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Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

mdubakov.medium.com

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Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#31

Post by ericpauley »

boxed wrote: post #22
tintor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using that rule it would be very easy to derank any website.

Not if the list of A sites was manually curated. Like stackoverflow and wikipedia. This isn't hard for shooting down a ton of sites.

Then people could derank sites by copying them to stack overflow.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#32

Post by levymetal »

pupppet wrote: post #17

What really ticks me off are all these sites clearly scraping content from Stack Overflow that somehow end up near the top of the search results. How is there not an automated fix for this. Lemme help you out with this Googlers: If site content A == site content B, pagerank = -1.

These can be hidden using uBlock origin. I’ve got a list you can import (just use the raw link). The selector isn’t perfect in Google (sometimes leaves some unattached content) but the link is always removed. Feel free to submit a PR if you find any other SO clones - there seems to be no end to them.

https://github.com/levymetal/filter-lists/blob/main/filters/...

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#33

Post by thewebcount »

miguelazo wrote: post #9
more_corn wrote: post #4

Just switch search engines.

To what? I'm unaware of any decent alternatives, unfortunately. I have all my defaults set to DuckDuckGo, but as soon as I search anything remotely uncommon, I end up having to switch to Google (although at least you can block the ad results with Ublock Origin browser extension).

I’ve had very good luck with a paid account at kagi.com. They have many filtering options to remove sites you don’t ever want to see (like Pinterest, allrecipes.com, etc.).

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#34

Post by UncleMeat »

pupppet wrote: post #29
UncleMeat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cue a HN post “wtf google, my archive website is getting marked as spam.”

I don't want your archive website near the top of my search results when the original is readily accessible.

Won't stop the outrage post.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#35

Post by Fatnino »

UncleMeat wrote: post #34
pupppet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want your archive website near the top of my search results when the original is readily accessible.

Won't stop the outrage post.

The actual outrage should be when a small site posts something and then that content gets stolen and posted verbatim as an answer on stackoverflow.

There's even the possibility that the Google crawler will have seen the SO page before discovering the original small site.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#36

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

pupppet wrote: post #17

What really ticks me off are all these sites clearly scraping content from Stack Overflow that somehow end up near the top of the search results. How is there not an automated fix for this. Lemme help you out with this Googlers: If site content A == site content B, pagerank = -1.

They have a fix already and applied it to the Wikipedia clones. They intentionally ignore other content scrapers because they drive ad impressions.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#37

Post by tremon »

tintor wrote: post #21

DuckDuckGo

...has the same problem. There have been a few years where DDG/Bing's results were better than Google's for me, but nowadays DDG gives me the same blogspam results as Google used to do. I've mostly given up on general search engines, nowadays I use only site-specific searches. That means I won't find out about new motherboards other than those from MSI and Asus, and I won't know about python tooling unless they're listed on pypi, or maybe I will know it because it once featured on HN.

I've never used browser bookmarks before -- it used to be that I would remember enough about a site that I could always find it in the first few pages of search results. Nowadays, for many things I don't even bother to search; if I forgot to bookmark it, it might as well never have existed.

Frankly, it sucks. The endless quest for monetization has made it so that a large part of the Internet is now no longer discoverable for me. I eagerly await the return of curated directories, either in usenet or activitypub form.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#38

Post by tyingq »

chopete3 wrote: post #6

There is a simple way to show your frustration. 1. Buy Google stock 2. Google has to show more ads to keep market hype on stock price. 3. They will fill 2 pages instead of current one page with ads. And then 3 and 4... 4. You buy more stock and protect your down side. 5. They will insert 2-3 times more ads per video on youtube. At some point the average person will loose Google. You win big on stocks until then. /sar…

Not exactly that, but: https://www.gwei.org/index.php

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#39

Post by nojs »

pupppet wrote: post #27
plantain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So both sites lose? That'll make manipulation easier than ever before. Or does the older site win? Frequently scraped / already popular sites will love that.

Derank the newer page, you don't need to derank the entire site.

This doesn’t work in general because people can copy content faster than google can check who was first. Also sometimes you actually want the derivative.
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