Hacker News Reader

Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

You can report these to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1

Edit: better link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.

No money in it. My unsubstantiated guess is that being part of the search team became uncool a while back because it wasn't new and shiny.

Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality organic results

Whenever a company pisses me off, I turn off my adblocker, do a few searches for them or that industry, and click their ads whenever they appear.

I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits.

It really shows which products have high marginal profits.

> I also like to see who’s advertising because it shows which industries/companies compete on marketing, instead of their own merits.

Quite frankly this is wrong. You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it then you're out of business.

> It really shows which products have high marginal profits.

AdWords can be life or death enough that it's worth eating the cost because the alternative is not having a business.

> You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it then you're out of business.

With the rise of social media, this is about 20 years out of date. If you have a great product and 100 users, 1000 people are going to see glowing testimonials at zero cost.

I strongly disagree. You're thinking purely from a software point of view - advertising is still extremely useful for any kind of local business or startup.

Good pointer but...let’s try that. My guess is they stay online. Here’s a couple minutes of searching. All the same company. Google can’t even see the dupe content obvious to us:

https://rivoniaplumber24-7.co.za/?wpamp https://midrandplumber24-7.co.za/?wpamp https://plumberdurbannorth.co.za/ https://bluffplumber.co.za/

Think a different bunch but look at the keyword stuffing: http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers-areas/plum...

Google aren’t even making ad money on this. It’s just crap content and really bad old-style spam. If they just required a business location it might help.

Are we in the 90’s?!

I did. I also told a real plumber what was going on so he could report it. Now I see he's doing it too, or at least a minor version with one page per area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com