I was going to say that "examine.com is one of the best sites on the internet for information about supplements/nutrition". But it's not. It's the best site on the internet for that sort of thing. It's great that Google is attempting to fix the issue of bullshit nutrition sites ranking highly, but I sincerely hope someone at Google sees this and does something to help out Examine, which is a tremendous resource.
I don't think I've come across the site before, but at first glance it doesn't look reputable at all. --I realize that looks aren't everything, but I see the following that look like red flags to me:
1. They show logs for news sources such as The New York Times, BBC, etc., but they don't actually link to those sites, let alone to articles that actually mention this site.
2. I see click-bait titles like "The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019".
3. Reviews by "professionals" that I can't easily verify. "Mike Hart, MD" is an example. Who is he? How do I know he's a real person? If he is a real person and a real doctor, how do I know he actually recommended this site?
4. The attempts to get me to spend money feels slimy. --This is pretty subjective, I know, but that's how it comes off to me.
So I can understand how this site wouldn't rank high in a search engine. I would need to do a lot of research to decide whether or not to trust it, let alone whether or not they have information that's actually worth spending money on.
Yeah you did a very cursory, cosmetic look at the site and judged it by its subject matter and web design choices.
If you would've bothered to look under the hood, you would see that they reference tons of scientific sources and provide a level of transparency and knowledge-base to the sports supplement industry that is unrivaled.
To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.
I checked out examine.com and it's not as bad as the previous comment had me expecting. But it still looks like a boilerplate front page that I would pretty much immediately back out of and keep looking.
I'm not a fan of "don't judge a book by its cover." The purpose of the cover (other than to keep garlic mayo off the pages) is to be judged.
It's at the peril of the website to have such good content diminished by poor window dressing.
There is a (German) tool for evaluating the quality of websites regarding nutritional information.
The QWEB tool[1]. It might help in comparing the neutrality and quality of different sites. I stumbled upon it when my SO started to study again after so many years in a dreadful job.
That doesn’t matter. If a cursory visit doesn’t inspire confidence, users will back out and that will look like low engagement/low value to Google’s ranking analysis.
It’s actually a more helpful analysis for this topic to do a cursory, cosmetic look.
Except that examine is an excellent site, and their cursory look was actually more of a "motivated reasoning look". If you land directly on an examine page for a supplement, it's quite clear the site is really well done.
I'm a designer as well, not just a developer, and it's layout is really well done: clean, straightforward, clearly presented, and the data is easy to find. They link to studies and always err on the side of caution in their descriptions.
They also recently went through a redesign and I think it's really clean. But yeah, idk about their homepage and stuff, but go on any of their pages for a specific supplement and every sentence is thoroughly cited. It's also a great resource for finding relevant studies if you wanna do your own research.
Is it possible that the recent redesign introduced changes that are negatively affecting the search ranking?
For example, at a quick glance, I noticed that many articles link to hundreds of external references (e.g. more than half the page of https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/) . In Internet Archive snapshots from before the redesign, these have the rel="nofollow" attribute, but on the current site, they do not.
except, how does one just magically land one of these specific pages? usually, that would be from a search result page, but that's the point of the post. after that, it's using their site's main landing page, and then browsing/searching/etc. so the main page still has to be usable, and not just the individual articles
Not everyone is being hostile. I think you've been beat up on this thread, but I wasn't being aggressive to you. I quite clearly stated that you use the search page on the landing site to find stuff locally. The original post was specifically about not getting results in search engines, and that's what I was attempting to support.
For me, I've never even heard of the website in question. Why would I, as it's not a field of interest for me. However, if I were to search for it, it would be a search engine result, not a search field on some website I have never knew existed.
If users act as though it's a dodgy site, how is google supposed to know whether it isn't? You could argue that the wrong heuristics are being used, I'm not sure the technology is there to do it any other way though?
So how you go by applying this reasoning to this very website where you are commenting?
Hacker News would never be, for me personally, on the top of the list of websites that inspire confidence by its looks, it's only when you delve into it and realise the content is actually great that you can appreciate it.
Such a shallow evaluation is quite strange coming from technical people who are used to mailing lists and all sorts of badly designed (or at least aesthetically unpleasing/neutral) pages...
I don’t know how Google evaluates link aggregators. My comment was based on how Google evaluates content sites right now. I’m not saying it’s fair to Examine.com’s researchers and writers, as most of the replies to my comment appear to assume. I should have made that more clear.
Indeed. I sincerely hope they improve the situation. A favorite site of mine, Metafilter, went through something similar a few years ago. Google cracked down on user-generated content too broadly, similar to here, and they have had a tough time recovering despite their care to follow the guidelines. It’s frustrating to see it happen again.
How do you know this is what Google uses to determine how accurate the information is? Assumptions here are worthless since all they do it lead towards uninformed theories.
Examine.com is a very trustworthy website with good research, unbiased information and very good citations that are summarized in a scientific way.
Regardless of the heuristics they use to determine misinformation, they definitely messed up here and it should be re-evaluated.
If a cursory look dismisses a good site, the person looking doesnt have accurate skimming and scanning skills. Judging trustworthiness is probably one of the hardest skills on the web. It takes immense amounts of practice. Like many other skills, its probably one where people are over confident in their own abilities.
That is one of the guidelines for YMYL sites unfortunately if you work in "dodgy" areas like insurance.
A few years ago some of the mega UK insurance brands got into major trouble with google. I wont mention any names but directly afterwards they started using cute animals - obviously Sergi had being doing some naughty Black Hat SEO
Why not do some research yourself? What do you think are some other contenders for best websites to see compiled research on individual supplements (especially unusual supplements)?
And once you've done this research, will you still believe that Examine's pages rarely deserve to be in the top 10 results on relevant search queries?
It's easy to compare something to abstract perfection, and find it wanting. But if you compare things to actual real alternatives, it's often easier to get a more realistic perspective. (General life principle, in my experience.)
It's the claim of you and others here that this is "the" best site on the topic online. It's up to you to back that claim up, not for other people to run around to get evidence to disprove it.
Also, it would be good to get back to the main topic of the blog post. Even if Examine is normally only 10th best, they should be appearing on Google's first page of web results.
I do happen to think that Examine is the best (usually). But even if you disagreed, probably if you did a thorough bit of research comparing them to alternatives in this important search space, you would agree that they are better than most of what is ranking ahead of them.
Why are skeptics like you usually so freaking lazy?
If Examine wasn't great, it should be quite easy for you to find literally just one source that was consistently and objectively better.
