Comment by theendisney
1 hour ago
Out of my countless www experiments the website made for myself turned out most enjoyable. Technically it is a blog with links, quotes, categories, tags and search. Sometimes i download all pages it links to. (tens of thousands)
Google dropped it from the index long ago. I had a fun discussion with some google folk where they kept arguing my website was designed wrong and that some pages had tomany links.
Basically, if you write an article about the largest banana companies you have to chose which to link to!
The 10 best movies article is better than the best 100. If you make a list of all the movies you've seen your page gradually turns into something really bad. Others will be punished for linking to it but only if you add the nth entry.
As the website is just for me it is clearly their loss not mine. No way im ging to consider linking a sub set of patents or research papers.
At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.
Im sure it is really hard to run a search engine that size. I have ideas how they could improve but it isnt my job. They chose to populate results with big websites which probably is good enough for most users. The problem is that there is now no point creating websites which is terrible for google. If it picks up the domain and (against all ods) deems it worthy of traffic it can be blacklisted at any time.