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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

#101

Post by shadowgovt »

youknownothing wrote: post #94

> I've done everything you're supposed to do and more. By the sound of it, everything except reporting it? Winning SEO just means appear before them in search results, but the fake page shouldn't just lose the race, it should be taken down. ICANN specifies how to deal with this kind of issue: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-a...

Comparing the two sites side-by-side (nanoclaw.net, the fake, and nanoclaw.dev, the correct one), there's also the issue that nanoclaw.net is doing a better job of looking like a correct website.

The fake site:

- includes a copyright statement

- includes a bottom sitemap

- includes an "author" meta-tag

- includes a sameAs to discord "nanoclaw", where the real site references some random string discord server

- has a .net instead of a .dev

Given all that plus the PageRank feedback loop of the .net having been up longer and enough people having found what they're looking for from it to not trigger Google's low-quality signals, author is fighting an uphill battle here; the squatters know what they're doing.

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

#102

Post by uyzstvqs »

I did some experimenting using different search engines and AIs. Here's the results:

Google and Brave linked to the official GitHub repo followed by the fake domain. DuckDuckGo and Bing linked to the fake domain first, followed by the official GitHub. Mojeek gave higher ranking to two third party articles, but linked to both the official GitHub and website without fakes. Qwant was the worst, as the official website was the second result amongst multiple fake websites and an unrelated GitHub repo.

Then there the AIs. ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and Brave Search "Ask" all linked to the official website, and some added the GitHub repo as well. DuckDuckGo Search Assist linked to just the official GitHub. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok also explicitly warned about the fake websites. Copilot got the official website and GitHub right, but linked to a presumably fake X account as well.

Conclusion: Google, Brave and Mojeek win in search. AI is very good and clearly beats search overall. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok stand out in quality.

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

#103

Post by shadowgovt »

stavros wrote: post #7
azangru wrote: post #5

> So I built a real website. That was two weeks ago. Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2 weeks?

The whole project is a month old, and two weeks were more than enough for Google to rank the fake site first, so yes?

There is significant first-mover advantage in the index, especially when the public is finding the initial result to be good enough to satisfy their questions.

Google doesn't care more about authoritative answers than the public does; the public is one of Google's signals for good-quality results.

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

#104

Post by shadowgovt »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #98
ryandrake wrote: post #97

> I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code, building community, pushing features, fixing bugs. Then just write code, build features, and fix bugs. Nobody is forcing you to fix search engines' problems. If you're not making money off of traffic, then why worry so much about SEO? Just do your thing. If it really bothers you, put a little note on your GitHub warning people about the fake site, and…

You think somebody who wrote "nanoclaw" really doesn't care about getting industry famous and improving their career prospects?

That information comes from the GitHub commit history, not the existence / nonexistence / relative popularity of a website. If that's the goal, the imitating website is only helping the career prospects so long as it doesn't do anything shady on pass-through.

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

#106

Post by LtWorf »

bubblewand wrote: post #11

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…

I moved my projects on codeberg and the first results in still the locked github project with the link to the new one.

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

#107

Post by bubblewand »

huijzer wrote: post #52
bubblewand wrote: post #11

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…

> 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. Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic

Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking that ads are "natural" search results. To include an extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for your own exact company and product names so competitors don't get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would have been all over them for this many years ago, besides which they'd long ago have been broken up into several separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions they've performed.

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

#108

Post by RealityVoid »

beej71 wrote: post #105
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #35

[flagged]

Oh shit... Ok... Um... Beej's Guide to Network Programming is now $500! Respect me!

Oh! Thank you mighty capitalist god! Now I appreciate the value add you bring this world! I was blind before, but now I see!

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

#109

Post by Boxxed »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #35

[flagged]

Pretty much matches my experience. Trying to sell something on Craig's list or whatever is pretty hit-or-miss, whether it's $5 or $500. But make it free, and people will bang down your door to try to get it. It could be a shoebox full of used soy sauce packets and you'll get people for days asking if it's still available.

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

#110

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

input_sh wrote: post #91
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is very generous of you! No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article. The author has invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit websites already link to it et cetera, it's all explained in the article. From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those figures by doing somethi…

> No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article.

Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own, I suppose.

But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence. Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?

My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's frustrating as hell.

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