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

https://mdubakov.medium.com/google-please-do-something-with-your-ads-and-seo-spam-99a6b039354c

by tablet • 4 years ago

126 94 4 years ago

mdubakov.medium.com

tommek4077• 4 years ago

They earn on both. Ads and the ad cramped seo stuff. So they probably wont change anything. And this is the case for the last ten years.

imagetic• 4 years ago

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.

bluepoint3• 4 years ago

Some people here a few days ago recommended kagi, a paid service with a limited free option. I have been trying it and so far the results seem great!

dylanowen• 4 years ago

Kagi has been amazing: verbatim mode that actually works, blocking sites you don't want to see, boosting sites you always want to prioritize, and lists of sites you can customize for specific searches.

boxed2• 4 years ago

I've switched. It's great at least for devs.

ksidudwbw• 4 years ago

Brave Search has done it for me

carewell4• 4 years ago

I am surprised by how well it works. Makes me wonder if they do use Google or Bing indexes after all.

JasonFruit• 4 years ago

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

xenospn• 4 years ago

I thought DDG was mostly bing results at this point?

mrobins• 4 years ago

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.

bityard• 4 years ago

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

0x5345414e• 4 years ago

Kagi has been great for me

more_corn• 4 years ago

Just switch search engines.

miguelazo• 4 years ago

To what? I'm unaware of any decent alternatives, unfortunately. I have all my defaults set to DuckDuckGo, but as soon as I search anything remotely uncommon, I end up having to switch to Google (although at least you can block the ad results with Ublock Origin browser extension).

sli• 4 years ago

I still have to fall back to Google sometimes but DDG covers a good 80% of my search usage just fine. Any amount of switching is better than none at all, even if just to push back against Google's hegemony however we can.

helph67• 4 years ago

There are search engines that value your privacy. Qwant https://www.qwant.com/ Ecosia https://www.ecosia.org/ and Start Page https://www.startpage.com/

This page may also help... https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...

thewebcount• 4 years ago

I’ve had very good luck with a paid account at kagi.com. They have many filtering options to remove sites you don’t ever want to see (like Pinterest, allrecipes.com, etc.).

Bellamy• 4 years ago

Great ending: "Hug me please." Love it.

chopete3• 4 years ago

There is a simple way to show your frustration.

1. Buy Google stock

2. Google has to show more ads to keep market hype on stock price.

3. They will fill 2 pages instead of current one page with ads. And then 3 and 4...

4. You buy more stock and protect your down side.

5. They will insert 2-3 times more ads per video on youtube.

At some point the average person will loose Google. You win big on stocks until then.

/sarcasm - pls dont do this.

tyingq• 4 years ago

Not exactly that, but: https://www.gwei.org/index.php

djbusby• 4 years ago

Looks like only 200 million years to reach the goal.

bluepoint3• 4 years ago

I don’t know if everyone knows that SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is

the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

UIUC_06• 4 years ago

Do you think there's anyone on HN who doesn't know "If you don't know what something is, just type its name into your search engine?"

this was on the first page of DuckDuckGo results for "SEO":

https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo

bluepoint3• 4 years ago

I was trying to save that search, but I accept your advice.

tlogan• 4 years ago

I looked the results for “remote work best practices” and they all seems a valid articles. Not really SEO spam.

Which article is considered as not spam? HRB one? Really?

crazygringo• 4 years ago

I came here to say the same thing.

They're a bunch of lists of exactly what the search term was looking for. And I've found these kinds of lists to be great jumping-off points in terms of getting an overview, whether I'm looking for remote work practices or humidifiers or types of mindfulness.

If you want long, in-depth articles those usually come up when your search terms become more specific. For example, the first link includes a bullet point "One-on-ones and check-ins" for remote work... throw that into Google and it's a bunch of useful articles (not lists), the fourth one is from Harvard Business Review.

As far as I can tell, Google's doing a great job in terms of organic results, and then it's adding ads on top and bottom because obviously it's got to pay the bills. I don't get the complaints at all.

hienyimba• 4 years ago

Whenever articles like these are published, I wonder who the Author thinks does the work of writing free articles on the Internet just for their pleasure. Content is expensive and is created by writers who must be paid.

To demand quality articles from the Internet, you must be willing to pay for them. Nobody exists just to write free passionate articles on the Internet and earn no money from them.

newZWhoDis• 4 years ago

It was that way for more than decade. The internet used to be nothing but passion projects

Veen• 4 years ago

Plus, Mr. Dubakov knows damn well why people write those types of articles. In fact, he's published quite a few shallow search optimized articles on the same Medium blog he's using to complain about the practice and on the Fibery blog. He does it to publicize his startup, just like most of the others.

e.g.

10 Top Product Marketing Bullshit Things in 2022

Survival guide for an introverted CEO

10 worst interview questions

5 Biggest Problems in Software Development

Overcoming fear of public speaking in 8 easy & honest tips

rozhok• 4 years ago

Those are not shallow blogspam. Those are actually good articles derived from the man experience.

butz• 4 years ago

A huge issue is when one is googling for some obscure issue or error message at work, and end up in a fake website with NSFW content or banners.

pupppet3• 4 years ago

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.

tintor3• 4 years ago

Using that rule it would be very easy to derank any website.

boxed2• 4 years ago

Not if the list of A sites was manually curated. Like stackoverflow and wikipedia. This isn't hard for shooting down a ton of sites.

plantain• 4 years ago

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.

pupppet3• 4 years ago

Derank the newer page, you don't need to derank the entire site.

