28 ms·

The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

1743 points by caspii 5y ago

lumpa 5y ago
Amazing how such a simple approach can achieve content injection on a diverse network of unrelated websites, to the point of raising the profile of the vector and increasing the chances of further spread. I hope someone figures out which other campaigns were run with these tools. Also, whether you can find output with the link injections in source code, like on GitHub or distro packages.
dataviz1000 5y ago
I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's description. The network tab in devtools isn't loading Google Analytics on you site. I think the bigger conspiracy is that Google isn't giving high search result rankings to websites that don't include Google Analytics. Part of the reason is they use time on site after following through a search result link as a dimension of quality for that search result. If that makes sense? They give 10 search results and their algorithm can tell if the search result satisfies the end user's request if they don't go back to the search results but rather continue on that site. Lastly, clicking through a search result to your site might not give the searching user what they are looking for. Amazon discovered every time a person has to click they are far less likely to purchase an item so they created one click. Your competition makes it visually clear what their site does. You probably would get far more retention on the original click to your site if you have an image of what the end product looks like in a hero, front and center (with all the meta tags described in Google's document on SEO of course.) That way people won't click back to the search results page which Google is tracking as a dimension. [0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/en/dk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/en/...
- caspii 5y ago
  I only switched Google Analytics off last week! I had it on for the whole time before and it made no difference.
  - dataviz1000 5y ago
    [deleted]
    - johncolanduoni 5y ago
      I mean, you did read the part where the HTML cleaners were adding links to the content they were “cleaning” right? Whether it’s what is causing the higher ranking or not, they are certainly trying to do something underhanded.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      This is not how SEO works. Putting a keyword in your page's title/text/etc can help somewhat, but it's a much weaker signal than (say) a couple thousand keyword links from seemingly unrelated sites.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- lloyddobbler 5y ago
  > I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's description. While I like the thought progression you're going through, this is a "not really." Google has confirmed a number of times over the past 15+ years (going back to the Matt Cutts era) and even in the document you linked that the meta description does nothing to influence ranking in the SERPs. However, the meta title does influence ranking. I'm on mobile, so unable to dig in right now - but my guess is either this has something to do with the meta title, or the specific anchor text of the backlinks that are getting inserted via the app in question. Aside from that, agree 100% with your other assessments.
nostromo 5y ago
I've heard so much about how PageRank isn't that important to Google anymore -- but there are many reports of SEO tricks that get people on the first page of Google for common queries. It seems like it's still quite important after all.
- Lammy 5y ago
  Those can both be true. PageRank is a relic of a time when search engines more consistently returned the same results for the same query. These days we're all filter bubbled with personalized results
- advisedwang 5y ago
  They may have abandoned the actual page-rank scoring system (a quite specific implementation) without wholly abandoning the idea of using "who links to who" as a quality signal.
commandlinefan 5y ago
I suspect this will only get worse over time. There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. But, even as what's considered a professional web site has gotten exponentially more complicated, too many people see setting up an online presence as something like printing a brochure: details irrelevant. Somebody who does understand the details is going to use them to their advantage.
- onion2k 5y ago
  There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. I've been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and there has always been scammers happy to take their money. What's worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe they're actually selling a good service. There have always been people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back button, with no context menu, etc etc. Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn't any better years ago.
  - julianz 5y ago
    True. A company we bought in the very early 2000's was paying $1000 a month to an SEO "expert". The expert hadn't noticed that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all search bots but was still happy to take their money and produce faked up reports about how busy they'd been pushing search terms around.
    - zyemuzu 5y ago
      I have had two clients in two years that have had that exact issue. In both cases they were WordPress websites, my friend and I refer to them as 'WordPress Specials'. It is obscene considering the amount the clients originally paid, but it works well for me as the client immediately sees a dramatic jump in the SERPs as soon as the new site goes live, and that's before any of the general improvements in navigation, content and structure!
shanecleveland 5y ago
Could it be that Scorecounter is paying for their links to be embedded, as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both sites? If so, and provable, can they be flagged in some way? Doesn't say much for Google's ability to determine relevancy in linking or recognizing suspicious link growth. Or perhaps it just takes some time ...
- dstick 5y ago
  If I’m not mistaken, paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. Whatever weight that should carry... in my opinion you should always try to be as independent from Google as possible. It’s such a huge liability.
  - shanecleveland 5y ago
    Clearly. But I guess it is not outright proven that they are technically buying links. Though they would likely fall under some form of bad behavior in Google's eyes. And, buying or otherwise, I am not sure what the mechanism is for bringing this to Googles attention. I doubt there is another acquisition channel for a project like this that would compare to SEO (and not just Google).
  - enriquto 5y ago
    > paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. quite a strange think to say about a company whose bussiness is based on selling links (to ads)
    - shrikant 5y ago
      I believe dstick meant to say "paying [someone else] for links is still very much against Google’s policies."
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Probably. It'd be weird for a SEO spammer to put the effort into building a popular HTML editor/optimizer just to inject links to a few sites they own and operate. It's far more likely that they're offering that link injection as a service.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
Several points; the title is slightly misleading, i initially thought (in my ignorance) that OP was referring to a company employee, also this article is surprisingly open in 'naming and shaming' his competitor.
- caspii 5y ago
  Yikes, should I have shown more discretion in naming the competitor?
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    You know better then me. But i hope that since what you are saying is easily provable there shouldn't be any problem at all. Nice article, by the way.
    - caspii 5y ago
      Thanks. I think it is.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    No. People should name-and-shame more often in these sorts of scenarios.
  - janmo 5y ago
    It could be that they were acting in good faith and paid some SEO agency/Guy unknowing what was going on.
  - ben509 5y ago
    Talk to a lawyer.
qeternity 5y ago
I have little to no experience in SEO. Does Google have a history of weighing in on situations like this and manually penalizing bad actors? If so, I would love a link to read about.
- jboynyc 5y ago
  Here you go: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
  - bliteben 5y ago
    https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/ wow that's amazing, I guess I sort of quit reading blogs like this when all the RSS readers died.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      People seem to have stopped producing blogs like this ever since Facebook are the world. I wonder how much of modern search crappiness is because much of the good content that used to be in small blogs is now locked away behind facebook’s logins.
- silviot 5y ago
  They state that they don't manually pick results, but improve their algorythms to solve these problems. They prefer to share the least amount of details though, since it would better inform SEO spammers.
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    Not true, you can get penalized and you may be noticed about it in the google search console.
    - silviot 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I remembered it wrong. In this article for instance Matt Cutts details how they go about flagging individual pages [1] [1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-sites-critical-of-google-but-here-is-why-we-do-penalize-sites-150549 https://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-sites...
stefan_ 5y ago
