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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

#41

Post by tehwebguy »

gitgud wrote: post #40

Anyone have any methods for avoiding this SEO nonsense? I generally prefix search query with `site:reddit.com` or `site:news.ycombinator.com` Which returns much better discussions about a question/topic, in those discussions can be genuinely great ideas and links

Yeah, and for product reviews I only trust SlickDeals commenters.

This funny tweet mostly covers it:

> u can google ur questions about the world and get the CIA FBI answer or u can add "reddit" to the end of it and learn the truth

https://twitter.com/literallysofie/status/137189962449199513...

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

#42

Post by sefrost »

gitgud wrote: post #40

Anyone have any methods for avoiding this SEO nonsense? I generally prefix search query with `site:reddit.com` or `site:news.ycombinator.com` Which returns much better discussions about a question/topic, in those discussions can be genuinely great ideas and links

Unfortunately I think the more this knowledge is shared the more those sites will be spammed.

Look what happened to ad blockers - we told everyone about them and now so many sites have ad blocker blockers.

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

#43

Post by bombolo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36
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.

I wish google had a feature to permanently ban domains from search results.

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

#44

Post by carewell »

Fatnino wrote: post #35
UncleMeat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The suggestion is not to penalize all websites that share some minor amount of content with SO but to remove websites that copy tens of thousands of comments from SO and do not provide any other value. It’s a pretty easy to identify and implement this distinction.

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

#45

Post by carewell »

levymetal wrote: post #32
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/...

Thanks! I didn’t realize uBlock can remove specific domains from Google search, but looking at filter definitions it makes sense.

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

#46

Post by xenospn »

imagetic wrote: post #3

Can't say I'm ever surprised to see another "WTF Google" post. The search has degraded a lot over the years. With that said, I've tried to switch on more than one occasion and Bing might be the only alternative that worked for me. DuckDuckGo is always way off the mark, no matter how many chances I've given it over the years. Google still wins, even with the ads and spammy stuff.

I thought DDG was mostly bing results at this point?

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

#47

Post by carewell »

nojs wrote: post #39
pupppet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let’s start with big offenders. If a website copied tens of thousands of comments from SO it gets penalized. We don’t always need to find a perfect system to improve our experience.

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

#48

Post by carewell »

ksidudwbw wrote: post #10
imagetic wrote: post #3

Can't say I'm ever surprised to see another "WTF Google" post. The search has degraded a lot over the years. With that said, I've tried to switch on more than one occasion and Bing might be the only alternative that worked for me. DuckDuckGo is always way off the mark, no matter how many chances I've given it over the years. Google still wins, even with the ads and spammy stuff.

Brave Search has done it for me

I am surprised by how well it works. Makes me wonder if they do use Google or Bing indexes after all.

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

#49

Post by apple4ever »

tremon wrote: post #37
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 li…

And its not just that: its going to the next page... and see literally the same results.

It drives me crazy. The next page should be totally different results! I can go 10 pages in, and still see something from the first page!!

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

#50

Post by prolyxis »

bombolo wrote: post #43
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish google had a feature to permanently ban domains from search results.

There are browser add-ons that can do this (for example, uBlacklist).
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