[HN Gopher] The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
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The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
Author : caspii
Score : 1643 points
Date : 2021-06-07 21:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (casparwre.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (casparwre.de)
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I personally think that SEO is kinda a waste of time. Because why
| would we have to adapt to a bot, a program. When the program
| should have to adapt to us.
|
| The problem is that people will always try to game the system :/
| mtnGoat wrote:
| ive learned that almost any keyword related to sale-able products
| has been gamed on Google. all i see are affiliate links and
| people that keep track of which format to build their website in,
| that google likes this week.
|
| more importantly, what ive also learned is that Bing search
| results are less of an affiliate link cesspool because fewer SEO
| spammers are working at gaming Bing's results.
| didip wrote:
| The old Google would have hunted these down mercilessly (Panda
| update in 2011). What happened to Google these days?
| rondrabkin wrote:
| Yes they would have. OMG that was 10 years ago and ...what is
| new in Google search these last 10 years. Maybe a lot but I
| don't see it. I just see ads and, when I do some long tail
| query most of the results are just random sites in russia or
| whatever with keyword salad (is there a word for that kind of
| site?)
| cirno wrote:
| They have no competition to care anymore. Their closest
| competitor, Bing, has a 2.24% market share which consists
| mostly of people who don't bother to change their default
| browser's default search engine. Competition is necessary to
| breed innovation. See for example, IE6.
| progx wrote:
| That is true! Why should google do something? They say "use
| ads", to make money.
|
| Use other search engines is the only way to do something.
| rchaud wrote:
| "SEO scammers got you down? Call Google Ads now!"
| adrr wrote:
| I've always wondered if Google AdWords hurts your SEO. Let's
| say you sell widgets and searching for widgets you are ranked
| 5. You buy AdWords to be on the top. Since people click you
| AdWords ad that's on top, they are less likely to click the
| organic listing thus penalizing your organic listing since
| it's not getting clicks. Google factors in which organic
| listing click counts when determining ranking since it is a
| strong signal.
| rchaud wrote:
| Most companies will buy Google Ads (formerly Adwords) as
| insurance for their SEO efforts. At the barest minimum, you
| don't want links to competitor sites at the top of the
| search results. With ads, you can at least claim the top
| spot for those search keywords.
|
| Most people don't click on ads, so getting visitors to your
| site from organic search terms is more likely to convert
| them into returning users.
| martin_a wrote:
| Interesting idea.
|
| Also funny that Google Page Speed Insights was complaining
| about the Google Analytics JS and its caching duration.
|
| Probably different teams and competing in a strange manner
| with each other.
| shmiga wrote:
| SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website
| quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO
| experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Fix the system? People who comment online seem to think the
| concept of the "search engine" cannot be improved, except by
| Google. The list of inactive search engines at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine is depressing. The
| problem for us is that the supposed innovator Google has little
| financial incentive to improve the system regarding "content"
| or "quality". As long as the traffic keeps coming, the ad
| revenue keeps coming. Their best bet is promote what's
| "popular" ("top-ranking"). Because the traffic keeps coming no
| matter what Google does, "content" and "quality" are not really
| their major concerns. There are no true alternatives for users.
| Bing is basically a Google clone. No new ideas. Other search
| engines, like DDG, just piggyback off Google or Bing crawlers.
| Not sure about Baidu, Yandex or others but I suspect they are
| more or less Google clones as well. In every case, advertising
| dictates design. No new ideas.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I'm trying alternative search engines from time to time and
| and they are much weaker than Google. So yeah, I'd bet on
| them to improve stage. The others first need to catch up.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Long time ago (~2005) my French Telco employer had a search
| engine (Voila), and they were worried by Google's influence
| so they try a test campaign to see how Google's results
| were different from their own search engine.
|
| The result was astonishing: In the first page most results
| were similar, except for the order. Specifically a first
| result in Google was only second in the first page in the
| company's search engine. But in overall the difference was
| mostly in the presentation, not in the results.
|
| There was something Spartan in Google's page UI that made
| it more credible and informative. At the time for most
| people including academics, they were the good guys and us
| (Telcos) the bad boys.
|
| I guess academics advices were very influential on young
| adults who will shape the world the next years.
|
| I guess also the erratic management by France Telecom was
| for something in the demise of Voila.fr
| topicseed wrote:
| True to some extent but it is improving with Google updates.
| Now, there is a way to go still, and some legit websites get
| hit by updates unfortunately, but overall fewer and fewer scams
| pass through.
|
| SEO used to be extremely gameable (seniority of site, keyword
| stuffing, backlinks), but these levers aren't as obvious now,
| if at all.
| shmiga wrote:
| That is great, but can google change their algo to some point
| where it works differently? Their ad business is there in the
| web.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Google changes their algo frequently. It's a cat and mouse
| game. Sometimes Google have the lead, and sometimes the
| Blackhat SEOs do.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| the game doesn't change ... only the players
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| This is not how it generally works, I would say. It is more
| about how much you pay Google and how good your page is. I
| worked with several SEO experts and none of them suggested
| scams like this. The risk of doing something like this is too
| high for many companies.
| maze-le wrote:
| I wonder why google is not more rigorous about that. Google
| search is riddled since years with "optimized" content nobody
| wants. It's become so bad even my non-techie friends are
| beginning to switch to DuckDuckGo -- which is not better per se
| (probably worse at contextualizig).
| bungle wrote:
| Getting stuff on PagaRank feels a game. Getting stuff out of
| Google feels a game too. To the point that moving to an
| alternative feels worth it, at least to try.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Everyone wonders about that. Googling most phone numbers
| return nothing but pages of spam links.
|
| A decade from now, Google will have made no improvement.
| DelightOne wrote:
| That's why for certain things Google is useless. Have to add
| certain keywords to avoid the SEO content to get comparisons,
| reviews, forums.
|
| One day Google may introduce multiple search rankings, where
| one of them is SEO and another is the "useful things". But I
| don't hold my breath.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| It's also so frustrating to get results for websites which
| present themselves in the search results with "Results for
| <your query>"...only to show "no results found" when you
| actually click on them.
|
| Good thing /etc/hosts has no size limit.
| mikevin wrote:
| I still do this but I'm 99% sure Google and DDG max out at
| around 3 keywords these days. I just get results for the top
| 3 SEO keywords, no matter how much I try to refine my search.
|
| Maybe it's just because I'm searching for technical stuff but
| DDG and Google are both a big source of frustration for me,
|
| DDG thinks I mistype most of my queries and will desperately
| try to correct my 'mistake' because "surely nobody is really
| searching for documentation about ARM32 bootloaders, they
| just mistyped when they were really trying to look for a
| webshop that sells 32 different ARMchairs and ARMy boots.".
|
| Google will understand my input at least half of the time but
| uses that power to show me the power of websites that do some
| article/keyword scraping and run GPT on it, or this great new
| Medium blogpost with two paragraphs of someone copying a
| Wikipedia summary of what ARM is and copy pasting build
| instructions from a GitHub README.
|
| I've tried searching github.com itself but that's just a nice
| way to find out that apparently most of the data they store
| is just scraped websites, input for ML models or dictionaries
| and they will happily show me all 9K forks of the one repo
| that contains the highest density of these keywords.
|
| /rant
| ma2rten wrote:
| The useful thing would instantly become useless because
| people would start gaming it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I doubt it. A lot of SEO drivel appears easy to detect -
| recipes for example.
|
| Recipes would ultimately be a list of ingredients, concise
| instructions and maybe a picture or two. It should be
| trivial to train a classifier to detect SEO spam in this
| context.
|
| I think Google doesn't really have an incentive to do this,
| as SEO spam typically includes ads which can contain
| _Google ads_ or analytics /Google Tag Manager which helps
| Google, thus prioritizing better results would work against
| their bottom line.
| jehb wrote:
| > Recipes would ultimately be a list of ingredients,
| concise instructions and maybe a picture or two.
|
| So, if Google altered their algorithm such that "recipe"
| content had to be shorter-form in order to perform better
| in SERPs, how would this change anything? The sites that
| profit from search traffic would be the ones with their
| fingers on the pulse of the algorithm, and the resources
| to instantly alter their content in order to ensure that
| they continued to rank for the terms that were driving
| traffic.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Well, if Google ranks user-friendly content higher then
| sites will either adjust to be more user-friendly or get
| outranked by new sites that are user-friendly. The user
| wins.
| DelightOne wrote:
| Agreed, I heard that before.
|
| What about trust-based systems. You choose who you trust
| and get information that they found not to be SEO-garbage,
| like trust-rings. When the system can't do it alone, user-
| centric feedback may work. That could give interesting
| inputs besides the ones Google already gets using its
| standard metrics.
| randomswede wrote:
| Yes, but it feels like an approach that would not allow
| you to do anon searches. I guess pseud searches may be
| good enough.
|
| I suspect this is actually one of those fundamentally
| hard problems.
| teddyh wrote:
| When you place a tangible value on trust, trust becomes a
| commodity to be bought and sold. See:
|
| 1. Old domain names bought solely for their old SEO rank.
|
| 2. Apps on mobile app stores are sold, and updates begin
| to include shady privacy-invading malware.
|
| 3. Old free software projects on various registries (npm
| etc.) are sold, with the same result as (2).
| DelightOne wrote:
| Agreed, being able to become part of any group makes this
| problematic. Without repercussions, it seems difficult.
| Detection of ownership and the following loss of trust
| seems to be also in order. Or make the trust innate, not
| sellable to others, under the assumption that you cannot
| sell yourself.
|
| Otherwise, it seems really like a cat and mouse game.
| Another option may be to force SEO to be
| indistinguishable from the best content. Is that the
| current goal?
| rrdharan wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/810/
| enknamel wrote:
| Or .... how much money you pay Google. This is working as
| intended for a free search engine.
| mrtksn wrote:
| If you Google stuff like "opening hours of ..." in
| Turkish(probably in other languages too), since many years the
| search results are only news websites spamming google,
| including the Turkish franchise of CNN, the CNN Turk.
|
| The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ
| but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To
| find out continue to read our article.
|
| Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords(in
| sentences that don't make sense), if you are lucky there would
| be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere
| down the text.
|
| But that doesn't stop there. Even actual news articles are
| written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences
| often don't make sence, they are repeated multiple times with
| the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy
| article that doesn't have any meat beyond the title.
|
| I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics,
| the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts
| don't do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid
| to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI
| on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then
| Google pays those who generate the eyeballs.
|
| Isn't it better for Google and everyone involved if you can't
| find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings
| more eyeballs? It's not like you are going to switch to Bing?
| You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a
| library.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords.
|
| I've noticed a rise of that as well. With some searches such
| spam is all I've received. But that's really a problem in all
| languages Google supports I think.
|
| There's even malware that infects websites and generates such
| content, not sure what's the point of that. Anyone knows?
| vijayr02 wrote:
| I'm guessing if even legitimate websites have similar
| content it's difficult to distinguish between fake and real
| content for an automated system?
| dspillett wrote:
| I've not seen it for opening times (UK here) but the same
| pattern is very visible elsewhere.
|
| Entertainment/news sites are chock full of pages like
| "<whatever>, what we know so far, release date, cast, will it
| be renewed, has it been cancelled..." pages that spend many
| paragraphs saying "we know nothing, randomly plucking crap
| out of thin air we could guess something-or-other but that
| remains to be confirmed". A new news story, film, show, or
| even just a hint of something, and the pages go up to try
| capture early clicks. Irritatingly they are often not updated
| quickly when real information becomes available or that
| information changes (particularly over the last year that has
| affected release dates). I have several sites DNS blocked
| because that annoys me less than getting one of these
| useless/out-of-date pages more often than not when I follow
| one of their links.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Oh, tell me more about it. It's a painful endeavour to
| gather information about upcoming TV show precisely because
| of the tactics you described.
|
| BTW, news websites in question are not doing it only for
| opening times but for any popular search phrase they can
| come up. Would be such a shame if outlets like BBC, WSJ and
| others adopted that kind of SEO.
| lodovic wrote:
| > It's not like you are going to switch to Bing?
|
| I changed the default search engine from Google to Bing and
| DDG in all browsers. Google does have better results, so
| sometimes I still need to use them. But for 90% of generic
| queries such as the weather, product information, or finding
| a company's website, Bing is good enough.