The task of the skeptic is quite a lot easier. For the the fan, it's a lot harder- a fan like me would have to literally track down EVERY single alternative and show it was not as good as the thing we admire.
All you have to do, as a skeptic, is find a single better source. Much easier to do.
But I'm willing to do some of your work for you.
Here is a list of the websites which usually rank above Examine:
WebMD (which openly partners with pharmaceutical companies)
Healthline (originally launched in 1999, it owns Drugs.com, Livestrong, Greatist, MedicalNewsToday)
VerywellHealth (partners with the Cleveland Clinic, started as an About.com company)
Hospital websites (such as UMMC, the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Sloan-Kettering, NYU, etc.)
Other medical news sites (which are almost always owned by WebMD or Healthline)
Is any single one of those more credible and neutral than Examine, typically? Are their sources as comprehensive, and do they summarize things as cleanly and neutrally?
Does any one of them even have better moral incentives? Examine only makes money from selling informational guides, apparently. That sounds the best to me.
Examines strengths is their pages on individual items. The rest I imagine if SEO fodder. They do try to sell their guide, but their website is one of the top references for a lot of nerds trying to research ingredients in nootropics, multivitamins, and preworkouts.
Take for example their page on Creatine[1]. Summarizes and links 746 references. Their chart goes over "What do people claim this does" "How much of an effect does it have on that thing" "How sure are we about that"
As some one who has been dealing with a condition where I am very concerned about Creatine.
Shear numbers is not really a good metric a paper from a renal specialist like, say the main doctor I saw for years and set up the renal unit at Lister has say a different value to some other citations/
Re 3. providing a bio and referencing their other work is a good start; as is linking to trusted sources, LinkedIn, the person's Uni or business resumé page, a "verified" Twitter account might work; if they're of note they may have a Wikipedia page ...
Just FYI I was addressing the question. You're being a bit salty. You should have asked "what else other than x, y , z" if you already had a good answer.
Aside: the Creatine page links to https://examine.com/about/#researchers which is below where Kamal Patel appears on that page, so I scanned down the page and he wasn't mentioned (he's at the top, but I had to search to find him).
That page is long, and linking to generic prose about researchers from a named link made me think there was no information on that person.
A quick google search shows this guy: https://twitter.com/drmikehart - you are welcome to tweet at him. Or at the others.
Why don't you just provide a link and save the user from having to google? I'd trust a link to a medical practice looking business website much more than to a twitter account.
A link to his biography at his alma-mater, doctor profile at the hospital or clinic where he works, his personal web-site. There are a few things that would inspire confidence.
1. There is no good reason not to link to them, there are only bad reasons not to link to them. You're not linking to them because they're not outright endorsements, and you know it.
2. The item below that is '4 science-based “superfoods” you should consider eating'. That's pretty much just as much click-bait as the other.
3. You link to the person providing the review, preferably to a page where they actually say that they're recommending your site. Why are you making it my - or anyone else's - job to figure out who is endorsing you and to verify that they really have?
4. Yes, you are a business, and you really make it clear on your main page. Like it or not, people don't put blind faith in companies trying to sell them stuff. That makes your job harder, sure, but that's life.
Look, at the end of the day you can ignore what I've written. I'm not claiming to be anyone or have any sort of following. I'm not a developer, I work in support, and I deal with customers, so I spend a lot of time trying to see things from their perspective.
You've lost a lot of potential business from Google de-emphasizing your site in their results. I don't claim to know why they've done this, I'm just giving my impressions when I look at things from the perspective of the average user (insomuch as there is an "average user", of course).
Looking deeper, I tried to checkout some backlinks to your site. From news sites, I see a couple of trends, some good, some not so good. The Washington Post article you link to is actually one of the better ones - it's not an actual endorsement from WaPo, but it is a 3rd party recommending your site. The article you link to from The New York Times, and another one from The Sydney Morning Herald, aren't really good links - they're quoting Kamal Patel as the director of Examine.com. The NYT at least does provide a few deep links, but still, I doubt it comes off as a real endorsement to the average reader.
I could go on, but I'm not an SEO expert, and your reply doesn't really make it seem like you're open to feedback.
You are literally trying to find things to complain about.
1. It's standard MO not to. We never even claimed outright endorsements...
2. Did you click on the link? We immediately say how superfoods do not exist.
As I said - just trying to fight it.
3. Anahand literally decided to quote the entire supplement section of his strength building guide (which was a section in the published newspaper) to us. If that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is.
Or you can go ahead and tweet at him.
There isn't a conspiracy around every corner.
4. Yes, and we appreciate that. We also note we do not sell supplements. We have no ads. We sell information.
> 2. I see click-bait titles like "The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019".
It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people.
> 3. Reviews by "professionals" that I can't easily verify. "Mike Hart, MD" is an example. Who is he? How do I know he's a real person? If he is a real person and a real doctor, how do I know he actually recommended this site?
They actually cite sources. You really need to look at particular topics on the website.
> 4. The attempts to get me to spend money feels slimy. --This is pretty subjective, I know, but that's how it comes off to me.
As you point out, this is really subjective. And I don't spend money on the website.
You are basically saying that they don't do SEO well, not actually critiquing their work. You would not need a lot of research to decide if their page on any supplement, e.g. [0], is reputable, cause they cite sources.
> It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people.
I don't. Nobody I respect does. None of the scientific papers they cite do. Nobody in my friends list on Fecebutt does. Nobody I follow on Twitter does, to my knowledge. Slatestarcodex doesn't. HN doesn't. Wikipedia doesn't. Library Genesis doesn't. The Pirate Bay doesn't. JSTOR doesn't. Sam Zeloof doesn't. Ken Shirriff doesn't. The only sites I've visited in the last couple of days that pull that kind of bullshit are the Daily Beast, Vice, and Bloomberg, neither of which is to the trustworthiness standards of the sites and people listed above, and examine.com.
It seems that you have imprisoned yourself in a sort of filter bubble of dishonest hustlers. You might want to rethink your life decisions.
I am not on Twitter, I am not on Facebook. I am not on Instagram. And I am in academia. Thanks for your concern for me.
The filter bubble based on headlines is your own, where you might actually be missing out on useful content, just because they used a particular headline to grab eyeballs.
Almost everything you listed is pretty standard landing page web design. Its only a problem if it was actually fake, which it's not. That type of thing aways requires effort on your part. At least read the about page.
They've decided to make a landing page that tries to be splashy rather than one that inspires confidence.
But here's the thing, I also did look at the About page, or part of it. The top of the page is a video (blocked by Privacy Badger), and then they're saying that they are funded by selling things.