I'm so happy the author is an ethical SEO scammer and will not stoop to these tactics.
- caspii 5y ago
  Big difference
  - adolph 5y ago
    Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…” Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?” Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.” http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/haggling-about-price.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/haggling-about-price.htm...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      Churchill has an interesting reputation. He was a failed military commander pre-PM, even ridiculed after the failed landing at Gallipoli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign Yet we most remember him as a fierce leader from the top, and he did so while under extreme stress due to U-boat attacks strangling shipping to Britain, and puzzlement from the German alien-level advanced technology (V-2 hypersonic ballistic missiles, long-range radio navigation, etc.) (His scientific advisor told him the above technologies were disinformation, and couldn't be real.) It's important to realize that while French and British public opinion became soft on the value of their culture and nationhood, Churchill knew better. Just like the pernicious impact of cultural Marxism today in the US, which must be fought as a war on every front.
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
imaginamundo 5y ago
Well, that is unfortunately. In 2015 I was fired because some issues on a site that I was working on because some friction with the company owner. Two months before I was fired I reported that some links to others sites non related to our service was on the initial page (some porn and some scams pages). After that I heard from my ex-coworkers that a manager from another area from the company told that I was fired because I was linking porn on some pages from our service. I didn’t knew at the time that those tools existed, but only today I realized that it is an option. I was really sad with that manager and didn’t understood the reason to lie to my friends the reason of my demission. But is nice to know what may have caused the issue. Better late than never hahaha.
- megablast 5y ago
  You had a job where you used an online HTML editor to create pages?? Wow.
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    And without version control, or they could have just looked back to see how the links got in there.
  - wolfd 5y ago
    Everyone starts somewhere.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't be an asshole in HN comments. We're trying for a different sort of internet here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - fossislife 5y ago
      Just my thanks for keeping HN so absolutely clean, in comparison to other online forums.
- geek_at 5y ago
ilamont 5y ago
Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers. Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Ugh Pinterest results.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have. It's literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.
    - kemotep 5y ago
      And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion and not the image which I was searching for.
      - wlesieutre 5y ago
        When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other work, and find it in its original quality without 15 generations of jpg recompression artifacts. But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the original work. Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find where it came from.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
didip 5y ago
The old Google would have hunted these down mercilessly (Panda update in 2011). What happened to Google these days?
- cirno 5y ago
  They have no competition to care anymore. Their closest competitor, Bing, has a 2.24% market share which consists mostly of people who don't bother to change their default browser's default search engine. Competition is necessary to breed innovation. See for example, IE6.
  - progx 5y ago
    That is true! Why should google do something? They say "use ads", to make money. Use other search engines is the only way to do something.
- rchaud 5y ago
  "SEO scammers got you down? Call Google Ads now!"
  - adrr 5y ago
    I’ve always wondered if Google AdWords hurts your SEO. Let’s say you sell widgets and searching for widgets you are ranked 5. You buy AdWords to be on the top. Since people click you AdWords ad that’s on top, they are less likely to click the organic listing thus penalizing your organic listing since it’s not getting clicks. Google factors in which organic listing click counts when determining ranking since it is a strong signal.
    - martin_a 5y ago
      Interesting idea. Also funny that Google Page Speed Insights was complaining about the Google Analytics JS and its caching duration. Probably different teams and competing in a strange manner with each other.
    - rchaud 5y ago
ziftface 5y ago
While I think this is extremely shady and will avoid ever using a tool like this in the future, does it actually break google's TOS? It seems like a valid defense could be made.
- shanecleveland 5y ago
  This is a valid question. Though, I would argue in this case that they have found a loophole more than anything, if they are not in violation of the TOS. As others have pointed out and the author acknowledges, he is technically injecting links when his users embed their scoreboard on their website through an auto-included link-back to his site. Now, I don't frown upon this. It is not deceptive and its placement is more than relevant. The same cannot be said for the scheme the author uncovered. But whether it is violating Google's TOS is another question. I'm not sure of the answer.
DaveExeter 5y ago
This is clever! https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubix+Cube+with+the+beginner+method%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubi...
- jesseryoung 5y ago
  I find it hilarious that this made it's way into an Amazon listing for some waterproofing chemical. https://web.archive.org/web/20210607233655/https://www.amazon.com/Star-Brite-81900-Fabric-Waterproofing/dp/B01FI61GFS https://web.archive.org/web/20210607233655/https://www.amazo...
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    I find it even funnier that it appears in a research paper: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8615/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8615/v1 (It's on page 24, at the bottom of the References section.)
    - tyingq 5y ago
      And a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson, as the only portion in English. https://zomisda.org/zokam-sabbath-school-lesson-2019/ https://zomisda.org/zokam-sabbath-school-lesson-2019/
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        Serious question: are you guys trolling? Is this like describing Rick Rolling by actually Ricking Rolling people? I only ask because when I click on these links, I get a while bunch of legitimate text, but noting actually useful. Am I missing something?
        exikyut 5y ago
        In the case of the last one it's immediately above the "Related posts" at the bottom. In all cases, this is a job for ^F. (I was genuinely surprised all the random links cited on the website _still work_, and had to search the page for them.)
bredren 5y ago
> Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version. This unknown exchange of value for “free” products and services is what everyone from Facebook and Google down to malware-like browser extensions do to extract difficult-to-acquire resources. People don’t understand how their personal data, internet connection (residential proxy network node), or in this case, publicly displayed website are being monetized or used indirectly for monetization. People don’t know or are tricked into allowing themselves or their resources to serve as an ugly cost externality to some other clean-looking business endeavor.
gitgud 5y ago
> Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version. Well, unfortunately this is basically how every freemium tool works. They have some way of advertising, in exchange for free use of the tool. Even reputable CMS tools like WordPress include back links to wordpress on a new site and themes. Although, this is much less common with open-source free tools, as the community resists these kinds of changes. No such thing as a free lunch!
FranchuFranchu 5y ago
I wonder how many similar tools are also like this. We can't trust search engines anymore.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
SomInjust tried one of these sites - and I cannot reproduce the scam - my output from htmltidy.net seems to work fine and I cannot find any weird back links. Any notes on how to reproduce?
- bombcar 5y ago
  Keep trying, it seems to only do it some times. I’ve used them and am always checking my code and have seen it a few times. Maybe clear cookies and try from a diffferbroawer?
fnord77 5y ago
I searched for my local USPS store today. Every result was some SEO crap. No usps.gov result on the first page.
- dpedu 5y ago
  Well, it's USPS.com, so... :-)
  - fnord77 5y ago
    usps.com wasn't on the fp either postofficelocations.com, postofficehours.com, yelp, postallocations, etc.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The United States Post Office in Local Town USA is a great place to buy stamps. Find out about Local Town USA mail service here at randomlocaltownmailservice dot com.
chrischen 5y ago
Similar to “my ip address” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415897. Google just seems to give way too much weight to domain name matches with the search keyword.
alphabetting 5y ago
It's worth noting the scam site is the top result in Bing and DuckDuckGo as well
