Search engines and SEO spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#161

Post by notreallyserio » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #114

All of the amateur search quality experts forget to mention the regulatory environment. Obviously, Google could nuke Pinterest from orbit, dramatically improving image search results. Clearly, Google could effectively take down Statista, technically. But various Eurocracies have shown an extreme willingness to take the side of Yelp, Pinterest, and whatever other spam/scam mills are able to form a shadow alliance with…

If this is a real concern they can side step it by simply allowing users to block specific domains, like they have in the past.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#162

Post by xondono » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days.

It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#163

Post by 1024core » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

... and the moment you gain some traction, the SEO monster will train it's eye on you like Sauron; and without a billion dollar budget, you will be toast.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#164

Post by Rastonbury » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #117

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads (clicking an ad because results are crap, going thru more pages of results means more ads). Clicks are revenue which is much easier to optimise for.

Internal Search owners can push for better algos, but what if the algo causes revenue to fall? Are there strong forces strong enough within the organisation to ensure that search quality prevails?

If this is the case, the problem is existential. It can only be arrested at the very top

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#165

Post by nefitty » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

curiousllama wrote: post #123

nefitty wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a problem I'm working on. What sorts of unique things did you do that Google failed at? Maybe you read through discussion sites or got tips from books or something like that

Social media and trial and error. I knew a bit, and asked some friends for advice. I used that to find people who said stuff I thought made sense on Quora, Tik Tok, and Instagram (ie they agreed with what I knew to be true and false, so I could assume the other stuff they said was likely to be true as well). I tried what they said, found what worked, and went all in when I saw results. Importantly, this was bottom up…

That's a new angle to me. I rely on pseudonymous content like Reddit and HN. It does make sense to look for people or groups focused on a larger topic like fitness.

That helps a lot! Thank you.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#166

Post by frenchyatwork » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #137

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

Legitimate sites could help a lot by adding machine-readable descriptions of their content, per the schema.org spec. The richness of these descriptions means that this is effectively a "hard", non-forgeable claim to being a worthwhile, non-spam source (quite unlike the old META tags that got abused to death pre-Google). Of course spam sites could simply lie in their schema.org tags, but the lies are easy to spot (wit…

A lot of what counts as spam these days isn't something like "I search for bicycle reviews and get penis enlargement pills", it's more like "I search for bicycle reviews and get some blog who searched Amazon for the 5 most popular bikes and posted links to them with a little blurb and called it a 'Review'".

These sort of things are easy to spot, but only if you actually have a basic amount of familiarly with the topic. It's hard to spot with "AI" or super-cheap labor.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#167

Post by deadalus » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

I also consider Paywalls to be spam. Clicking on a link and finding out that it is paywalled, is a massive waste of time.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#168

Post by RichardHeart » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

His suggestion basically is to become DMOZ.org If you are old enough to remember it.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#169

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #159

numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

Those shitty SEO spam sites exist only to serve ads, and Google has a monopoly on internet ads. So there is no real incentive for them to solve the problem.

[deleted]

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#170

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

For medical search the answer is pubmed. Not only is the collection of documents clean (of low-grade scammers, pharma companies have to pay big $ to play) but the NIH has done a large amount of search quality and ontology work -- the system knows "Tylenol" is synonymous with "Paracetamol", "Acetaminophen", etc.