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I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
21–30 of 288 posts
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#22[flagged]
OP is playing the wrong game. They should have filed a trademark for the name and start sending legal letters to the copycat. This is why open source projects like Firefox hold trademarks near and dear.
Last that I paid attention, filing a trademark was a 4-figure (US$) move, and defending it internationally could easily be 5-figures.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#23My advice to all OSS developers: if you open source your project, expect it to be abused in all possible ways. Don't open source if you have anxiety over it. It is how the world works, whether we like it or not.
I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study. But TBH, please help yourself first.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#24> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem. Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.
> Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. Google linking to a fake website directly underneath the real project's repository that has a real link to the real website isn't a SEO problem, lol.
If it doesn't work it's not SEO.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#25It'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"
Yeah but you do need to hang the takedown on some technical reason like copyright or scamming. The issue here is there's no obvious victim. Makes a takedown harder.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#26I'll be honest, I'd take this more seriously if this post didn't read like ChatGPT output. If you won't spend the effort to use your own words why should I stir myself to care?
Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese:
## The Slop Problem
Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality. Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in.
- Every post has LLM tells. This is key.
- Posts get upvoted anyway. Nobody seems to notice or indeed care.
- People acclimate to the slop. This isn't just a coincidence. This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of this, they begin to think it sounds normal.
## The Replying Dilemma
Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand, if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of writing.
## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option
Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it your whole personality. Go insane.
## The "Giving Up" Solution
Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#27Copycats are not a new problem. You can be completely open source and have a trademark on the project name.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#28> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem. Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.
I'm not sure how relevant this is anymore, but when I worked in SEO/Rep Management, when a website was dinged either by google or by hackers, we would usually spin up a new website as an umbrella website for the brand, fix their old site, and create a few smaller websites for the brand in specific niches (like if the brand was a bookseller, we'd have local websites, genre websites, etc.), link to the new websites by the umbrella site, then do a link analysis of the old site, and any news media with high authority, we'd have them update their links to point to the new umbrella website.
It was 100% a game of whack-a-mole. And while we were a reputation raiser, we were always combatting against reputation tarnishers. Car dealerships already have a bad reputation to begin with, but they hate eachother more than their customers hate them. They were our bread and butter. Same with tradespeople (plumbing, electrical, hvac, handy(wo)men).
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#29It'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"
Since the clone site isn't doing anything obviously malicious like spreading malware or blatantly illegal content none of those parties will take any action whatsoever, nor should they.
Re: I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
#30Suddenly the pre-Google Yahoo model of curated links is starting to seem relevant again.
Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.