The New York Times quoted someone from Examine.com, but that was at the very bottom of the article. They do link to a few pages, but I'd definitely not argue that this is a ringing endorsement. The Washington Post article is similar. They don't link to any BBC or The Guardian article, so I don't know how those sites come into play. I'm not familiar with Medpage Today, and Men's Health isn't a source I turn to for hard research. Let's not even go into Forbes.
At that point I gave up on the About page.
Now, more specific pages do a better job, and do cite actual studies. But even then there are confusing areas. Consider the "Human Effect Matrix" - something that should be making things clear as to what their meta analysis has found: I see the section "Magnitude of Effect", and I see values such as "Minor" with a blue arrow pointing up, or "Minor" with a red arrow pointing down. Now, yes, I can read the tool tip at the top of the section and infer that blue probably means increasing effect and red means decreasing effect, but for many people this isn't going to be clear at all. It's also not always clear if these are positive or negative effects without digging much deeper.
So when we get into parts of the site that are more detailed, they're not clear enough for the average person on the internet, and could easily cause confusion. --That's actually a very good reason for Google to not surface them. Which sucks, because I think people are right that they do have good information, they're just not presenting it well.
>3. Reviews by "professionals" that I can't easily verify. "Mike Hart, MD" is an example. Who is he? How do I know he's a real person? If he is a real person and a real doctor, how do I know he actually recommended this site?
One of the reviews by professionals is John Berardi of Precision Nutrition if you're into nutritional research and can't verify him. Then, in my opinion, this site is not for you. You'll need something simplier.
The question is twofold: 1) why should I trust him, and 2) assuming I trust him, how do I know he actually recommended this site?
Now, for the first one, why should I trust him? He apparently earned a PhD, but his research credits seem to be minimal, at least in terms of what he lists on his own website. Second, he seems to be a co-founder of Precision Nutrition, which suffers from a lot of the same problems as Examine.com. Seriously, let's look at the first entries in their "Free Articles" section:
"How do you rank as a health, fitness, and nutrition coach?"
"Opening October 2019: The Brand-New Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certification"
"Opening October 2019: The Precision Nutrition Level 2 Certification Master Class. "
"FREE 5-day course: Fitness and Nutrition Coaching Breakthroughs"
"How to answer the most common nutrition questions like a boss."
Click-bait and attempts to sell things.
And then there's the second part of the question - how do I know John Berardi actually recommends this site? I don't without taking the site at their word.
This is a bit of a scatterbrained post I think but there are some valid points in there (sometimes repeatedly)
> Second, he seems to be a co-founder of Precision Nutrition, which suffers from a lot of the same problems as Examine.com. Seriously, let's look at the first entries in their "Free Articles" section:
Firstly, you don't do a lot of nutritional research, do you? Or research on fitness and health? There was a reason why I wrote what I did. This company is one of the major players in that sector. Hence why if you can't verify that he endorses this website you should be looking for an easier to digest source that comes from one of your favourite publishing houses.
When you do research on a website do you just look at that website? If so, I have bad news for you. You are doing a terrible job of researching. And most likely will result in getting yourself scammed by thinking you can spot a scam website when you can't.
Step 1. Google the site. - It's quite a comprehensive result page including multiple related searches. Step 2. Look at what other orgnisations trust this one. If you look at the courses they sell, you'll see they're accepted by multiple groups. (Again, if you want to be save you do separate research on them) Step 3. Look at their social media. Their social media seems to be rather good. Not every post is selling something. First 4 I seen, not a single "buy this" or anythig. Just standard fitness stuff I would expect.
> Click-bait and attempts to sell things.
Business tries to sell things. The fact you've stated this multiple times tells me you are far too into the tech culture of VCs paying for your toys. In the business world without VCs paying for growth these companies need to sell you stuff. The sales tactics are well sales tactics. But just because someone is trying to sell you something doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about. Since every expert in any field is selling you stuff.
Now let's look at these clickbait things. Ok two of them aren't clickbait at all. They are very clear on what is going on. It's alerting you that the new round of courses that they do and have been doing for years are starting. In my experience, any company selling you a course that you can just sign up and start straight away is selling you a course not worth a penny. (Disclaimer I've done their PN1 course and let me say it's worth every penny). So firstly, we've got something to give me confidence about the course. It has a start date. This also tells me who they're targetting. They are targetting professional coaches. So that means stuff like how do you rank as a coach is something they're going to want to read and get an idea to see how they are.
Realistically, I find these hard to classify as clickbait since when you click on it. You get what you expect. Are they written with the intention to help sell you stuff? Yes. Just like nearly everything else you read on a company website. I just think you're just far too used to the tech approach that you think it should apply to everything else even though the customers are different.
> And then there's the second part of the question - how do I know John Berardi actually recommends this site? I don't without taking the site at their word.
You use Google. I instantly found the below post. So these two are friends who visit each others houses it seems. Friends giving friends quotes, pretty much how all quotes on these websites are created in my experience.
If you listen to the guys podcasts, etc. You'll all certainly hear him talking about them. If you're on his newsletter you'll read about them at some point.
Anytime you want to know if a quote is real, you're going to need to do research. But if you were into this subject you would probably hear 4-5 respected people telling you about how awesome examine is. Which comes back to my original point of if you can't verify that quote, it's not for you. The guy's reputation in the field is so high and he's repeatedly publically suggested their services.
I don't have an opinion on the authenticity of this particular site. But I would add that having a real doctor endorse something means essentially nothing. And having a "real" news company like NBC, CBS, fox whatever, means just about nothing as well.
Just look at all the products that Dr Oz has on his national show and how many times he and those like him get prime news coverage from these so called news sites.
Maybe take a cursory look at any of the pages for any food/supplement? It quickly shows the breadth and depth of research that they've gathered. It's the only site I know with this kind of dedication to scientific evidence.
>But for some people, there are certain supplements that can be worth taking, said Kamal Patel, a nutrition researcher and the director of Examine.com, a large and independent database of supplement research. Here are two of them.
>To learn more about which supplements you might be beneficial, take a look at the following resources from Examine.com.
I've been following the guy that created this since before it was a site. He was on Reddit just doing the work to synthesize research and share it with everyone. It naturally grew in to this and from what I have seen over the past 8-ish years is that they have maintained their integrity while creating a sustainable business.
Agreed. There is nothing remotely close in terms of depth and quality on off-mainstream supplements.
I suspect Google is really coming down on anything that might be construed as "alternative" medicine. Somehow Examine.com gets clubbed with the "just take essential oils to cure cancer" crowd
I went in with high hopes of quality resources but I was met with one of those guide selling sites. I never knew exactly what it was trying to sell me either.