| high_byte wrote:
| I used DDG as primary engine for a while and it was more
| like 30% effective
| eino wrote:
| > It's not like you are going to switch to Bing
|
| From personal experience, I switched to another tool (DDG) a
| couple of years ago. When I occasionally try Google, for 95%
| of common requests I'm appalled by the results: the top is
| only SEO garbage. For very specific and precise searches
| (where people are not trying to game the system), Google is
| still the best, though.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Huh, you've given me a realisation - I don't do 'generic
| searching' on google anymore. I hear people say "google is
| broken" and I always think "it's fine for me" but thats
| because I'm searching for specific things, error messages,
| function calls etc. If I am searching for general interest
| stuff I tend to search reddit, hacker news or some other
| topic specific community rather than just search google
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I just realised I do something similar - almost every
| term I search will have the word "Reddit" appended to it.
| It's not perfect, but at least the content is intended
| for human consumption.
| lvncelot wrote:
| Same for me, `site:reddit.com` for almost everything that
| has to do with product recommendations or reviews.
| atatatat wrote:
| Putting this here makes it even less likely marketers
| will miss "gaming reddit" as part of their strategy.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I agree. Although DDG isn't exactly a bed of roses either.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| DDG's refusal to honor booleans is putting a gun to it's
| own head.
|
| The best is minus operands acting more like plus or
| quotes.
| jitbit wrote:
| Me too, but DDG is using Bing under the hood though.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Ok, that's ultra-smart. Something you would think "how come I
| never thought of that?"
| progx wrote:
| google search is garbage, that's it.
|
| We had a compititor who spams his page full with SEO garbage
| Words, our Software is used 100 times more than his software,
| more people search for our software, click it and use it, link
| it, but who is on 1st place in search results? Right, the SEO
| spammer, with the slower page, full of shiny SEO words that has
| nothing todo with the software.
|
| @google i wait for working AI that detects such garbage sites!
| superasn wrote:
| Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks
| to rank sites.
|
| It's 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can
| still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no
| connection from the article to the site.
|
| Also it's pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For
| my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review
| just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the
| software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites
| which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making
| scams yet they rank so highly on Google.
|
| P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with "offers"
| from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a
| paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such
| shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't think there are incentives for a change. The way it is
| done now is probably more profitable and the competition is
| doing exactly the same.
| dafelst wrote:
| Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think,
| they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail
| of the web.
|
| Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're
| important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing
| effort in the wrong places.
|
| Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well
| known search engine
| superasn wrote:
| That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news.
| Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on
| usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most
| links.
|
| Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this
| article? I thought all that was going for these guys were
| just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.
| wyaeld wrote:
| Google collects immense of data about people's actual
| visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative
| things were You don't need the proxy when you have the
| record of where people actually visit.
| rocho wrote:
| That's very effective for the top results. But if legit
| sites cannot rank in the first spots they'll get orders
| of magnitude fewer visits than the scam sites that employ
| SEO hacks to get the first places.
| shitRETARDSsay wrote:
| Like the backlink spammers on the article, which are winning?
|
| but yea "narrative"
| Exuma wrote:
| Go on...
| meowster wrote:
| Nice try black hat SEO person :-)
| blobster wrote:
| Interesting, but this does not seem to match empirical
| evidence by the likes of Ahrefs, which suggests that links
| are by far the most important ranking factor.
| somehnguy wrote:
| >Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar
| money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google.
|
| I was just talking to my SO about this the other day when we
| were trying to find an air purifier for allergies. I'm the kind
| of person that likes to compare products a ton before dropping
| more than about ~$100 on anything. The way the internet has
| become in the last 10-15 years has made this increasingly more
| difficult. You really have to dig to find in-depth unbiased
| content on anything someone stands to make money from. For
| every 1 good review there are 100 'top 10 best ranked' blogspam
| sites..
| bassdropvroom wrote:
| Heh, I struggle figure out what is a real review and what is
| a paid for ad. It's sad to the point where I've pretty much
| given up because of the sheer amount of time it would take to
| do the research. Instead I opt to go for Amazon's competitors
| (e.g. Currys and Argos for us in the UK) and pick something
| there. They're a little more vetted, and less likely to be
| knock off or something.
| visarga wrote:
| If you think about it, these are the "money searches". It's
| crazy they didn't try harder to solve people's needs instead
| of regurgitating that careless spam.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| What I don't understand is why does Google continue to use
| metrics that are so easy to fake and game.
|
| Surely some kind of fairly trivial NN/Not very deep learning
| system can classify HTML content so that out of context links
| (like "Learn how to solve a Rubic Cube" in a Seventh Day
| Adventists sabbath lesson) and content that is copied is ignored
| or marked down.
|
| Whilst I'm sure GPT-3 could be used to create more realistic
| looking fake content - this would eliminate 99% of the script
| kiddies creating low value SEO spamming sites.
| nickodell wrote:
| Are non-sequiturs always malicious? For example, suppose you
| have a news site, and it has a story about Ukraine, followed by
| a story about school shootings. Even if two links next to one
| another are unrelated, that doesn't prove that they're not
| genuine.
| csunbird wrote:
| but, in your example, the context is "news" and both examples
| that you have provided do fall into that context.
| jmspring wrote:
| The problem with an algorithm, you can find ways to game the
| algorithm.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > The creators of Scorecounter also made an online HTML editor
|
| Or paid the entity running the malware HTML editor. It's probably
| injecting links to a variety of sites who paid them for
| placement.
| janmo wrote:
| He's probably selling that service on blackhatworld
| ra33o wrote:
| Begin to make your own content and make it public... Oh, like a
| blog. Like in the old days.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Could it be that Scorecounter is paying for their links to be
| embedded, as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both
| sites? If so, and provable, can they be flagged in some way?
|
| Doesn't say much for Google's ability to determine relevancy in
| linking or recognizing suspicious link growth. Or perhaps it just
| takes some time ...
| dstick wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, paying for links is still very much
| against Google's policies. Whatever weight that should carry...
| in my opinion you should always try to be as independent from
| Google as possible. It's such a huge liability.
| enriquto wrote:
| > paying for links is still very much against Google's
| policies.
|
| quite a strange think to say about a company whose bussiness
| is based on selling links (to ads)
| shrikant wrote:
| I believe dstick meant to say "paying _[someone else]_ for
| links is still very much against Google's policies. "
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Clearly. But I guess it is not outright proven that they are
| technically buying links. Though they would likely fall under
| some form of bad behavior in Google's eyes.
|
| And, buying or otherwise, I am not sure what the mechanism is
| for bringing this to Googles attention.
|
| I doubt there is another acquisition channel for a project
| like this that would compare to SEO (and not just Google).
| topicseed wrote:
| Google used to impose manual penalties for unnatural links BUT
| this gave the rise to, you guessed it, competitors buying
| unnatural links for their enemy and waiting for the penalty to
| be given.
|
| Nowadays, unnatural links are mostly ignored.
| vitus wrote:
| > as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both sites?
|
| If they're not owned by the same entity, then this blog post is
| rather odd: https://html-online.com/articles/scoreboard/
|
| (To be fair, that entire blog seems odd...)
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Agreed. Sure seems that way. Though that may actually make it
| less likely to be a violation than if one was paying the
| other for the links. Not within the spirit of the terms, but
| may not be a violation either.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Probably. It'd be weird for a SEO spammer to put the effort
| into building a popular HTML editor/optimizer just to inject
| links to a few sites they own and operate. It's far more likely
| that they're offering that link injection as a service.
| dalbasal wrote:
| This is apropos...
|
| Google's old link-based authority algorithm, pagerank, isn't
| alaysing the same web anymore. I think there's barely any signal
| in links these days.
|
| The first major event was Google itself. Once you use something
| as a metric, it becomes currency. SEO vs anti-spam became a
| defining cat and mouse game. This kind of stuff was born then,
| and antispam was meant to curb it.
|
| The second major event was user generated content. The old link
| pages and blogrolls die slowly. Comments, twitter, and such
| become the way links are shared. High signal, but extremely spam
| prone. Google tapped out of this early, and mostly ignore user
| generated content.
|
| The third major event is facebook, and facebook like ways of
| doing things. This made most regular people's content
| unindexable. Search for esoteric keywords used to return a lot of
| forum results. Still does, to an extent. The thread is usually
| years, or decades old. What's left on the open web is a subset, a
| non random subset.
|
| Wikipedia is one of the last sites that does "hypertext" the way
| pagerank assumes the web works.
|
| In any case, I feel like search (or what search used to be) is in
| decline. There isn't as much web to search anymore, in a sense.
| The broad brush way of doing antispam (eg user generated content
| is just ignored) makes more sense. Why deal with all that
| noise/spam, just to search what's left of the old web.
|
| What's left? User behaviour, a la analytics. That's makes for
| more feedback loops and winner takes most dynamics. Localisation
| became localisation to your bubble. Meanwhile "officialness"
| measures aren't against google's ethic/aesthetic anymore. They
| got burned by the "fake news^" crisis, and the quick fix was
| officialness. In for a penny. In for a pound.
|
| Meanwhile, web search is increasingly just another thing that
| google search does. It searches "your" data, content of your
| devices, search history and NN generated whatnot. It searches
| news, ads, returns answers to questions, does math... There's
| nothing new about seo scams, antispam just isn't Google's primary
| solution anymore. Just default to other ways of returning
| results.
|
| I'm calling it. Web search is dead. Long live the new websearch.
|
| ^Circa 2015 usage, not the current
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >first major event
|
| IIRC with PageRank there were very specific values associated
| with 'toolbar PageRank', e.g. a PR7 link could be sold for $1K
| a month. Understandable because at that time there was no
| context to PageRank at all, it was simply about being linked to
| by an "authority". This was 20 years ago though.
| chrischen wrote:
| Similar to "my ip address"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415897.
|
| Google just seems to give way too much weight to domain name
| matches with the search keyword.
| qeternity wrote:
| I have little to no experience in SEO. Does Google have a history
| of weighing in on situations like this and manually penalizing
| bad actors? If so, I would love a link to read about.
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
|
| >Google issues a manual action against a site when a human
| reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are
| not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Most
| manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index.
| Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being
| ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual
| indication to the user.
| cocoafleck wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...
| I'm sure that the title tells you that the article has an
| opinion (not unbiased), but I think it is a useful source.
| jboynyc wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
| bliteben wrote:
| https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/
|
| wow that's amazing, I guess I sort of quit reading blogs like
| this when all the RSS readers died.
| bombcar wrote:
| People seem to have stopped producing blogs like this ever
| since Facebook are the world.
|
| I wonder how much of modern search crappiness is because
| much of the good content that used to be in small blogs is
| now locked away behind facebook's logins.
| silviot wrote:
| They state that they don't manually pick results, but improve
| their algorythms to solve these problems. They prefer to share
| the least amount of details though, since it would better
| inform SEO spammers.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Not true, you can get penalized and you may be noticed about
| it in the google search console.
| silviot wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. I remembered it wrong. In this
| article for instance Matt Cutts details how they go about
| flagging individual pages [1]
|
| [1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-
| sites...
| RileyJames wrote:
| I agree with some of the other comments, googles actions on SEO
| are always shrouded in a little "algorithmic" mystery. That
| said, they do apply "manual action" penalties to individual
| websites.
|
| Using google search console you can determine if a manual
| action has been applied to your own website:
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en
|
| Rather than determine the ranks, these actions remove / punish
| offending websites from the ranks, effectively making room for
| 'good' actors.
|
| Manual actions often come after a a significant change in
| ranking algorithm or policy, and can be reverted / resolved in
| some cases. This usually requires removing or disavowing (in
| the case of unauthorized or unresponsive sites) the links
| pointing to a website.
| vgeek wrote:
| You may want to dig into http://www.seobook.com/blog for an
| opinionated (albeit typically objectively correct) perspective
| on many things related to the SEO industry. There are a few
| studies about Thumbtack (with GV investment), RapGenius and
| eBay penalties and their subsequent recoveries.
| ziftface wrote:
| While I think this is extremely shady and will avoid ever using a
| tool like this in the future, does it actually break google's
| TOS? It seems like a valid defense could be made.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| This is a valid question. Though, I would argue in this case
| that they have found a loophole more than anything, if they are
| not in violation of the TOS.
|
| As others have pointed out and the author acknowledges, he is
| technically injecting links when his users embed their
| scoreboard on their website through an auto-included link-back
| to his site.
|
| Now, I don't frown upon this. It is not deceptive and its
| placement is more than relevant.
|
| The same cannot be said for the scheme the author uncovered.
| But whether it is violating Google's TOS is another question.
| I'm not sure of the answer.
| bluedino wrote:
| Plus google returns results that link to shit like
| http://edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it/somewhat-related-...
|
| And then you get re-direct to some prize-winning spam site.
|
| I love getting a search result that includes Google Books because
| those are usually useful. That's what Google was best at,
| bringing in things that weren't regular web pages.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| so lazy/terrible developers were using random tools online and
| not noticing injected spam links into their pages. Whatever man,
| you're getting beat because of it, better find a new strategy.
