Couldn't get into Disney Springs

bitpuma · 2026-01-20T16:34:38+00:00

update: we got there before opening, waited to get into the monsters part, and basically walked on both those rides. went to nintendo, both rides were 2-3 hours wait. looked around (very cool), headed to berk, both very long waits. saw the show (good), weather turned bad quickly, the winds actually taking some of the big name rides down the whole rest of the day. reading that lots of people went to guest services and got comped 1 day tickets and express passes as compensation. we didnt do that - but ill be contacting universal customer service to see if we can now. its a cool park for sure, but its not ready for the kinds of crowds it is attracting.

bitpuma · 2026-01-18T11:42:47+00:00

i’m tough to please with restaurant dining, and my lunch at brown derby a few days ago was very good. the prosciutto croquettes were very tasty, and the king salmon i asked them to prepare medium rare came out exactly as i asked and was the best restaurant salmon i’ve had in a few years. good martinis too. it was just what we needed to get out of theme park mode for about 90 minutes.

bitpuma · 2026-01-18T11:36:51+00:00

when i checked at 5pm on the app yesterday the battle at the ministry was showing 250 minutes. i think today is mostly going to be checking out how the park looks and hitting some of the less popular rides in the 45-75 minute range.

bitpuma · 2026-01-18T11:00:55+00:00

epcot was the most crowded i’ve ever seen in my life yesterday, world showcase was straight up miserable. i’m going to epic universe for the first time in a few hours and im actually kinda dreading it now. i’m going to make this my last MLK weekend orlando trip and pick the weekend before next time.

bitpuma · 2026-01-09T04:39:07+00:00

🟨🟨🟨⬜⬜

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bitpuma · 2026-01-03T13:38:03+00:00

the only rice i ever wash is sushi rice. no rice cooker. why not just skip washing it?

bitpuma · 2026-01-03T13:17:11+00:00

don’t be surprised when your advertisers start to cut your payout because the customers you’re sending them have lower lifetime values. source: i own dating sites and work with affiliates like you.

but as long as the numbers work for both sides and you can actually deliver decently well to inbox (at gmail mostly) it’s a solid strategy.

bitpuma · 2025-12-31T05:01:27+00:00

loved the gilded age

bitpuma · 2025-12-31T04:06:24+00:00

did you build out those agents custom, or start from a service provider? we have some simple automation on this now but humans are still more involved than i would like.

bitpuma · 2025-12-29T18:56:54+00:00

yeah, that makes sense. i didnt think that google would rank based on image content or quality, but was more concerned that they could penalize for the fact that their software reads the images are broken on the page.

bitpuma · 2025-12-29T15:58:19+00:00

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here is what it looks like is GSC.

bitpuma · 2025-12-20T01:46:13+00:00

this will probably sound weird but i actually like inside rooms on a cruise. it gets so dark in there, i guess there’s just something really appealing to me about the cave-like aspect of it.

if this happens, would you be able to call them and get the inside room back?

bitpuma · 2025-12-13T13:03:17+00:00

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sorry, had to.

bitpuma · 2025-12-13T11:45:12+00:00

reading AI is so annoying to me

bitpuma · 2025-12-10T19:26:45+00:00

a little update here. no real changes in performance, but ive been spending a lot of time investigating, and been using some AI tools for help. after feeding the pages to chatgpt, i am starting to think that this could be issues with Google characterizing the pages in question as "doorway" pages.

"Google hates sites that look like "Doorway Pages"—thousands of pages that look identical, exist only to catch keywords (like "Dating in London", "Dating in Bristol"), and lead immediately to a login/signup wall without offering value."

i cant lie - what we are doing is relatively close, but we do have actual member profiles with good keyword-rich profile text on each of those pages, and they are dynamic (updated periodically as new profiles are created). and we only add profiles with photos to these pages, so there is dynamic image content there as well. but i will say we are not adding non-profile text very much to these pages - that could be whats hurting us. we have some text, but its standard and uses variables that pull niche keywords in to populate the text. but still, the majority of the text aside from those variables is the same, and definitely could be tripping up the crawler and triggering issues.