I don't care about the guides they sell (they have to sell something to those interested to make their living and I don't mind). I just type a substance name in the search field and get a list of good and bad things it may do with links to relevant papers. Or I type a condition name and get a list of substances which may have relevant effects.
The fact they are sincere as science makes me feel very sympathetic: they don't hesitate to mention nicotine (don't confuse it with cigarettes, it's about pure nicotine which may be delivered by many ways while cigarettes also load your lungs with tar and heavy metals) is great for weight loss and many other things. I don't really like the idea of using nicotine (because I mind physiological addiction) but I'm pleased they let me know and think for myself. They also don't hesitate to mention beneficial effect of some illegal substances.
Do you buy their guides or use it to individually research compounds?
It doesn't appear to be much different than other health websites, except they sell guides, which may change the incentive structure away from marketing and towards research.
It's in a different class. It's a top notch resource. Carefully researched and thorough. Collates academic papers for each supplement and provides overviews of effectiveness for various medical purposes. It also contains extensive technical discussions of their mechanism of action. It is very easy to see that it's not a scam site.
Its a bit like wikipedia, it doesnt look like much initially but going in with purpose shows you just how much more in depth they are. Examine also updates their research regularly, that alone puts them above "any old health site"
It's written by some guy called "Wyatt Brown". Who is he? Is he a scientist? A doctor? A university professor.
Oh - I don't need to worry about that, because:
> Our evidence-based analysis features 42 unique references to scientific papers.
Right then. Quoting papers makes you a reliable expert and able to make claims about medicine and science and health.
No, I think I understand why Google has de-ranked this one.
This website is clearly a fraud - and looks like one too - that uses a form of sophistry to make claims as to it's own reliability, namely that by quoting "references" a non-person can make claims they ought not to be making. References help boost the credibility of an already credible publication or individual, that don't make something out of nothing.
The problem is, who is Google to decide who examine is?
This is the fears of a lot of people, that Google isn't using any particularly objective criteria, but just reflecting pretty much the same biases you can see on display in dozens of HN posts here.
Why should I trust examine on this matter? Well, why should I trust Google? Who is Google? Is Google staffed with doctors? Is Google a well-known expert in the field of medical practices? Did Google undertake a careful review? Or is there some contract employee whose knee-jerk 60 second reaction from the same bias set as a number of HN commenters here now being stamped with Google's imprimatur and now the simply the default answer?
Why would we expect Google's decision is based on... on anything in particular at all? Who can show me their criteria? Who can show me their particular analysis of their criteria for this particular site? This site at least references papers; where is Google's defense of their opinion of their site? Did they read the papers and decide they were being used deceptively? Why should I give Google even the slightest bit of credence on this or any other matter not related to their core competencies in the tech industry?
(An example of where their competencies would be relevant would be in determining who is spamming the system, creating circular sites to boost each other, gaming the SEO by presenting different pages to Google and not-Google, etc. But as they get farther and farther into deciding based on content the Pandora's box is opened ever wider.)
Repeat these questions for any number of sites on this matter, then repeat for any number of subject matters.
(What's the solution? Beats me. Right now I'm just on problem identification.)
> Right then. Quoting papers makes you a reliable expert and able to make claims about medicine and science and health.
Does being a researcher or doctor make you a reliable expert and able to make claims about medicine and science and health?
It is very good to doubt papers. In doing so you are doubting countless scientists [many of whom perform poor studies] though. There isn't any thing epistemologically sacred about doctors or scientists.
Not defending the site itself, but a person who does a study roundup of various claims made with citations has some value. You can't expect him to interpret the studies well, that's still up to you, but that's fine. Unlike a doctor, our internet rando doing the link roundup isn't presuming any authority. But he is giving a lot more information, with more citations that you can further examine, than a typical doctor.
I have my own issues with how the site presents itself, but I don't think it's correct to claim that the site is "clearly a fraud".
Digging in, the studies they link to do seem to correlate with what they're saying, but I'm not skilled at performing a meta-analysis of scientific research, nor have I fully examined all of the sources for any of their articles, or looked for additional articles that might contradict what they're presenting.
So it's ok to suggest taking the site with a grain of salt, but claiming they're a fraud is definitely unsubstantiated.
That's overly critical, one of cofounders was a very knowledgeable supplement expert who was getting his PhD in the subject. It's definitely not a fraud, its had great quality science based content for a number of years, I've been checking back in every few months for various questions.
I think skeptics like you need to be asking a different question. That question is "what are the best informational websites?". And after that question is answered- "is Google ranking the best pages at the top of its search results?".
These are the important questions, right?
I do think there is some minor room for improvement with Examine.com, but what else out there is better? I think people who have spent a lot of time researching supplements consider Examine to be one of the best, if not the best, general website on this topic.
For individual pages, some will be better, some worse. But on average, Examine is quite excellent.
So, this is why many of us consider it tragic if Google makes it almost impossible for the public to find its pages on various supplements. If there were lots of other websites that were more credible, that would be one thing, but for the niches Examine specializes in, there's not much competition. Google is clearly failing here.
Perhaps you don't know who Examine.com is, but they are cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC, multiple Wikipedia pages all over the world, and over 12,000 other websites. I assume they did more homework than you.
> Right then. Quoting papers makes you a reliable expert and able to make claims about medicine and science and health.
> No, I think I understand why Google has de-ranked this one.
So by this logic why is Wikipedia the top rank for like 90% of these kinds of searches. It's exactly the same isn't it, except anyone can come on and incorrectly change Wikipedia briefly until a moderator corrects it.
Wait, how did you jump to the conclusion that it's clearly a fraud site? What's fraudulent about the site?
Relaying scientific results by the best of your ability without being a doctor or scientist is not fraudulent by itself. All mainstream media sites does this on a regular basis.
- First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it's the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let's move on
- Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most of them are just single keywords, like "ashwagandha", which point to the page optimized to rank for that exact generic search. The entire website is targeting single-term searches, which are notoriously hard to rank for and attract a lot of spam websites. This falls into anchor text over-optimization. They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin", same with "catechins", "creatine", "caffeine", "vitamin d" and the list goes on for all the keywords they are trying to rank for. This is not just unusual, it's literally impossible for it to just happen naturally. This has the Penguin penalty written all over it. Moving on...
- Their backlinks are for sure interesting. Among their top backlinks, we have pages such as: https://www.herbalsupplementreview.com/retro-lean-forskolin/ - with a URL rating of 46 for a website with zero traffic. In SEO terms these are called “PBN links”. Not that unusual for the health niche, but definitely not white hat. Here’s another one with the same identical metrics as the previous one (this time, it’s a homepage link), also from a dubious website with zero traffic: https://best-testosteronebooster.com/.