| There's tons of link spam and stuff out there but google's
| results are still good for real content for the most part if you
| build it up
| Wronnay wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210608085551/https://casparwre...
| billyharris wrote:
| This isn't the only website which is ranking on first position
| using such blackhat SEO tactics but if everyone mention them like
| you do, then they will surely not going to remain at top for
| long.
| alphabetting wrote:
| It's worth noting the scam site is the top result in Bing and
| DuckDuckGo as well
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Yep this! How can you really beat SEO when people can just try
| new things all day and see if it helps their rankings? I don't
| feel there's a solution here. Everyone suffers under SEO types
| just trying to bring scammy things to the top of the results
| page.
| topicseed wrote:
| The thing is, I have a site in a very competitive niche
| that's full of black hat SEO tactics, and I am doing my white
| hat best hoping that Google tanks these sites when they
| update algos over time, and I'd then be the best placed to
| take their spots over.
|
| But in the meantime, yep... It sucks.
| thar327 wrote:
| How does ahrefs.com get the information of any websites
| backlinks? This is more interesting than the original article
| itself
| aembleton wrote:
| With web crawlers. They index the web to give you this
| information: https://ahrefs.com/big-data
| gitgud wrote:
| > _Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that
| the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you
| pay for the free version._
|
| Well, unfortunately this is basically how every freemium tool
| works. They have some way of advertising, in exchange for free
| use of the tool.
|
| Even reputable CMS tools like WordPress include back links to
| wordpress on a new site and themes.
|
| Although, this is much less common with open-source free tools,
| as the community resists these kinds of changes.
|
| _No such thing as a free lunch!_
| baby wrote:
| Same story for chrome a while back. I formatted my father
| computer because he had a bunch of malware. The first thing he
| did was to google "chrome" and download the first result. Which
| was an ads. Which was a malware.
| CR007 wrote:
| I believe that Google search quality has degraded a ton. Not
| surprised here.
|
| By the way, I develop proprietary software. Hope that someone
| reads at Google and stop indexing all those pirate websites where
| people steal from others. Not torrents, talking about those
| websites where they even sell you paid access to stolen stuff.
|
| Serously Google? You can't filter "nulled"?
| linuxfan2021 wrote:
| That must suck. All my life I've developed open-source software
| so I don't mind about people sharing it, but to think that
| people would not only take it, but actually SELL it for their
| own profit? People are lame.
| joeyoungblood wrote:
| SEO professional here, I can't see the article due to the wide-
| spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in
| closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as
| well as the tool's admission of such links on their site. This
| tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO
| link value from user websites, it is also possible they are
| selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of
| link building was a common practice in the early 00's used by CMS
| theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google
| took a stand against "widget links", which is likely what these
| would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against
| their usage:
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder...
|
| A year later Google's John Mueller, a trends analyst who often
| also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster
| community, stated that Google might automatically apply a
| 'nofollow' attribute to these types of links, effectively killing
| their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves:
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-lin...
|
| We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar
| usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites
| positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized,
| including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and
| collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links
| has changed quite a bit over the past 5 years and there is a
| chance they no longer penalize for widget links (unlikely) OR
| that their ability to detect them has degraded significantly (my
| guess is the later).
|
| One thing is for certain, Google absolutely retains the ability
| to manually devalue links and penalize a website for violating
| their guidelines. They do not enjoy negative press or communinity
| discussions on search quality like this one and in the past have
| taken swift action when such issues arised in the media.
|
| At our agency we advise clients against this type of link
| building as it has no long-term value for a brand and could cause
| long-term pain instead. SEO should be used to help new brands
| gain a competitive advantage against more established incumbents
| such as a startup taking on Amazon or a new SaaS tool providing
| valuable data to an industry.
| dmje wrote:
| Every time I think about developing a product I'm put off by the
| hell that is SEO. The whole landscape is just horrible, full of
| snake oil sellers. It's not like the end result is any good
| either: man, Google results are so fkn bland these days. You
| stand zero chance of finding anything interesting, it's all just
| MONETIZED in such a boring way. Yes, I want the old web back.
| aembleton wrote:
| Ignore the SEO and concentrate on the product. You can worry
| about SEO later, there are even specialists that can help you
| with that.
| przemub wrote:
| I am a programmer but it gets harder and harder to find good
| results for anything outside my niche, not to mention outside
| programming. Maybe there are any alternatives being worked on?
| Googling increasingly feels to be a complete waste of time.
| [deleted]
| mpva wrote:
| You should report this to google, its clearly a huge violation of
| terms of service.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| I have been thinking, it almost seems we are going back to the
| old way you would browse the web - with homepages and a page with
| relevant urls to other places of the web. Except the homepage is
| now your instagram account and a linktree in the bio.
| FranchuFranchu wrote:
| I wonder how many similar tools are also like this. We can't
| trust search engines anymore.
| lopatin wrote:
| Sorry in advance for off topic, but seeing as how both this
| website and Reddit is currently down with the same 503 Varnish
| cache error currently, I wanted to ask how that would be
| possible? Surely Reddit uses their own infrastructure and not
| some shared hosted server where this could happen across the
| board?
|
| Edit: Wow, this is much bigger than just those two sites. Looks
| like half the internet is down. https://downdetector.com/
| fluential wrote:
| Terraform.io Reddit.com same error msg, looks like CDN issue ?
| lopatin wrote:
| Looks like Fastly is having an outage.
| Wronnay wrote:
| Seems like this is connected to the https://fastly.com outage
| ;-)
| lumpa wrote:
| Amazing how such a simple approach can achieve content injection
| on a diverse network of unrelated websites, to the point of
| raising the profile of the vector and increasing the chances of
| further spread.
|
| I hope someone figures out which other campaigns were run with
| these tools. Also, whether you can find output with the link
| injections in source code, like on GitHub or distro packages.
| mjthompson wrote:
| Just an observation: your competitor site is using AMP pages,*
| while you don't appear to be. I suspect without knowing that
| Google take this into account in ranking.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
|
| * forgive my RAS syndrome
| caspii wrote:
| I know. But I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than use AMP.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Several points; the title is slightly misleading, i initially
| thought (in my ignorance) that OP was referring to a company
| employee, also this article is surprisingly open in 'naming and
| shaming' his competitor.
| caspii wrote:
| Yikes, should I have shown more discretion in naming the
| competitor?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No. People should name-and-shame more often in these sorts of
| scenarios.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| You know better then me. But i hope that since what you are
| saying is easily provable there shouldn't be any problem at
| all. Nice article, by the way.
| caspii wrote:
| Thanks. I think it is.
| ben509 wrote:
| Talk to a lawyer.
| janmo wrote:
| It could be that they were acting in good faith and paid some
| SEO agency/Guy unknowing what was going on.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Lately I've seen many automatically generated trash pages in
| high-ranking Google results, typically copied or "AI"-generated
| plausible text and spam links, suggesting that gaming Google
| ranking algorithms is a solved problem.
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| Yes, those stackoverflow clones and github clones are really
| annoying. You think someone might finally have an answer to
| your problem, but it's just a copy-paste of the stackoverflow
| you've read previously.
| napolux wrote:
| Worked with SEO until 2020. It's really a scam. I know people
| making 1000$ per month by just generating a bunch of interlinked
| domains with semi-random text like: 'phone number $randomNumber'.
| diveanon wrote:
| Easiest and most effective google SEO is to just buy ads.
| janmo wrote:
| It probably started with the guy adding something like "Edited
| using XXXX Editor tool" to make himself some publicity. Seeing
| that it worked he started selling those backlinks a fortune.
| slim wrote:
| Circa 1999 I was running a webdesing studio. We added that link
| to all the websites we designed, then the next logical step was
| to make it link to a page with our entire portfolio which in
| turn linked to our website. That boosted the SEO of all our
| customers, and in turn boosted ours exponentially.
| ilamont wrote:
| Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that
| live in site footers.
|
| Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself
| having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful
| results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings,
| searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have
| been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic
| abusers that hijack local business results.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > Google has turned into a cesspool.
|
| All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too.
| There's nothing particularly Google-specific to this story.
| It's about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a
| PageRank-style system.
| worble wrote:
| I think it's high time we had a webring resurgence. It's
| impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we
| need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy
| to say "I endorse the people running this site, so if like my
| stuff you'll like them too"
| cortesoft wrote:
| If they can inject a random link into a page, why couldn't
| they also be able to inject a web ring link?
| stevenicr wrote:
| Id like to see. and be happy to post some various web rings
| and blogrolls..
|
| One of the things that killed them imho is when google
| started penalizing sites that linked to some other sites.
|
| This was compounded by the expired-domain market..
|
| wordpress even took out linkrolls around that time, people
| that had them in sidebar widgets would have them disappear
| unless they installed a new plugin to bring them back.
|
| Webrings that auto-add the "nofollow tag" I guess could
| make them okay for people again.
|
| Might be cool to have a github type page with a list of
| rings to reccomend.. a script auto-pulls it into your page,
| adding nofollow - and then other people could copy your
| list or clone/fork..
| emodendroket wrote:
| Isn't that what people go to social media for?
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Social media is gamed the same way? Sharebots, etc
| emodendroket wrote:
| Do you suppose Web rings wouldn't be when there's money
| in it? There was plenty of that when they were just for
| fun.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's fundamentally about trust models. That is to say,
| about the audience.
|
| Everybody gave up trusting webrings because Google
| provided better results. Now that Google results are
| shit, there's room for other information vendors to come
| along, even if it's in narrow areas.
|
| Actually, HN is already this for me in some respects.
| emodendroket wrote:
| In my opinion this site is not really so different from,
| say, Reddit, beyond having more focused rules and being
| smaller. So I don't think my idea that social media have
| supplanted the Web ring is wide of the mark.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| This is my view too. Yes, I'd love to go back to a time when
| Google's algorithms were unknown enough for SEO to be futile
| but those days are gone and the problem isn't limited to
| Google.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Indeed. I recently noticed this while relying on DDG for
| documentation for Common Lisp, a language I still learning.
| The top-ranking site for any Common Lisp function was an SEO
| scam site, where clearly someone had hired freelancers to
| take preexisting CLisp documentation and rewrite it - in
| poor-quality English - until it would no longer be detectable
| as copyright violation, then loaded it with ads.
|
| (I just checked and this copycat documentation site has,
| thankfully, now been pushed down a bit in DDG results.)
| abhinav22 wrote:
| For learning Common Lisp, I highly recommend
| https://github.com/ashok-khanna/common-lisp-by-example
| birktj wrote:
| Note that as I quite recently learned DDG has support for a
| bunch of bang-commands listed at [1]. There are a bunch of
| them for documentation sites for all kinds of programming
| languages, including a couple for lisp it seems like.
|
| [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
| ping_pong wrote:
| Google is a cesspool because the spammers and SEO-hackers are
| in full force, and Google is only reactive to these threats
| these days. I mean, does it really matter if they are making
| hundreds of billions of dollars a year? They seem to be doing
| something right.
|
| The only time something will change is when traffic starts
| decreasing to their site, but it's good enough such that people
| won't change. Look at Facebook, I don't know anyone who uses it
| as much as they used to 10 years ago, but it's making the most
| money it ever has. Why on earth would any behavior change? From
| their points of view, everyone is happy with it!
