We recently – mistakenly – had an article (@see Google to flag HTTP sites as not secure) in our blog that had a clickbait title. It happened and we didn’t realised it. And it wasn’t as nice as you might think it was.
We are a small blog with a couple of hundreds visitors per day. We write articles ourselves when we have the time to take a break from coding or testing software. We don’t make any money out of the blog and we only have it as a hobby – We try to write 2 articles per week and we are 9 people, this means that it’s not even close to our priorities.
Suddenly, a couple of hours after the article was published, a comment came in – we never get comments! I was instantly happy and run to read it:
The rest of the day a and a big part of my evening was to make sure that:
Your article is misleading. […]First thing I did was call the author of the article and ask him not to reply on any comments – I thought that someone just wanted to troll us! Just 10 or 20 minutes later someone else also commented saying that the title is a clickbait. I run home, opened analytics and my jaw dropped.
The rest of the day a and a big part of my evening was to make sure that:
- The site will keep running normally, server should be able to handle the traffic
- No comments with harse language will be visible – we might have minors reading as well
- The title of the article should change everywhere possible
