Surely Google can spare an engineer or two to do a deep dive into the way any one of these spam sites manages to get itself to the first page of Google, work out their scheme, and fix the algorithm? This problem isn't exactly hard to reproduce!
Anyone trying to infect others with Trojans and viruses just need to check user agents or use dynamic redirect URLs, and suddenly this clearly illegal activity becomes black magic that is way beyond the comprehension of the folks at Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is basically making the shittiest parts of the Internet safe for scammers and spammers, and this is just one example.
If that's not bad enough, they're trying like crazy to become a monopoly. If this what they do now, imagine how bad it'll be when they control even more and feel even more immune to making money from scammers.
(1) Hosting is providing services on the Internet without which a site would not function. Providing DNS is hosting. Providing proxy is hosting. Providing email is hosting. Don't fall for Cloudflare's "we don't host" bullshit.
However, I don't want Cloudflare to preventatively police what is and isn't a bad website. When these scam sites go live, they can quite easily contain real content (say, a blog, with articles written by AI good enough not to be immediately obvious) and then change into malware on a schedule.
Cloudflare can't see what code customers run on the backend and that's probably a good thing. They're already holding too much power over the internet and requiring the backend to be transparent would only make them more in control of the web.
Any registrar hosts thousands if not millions of spam sites because every single one of the billion registrars have DNS set up in some way.
Despite being almost exclusively used for spam and amateur projects, the .TK TLD barely shows up in Google. Spam sites are a symptom of other services linking to them and making them worth the investment. If Google, Bing, Qwant and Yandex weren't falling for the SEO scams these scammers use, we wouldn't have this problem.
Hosters have some immunity by design, and that's very much a good thing. They have to respond to abuse complaints, but they're not responsible for filtering out all of their customers. Requiring them to do so is exactly what the EU is trying to force upon the internet, which is terrible for online freedom.
For example, SO copycats are legitimate in that they respect the license and otherwise just serve the content to whoever sends them an HTTP request. As far as I know they don't spam links to their domain anywhere. They are low-quality and of dubious utility for sure, but I'd rather not make the Internet a place where you need to prove quality & utility to someone to be able to host an HTTP server.
The real problem is that a dumbass like Google comes along, sees this and decides that it should rank higher than the source content.
But Google maps better not drive me to someone's yard when I ask to navigate to a nearby mechanic.
If it did, it would be hard to blame anyone but Google.
Somebody upthread suggested it was just the use of Google ads, which I suppose is possible, but somehow it seems unlikely. Google sure does love money but they also need to be considered a good search engine, and I'd expect them to be at least a little wary about things like that.
Is there something else I'm missing?
This is how it gets done and Google used to be brutal about crushing it, somewhere along the way they seem to have given up on being so brutal.
Do they? SO contributions are under CC BY-SA. Haven't seen copycats providing attribution let alone specifying that the content is under the same license.
It's really tricky to enforce open licenses on this scale as it's each contributor that licenses their content rather than the platform host.
This is clearly Google's issue.
Every time a scammer puts up a web site trying to sell counterfeit goods, the company which sells the real goods should file a lawsuit? One for each scammy web site, perhaps? Because Cloudflare shouldn't be expected to do anything at all, until they're compelled to do so by a court?
I don't think you're thinking this through.
> I don't think you're thinking this through.
love the sassines tho
For a while now Google has suggested that the best way to rank well is to have human readable content and focus on user experience. At the same time, natural language generation has come leaps and bounds, to the point where sometimes even I, a human, can't tell if an article has been spun by a bot or not.
So if Google starts ranking human readable content, and robots can now produce human readable content, what is the next ranking signal they can use to differentiate spam from humans? Are we going to end up with "Verified Websites" ala verified Twitter handles?
A huge portion of the web at this point is just bots communicating with eachother, and legitimate business systems having to process bots participation on the internet. I imagine the portion of the web that Google crawls that is legitimate versus that which is bot generated would surely be majority bots, just because of how fast they can generate content. One thing they can't do as easily though is register domains, so it may be one of the better points of defense.
If it can be effectively blacklisted, then Google is dropping the ball. This isn’t difficult algorithm foo failure.
I don’t agree with your sentences, but I do agree with your point.
The problem exists outside (Google-controlled) web: with (not fully Google-controlled) email, too.
Around 2020 I did a per-tld checks on wanted/unwanted messages (ham and spam). With thousands of messages sent from .xyz domains (envelope sender host or PTR record of sending host; I ignored the From header) there wasn't a single legit message. 100% SPAM.
Why they decided to ".xyz the TLD", I don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- abcedasdfff.io = €59.29/year
- abcedasdfff.tw = €25.20/year
- abcedasdfff.nz = €25.40/year
- abcedasdfff.mx = €48.28/year
Most of them appear to be €10-20/yr, but it's certainly not uncommon to see them go for €25 or higher. Note: EUR and USD are roughly at parity so I don't think it's really necessary to do a conversion.