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
  Yep this! How can you really beat SEO when people can just try new things all day and see if it helps their rankings? I don't feel there's a solution here. Everyone suffers under SEO types just trying to bring scammy things to the top of the results page.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    The thing is, I have a site in a very competitive niche that's full of black hat SEO tactics, and I am doing my white hat best hoping that Google tanks these sites when they update algos over time, and I'd then be the best placed to take their spots over. But in the meantime, yep... It sucks.
baby 5y ago
Same story for chrome a while back. I formatted my father computer because he had a bunch of malware. The first thing he did was to google “chrome” and download the first result. Which was an ads. Which was a malware.
superasn 5y ago
Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks to rank sites. It's 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no connection from the article to the site. Also it's pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google. P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with "offers" from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I don't think there are incentives for a change. The way it is done now is probably more profitable and the competition is doing exactly the same.
- dafelst 5y ago
  Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web. Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places. Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine
  - superasn 5y ago
    That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links. Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.
    - wyaeld 5y ago
      Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.
bluedino 5y ago
Plus google returns results that link to shit like http://edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it/somewhat-related-to-your-search.html http://edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it/somewhat-related-... And then you get re-direct to some prize-winning spam site. I love getting a search result that includes Google Books because those are usually useful. That’s what Google was best at, bringing in things that weren’t regular web pages.
funman7 5y ago
Don’t the kids say nowadays first link on google always sus
marcodiego 5y ago
If you're using google to find adequate tools, you're searching the wrong place. Wikipedia (even stack overflow) seems way better and has curated lists of open source tools for a particular purpose. Of course, wikipedia can be edited but IME, it is way better than google to find adequate tools. If you're decided on googling for a suggestion of a tool, at least include "open source". Even if you're searching for proprietary tools, you'll probably find the traditional "it has better X, Y, compared to proprietary tool W" review.
lurquer 5y ago
No great fan of Google, but a large component of the problem is the Library of Babel phenomenon: there’s just too much crap being published. Let’s face it... the early internet was interesting because the only people who could use it (and publish on it) were smart eccentrics. That was its charm. The technological hurdle served as the curator: you might have been a crazy white supremacist, anarchist, conspiracy theorist, or ‘expert’ in how to grow radishes or some other bizarrely eclectic field... but all of them were necessarily a bit smarter than the average bear just by virtue of knowing how to host content and access it; not a trivial task in the late 90’s. Maybe it’s time to think up some convoluted alternate network that is a royal pain-in-the-ass to use. Perhaps there the eclectic and useful content creators will once again arise (and searching their trove will be a snap as most everything there will be fresh, unique, and interesting.) It will exist, I suppose, for a few years before tools are made to enable grandma to easily use it.
- chrisfrantz 5y ago
  I think that’s somewhat the promise of Web 3.0 at this point. Painful to use and relatively empty. However, it’s mostly people hyping random crypto instead of actually creating value.
sova 5y ago
While Google still has market dominance, I wonder if privacy-centric search engines will be the future. I am considering putting substantial effort towards such a goal, you can sign up to learn about when at puubl.com [1] [1] https://www.puubl.com/ https://www.puubl.com/
mtnGoat 5y ago
ive learned that almost any keyword related to sale-able products has been gamed on Google. all i see are affiliate links and people that keep track of which format to build their website in, that google likes this week. more importantly, what ive also learned is that Bing search results are less of an affiliate link cesspool because fewer SEO spammers are working at gaming Bing's results.
jmspring 5y ago
The problem with an algorithm, you can find ways to game the algorithm.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> The creators of Scorecounter also made an online HTML editor Or paid the entity running the malware HTML editor. It's probably injecting links to a variety of sites who paid them for placement.
- janmo 5y ago
  He's probably selling that service on blackhatworld
- discmonkey 5y ago
  [Disclosure work at Google] Unless i'm misreading this, the publisher of the html editor can easily replace links on some pretty large websites. Then it can also hack Google to remain a top html editor. This is a very clever virus!
janmo 5y ago
It probably started with the guy adding something like "Edited using XXXX Editor tool" to make himself some publicity. Seeing that it worked he started selling those backlinks a fortune.
- slim 5y ago
  Circa 1999 I was running a webdesing studio. We added that link to all the websites we designed, then the next logical step was to make it link to a page with our entire portfolio which in turn linked to our website. That boosted the SEO of all our customers, and in turn boosted ours exponentially.
slugiscool99 5y ago
Honestly kind of a brilliant SEO strategy. Makes me nervous to use any free online tool
mastrsushi 5y ago
>Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings. You can't pretend this isn't funny as fuck lol.
fogof 5y ago
> and my personal favorite: a blog post on Kaspersky.com Wow, embarrassing for Kaspersky as a computer security focused site to be a victim of this. When I searched for "Rubiks" as it said to do, I couldn't find it though. Has the Kaspersky post been changed?
- caspii 5y ago
  Yeah, looks like they removed it.
- zulban 5y ago
  Embarrassing but understandable. Computer security isn't about perfection, which is impossible. It's about vigilance, resilience, backups, and responding quickly. I'd say they nailed it, here.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 5y ago
Imagine my surprise to find that the scammy site at the top of searches isn't w3cschools - that cesspool of terrible references. Once I discovered that everything I would ever need was better explained on the MDN my life as a webdeveloper strongly improved.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  Can you provide an example of terrible reference in W3Schools?
mpva 5y ago
You should report this to google, its clearly a huge violation of terms of service.
mjthompson 5y ago
Just an observation: your competitor site is using AMP pages,* while you don't appear to be. I suspect without knowing that Google take this into account in ranking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages * forgive my RAS syndrome
- caspii 5y ago
  I know. But I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than use AMP.
shmiga 5y ago
SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.
- topicseed 5y ago
  True to some extent but it is improving with Google updates. Now, there is a way to go still, and some legit websites get hit by updates unfortunately, but overall fewer and fewer scams pass through. SEO used to be extremely gameable (seniority of site, keyword stuffing, backlinks), but these levers aren't as obvious now, if at all.
  - shmiga 5y ago
    That is great, but can google change their algo to some point where it works differently? Their ad business is there in the web.
    - SquareWheel 5y ago
      Google changes their algo frequently. It's a cat and mouse game. Sometimes Google have the lead, and sometimes the Blackhat SEOs do.
      - 12ian34 5y ago
        the game doesn't change ... only the players
- mrtksn 5y ago
  If you Google stuff like "opening hours of ..." in Turkish(probably in other languages too), since many years the search results are only news websites spamming google, including the Turkish franchise of CNN, the CNN Turk. The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To find out continue to read our article. Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords(in sentences that don't make sense), if you are lucky there would be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere down the text. But that doesn't stop there. Even actual news articles are written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences often don't make sence, they are repeated multiple times with the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy article that doesn't have any meat beyond the title. I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics, the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts don't do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then Google pays those who generate the eyeballs. Isn't it better for Google and everyone involved if you can't find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings more eyeballs? It's not like you are going to switch to Bing? You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a library.
