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Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

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Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#201

Post by matheusmoreira »

Whiteshadow12 wrote: post #76
matheusmoreira wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.

This made me sad, the optimist in me believes that some alternative will be built, that could take us back to those days. Honestly I do feel for most of my life I experienced an American Internet mostly (From South Africa), as long as one can still hop from one internet to another, in as simple a manner as possible it might not as bad as it could be.

I'm sad as well. To me it feels like we're already living in a cyberpunk nightmare, things just keep getting worse and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#202

Post by ysavir »

nyokodo wrote: post #186
ysavir wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about surfacing organic human content, it's about only indexing organic human content. The problem is automated indexing. So long as indexing works according to defined rules, the advantage will be to those able to shape their content to those rules, and the spammers and scammers will win. An idea I've had for a few years is making a social-network based index engine. The only pages that get indexed are page…

> up to 5 or 6 degrees of separation So basically everyone on earth?

Alright, 2 or 3!

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#203

Post by PaulHoule »

closedloop129 wrote: post #163
PaulHoule wrote: post #23

Spammers badly need spam-free content so they can mix some legitimate links with the junk they spew. One great Black Hat SEO trick is to find where your competitors are getting clean links and insert your own links there so they do your spamming for you.

Why does the mixing work? Shouldn't Google and Bing know what the original content is and automatically identify the sites that are copies?

Here's an example.

If I have (say) 15 affiliate marketing sites, I might make a link aggregator site that looks a bit like Hacker News. Except I won't make just one, I might make 30 of them.

These might subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds and randomly select articles, maybe 10% of the links on those sites go to my affiliate sites.

If you can inject spam into those RSS feeds that system I describe would amplify it and this could have effects ranging from: you are using my marketing machine to promote your content to my sites getting really obnoxious and getting blocked.

----

"Duplicate Detection" is a necessary technology for web search because s̶h̶e̶e̶people copy themselves and other people without bound. It cuts both ways because Google and Bing have no sure way to know which one is the copy and which is the original. So (1) they aren't completely efficient at removing duplicates and (2) duplicate detection can be turned into a weapon against you, just like that link aggregator.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#204

Post by 0des »

Veen wrote: post #41
buro9 wrote: post #3

This is for comment spam. It's trying to find a long tail of popular but not top listed blogs for the purpose of posting comments with the much desired links to the SEO target.

Does that work any more? I thought everyone put nofollow attributes on comment links.

If it didnt work, would you still see it?

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#205

Post by tmaly »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #137
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is. There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

Agreed. > If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just legacy content and spam. The "general" Internet is not dead. Though if you just want to participate in just Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord you might well think that. Users of marginalia (aut…

Everyone is trying to game the Google algorithm. The net result is all this long form content and cooking recipes that are 10 pages long.

There seems to be a big disconnect with a typical users attention span and the length of a post.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#206

Post by ftkftk »

jerf wrote: post #161
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

"I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there." That is not the Dead Internet Theory. That's just something anyone can see by looking at the world. The Dead Internet Theory is that the Internet is already an echo chamber custom fed to you by a collection of bots and other such things, and that a…

I agree - I don't believe that there is a grand master plan of a conspiratorial or other nature. I think it is simply, as you stated, a co-evolution of independent actors.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#207

Post by ratww »

Nextgrid wrote: post #183
ratww wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's two kinds of SEO spam going on. The black-hat kind is definitely made to extract money from ads. But those are easy to avoid for web veterans IMO. And I also feel that Google is doing its part, even though it's costing them money from those sweet ads! But the white-hat kind, also known as content marketing, is made to let legit companies save money. Instead of paying for Google Advertisement, they get…

The "white-hat kind" can trivially be filtered out (or deterred) by downranking any of the crap these marketers use to measure their conversion rate - analytics, etc.

I love this idea. Would be nice to see it in a search engine, or at least a browser extension showing how much analytics junk a site has before you click it.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#208

Post by gnabgib »

Xylakant wrote: post #22
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that yes, it can. If the only people who are interested in using the website are those who block analytics - and, given the demographic of a niche search engine, it doesn't sound entirely implausible - then there's no telling how the 99.99% splits into bots and nerds.

You could guesstimate by checking the IP address - blocks assigned to residential users are likely humans, blocks assigned to cloud providers etc. likely bots.

This is far from true. Either via trojans, botnets, "crowd sourced vpns", or of course tor relays, residential IPs are a source of many bots. The overwhelming majority of spam sources (after you block a few data centers in NL).

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#209

Post by marginalia_nu »

dylan604 wrote: post #197
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is. There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

And who uses your search? I had never heard of "you" until just now. And there is the problem with "new" search engines. Unless you can come up with what would have to be one of the greatest ad campaigns the world has ever seen, no significant number of users will know you exist. Where does the money to pay for that ad campaign come from? How will a search engine generate money to stay relevant? Once people see you b…

Why would I need to generate money to stay relevant?

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#210

Post by throwaway14356 »

dylan604 wrote: post #197
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is. There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

And who uses your search? I had never heard of "you" until just now. And there is the problem with "new" search engines. Unless you can come up with what would have to be one of the greatest ad campaigns the world has ever seen, no significant number of users will know you exist. Where does the money to pay for that ad campaign come from? How will a search engine generate money to stay relevant? Once people see you b…

then he must be relevant
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