Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#321

Post by omega3 » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

> The programming content "industry" is highly fragmented (outside of SO) and difficult to monetize

I think part of the problem is that the content producers are trying to cater to everyone: google algo (by artifically inflating word count, using specific keywords), beginner programmers, advanced programmers, potentially paid users, ephemeral users that arrive on the site via a referral or via googling. In the end you end up catering to no one.

As a side note, RealPython.com is going to go down even more if they're going to keep their "register to view" policy I've started to see recently.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#322

Post by cuspycode » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

thesuitonym wrote: post #316

leephillips wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do "-site:spam.com".

This works, but bad actors like pinterest have found a way around that by having a domain on every TLD and ccTLD out there.

I found out by experiment that wildcards work, e.g. -site:pinterest.*

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#323

Post by ok_dad » Sun, Dec 05, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #318

ok_dad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day, I searched for something and got a whole HN thread copied to some crap site but it had just enough veneer to seem legit. I figured it out when I searched for something from that thread and found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. Google has been good to me overall, but in the past few weeks I've really noticed the SEO spam, and I'm not sure what to do about it so that I don't find…

> found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. So the nitwits just harvested too early, before the HN discussion was fully grown?

It seems like the harvested from a permalink to a comment (the link you get from clicking the "x minutes ago" time) rather than the entire comment section and later what I found was the whole comment section here that gave better context for my query.