ra33o 5y ago
Begin to make your own content and make it public... Oh, like a blog. Like in the old days.
cybice 5y ago
As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for googlebot.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  On the other hand, Google over the years has tweaked their algorithms and recommendations to match up with what makes a good site, in terms of content and markup.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Well, yes, because googlebot is the gatekeeper of popularity and income for websites. Got to appease the decision maker.
- hyperhopper 5y ago
  The problem is, is that the internet at its conception was just a way to host content, not a way to discover content. When discovery was done via word of mouth or extra-internet means, the websites themselves were just for the people that viewed them. Now, when the website needs to not only contain content, but also be its own advertisement, writing it in a way that will maximize virality is the natural course of action to make sure the site actually gets seen. This will likely be true until a method of finding webpages that is not based on automated scraping or the page itself.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    On the contrary, the Web, being a hypertext system, was definitely always about discovering content. If you found an interesting website, it would typically link to other interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web were in the form of human-curated directories à la Yahoo. It’s just that in just a few years it became apparent that this approach could not scale, and search engines based on automatic crawlers became the norm – but again, critically, these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web’s discoverability by following hyperlinks!
31tor 5y ago
Google is getting worse and worse. It's harder than ever to find real information. All you get is seo scams trying to lour you in and sell you stuff. It's tragic. I miss the old internet.
- Johnythree 5y ago
  This: As an electronic engineer I would often search for component data sheets. Usually the sheet I wanted would be the first hit. These days however I get pages and pages of crap sites that want to sell me the data sheet. Or even pages that say that they don't actually have it.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    To be fair, this is how the web has changed too. High-value content has been duplicated and hidden behind pay walls when in the early days (ie my early days on the internet/web) everyone seemed to come with their own content and share freely.
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
      There's an inverse to this, too: Low-value content is far easier to distribute because distribution is now effectively costless, a situation deliberately created by online platforms that want bottom dollar works. This effect isn't limited to web searches, either. Social media is way worse - at least Google pays you in presumably useful web traffic. Facebook and Twitter want to trap you on platform as long as possible. Even platforms like YouTube which pay their creators have this problem. So does Amazon, which encourages dropshipping cost-optimized products from China under weird, fly-by-night brand names. Their business model is to outsource the financial risk of creating new works to someone else so they can get "content" (or in the case of Amazon, actual products) for cheaper. In the olden days, a publisher was a corporation that took on the financial burden and legal risk of publishing your work; with the caveat that only a limited number of things would be published. Thanks to a number of 90s era liability limitations, online service providers were given broad leeway on pretty much everything a traditional publisher would need to worry about: defamation, product liability, copyright infringement, and so on. This flipped the publisher model on it's head, creating the "platform model": one where you publish everything with no up-front cost or prior restraint, monopolize your creators' audiences, and make your money by taking cuts of whatever revenue streams your creators happen to establish after-the-fact. Publishers had financial incentives to make their creative works more valuable. Platforms do just the opposite: their financial incentive is to devalue content. How do they do this? First off, they call it "content", as a generic catch-all term for anything their users publish. Second, they have no quality control mechanism, allowing literally anyone to submit content and have it promoted by their platform. Third, they run their platforms off of algorithms that use user-submitted feedback (reviews, upvotes, and so on) to judge group tastes in lieu of actually having taste. And finally, sometimes they'll just outright take money away from their creators in favor of their own stuff. The reason why people were even putting high-value content on the web for free was because nobody knew how any of this would play out. Advertisers were paying far too much for banner ads, so it made perfect sense to just put all your content online, make sure people could see it, and get a lot of money. You used to be able to run a whole YouTube channel purely off of AdSense revenue! That's all gone away, now. Advertising networks pay out a lot less than they did even a decade ago, and at least in the case of Google, are also competing against their own creators for ad space to sell. (This also implies that we will never actually go back to "the web as it used to be" until everyone alive has died and we can repeat the mistakes of the past. Hell, if you ask the copyright maximalist nutters, we've already repeated the mistakes of the past - publishers of centuries past acted a lot more like Internet platforms do today than modern publishers did pre-Internet.)
Giorgi 5y ago
Ok, that's ultra-smart. Something you would think "how come I never thought of that?"
progx 5y ago
google search is garbage, that's it. We had a compititor who spams his page full with SEO garbage Words, our Software is used 100 times more than his software, more people search for our software, click it and use it, link it, but who is on 1st place in search results? Right, the SEO spammer, with the slower page, full of shiny SEO words that has nothing todo with the software. @google i wait for working AI that detects such garbage sites!
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
What I don't understand is why does Google continue to use metrics that are so easy to fake and game. Surely some kind of fairly trivial NN/Not very deep learning system can classify HTML content so that out of context links (like "Learn how to solve a Rubic Cube" in a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson) and content that is copied is ignored or marked down. Whilst I'm sure GPT-3 could be used to create more realistic looking fake content - this would eliminate 99% of the script kiddies creating low value SEO spamming sites.
- nickodell 5y ago
  Are non-sequiturs always malicious? For example, suppose you have a news site, and it has a story about Ukraine, followed by a story about school shootings. Even if two links next to one another are unrelated, that doesn't prove that they're not genuine.
  - csunbird 5y ago
    but, in your example, the context is "news" and both examples that you have provided do fall into that context.
dalbasal 5y ago
This is apropos... Google's old link-based authority algorithm, pagerank, isn't alaysing the same web anymore. I think there's barely any signal in links these days. The first major event was Google itself. Once you use something as a metric, it becomes currency. SEO vs anti-spam became a defining cat and mouse game. This kind of stuff was born then, and antispam was meant to curb it. The second major event was user generated content. The old link pages and blogrolls die slowly. Comments, twitter, and such become the way links are shared. High signal, but extremely spam prone. Google tapped out of this early, and mostly ignore user generated content. The third major event is facebook, and facebook like ways of doing things. This made most regular people's content unindexable. Search for esoteric keywords used to return a lot of forum results. Still does, to an extent. The thread is usually years, or decades old. What's left on the open web is a subset, a non random subset. Wikipedia is one of the last sites that does "hypertext" the way pagerank assumes the web works. In any case, I feel like search (or what search used to be) is in decline. There isn't as much web to search anymore, in a sense. The broad brush way of doing antispam (eg user generated content is just ignored) makes more sense. Why deal with all that noise/spam, just to search what's left of the old web. What's left? User behaviour, a la analytics. That's makes for more feedback loops and winner takes most dynamics. Localisation became localisation to your bubble. Meanwhile "officialness" measures aren't against google's ethic/aesthetic anymore. They got burned by the "fake news^" crisis, and the quick fix was officialness. In for a penny. In for a pound. Meanwhile, web search is increasingly just another thing that google search does. It searches "your" data, content of your devices, search history and NN generated whatnot. It searches news, ads, returns answers to questions, does math... There's nothing new about seo scams, antispam just isn't Google's primary solution anymore. Just default to other ways of returning results. I'm calling it. Web search is dead. Long live the new websearch. ^Circa 2015 usage, not the current
- ricardo81 5y ago
  >first major event IIRC with PageRank there were very specific values associated with 'toolbar PageRank', e.g. a PR7 link could be sold for $1K a month. Understandable because at that time there was no context to PageRank at all, it was simply about being linked to by an "authority". This was 20 years ago though.
