Stackoverflow getting killed by SEO spam. Google? | Hacker News Reader

Stackoverflow getting killed by SEO spam. Google?

14 pointsmmaunder17 comments

Search results snapshot: http://i.imgur.com/9SRoX.png

Spam page: http://efreedom.com/Question/1-1708417/Can-Extract-EXIF-Data-Using-PerlMagick

Scraped verbatim from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1708417/how-can-i-extract-exif-data-using-perlmagick

Spam site has two entries ranking above two stackoverflow entries.

Here's the search link, although rankings may have changed since I posted this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=perlmagick+remove+exif

I tried various edits, but HN won't turn the URL's into links.

View on HN

The efreedom page contains more mentions of your search phrase "remove exif" than the StackOverflow page, with more links to relevant related questions than SO had. It's the more relevant result.

It's also not spam, all the content they've assembled is completely legally used and well presented. You're not brought to a malicious site or tricked into clicking any ads, you get the questions and answers you were looking for.

Google did its job. There's nothing wrong with that search result page or that site.

What about content duplication?

Excerpt from the Google Webmaster Central Blog[1]: "There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:"

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystify...

Why the downvotes? This is the comment that actually answers the question the poster asked! The fact that you disagree with the statement "It's also not spam" doesn't mean you should downvote, especially when the other 90% of the comment is very informative.

If you disagree, comment, don't downvote.

To restate: the searchfreedom page contains more of the stuff that an algorithm can know is important to a good search ranking like more mentions of the search phrase and more relevant outgoing links. It also contains nothing malicious. The stackoverflow page has some stuff that we consider important, like the ability to comment and by being the authoritative source. But Google cannot take this into consideration because it cannot know -- it's just an algorithm.

It fits Stack Overflow's Creative Commons license, it gives credit and states the license. Just plain legal content republishing, and Google being crappy (as usual).

I particularly like how the search result order now is efreedom, followed by StackOverflow, followed by this very post.

Wow, that was fast. I didn't realize HN used hackerne.ws. I've always used news.ycombinator.

Be warned: it doesn't appear to be the same server. I'm logged into news.ycombinator, but I'm not currently logged in to hackerne.ws. I can only assume it's a different server mirroring it, and unless I know it's run by the same people I'm not willing to type my password into the latter.

It's been around for a long time, and was accompanied by a message from the guy who registered it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84039

Neither did I. Thanks :)

"This question and answers originated from stackoverflow.com"; no ads. Not very spammy.

Except that this site breaks the ability for visitors to contribute their own answers [1] and displays content that is often old and out of sync. It does nothing to attempt to improve upon the original site, other than obtaining a better Google ranking - and that is a dubious improvement.

This site is abiding by the letter of the license but not the spirit. Once you start defending this garbage, you let your guard down.

Jeff Atwood's intention with Stack Exchange's data dumps is to make certain (and ensure to its users) that his site will never become evil and hold all the community-contributed content hostage behind a paywall [2]. Although Jeff does not come out and argue against simple reposting of content without any added value, I frankly consider it unwanted spam that fragments a beautiful community.

[1] Unless the visitor notices enough to click the tiny and generic stackoverflow.com link, bringing us back to (hey) the original site.

[2] See http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/defending-attribution-...

Edit: for formatting

I see AdSense right above that line; are you sure you don't have ads/scripts blocked?

The site is actually a little bloated with AdSense, making it hard to distinguish between content and adverts.

DuckDuckGo.com returns the Stack Overflow article as the first search result for your query, and doesn't return the spam page at all. Instead of complaining about Google, why not use a better search engine?

Try it: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=perlmagick+remove+exif

Side note: If you're on Chrome there's an extension that will auto-redirect you to SO if you click an efreedom (or similar) link

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gledhololmniapejef...

FWIW: I created an AppEngine-based webapp (http://www.gnaught.com) to keep track of blacklisted domains and uses Google's "-site:" options in the search query. It was a weekend-project to learn about AppEngine and Python.

I also dont see problem there. I think it's SEO problem of StackOverflow

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