Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Search engines and SEO spam

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 555 posts

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#481

Post by freeflight »

emerongi wrote: post #384
mrkramer wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're an elite engineer in Russia, top ~1%-3% globally. What do you do? Earn several thousand dollars per month doing legit software development in Russia Become software entrepreneur? And many international software companies have software development teams and presence in Russia.

> Become software entrepreneur? Exactly. Hacking for hire, making cheats, botnets, SEO farms, selling exploits and hacked social media accounts; practically anything you can think of that US software engineers can't be bothered with, as they already earn a healthy salary. That is entrepreneurism.

It's hardly only shady stuff; Kaspersky, ABBYY FineReader, VKontakte, Telegram are Russian software products that come to mind.

Russia also has its own SaaS enterprise sector with companies like SKB Kontur or Diasoft.

Just like the US has to this day warez and cracking groups, where it's for the longest time mostly been about scene prestige, and not making the big bucks.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#482

Post by throwaway2037 »

dehrmann wrote: post #432
nemothekid wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Publishers were only able to produce high-quality content because, with no conversion metrics, advertisers were willing to overpay for placement. This implies that big budget advertisers (the CPGs, like Coke and P&G), are buying Google/FB because they have better conversion metrics. That isn't true today; only SMBs and gaming companies care about conversion metrics. There are interns in LA/NY probably collectively…

> the CPGs, like Coke and P&G Did any of these heavily buy newspaper ads before 2000? Definitely TV, possibly magazine, but newspaper? I just don't remember seeing ads for Tide in newspapers.

I thought for a moment about your reply. Do you remember Saturday / Sunday coupon sections? These are essentially adverts. Those are 100% consumables -- like branded health, food, and cleaning products.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#483

Post by wyattpeak »

mrkramer wrote: post #436
ijidak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank. So everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except: 1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc. It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.

Wouldn't it be reasonable from Google to show how their ranking algorithms work so all webmasters and content creators know how to behave on the web. Now we have black box that's causing confusion and is misdirecting websites and web users.

I don't think so. If the problem is people gaming the system, making it easier to game isn't going to improve the situation. It's not going to put good content creators on a level playing field with spammers, because good content creators simply don't care as much as spammers about search engine gaming.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#484

Post by throwaway2037 »

Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

I cannot find the link now, but there is great one page graph / chart that shows all the categories of Craigslist that have been cloned/displaced by start-ups. Does anyone have a link to that report?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#485

Post by wyattpeak »

_delirium wrote: post #214
loceng wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're correct - however to point out there seems to be a trend where reviewers are only given pre-release versions if they practically always give favourable reviews to the products they list, especially if they're provided the product for free; there doesn't have to be an express relationship or contract between a reviewer and a company either, it's the reverse of how Bill Ga…

Yeah, that's been a problem with reviews for a long time. In fact it's what Consumer Reports used initially to differentiate themselves: their "thing" was that they only reviewed products bought anonymously at retail (no free samples or manufacturer-provided review items) and didn't accept any advertising from manufacturers either. Sites that receive free review samples and are supported by affiliate links are kind o…

It does in a funny way provide something of a metric for how willing the site is to be critical. Several video game reviewers I follow have stopped receiving product from some studios, which I think is a badge of honest review. Although it's not something you'd know easily so it doesn't help much in terms of finding good reviewers.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#486

Post by slig »

asiachick wrote: post #297
willhinsa wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) They're going the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from this!! They recently removed all downvote visibility of YouTube videos from the user, so now downvotes only feed into their algorithm. So in the last line of defense of me ending up watching a shitty video, one of the most valuable tools has been removed by my betters. It's prepostero…

They're doing a great job. I'm so happy dislike visibility have been removed. It removes the effectiveness of pile on coordinated harassment which many youtubers have fallen victim too.

Except the ratio is visible for the video creator, so they know nonetheless. And there's the possibility of disabling the the like/dislike for each video.

All the big channels I follow are mad at this change, and there's a coordinated effort to bring it back.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#487

Post by ajmurmann »

GarlicToum wrote: post #406
Volker_W wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search. Link please

https://garlictoum.com/

This is really cool! Bookmarked!

One piece of feedback: It seems to somewhat liberally fuzz the term, doesn't tell me about it and not toggle it in the UI. I searched for "Natto" and got some great results at the top (Spicy Kimchi Natto!). However, a few results down the recipes start including "Nattu" which seems to be a Indian chicken dish and then quickly have nothing to do with the term at all and give me stuff like Tafelspitz.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#488

Post by toastal »

orcasushi wrote: post #271
wodenokoto wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.

Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric. Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this se…

Yup and developers have been allowing the marketing and product teams to break the back button as well opening every external link in a new window instead so users have to keep something open to their site. You always had middle-click to do this, but now it's being forced on users.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#489

Post by ajmurmann »

Fede_V wrote: post #476

I think the complaints about SEO spam are valid - but - I think msweibel and pg misdiagnose the challenge. The challenge is that you are dealing with an adversarial system, and, the better your search engine is, the more widely used it becomes, the more valuable it is for your adversaries to find ways to game your rankings. Any new niche search engine will go through a small window of time where they have the luxury…

The main motivation to SEO crappy content seems to be ads and affiliates links. What if you take the motivation away to SEO crappy content by deprioritizing sides that contain ads or affiliate links? Of course Google would never do this, but someone else could.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#490

Post by slig »

bombcar wrote: post #88

Just give users the ability to blacklist domains when searching; pretty soon you'll have a decent list of what users consider worthless. And pintrest would die.

>And pintrest would die.

They're friends with the king, so don't hold you breath.

Post reply on HN