napolux 5y ago
Worked with SEO until 2020. It's really a scam. I know people making 1000$ per month by just generating a bunch of interlinked domains with semi-random text like: 'phone number $randomNumber'.
raverbashing 5y ago
So people edit html using these "online tools" (because <p> is hard apparently) and then nobody cares to proofread, and even whole paragraphs are added without anyone noticing. Great. Nobody cares about the content apparently. Nobody checks if the generated HTML makes sense. It's all about spinning the wheel. Sigh.
billyharris 5y ago
This isn't the only website which is ranking on first position using such blackhat SEO tactics but if everyone mention them like you do, then they will surely not going to remain at top for long.
dmje 5y ago
Every time I think about developing a product I'm put off by the hell that is SEO. The whole landscape is just horrible, full of snake oil sellers. It's not like the end result is any good either: man, Google results are so fkn bland these days. You stand zero chance of finding anything interesting, it's all just MONETIZED in such a boring way. Yes, I want the old web back.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Ignore the SEO and concentrate on the product. You can worry about SEO later, there are even specialists that can help you with that.
RileyJames 5y ago
Totally agree with all the comments here, seo broke google, and they don't care. Probably sells more adwords in the end. I found uBlacklist from this thread, and the subscription functionality enables some collaborative effort. So I've started making a list, but unfortunately there aren't many uBlacklist subscription lists out there yet. Be interested to see how far this could go: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist/ https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist/
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
WTF is a html cleaner and why would you use one.
- aembleton 5y ago
  It can be used to simplify HTML, removing comments, attributes, classes or anything you like. You would use it to simplify and shorten your HTML. Here's an example of one https://html-cleaner.com/ https://html-cleaner.com/
  - Mauricebranagh 5y ago
    That's Minifcation and you'd normally thigs like https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier I am not sure what you'd use this tool for possibly for scraping work but beautiful soup is probably better for that
ricardo81 5y ago
On the positive side I suppose, at least it was just regular HTML, could've been injected JS.
thar327 5y ago
How does ahrefs.com get the information of any websites backlinks? This is more interesting than the original article itself
- aembleton 5y ago
  With web crawlers. They index the web to give you this information: https://ahrefs.com/big-data https://ahrefs.com/big-data
clydethefrog 5y ago
I have been thinking, it almost seems we are going back to the old way you would browse the web - with homepages and a page with relevant urls to other places of the web. Except the homepage is now your instagram account and a linktree in the bio.
HelloNurse 5y ago
Lately I've seen many automatically generated trash pages in high-ranking Google results, typically copied or "AI"-generated plausible text and spam links, suggesting that gaming Google ranking algorithms is a solved problem.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  Yes, those stackoverflow clones and github clones are really annoying. You think someone might finally have an answer to your problem, but it's just a copy-paste of the stackoverflow you've read previously.
LoveMortuus 5y ago
I personally think that SEO is kinda a waste of time. Because why would we have to adapt to a bot, a program. When the program should have to adapt to us. The problem is that people will always try to game the system :/
lopatin 5y ago
Sorry in advance for off topic, but seeing as how both this website and Reddit is currently down with the same 503 Varnish cache error currently, I wanted to ask how that would be possible? Surely Reddit uses their own infrastructure and not some shared hosted server where this could happen across the board? Edit: Wow, this is much bigger than just those two sites. Looks like half the internet is down. https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/
- fluential 5y ago
  Terraform.io Reddit.com same error msg, looks like CDN issue ?
  - lopatin 5y ago
    Looks like Fastly is having an outage.
- Wronnay 5y ago
  Seems like this is connected to the https://fastly.com https://fastly.com outage ;-)
diveanon 5y ago
Easiest and most effective google SEO is to just buy ads.
Wronnay 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210608085551/https://casparwre.de/blog/seo-scam/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210608085551/https://casparwre...
przemub 5y ago
I am a programmer but it gets harder and harder to find good results for anything outside my niche, not to mention outside programming. Maybe there are any alternatives being worked on? Googling increasingly feels to be a complete waste of time.
joeyoungblood 5y ago
SEO professional here, I can't see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool's admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00's used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against "widget links", which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder-about-widget-links https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder... A year later Google's John Mueller, a trends analyst who often also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster community, stated that Google might automatically apply a 'nofollow' attribute to these types of links, effectively killing their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-links-23869.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-lin... We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized, including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links has changed quite a bit over the past 5 years and there is a chance they no longer penalize for widget links (unlikely) OR that their ability to detect them has degraded significantly (my guess is the later). One thing is for certain, Google absolutely retains the ability to manually devalue links and penalize a website for violating their guidelines. They do not enjoy negative press or communinity discussions on search quality like this one and in the past have taken swift action when such issues arised in the media. At our agency we advise clients against this type of link building as it has no long-term value for a brand and could cause long-term pain instead. SEO should be used to help new brands gain a competitive advantage against more established incumbents such as a startup taking on Amazon or a new SaaS tool providing valuable data to an industry.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Scummy but pretty smart setting up such a network of sites. Even more reverse figuring it out. Bravo to the author.
CR007 5y ago
I believe that Google search quality has degraded a ton. Not surprised here. By the way, I develop proprietary software. Hope that someone reads at Google and stop indexing all those pirate websites where people steal from others. Not torrents, talking about those websites where they even sell you paid access to stolen stuff. Serously Google? You can't filter "nulled"?
- linuxfan2021 5y ago
  That must suck. All my life I've developed open-source software so I don't mind about people sharing it, but to think that people would not only take it, but actually SELL it for their own profit? People are lame.
kaltuer 5y ago
Google cannot see these frauds, and even warning works. There are ten sites on the internet and have separate domains with every term in the sector. In a SERP, you may thus observe all of its web pages that practically replicate and rephrase each other. I reported these websites, and I didn't even receive a single response.
kontxt 5y ago
Summary: https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/9LogKuJbXwihQd6nj0Y0iSP8h8tohg_MVdCI7CqYkcXqG/summary https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/9LogKuJbXwihQd6nj0Y0iSP8h8t...
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
so lazy/terrible developers were using random tools online and not noticing injected spam links into their pages. Whatever man, you're getting beat because of it, better find a new strategy. There's tons of link spam and stuff out there but google's results are still good for real content for the most part if you build it up
tartoran 5y ago
Do away with google. Problem fixed
trungdq88 5y ago
Sorry for the plug, but this is the exact reason why I build https://devutils.app https://devutils.app Developers paste their data to online websites too frequently these days.
codehawke 5y ago
We need an open source Google, yesterday.
tcarambat1010 5y ago
The site has been hammered down by google now and will be unranked since this story broke. https://html-online.com/editor/ https://html-online.com/editor/ In case you cannot view it the banner across the site says now "Goodbye! This site has been penalized for unnatural link building and will be removed from Google Search Please bookmark if you wish to continue use of the site. We are sorry and are working on fixing the problem to recover from the penalty. " They are only sorry they got caught
vagab0nd 5y ago
This sounds like something a reinforcement learning agent would do to maximize income.
joeyoungblood 5y ago
This HTML editor site has now been penalized by Google for unnatural link practices as I had assumed they would be.

