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

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 2 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.533s | source
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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.

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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.

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worble ◴[07 Jun 21 23:33 UTC] No.27428739[source]▶
I think it's high time we had a webring resurgence. It's impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy to say "I endorse the people running this site, so if like my stuff you'll like them too"
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emodendroket ◴[07 Jun 21 23:44 UTC] No.27428818[source]▶
Isn't that what people go to social media for?
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bottled_poe ◴[08 Jun 21 00:14 UTC] No.27429062[source]▶
Social media is gamed the same way? Sharebots, etc
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emodendroket ◴[08 Jun 21 00:17 UTC] No.27429082[source]▶
Do you suppose Web rings wouldn't be when there's money in it? There was plenty of that when they were just for fun.
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1. IggleSniggle ◴[08 Jun 21 00:43 UTC] No.27429314[source]▶
It’s fundamentally about trust models. That is to say, about the audience.

Everybody gave up trusting webrings because Google provided better results. Now that Google results are shit, there’s room for other information vendors to come along, even if it’s in narrow areas.

Actually, HN is already this for me in some respects.

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2. emodendroket ◴[08 Jun 21 02:09 UTC] No.27429867[source]▶
In my opinion this site is not really so different from, say, Reddit, beyond having more focused rules and being smaller. So I don't think my idea that social media have supplanted the Web ring is wide of the mark.