Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal

Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million -- an 80% drop in three months -- after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet's partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph's domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting platforms.

The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in 2025 and repeated objections from the outlet's three most senior editorial staff members throughout the year. The penalty removed Cointelegraph from Google News, Discover and search results entirely; a search for "Cointelegraph" now returns CoinDesk as the top result. Jon Rice, the former editor-in-chief, resigned on December 31st and described the situation as an "existential threat to business."

And nothing of value was lost?

[silentbozo]

Is this news because this happens often, or not often enough (the google manual death penalty)?

That much?

[smooth wombat]

If people already knew about this site, wouldn't they keep going back to it? Wouldn't they have the site bookmarked?

Not saying their traffic wouldn't go down, but if it was that "popular", shouldn't the people who already know about it still viist?

Re:That much?

[DamnOregonian]

I think the answer to that, is there are different kinds of popularity- and if your kind of popularity is the kind that doesn't create loyalty, but instead relies on people being driven to you... don't piss off who's doing the driving, unless you have a plan to replace them.

I see it as a shop on a boardwalk. Sure, it may have some kind of loyalty- but its overall foot traffic is driven by people coming to the boardwalk.
If you piss off the owners of the board walk so that they build a wall between your store and the boardwalk... your business is going to suffer enormously, unless you have made it your priority to foster loyalty.

Re:

[Shmoe]

I think you're sorely underestimating the amount of people that type 'Facebook' in their address bar to reach fb.

Re:

[nugatory78]

I recently came to the same conclusion... I've seen people with a desktop full of web shortcuts and then open a browser and search for what they want "Is this how you open facebook?"

Re:

[TGK]

Inside the /. bubble, sure, that makes sense. But crypto badly wants to be mainstream and, demographically, it's a lot younger than this community is. You might be surprised at how few people under 30 maintain bookmarks or consume news from specific outlets intentionally.

Re:

[sound+vision]

To a lot of people, social media essentially is the browser, and the search engine. They don't deliberately visit any site or seek out anything. They have a couple of social media "portals" that drip-feed links to them in an endless scroll. This is partly why they are so easily manipulated. The people in control can put (or withhold) anything in that drip.

Re:

[cusco]

You'd be surprised at the Internet illiteracy of the common (L)user. A huge percentage of people can **only** get to Farcebook by typing it into their search engine, even though they've gone there multiple times a day for years they can't figure out how to type 'facebook.com' into the address bar. Years ago there was a story here on Slashdot about a news site which had run a story about Farcebook and temporarily hit the top of Google's search results. Thousands of people put 'facebook' in the search fiel

Re:

[sg_oneill]

For non paywall news site, the vast majority of impressions come from people stumbling off the net onto the site. For paywall news sites, the only source of new customers is people stumbling onto the site off the net.

Almost no website survives being delisted.

Re:

[cusco]

You're STILL posting this copy/pasta spam? Dude, it's been years.

Bing still works

[jfdavis668]

You can find it there.

Re: Bing still works

[Frank Burly]

Also, AOL keyword ReamMe

Assoc of Crypto Journalists and Researchers

[edi_guy]

RTFA shows that the author of this opinion piece.

"Jon Rice is the former editor-in-chief at Cointelegraph, Blockworks, and Crypto Briefing."

Which are the firms he is dunking on in the article. Further quote:

"Perhaps when media owners and operators begin to recognize that sidelining expertise often leads to the destruction of value, they’ll have a little more respect for the people in their organizations who actually understand the industry."

Just another facet of the exciting and totally not-sketch crypto-sphere.

Cointelegraph is apparently owned by Luna Media, a Dubai based VC.

Where's the beef?

[HeckRuler]

Help me out with this one.

Cryptocurrency news site sells ads to casinos. This angers Google who threatens and then follows through with blacklisting the site and pretending it doesn't exist in any search result. Traffic to site goes down.

. . . Why exactly is Google angry about here? I mean, sure, NOBODY actually likes ads and casino ads rank right around porn ads. Do they just hate cryptocurrency? Also understandable, but I think I might have missed the point where Google became the Internet morality police. They've got a BIG job ahead of them if they want to start taking down thought-crime. "Parasitic SEO using domain authority to promote affiliate links"... isn't that what Internet ads do? You want the site, they show you an ad. It sucks. For sure. Nobody likes ads. ...But this is what Google does. Right at the top of Slashdot is a Google double-click ad to "homeserve" right there.

Feels familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

> The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in 2025 and repeated objections from the outlet's three most senior editorial staff members throughout the year.

Sounds about right.

I saw the de-facto CEO (technically he wasn't although he was promoted to CEO a few months later because of course he was) veto an attempt to comply with our credit card processing company's mandate after we were hit by credit card washers using our shopping system to test stolen card