Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blogwashing

eggonomy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 117 posts

Re: Blogwashing

#51

Post by hombre_fatal »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #16
ddevault wrote: post #11

Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.

Have you had any luck getting them to take that content down?

It's not really an issue unless they outrank you or rank near you.

In my experience, Google's dupe content detection is pretty good and their penalty is harsh. I once ran a website that tried to curate and touch up old usenet material that never could rank all that well because of dupe content (another website had monospaced dumps of the usenet content).

Re: Blogwashing

#52

Post by sct202 »

WA wrote: post #4

What? I thought I read somewhere on Google's webdev infos that they know when an article was first created vs. updated. Not sure if this "old trick" still improves the ranking of an article, but surely enough, it baits people into clicking on a link. I noticed it a couple times myself. Stuff that's obviously an older article appears in the SERPs as if it was published a few days ago.

It could be a self fulfilling thing, if the CTR increases on a search listing (because it appears newer to the user) that listing generally moves up because of higher CTR.

Re: Blogwashing

#53

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #2

Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick. But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

[deleted]

Re: Blogwashing

#54

Post by semiotagonal »

codingslave wrote: post #15

Search is just getting worse and worse, its a problem that probably nobody can solve with the current paradigm. I think in a few years there will be a significant opening in the search market for an algorithm that manages to structure information differently

Yes. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If the visibility of your work is determined by it's "freshness", then freshening up makes sense. If everyone does this, then Google et al will have to find a better criterion to rank by.

Re: Blogwashing

#55

Post by PretzelFisch »

I don't really see the harm in re-dating a blog to keep it high in search results. There is a lot of information that once publishes stays relevant and informative for years, to get dinged on seo because it is stale says more about google then the blog authors. Also they have an image which doesn't tell you if a links url was updated in an edit.

Re: Blogwashing

#56

Post by mikepurvis »

code_duck wrote: post #41
swalsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.

I have missed so much media over the past 20 years that I operate like this. I'm not concerned with whether music or games are new or not. Media that came out 5 or 15 years ago is just as new to me as something that came out this year, and there's a much larger selection.

There's a whole community of video gamers who do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

Cost is the most obvious motivator, but for me it's more about filtering for quality in order to best allocate my limited adult gaming hours— why sink the time and money into a just-released title that might turn out to be the next Anthem or Fallout 76, when you can wait a few years about pick it up for $10-15 once it's a known winner?

That said, even within r/patientgamers, there's a spectrum in terms of just how patient some people are. For example, some people are just getting into stuff from the Xbox 360 era, whereas others are already talking about whether RDR2 has stood the test of time or not, ha.

Re: Blogwashing

#57

Post by mfer »

The "freshness" issue is one that causes problems and subtly sets priorities.

Problems come up when looking for older content on purpose. A lot of older content is very relevant still today. I know people who could not find something they knew existed in Google. Switched to Bing and it came right to the top. The difference was the way newer content was prioritized.

Google doing this sets priorities. It says that newer is more important. Is that true? Many would argue it's not. Google says it is and "advises" people where to go based on that.

I find these worth considering.

Re: Blogwashing

#59

Post by swixmix »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

When it comes to blogs, prioritizing new over old is generally a good idea.

If a blog post is worth publishing multiple times then it should be published as something different.

I think Google ranks microblogs, blogs, articles, wikis, discussions, books, etc differently.

Re: Blogwashing

#60

Post by jagged-chisel »

endorphone wrote: post #45
nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

Or they didn't change because the author moved on to other things. So their article is full of obsolete information, comparisons are no longer relevant, old APIs, invalid syntax, incorrect library assumptions, etc. When I search for anything technical the first thing I do is change the date range to the past year.

> ... full of obsolete information ...

That would make it not "one of the best," right?

Post reply on HN