Google thought we were a dating site

It started with the news

When I launched imchatty in 2025, it wasn't a language-learning site at all. It was an experiment: could people talk about current events across languages and cultures? You'd take a story from the news and discuss it in whatever language you liked, and the AI would translate, transparently, so nobody had to switch. A Dutch reader and a French reader arguing about the same headline, each in their own language. I thought that was rather wonderful.

To give people something to talk about, the site published its own articles. They were AI-assisted, with some human perspectives added, and before long there were hundreds of them.

On my About page I admit that I've published content written to rank, not to be read. This is the story behind that sentence.

Nobody came for the news

People did come. They chatted, they exchanged messages, some of them came back. But they never really cared about the content I was producing. The translation was technically interesting... the discussion never got serious. The news was the excuse, not the point.

The answer, as it often does, turned up at the bar. Our local bar-restaurant has a regular crowd of neighbors: Dutch, English, American, French. One evening they were doing exactly what I'd built imchatty for, talking about the news, in several languages at once. And listening to them, it was obvious what they actually wanted. Not a better debate about the headlines. They wanted to learn French.

So that's what imchatty became.

Then I looked at Search Console

Google, it turned out, had its own opinion of what imchatty was. Here are some of the searches it showed us for over the last twelve months:

• "margot robbie wuthering heights", where we ranked first
• "wall street $3 trillion ipos"
• "dating service", where we averaged fourth
• "dating services", "dating near me" and plain "dating"
• "анонимный чат для общения", Russian for "anonymous chat to talk"

People looking to learn a language almost never found us.

Google has its own measure of intent

Here's the thing nobody tells you: you can't describe your intent to Google. There's no form to fill in. It interprets your intent from what it sees (the pages, the words on them, who links to you, what people do when they arrive), and its interpretation isn't always accurate.

Look at the old imchatty through Google's eyes and you can see how it got there. "Chatty" in the name. Hundreds of news articles. Pages about chatting with strangers. Profiles with a "Looking for" field. Put that together and "a place where people meet, with a news feed" isn't a crazy guess. It just wasn't us anymore.

The pages that ranked weren’t the pages we’d written for learners.

What we deleted

So we started removing everything that told the wrong story:

• The news articles. All of them, hundreds of pages.
• The "chat with strangers" pages, redirected to pages about what imchatty actually does.
• Old tag and category pages, marked as gone for good, so Google stops sending people to them.
• The "Looking for" field on profiles, replaced with Interests: the topics people actually want to talk about in a lesson.

It's an odd feeling, deleting the pages that bring in most of your search traffic. But someone looking for a date, or for Margot Robbie, isn't really a visitor. It's a misunderstanding.

What it taught me

I spent ten years matching tutors and students, and the lesson never changed: a good method doesn't count for much if the match is wrong. Search is a matching problem too. Google was matching imchatty with the wrong people, and no amount of clever optimization was going to fix that. Only being clear about who we're for would.

So the rule now is simple: write for the person, and let Google catch up. That's a big part of why this blog exists, and why it will never publish very much.

As I write this, Google hasn't caught up yet. I'll report back when it does. Let's see how it goes.