Ask HN: Is there any way to detect websites that are SEO-optimized on Google? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any way to detect websites that are SEO-optimized on Google?

10 pointsbehnamoh12 comments

Let's say I'm searching for "the best pillow cushion for tailbone pain". If I come across a website that starts by talking about what tailbone pain is, whether cushion pillows help with that or not, what the benefits are for the coccyx, etc., I'm pretty sure that website is crap and is doing all this to improve their SEO and their recommended products are likely paid-ads.

On the other hand, if I see a website (or a blog) that goes straight to the point and tells me what the best pillow cushions are, I'm more likely to trust that recommendation.

Is there any way that we can decrease the score of SEO-improved websites so that only the ones that aren't SEO-optimized can be shown at the top? Any extension or search engine that does that would do us all a huge favor.

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The likelihood of some benevolent person going to the trouble of writing such a blog is close to zero so you can assume any such site is going to be optimised some degree.

A web forum where people discuss such matters is more likely to yield an uncompromised solution although the chance of such a forum being gamed still remains if there is a financial incentive to do so.

Very simple. You write "site:reddit.com" at the end of your URL.

Independent websites for anything useful are largely a thing of the past. If you see a website that gives product recommendations, you should assume, 100% of the time, that it's a SEO sham.

Sometimes I type in just such a search and scan a couple pages of results, looking for the least “optimized” titles. The same applies to YouTube: I’m not looking for “10 secrets to …”. It takes time but I often find a decent blog or a good video in the end.

When I do find that lone blogger writing deep content, it’s like finding buried treasure amidst a sea of junk.

I could see the next level up from an adblocker as a NN trained to recognize clickbait (and SEO-optimization); it could flag that in real time and help you find the “buried treasure” of real content.

Do a search and the websites that rank at the top are the optimised ones

I find myself using Pinboard's search feature[0] more than Google these days. By using Pinboard you are searching what people have deemed useful and interesting, and the links are deliberately curated just for you. No snakey SEO optimizations.

[0] https://pinboard.in/search

Not the worst idea I've heard!

So almost an Ad' Blocker for Spam Sites?

Something that hides 'low quality' spam results from the SERPs.

As an addition, I'd love to hide sites that just scrape Stack Overflow!

How hard can it be Google! Surely they know these scraped results are not the canonical source of the content!

This was recently posted:) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374905

Thanks!

Kagi (alternative search engine) lets you uprate or block domains. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

This appears to be a search engine that will be paid at some nebulous future time. That would be okay, but the price point is around 10 dollars per month. That is very very high - so depending on whether or not you could miss such an amount you may not want to start depending on it.

Sure. I’m very happy to pay $10/month for something so crucial to my daily work, but YMMV.

Remove all sites with affiliate links

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