1743 points by caspii 5y ago

Amazing how such a simple approach can achieve content injection on a diverse network of unrelated websites, to the point of raising the profile of the vector and increasing the chances of further spread. I hope someone figures out which other campaigns were run with these tools. Also, whether you can find output with the link injections in source code, like on GitHub or distro packages.

dataviz1000 5y ago

I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's description. The network tab in devtools isn't loading Google Analytics on you site. I think the bigger conspiracy is that Google isn't giving high search result rankings to websites that don't include Google Analytics. Part of the reason is they use time on site after following through a search result link as a dimension of quality for that search result. If that makes sense? They give 10 search results and their algorithm can tell if the search result satisfies the end user's request if they don't go back to the search results but rather continue on that site. Lastly, clicking through a search result to your site might not give the searching user what they are looking for. Amazon discovered every time a person has to click they are far less likely to purchase an item so they created one click. Your competition makes it visually clear what their site does. You probably would get far more retention on the original click to your site if you have an image of what the end product looks like in a hero, front and center (with all the meta tags described in Google's document on SEO of course.) That way people won't click back to the search results page which Google is tracking as a dimension. [0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/en/dk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/en/...

caspii 5y ago
I only switched Google Analytics off last week! I had it on for the whole time before and it made no difference.
- dataviz1000 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - johncolanduoni 5y ago
    I mean, you did read the part where the HTML cleaners were adding links to the content they were “cleaning” right? Whether it’s what is causing the higher ranking or not, they are certainly trying to do something underhanded.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    This is not how SEO works. Putting a keyword in your page's title/text/etc can help somewhat, but it's a much weaker signal than (say) a couple thousand keyword links from seemingly unrelated sites.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
lloyddobbler 5y ago
> I'd put my money that they included 'online scoreboard' as the first phrase in the `<meta name="description" content="Online scoreboard"> tag per Google's recommendations for SEO which put them ahead.[0] Also, to this one point of many when searching for `online leaderboard` you get the top spot because leaderboard is not included in the other website's description. While I like the thought progression you're going through, this is a "not really." Google has confirmed a number of times over the past 15+ years (going back to the Matt Cutts era) and even in the document you linked that the meta description does nothing to influence ranking in the SERPs. However, the meta title does influence ranking. I'm on mobile, so unable to dig in right now - but my guess is either this has something to do with the meta title, or the specific anchor text of the backlinks that are getting inserted via the app in question. Aside from that, agree 100% with your other assessments.

nostromo 5y ago

I've heard so much about how PageRank isn't that important to Google anymore -- but there are many reports of SEO tricks that get people on the first page of Google for common queries. It seems like it's still quite important after all.

Lammy 5y ago
Those can both be true. PageRank is a relic of a time when search engines more consistently returned the same results for the same query. These days we're all filter bubbled with personalized results
advisedwang 5y ago
They may have abandoned the actual page-rank scoring system (a quite specific implementation) without wholly abandoning the idea of using "who links to who" as a quality signal.

commandlinefan 5y ago

I suspect this will only get worse over time. There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. But, even as what's considered a professional web site has gotten exponentially more complicated, too many people see setting up an online presence as something like printing a brochure: details irrelevant. Somebody who does understand the details is going to use them to their advantage.

onion2k 5y ago
There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. I've been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and there has always been scammers happy to take their money. What's worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe they're actually selling a good service. There have always been people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back button, with no context menu, etc etc. Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn't any better years ago.
- julianz 5y ago
  True. A company we bought in the very early 2000's was paying $1000 a month to an SEO "expert". The expert hadn't noticed that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all search bots but was still happy to take their money and produce faked up reports about how busy they'd been pushing search terms around.
  - zyemuzu 5y ago
    I have had two clients in two years that have had that exact issue. In both cases they were WordPress websites, my friend and I refer to them as 'WordPress Specials'. It is obscene considering the amount the clients originally paid, but it works well for me as the client immediately sees a dramatic jump in the SERPs as soon as the new site goes live, and that's before any of the general improvements in navigation, content and structure!

shanecleveland 5y ago

Could it be that Scorecounter is paying for their links to be embedded, as opposed to them being the owner/developer of both sites? If so, and provable, can they be flagged in some way? Doesn't say much for Google's ability to determine relevancy in linking or recognizing suspicious link growth. Or perhaps it just takes some time ...

dstick 5y ago
If I’m not mistaken, paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. Whatever weight that should carry... in my opinion you should always try to be as independent from Google as possible. It’s such a huge liability.
- shanecleveland 5y ago
  Clearly. But I guess it is not outright proven that they are technically buying links. Though they would likely fall under some form of bad behavior in Google's eyes. And, buying or otherwise, I am not sure what the mechanism is for bringing this to Googles attention. I doubt there is another acquisition channel for a project like this that would compare to SEO (and not just Google).
- enriquto 5y ago
  > paying for links is still very much against Google’s policies. quite a strange think to say about a company whose bussiness is based on selling links (to ads)
  - shrikant 5y ago
    I believe dstick meant to say "paying [someone else] for links is still very much against Google’s policies."
duskwuff 5y ago
Probably. It'd be weird for a SEO spammer to put the effort into building a popular HTML editor/optimizer just to inject links to a few sites they own and operate. It's far more likely that they're offering that link injection as a service.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

Several points; the title is slightly misleading, i initially thought (in my ignorance) that OP was referring to a company employee, also this article is surprisingly open in 'naming and shaming' his competitor.

caspii 5y ago
Yikes, should I have shown more discretion in naming the competitor?
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  You know better then me. But i hope that since what you are saying is easily provable there shouldn't be any problem at all. Nice article, by the way.
  - caspii 5y ago
    Thanks. I think it is.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  No. People should name-and-shame more often in these sorts of scenarios.
- janmo 5y ago
  It could be that they were acting in good faith and paid some SEO agency/Guy unknowing what was going on.
- ben509 5y ago
  Talk to a lawyer.

qeternity 5y ago

I have little to no experience in SEO. Does Google have a history of weighing in on situations like this and manually penalizing bad actors? If so, I would love a link to read about.

jboynyc 5y ago
Here you go: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
- bliteben 5y ago
  https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/ wow that's amazing, I guess I sort of quit reading blogs like this when all the RSS readers died.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    People seem to have stopped producing blogs like this ever since Facebook are the world. I wonder how much of modern search crappiness is because much of the good content that used to be in small blogs is now locked away behind facebook’s logins.
silviot 5y ago
They state that they don't manually pick results, but improve their algorythms to solve these problems. They prefer to share the least amount of details though, since it would better inform SEO spammers.
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  Not true, you can get penalized and you may be noticed about it in the google search console.
  - silviot 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I remembered it wrong. In this article for instance Matt Cutts details how they go about flagging individual pages [1] [1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-sites-critical-of-google-but-here-is-why-we-do-penalize-sites-150549 https://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-we-dont-ban-sites...

stefan_ 5y ago

I'm so happy the author is an ethical SEO scammer and will not stoop to these tactics.

