Hacker News Reader

Comment by nordic-nomad | Hacker News Reader

Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use.

And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thing getting crushed.

Unfortunately it seems like he's the one person out there making a site like this honestly and over optimized for a search algorithm that was inevitably going to change. Building a brand and using a more personal voice instead of thinking you can win at SEO is always going to be the way to go.

View on HN

Also his website is just affiliate link garbage.

I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow.

I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products are not good, but this page is content that's designed to match for certain search terms and not something that's organically good content.

I'm fine with Google ranking this content straight to zero.

Edit: The author is a nice guy and a decent writer. Emotionally, I want to feel for him. But not for content like this.

You can have all of the best intentions and still contribute negative value to the world.

I clicked on the gaming monitor category because it's actually something i've been shopping for.

I was really expecting good content and a single recommendation or two that would replace hours of reading crap reviews, reddit threads, etc. but instead was met with what could be auto-generated list of monitors with scraped descriptions and links

I can really see why this would be flagged as just search front-running for affiliate money

You've stoked my curiosity. Which sub-$200 144Hz monitors are your favorites?

I'm surprised to hear this, not because I think my recommendations are infallible, but because the user return rate is lower than average. Are there any specific products that you think are junk?

He's competing with a huge army of auto-generated spam sites that are in the same business. Best LED strip lights? Good luck getting on the front page of that one. The results are dominated by sites using superficially respectable, popular domains to push the same affiliate spam.

So because he generates functionally-equivalent output, but in a way that passes some vague moral purity test he's the good guy underdog then?

That's not what I'm saying at all. I couldn't care less whether he's the winning spammer or not.

> Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use.

My own sense of spam smell got triggered by the name of the site, too. Sounded like a gimmick; you can have all three, after all.

A rebranding might solve his issue.

It could be very interesting to see a sort of A/B test between the current site and a clone of the site but with a different name.

Not just this, but think of all the links with the anchor text, “good cheap and fast.” Google would penalize any site with this anchor text repeated too many times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com