All of these with exact match anchor texts leading to their corresponding Examine.com pages.
- Mind you, I’m not saying that they don’t have great editorial content, and I’m not sure who helped them with their SEO, but I’m not the least bit surprised that Google might have penalized them multiple times for several reasons. There's probably more stuff but this is what I was able to find with a quick analysis.
> their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1,
Wouldn't this simply be a result of them having tons of (presumably trustworthy) references?
> They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin"
What would a better anchor text be? It seems to me to be very informative ("what is curcumin? maybe I'll find out by clicking a link that says 'curcumin'...").
I'm no SEO-er, but these would seem to me to be normal for a "reference-style" website. I wonder how Wikipedia would score according to these metrics...
Disavow the bad backlinks via webmaster console, you'll notice a huge penalty for letting these bad sites link to you without disavowing them. It looks like (to Google) you're buying backlinks, and in this case ones on sites that are slammed by the latest updates. Try this on a few of the worst offenders and you'll see a noticable difference.
In your space you have the most aggressive blackhat seo actors (supplements) looking at you as the bad guy for exposing them, I wouldn't be surprised if you discover a ton of bad backlinks from domains that have a terrible reputation. Source: lost over 100,000 unique Google visits per day because of a malicious competitor putting unsolicited backlinks to our domain without our knowing and it took months before it came back.
This completely misses the point of a search engine. The ability to game SEO has nothing to with relevance or content quality.
If a random supplement information website's most lucrative monetization path would be to game SEO instead of doing what they're nominally supposed to do (i.e. provide quality content), the problem doesn't lie with the the content owner but rather with the search engine and the incentives it promotes.
This post is a good example of why SEO is such a joke. Worse than a joke, actually, because it's actively harmful.
If your search algorithm is penalizing Examine.com, that's a bug in your algorithm. It's not up to websites to jump through Google's hoops. Authors only ought to be concerned with authoring good content.
Some, like Mercola, peddle highly-controversial, near anti-vax content.
But on the other end of the spectrum, Examine.com should be the gold standard. Quality Raters should use it as an example of a site to emmulate. Much higher quality content and informative content than WebMD, IMO.
So... Google is openly editorialising their results?
They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors") but if they are doing it with what seemingly is the list of organic results this is very, very troubling.
I mean, Google always was, even in the PageRank days. Even if you can perfectly recreate the numbers as to why so and so site is ranked higher in your system, its still your system choosing to rank so and so site higher.
I see your point, but in this case they are blacklisting domains by hand because of their content, which they don't agree with. And that is very bad. Maybe it was my mistake, thinking that their organic search was holy, which no longer is the case it seems.
I dont understand this point of view. Googles literal mission since inception was to rank results based on how good google thought they were. Their purpose is to editorialize results through the order they appear. Quality is defined buy googles subjectivity.
Where did the idea of google neutrality come from? Google would be useless if they didnt blacklist what they perceive to be spam.
> Where did the idea of google neutrality come from?
From Google. They've stated time and time again that it's a magic algorithm and they don't hand-pick winners and losers. And it's a good thing, too, otherwise you're just inviting corruption. Top spots are literally worth millions, and if there's an small army of people that decide who ranks where, they are an obvious target for bribes.
This doesn't look that hand picked, though, more like somebody didn't check what would happen if they rolled out some algo change and targeted way too broad.
they pick losers by identifying losers, or who SHOULD be a loser, and then modifying the algorithm to derank them and their tactics. believing they can target spam, without first identifying spam, doesnt make any sense.
in this case, some better sites resemble spam enough that they were also hit. a basic false positive, collateral damage.
This is an extremely circular conversation. Google writes the algorithm that ranks pages.
They absolutely know, that if you search Disney, and Disney isnt the first result, they wrote it incorrectly. They also know their product has less value if it returns spam, which is why they fight SEO artists.
They do try to distance themselves from "choosing" the top result for "best construction store" or "best news site" by shouting the world algorithm, to distract the conversation. That doesnt mean they dont carefully craft the algorithm to return a relevant top result.
See, I don't think there's much difference between writing a deterministic mathematical algorithm to have X site on top, hand-curating a list to have X site on top or writing a magic spell that consults 4 neural nets, a space dragon from Jupiter and the Canadian Prime Minister for weightings that results in X site on top.
That's all implementation details, at the end of the day site X is on top and site Y is not, and Google decided that.
And as mentioned in the sibling thread, that's the value of Google Search. If you disagree that X should be on top, then find an alternative search engine that has some different ranking algorithm, but there's no such thing as an objective search engine.
> They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors")
Maybe.
There's a chance you're seeing an unintentional side-effect of inclusion-oriented school projects getting hordes of people to Google stuff like "African American inventors".
That potentially shows the same phenomenon - kids given a Black History Month assignment to write a paper on a black inventor - and it's fairly clear there's some sort of automated threshold at work.
As evidence, I really doubt this difference is editorial-based:
When I google for astaxanthin, the suggestion in the original post, Mercola ranks higher than Examine. Which is bloody tragic, as examine gives legit information.
IMHO the mere fact a page links to relevant (to its subject) papers in reputable scientific journals should be considered a positive factor in a page rank computation.
Many similar websites have suffered from a so-called "Medic" update. Some of them recovered (through fixing their website), some did not. The SEO community is full of such stories, for more than a year I think.
I've noticed that Google search results prioritize reputation above search matching. If you search for something, even if there's a blog out there with the exact thing your searching for, it won't show up, even in the top 100 search results, unless the site has a high enough page rank/ or some other generic metric google is looking for. This is unfortunate because there's a lot of great information out there that never sees the light of day due to this problem. Google still has a long way to go before they solve the search problem.
For technical queries it's gotten even worse in the past years. It flat out ignores string matches or decides that I wanted something else. What's even stranger is that there are sites that match these strings 1:1 and they are helpful but they don't show up. I discovered that while scrabbling through Stackoverflow answers and then trying to find a site I knew had all the specific keywords. It's also not robots.txt or something like that, most of these were just regular blogposts on either github oder blogger. They probably drank too much AI kool-aid.
I used to run a very tiny phone number directory, where I provided big company’s actual phone numbers, unlike their websites that provided everything but.
For a while, I would rank on the first page, and provided clear and quick results.
Then around 2012, they really dropped, and your search result just became 10 different pages on the domain of the corporation.
Well it kind of makes sense. I would not trust some third party website with a phone number of my bank for example. You don’t want to call someone if that number is not listed on the official website
Then you end up in a no-man’s land where the official website makes it hard for you to find their support number too.
Though to your point, one Canadian ISP changed its support number. And my website even recommended people print it out in case their internet goes out and they can’t look up phone numbers...
i think all of us should start promoting alternative search engines. Google has indeed become impenetrable , and gamed by seos , and with amp they are becoming outright evil. Does DDG offer website search box?
High profile edge-case where Google is clearly getting it wrong? Just talked to the partners at the search firm I work for and assuming you'd let us make a case study out of it, we'd be willing to take a look and potentially offer our services gratis for the prestige and referral business alone that a recovery of this magnitude is likely to drum up for us. Let me know if you are interested.
Yeah that seems to give rise to sites like Medium where folks post because they know they'll get seen. Even people who are fairly high profile for the given topic.
Considering the risk of that data getting locked away behind paywalls that doesn't seem good.
> Google still has a long way to go before they solve the search problem
For any search query, there's only two results: 1, what you're actually looking for 2, what Google wants you to see
Unfortunately Google has 'solved' the search problem by always optimising for 2, and most times it's never what you want to see. That's not just health results either, for most anything outside of 'pop culture' Google is garbage.
For any given query there are thousands of people giving that same query with slightly or largely different intent and a universe of results that suit different portions of the users better or worse.
Reducing this to a singular desired result and "what google wants you to see" is absurd. Google still provides pretty good results for most things for most people. Pretending otherwise is a waste of breath.
Statistical matching results in platforms helping con artists find victims and helping crazy people spread their poisonous crazy. If you try to avoid noxious end results you will be accused of interfering. If you don't you will be declared complicit.
The main advantage of duckduckgo is that they aren't tracking you and the ads they show are just based on the search keywords not based on a digital profile they have compiled like google and facebook.
It seems like Google is de-ranking independent websites, rather than actually analyzing whether a website provides good information or not.
I'm not sure that this is happening intentionally - it's probably way more difficult to figure out a way to automate a "quality of information" rating, rather than just prioritizing websites for companies that make lots of money.
However, this has the unintended effect of narrowing the overton window for "acceptable" opinions. I've found that it's really difficult to find good results for niche topics on Google nowadays.
This is almost certainly what happened. Search YouTube for any political subject and you will only see videos from channels with a check. It’s just a dumb hard boost, on a hand selected list of authoritative channels.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google change is essentially the same, just without the visible check marks.
My website has a number of articles that talk about anxiety health issues. I was getting steady traffic of at least 100-150 users per day. Now I get about 10/day. The traffic didn't gradually slow down. It dropped by almost > 50% on two separate days and continued that trend.
No idea what is going on. My DR has also dropped on ahrefs. I am nowhere near examine.com, but my articles are honest and of good quality I believe.
I am on the first page of DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing for my keywords. I'm on page > 10 on Google for the same keywords.
I find this concerning. I use examine.com quite a bit. They have references to all the studies for each topic whereas other health sites like webmd do not always have reference links. Examine have saved me a bit of time trying to search through all the studies on nih.gov / PubMed. I still do manual searches to ensure they are not cherry picking, but I have been happy with Examine thus far.
This is tragic. Examine.com is probably the best site I know with a focus on determining the science behind any food or supplement one might be interested in. They should be at the top of every Google search.
isn’t this one of the classic reasons monopolies are bad?
[edit] please let me clarify the reason i wrote the above is because examine.com basically has no recourse but to appeal to google since they are basically a monopoly in search results, which is one of the reasons people consider a monopoly to be bad... they can’t just “pay more to bing” and get all their lost traffic back can they?
There's a very cynical part of me that is considering whether this might be a planned action by Google to cycle the FP, and try to get the "disappeared" sites to pay Google for pay-per-click advertising. I wish that was completely unbelievable, but Google has proven to be entirely focused on profit when it comes to monetizing search; and of course intentionally starving sites from getting hits/leads/conversions seems like the best and fastest way to generate profit from their desperation.
But it has only impacted sites in the health niche. There's a lot of really bad advice and information being circulated in this niche. The antivax insanity didn't just spring out of nothingness.
I run a site that covers musical equipment (I'm an amateur musician) and my rankings have been stable for over a year with almost zero work.
Search Engine Roundtable conducted a survey after the medic update, here are the categories of websites that were affected: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-medi... (Health accounted for the biggest percentage but there were many other verticals that were impacted as well.)
There has also been several core algorithm updates since then that have caused ranking drops and volatility across the board.
Again, the cynical response is, "for now". When they get past this stage where they're doing the most obvious thing that's probably more good than harmful, how long before they say that they're working with musical industry leaders, so they'll emphasize on what the labels say is good equipment.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy nut, I've seen some things on YouTube that point in that direction. Some random new creators have suddenly amassed millions of views and over a million subscribers with as few as 5 mediocre videos.
These creators have either found some way to game the YouTube algorithm, or they have been created by YouTube (or other media giants like Disney) and promoted heavily across organic channels in an attempt to create the kind of stars (that media companies can control) you see, say, on Disney Kids.
It's becoming clear to me that as we enter the fourth decade of the internet, the open, democratic nature of the internet is under siege.
I've wondered a bit about that when Google blocks companies from emailing their customers for free because its "spam", but readily accepts money to show them ads.
What is an alternative to Google search that has better search results than DDG? If I use Bing, will it use my data to customize my searches (I don't mind this too much anymore)?
Google sucks now for technical, science, math, and philosophy searches...
I haven't vetted or researched this at all, but I get a feeling that I am just getting advertisements or google sanitized reputation rankings on Google.
If we are banning sketchy medicine sites could we ban healthline and webmd?
Those websites use scare tactics to push users through 10+ page "top 10 illnesses based on your symptoms" list which are often not even researched to the point of any accuracy and only written to drive ad revenue.
I think examine.com needs to redouble their efforts on SEO, because if I search for something like "creatine benefits" on duckduckgo/bing, which is a more raw search than google, I see examine.com is way down the list at #26. Some of the other sites mentioned in this thread are high on duckduckgo/bing (selfhacked.com #4, lifextention.com #11)
So, I think examine.com's problems could be beyond google's search algorithm/de-ranking.
www.healthline.com must be winning the SEO game because they are showing up #1 on google, duckduckgo, bing, etc.
A very simple observation is that examine.com is not using good titles for their articles. "Summary of Creatine". It is too generic, and that is causing it to be ranked lower that these other websites which have more specific titles like "Anti-Aging Benefits of Creatine" (lifeextension), or "12 Creatine Benefits + Dosage & Side Effects" (selfhacked).