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Ugh Pinterest results.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I'd expect a company like google, who tracks what kind of
| socks you have on everyday, to also track their own search
| engine... users mistakingly clicks on pinterest link, user
| immediatly clicks back, and looks for something else... is it
| so hard to assume, that they don't want pinterest results,
| because they're useless, and somehow lower their seo score?
| Nooo, of course not, just put the pinterest results near the
| top, until users puts "-pinterest" in the search bar.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in
| the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy
| image search results the way they have.
|
| It's literally never the original source for anything, but
| you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then
| it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file,
| and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything.
| THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH
| IT.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| Really makes you wonder if the people at google actually
| use their own product. Anyone who has ever used google
| image search in the past couple of years will have noticed
| that it's filled to the brim with garbage results from
| pinterest.
| visarga wrote:
| I have fallen in love with Yandex image similarity search
| (search by providing a query image, not text). You can
| find so much more with it, it's like Pinterest but
| without the crap. For example I could find images for my
| ML model but also furniture ideas for my house and check
| if my kid is objectively cuter than average (lol, yeah,
| objectively!).
| kemotep wrote:
| And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is
| equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a
| picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture
| but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion
| and not the image which I was searching for.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to
| find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or
| whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other
| work, and find it in its original quality without 15
| generations of jpg recompression artifacts.
|
| But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so
| it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the
| original work.
|
| Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image
| that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find
| where it came from.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Try using tineye.com. It has noise too, but seems to be
| easier to find the original source than Google these
| days, at least for me anyway.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| THIS. So much this. Time was when you could actually
| discover the provenance of an image. Almost every time,
| when I'm doing a reverse image search, that is my intent.
| It used to work. It seldom does these days.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| In my recent experience, Bing, Tineye, and Yandex are all
| better at finding image sources than Google Images. But
| who knows how long that will last.
| tempestn wrote:
| And the interesting thing about that is, you'd think it
| would be (relatively speaking) straightforward for Google
| to keep track of the first place a given image was
| indexed (or possibly the first few places, or everywhere
| it was seen over the first X period of time since you
| couldn't guarantee the very first would always be the
| original). Assuming that original was still online, it
| would seem to be the place to direct searchers to,
| regardless of pagerank or whatever.
| eythian wrote:
| I find this helps:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/
|
| It puts the "view image" button back.
| elchupanebre wrote:
| The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was
| in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was
| fired, the Search Quality team switched to machine learning.
| The ML was better in many ways: it produced higher quality
| results with a lot less effort. It just had one possibly fatal
| flaw: if some result was wrong there was no recourse. And
| that's what you are observing now: search quality is good or
| excellent most of the time while sometimes it's very bad and G
| can't fix it.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > G can't fix it.
|
| Yes, they can. They should simply stop measuring only
| positives, and start measuring negatives - e.g. people that
| press the back button of their browser, or click the second,
| third, fourth result afterwards...which should hint the ML
| classifiers that the first result was total crap in the first
| place.
|
| But I guess this is exactly what happens if you have a
| business model where leads to sites where you provide ads
| give you a weird ethics, as your company profits from those
| scammers more than from legit websites.
|
| From an ML point of view google's search results are the
| perfect example of overfitting. Kinda ironic that they lead
| the data science research field and don't realize this in
| their own product, but teach this flaw everywhere.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| They have been already doing this for a loooong time, it's
| a low hanging fruit.
|
| Take a look sometime at the wealth of data google serp
| sends back about your interactions with it
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Please provide proof for this theory that google measures
| this also.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| I worked in ranking for two major search engines. They
| all measure this, this is a really low hanging fruit -
| how much time it took you to come up with this idea? Why
| do you think so lowly of people who put decades of life
| into their systems that they didn't think of it?
|
| Technically just open google serp in developer tools,
| network tab, set preserve/persist logs option, and watch
| the requests flowing back - all your clicks and back
| navigations are reported back for analysis. Same on other
| search engines. Only DDG doesn't collect your
| clicks/dwell time - but that's a distinguishing feature
| of their brand, they stripped themselves of this valuable
| data on purpose.
| skinkestek wrote:
| So they _do_ collect it, they only ignore it - just like
| the 10 - 30 (or more) clicks I 've spent on the tiny tiny
| [x] in the top corner of scammy-looking-dating-site-
| slash-mail-order-bride ads that they served me for a
| decade?
| friendzis wrote:
| Again, this is not about data being collected, we do know
| how much data Google collects, it is all about what is
| being done with the data and by extension how good the
| end result is.
|
| This touches the broader subject of systems engineering
| and especially validation. As far as I am aware, there
| are currently no tools/models for validation of machine
| learning models and the task gets exponentially harder
| with degrees of freedom given to the ML system. The more
| data Google collects and tries to use in ranking, the
| less bounded ranking task is and therefore less
| validatable, therefore more prone to errors.
|
| Google is such a big player in search space that they can
| quantify/qualify behavior of their ranking system,
| publish that as SEO guidelines and have majority of good-
| faith actors behave in accordance, reinforcing the
| quality of the model - the more good-faith actors
| actively compete for the top spot, the more top results
| are of good-faith actors. However, as evidenced by the OP
| and other black hat SEO stories, the ranking system can
| be gamed and datums which should produce negative ranking
| score are either not weighted appropriately or in some
| cases contribute to positive score.
|
| Google search results are notoriously plagued with
| Pinterest results, shop-looking sites which redirect to
| chinese marketplaces and similar. It looks like the only
| tool Google has to combat such actors is manual domain-
| based blacklisting, because, well, they would have done
| something systematic about it. It seems to me that the
| ranking algorithm at Google is given so many different
| inputs that it essentially lives its own life and changes
| are no longer proactive, but rather reactive, because
| Google does not have sufficient tools to monitor black
| hat SEO activity to punish sites accordingly.
| friendzis wrote:
| The fact that they do collect data does not mean that
| they use that data in any meaningful way or at all.
|
| They ought to see humongous bounce rates with those fake
| SEOd pages. Normally, that would suggest shit tier
| quality and black-hat SEO, which is in theory punishable.
| Yet, they throw that data away and still rank those sites
| higher up.
|
| You mean to say that no one at Google has even heard of
| "external SEO", which is nothing more than fancy way of
| saying link farming? They do know, this is punishable
| according to their own rules, yet it works, because
| either they cannot fix it or do not care to.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| They'll never tell how they use the data for obvious
| reasons and I also can't go into any details. But any
| obvious thing you can think of almost certainly has been
| tried, they've been doing it for 20+ years and ranking
| alone is staffed with several hundreds of smart
| engineers. Mining clickthrough logs is a fairly old topic
| itself, has been around since at least early 2000s.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I wouldn't call that rational. There is no reason you can't
| apply human weighting on top of ML.
|
| Honestly, I don't believe for a minute they "can't fix it."
| They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML
| shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they
| obviously have recourse.
| htrp wrote:
| You do know that Google basically slapped a patch on that
| one right?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-
| go...
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Yes but then they fixed it right.
| htrp wrote:
| Fixing it right would be re-training the ML algo.... they
| basically told the algo to never ID anything as a gorilla
| (even actual gorillas)
| brigandish wrote:
| I'm confused. I read that article and it has this:
|
| > But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three
| years on and Google hasn't really fixed anything. The
| company has simply blocked its image recognition
| algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether --
| preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than
| risk another miscategorization.
|
| Is that not an example of human intervention in ML?
| coliveira wrote:
| My impression is that the ML algorithms at Google have the
| goal of increasing profitability from search. If that is the
| case, the quality of search will tend to be secondary to
| displaying pages that bring more revenue.
| humaniania wrote:
| "Request manual review of search results" button?
| bhartzer wrote:
| Since this is now the top spot here on H/N I suspect it
| just got the attention of some Googlers who I'm sure will
| review it.
|
| They may not give the site a manual action, though. They'd
| rather tweak the algorithm so it naturally doesn't rank.
| Google's algo should be able to see stuff like this.
|
| I know that I've seen sites tank in the rankings because
| they got too many links too quickly. It could be that the
| link part of the algorithm hasn't fully analyzed the links
| yet.
|
| I'd be interested in seeing what the Majestic link graph
| says about this site, ahrefs doesn't have tier 2 and tier 3
| link data.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Blatantly false that Google has "no recourse", Google can put
| on penalty and bring domains down.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Free WordPress* themes are particularly bad in this regard.
| Since they're expected to contain HTML anyway, it's altogether
| too easy for the author of a theme to include a couple of links
| to a site they want to promote. Some themes take this to the
| next level by obfuscating the code that generates the
| promotional links, and/or including other code which makes the
| site not work properly if the links are removed.
|
| *: and themes for other web applications, but mostly WordPress
| these days
| naikrovek wrote:
| google isn't the cesspool, people who want to appear at the top
| of a list of search results are doing whatever it takes to
| create a cesspool, because that's what it takes to earn more
| money.
|
| being willing to make other things in order to have more money
| always creates cesspools.
| prepend wrote:
| Google's mission was "organize the world's information and
| make it useful" and they are doing a poorer job now than
| historically.
|
| Of course there are scammers, that's part of what makes
| organizing so hard.
|
| Cynically, I think that Google is worse as filtering scammers
| is because they care less now. Half the page is ads so they
| make money either way.
| Retric wrote:
| Google is a cesspool because it's their job to fix it and
| they failed. I stopped using Google search because of how far
| it's fallen.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If its the only way to make money, it doesn't really feel
| like the burden is on the people to make a cleaner pool
| naikrovek wrote:
| there is never only a single way to make money. some ways
| are easier. some ways let you take advantage of others;
| these are of the variety that create cesspools.
| luke2m wrote:
| I don't like google and don't really want to defend it, but
| this is more of a lots of crappy websites problem than a google
| problem.
| worik wrote:
| Google, to justify its huge capital worth, should deal with
| that crap. Why else bother?
| aarchi wrote:
| Anecdotally DuckDuckGo seems to have fewer sponsored sites than
| Google. DDG also makes it easy to block low-quality sites
| because it adds a data-domain attribute to the root of every
| search result. I recently started this mini uBlock Origin
| filter list for that (suggestions welcome!):
| ! Hide low-quality results on DuckDuckGo
| duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.com"]
| duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.com"]
| duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.in"]
| duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.in"]
| duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="download.cnet.com"] !!
| Stack Exchange mirrors duckduckgo.com##[data-
| domain="exceptionshub.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-
| domain="intellipaat.com"]
| zem wrote:
| pinterest.com would clean up another large chunk of crap
| raverbashing wrote:
| Great idea. Though I've noticed DDG promotes "blogspam"
| articles more often than the authoritative sources.
|
| Let's say, if I search for a python builtin library, I want
| to go to the python website, not some "Python 101" blog post
| about it.
| bassdropvroom wrote:
| Great tip! I've been using DDG's official addon but this
| means one less addon. Thanks!
| wingworks wrote:
| I really don't like how easy it is to fake a "new" article on
| Google. You can just re-publish an old article and stick a new
| date on it and Googles takes it on face value and uses the new
| date.
| BigJono wrote:
| I ran into this for the first time yesterday when trying to
| find out new info about a footy player. Some article from 15
| years ago talking about how he had a good first game, tagged
| as 5th june 2021. Like, wtf?
| lethologica wrote:
| I have been seeing this a lot recently too. Especially with
| the first result or two. Or the section up top that gives
| you a partial answer without having to click through. All
| of them always seem to have been freshly written like some
| made to order meal at a restaurant. It's just too
| suspicious really.
| sellyme wrote:
| You can also do the opposite: post something today and say it
| was up on your site in 2003.
|
| Makes it really difficult to find old pages about something
| that recently exploded in popularity, because the age filter
| just doesn't work.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I also noticed that Apple users see way more fake online shop
| results than Linux users, from the same IP, with regularly
| cleared browser cache and identical search terms.
|
| Those fake shops are part of discussions in politics right now.
| Usually they're registered in Ireland or Malta as companies due
| to their specific banking laws. They make millions with those
| scams and people can't differ between legit online shops and
| fake ones - because the legit ones actually look crappier than
| the fake ones when it comes to the website designs.
|
| In Germany, we have at least for hardware the "geizhals"
| website which is kind of an index for all kinds of electronics
| shops and they try to verify as much as possible.
|
| But for other online shop sectors (e.g. clothing or home stuff)
| I wouldn't trust anything. Even on Amazon I got scammed a lot
| and heard absurd things from others...like getting packages
| with no content in them and Amazon refusing to see that the
| seller is a scammer etc.
| [deleted]
| lupire wrote:
| > Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search
| contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site:
| .edu or .gov
|
| A great opportunity for students and public servants to sell
| premium URLs.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I wish duckduckgo had better results. google still better
| cyanydeez wrote:
| dont forget adding quotes to things to stop the random "did you
| mean to spell this?" crap
|
| basically, like everything in modernity, its a race to the
| bottom of the infinite dullards of popular
| colordrops wrote:
| Google Search is ripe for disruption. It's been over 20 years
| now and they are not dynamic or interesting at all anymore.
| lemmiwinks wrote:
| The irony being that 20 (more like 25?) years Yahoo search
| was ripe for disruption... by Google :)
|
| Halt and Catch Fire [1] (As a nerd, I can say it's one of the
| few TV series that got the hackers spirit correctly) had a
| few episodes about the Google disruption.
|
| Like some people often say here, things come and go in
| circles...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_se
| ries...
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| Neeva.com
|
| I am in the pre-release program. The hardest initial thing to
| get used to was not immediately scrolling down to the bottom
| to avoid all of the spam.
|
| I suspect that their methods are not much different than
| Google, but the experience has been so much better.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I'm also testing neeva, do you know what they use to get
| the search results?
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Bing
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| I just signed up for a trial with them after reading this
| post.
| luke2m wrote:
| I would rather not have a required sign in to a search
| engine, but looks interesting.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| That just implies locking into an ad supported model.
| Personally, would prefer to pay. Stewart Russel wrote in
| his book that when surveying humans the value they
| ascribed to not being able to google fo a year was
| something like $17,000 per year. Just some absurd number.