BugsJustFindMe• 4 years ago

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.

UncleMeat3• 4 years ago

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

pupppet3• 4 years ago

I don't want your archive website near the top of my search results when the original is readily accessible.

levymetal• 4 years ago

These can be hidden using uBlock origin. I’ve got a list you can import (just use the raw link). The selector isn’t perfect in Google (sometimes leaves some unattached content) but the link is always removed. Feel free to submit a PR if you find any other SO clones - there seems to be no end to them.

https://github.com/levymetal/filter-lists/blob/main/filters/...

carewell4• 4 years ago

Thanks! I didn’t realize uBlock can remove specific domains from Google search, but looking at filter definitions it makes sense.

paulpauper2• 4 years ago

buuh bye Investopedia

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

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

bombolo• 4 years ago

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

_cs2017_2• 4 years ago

because they drive ad impressions.

Could you explain why?

If Google replaces SEO trash with decent results, the ads they will show on the Search page will remain unchanged. How would the impressions suffer? Or rather, since Google charges per click not per impression for search ads, how would ad clicks suffer?

In fact, I thought low-quality organic search results are purely a negative for Google profits, since users (over a very long run) move their search elsewhere (Tiktok, Reddit, etc.).

tintor3• 4 years ago

DuckDuckGo

tremon• 4 years ago

...has the same problem. There have been a few years where DDG/Bing's results were better than Google's for me, but nowadays DDG gives me the same blogspam results as Google used to do. I've mostly given up on general search engines, nowadays I use only site-specific searches. That means I won't find out about new motherboards other than those from MSI and Asus, and I won't know about python tooling unless they're listed on pypi, or maybe I will know it because it once featured on HN.

I've never used browser bookmarks before -- it used to be that I would remember enough about a site that I could always find it in the first few pages of search results. Nowadays, for many things I don't even bother to search; if I forgot to bookmark it, it might as well never have existed.

Frankly, it sucks. The endless quest for monetization has made it so that a large part of the Internet is now no longer discoverable for me. I eagerly await the return of curated directories, either in usenet or activitypub form.

apple4ever• 4 years ago

And its not just that: its going to the next page... and see literally the same results.

It drives me crazy. The next page should be totally different results! I can go 10 pages in, and still see something from the first page!!

tintor3• 4 years ago

Might start using bookmarks again.

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

It works for me, so I switched and haven't looked back.

gitgud• 4 years ago

Anyone have any methods for avoiding this SEO nonsense?

I generally prefix search query with `site:reddit.com` or `site:news.ycombinator.com`

Which returns much better discussions about a question/topic, in those discussions can be genuinely great ideas and links

tehwebguy• 4 years ago

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...

propogandist• 4 years ago

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

sefrost• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I think the more this knowledge is shared the more those sites will be spammed.

Look what happened to ad blockers - we told everyone about them and now so many sites have ad blocker blockers.

paulpauper2• 4 years ago

or use https://hn.algolia.com/

the problem with Reddit is for some stupid reason that has yet to be fixed and likely never will, Google shows reallllllly old reddit results but marks them as new.

lolinder• 4 years ago

For dev searches, Kagi. I switched during closed beta, and I couldn't be happier. The SEO'd GitHub or SO copypasta is gone by default, and it gives you the ability to ban or prioritize other sites in your searches. I honestly haven't had to do that much because their filters are great by default, though I did give MDN a bump so it's always at the top for web stuff.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

Why would Google fix anything?

Google makes money from keeping you clicking. If it shows you want you want right away, then it loses money.

Keeping you on a treadmill chasing bits of cheese is how it became a billion-dollar company.

permo-w2• 4 years ago

it became a billion dollar company by having a better index and search algorithm than anyone else

the carrot on a stick came later

d7z• 4 years ago

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?

paulcole• 4 years ago

Holds envelope to head and does Carnac impression

Name 3 things about SEO that aren’t true.

fiatjaf• 4 years ago

Recommendation: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

WirelessGigabit• 4 years ago

God, those scrapers... You Google something & the results you get are c/p-ed from GitHub issues, with mangled formatting, and no link back to the original content.

We need domain-banners back in Google!

Animats• 4 years ago

I'm beginning to think that someone might be able to knock off Google. Remember Myspace? They were #1 once. Then revenue went down and they compensated by putting in more ads. Then they became irrelevant. Broadcast TV did the same thing. Facebook seems headed down that road.

Running a search engine isn't that expensive. Held down to 10% ad content and run with a modest staff, this could work out.

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539

anupamchugh3• 4 years ago

The SEO spam is more prevalent in the programming space as recently published articles tend to shadow the older ones as long as they have the right set of keywords.

Just Google “react node.js” and you’d see a low-quality post farming the top spot (with paid-product CTA links).

richardsocher• 4 years ago

you.com CEO here. We let people give feedback on which major content blocks they want to see and soon will let developers add their own search-apps also. We believe in an open platform you can control, for the future of search.

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

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