←back to thread

The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 3 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.677s | source
Show context
ilamont ◴[07 Jun 21 22:47 UTC] No.27428272[source]▶
Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers.

Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

replies(19): >>27428410 #>>27428439 #>>27428441 #>>27428466 #>>27428594 #>>27428652 #>>27428717 #>>27428807 #>>27429076 #>>27429483 #>>27429797 #>>27429818 #>>27429843 #>>27429859 #>>27430023 #>>27430207 #>>27430285 #>>27430707 #>>27430783 #
newacct583 ◴[07 Jun 21 23:24 UTC] No.27428652[source]▶
> Google has turned into a cesspool.

All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too. There's nothing particularly Google-specific to this story. It's about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a PageRank-style system.

replies(3): >>27428739 #>>27428757 #>>27429080 #
1. Mediterraneo10 ◴[08 Jun 21 00:16 UTC] No.27429080[source]▶
Indeed. I recently noticed this while relying on DDG for documentation for Common Lisp, a language I still learning. The top-ranking site for any Common Lisp function was an SEO scam site, where clearly someone had hired freelancers to take preexisting CLisp documentation and rewrite it – in poor-quality English – until it would no longer be detectable as copyright violation, then loaded it with ads.

(I just checked and this copycat documentation site has, thankfully, now been pushed down a bit in DDG results.)

replies(2): >>27430451 #>>27430948 #
2. birktj ◴[08 Jun 21 03:46 UTC] No.27430451[source]▶
Note that as I quite recently learned DDG has support for a bunch of bang-commands listed at [1]. There are a bunch of them for documentation sites for all kinds of programming languages, including a couple for lisp it seems like.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

3. abhinav22 ◴[08 Jun 21 05:31 UTC] No.27430948[source]▶
For learning Common Lisp, I highly recommend https://github.com/ashok-khanna/common-lisp-by-example