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| It is not an ad supported model - it is a subscription
| model. I just signed up for it.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's so easy to do better! Just look at what a rousing
| success Cuil was.
| kortilla wrote:
| Nobody said it would be easy. Industries ripe for
| disruption are often very hard to break into. Being ripe
| for disruption is more about giving up on innovating so you
| stagnate.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I _still_ think that the "Yahoo!" style web directory is a
| good model. A catalogue of hand-curated links has increasing
| value as the quality of Google results goes down.
|
| I was briefly going to write "I'm surprised that DMOZ[1]
| still exists" but it says "Copyright 2017 AOL" at the bottom
| so maybe it doesn't.
|
| Edit: ...and using the search box results in a 404 so I guess
| it's really dead huh.
|
| Edit 2: Apparently this is the successor!
| https://curlie.org/en
|
| [1]: https://dmoz-odp.org
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The creation and maintenance of such a directory might
| additionally be more feasible now because sadly there are
| much fewer personal or independent websites instead of
| content hosted on large platforms.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I just tried to use both to look up pharmacies via
| navigation.. With Dmoz after my second try I was able to
| find CVS, but I wasn't able to find it with Curlie..
|
| It's not a bad idea to have a curated dataset of
| information. But clearly there are much better ways to
| _navigate_ said information, which would include search,
| but also dynamic filters, predictive text, sorting
| algorithms, context awareness, etc. All of which... is
| built into modern search engines.
|
| So perhaps what we really want is a
| Wikipedia/OpenStreetMaps of curated, indexed, semantic
| content/links, that anyone can consume and write their own
| search interface for. Basically, an open data warehouse of
| website information.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > A catalogue of hand-curated links has increasing value as
| the quality of Google results goes down.
|
| Who will pay for its creation, maintenance and hosting? Who
| will judge ranking, disputes, hacks?
|
| Who will have an eye on discrimination issues? Whose
| jurisdiction will be relevant (think GDPR or the Australian
| press "gag order" law in the case of that cleric accused of
| fondling kids)?
|
| Who will take care that the humans who _will_ get exposed
| to anything from generic violence over vore /gore to pedo
| content get access to counseling and be fairly paid?
| Facebook, the world's largest website, hasn't figured out
| that one ffs.
|
| These questions are ... relatively easy to bypass with an
| automated engine (all issues can be explained away as "it
| was the algorithm" and IT-illiterate judges and politicians
| will accept this), but as soon as you have meaningful
| _human_ interaction in the loop, you suddenly have humans
| that can be targeted by lawsuits, police measures and other
| abuse.
| derefr wrote:
| > as soon as you have meaningful human interaction in the
| loop, you suddenly have humans that can be targeted by
| lawsuits, police measures and other abuse.
|
| In theory, you could have a curated directory whose
| hosting works like ThePirateBay, and whose maintainership
| is entirely anonymous authors operating over Tor (even
| though the directory itself holds nothing the average
| person would find all that objectionable.)
|
| Of course, there's no _business model_ in that...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| TPB is not a good example since they're allowing
| _everything_ except pedo content, thus drastically
| shrinking their moderation workload.
|
| A site that wants to be compliant to the law in the major
| jurisdictions (US, EU) can't operate that way, not with
| NetzDG, copyright and other laws in play.
| rchaud wrote:
| It doesn't need to be a corporate enterprise that has to
| worry about all those things. People already share
| directories of links via Google Docs, Notion notebooks
| and the like.
| torbital wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I searched on Google without
| appending "reddit" to the end.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Google has turned into a cesspool."
|
| That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to
| live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out
| and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks.
|
| Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as
| we await Google being given a right old kicking?
|
| Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with
| rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter
| out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to
| decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be
| CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in
| reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and
| other _cough_ slatwarts to see if results get better for me.
|
| In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a
| Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five
| years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to
| the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they
| are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it
| works really well.)
|
| I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am
| increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results
| from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine)
| at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search
| terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns
| featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be
| able to turn all that stuff off.
|
| I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try
| and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be
| a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that
| was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that
| Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices
| from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant.
|
| Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move
| again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the
| grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around
| 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably
| not a big deal.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I wish i could have 2010 google search as a alternative to
| 2021 google search.
| gerdesj wrote:
| How so? I haven't seen much change apart from that crappy
| yellow streak of piss thing that dribbles on pages.
|
| How do you recall 2010 search? (I suspect I've lost it a
| bit - I'm 50.5 years old)
| smegger001 wrote:
| In general i had more relevent results on my first search
| qurry compared to now admitedly thats hard to prove as i
| can't rerun the search side by side for a comparison now.
|
| additionally ads were firmly separated into a colored box
| away from actual results
| wernercd wrote:
| As mentioned, I removing the think the rose colored
| glasses won't put lipstick on this pig. Google Search
| (and not sure how Bing or similar would do better, baring
| their censorship problems) is increasingly a minefield...
|
| This is the same problem with something like WoW
| classic... you can get the game that existed 15 years
| ago. But even if it is the exact same game, the world
| itself isn't. Online walkthroughs, videos, modding
| knowledge, theory crafting, etc. Those things are much
| more fleshed out today so even if the system didn't
| change 1 bit, WoW Original vs WoW Classic are really two
| separate games.
|
| Likewise... if you dropped Google Original down today?
| I'd love to see how fast it would get owned by these
| sorts of operations that have had a decade+ of practice
| in skills like CEO that didn't exist in 2010.
|
| You had more relevant results? That wouldn't change
| because companies live and die off of SEO now and didn't
| then. Highlighted ads are such a small thing on the
| website when compared to getting a full front page of the
| same Stack Overflow answers in 20 different websites that
| all have SO cloned and reskinned.
| narrator wrote:
| Yandex.com is 2010 Google search, IMHO. It's not filtered
| at all and seems to have that pure pagerank feel of the old
| Google search engine, while the modern Google seems to be
| hand tweaked quite a bit to only quote "authoritative
| sources". Search for a politically controversial topics all
| you want on Google and you will not have your first couple
| of pages being debunking or fact check sites. Compare
| Google's search results for "who is zhengli shi" vs. the
| Yandex.com results for example. You can even find Putin
| scandals and "Tank Man" on there, even though it's a search
| engine based in Russia.
| tempestn wrote:
| Problem is, I expect 2010 google search would be
| considerably worse now than it was in 2010, because "SEO"
| has had another decade to evolve.
| eitland wrote:
| I think matt_cutts or someone who was active at the same
| time used to say that.
|
| But it still doesn't defend not blocking sites that
| doesn't contain anything except autogenerated content.
|
| And it still doesn't defend ignoring my keywords.
| tempestn wrote:
| No, the keyword ignoring stems more from catering to the
| majority of people who don't know how to logically
| formulate a search for a search engine that expects every
| word to match. Most people will intuitively just try to
| ask the search engine a question (even if not literally
| phrased as such), and so Google has adapted to fill that
| need. Which even for those of us who would prefer
| something a bit more clear cut, is honestly handy a lot
| of the time.
|
| I _think_ using +plus +before +keywords still works for
| situations when you don 't want any words ignored?
|
| Certainly agree it seems like they could do a better job
| of burying auto-generated sites though. (Although I'm
| sure it's a difficult problem!)
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| There was already SEO stuff going on back then people
| were less aware of it. I can remember during height of
| the Iraq war people manipulated google to display George
| Bush as the top result for "Miserable Failure" and there
| were other exercises like that happening.
|
| It's hard for me to pick a sweet spot for the internet in
| many ways I feel like I've grown up with it.
|
| I can remember the web of circa 1995 to 1997 with Gif's
| that wouldn't render properly in internet explorer, HTML
| marquee scrolling text and the dreaded blink tag being
| used everywhere. You needed to play search engine bingo
| with Altavista, Metacrawler, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos etc
| etc. And it was a crap shoot if search engines would give
| you useful results.
|
| I can remember the web of 1998 to 2000 where every web
| developer seemed to discover html frames at the same
| time. We had good search with Google but pop up ads were
| so rife that the internet was borderline unusable. I can
| remember all the free webmail sites like hotmail, yahoo
| etc. ICQ chat was massive (whatever happened to that - it
| was a staple of my teen internet).
|
| In Early 2000's Firefox came along and saved the internet
| by virtue of its built in popup blocking. But there was a
| mishmap of "Applets" and "Plugins" everywhere Flash
| Player, Java Applets, Real Player etc. Video (and audio)
| on the web was terrible half the time it would complain
| about missing codecs, it would buffer forever and if
| something did load it would be the size of a postage
| stamp and look pixelated as all hell. I remember Gmail
| came out and everyone went gaga over it's interface.
|
| Last period that real stands out is the mid to late 00's
| with development of big Social Media sites, Facebook,
| Twitter, Youtube etc. The web got more and more
| javascript heavy. Web video streaming finally became
| useable. Google Chrome came out and flash player finally
| died despite Microsoft trying to revive it with
| Silverlight.
|
| I kind of feel like this last 10 years are a continuation
| with increased surveillance and tracking.
| oska wrote:
| I appreciate a lot of what you're saying in this comment but
| I disagree with this sentiment:
|
| > not the Ads - that's fine
|
| In my strongly held opinion, push advertising is _not_ fine
| and it 's the root cause of all the problems you are
| discussing. We will only exit this mess that the web has
| become when everyone blocks push advertising by default.
| People should only see advertising when they are interested
| in being advertised to, e.g. sites you consciously choose to
| go to that advertise products & services, like the old Yellow
| Pages phonebooks.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I don't think Google is the cesspool, I think Google is a
| search engine for an internet that is the cesspool.
|
| We're moving to the vision of information services that were
| pioneered by AOL, Prodigy, etc. Honestly, we're there
| already.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| We were already there when Google was the hot thing all the
| nerds loved. At the time their search was a way to cut
| through that, not the primary window into it. The cesspool
| isn't Google, now it's just hosted by them.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| Comparing Google now to Alta Vista is not very helpful. They
| don't get to rest on their laurels. Search is less helpful
| now, and it's not clear to me that they care enough to do
| something about it.
| lupire wrote:
| You mean besides spending far more on people and computers
| than any other company, perhaps combined?
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| You're giving their entire search budget credit for
| dealing with spam results? My observation is that it's
| bad and has been for some time. They are either unable or
| unwilling to solve the problem.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I'm amazed that there isn't anything like uBlock Origin for
| search results.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "My eyes are bent, my back is grey etc"
|
| I think we have loads of tools to play with but
| fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with
| your search engine to find stuff you want to find.
|
| My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock
| Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others
| running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync
| server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll
| also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more)
|
| When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something
| like reverting a 10-15 years change.
|
| I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the
| day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now
| I think I'll go back.
|
| Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding
| error. I'm sure that all is fine there.
| eitland wrote:
| > I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is
| fine there.
|
| I'm already here :-)
|
| If 5 or so devs read it and change too and they start
| mentioning it then we have a fast chain reaction.
|
| Just look at WhatsApp or even Microsoft or IBM: they
| seemed unstoppable but are very nuch just another
| alternative today.
| aarchi wrote:
| If you're referring to user-curated search result blocking,
| that's very easy with DuckDuckGo and uBlock Origin (just
| block elements like [data-domain="w3schools.com"]; see my
| comment to the GP). I don't know of any large extant lists
| like this though.
| derefr wrote:
| That won't do much if every result on the first page is
| blocked. Ideally a filter list like this could be pushed
| to the server side as a per-user preference to go with
| your query, so that if e.g. the top 10000 results were
| all filtered out, then you wouldn't have to click through
| (or infinite-scroll autoload) 100 empty pages before
| getting anything.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://millionshort.com/ tries something like this.
| aarchi wrote:
| DDG will add more results, if enough are hidden. If I
| search "w3schools" with my filter, there are only two
| results on the first page that are not hidden, so it
| immediately displays the second page below. It seems that
| they planned for this use case.
| normac2 wrote:
| Hmn. I would agree about all crap being mixed in there, but in
| terms of overall results (both wrt. SEO crap and other
| irrelevant stuff), my experience has been that the quality
| troughed something like 2-3 years ago and then came back (my
| guess is that they're incorporating all of the AI they've been
| doing throughout the company into search). To me it feels like
| it's about 80% of its best right now.
|
| I bet it's that we do different types of searches.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also phone problems: Google a problem with a phone and the top
| hit will be a whole bunch of churned out articles with generic
| copy on the cause (sometimes there are bugs in the software, so
| reboot your phone).
| duskwuff wrote:
| Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated
| content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot
| of it is used as lead generation for scammy
| antivirus/antimalware/"cleaner" software, paid tech support,
| or outright tech support scams.
