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Comment by LelouBil | Hacker News Reader

I encountered a BTRFS filesystem corruption today, nothing too heavy, it got recovered by a repair (even tough I don't know what caused it, memtest is clean and ssd is also clean), but while researching about it I was surprised to see Louis Rossman's business website show up !

https://rossmanngroup.com/problems/btrfs-filesystem-corrupti...

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Wow, the amount of AI-generated SEO content on this website is wild. I clicked on one of the related articles and it's also hijacking my scroll so I can't scroll down to the pages of extra content underneath the article.

I don't care who's doing it, that's not cool.

he explained why he does that. In short, he was fighting to be displayed in search results by having legitimate content on the site for months, but the traffic was dying day by day and killing his business. He then asked Gemini to write him some bullshit SEO and went back to the 1st spot on google. Look for the video on his channel, it's not as bad as it looks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

I found this but keep in mind there were more videos about it. Let me leave the description of the video here:

Google delisted my business for almost a year. Professional SEO couldn't fix it, creating a new site didnt help. What finally worked was having AI rewrite my authentic content into corporate-friendly bunk. I hate that it worked. This video took me a month to make because I felt ashamed of my decision.

"The website search company sells a tool to make websites", just another entry in the looooong list of Google's conflicts of interest

Or maybe his legit content just wasn't that good.

Watch the video, he shows what was on the website. Additionally, it only recently fell off google while it was in perfect standing for many many years.

He used that exact same excuse on another website that he AI generated for another project that was discussed here.

If anyone else was polluting Google search results with AI generated blog spam to promote their business the Hacker News audience would hate it, not accepting any excuses. I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but there’s a huge double standard that happens with figures that develop parasocial relationships with fans through their YouTube videos or podcasts. Can we just call a spade a spade and say that generating SEO blog spam with AI to get rankings for search terms like “btrfs corruption” just sucks, even if the person doing it made a YouTube video about it? I’m not buying the whole “Google made me do it” victim story when the SEO blogspam pollution isn’t stopping at getting his repair business listed. The website is spamming software search topics like btrfs and synology issues with a million AI generated pages trying to boost his hardware repair business. Why is it so hard to admit that he’s just playing the same scummy AI SEO blogspam game that everyone else is, but trying to pretend he’s the good guy while doing it?

You aren't wrong, but ultimately to survive as a business like this that relies on search rankings, you have to play the game. Google rewards spamming the web with bullshit, and the businesses which do it capture all the sales.

Also known as the "don't hate the player, hate the game" defense.

> but ultimately to survive as a business like this

He runs a popular YouTube channel which is a giant source of leads, and should be a good way to rank well in Google like all of the other famous YouTube figures who pull this off without creating 100s of AI generated blogspam pages.

I know I'm not going to win any arguments against dedicated fans who hang on to his every word as the ground truth, but to me it looks like he's just taking any advantage he can get to grow his business, even if it's AI generated blogspam, scroll hijacking, keyword stuffing, and other tricks that Hacker News readers usually hate. Playing the victim card to pretend like he had to do it doesn't sit well with me, especially since he's done this twice now across two different websites. If you want to do AI SEO blogspam to grow your business, just admit that it's what you're doing without trying to play the victim card at the same time.

He said that it sucks and we all know it does. I think there's a big difference between vibecoding a product in a week and blogspamming to promote it and running a legitimate business for the past 15 years, and suddenly getting delisted by google. After fighting to get his site back on Google for a YEAR, I can understand his frustration - and would probably do the same. According to him he tried every single legitimate option before finally succumbing.

I have no dog in this fight, I disagree with some stuff that he says, just so you know.

And what's his other project that you keep mentioning? I haven't heard of it yet.

Addendum: the argument of trying to grow hia business may not be valid, as he mentioned that he voluntarily (iirc) shrunk his business lately

> And what's his other project that you keep mentioning? I haven't heard of it yet.

https://www.fulu.org/

They went straight for an AI generated website with a bunch of AI copy that didn't really make sense when they first launched it. I only know this because it got posted here without context and a lot of us were trying to figure out what was going on with that website. IIRC he had the same excuse about not wanting to be delisted by Google, but it was literally a brand new website.

I think you're reaching to defend the guy, but it's clear that he just likes to lean into the AI slop and then record 30 minute videos where he explains that he's actually the victim in the whole situation.

Aren't you misremembering? I checked the first webarchive snapshots of this site and the site is almost the same as today https://web.archive.org/web/20251001004605/https://fulu.org/

Does the site feel AI-generated to you?

Also I may be dumb but I can't find the thread you are talking about, anytime the site got posted it got almost no traction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit, I think I found it:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739271 I'll read it soon. Another edit: this isn't it.

>I think you're reaching to defend the guy

I think you don't understand my intentions even though I explicitly stated I don't care about the verdict. I don't care about defending him for the sake of defending him. I defend actions I deem reasonable regardless of who is doing them. You haven't addressed the points from my previous comment, and only picked one so I can't comment much more.

>IIRC he had the same excuse about not wanting to be delisted by Google

Do you know where I can find him saying this? I'm not requiring you to send me the source, just point me in the right direction. I am always happy to change my opinion when new facts emerge

Louis is quite vocal about transparency for consumers and openly sharing knowledge for people to be able to do repairs themselves or even set up a competing business.

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