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This whole situation just shows as a lie everything we hear about SEO. Stack Overflow has the exact text, it loads incredibly fast (should be commended more for this), doesn't require ten meg of Javascript to render as far as I know generally meets HTML standards.

These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them, if you open devtools you'll often see pages of warnings about deprecations and/or invalid html, and despite having the same scraped text always score higher on Google.

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It has long been a mantra in SEO land that user generated content sites in general and forums in particular are to be aggressively down ranked. The reason for this is that industrial strength spam farms otherwise spin up tens of thousands of forum domains to pass link juice to what they are targeting. This naturally penalizes real forums, which often contain the best content for a query.

This is why Google has basically surrendered and why so many search result categories are now dominated by whatever sites Google has arbitrarily declared the winner through editorial decision making. In many search categories, we are effectively back where we started with Yahoo directories and hand-picked search rankings. What you see on the first page SERP is the best that they can do under the circumstances based on the fundamentals of how search works.

The web was a fun idea while it lasted, but if you are using it as a primary information resource, you are wasting your time.

funny, I just rented an introductory book about signal processing and was (re) amazed to see how much the information is well explained, with tons of example, and a real plan to guide you in the ton of knowledge you have to master.

I for one welcome back our new library overlords.

Come on now... Don't hold out... Citation?

Understanding Digital Signal Processing, 3rd edition

    Richard G. Lyons

I think there are a number of things that could be done to improve this, but I'm sure Google won't do:

1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model.

2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.

Except those adds are often provided by Google itself. So penalizing them would be self harm for google revenues

Well, those sites are often running ads probided by Google, so it's understandable why Google doesn't really have a good incentive to follow your first suggestion.

They do penalize heavy ads. There have been shenanigans on this front also (penalizing non-Google ad networks and favoring Google ad networks). They do penalize some content farms and favor others. The issue they are concerned about with SO and MDN among other user generated content sites is covert seeding at scale for the purpose of manipulating search results.

There's just a lot of fraud on the internet related to search and advertising manipulation, but it's under-policed in part because of the internationalized nature of it and because it is hard to bring fraud cases in the United States because of the particularized pleading standard. That should not stop the feds from bringing criminal cases, but generally the feds care about large dollar value frauds (as they probably should be) rather than on policing very large numbers of small dollar value frauds that have a major aggregate impact on the online economy. They like going after the guys who steal $100 million from deaf children with Lupus rather than doing 200 $500k fraud prosecutions.

Anecdotal, but my website lost a lot of search traffic after Google's core update in March, which seems to have affected SO as well looking at the first chart.

If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.

I looked into it and some other websites benefited from the update, so who knows what changes they made and why.

Again anecdotal, but I lost the majority of my SEO traffic late last year around the time of a core update. I've spent the best part of a year attempting to repair it, on the assumption I'd committed some heinous SEO crime. The more time that passes, I'm starting to think that the issue isn't mine so much as Google's. It's baffling. I wrote about it here:

https://johnnyreilly.com/how-i-ruined-my-seo

Looking at your post and the HN discussion, I am also of the same impression.

I don’t see what you did wrong, it must have been the algorithm change. My parents had a business that was killed by a Facebook algorithm change. My brother took a significant hit from an Amazon algorithm change. Building a business around any of the big tech companies seems very risky.

I think Google search has just declined a lot. I guess they’re losing the constant cat and mouse game with SEO. It seems worse than it has ever been, I’m relying more on ChatGPT and copilot now.

I can only imagine that LLMs will be the end of any content based search ranking. I don’t know how they’ll adapt to that.

Maybe Google (semi/permanently?) penalized your domain when spammers started using your GA4 tag?

Gosh that would suck. Sounds plausible though

> These scam sites load megabytes of junk, load slowly, have text interpersed with ads and modals that render right on top of them

Only if you're not googlebot. The crawler sees a much nicer site.

which should — in theory — get them penalized for cloaking. But obviously it doesn’t. Reinforcing GP’s point.

Google has gotten pretty lenient about that: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

"If you operate a paywall or a content-gating mechanism, we don't consider this to be cloaking if Google can see the full content of what's behind the paywall just like any person who has access to the gated material and if you follow our Flexible Sampling general guidance."

I wonder if they just gave up

Hypothesis: Search, being Google's oldest product, is no longer prestigious to work in. It's in maintenance mode.

Does Google run other indexers for the purposes of catching cloaking? Are there other strategies that can be used? One of the problems of SO is that most of the valid content is out there and easily available without having to scrape the site which may mean penalizing for bad content is harder.

I wonder what will I see if I change my browser's user agent?

And the fact that google is not detecting those is damning (to google)

Does it even make sense to serve different content to a bot than what a human would see? Isn't the search engine trying to rank content made for humans?

It makes sense if you know your content isn't nice for humans (e.g. full of ads and tracking stuff) but you want it to rank high anyway.

It's an adversarial process. The search engine is, in theory, trying to rank by usefulness to the user, and the site owner is trying to maximize revenue by lying to the search engine. And the user.

Then, maybe the "crawler" should be an actual PC navigating to the browser, taking a screenshot (or live feed) of the page and processing it with AI.

Eh, Google choose to be identifiable as googlebot and to obey robots.txt for other reasons of "good citizenship", because not everybody wants to be crawled.

I'm generally puzzled by Google's reluctance to do manual intervention in these cases. It's not like this is a secret. Just penalize the whole domain for 60 days every time a prominent site lies to the crawler.

If Google's support is any indication, Google doesn't like to involve humans in their processes. There probably isn't enough humans to do this manual intervention you propose.

There are very many sites where the content you see as a non-logged-in user is different from what you see if you have in your possession an all-important user cookie.

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