| toeget wrote:
| That's why I append reddit, stackoverflow, superuser when I
| search for technical solutions. At least those sites are
| still full of user-generated content with good answers
| upvoted to the top.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| You know, I was joking the last few times the subject
| came up, but I'm getting seriously worried that the more
| people mention using that kind of trick on HN, the faster
| advertisers will catch on and start building reddit-based
| SEO strategies.
|
| Not sure how we should react :/
| na85 wrote:
| Reddit has been gamed by guerilla advertisers for years,
| everyone knows it, and the admins there don't seem to
| care/are unable to do anything about it.
|
| r/HailCorporate used to be about calling out stealth
| marketing/advertising but it's morphed into just
| discussing how things can inadvertently act as an
| advertisement aka society is full of branding and
| consumerism. It's a shame because it used to be a very
| high quality sub.
| Camillo wrote:
| Oh, it's no secret. Google's autocomplete will actually
| suggest appending "reddit" to certain queries. For
| example, let's take one of the most SEO-spammy queries
| imaginable, "best mattress 2021". Google will suggest:
|
| - best mattress 2021
|
| - best mattress 2021 consumer reports
|
| - best mattress 2021 reddit
|
| - best mattress 2021 for back pain
|
| - best mattress 2021 wirecutter
|
| etc.
|
| But of course Reddit is already rife with shills. Not
| sure about CR.
| lupire wrote:
| Don't search for "best". That's specifically requesting
| spam.
| ehnto wrote:
| I use colloquial language to try and target actual human
| reviews on forums. "Are audio-technica any good?"
|
| Mostly works, but Google drops keywords pretty quickly
| now so you still get lots of spam or shopping sites.
| sixothree wrote:
| I remember in the late 2000's I had a CR account. I had
| two weeks left on the period I had paid for. But when I
| cancelled the account... poof. My access was revoked
| immediately. Very much not consumer friendly. I was done
| enough with their crap that I didn't even bother with an
| email.
| abawany wrote:
| I've been trying to unsubscribe from CR email spam for
| months now to no avail. Looking at the browser tools, it
| seems that their api can't handle the fact that I
| registered with a single letter first/last name so
| therefore my attempts to unsubscribe silently fail. There
| also appears to be no way to change my name since the api
| for that also fails on the single letter first/last name.
| I wish ungood things to happen to the people who
| 'designed' this Kafkaesque rubbish and in the meantime,
| thank GMail's mark-as-spam feature for throwing away
| their unrelenting pablum to the memory hole. This
| experience has led to me canceling my print subscription
| to CR plus my donations to their organization.
| Gracana wrote:
| FWIW I signed up for CR recently when I was car shopping,
| and I canceled my subscription within the first month.
| They assured me that I would still have access for the
| remainder of the period. Of course, you're forced to
| subscribe rather than buy access for a set period, and
| they sent me a couple dozen emails during the time I was
| signed up, so they're not completely innocent... but at
| least that part felt reasonable.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Prefer resources that have some governance and aren't
| entirely crowdsourced. For example if I'm looking for web
| tech answers my first search is '[whatever topic] mdn'.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| The last few weeks I've started noticing a very specific
| type of SEO that pops up when I'm doing technical search,
| where the first page will be a Stack Overflow result, and
| the 3rd or 4th result will be from some content farm, copy-
| pasted from SO, sometimes translated in French.
|
| It's a little unsettling.
| ihnorton wrote:
| It can be worse than that when those sites get a full
| multi-line result billing whereas the original
| stackoverflow answer gets a single-line subheading under
| some other SO result.
| lupire wrote:
| That's a years old scam, but occasionally a new site pops
| through Google's filters.
| kuschku wrote:
| I haven't gotten real SO as google result in years, only
| those content farms, constantly. Nowadays the same even
| happens for github issues, they're also mostly outranked
| by content farms copying from them.
|
| If I search on mobile, often all my results are these
| content farms. (Google used in English from Germany)
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| If you start getting a little esoteric in your searches
| you'll get tons of results that are clearly crawled from
| personal blogs, and hosted on personal-blog-looking
| domains that redirect to godawful garbage. Especially bad
| on mobile because Google truncates the URLs.
| initplus wrote:
| These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-
| rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites.
|
| Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my
| issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips
| copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.
| minikites wrote:
| >These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should
| de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites.
|
| Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way,
| it's not in their interest to improve search results. If
| anything, terrible search results make users more likely
| to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Google became very popular very quickly because it gave
| much better results much faster. The more that Google
| allows quality to decline, the faster they approach a
| non-recoverable tipping point. Just ask Yahoo how quickly
| that can happen. Google may seem entrenched, but they
| have a shaky hold on search that is only as strong as its
| result quality. They are entrenched in _advertising_ ,
| but only because that's where searchers go to search.
|
| Users may be entrenched in other Google products-- Gmail,
| gcal, docs, etc-- but not search. Someone using all those
| other Google products could change their default search
| engine and have zero impact on the rest of their digital
| life.
|
| I'm shopping around for a preferred alternative right
| now, I just haven't settled yet.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That was pre-IPO Google. That company doesn't exist
| anymore. Money is their God now. Every Googlers high
| salary depends on it.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yep, not disagreeing. My point is that a short term
| pursuit of money over at least a reasonable quality of
| search will destroy what they have built very quickly if
| quality gets low enough to make it easy for an upstart
| rival to have obviously better search results. And the
| evidence for that is in the history of their own rise to
| search dominance.,
| minikites wrote:
| >The more that Google allows quality to decline, the
| faster they approach a non-recoverable tipping point.
| Just ask Yahoo how quickly that can happen.
|
| Do you think we're in the same situation now as we were
| fully 20 years ago? I don't. Facebook killed MySpace, but
| Facebook is now too big to be disrupted, same with
| Google. The word "google" is a verb now. This is why the
| quality of their search results doesn't matter, people
| are too entrenched to switch now, which was not true in
| 2001.
| ineedasername wrote:
| With respect to getting users to switch, Facebook and
| MySpace are much more complicated services in terms of
| user interactions and the need for network effects. It is
| literally a text box you type into, and it's usefulness
| does not directly depend on how many other people use it.
|
| In that respect, not much has changed in 20 years.
| Switching your search bar is a very low friction
| activity, and if quality of results is too low then
| people will look elsewhere. There's only so many times
| someone will tolerate seeing the exact same copy/paste
| useless answers to questions as most of the first page of
| results.
|
| -#-#-#-#-#-#-
|
| In General:
|
| The tech industry is filled with examples of companies
| that had an entrenched product end up failing very
| rapidly. I think Google probably understands this well
| enough to ensure search quality remains better than a
| scrappy under funded startup can accomplish, but then
| again Google achieved search dominance by coming up with
| a different way to determine results, relevancy, etc.
| There's no reason to believe that someone couldn't come
| up with something superior now either.
|
| I think the most significant threat to that possibility
| is 1) FAANG companies buying up many of the most talented
| people. 2) If a competitor did come along, buying them up
| as well.
|
| But it's also hard to predict the anti-trust future.
| Microsoft had an extremely long run as the most dominant
| web browser for longer than Chrome has held that crown,
| but they got knocked down very quickly. I doubt that
| would have happened as easily if not for their anti-trust
| issues. Of course it doesn't help that IE grew into a
| slow bloated mess, but in that respect, refer back to
| what I said about search quality: Microsoft was
| entrenched, if sliding, in the browser space even after
| its anti trust issues, but it let it's quality slip too
| much for users to accept. Given viable options, users
| switched.
|
| That switch was truly remarkable due to the much higher
| friction. IE still cam bundled with Windows, Chrome did
| not. Every home computer with Chrome requires a user to
| ignore the option right in front of them and choose
| Chrome instead. Now just think about how much easier it
| is to use a different search engine.
|
| I'm not saying Google is doomed, but 20 years of market
| dominance guarantees nothing. The "big 3" US automakers
| owned the market for longer than Google's founders have
| been alive, but those days are now just another
| cautionary tale of poor quality and unassailable
| arrogance.
| lupire wrote:
| The entire reason Google is the most successful search
| engine is that people don't use search engines that
| behave this way.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| They obviously do use search engines, like Google, that
| behave this way.
| [deleted]
| bashtoni wrote:
| I keep getting results to a site 'gitmemory.com' which is
| just GitHub issues scraped. Super annoying that they
| outrank the actual GitHub issues they've taken the content
| from.
| sdoering wrote:
| How is this not just spam and duplicate content. I
| remember when I was punished by G for duplicate content
| on my very small private blog when I was using jekyll and
| had the markdown sources and the code stored in GitHub. I
| didn't know of the canonical tag back than and was
| punished because the GitHub domain had more trust.
|
| It is sad, bit nowadays I often just directly jump onto
| page 3 at Google or use other "tricks" to get okayish
| results.
| cybice wrote:
| As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web
| for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I
| have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page
| bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls
| without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules
| etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for
| googlebot.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| On the other hand, Google over the years has tweaked their
| algorithms and recommendations to match up with what makes a
| good site, in terms of content and markup.
| mercury_craze wrote:
| It never seemed important to the CEO of a previous company I
| worked for that we had something to say, only that we gave off
| the impression that we had something to say. We hired an
| outsourced blog writing service to fill our wordpress instance
| with generic, inoffensive platitudes and listicles poorly
| cribbed from Wikipedia and the ONS. Squint a little bit and you
| could convince yourself there was value to it, but nobody with
| any experience in the problem space would treat it as anything
| more than marketing fluff. His hope was always that one day we
| would get rewarded by the great Google algorithm and appear on
| the first page for search terms we were convinced our users
| were looking for, but the end result was that our blog was
| largely designed to be read by robots.
|
| It's the same thing as the tweaks you have to perform for SEO
| optimisation, some have questionable value to the end user but
| you jump through the hoops anyway because it's what is done, by
| pleasing the robots you're rewarded with a higher search
| position.
| canadianfella wrote:
| > but nobody with any experience in the problem space would
| treat it as anything more than marketing fluff.
|
| You mean "nothing more" right?
| hyperhopper wrote:
| The problem is, is that the internet at its conception was just
| a way to host content, not a way to discover content. When
| discovery was done via word of mouth or extra-internet means,
| the websites themselves were just for the people that viewed
| them.
|
| Now, when the website needs to not only contain content, but
| also be its own advertisement, writing it in a way that will
| maximize virality is the natural course of action to make sure
| the site actually gets seen.
|
| This will likely be true until a method of finding webpages
| that is not based on automated scraping or the page itself.
| Sharlin wrote:
| On the contrary, the _Web_ , being a hypertext system, was
| definitely always about discovering content. If you found an
| interesting website, it would typically link to other
| interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these
| ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to
| catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web
| were in the form of human-curated directories a la Yahoo.
| It's just that in just a few years it became apparent that
| this approach could not scale, and search engines based on
| automatic crawlers became the norm - but again, critically,
| these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web's
| discoverability by following hyperlinks!
| kevincox wrote:
| This works well for random exportation, or exportation of
| related topics, however it is basically useless for finding
| information on a new topic as you don't have anywhere to
| start.
|
| The only way would be to keep finding links like Wiki Game
| and hoping to get closer to the intended target. Luckily
| there are huge robots who have done this for you and can
| tell you which links lead to your destination.
| stinos wrote:
| Yeah I also don't really remember this extra-internet
| thing. Perhaps the author is talking about a very early
| period of the internet (which I don't know)? What I
| rememeber was that before 'real' search it was indeed what
| you describe, just endless chain of links of one site to
| the other and sites aggregating links.
| hliyan wrote:
| I know that it's being done, but I don't know if it's
| necessary. I frequently find good old unstyled HTML pages from
| the 90's internet (the ones with Prev/Next/Up links, like this:
| https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html) at the top of
| Google results.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I didn't check but to my recollection that domain is pretty
| old, domain age is supposed to be a principle metric for
| trust (which in turn is a strong signal for page rank). So,
| ...
|
| I mean it's pretty reasonable, if a site has been around a
| long time it's going to be generally 'good'.
| novaleaf wrote:
| worse: paid content farms / ai to generate crap "articles" by
| the boatload, targeting every organic search term 5 different
| ways.
|
| The result is that ACTUALLY USEFUL articles are buried on page
| 5. Any slightly helpful bit of content in the top articles are
| repeated (using different grammar of course) in all the other
| "top" articles.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Apart from stuffing 200 links in the footer why is this bad?
| ridaj wrote:
| Much of it driven by cult cargo SEO, throwing everything and
| the kitchen sink into the page in completely unproven hope that
| it'll somehow game the rankings
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I am running every SEO advise as an experiment before
| implementing it across my network and a lot of advise
| actually brings results.
