When Googling our name + ‘Patreon’ on Google, the main campaign page does not show up. This is new behavior - the link would show up first up until a few days ago. Is anyone else experiencing this? Could Google be de-prioritizing Patreon links?
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I doubt it and I can’t see that behavior while testing a few Patreon creators.
It would help if you would give us your Patreon name so we can check it for ourselves.
Try Googling:
Patreon Amanda Palmer
Patreon Simone Giertz
Patreon Philip DeFranco
All heavy Patreon creators, all don’t show up in my Google search?
True. Some creator pages are unlisted currently, others are not, which can be tested even better with specific searches like: “site:https://www.patreon.com/creatorname”
I still don’t see how this would be a deliberate action from Google. Maybe there was a server misconfiguration on Patreon’s side? Their web developers would need to investigate this. They control which pages are set to be indexed and they can access Google’s tools to check the crawling results of the search engine.
@mindy could you forward this to the right team? something is broken with Patreon on Google
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Thanks for alerting us of this! I will pass it on to the team so they can investigate further and I’ll update this thread with any news.
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Hello! We’ve confirmed there is a problem. We can get to the bottom of this this week as the team needs to work back and forth with an engineer to figure it out. I’ll let you know more as I hear it. Thank you again for reporting this, we hope to have those pages URLs indexed soon.
UPDATE: We have fixed the issue – in an attempt to make some more security improvements for Patreon we inadvertently (and temporarily) blocked Google from crawling some pages. Apologies for the inconvenience; we are seeing things back in the search index now!
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glad to hear this is fixed. any chance we can get off facebook’s naughty list, as well? posting anything patreon related basically sends our views on that specific post down the toilet
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That’s Facebook’s algorithms. In general: the first views count. The more people engage with the post, the more will see it. If the post is ignored by most, it will get less views.
The external companies (e.g. Patreon) have no control over that process whatsoever.
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All listed again it seems.
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Hi @inversephase, thanks for the comment! Unfortunately @TypographyGuru has it right - that is entirely up to Facebook and their algorithms. They tend to change them without notice or information very frequently and it can often have dire consequences on those who rely on Facebook to reach their audience and make money from that platform. I’ve noticed a lot of creators saying a similar thing on Instagram - that they have changed something and now they’re posts are only reaching a fraction of their audience. We hope that Patreon can help protect creators from this in the future as the creator owns the relationship 100% there 
Yes. I’m sorry for being unclear. I said “naughty list” because I figured that would imply that I knew the facebook AI was algorithmically lowering our views.
I guess I was just shouting at the darkness in hopes someone had noticed a trend of increased views or a workaround.
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Ah, no worries, sorry to hear about that @inversephase. From my experience managing social pages in the past, you have to go back to experimenting with things again to see what performs best. I think about things like…
- When: times of day, days of week, also targeting different timezones you know you have an audience in (eg 8am in NY vs 8am in London)
- What: content uploads vs content links - FB always prefers their audience to stay on their site so as a rule always deprioritizes links to content off of FB. Sometimes they prefer an image upload to a video upload etc.
- Word length in post - where does the break happen?
- Post appearance on desktop vs web vs mobile app
Hopefully other creators will chip in with their learnings too