caspii 5y ago
Big difference
- adolph 5y ago
  Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…” Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?” Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.” http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/haggling-about-price.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/haggling-about-price.htm...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Churchill has an interesting reputation. He was a failed military commander pre-PM, even ridiculed after the failed landing at Gallipoli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign Yet we most remember him as a fierce leader from the top, and he did so while under extreme stress due to U-boat attacks strangling shipping to Britain, and puzzlement from the German alien-level advanced technology (V-2 hypersonic ballistic missiles, long-range radio navigation, etc.) (His scientific advisor told him the above technologies were disinformation, and couldn't be real.) It's important to realize that while French and British public opinion became soft on the value of their culture and nationhood, Churchill knew better. Just like the pernicious impact of cultural Marxism today in the US, which must be fought as a war on every front.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago

imaginamundo 5y ago

Well, that is unfortunately. In 2015 I was fired because some issues on a site that I was working on because some friction with the company owner. Two months before I was fired I reported that some links to others sites non related to our service was on the initial page (some porn and some scams pages). After that I heard from my ex-coworkers that a manager from another area from the company told that I was fired because I was linking porn on some pages from our service. I didn’t knew at the time that those tools existed, but only today I realized that it is an option. I was really sad with that manager and didn’t understood the reason to lie to my friends the reason of my demission. But is nice to know what may have caused the issue. Better late than never hahaha.

megablast 5y ago
You had a job where you used an online HTML editor to create pages?? Wow.
- Noumenon72 5y ago
  And without version control, or they could have just looked back to see how the links got in there.
- wolfd 5y ago
  Everyone starts somewhere.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't be an asshole in HN comments. We're trying for a different sort of internet here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - fossislife 5y ago
    Just my thanks for keeping HN so absolutely clean, in comparison to other online forums.
geek_at 5y ago

ilamont 5y ago

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers. Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

jamiek88 5y ago
Ugh Pinterest results.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have. It's literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.
  - kemotep 5y ago
    And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion and not the image which I was searching for.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other work, and find it in its original quality without 15 generations of jpg recompression artifacts. But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the original work. Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find where it came from.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

didip 5y ago

The old Google would have hunted these down mercilessly (Panda update in 2011). What happened to Google these days?

cirno 5y ago
They have no competition to care anymore. Their closest competitor, Bing, has a 2.24% market share which consists mostly of people who don't bother to change their default browser's default search engine. Competition is necessary to breed innovation. See for example, IE6.
- progx 5y ago
  That is true! Why should google do something? They say "use ads", to make money. Use other search engines is the only way to do something.
rchaud 5y ago
"SEO scammers got you down? Call Google Ads now!"
- adrr 5y ago
  I’ve always wondered if Google AdWords hurts your SEO. Let’s say you sell widgets and searching for widgets you are ranked 5. You buy AdWords to be on the top. Since people click you AdWords ad that’s on top, they are less likely to click the organic listing thus penalizing your organic listing since it’s not getting clicks. Google factors in which organic listing click counts when determining ranking since it is a strong signal.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    Interesting idea. Also funny that Google Page Speed Insights was complaining about the Google Analytics JS and its caching duration. Probably different teams and competing in a strange manner with each other.
  - rchaud 5y ago

ziftface 5y ago

While I think this is extremely shady and will avoid ever using a tool like this in the future, does it actually break google's TOS? It seems like a valid defense could be made.

shanecleveland 5y ago
This is a valid question. Though, I would argue in this case that they have found a loophole more than anything, if they are not in violation of the TOS. As others have pointed out and the author acknowledges, he is technically injecting links when his users embed their scoreboard on their website through an auto-included link-back to his site. Now, I don't frown upon this. It is not deceptive and its placement is more than relevant. The same cannot be said for the scheme the author uncovered. But whether it is violating Google's TOS is another question. I'm not sure of the answer.

DaveExeter 5y ago

This is clever! https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubix+Cube+with+the+beginner+method%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Learn+how+to+solve+a+Rubi...

jesseryoung 5y ago
I find it hilarious that this made it's way into an Amazon listing for some waterproofing chemical. https://web.archive.org/web/20210607233655/https://www.amazon.com/Star-Brite-81900-Fabric-Waterproofing/dp/B01FI61GFS https://web.archive.org/web/20210607233655/https://www.amazo...
- duskwuff 5y ago
  I find it even funnier that it appears in a research paper: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8615/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8615/v1 (It's on page 24, at the bottom of the References section.)
  - tyingq 5y ago
    And a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson, as the only portion in English. https://zomisda.org/zokam-sabbath-school-lesson-2019/ https://zomisda.org/zokam-sabbath-school-lesson-2019/
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      Serious question: are you guys trolling? Is this like describing Rick Rolling by actually Ricking Rolling people? I only ask because when I click on these links, I get a while bunch of legitimate text, but noting actually useful. Am I missing something?
      - exikyut 5y ago
        In the case of the last one it's immediately above the "Related posts" at the bottom. In all cases, this is a job for ^F. (I was genuinely surprised all the random links cited on the website _still work_, and had to search the page for them.)

bredren 5y ago

> Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version. This unknown exchange of value for “free” products and services is what everyone from Facebook and Google down to malware-like browser extensions do to extract difficult-to-acquire resources. People don’t understand how their personal data, internet connection (residential proxy network node), or in this case, publicly displayed website are being monetized or used indirectly for monetization. People don’t know or are tricked into allowing themselves or their resources to serve as an ugly cost externality to some other clean-looking business endeavor.

gitgud 5y ago

> Now if you are feeling very magnanimous, you could argue that the editor is a freemium tool, and that added links are how you pay for the free version. Well, unfortunately this is basically how every freemium tool works. They have some way of advertising, in exchange for free use of the tool. Even reputable CMS tools like WordPress include back links to wordpress on a new site and themes. Although, this is much less common with open-source free tools, as the community resists these kinds of changes. No such thing as a free lunch!

FranchuFranchu 5y ago

I wonder how many similar tools are also like this. We can't trust search engines anymore.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

SomInjust tried one of these sites - and I cannot reproduce the scam - my output from htmltidy.net seems to work fine and I cannot find any weird back links. Any notes on how to reproduce?

bombcar 5y ago
Keep trying, it seems to only do it some times. I’ve used them and am always checking my code and have seen it a few times. Maybe clear cookies and try from a diffferbroawer?

fnord77 5y ago

I searched for my local USPS store today. Every result was some SEO crap. No usps.gov result on the first page.

dpedu 5y ago
Well, it's USPS.com, so... :-)
- fnord77 5y ago
  usps.com wasn't on the fp either postofficelocations.com, postofficehours.com, yelp, postallocations, etc.
bombcar 5y ago
The United States Post Office in Local Town USA is a great place to buy stamps. Find out about Local Town USA mail service here at randomlocaltownmailservice dot com.

chrischen 5y ago

Similar to “my ip address” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415897. Google just seems to give way too much weight to domain name matches with the search keyword.

