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Comment by herlitzj | Hacker News Reader

Ads aren't the only problem. All the SEO clickbait is worse than the ads in my opinion. I can ignore the ads, but anymore a lot of the time the first page or two of results are just clickbait junk. Look at their example results. #3 looks like an SEO clickbait site to me.

edit: Looks like you can customize results somewhat, so maybe that will help? A quick way to silence those kinds of hits would be nice.

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For those who have joined, I'm curious about the following query:

Are women better than men at limbo?

The results on Google[0] and Bing[1] are both entirely useless clickbait. I just want to know if women can bend back farther than men without falling over.

0. https://www.middleendian.com/limbogoogle.png

1. https://www.middleendian.com/limbobing.png

At least Yandex seems to have gotten the gist of the question, and isn't full of clickbait, even if it doesn't answer the question (and seems to have mostly ignored the word "limbo")

https://imgur.com/a/XTIDjEG

I don't know enough about SEO/web crawlers, so this might be a silly question, but there is a way to identify SEO optimized websites, right? Isn't there a special file or something?

Not sure if it'd be optimal, but dropping all search results with such optimization might bring a more broad search across the internet (more sites than just the common clickbait ones).

The vast majority of SEO optimization at this point is through backlinks, internal keywords, meta tags, links, headings, keyword usage, etc.

Dropping SEO optimized results from a search is a bit of an oxymoronical idea. You'd essentially be punishing websites for simply ranking higher in search results which doesn't make sense.

Back during the heyday of land lines, phone book optimization was naming your company AAA <service> because phone books were sorted alphabetically.

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