1 yr. ago • 97%

Twitter seeing 52% of its links removed on google after user requirement change

boingboing.net DOOM: Twitter's panic-driven rate-limiting gets them dropped out of Google Search | Boing Boing

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 &#…

36 comments

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.

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- 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.
  
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  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….
  
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- 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.
  
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  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.
  
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- 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.
  
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  There is a lot of Internet to crawl
  
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I might be enjoying all of this a little too much.

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- The US navy detected the implosion of Twitter 3 days ago
  
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  Never too soon. 🚢 🧑‍✈️
  
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  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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  @metaStatic @jestyr @70ms classic!
  
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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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The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

That's exactly what is happening now.

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

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Elon speed running the fediverse migration

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

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- 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.
  
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- Do you mean to tell me that a website called “boing boing” isn’t only written by the utmost professional of journalists?
  
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  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.
  
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  sad Cory Doctorow vibes
  
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  I mean, it is to be good, like a decade ago.
  
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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.

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- Are you really questioning the journalistic integrity of boingboing. net?
  
  What is this world coming to...
  
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  boingboing used to be excellent when it was Cory Doctorow.
  
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- It's just an editorialization of https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
  
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These big pretty thumbnails, they're all broken.

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We're reaching levels of schadenfreude which shouldn't be possible

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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."

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

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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.

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- Following the trail of references (which is actually nice to see even exists) you end up here at Search Engine Roundtable.
  
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It feels like the internet is on fire but the firemen hooked their hoses into a gas pump

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They probably fired all their SEO engineers.

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Anti-SEO, brilliant.

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