Live data from Hacker News

The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

1–10 of 359 posts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#5

Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before. It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#7
I've noticed this daily.

Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard.

I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic.

EDIT: After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me.

Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content.

I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page.

Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing.

Example: "wash car"

Result in google: "A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article.

"Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article.

Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway.

Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve.

Weird.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#8
post #5

Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before. It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

I agree. Tons of sites employ the bounce-back avoidance tactics, and these don’t particularly help their ranking (in fact, lots on non-ranking sites do it — presumably just to keep you on the page)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#9
post #5

Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before. It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN