I've lately noticed that searching Google for topics related to gardening in Finnish often gives me some scraped and machine translated pages from Russia. Really annoying that totally useless content is so high up in the results.
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#102Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
Same here, I no longer can find anything sensible on Google, regardless how much I try to customize the search expression.
Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs' And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example. Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'! Even putting something opposite or unrelated to…
Reservoir Cats is actually a movie! I feel like I've slipped into an alternative time stream.
You just got me something for the weekend. :)
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.
I wonder why Yandex opens every link in a new window. How can they track bounceback?
98% of Russian sites uses Yandex Metrika. It's really easy to track bounceback if you control both search engine and web analitics tool :)
Actually Metrika is quiet big even outside of ex-CIS countries, IIRC it's like 15% of GA in terms of number of sites.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#105Can somebody else who is in Norway can confirm this? It could be simply be a malware injecting this. Would be great to eliminate this possibility
I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages…
That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#106I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic.
I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them.
Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their proxy traffic towards many sites I managed. I could easily document their behaviour.
In the same time, I wrote a crawler that visited their sites over a long, long time. I learned that they kept injecting hidden links to other sites in their network, so I did let my bot look at those also.
By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it.
My bot found in excess of 100K domains being used for this operation, targeting all of westeren Europe. All the 100K sites contained proxied content and was hidden behind Cloudflare, but thanks to the position I had, I managed to find their backend anyways.
We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down.
Oh, and the journalist? He did find a Dutch company that was not happy to see neither him or the photographer :)
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#107Can somebody else who is in Norway can confirm this? It could be simply be a malware injecting this. Would be great to eliminate this possibility
Can confirm this is not malware, Google has a huge spam problem, see my previous comments.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#108Wow, the Norwegian on those scam web sites is actually perfect. Never seen that before.
That's because it's real content that they have stolen and just republished. In SEO circles one like to say that original content is king. Well, not so much after all.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#109Not sure how relevant this is, but the animal characters in the top image are from a Russian children hit cartoon "The Smesharicks" (literally "The Laughballs").
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#110Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for: Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale. For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" whi…
Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool.
But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.