181–190 of 238 posts
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Google used to have a deny/block list. But such lists are obviously very advertising unfriendly, since the companies paying for placement and running the most ads are most likely to be blocked.
They have one, it's just centralised and blocks the good sites.
> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel? This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money. https://www.google.com/search?&q=domain+resale+backlinks
The targets in the spam world (email and seo) that want to make money want the low hanging fruit. They want uneducated people to visit the site. I remember when google was still young, these same people wanted visitors from AOL. Why? lower traffic and much higher conversion. What kind of person uses AOL when google is available? An uneducated one and a new one to the internet. Or an older person who is likely to fall for a scheme.
I suspect more and more visitors coming from google will be seen this way in the age of AI and social media searching. Easy targets. Whether it's true or not is debatable (maybe people just want to read a real webpage and have AI burnout). Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.
When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit…
Fandom was pure corruption even before the tenth round of enshittification.
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If there is a person on the other end it’s not someone who has any link to the company, they’ll be an outsourced service, so all you’d be doing is sending graphic porn to a poorly paid worker. It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
The cashier still gets paid mind you, if he can put up with it it's the company who is inconvenienced by the slower queue.
Occasionally your server deserves a bit of dickish behaviour because of their attitude, but this is relatively rather rare in my experience.
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> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel? This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money. https://www.google.com/search?&q=domain+resale+backlinks
Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert. The ta…
People who work in actual infrastructure building tech may not know or have any reason to pay attentino to how many shady "affiliate" networks there are in existence for click traffic.
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In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.
My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia. I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs. I hope this means no more of th…
Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day.
YMMV
Some of this might just be problems with the websites themselves. With the Path Of Exile 2 Wiki example, I'm looking at the sitemaps. Once you get through the first sitemap of nested sitemaps (ugh, not a fan of those), the very first actual sitemap returns: XML Parsing Error: no root element found Location: https://www.poe2wiki.net/sitemap/sitemap-poe_wiki-poe2_wiki--NS_0-0.xml Line Number 18040, Column 1 (EDIT: Of c…
Me again! I couldn't figure out why I was getting transient errors on that Poe2wiki sitemap, so I tried looking at other sitemaps on the site. I'm getting transient errors on all of them. Then I realized - the sitemap files are being overwritten in real time. Every edit on the Wiki is causing the sitemap file to be edited in real time. That's why the sitemaps sometimes stop right in the middle of a filename when I ac…
When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom. The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable. The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site. (It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit…
I enjoy the this extension that redirects search results from Fandom and other such terrible hosts to their higher quality indie alternatives. https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy
This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links. /edit It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
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This is great for users, but it’s terrible for the SEO of those independent wikis as you’re telling Google you want to click on Fandom and Fextra links. /edit It appears this is no longer the case and the extension does things a lot better than it used to!
That might be true for the default config in the extension, but you can also configure the extension to de-emphasize fandom wikis or outright hide them in search results. I don't quite remember the exact default config though.