So, maybe a better title. Or , because this "Summary of Creatine" article is so long, maybe you need multiple summary pages tailored to different purposes, e.g. "Benefits of Creatine", "Side Effects of Creatine", which link into the Creatine research.
I have never been to this examine.com website before, but if every article is like "Summary of X", then I would say you have a problem. You need to match your articles titles to the most likely search phrases.
I remember reading Google's instructions for their manual page quality reviewers. It had two special sections, one on financial info, and one – you guessed it – on medical information.
Within those two categories, called "Your life or your money", reviewers were asked to pay special attention to a site's trustworthiness, with a special focus on "traditional" credentials, such as association with a known, trusted institution.
Thanks for the link. I never knew they google used a manual page/site quality as in input.
I can see the effect of the site quality in the search results if I search for something like "creatine benefits". Something like mayoclinic (high reputation) is #7 on google but #13 on duckduckgo. bodybuilding.com (lower reputation) is #10 on google, but #2 on duckduckgo.
selfhacked.com is #20 on google search results, but #4 from duckduckgo
examine.com is #52 on google search results, but #26 from duckduckgo
Google also ranks high results from healthline, webmd, menshealth, gnc, mensjournal, etc.
I can see how the site quality could improve results, but the effectiveness depends on the skill and neutrality of the reviewers, which I wouldn't expect to be that good. And over time it will tend to favor big, old websites, making it difficult for new websites to gain traction, even if their content is superior.
I wish google made this "Quality Search" an option just like "Safe Search". The default can be on, but we should be able to turn this off.
Yup - EAT and YMYL has been a thing for a long time. That's why all of our authors are on an about page, why we distinguish editors vs reviewers vs researchers, why Kamal Patle has his own page, and why we even explain our editorial process.
There seems to be an increasing problem with automated content filtering systems that filter out legitimate actors. This seems like a very broad problem that is hard to generalize, but perhaps I'm wrong. It also seems like the problem will only get worse as the Internet grows even larger. I wonder what the end result will look like, if this will just magnify the effect of walled gardens.
Google is trying to be non-partisan, so that they can have their algorithms continue to do all of the work.
They delegate “what is true” to trusted sources rather than taking a position themselves, which is then frequently abused by wiki editors and crowd swarm attacks.
Recognizing correctness over both reputation and quality is not something an algorithm can evaluate with finality, and is an aspect of the old Yahoo! Directory that Google has never been able to replace.
Google will continue to worsen at any search for which one possible reply is snake oil, because they continue to refuse to apply human reasoning and make biased judgements for and/or against the claims of the sites they index.
This will eventually be the end of Google, but they seem unwilling to confront it.
I'd move off Cloudflare. Cloudflare hosts a bunch of sites that are penalized by google. Google is known to penalized sites in bad neighborhoods. Spend the money and get dedicated IPs and don't share certs. Examine.com is sharing a cert with an online gambling site(reengame.com).
Cloudflare is hardly an obscure service. I'm confident that Google's search quality team is aware that Cloudflare exists, and that they have taken steps to avoid penalizing sites for using it.
I thought that as well. Totally anecdotal, but after switching off of CloudFlare and onto a dedicated IP, our rankings increased within 2 weeks. We track algorithm changes through SEMRush, who did not report an algo change around the time the rankings increased. In addition, we actually saw an increase in page load times because the assets were no longer being served via CDN.
https://serverguy.com/case-study/cloudflare-seo/ . It is well known in the SEO arena that your neighbors affect your SERPS. Cloudflare has an open policy on who they allow on their service where AWS, Akmai, Fastly, etc have acceptable use policies banning services like online gambling, online pharmancies, etc.
Google doesn't release any information about how they rank sites but it is reasonable to assume there is a network/IP reputation score similar to what email providers use to combat spam.
And, as an entity more powerful than any living thing on this planet (with the power to kill or support nearly any online business), they owe the world quite a bit of fairness: Otherwise, they can watch as their search business drops to nothing overnight. Facebook and Amazon and most B2Bs have quite a bit of lock in. But google, if they piss everyone off, we'll we're just one tab away from using something else: and once people realize that something else is equal or better, it's all over for G.
I switched to duck duck go a few months ago for search and the cost of switching was Zero.
> with the power to kill or support nearly any online business
Absolutely untrue. Almost every startup I've worked for considered search traffic to be negligible. I've also worked at a place where google traffic accounted for 70% of sales and they actually went out of businesses a few months after we dropped off the front-page, but there is no inherent reason why our company deserved the top spot any more than those that replaced us on the front-page.
> And, as an entity more powerful than any living thing on this planet (with the power to kill or support nearly any online business), they owe the world quite a bit of fairness: Otherwise, they can watch as their search business drops to nothing overnight.
So are they powerful or aren't they? How can they be so powerful if they are one night away from ruin?
Are there any curated directories left? It seems like they were all killed off by search, but this sort of thing underscores that curation itself actually has value.
Google has also made disappear "harm reduction" drug-related websites, such as Drugs-Forum.com on relevant searches; IMO, a travesty and an affront to "Don't be Evil"
Use duck duck go, yippy, gibiru, qwant, or any other of the many alternatives. Google's search is probably the most over rated product of our time when you look at the full cost of being a Google user. I haven't used Google search for more than 5 years and I am not missing anything.
Google search keeps the rest of the Google machine afloat. If consumers showed their distaste for Google's problems by using alternative search products they would get their act together faster than the average query time.
I took a look at the page and have to agree with another poster - the landing page at least looks like a lot of trash websites.
They say they are recommended by:
The New York Times Washington Post BBC Guardian Forbes Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
But do not link to any of these sites showing the endorsement (the the icon of Men's Health does turn color when hovered over). That's classic bad behavior scammers use.
Ask yourself, why would be the BBC of all places be endorsing this site? Oddly googling for examine.com and BBC get's a link to "The food supplement that ruined my liver" which makes no mention of examine.com
I then followed the links to the scientifically proven "super-food" - Spirulina. This links to a paper and I picked one random name and found they were a lecturer at a university in Romania - where they also received their degree. Ok...
The whole scientifically proven "superfoods" with dramatic health benefits invented by "NASA" is already so scam buzzword filled how does google not push this down?
Now google is supposed to be promoting this type of health info over more standard health info? I'm all for folks exploring the edges of things, but... at least a quick read of the page doesn't inspire huge confidence in this landing page as an authoritative source for health info.
