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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

#241
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw this is a pre LLM problem.

Yep. SEO spam has been a thing for decades. LLMs have supercharged it though, it's so much easier to create dozens or hundreds or thousands of ultra low effort LLM written webpages and websites that it ever was before LLMs.

I'm not talking about LLMs diluting search. I'm saying users are using LLMs to search more than search itself, including in search engines.

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

#242

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fak…

If Nanoclaw generates some revenue, you should trademark the name and also buy nanoclaw.com. Move the site to the .com domain and then do the steps above. All things being equal, ".com" TLD should get you higher page rank than your existing ".dev". Google is ranking ".net" fake page higher than ".dev". If your page wasn't on .dev TDL it might be second already.

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

#243

[flagged]

Extremely offtopic but I accidentally pasted the link linuxtoaster.com. (with the dot) and I thought it would lead to my search engine (DDG) or something but then the website opened. Then I tried opening up google.com. and this works too. I didn't know that websites resolve when you add another additional dot after TLD. This was a really fun coincidence type thing so I wanted to share it with you.

I got tripped by this once - a tester at work accidentally added a trailing . to a dev site URL and everything was broken... because the CORS code didn't account for a trailing . in the URL.

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

#244

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fak…

> Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev there?

Did you read the post before promoting yourself?

> Submitted to Google Search Console probably 15 times.

> map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it.

The links are already correct:

> NanoClaw got covered in The Register, VentureBeat, The New Stack, all linking to the real site.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want evil megacorps to give you money when they use your thing, maybe say "if you're an evil megacorp you have to give me money when you use my thing" in the license? If your license reads "hey, you can use this however you want, no matter who you are, and don't have to give me money", people will use it however they want, no matter who they are, and won't give you money. Unfortunately, for decades, free softw…

> free software fanatics have bullied and eager programmers We must travel in different circles. I've been around a while, and I've never seen _any individual_ bullied for keeping their code closed source. That said, I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code, for practical reasons, and I'm open about that.

> I have an extreme bias toward only using open source code

If you have eyes closed how would you notice?

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publicly defending pedophilia arguably isn't “right”, but if you restrict Stallman's positions to software licensing, then I'd agree with you.

He was wrong about refusing to make gcc more modular by fear that it would be used to insert proprietary plugins, which is why llvm is behind every new language or dev tool now and gcc is only relevant because the kernel still depends on it (for now). His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years. People might yearn for his ideals, but it's just not the world we live in.

> His opinions on software have been largely out of touch for the past 20 years

I said “software licensing”, you're talking about “software”.

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

#247

Before installing new software, I usually visit its GitHub page or Wikipedia entry first and click through to the official site from there. I just don't trust the 'official' sites that pop up in Google search results. How many of you do the same?

Why not use your package manager as a first step instead?

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

#248
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?

Yes, computers are pretty fast. But also don't ignore history, the website shouldn't have been ranked higher than the github repo in the first place

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

#249

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…

> 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others. > 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. Reason why I still always get the Java 8 docs for any search. Annoying.

I think the real reason for that is simply that a lot of people are still running Java 8 (so those docs still see a lot of traffic). I remember reading that it's still used by something like 25% of Java developers.

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

#250

A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo Happy to do the same for you if you want. The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fak…

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…

Author already is spending personal agency

So the feeling is fine, and if he’s going to bother at all, which he is, he should be doing it efficiently. Everything so far was panic and inefficiency

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