The "90s" comment forwards a wrong-headed perspective, casting web style as trendy, like clothing style. If newer functionality is missing, complaint about the missing functionality is legit; but date references are just vacuous & snide.
Beside the unmanageable effort of writing your own text, using the author/publisher text offers a preferred neutrality.
Users often don't care whether a site has 15, 15K, or 15M pages -- only whether we can easily reach what we want. Dynamic database-generated pages make the idea of "page count" obsolete anyhow. E.g., "How many pages does Amazon have?"
... and "busy"??? ... has Ms. Jeffries seen an Amazon page? By comparison, AALBC pages are relatively minimalist. (if not as structurally polished) "Websites like AALBC also would never have been viable businesses without Google to send new visitors their way." Really? ... maybe without any search engine ... but Lycos/HotBot/AltaVista, etc preceded Google, and might have routed queries for "African American book" to AALBC using their algorithms.
I've only used a fraction of AALBC.com, but the community support is unparalleled, and I found the site mechanisms rich & intuitive.
AALBC comments notwithstanding, Ms. Jeffries' (re)report of Google algorithms amplifying false content partially mitigates the other sins. Thanks for linking it here.