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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

#91

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…

> 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 something legit and actually useful to a tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they already have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a new one to expand their shitty network.

From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs $129/month. Do you care about SEO that much? No, so you go to these agencies and give them money for them to give you the output of such a tool. But that SaaS also only contains vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best practices" because they also cannot know what drives traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.

My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one. Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a website after the knock-off version already exist, you might as well give up immediately, it's gonna be near impossible to recover from that.

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

#92

Copycats are not a new problem. You can be completely open source and have a trademark on the project name.

It might be mitigated a bit by having a website that doesn't look like AI slop, just to differentiate it from the duplicates which are also AI slop.

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

#93

Suddenly 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.

Unfortunately everyone here is terrible at curation, because this post is itself LLM output.

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

#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...

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

#95
post #60

[flagged]

Food stamps?? This is a ghoulish position, morally, financially, and as a matter of policy. We live in the richest country on planet earth and we eliminated child hunger here during COVID only to roll it back . It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our military adventurism budget. Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity , right now. Children need food to grow up and be 'pr…

You are arguing against a different argument than your parent. He implied that people using food stamps do not respect the effort it took to provide the food. You seem to be arguing whether food stamps are profitable.

Your implication that people when not given free food will starve and that your parent commenter wants people to starve is clear manipulation.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that does say something about the world, doesn't it? I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might as well give us what they prompted or just write under Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking to the camera about it like they might've with claude perhaps. They also have d…

My guesses in no particular order: 1) this style genuinely is preferred by lots of people on X/Twitter so you might as well lean into it 2) People who spend a lot of time with LLMs think this sort of writing is normal or even standard just through overexposure, a sort of pseudo social proof 2b) People who spend a lot of time with other people who use LLMs think this is how humans write (actual social proof) 3) People…

> 3) People are insecure about their writing ability and find the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing

My writing style gets criticized. a lot (I think its from people who have good hearts who just want to point out some flaws and I appreciate that). So I will admit that I understand this point because if someone questions your writing style, you do get insecure and sometimes I did have thoughts of leaving hackernews because of it, because I mean I always took pride in all of my comments, they are mine after all :)

I don't think you can ever fix that, All AI does is remove that critique from you to LLM but I'd say that the largest reason people might do it is because its hard to respond to such criticism (IMO).

If suppose someone says your writing is bad. To me, it takes a huge mental effort to not be angry at the decision and type something. It takes me time to reflect and try to respond to them peacefully.

I think I am only able to do that because I imagine this as a person who has business and I imagine how I would want an ideal business or a person who has business would want to reply and how it would look on the business. I have witnessed some businesses who are absolutely top notch but their responses/nature in forums sometimes is very off-putting. I'd rather try to do opposite.

And to me, its those particular comments that I write that I cherish the most. I had once written a comment which felt so good to me personally from a criticism that I seriously wondered how I wrote that. For a few days, I can't say for sure but I remember just looking up at that comment whenever I felt bad.

The one thing I agree is that it can be very time consuming tho to respond to such criticism.

I mean, I try to respond to these comments nicely but that doesn't mean I am not insecure about my writing. I do think that I may project that if I write a nice comment but yeah, I believe everyone can be insecure about writing to some degree. And chances are that most people are more likely to create a ruckus of the situation than handle it well.

So I think from all of this, if I had to summarize it, I'd like it if people could share their concerns but in a way which is agreeable. If you don't like someone's writing, try to point it out in a way of feedback/cooperation that the other person I can agree in.

If you do want to point out someone's writing, try to imagine yourself being in their situation and try to anticipate what message might be the most beneficial/(cooperative?) in that sense. Just imagine yourself in their shoes basically.

So I do agree with you on this point. Perhaps point 5) as well because this comment took me 40 mins to write and think.

It's also how time is invested, like people rather use their 40 mins to create a project which can reach x stars on github and that will have some definite measure. Whereas this comment got no measure in like, the value right now but I like to think that given enough long time, if I ever create anything. These comments could be meaningful in that regards to show what I think maybe.

Another part is that I can't stand obnoxious reddit/twitter. Those algorithms feel flawed to me and I'd rather not contribute to that machine and the funny thing is that the above line of thinking might be more beneficial in those platforms than here given that they are mainstream but yeah.

More than anything, I just write because I find these topics interesting to type about or that, I write for myself, I wish to read these comments I type in future to really see what I was thinking about stuff. Kinda like a journal and twitter/reddit platforms are less intended for such long comments than HN and tbh HN can have its limits too but I think the community overall is much more receptive of long comments.

(Imagine if I wrote you such a long post on a random subreddit or in twitter, those platforms are less likely to capture nuance imo)

Edit: were these the best 40 minutes I have spent, probably not, that was playing skribble with my friend yesterday but like I did get a comment permanently about a particular topic I can reference anywhere in a discussion and it was interesting to think about it. But if a person doesn't care about it or the community doesn't do backlash about AI writing and those were your points. So yeah I do agree with you more and more thinking about it honestly.

To some people, it could be an interesting tradeoff to spend less time thinking or writing but I mean, that doesn't feel right to me, especially if you are passionate about something I guess.

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

#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 get on with your life.

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

#98

> 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?

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

#100
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It isn't doing that now, but you can't be sure about what they're going to be up to a little ways down the line, the fact that they are clearly trying to misdirect the traffic is proof positive they're up to no good.

Just do a bit of risk assessment if something like this were to be shipped to people that have come to blindly trust the source and you'll see why letting this slip is a very bad idea.

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