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I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

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Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#71

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

Growtika wrote: post #53

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fak…

This is very generous of you!

If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken.

While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of my life because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT THERE in the GitHub repository?

Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me rage against the machine on the author's behalf.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#72

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

roywiggins wrote: post #64
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #55

Another comment here but here are all the search engines I looked at: 1. DDG 2. Kagi 3. Brave 4. Ecosia 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia 7. Mojeek 8. Yandex.ru from 1-5 all referenced .net before .dev and DDG referenced .net before github , marinalia didn't give me either .net, .dev or gh link but rather docker.com or some other tech articles Mojeek and Yandex.ru DID give me .dev links before .net at the time of writing. I…

I think you put more effort into this comment than the entire OP, which was clearly written by Claude.

Now that does say something about the world, doesn't it?

I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha

I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might as well give us what they prompted or just write under Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking to the camera about it like they might've with claude perhaps.

They also have discord, They could have literally given a free contributor to help write the article from such video or concerns and credit them properly. I mean, heck I could've written the article for free for just a credit at this point where I got so invested haha.

I genuinely don't understand why you would prompt an article/text out of all things with AI. I hope I never get persuaded with this dark side lol.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#73

Post by beepbooptheory »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #35

[flagged]

Free as in beer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way or another.

Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#74

Post by [deleted] »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #71
Growtika wrote: post #53

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fak…

This is very generous of you! If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken. While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of my life because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website w…

[deleted]

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#75

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

TreeInBuxton wrote: post #41
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely offtopic but I accidentally pasted the link linuxtoaster.com. (with the dot) and I thought it would lead to my search engine (DDG) or something but then the website opened. Then I tried opening up google.com. and this works too. I didn't know that websites resolve when you add another additional dot after TLD. This was a really fun coincidence type thing so I wanted to share it with you.

That's what makes domains true FQDNs :) I read an interesting blog article on this a while back: https://lacot.org/blog/2024/10/29/the-trailing-dot-in-domain...

This is an interesting rabbit hole I wasn't prepared to jump in. Thanks for sharing the article, the world does work in strange coincidences indeed.

Have given a glance through it but I am also bookmarking to read it later once I get more free. Thanks for sharing it!

From the article:

> Wait, what? I can put a dot at the end of my domain names?

This was exactly how I felt at that moment :) The article has started pretty nicely.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#76

Post by fc417fc802 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #44
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #35

[flagged]

It took me a long time to realise that people value things by how much they pay for them, not by how much they cost to produce. It doesn't matter if that's software, a pair of trousers or a meal at a restaurant. This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.

I think that's backwards. If something is expensive those who don't value it won't pay and thus won't have. It's not that paying results in respect but rather a straightforward case of sample bias.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#77

Post by roywiggins »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #72
roywiggins wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you put more effort into this comment than the entire OP, which was clearly written by Claude.

Now that does say something about the world, doesn't it? I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might as well give us what they prompted or just write under Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking to the camera about it like they might've with claude perhaps. They also have d…

My guesses in no particular order:

1) this style genuinely is preferred by lots of people on X/Twitter so you might as well lean into it

2) People who spend a lot of time with LLMs think this sort of writing is normal or even standard just through overexposure, a sort of pseudo social proof

2b) People who spend a lot of time with other people who use LLMs think this is how humans write (actual social proof)

3) People are insecure about their writing ability and find the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing

4) people are lazy

5) people aren't lazy per se but they know writing has been so devalued that they aren't going to spend time on it that they don't need to

6) their first experience of writing was trying to hit word count requirements in grade school and that stuck

7) Visibly using LLMs is becoming a shibboleth for a social group on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's a marker that you are dogfooding the crappy AI tools you're developing and selling. Under this theory, being visibly LLM output is actually intentional: "look ma, no hands- all NanoClaw!"

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#78

Post by pbmonster »

signorovitch wrote: post #66

> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem. I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev is never in the first page. Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode." The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.) Seems this is…

> Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode."

Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.

Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it does research.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#79

Post by MarkSweep »

The link on GitHub to the real site is marked with rel="nofollow". I wonder if it would make sense for GitHub to remove nofollow in some circumstances. Perhaps based on some sort of reputation system or if the site links back to the repo with a in the header? Presumably that would help the real site rank higher when the repo ranks highly.

Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

#80

Post by Sweepi »

> When you Google "NanoClaw," a fake website ranks #2 globally, right below the project's GitHub.

Unfortunately, the fake website [.net] is also #3 on Kagi, and #1 on Duckduckgo. On Kagi, the Github is #1 and nanoclaw.dev is #4, but only if you count "Interesting Finds". On Duckduckgo, the Github is #2 and nanoclaw.dev is nowhere to be found.

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