I've been going on every month or so to prune a few more Steemit posts and point them over to the Hive version.
I know there's @engrave's Pruner, but I guess I'd like to revisit my recent past.
So I prune a few articles at a time.
Pruning works.
Pruning from Amazon
A while back, my Amazon review privileges got blocked. I'm not sure why. Maybe I was too critical of some Kindle books that were click/pageturn bait, and I panned them, so I may have been reported by one of the fake-review writers.
I also tried to do a review-trade in a Facebook group, and an Amazon spy may have caught me. I wasn't in the groups with a fake account. (To do it right, you need to construct a fake persona, and use it consistently.)
Oh well.
It's just a strange thing: Amazon values legit reviews, but basically allows for a lot of fake reviews for their Kindle publications. Yet, these low-grade, bullshit books just pollute their ebook marketplace.
Many of the legit books they sell have promotional quotes on them, and that's also a kind of "fake review" or "paid review", because they gave a copy of the book to the reviewer, in exchange not only for the review, but with the unspoken deal that the reviewer's book will get a quote in return.
So, I just started to withdraw my reviews from the Amazon platform. I just put them on a blog here so they could be saved, archived, etc. I sometimes included non-affiliate links to the products.
After submitting this site to Google Search Console, it got picked up, and started showing up in search results in a few weeks. These pages aren't performing, but they are coming up in a few searches, and up in the top 20 results, meaning on pages 1 to 3 of the results.
Deleting the content from Amazon after copying it over helped with search results. When you have two copies of a text, Google going to show one, and it's likely to be the copy on Amazon.
Once this work is done, I'll see if these pages get traffic, and maybe migrate them to a domain or some kind of review app.
De-duplicating Indymedia
There's also a penalty for hosting duplicate content. I work on LA Indymedia's site and a few years ago, our site was tanking in Google search results. The platform was a posting free-for-all (it's a pre web 2.0 site), and there was a lot of duplicate content on there.
People did reposts of articles from bigger media sites, or spammed their own content across multiple sites. (They still do this.)
The big media posts were also a copyright violation, and that was a whole other potential mess of problems, because the local paper was out to sue websites.
So, I manually went through the posts and found the "big media" posts and hid them.
I also had to seek out the duplicate content posters, and hide their old posts, as well. Spam posted across many sites is a bad look, not only to search engines, but to readers. It's better to excerpt and link out.
Eventually, I had to alter the "hidden" pages to make sure they didn't get indexed by Google.
We also had some advertiser spam that did a better job of SEO on our pages than we could. I think they had blackhat SEO networks to boost their pages. This probably helped our site rankings, by creating inbound links, but I deleted their posts. (The way it works is that the posted ad would have some site authority, so it would get indexed pretty well. Then, the inbound links they added would boost the page to the top of the SERP. Gamers would see these ad pages in the SERP, and click on them.)
Beyond these search engine problems, the flood of reposts and mainstream media shares drowned out the original writing and photography, making for a less local feeling site.
All this work to clean out reposts helped a lot. (I had to remove a lot of things I reposted, as well!) The search engine traffic stabilized and rose a bit, and more pages got indexed correctly.
(I know, some people are probably thinking "this is censorship". I suppose it is, in some way, but in the bigger picture, it's not. All this content has been posted, multiple times, on multiple websites. Also, the site has reserved the right to moderate posts for the last 20 years.)
So, pruning works, and helps with showing up in search results, and also helps the https://hive.blog domain rank in search results.
Resources
Automated pruning: @engrave/even-better-steem-pruner