My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
This is one of several posts I&#x27;ve seen on HN lately following a similar trend: sudden and unexpected drops in search engine traffic. On the one hand it must be jarring to suddenly have a drop in traffic. But is it necessarily indicative of a bad administration of a search engine?<p>Popularity of sites shift. People&#x27;s tastes change. Even without an algorithm change we would not expect search traffic to remain constant. And algorithm changes do shift attention to sites that previously weren&#x27;t getting traffic. Would the world better with static search traffic? The incumbents always win, and newcomers have a tough time getting a foothold. That&#x27;s what it would take to avoid situations like these, and I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s an improvement over the status quo. Between living in constant worry that the algorithm might change and shift search traffic, and a world where the algorithm never changes and search traffic remains rather static I&#x27;m not sure which is really better. In the latter goodcheapandfast.com might never even have existed.<p>Bing&#x27;s blocking mechanism seems pretty crude, though, and not sharing why it was blocked seems particularly wonky. Sure it&#x27;s a cat and mouse game between scammers and devs, but it&#x27;d be nice if they at least vaguely alluded to why the false positive happened.