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

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

mdubakov.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 98 posts

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

#51

Post by propogandist »

tehwebguy wrote: post #41
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...

be weary of astroturfing. Reddit has had this problem for over a decade and increasing popularity means more shills using the site to sway opinions. Aged accounts, karma boosting and fake comments/engagements are all common techniques to propagate a desired narrative

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

#52

Post by vorpalhex »

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.

Kagi has that feature.

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

#53

Post by _cs2017_ »

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.

You have any examples of that? Sounds far-fetched to me, since SO posts:

(a) are in response to very specific questions

(b) can be easily reported to SO for plagiarism

(c) make no $$ for the poster, reducing the incentive to plagiarize

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

#54

Post by kdot »

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.

They had a personal block list at one point... but removed it.

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

#55

Post by _cs2017_ »

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.

> because they drive ad impressions.

Could you explain why?

If Google replaces SEO trash with decent results, the ads they will show on the Search page will remain unchanged. How would the impressions suffer? Or rather, since Google charges per click not per impression for search ads, how would ad clicks suffer?

In fact, I thought low-quality organic search results are purely a negative for Google profits, since users (over a very long run) move their search elsewhere (Tiktok, Reddit, etc.).

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

#57

Post by mrobins »

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.

This is entirely anecdotal but recently many top results in DDG read like they’re written by GPT-3 or the like. Half coherent sprawls of text that contain lots of random factoids but nothing novel or that actually answers the question.

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

#58

Post by djbusby »

tyingq wrote: post #38
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

Looks like only 200 million years to reach the goal.

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

#59

Post by paulpauper »

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

or use https://hn.algolia.com/

the problem with Reddit is for some stupid reason that has yet to be fixed and likely never will, Google shows reallllllly old reddit results but marks them as new.

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

#60

Post by lolinder »

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

For dev searches, Kagi. I switched during closed beta, and I couldn't be happier. The SEO'd GitHub or SO copypasta is gone by default, and it gives you the ability to ban or prioritize other sites in your searches. I honestly haven't had to do that much because their filters are great by default, though I did give MDN a bump so it's always at the top for web stuff.
Post reply on HN