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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

#11

Post by bubblewand »

Yeah, Google stopped even trying to usefully index most of the web around ‘08 or ‘09 or so. Was super obvious when it happened and it’s been that way ever since. Your GitHub is up there because it’s a blessed website, your personal site isn’t and will struggle mightily to rank even when you search exact, unusual phrases on it, if it’s like most of the rest of the Web on Google these days.

Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help.

Most of the other indices aren’t much better. Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.

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

#12

Post by phkahler »

AznHisoka wrote: post #4

I’m looking at this from a 3rd party of view (definitely not claiming the .net “deserves” to rank higher) 1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement). I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links. 2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher. 3) Google is biased t…

>> I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.

With so many copycats on the internet, first to publish seems like a fairly good indication of the original source. But as we can see here, that's not always true.

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

#13

Post by ariehkovler »

It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses.

The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead.

One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.

Good luck, though!

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

#17

Post by tyingq »

AznHisoka wrote: post #4

I’m looking at this from a 3rd party of view (definitely not claiming the .net “deserves” to rank higher) 1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement). I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links. 2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher. 3) Google is biased t…

Most of the problem is the "only been a week" part, likely. Though you're fighting an algorithm that's been patched in inconsistent places for all sorts of weights like "authority" and "quality".

Thousands of little weights driven by obscure attributes of the site that you're not really going to figure out by thrashing and changing stuff.

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

#18

Post by DeathArrow »

>We trust Google to surface reliable information about elections. Vaccines. Medical conditions. Financial decisions. And they can't get this right?

Actually I don't trust Google and I don't expect it to surface reliable information. I expect it to surface information and I will dig through it and judge for myself whether it is reliable or not.

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

#20

Post by yorwba »

ariehkovler wrote: post #13

It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses. The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead. One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ra…

The article says "Filed takedown notices with Google, Cloudflare, and the domain registrar spaceship.com"
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