| Jenk wrote:
| It is cargo cult but it's cargo cult because it is the way to
| "success". Company A have great page ranking, and blog about
| how they think they got there. Company B also have great page
| ranking, but think they did something different to Company A,
| so they blog about it, too. Everyone else reads both blogs
| and intersects what both companies did, and implement those
| changes. Iterate for every difference you encounter and
| voila.. you now have your rubber stamp SEO method.
| lvncelot wrote:
| Even (or rather, especially) if every SEO advice is correct,
| it still means that Google effectively has a lot of control
| over the shape of the modern web, alone through indirect
| pressure via SEO.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making
| the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.
|
| The "fiddle with H1" or "write X amount of words" or "buy Y
| number of links with a % of anchor text" is silly.
| lvncelot wrote:
| Yes, but even for those, it means that we are left to hope
| that what's good for a crawler and what's good for e.g. a
| screen-reader will still align in the future. Right now it
| feels almost coincidental.
| tomcooks wrote:
| > Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply
| making the page crawlable and content being in a logical
| order.
|
| Semantic HTML has been created to help screen readers and
| browsers understand content organization, it having been
| hijacked by SE is just a side-effect.
| dspillett wrote:
| Though a useful side effect of SEO people finding it to be
| a useful side effect, is that what they are doing for their
| gain may help overall accessibility (where too often the
| opposite is the case, when people trying to game systems
| accidentally affect accessibility, it is usually
| negatively).
| ricardo81 wrote:
| The point I was meaning to make is that it's quite easy to
| make a site uncrawlable, and therefore unfindable in search
| engines.
|
| e.g. Google always had problems indexing Flash websites. It
| historically had issues with sites heavily relying on
| Javascript. Nowadays it's less of a problem, at least for
| Googlebot.
| tootie wrote:
| What I tell every client is that 90% of SEO is in writing good,
| relevant content. Technical SEO is more like housekeeping.
| Adding footer links is redundant if you have a sitemap and good
| navigation. If your users can find stuff easily, crawlers can
| too. The biggest technical things that I make a stink over are
| canonical URLs and https.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Well, yes, because googlebot is the gatekeeper of popularity
| and income for websites. Got to appease the decision maker.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| As a mobile developer (sometimes) I rarely/never see apps that
| don't have Google SDKs bundled either..
| atatatat wrote:
| That sounds...like a great reason not to get into "mobile"
| dev and stick to PWAs.
| growt wrote:
| Human readable Urls don't sound that bad.
| loonster wrote:
| Extremely useful for when a link dies and there is no useful
| archive.
| raverbashing wrote:
| So people edit html using these "online tools" (because <p> is
| hard apparently) and then nobody cares to proofread, and even
| whole paragraphs are added without anyone noticing.
|
| Great.
|
| Nobody cares about the content apparently. Nobody checks if the
| generated HTML makes sense. It's all about spinning the wheel.
|
| _Sigh._
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| Honestly kind of a brilliant SEO strategy. Makes me nervous to
| use any free online tool
| kaltuer wrote:
| Google cannot see these frauds, and even warning works. There are
| ten sites on the internet and have separate domains with every
| term in the sector. In a SERP, you may thus observe all of its
| web pages that practically replicate and rephrase each other. I
| reported these websites, and I didn't even receive a single
| response.
| [deleted]
| funman7 wrote:
| Don't the kids say nowadays first link on google always sus
| stefan_ wrote:
| I'm so happy the author is an ethical SEO scammer and will not
| stoop to these tactics.
| alvah wrote:
| What would you have the author do? Market his business or build
| it and let them come?
| caspii wrote:
| Big difference
| adolph wrote:
| Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million
| pounds?"
|
| Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose...
| we would have to discuss terms, of course..."
|
| Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"
|
| Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I
| am?!"
|
| Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are
| haggling about the price."
|
| http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/haggling-about-
| price.htm...
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Churchill has an interesting reputation.
|
| He was a failed military commander pre-PM, even ridiculed
| after the failed landing at Gallipoli:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign
|
| Yet we most remember him as a fierce leader from the top,
| and he did so while under extreme stress due to U-boat
| attacks strangling shipping to Britain, and puzzlement from
| the German alien-level advanced technology (V-2 hypersonic
| ballistic missiles, long-range radio navigation, etc.)
|
| (His scientific advisor told him the above technologies
| were disinformation, and couldn't be real.)
|
| It's important to realize that while French and British
| public opinion became soft on the value of their culture
| and nationhood, Churchill knew better. Just like the
| pernicious impact of cultural Marxism today in the US,
| which must be fought as a war on every front.
| smcl wrote:
| The downvotes will be because the article is about SEO
| and your comment (while factually OK on Churchill and
| WW2) is wildly off-topic and ends with a call to action
| against "cultural Marxism". That last bit is
| controversial not because people disagree with you, but
| because it looks like flamebait.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Since when is being anti-Marxist trolling?
|
| Is that how misguided HNers have become?
| smcl wrote:
| I have hit "vouch" on this post because I wanted to
| respond. Being anti-Marxist (you originally said
| _cultural-Marxist_ which is a reference to something
| different) is a perfectly valid position to hold, and if
| you spend much time on HN you 'll find that there's
| actually a fair amount of political discussions and
| representation from the left, the centre and the right.
| But what you said looked weirdly out of place in this
| thread, and to be honest it seemed to me you were more
| interested in starting a fight than anything else.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| I'm guessing the downvotes are to support cultural
| Marxism.
|
| I can't think of anything good about that.
|
| Can you explain why?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 1. This guy is doing SEO but I don't see any scam.
|
| 2. There is a qualitative difference between life-changing
| money and day-job money.
|
| 3. "I won't risk my life any amount" is a dumb ideal,
| because everything has a risk of death.
| adolph wrote:
| 1. Yes, if you don't see the entirety of SEO as a scam
| then truly the sarcasm of the ancestor comments and
| Churchill's equivocation don't make sense.
|
| 2. Is one's sense of right and wrong for all things
| driven by the amount of money involved? Are there some
| things money can't buy?
|
| 3. Would you elaborate on this assertion? I don't quite
| understand.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Is one's sense of right and wrong for all things driven
| by the amount of money involved? Are there some things
| money can't buy?
|
| Sleeping with someone isn't exactly in the realm of moral
| repugnancy. It's not about right and wrong, the
| implication is that she is a whore. But she's not,
| because she wouldn't take money for sex as her _job_.
|
| > Would you elaborate on this assertion? I don't quite
| understand.
|
| The article you linked is claiming that "the very real
| possibility of being killed" should disqualify the job,
| no matter what the pay. But that's an extremely myopic
| way of evaluating risk. Would he refuse on principle to
| commute an extra 15 minutes, even if it adds up to the
| same risk after 20 years? It doesn't look like it. But to
| take that risk all at once in exchange for 20 years of
| pay or even 50 years of pay means you've been
| "corrupted".
|
| He's decided that some risks to yourself are fine and
| some risks to yourself are unacceptable based on
| arbitrary measures and not what actually keeps you
| safest.
|
| Overly hard stances for risk mitigation lead to a lot of
| really bad conclusions and contradictions.
| joeyoungblood wrote:
| SEO is not a scam and itself is endorsed by major search
| engines. Trying to position it as such removes any
| credibility you might have had.
| [deleted]
| imaginamundo wrote:
| Well, that is unfortunately.
|
| In 2015 I was fired because some issues on a site that I was
| working on because some friction with the company owner. Two
| months before I was fired I reported that some links to others
| sites non related to our service was on the initial page (some
| porn and some scams pages). After that I heard from my ex-
| coworkers that a manager from another area from the company told
| that I was fired because I was linking porn on some pages from
| our service. I didn't knew at the time that those tools existed,
| but only today I realized that it is an option.
|
| I was really sad with that manager and didn't understood the
| reason to lie to my friends the reason of my demission. But is
| nice to know what may have caused the issue. Better late than
| never hahaha.
| geek_at wrote:
| Wow that sucks. It's not just HTML Cleaners though. A few years
| ago (before snowden) I analyzed free proxy servers and found
| that most of them blocked https and many even injected JS or
| HTML into all requests [1].
|
| I also wrote a tutorial on how you can build an infecting proxy
| too [2]. Doesn't work anymore though since HTTPS is everywhere.
| Thank god
|
| [1] https://blog.haschek.at/2015-analyzing-443-free-proxies [2]
| https://blog.haschek.at/2013/05/why-free-proxies-are-free-js...
| megablast wrote:
| You had a job where you used an online HTML editor to create
| pages?? Wow.
| wolfd wrote:
| Everyone starts somewhere.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't be an asshole in HN comments. We're trying for a
| different sort of internet here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fossislife wrote:
| Just my thanks for keeping HN so absolutely clean, in
| comparison to other online forums.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| And without version control, or they could have just looked
| back to see how the links got in there.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| This is clever!
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubi...
| caspii wrote:
| Amazing!
| [deleted]
| jesseryoung wrote:
| I find it hilarious that this made it's way into an Amazon
| listing for some waterproofing chemical.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210607233655/https://www.amazo...
| duskwuff wrote:
| I find it even funnier that it appears in a research paper:
|
| https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8615/v1
|
| (It's on page 24, at the bottom of the References section.)
| tyingq wrote:
| And a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson, as the only
| portion in English.
|
| https://zomisda.org/zokam-sabbath-school-lesson-2019/
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Serious question: are you guys trolling? Is this like
| describing Rick Rolling by actually Ricking Rolling
| people?
|
| I only ask because when I click on these links, I get a
| while bunch of legitimate text, but noting actually
| useful. Am I missing something?
| exikyut wrote:
| In the case of the last one it's immediately above the
| "Related posts" at the bottom. In all cases, this is a
| job for ^F. (I was genuinely surprised all the random
| links cited on the website _still work_, and had to
| search the page for them.)
| tyingq wrote:
| An (obvious) injected link, as described in the article,
| is at the bottom of the Sabbath lesson I posted.
| avipars wrote:
| go to "view page source" and then search
| caspii wrote:
| This is fantastic. I added this example to the post.
| Thanks!
| [deleted]
| RileyJames wrote:
| Totally agree with all the comments here, seo broke google, and
| they don't care. Probably sells more adwords in the end.
|
| I found uBlacklist from this thread, and the subscription
| functionality enables some collaborative effort.
|
| So I've started making a list, but unfortunately there aren't
| many uBlacklist subscription lists out there yet.
|
| Be interested to see how far this could go:
| https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist/
| marcodiego wrote:
| If you're using google to find adequate tools, you're searching
| the wrong place. Wikipedia (even stack overflow) seems way better
| and has curated lists of open source tools for a particular
| purpose. Of course, wikipedia can be edited but IME, it is way
| better than google to find adequate tools.
|
| If you're decided on googling for a suggestion of a tool, at
| least include "open source". Even if you're searching for
| proprietary tools, you'll probably find the traditional "it has
| better X, Y, compared to proprietary tool W" review.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the
| first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online
| scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put
| them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for
| `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is
| not included in the other website's description.
|
| The network tab in devtools isn't loading Google Analytics on you
| site. I think the bigger conspiracy is that Google isn't giving
| high search result rankings to websites that don't include Google
| Analytics. Part of the reason is they use time on site after
| following through a search result link as a dimension of quality
| for that search result. If that makes sense? They give 10 search
| results and their algorithm can tell if the search result
| satisfies the end user's request if they don't go back to the
| search results but rather continue on that site.
|
| Lastly, clicking through a search result to your site might not
| give the searching user what they are looking for. Amazon
| discovered every time a person has to click they are far less
| likely to purchase an item so they created one click. Your
| competition makes it visually clear what their site does. You
| probably would get far more retention on the original click to
| your site if you have an image of what the end product looks like
| in a hero, front and center (with all the meta tags described in
| Google's document on SEO of course.) That way people won't click
| back to the search results page which Google is tracking as a
| dimension.
|
| [0]
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/en/...
| lloyddobbler wrote:
| > I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as
| the first phrase in the `<meta name="description"
| content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations
| for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of
| many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top
| spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's
| description.
|
| While I like the thought progression you're going through, this
| is a "not really." Google has confirmed a number of times over
| the past 15+ years (going back to the Matt Cutts era) and even
| in the document you linked that the meta _description_ does
| nothing to influence ranking in the SERPs. However, the meta
| _title_ does influence ranking.
|
| I'm on mobile, so unable to dig in right now - but my guess is
| either this has something to do with the meta title, or the
| specific anchor text of the backlinks that are getting inserted
| via the app in question.
|
| Aside from that, agree 100% with your other assessments.
| bliteben wrote:
| I think they will use it for a fallback description so it
| could affect the CTR. But one that short probably doesn't
| really help.