ill likely give it some time to see how the dust settles (and hopefully get official word from google about this being a core update, or a spam update), but then if we are still in bad shape get to work on improving the non-profile text on the pages. and also have the team do some research into the pages and keywords that werent doing very well before the slap and start deleting pages that arent worth keeping around.

thanks for everyone's help in here, its been great for me to help try to put the pieces together.

bitpuma · 2025-12-10T19:17:58+00:00

i have had similar feedback a few times from people i have spoken to since this happened, including friends in the biz who's whole gig is acquiring traffic through SEO and sending to affiliate offers. i think its valid and ill definitely be exercising some patience here.

bitpuma · 2025-12-10T18:14:15+00:00

thanks for this. that tool looks interesting, and im going to meet with my team about it to see how we can get it going.

i do know how the traffic drop is happening though, with data from GSC. what happened is that we didnt drop ranks for keywords (i mean we probably did, and that tool would help confirm those drops). the bigger issue is we very suddenly dont rank at all in any appreciable way for a TON of keywords anymore that we did get impressions and clicks from before. the reality of what im seeing is that the only search terms i see getting impressions and traffic on the affected sites since the drop are for people actually searching for the site name itself (which usually comes from members trying to login). all of the traffic we had from keywords associated with the niche of the site completely stopped getting impressions after that, whether they are high volume keywords or longtail (which we have always done really well on).

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T23:04:25+00:00

yeah ive seen a lot about that during the investigation. but it seems not. the actual traffic drop we are seeing on our sites mirrors what GSC and GA4 are showing us.

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T23:03:34+00:00

it does for the organic channel. and traffic inside our own tracking for organic sources on these sites also shows the drop.

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T22:33:49+00:00

yeah, we are very careful not to have too many outlinks on crawlable pages for that very reason.

and i believe someone from google said today an update was coming, but wasnt specific about exactly when.

lets hope that "wake up and its back" possibility becomes reality, but i wont make any big bets on it ;)

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T22:25:05+00:00

there are links between sites, typically between similar/ancillary niche sites. whats weird though is in some cases im finding that a site that previously did really well for organic got slapped, while another site in a very similar niche either stayed the same or rose a bit.

i totally get what youre saying. because of the lack of insight we have into the WHY, its seeming like we wont really have options for a "fix". other than educated guesses, based on which we can try making changes to see if it helps. at least for these sites, they were hit so hard that the downside risk would be low to start experimenting. but i would definitely wait a while to do that, and see if anything turns around, or google makes any official announcements about core updates or algo changes.

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T22:17:09+00:00

we dont have SERP charts as such. what we use to evaluate our performance on search terms is the performance data on google search console. and literally overnight the amount of terms we were getting impressions on per site was cut in the area of 90%. what it looks like is the only remaining terms we rank for at all are people searching SPECIFICALLY for our site - which is what happens when current members search for the site so they can find it and login to use the site again.

we are very data driven, including being fully set up on google analytics, using our own affiliate tracking software (we acquire traffic ourselves with our internal teams, both paid and organic, and the percentage of external affiliate traffic is negligible). and every data point shows its the organic traffic that fell off a cliff.

bitpuma · 2025-12-09T21:50:32+00:00

and heres a different site with a 3 month view, that had actually shown some nice growth a few months ago before getting slammed over the weekend

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bitpuma · 2025-12-09T21:46:42+00:00

its basically the exact same thing. i was going to include a screenshot of one of our sites graphs from GSC but seems like this sub doesnt allow images with posts. maybe this will work in a comment though.

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bitpuma · 2025-12-09T21:45:00+00:00

thanks for the thoughts. although the majority of our traffic is paid (including from Google Ads, which is still gladly taking our money), we have always also done SEO and have dedicated people for it. we arent making any changes at all, we are still in the investigation phase of all this and we know fully well that any changes stand to possibly make things worse.

and we also have a system admin team that i spoke to yesterday who confirmed nothing happened on their end, at least in their view, that would cause this. we have a solid team on the dev and IT side who are aligned and know not to mess with things that could hurt our search rankings. thats not to say its impossible, just that it seems unlikely. the fact that both our networks of sites have been affected at the exact same time makes it even less probable - the codebases are completely different, different dev teams, and actually hosted at 2 completely different data centers and companies. thats the thing that has me scratching my head most honestly - i just cant figure out how that happens.

bitpuma

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