Earlier today, I was searching Google for a quirky piece of information*, and the first good hit turned out to be from a Straight Dope article. OK, that wasn’t too surprising. But what was surprising was that the hit was from the Washington City Paper. OK, I guess that that’s one of the papers that syndicates the Straight Dope column, so they’re not stealing our content, but the link to the column here on straightdope.com was nowhere to be seen in Google.
Now, I know that our search rankings were slipping some due to a non-mobile-friendly design, but that’s been changed for a while now. What’s dragging us down now?
*I won’t say precisely what quirky piece of information just yet, as it’s the subject of a puzzle in the Game Room.
I am in no position to authoritatively state anything – but with all the changes to the site over the last few months, I would suspect TSD site is still being spidered by Google. I bet the current Google algorithm favors sites already indexed.
Just a guess. I could be totally wrong.
In Chrome on my Android phone, the archive doesn’t really work. I get the first page of results with the “Last” button. There’s no way to go to any other page. Going to the last page, the only paging button is “First”. On the desktop version, paging works correctly. The inability to reach the articles in mobile mode might be enough to drop the rankings.
Having pop under and whatever other annoying ad types are served by the site might also lead to lower rankings.