HACKER Q&A
📣 ivanech

Accidentally getting a lot of traffic from Google. What now?


I made a post about differences between streaming versions of The Matrix [1], and shortly afterward I started getting a lot of Google search traffic (tens of thousands of visitors in the past 24 hours).

It looks like this is because my post is the #2 result when you search "the matrix hulu" and similar variations on Google. I didn't intend for this to happen.

I've added a box at the top of the post that tells people that The Matrix isn't on Hulu anymore and what their other options are.

I see two paths forward:

1) Try to drop in search rankings because it seems like people are getting to the post from somewhat unrelated searches. I think I could do this by changing the name of the post.

2) Leave the post as-is even though I didn't intend for this to happen because the other search results are filled with ads and no information at all. At least my post actually tells people they can't watch on Hulu.

What do you think the right move is? Is there something else I haven't considered?

[1]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-matrix-looks-different-hulu-hbo-max/index.html


  👤 Flankk Accepted Answer ✓
Google's ranking algorithm is broken. Just yesterday I got one of those fake developer forums as the first result for a search. The second result was the stack overflow page that the fake result had scraped from. I've noticed they are censoring a lot of results related to the vaccines. I'm switching to duck duck go.

👤 gus_massa
It will not last for too long. Enjoy the traffic.

Perhaps add on the side a few links to your favorite/most popular articles.


👤 drakonka
I would just leave it up with the note you added and not worry about it. Interesting post and observation, by the way!