In 2022, when the Jack Yan & Associates site went to HTTPS—though some parts of it were on that even in the 2000s—it fell from being second place in Google to below 30th for a search for my name. However, the accepted wisdom was that HTTPS sites outranked HTTP ones on Google. The “experts” all said to wait a bit and it would rise back up there. I took the time frame to be days or weeks.
It languished in the 30s, on the fourth page, for most of the time since.
Mojeek never demoted it: the only search engine that behaved as conventional wisdom stated.
But the notion that moving to HTTPS would improve search engine ranking was, in my experience, false. Where did I read that first? Oh yes, Google—they were the ones who started spreading this.
Yet here was a site that has existed since the early 1990s, moved to its own domain in 1995, before Google was even an idea, that was well established. It would have been better to have left things as they were.
Today, finally, I saw it in 10th for that Google search.
Still not back in second place, and it took two years, seven months for it even to return to the first page of results.
As I wrote this blog post, it fell to 11th, but close enough. We know there’s regularly some jostling.
Maybe the redesign helped, but it would totally be in line with Google’s behaviour if it lied—and these days, what does Google know about running a search engine anyway? It’s certainly not about getting us the information we want efficiently, and it’s definitely not able to weed out “AI” bot content, even ranking it and various harmful redirect pages highly.
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