The Discourse SPA and May 4th Update by Google

Richard is correct here in my view as is Jeff:

Let me give a concrete example.

A number of years ago Google was pushing "everything must be HTTPS" and so we moved our old LAMP site (of way over a decade of HTTP links to our site) to SSL / HTTPS. Our SEO dropped and traffic dropped because we lost links and it seems that, although Google was pushing the "SSL signal", the "links" signal were a stronger signal and so moving to SSL actually hurt our SEO.

In the reference Richard provided in his post above, you can clearly see that HTTPS is a first class member of the core signals:

Screen Shot 2020-10-01 at 12.20.52 PM897×614 138 KB

But to what extent?

Even today (but less than a few years ago), we see sites running only HTTP ranking higher in Google search results than "better content" (longer, more established, cleaner) on our site with HTTPS!

So back to Richard's point, we must be careful to not go down the "rabbit hole" of focusing on a single metric like LCP or FCP, when, as Google has said (from the same page as Richard kindly provided):

google_stuff869×89 31.9 KB

This is exactly what Jeff was saying, when he said:

If you want a great SPA like Discourse, there is no realistic way to getting around the initial load time issues. You can use faster servers, higher bandwidth, and CDNs, but if your core audience is on a slower part of the Internet or uses slow computers or mobile devices with limited RAM, your stats are constrained by the end user's experience as well.

Google has told the world (above, and elsewhere) that the main SEO signal is quality, original content and relevant back-links (from highly ranked sources).

If your site is the main forum discussing Discourse (the open source software), for example, and have great content related to Discourse, and many other sites reference your site, you will have great SEO results regardless of your "user experience metrics" like LCP and FCP.

If your site, as another example, has a lot of political discussions, back and forth, with little super quality, unique content, then having great LCP and FCP is not going to help with SEO, sorry.

On the other hand, as one final example, if you are in a very saturated genre, where there are countless competing forums, blogs and social media groups discussing your topic, user experience signals play a role. Google has told us that, in this situation, where all else is equal, they will (in the future) give more weight to the "core user experience" vitals and performance (as they already do today).

In my view, and the view of many others, Google already favors faster sites to slower sites, long before the FCP, LCP and other core user experience metrics are incorporated as core signals.

SPA apps, most of them (with a large SPA initial load), suffer from the initial app load, but provide a nice user experience after the initial load. Does Google plan to move past this apparent bias against SPA? I hope so and I assume everyone here hopes so as well!

The Discourse dev team has done some things to help mitigate against this anti-SPA bias; for example, serving only the Rails app and not the SPA to crawlers. However, many of Google's metrics / signals are derived from the user experience using the SPA, and it seems, unfortunately, that Google is trying to focus on the initial loading experience which is, as we have observed, biased against SPA.

Regarding the May 4th Google Update, many tech forums, including our well established LAMP forum, took a 30% hit; and even to this day, 5 months after that update, I still have little tangible technical approach to try to recover that lost traffic. I wish I did, because if I did, you can bet a huge sum of cash that I would be the first to share it with everyone here!

Reference

Notes

1. This post original was the single most liked post in the meta discourse topic above; but it was deleted for reasons unknown. If anyone has any idea why this post above would be deleted, please let me know.

2. Originally, this post followed the post below and has around 12 likes before it mysteriously disappeared from the meta site:

3. This is becoming a recurring situation over at meta, where my posts magically "disappear" , Anyone know why?? Does my post break some rule I am not familiar with?

Anyone has any idea at all why anyone, of reasonable or even an unreasonable mind might delete my post above (before the notes) in a tech forum?

I am at a loss why they would delete such a constructive, informative and high quality post.

--edit--
Perhaps they do not like posts that bring up initial load times and (discourse) SPA (i.e. censorship)?

Hi @Scrutinizer

Thanks for the feedback and for your idea. I am truly at a total loss.

You know better than I, here at unix.com we never delete posts based on technical views and different approaches and have never done so in our very log history (long before Discourse, SlackExchange, or even Facebook, LOL). We only delete posts where there are foul language or personal attacks (which are rare these days anyway); but never because a different technical idea or approach is raised.

This is not the first time I have spend 20 minutes or more writing a well thought out reply at meta only to have it "disappear". This post was liked 12 times (at last view), much more than any other reply (Discourse actually awarded me a "great reply" badge for that post, which has since also disappeared from my profile) and I spent quite a lot of time on it, including reading references on the net. I have a lot of experience with Google signals and using both SPA and LAMP apps; so why would anyone just "make my post(s) 'go away' "?

After all, if anyone disagreed, they could easily post in a professional manner and we could discuss it, in the spirt of "community."

Do some people at meta believe they can just make posts written by senior members "disappear" because they disagree technically? We have never done this in our entire history at unix.com.

So confused.... I am afraid to even ask them because they might suspend me for asking or lock my account for even raising the issue of why it was "disappeared"?

I learned months ago, always make a full backup of any well thought out reply at meta, because there is a significant chance it will "disappear" without warning for unknown reasons, especially if it is well written and does not mimic certain "religious technical views or preferred methods" but I did not see anything in my reply above which would rub the anyone way wrong for any reason!

That reply was simply factually correct and, in my biased opinion, well thought out and also well referenced.

See "Earned Nice Reply" below (now gone from my profile, for that reply)

In addition, all prior "likes" for that "nice reply" were removed automatically after the reply was "disappeared".

So it wasn't an impression, I thought I read a post I could not find anymore...

