Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.
Blogwashing
11–20 of 117 posts
Re: Blogwashing
#12If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content?
This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing up, be it for SEO, for my more up to date 'voice' or because I switched to Gutenberg and removed janky slider plugins that haven't been updated since 2014. Should I re-date? Or leave them as-is?
Re: Blogwashing
#13Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.
I thought Google heavily penalized your site if the human version was different from the googlebot version
Re: Blogwashing
#14Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.
When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.
Re: Blogwashing
#15Search is just getting worse and worse, its a problem that probably nobody can solve with the current paradigm. I think in a few years there will be a significant opening in the search market for an algorithm that manages to structure information differently
Re: Blogwashing
#16Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.
Have you had any luck getting them to take that content down?
Re: Blogwashing
#17Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.
You want to read a "classical" comparison of SES vs SendGrid? Really?
Re: Blogwashing
#18Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.
I thought Google heavily penalized your site if the human version was different from the googlebot version
How do they detect that? Presumably human review, which can't possibly cover every malicious page on the internet. I assume if you report the site they queue it up to be scanned by a human, unless their solution is just to have versions of googlebot that are harder to detect - possible, but if someone is already going out of their way to trick googlebot, I don't know how well this would work in practice.
As a starting point, your not-googlebot needs to spider sites differently from googlebot (so it can't be detected by traffic analysis), imitate average user hardware well (GPU acceleration + high GPU performance, more realistically slow network, slower CPU hardware, etc), use network addresses not obviously Google's, and imitate user behavior (plausible input events, scrolling, etc). This is within Google's capabilities but is definitely an undertaking and SEO types could eventually identify their strategies.
Re: Blogwashing
#19If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content? This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing u…
I would re-date and just include a short note to that effect if I had updates of any material nature.
Re: Blogwashing
#20If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content? This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing u…
On some topics a new post, titled "X Revisited in 2019" would be the option I'd go for, updating the old article with the link to the new post (without updating the date in the old post).
Granted this would be my personal preference. From an SEO point of view this doesn't make sense, at all.