It’s not just us: Google fares poorly for site: search for Quartz

Not all of you will have caught the postscript to yesterday’s post. I wanted to see if Google was doing as bad a job with other Wordpress-only websites, and one of the most famous is Quartz. Sure enough, it was. Of the top 50 for site:qz.com, 33 pages were author, tag or category pages (let’s […]

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Got dynamic pages or a Wordpress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly

That was short-lived. Bing’s back to offering 55 results for Lucire, and when you go through them, c. 40 per cent are repeated from page to page. However, a lot of the results are from the 2020s now, of both static and dynamic pages, so that’s something. There’s still a handful of truly ancient pages […]

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Bing is coming back to life

In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s. There are still a […]

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Nostalgia is not a business strategy

Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, […]

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Pirates must love GoDaddy

If you are a pirate, then GoDaddy seems to be the place to host. Last November, we spotted three stolen articles on the sephari.co.nz domain, which appears to be hosted by GoDaddy. I filed two DMCA notices, to no avail. They were in the standard format, one that GoDaddy requests and has acted on in […]

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Autocade is about to turn 15

Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade.   Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008. We did a single video under the Autocade name, […]

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Nostalgic thoughts: what sparked my interest in fashion magazines, and Nike’s 10 rules for business

  I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the […]

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Google’s top 10 continue to bring up old pages; and it looks like Bing’s about to kick us off

After years of using the web, I think I know a little about how web spidering works. The web spider hits your home page (provided it knows about it), then proceeds to follow the links on it. Precedence is given to the pages within your site that are linked most, or are top-level: in Lucire’s […]

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Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world

When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]

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Nice try, Marissa Mayer, but no conversion

I had a chuckle at Marissa Mayer saying that Google results are worse because the web is worse. As I’ve shown with a site:lucire.com search, which is a good one since our site pre-dates Google (just), Google is less capable of providing the relevant pages for a typical search. I know how web spiders work […]

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