| [deleted]
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| This (and another comment you made deeper down) make me think
| you may be stuck on the mechanical/technical side of SEO. While
| it is important, it is not nearly as important as it used to
| be, say 10 years ago. It's probably much less than 50% of your
| overall ranking. Yes, you need to get it right, but relevant
| back links and the associated link text on the sites linking TO
| you will have a far greater affect. Google prioritizes what
| OTHERS say about your site more than any factors you can
| control. Mainly because people abuse those factors
| significantly.
| [deleted]
| alvah wrote:
| This. The number of sites you see following pretty much none
| of Google's suggestions or industry practice, but dominating
| search results due to a combination of content and links, is
| massive. If people stopped and thought about what they're
| looking at, the "selling technical SEO knowledge" industry
| would pretty much die.
| caspii wrote:
| I only switched Google Analytics off last week! I had it on for
| the whole time before and it made no difference.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| [deleted]
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| I mean, you did read the part where the HTML cleaners were
| adding links to the content they were "cleaning" right?
| Whether it's what is causing the higher ranking or not,
| they are certainly _trying_ to do something underhanded.
| duskwuff wrote:
| This is not how SEO works. Putting a keyword in your page's
| title/text/etc can help _somewhat_ , but it's a much weaker
| signal than (say) a couple thousand keyword links from
| seemingly unrelated sites.
| [deleted]
| lurquer wrote:
| No great fan of Google, but a large component of the problem is
| the Library of Babel phenomenon: there's just too much crap being
| published.
|
| Let's face it... the early internet was interesting because the
| only people who could use it (and publish on it) were smart
| eccentrics. That was its charm. The technological hurdle served
| as the curator: you might have been a crazy white supremacist,
| anarchist, conspiracy theorist, or 'expert' in how to grow
| radishes or some other bizarrely eclectic field... but all of
| them were necessarily a bit smarter than the average bear just by
| virtue of knowing how to host content and access it; not a
| trivial task in the late 90's.
|
| Maybe it's time to think up some convoluted alternate network
| that is a royal pain-in-the-ass to use. Perhaps there the
| eclectic and useful content creators will once again arise (and
| searching their trove will be a snap as most everything there
| will be fresh, unique, and interesting.) It will exist, I
| suppose, for a few years before tools are made to enable grandma
| to easily use it.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| I think that's somewhat the promise of Web 3.0 at this point.
| Painful to use and relatively empty. However, it's mostly
| people hyping random crypto instead of actually creating value.
| munk-a wrote:
| Imagine my surprise to find that the scammy site at the top of
| searches isn't w3cschools - that cesspool of terrible references.
|
| Once I discovered that everything I would ever need was better
| explained on the MDN my life as a webdeveloper strongly improved.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Can you provide an example of terrible reference in W3Schools?
| kontxt wrote:
| Summary:
| https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/9LogKuJbXwihQd6nj0Y0iSP8h8t...
| 31tor wrote:
| Google is getting worse and worse. It's harder than ever to find
| real information. All you get is seo scams trying to lour you in
| and sell you stuff. It's tragic. I miss the old internet.
| Johnythree wrote:
| This: As an electronic engineer I would often search for
| component data sheets. Usually the sheet I wanted would be the
| first hit. These days however I get pages and pages of crap
| sites that want to sell me the data sheet. Or even pages that
| say that they don't actually have it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| To be fair, this is how the web has changed too. High-value
| content has been duplicated and hidden behind pay walls when
| in the early days (ie my early days on the internet/web)
| everyone seemed to come with their own content and share
| freely.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There's an inverse to this, too: Low-value content is far
| easier to distribute because distribution is now
| effectively costless, a situation deliberately created by
| online platforms that want bottom dollar works.
|
| This effect isn't limited to web searches, either. Social
| media is way worse - at least Google pays you in presumably
| useful web traffic. Facebook and Twitter want to trap you
| on platform as long as possible. Even platforms like
| YouTube which pay their creators have this problem. So does
| Amazon, which encourages dropshipping cost-optimized
| products from China under weird, fly-by-night brand names.
| Their business model is to outsource the financial risk of
| creating new works to someone else so they can get
| "content" (or in the case of Amazon, actual products) for
| cheaper.
|
| In the olden days, a publisher was a corporation that took
| on the financial burden and legal risk of publishing your
| work; with the caveat that only a limited number of things
| would be published. Thanks to a number of 90s era liability
| limitations, online service providers were given broad
| leeway on pretty much everything a traditional publisher
| would need to worry about: defamation, product liability,
| copyright infringement, and so on. This flipped the
| publisher model on it's head, creating the "platform
| model": one where you publish _everything_ with no up-front
| cost or prior restraint, monopolize your creators '
| audiences, and make your money by taking cuts of whatever
| revenue streams your creators happen to establish after-
| the-fact.
|
| Publishers had financial incentives to make their creative
| works more valuable. Platforms do just the opposite: their
| financial incentive is to _de_ value content. How do they
| do this? First off, they call it "content", as a generic
| catch-all term for anything their users publish. Second,
| they have no quality control mechanism, allowing literally
| anyone to submit content and have it promoted by their
| platform. Third, they run their platforms off of algorithms
| that use user-submitted feedback (reviews, upvotes, and so
| on) to judge group tastes in lieu of actually having taste.
| And finally, sometimes they'll just outright _take money
| away_ from their creators in favor of their own stuff.
|
| The reason why people were even putting high-value content
| on the web for free was because nobody knew how any of this
| would play out. Advertisers were paying far too much for
| banner ads, so it made perfect sense to just put all your
| content online, make sure people could see it, and get a
| lot of money. You used to be able to run a _whole YouTube
| channel_ purely off of AdSense revenue! That 's all gone
| away, now. Advertising networks pay out a lot less than
| they did even a decade ago, and at least in the case of
| Google, are also competing against their own creators for
| ad space to sell.
|
| (This also implies that we will never actually go back to
| "the web as it used to be" until everyone alive has died
| and we can repeat the mistakes of the past. Hell, if you
| ask the copyright maximalist nutters, we've _already_
| repeated the mistakes of the past - publishers of centuries
| past acted a lot more like Internet platforms do today than
| modern publishers did pre-Internet.)
| cheph wrote:
| Don't forget the suppression of information based on fraudulent
| Lancet letters:
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
|
| > Under the subject line, "No need for you to sign the
| "Statement" Ralph!!," he wrote to two scientists, including
| UNC's Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on
| the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable
| of infecting human cells: "you, me and him should not sign this
| statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore
| doesn't work in a counterproductive way." Daszak added, "We'll
| then put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our
| collaboration so we maximize an independent voice."
| bredren wrote:
| > Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that
| the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you
| pay for the free version.
|
| This unknown exchange of value for "free" products and services
| is what everyone from Facebook and Google down to malware-like
| browser extensions do to extract difficult-to-acquire resources.
|
| People don't understand how their personal data, internet
| connection (residential proxy network node), or in this case,
| publicly displayed website are being monetized or used indirectly
| for monetization.
|
| People don't know or are tricked into allowing themselves or
| their resources to serve as an ugly cost externality to some
| other clean-looking business endeavor.
| nostromo wrote:
| I've heard so much about how PageRank isn't that important to
| Google anymore -- but there are many reports of SEO tricks that
| get people on the first page of Google for common queries. It
| seems like it's still quite important after all.
| Lammy wrote:
| Those can both be true. PageRank is a relic of a time when
| search engines more consistently returned the same results for
| the same query. These days we're all filter bubbled with
| personalized results
| advisedwang wrote:
| They may have abandoned the actual page-rank scoring system (a
| quite specific implementation) without wholly abandoning the
| idea of using "who links to who" as a quality signal.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| >Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or "cleaning" HTML
| seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push
| themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings.
|
| You can't pretend this isn't funny as fuck lol.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| SomInjust tried one of these sites - and I cannot reproduce the
| scam - my output from htmltidy.net seems to work fine and I
| cannot find any weird back links.
|
| Any notes on how to reproduce?
| bombcar wrote:
| Keep trying, it seems to only do it some times. I've used them
| and am always checking my code and have seen it a few times.
|
| Maybe clear cookies and try from a diffferbroawer?
| fnord77 wrote:
| I searched for my local USPS store today. Every result was some
| SEO crap. No usps.gov result on the first page.
| bombcar wrote:
| The United States Post Office in Local Town USA is a great
| place to buy stamps. Find out about Local Town USA mail service
| here at randomlocaltownmailservice dot com.
| dpedu wrote:
| Well, it's USPS.com, so... :-)
| fnord77 wrote:
| usps.com wasn't on the fp either
|
| postofficelocations.com, postofficehours.com, yelp,
| postallocations, etc.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| WTF is a html cleaner and why would you use one.
| aembleton wrote:
| It can be used to simplify HTML, removing comments, attributes,
| classes or anything you like. You would use it to simplify and
| shorten your HTML.
|
| Here's an example of one https://html-cleaner.com/
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| That's Minifcation and you'd normally thigs like
| https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier
|
| I am not sure what you'd use this tool for possibly for
| scraping work but beautiful soup is probably better for that
| fogof wrote:
| > and my personal favorite: a blog post on Kaspersky.com
|
| Wow, embarrassing for Kaspersky as a computer security focused
| site to be a victim of this.
|
| When I searched for "Rubiks" as it said to do, I couldn't find it
| though. Has the Kaspersky post been changed?
| zulban wrote:
| Embarrassing but understandable. Computer security isn't about
| perfection, which is impossible. It's about vigilance,
| resilience, backups, and responding quickly. I'd say they
| nailed it, here.
| caspii wrote:
| Yeah, looks like they removed it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I suspect this will only get worse over time. There was a time
| when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that
| represented you) made a point of understanding everything that
| went into it. But, even as what's considered a professional web
| site has gotten exponentially more complicated, too many people
| see setting up an online presence as something like printing a
| brochure: details irrelevant. Somebody who _does_ understand the
| details is going to use them to their advantage.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Feels similar to "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
|
| Could someone inject links into content in such a way that you
| cannot find the link in your own source or even your hosting
| stack?
| bombcar wrote:
| You could modify the web server to modify the code in a
| similar way to the reflections paper.
|
| But even more imaginative would be to work it into the kernel
| or the ssl layer somehow.
| adventured wrote:
| I agree, there has been a clear, negative direction of stacking
| complexity in Web development for the past 20 years. It's one
| of the primary reasons Wordpress has 1/3 of the Web and there
| is a cottage industry of developers that specialize in just
| hacking at Wordpress to make it do things it's not particularly
| great at. Most people and most businesses can't come remotely
| close to building their own high-functioning sites (from
| scratch) in a cost effective manner, while getting all the
| critical details (eg building for SEO) right. So you get an
| obese do-everything CMS, and throw in some plug-ins, to sort of
| shim the problem.
|
| Why is Shopify worth $150 billion? Well, other than the bubble,
| this effect is why. People can't easily build their own
| ecommerce sites, can't integrate everything they need to, in a
| way that doesn't cost them a small fortune.
|
| Wix is a pretty mediocre service, clunky and slow. It's worth
| $15 billion? How in the world does that happen. Well, building
| sites is super difficult for most people. The opportunity to
| make that problem better is, apparently, huge.
| Moru wrote:
| What they value is the users, not the platform as such.
| onion2k wrote:
| _There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you
| (or somebody that represented you) made a point of
| understanding everything that went into it._
|
| I've been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has
| always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and
| there has always been scammers happy to take their money.
| What's worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe
| they're actually selling a good service. There have always been
| people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call
| it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed
| keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with
| JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back
| button, with no context menu, etc etc.
|
| Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider
| ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn't any better
| years ago.
| julianz wrote:
| True. A company we bought in the very early 2000's was paying
| $1000 a month to an SEO "expert". The expert hadn't noticed
| that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all
| search bots but was still happy to take their money and
| produce faked up reports about how busy they'd been pushing
| search terms around.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| I have had two clients in two years that have had that
| exact issue. In both cases they were WordPress websites, my
| friend and I refer to them as 'WordPress Specials'. It is
| obscene considering the amount the clients originally paid,
| but it works well for me as the client immediately sees a
| dramatic jump in the SERPs as soon as the new site goes
| live, and that's before any of the general improvements in
| navigation, content and structure!
| sova wrote:
| While Google still has market dominance, I wonder if privacy-
| centric search engines will be the future. I am considering
| putting substantial effort towards such a goal, you can sign up
| to learn about when at puubl.com [1]
|
| [1] https://www.puubl.com/
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Scummy but pretty smart setting up such a network of sites. Even
| more reverse figuring it out. Bravo to the author.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| On the positive side I suppose, at least it was just regular
| HTML, could've been injected JS.
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