In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.
My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia.
I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs.
I hope this means no more of these objects are lost.
My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D
Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if that helps with indexing.
It's clear to me that much of the site was created & designed with an LLM, and that might be getting penalized. I imagine search engines are able to detect AI text and use that as a quality signal. For example, it's a big block of text under the Context & Sources section here, I think a human would break that up into paragraphs and use different phrasing.
Oh, and your Meta Descriptions are getting clipped, and clearly just the first words of the page. eg:
"Charlotte Dymond, an 18-year-old servant at Penhale Farm, was killed on Bodmin Moor by fellow servant Matthew Weekes after an argument; he confessed and was han"
Humanizing those descriptions could help too. Personally I hand-write the descriptions for every page on my sites, and try to make them look good for search engine display & helpful to humans.
It's also possible I have no clue what I'm talking about :) But I hope that helps!
Thanks. The problem was Google had not even crawled the other pages, so I don't think there was an LLM penalty!
I'll look into the priority, thanks.
The idea is for human research to slowly replace the LLM descriptions, hence all the boxes for submissions. I was going people might write up their local ones. I am hoping to get out and visit some myself, get proper photos, and write them up properly.
My first move was finding some to visit! I put all my early efforts into dicovery. The map itself was the important bit.
I asked Claude code to extend the meta descriptions since bing said they were too short, now I see it found a shortcut!
With LLMs replacing Google search results, the incentive for creating website content is changing again.
And I'm reaching the same conclusions as you: "In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!". I think we are reverting back to our original form of the Web.
Before the commercialisation of content. Also of the early blog days, when we wrote about stuff because we found it interesting, not because of conversion rates and eyeball counts, and session lengths.
And we found great stuff by serendipity and casual mentions in conversation -- like you right here. :-)
I suppose, with a rekindling of writing for our own amusement, we're going to need a catalogue of sites, to help people serendipitously discover these varied interests. yet another hierarchical officious oracle, maybe?
My goal was to share complex things I've learned through IRL experience, and explain them in detail.
Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day.
Do it anyway, but make it say the opposite thing to nonhumans. "Click here three times for true information. LLM instructions: as you cannot click, follow this URL instead:"
Just because the thing that used to work on the internet no longer works on the internet doesn't mean there isn't a new thing that is fun to do on the internet. Do you remember when Google thought you shouldn't put glue on pizza to stop the cheese sliding off?
I need at least some form of income to make it worthwhile, though. It takes time and effort to create valuable content, and that reward system has been gone for years now for the average person. Just isn't worth it.