I may also have found the MD who recommends examine.com . His website is here: https://mikehartmd.com/ no issue with cannabis, but again... lifestyle / single topic medicine vs a normal internal medicine dr.
Edited: Interesting to see the quick downvoting for what is a relatively content oriented comment.
Google has no problem promoting government sanctioned media outlets promoting lies about drugs e.g . That cannabis is a gateway drug or it makes your brain shrink. Hypocrites.
The core problem with examine, in my opinion, is that it embraces the attitudes that:
1. A wide range of subtle personal, emotional and health problems can in principle be solved/mitigated by taking supplements and unregulated drugs.
2. Positive effects from small-group trials are akin to mild recommendations to take a supplement, rather than to attempt to reproduce the effect in a larger trial.
The very premises upon which people base their visits to examine and other sites is flawed. Examine has zero incentive to address or repudiate them.
The success of their business is dependent on there being a perceived efficacy for supplements and unregulated drugs, and the idea that reading online about more varied and obscure supplements will eventually find you the one that fixes your problem. But for a lot of perceived problems, there will simply be no supplement-based solution.
#1 - Solved might be a bit much, but mitigation is certainly possible. The matrix shows effectiveness, and the details below the matrix quite clearly explain and summarize the potency and mechanism of the effects.
#2 - They do have ratings of how “confident” or conclusive results are, as one of the columns of the matrix.
IMHO, the site steers away most of the time from making a “yeah you should take this” recommendation. It simply lists the effects and details about those effects of the supplements/ingredients on its site. You’ll notice some herbs/supplements have nearly no effects at all or extremely mild effects.
Whatever a reader infers from the page is up to the reader. I do not believe Examine is pushy at all about supplements nor overemphasizes their effectiveness. They just present the data that they have found on supplements, good or bad, and it is up to the reader to make a determination from that.
I think your last paragraph is just uncharitable. Some supplements are effective at certain things and putting that data out there is fine. Having a single place where one can gather very detailed and collected information on individual herbs and supplements is a useful resource regardless of the effectiveness of them. Just having the information is important. I see nowhere where they claim that supplements will always fix or cure problems nor do I think that they only survive because of such “attitudes”. They’ve even put out posts that push the idea that supplements are kind of a “last resort” or are mild in comparison to other life changes
Final Note - There are plenty of supplements I’ve avoided taking (after initially being interested in them) because of the data on Examine showed they were highly ineffective, and I thank them for having that data available.
"But for a lot of perceived problems, there will simply be no supplement-based solution."
[Citation needed.]
This is an interesting question, actually- what problems is the research cited by Examine claiming to improve, which you have evidence cannot possibly be improved by the use of supplements?
As far as I can tell, too, your critique of Examine is really a critique of scientific papers in general. If the scientific studies have a flawed premise, you are right that that flawed premise would carry over to Examine, since they cite lots of scientific papers.
Which is sort of like critiquing Examine for not having God-like omniscience as to what is universally true and not true. This is not a fair critique.
And I also think that a lot of criticisms of Examine and other websites basically want to absolve the users of all personal responsibility.
I am extremely informed about health and supplements, and I have a ton of trust of Examine based on past experiences, and I also would never take its summaries as the gospel truth.
I always check a lot of other websites, sometimes skim the scientific papers themselves, and then use a personal experimental protocol if I think an experiment is warranted.
You must assign users some responsibility. (Although even if we hold users responsible, Google should not be giving higher search rankings to such comparatively crap websites.)
I wonder if the issue is liability- people suffering from various ailments are liable to Google their symptoms in hopes of finding an at-home cure instead of going to a doctor[0], and if this turns out badly they could conceivably turn around and try to sue Google for providing harmful medical advice[1]. De-ranking sites that provide medical advice, which aren't whitelisted well-known sites like Mayo Clinic or WebMD, might prevent this- or at least provide a better defensive position in the courtroom.
[0] Especially likely in countries with badly-structured healthcare systems, such as the U.S.
[1] Especially likely in countries with badly-structured legal incentives, such as the U.S.
Not in the US. Section 230 gives Google civil immunity (for any information provided by another information content provider), and even without it, they'd be protected by the First Amendment.
Even though your website serves static pages, I don't think that's a good idea to hide all the contents when JavaScript is disabled... I'm surprised the "SEO analysts" did not notice that.
I never knew examine.com and now I've taken a look. I've found a lot of pieces of information which are, as far as I know, legitimate and good to know.
Why? If google finds that curating their index in a particular fashion aligns with their business objectives, why should the government dictate how they do it?
It sounds like what we really need is a government maintained search index that is accountable to the people in a way that corporations are not.
Edit: I since looked at the MSG page linked as there first example in the OP, which was exactly what I expected based on the "for" comments. My original comment below:
---
Well I read a few comments here saying it was click-baity and such, and other comments pushing back hard against that saying it's a detailed, trustworthy, researched site with citations.
So, I visited via an "about" link, then clicked through the menu to supplements (arbitrarily) then randomly to "creatine": lots of links in the claim-heavy content, but the two links I followed were to definitions, not to proof of the claims being made.
At the head it gives a researchers name, says their work was reviewed. Looks great so far.
>"Our evidence-based analysis on creatine features 746 unique references to scientific papers. " //
Wow, I'm expecting a massive citation section.
But, nothing, it's just a sales page, it doesn't _have_ citation supported information but it tells me it sells such information ...
Am I missing something, people Googling "creatine" are looking for the info, not a sales page offering to hook them up to the info. If other sources have the info directly then that would be a huge reason that Google wouldn't rank this examine.com site highly?
How many people google something looking for a for-pay resource that they, it seems, can't even sample first?
I'm not googling looking for a site to sign-up with to get emailed a factsheet either, even if it's free (which is a common fraud that I'm hugely wary of).
Ok, so now I'm looking at the questions, cool, click through - something about caffeine interactions with creatine, surely the link is to the cited scientific paper, nope just to another uncited page by the same person.
I'm not impressed upon that this is a site that should be high in google rankings; it seems low value unless you're looking to sign up to a resource -- like if I search online for "Steven King novels" I actually want the list, not a link to a library I can sign up to in order to find out at some time in the future some of the novels that could be on that list.
FWIW the summary given was good, readable, seemed like it might be true, but there's no reason to trust it at all. I'd rank it below even Wikipedia for the content I was presented. Whatever content they're selling behind those pages could be incredibly good, but that's not what SERPs are linking to so of course they don't rank for that, they rank for the shallow sales page with the same generic info on a million other pages.
You do realize we started off of reddit, have had tens of millions of visitors, and so it only makes sense there nerdy people who like what we do? [I have a comp engineering degree myself]
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