I wanted to return yesterday to read more in depth what it was all about and could not find your reply, that made me read the thread in the first place...

pfffff

Getting like FB

Easy. Our product is the best out there so everyone should buy it and use it. Anyone who has anything negative to say about it doesn't know what they're talking about so such comments should be deleted as they might prevent sales. You must understand that the product is perfect!

Hi @hicksd8

One of the things I am not good at is guessing other's motives.

However, having said that, my intuition tells me it is more of a matter of experience, expertise and "territory". I have seen a lot of my well written replies at meta "disappeared, and some with many "likes" from the users there; but even in the short time I have been using Discourse, I have nearly 1000 likes, and that is in spite of the fact I was suspended for nearly a month for challenging one of the senior people there regarding some cybersecurity statements I disagreed with.

Screen Shot 2020-10-05 at 11.58.25 AM1150×785 88.8 KB

If my posts were not being "disappeared", my likes would already be well over 1000.

My "feeling" it is simply a matter of "territory" and because I am not being a member of the core "team" so my posts disappear; but since they do not inform me of why the posts disappear or who "disappears" them, I have no idea actually.

It's really strange, I must say! No idea really why folks at meta like "disappearing" so many of my posts to help others over there.

Maybe it is just my karma, for all the countless forum moderation tasks performed (some controversial, some performed too heavy-handedly) over the last two decades? I am sure I have accumulated a lot of karma over the past two decades, both good and bad.

Summary

Always make a backup up copy when you spend a lot of time on a post over at meta, if you do not want to lose all your hard work and time spent researching an issue and posting to help others.

Regardless what anyone says, SPA web apps (like Discourse) generally have slow initial load times and caching issues compared to LAMP apps or pure Rails applications. The initial app load time are greatly dependent on the end-user bandwidth, RAM, and their other device performance parameters. For this, and other reasons, the SEO of SPA is generally not as good as "traditional web apps like LAMP and Rails, for example) because of the "Google-anti-SPA bias" against SPA web applications.

As we know from engineering, everything is a "trade-off" and you generally cannot gain one "thing" without losing another "thing" and there are some SEO and initial load time "trade-offs" when using an SPA web application.

Welcome to the club Neo!
I have been through such similar experience during almost 20 years, my point of vue evolved with time, at the beginning I considered myself still as "Young" so accepted as "i" maybe lacked experience, then it was because I was small (1m58) and cannot impose compared to my hierarchy all over 1m80, later I realised looking at how things work, I was a wart in the system ( the only happy were the ones I was responsible of so that also was reduced to just one dept till I retired...) then I was the dinosaure/fossil of older age but still a nuisance as I belonged to the very few left who remembered how things were before all this digital revolution and the prehistoric period of network and invasion of open minded scholars or geeks saying little is beautiful, putting big efforts into writing portable code etc and documenting the lot in what is now almost the kernel of all we use, be it in automotive, domestic, aeronautics, military, nuclear research, network, telecoms ...

I I would have said 10 years ago all old schools like HAL are doomed long term, look around who of the ones you knew, great glory are still present? CDC? Digital ? Bull? ...
HAL is a mystery to me and its survival is mostly because its true force is not so in innovative as it claims but on its commercial aggressiveness and awareness and its "reputation":
Who will go wrong buying its equipment?...
The company has such solidity it can make mistakes, others cannot, it can try new products and seeing it not bringing the revenues expected stop the production or sell it etc...
And it will wipe off anything that could shadow whatever they are presenting...

The delicate situation is where/what or not to say about things you disagree with or see differently ( which displease as felt like an attack; or culprit because as felt like not playing the game: retaining valuable information...)

It does appear that the core Discourse team acknowledges this issue at this time and does have plans to address the problem "in the future".

See, for example:

and also:

Still not sure why anyone would remove my post, which basically said the same thing with more details about issues with SPA and provided references.

I think mentality matters. I'm not saying that this is the root cause, but there is something to think about. All who consider Unix their environment are accustomed to a straightforward approach to the task, discarding unnecessary curtsies. On the meta forum, to most, this may seem exactly as it is written in the classic Unix romanticism "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: by Eric Raymond":

"Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy."

Maybe we need to work on secular manners and not frighten the locals?

tNot sure what your reply has to do with Google Search and my post on meta (this topic) which "disappeared" @nezabudka.

Kindly elaborate!

What to you mean, exactly @nezabudka ?

Is there something you think is "offensive" in my original post on the topic of this " The Discourse SPA and May 4th Update by Google" posted on meta?

Sorry, but I read your post @nezabudka and could not understand what you are trying to say. This topic is about a reply I made on the meta forum and why it might have been "disappeared". Are we talking about the same thing?

Hi @Neo
Probably I can't, but I'll try. Straightness, which in a Unix environment helps to achieve the goal as soon as possible, in a non-Unix environment can cause a wary reaction. I did not read the disappeared post, but I read your post about BB-code to Markdown rubby-mangler. Therefore, a crazy thought arose that perhaps such a presentation of material is not characteristic of non-Unix forums. To be honest, for this reason I am afraid to make comments on the side.
They seem to be trying to deal with rudeness.

Hi @nezabudka

The post we are talking about, in this case, is the first post in this topic.

I understand about the BBCODE Markdown post as that flawed Ruby GEM set our migration back almost a month and I was very straight about my feelings after that caper.

I am only taking about the first post in this topic.

And I answered this:

Disappearing posts are so unusual that my attempt to bring at least some kind of logic under this event should not look even more strange. I just tried ...