics.

Have fun writing, and thank you for reading!

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