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Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

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Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#71

Post by nikanj »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #30
plantain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So both sites lose? That'll make manipulation easier than ever before. Or does the older site win? Frequently scraped / already popular sites will love that.

It kinda sounds like you think that Google doesn't have the resources to have a human decide that stackoverflow isn't itself a spam clone. This is a huge problem for a very small number of sites and a non-existent problem for everything else. The list of authoritative, egregiously-copied sources could easily be maintained by one person. The only difficulty comes from determining when to trigger the system.

They have the resources, they don’t have the willingness. Google’s MO is never hiring a human to do a job well, when a computer can do the same job badly.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#72

Post by lazyeye »

bombolo wrote: post #43
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a fix already and applied it to the Wikipedia clones. They intentionally ignore other content scrapers because they drive ad impressions.

I wish google had a feature to permanently ban domains from search results.

There is a chrome addon called uBlacklist that auto-hides domains (configurable) in the google search results.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#73

Post by bityard »

mrobins wrote: post #57
imagetic wrote: post #3

Can't say I'm ever surprised to see another "WTF Google" post. The search has degraded a lot over the years. With that said, I've tried to switch on more than one occasion and Bing might be the only alternative that worked for me. DuckDuckGo is always way off the mark, no matter how many chances I've given it over the years. Google still wins, even with the ads and spammy stuff.

This is entirely anecdotal but recently many top results in DDG read like they’re written by GPT-3 or the like. Half coherent sprawls of text that contain lots of random factoids but nothing novel or that actually answers the question.

No, this is just how most bloggers talk. /s

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#74

Post by mynameisvlad »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #53
Fatnino wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual outrage should be when a small site posts something and then that content gets stolen and posted verbatim as an answer on stackoverflow. There's even the possibility that the Google crawler will have seen the SO page before discovering the original small site.

You have any examples of that? Sounds far-fetched to me, since SO posts: (a) are in response to very specific questions (b) can be easily reported to SO for plagiarism (c) make no $$ for the poster, reducing the incentive to plagiarize

You misunderstand the parent comment.

They’re saying there are full sites which just scrape SO content. These are not hosted in StackExchange and therefore are not subject to their reporting system, and generally are filled with ads which provide the money and therefore incentive.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#75

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #53
Fatnino wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual outrage should be when a small site posts something and then that content gets stolen and posted verbatim as an answer on stackoverflow. There's even the possibility that the Google crawler will have seen the SO page before discovering the original small site.

You have any examples of that? Sounds far-fetched to me, since SO posts: (a) are in response to very specific questions (b) can be easily reported to SO for plagiarism (c) make no $$ for the poster, reducing the incentive to plagiarize

It wouldn't have to be malicious or uncredited, SO answers often quote manuals, books, etc.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#76

Post by my_usernam3 »

propogandist wrote: post #51
tehwebguy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and for product reviews I only trust SlickDeals commenters. This funny tweet mostly covers it: > u can google ur questions about the world and get the CIA FBI answer or u can add "reddit" to the end of it and learn the truth https://twitter.com/literallysofie/status/137189962449199513...

be weary of astroturfing. Reddit has had this problem for over a decade and increasing popularity means more shills using the site to sway opinions. Aged accounts, karma boosting and fake comments/engagements are all common techniques to propagate a desired narrative

Unfortunately the game of cat and mouse between marketing teams, and potential consumers simply trying to research, continues.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#77

Post by d7z »

If you have page with a clean cut answer and a page full of repeated synonyms around the question prompt - the latter wins on Google.

If you have a site full of Google ads and a site without google ads, the former wins Google search traffic.

If you have a site with google analytics and one without the former wins.

If you have a search engine should you be allowed to prioritize entries that use your advertising network, analytics software, payment methods, etc?

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#78

Post by [deleted] »

UncleMeat wrote: post #28
pupppet wrote: post #17

What really ticks me off are all these sites clearly scraping content from Stack Overflow that somehow end up near the top of the search results. How is there not an automated fix for this. Lemme help you out with this Googlers: If site content A == site content B, pagerank = -1.

Cue a HN post “wtf google, my archive website is getting marked as spam.”

[deleted]

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#79

Post by paulcole »

d7z wrote: post #77

If you have page with a clean cut answer and a page full of repeated synonyms around the question prompt - the latter wins on Google. If you have a site full of Google ads and a site without google ads, the former wins Google search traffic. If you have a site with google analytics and one without the former wins. If you have a search engine should you be allowed to prioritize entries that use your advertising networ…

Holds envelope to head and does Carnac impression

Name 3 things about SEO that aren’t true.

Re: Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam

#80

Post by JasonFruit »

ksidudwbw wrote: post #10
imagetic wrote: post #3

Can't say I'm ever surprised to see another "WTF Google" post. The search has degraded a lot over the years. With that said, I've tried to switch on more than one occasion and Bing might be the only alternative that worked for me. DuckDuckGo is always way off the mark, no matter how many chances I've given it over the years. Google still wins, even with the ads and spammy stuff.

Brave Search has done it for me

I've been using it, and it's not bad, but I do fall back on Google fairly often.
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