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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: 0s | 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. bashtoni ◴[08 Jun 21 04:27 UTC] No.27430638[source]▶
I keep getting results to a site 'gitmemory.com' which is just GitHub issues scraped. Super annoying that they outrank the actual GitHub issues they've taken the content from.
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2. sdoering ◴[08 Jun 21 05:35 UTC] No.27430968[source]▶
How is this not just spam and duplicate content. I remember when I was punished by G for duplicate content on my very small private blog when I was using jekyll and had the markdown sources and the code stored in GitHub. I didn't know of the canonical tag back than and was punished because the GitHub domain had more trust.

It is sad, bit nowadays I often just directly jump onto page 3 at Google or use other "tricks" to get okayish results.