> Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault
replyIt is, they’re darkpatternmaxxing.
There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..
Anyone else does that and Google downgrades you, but LinkedIn and Pinterest do it, and Google keeps them at the top.
replyIf you use kagi you can block those pages. Doesn't mean you find the information you're looking for but it does make me feel better
replyIncreases probability if you downrank enough of the noise.
replyLinkedIn was more open earlier I think they closed down much more. It seems that Google didn’t delist the profile pages.
replyLinkedin, reddit, instagram, pinterest, x, bluesky, threads, facebook... they provide a better experience to web crawlers than logged-out humans.
replydeleted
replyDoes this suggest an opportunity (maybe a business opportunity) for a service that, by crawling and scraping paywalled sites, presents to the human user what bots get to see? What if this service could somehow correlate all the socials you mentioned in a single, less horrible user interface?
replyXcancel before it got cancelled and I doubt anyone would have paid for it anyway
replyarchive.is, when google served cached pages you could get the actual content from the cache, not sure if other engines still serve the page they crawled as a cache.
replyThat’s how paywall unlockers work
replythey would all try to sue you and you'd be fighting constant rate limits
replyIf you like, you can block it from coming up with an extension: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
replyThe problem is really the unpredictability: some LinkedIn pages can apparently be accessed publicly without a login, others cannot. But perhaps that fact alone would be reason enough to block it entirely in Google searches?
replyX is the same. "Check out what [politician/celeb] said on X!!" And it's the login page.
replyThe answer is not to sign up to X, but to learn to suppress your FOMO. Chances are it was drivel anyway. Especially true for LinkedIn.
Back when expertsexchange was consistently in the top search results, google had instituted a rule that said that the page must show content without requiring being logged in otherwise the site would be deranked. Guess they quietly dropped that rule
replyOh! Does that play on words bring back memories. Along with Pen Island!
replyTry Kagi. It's definitely worth it. And you can block sites in search very easily. None of the closed content farms show up in my search results.
replySecond. Kagi is worth paying for, and they keep adding features that are actually useful.
replyI still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.
replyLike I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.
But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.