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Comment by _akrs | Hacker News Reader

I dreamed of building a website like the type I grew up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. The gamefaqs, mrfixitonlines and casterrealms-type websites for me were at the forefront of making this internet medium to be better than books, voice or anything else for that matter for the transmission of information.

Fast forward 20 years later. I think I've spent close to [redacted] on the website and team to help with it. I don't even want to think about my own labor costs. These days the google results for my niche are entirely dominated by an ugly purple wordpress blog ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites. Their information is frequently wrong. It doesn't hurt their rankings at all. Yoast through it bro. Keep up the great work Google.

The entire story was posted on twitter last year by some shocked SEO researcher last year https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

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I see your point and mostly sympathise. It's relevant to the topic and provides a personal perspective.

>> ran by non-native English speakers

I feel this clause doesn't help promote your grievance. A big promise of the Web was that it was World-Wide. If a site in say Thailand could exceed say a USA site's quality, all the better. I get that your specific competitors didn't excel - except in ranking. But, in principle, good wishes to global competition.

> If a site in say Thailand could exceed say a USA site's quality

For many users, a foundational element of the quality of a website is that is in English; it’s all they speak.

The site is in English. So it’s just like are you going to judge them for not being native speakers of English and perhaps sometimes making mistakes?

How’s that a non-native speakers problem?

Listen I watched the movie Hackers as a kid and want to throw my fist up and say yeah too but in reality that's not how it works. These sites in 'Thailand' are very seldom competing on quality in my experience.

Is there a way to read it without an ex-twitter account? I just see the first tweet

Here you go https://nitter.net/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

I don't get it. kprofiles sounds like it provides a service. It might not be a great one or one I'm interested in, but collating all that information about K-Pop bands and publishing one or two articles a day is non-trivial.

I would argue that the word trivial is exactly what would describe their entire operation.

>ran by non-native English speakers that gets hacked every few months with a redirect to porn or russian sites.

I imagine that this would be a problem.

https://twitter.com/KProfiles_com/with_replies

What's amusing is they think it's "rival websites" hacking them with redirects to russian purse sites

Here's how that Twitter link describes you and your competitors vs. Kprofiles:

> A few other people have noticed the quiet success of Kprofiles and have already attempted to copy them.

> Some have better content, site structure, and formatting than Kprofiles.

> But they just compete with Kprofile's massive backlink profile.

So did Kprofiles (a somewhat purple website) come before you (Kpopping) or are you talking about competing for second place with Hallyu Idol (a very purple website)?

I was referring to the former. The waybackmachine confirms they launched around 2016, but with sporadic uptime (apache settings in there)

https://web.archive.org/web/20170530121529/http://www.kprofi...

We were running a beta for that period and launched publicly in July of 2017

[link redacted]

Personally I think hallyuidol is even worse but that's another matter. (they are just copying kprofiles but whoever designed it has eyeballs so they have a massive advantage on that front)

Right now I have YouTube's API team giving me an audit that is compounding my already overextension on our development. They're telling me I can't do rankings or aggregate data. It's a giant mess and I have another fulltime job so it's not getting the attention it deserves -- still it's miles ahead of its competitors and I don't see how that's even debatable.

So kprofiles provides a service - providing information to those looking for it - be it fans or journalists. I don't get why it shouldn't be ranked high since it's been a valuable resource since 2016?

It's not a question of "ranked high" - it's that they're far and away #1 in our niche when they are quite obviously just another garbage SEO website.

If you can't understand that I'm afraid I don't see a point in continuing.

Can't you do the same they do? Obviously not about the contents, I believe you when you say yours is so much better, but about the SEO. Isn't it possible to imitate their tactics to a certain extent, without getting equally trashy?

I mean, yeah we try to score the free SEO wins already (see page titles: UPDATED 2023) but at this point we make enough to pay our small staff and I'm fine working for free on it. I think SEO and quality are basically inversely correlated and if you try to chase SEO you will only create dogshit and have to get lucky with stupid journalists.

That's really unfortunate. Best of luck!

I visited the site. It has pages of facts about bands and artists.. you might even call them profiles...

It also has a forum with a community. I really this as you being frustrated by the competition rather than them doing something nefarious.

Who said anything about nefarious? Struggling with reading comprehension? It's about quality.

Every reply you make makes you look worse. No one cares (i.e. google, kprofiles, journalists, kpop fans) about what you think is "quality" or not.

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