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

(casparwre.de)
1743 points caspii | 5 comments | 07 Jun 21 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | 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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XorNot ◴[07 Jun 21 23:17 UTC] No.27428594[source]▶
Also phone problems: Google a problem with a phone and the top hit will be a whole bunch of churned out articles with generic copy on the cause (sometimes there are bugs in the software, so reboot your phone).
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duskwuff ◴[07 Jun 21 23:31 UTC] No.27428715[source]▶
Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for scammy antivirus/antimalware/"cleaner" software, paid tech support, or outright tech support scams.
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1. PoignardAzur ◴[08 Jun 21 01:51 UTC] No.27429760[source]▶
The last few weeks I've started noticing a very specific type of SEO that pops up when I'm doing technical search, where the first page will be a Stack Overflow result, and the 3rd or 4th result will be from some content farm, copy-pasted from SO, sometimes translated in French.

It's a little unsettling.

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2. ihnorton ◴[08 Jun 21 02:27 UTC] No.27429986[source]▶
It can be worse than that when those sites get a full multi-line result billing whereas the original stackoverflow answer gets a single-line subheading under some other SO result.
3. lupire ◴[08 Jun 21 03:23 UTC] No.27430312[source]▶
That's a years old scam, but occasionally a new site pops through Google's filters.
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4. eyelidlessness ◴[08 Jun 21 03:31 UTC] No.27430366[source]▶
If you start getting a little esoteric in your searches you’ll get tons of results that are clearly crawled from personal blogs, and hosted on personal-blog-looking domains that redirect to godawful garbage. Especially bad on mobile because Google truncates the URLs.
5. kuschku ◴[08 Jun 21 05:33 UTC] No.27430962[source]▶
I haven't gotten real SO as google result in years, only those content farms, constantly. Nowadays the same even happens for github issues, they're also mostly outranked by content farms copying from them.

If I search on mobile, often all my results are these content farms. (Google used in English from Germany)