alphabetting 5y ago

It's worth noting the scam site is the top result in Bing and DuckDuckGo as well

drzaiusapelord 5y ago
Yep this! How can you really beat SEO when people can just try new things all day and see if it helps their rankings? I don't feel there's a solution here. Everyone suffers under SEO types just trying to bring scammy things to the top of the results page.
- topicseed 5y ago
  The thing is, I have a site in a very competitive niche that's full of black hat SEO tactics, and I am doing my white hat best hoping that Google tanks these sites when they update algos over time, and I'd then be the best placed to take their spots over. But in the meantime, yep... It sucks.

baby 5y ago

Same story for chrome a while back. I formatted my father computer because he had a bunch of malware. The first thing he did was to google “chrome” and download the first result. Which was an ads. Which was a malware.

superasn 5y ago

Google really needs to come up with a better way than backlinks to rank sites. It's 2021 and surprisingly for all the billion dollar A.I. it can still be gamed with a bunch of unrelated links with little or no connection from the article to the site. Also it's pretty unnatural and shady to get these backlinks. For my own SaaS site almost every blogger I contacted for a review just straight up asked me money in exchange for link. What the software did was of no consequence to this exchange. Most sites which have these "list of 10 XYZ" are just similar money making scams yet they rank so highly on Google. P.S. And likewise I too get dozens of emails daily with "offers" from free article to actual dollar amounts just for putting a paid link. These SEO guys are just relentless because such shenanigans are working great at beating Google so far.

marcodiego 5y ago
I don't think there are incentives for a change. The way it is done now is probably more profitable and the competition is doing exactly the same.
dafelst 5y ago
Backlinks are not as important as Google would have you think, they are a pretty weak ranking factor except in the deep tail of the web. Google (and others) keep up the narrative that they're important so that black and grey hat SEO folks keep focusing effort in the wrong places. Source: ran the web spam detection team on a different well known search engine
- superasn 5y ago
  That is certainly eye opening and it's really amazing news. Hopefully in future the rankings could be fairly decided on usefulness and merit than who can buy or trick the most links. Anyway so how would you explain the rankings of sites in this article? I thought all that was going for these guys were just the insane amount of links pointing to their site.
  - wyaeld 5y ago
    Google collects immense of data about people's actual visits. Backlinks used to be a proxy for how authoritative things were You don't need the proxy when you have the record of where people actually visit.

bluedino 5y ago

Plus google returns results that link to shit like http://edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it/somewhat-related-to-your-search.html http://edva.implantologiadentalecroazia.it/somewhat-related-... And then you get re-direct to some prize-winning spam site. I love getting a search result that includes Google Books because those are usually useful. That’s what Google was best at, bringing in things that weren’t regular web pages.

funman7 5y ago

Don’t the kids say nowadays first link on google always sus

marcodiego 5y ago

If you're using google to find adequate tools, you're searching the wrong place. Wikipedia (even stack overflow) seems way better and has curated lists of open source tools for a particular purpose. Of course, wikipedia can be edited but IME, it is way better than google to find adequate tools. If you're decided on googling for a suggestion of a tool, at least include "open source". Even if you're searching for proprietary tools, you'll probably find the traditional "it has better X, Y, compared to proprietary tool W" review.

lurquer 5y ago

No great fan of Google, but a large component of the problem is the Library of Babel phenomenon: there’s just too much crap being published. Let’s face it... the early internet was interesting because the only people who could use it (and publish on it) were smart eccentrics. That was its charm. The technological hurdle served as the curator: you might have been a crazy white supremacist, anarchist, conspiracy theorist, or ‘expert’ in how to grow radishes or some other bizarrely eclectic field... but all of them were necessarily a bit smarter than the average bear just by virtue of knowing how to host content and access it; not a trivial task in the late 90’s. Maybe it’s time to think up some convoluted alternate network that is a royal pain-in-the-ass to use. Perhaps there the eclectic and useful content creators will once again arise (and searching their trove will be a snap as most everything there will be fresh, unique, and interesting.) It will exist, I suppose, for a few years before tools are made to enable grandma to easily use it.

chrisfrantz 5y ago
I think that’s somewhat the promise of Web 3.0 at this point. Painful to use and relatively empty. However, it’s mostly people hyping random crypto instead of actually creating value.

sova 5y ago

While Google still has market dominance, I wonder if privacy-centric search engines will be the future. I am considering putting substantial effort towards such a goal, you can sign up to learn about when at puubl.com [1] [1] https://www.puubl.com/ https://www.puubl.com/

mtnGoat 5y ago

ive learned that almost any keyword related to sale-able products has been gamed on Google. all i see are affiliate links and people that keep track of which format to build their website in, that google likes this week. more importantly, what ive also learned is that Bing search results are less of an affiliate link cesspool because fewer SEO spammers are working at gaming Bing's results.

jmspring 5y ago

The problem with an algorithm, you can find ways to game the algorithm.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> The creators of Scorecounter also made an online HTML editor Or paid the entity running the malware HTML editor. It's probably injecting links to a variety of sites who paid them for placement.

janmo 5y ago
He's probably selling that service on blackhatworld
discmonkey 5y ago
[Disclosure work at Google] Unless i'm misreading this, the publisher of the html editor can easily replace links on some pretty large websites. Then it can also hack Google to remain a top html editor. This is a very clever virus!

janmo 5y ago

It probably started with the guy adding something like "Edited using XXXX Editor tool" to make himself some publicity. Seeing that it worked he started selling those backlinks a fortune.

slim 5y ago
Circa 1999 I was running a webdesing studio. We added that link to all the websites we designed, then the next logical step was to make it link to a page with our entire portfolio which in turn linked to our website. That boosted the SEO of all our customers, and in turn boosted ours exponentially.

slugiscool99 5y ago

Honestly kind of a brilliant SEO strategy. Makes me nervous to use any free online tool

mastrsushi 5y ago

>Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings. You can't pretend this isn't funny as fuck lol.

fogof 5y ago

> and my personal favorite: a blog post on Kaspersky.com Wow, embarrassing for Kaspersky as a computer security focused site to be a victim of this. When I searched for "Rubiks" as it said to do, I couldn't find it though. Has the Kaspersky post been changed?

caspii 5y ago
Yeah, looks like they removed it.
zulban 5y ago
Embarrassing but understandable. Computer security isn't about perfection, which is impossible. It's about vigilance, resilience, backups, and responding quickly. I'd say they nailed it, here.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 5y ago

Imagine my surprise to find that the scammy site at the top of searches isn't w3cschools - that cesspool of terrible references. Once I discovered that everything I would ever need was better explained on the MDN my life as a webdeveloper strongly improved.

forgotpwd16 5y ago
Can you provide an example of terrible reference in W3Schools?

mpva 5y ago

You should report this to google, its clearly a huge violation of terms of service.

mjthompson 5y ago

Just an observation: your competitor site is using AMP pages,* while you don't appear to be. I suspect without knowing that Google take this into account in ranking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages * forgive my RAS syndrome

caspii 5y ago
I know. But I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than use AMP.

shmiga 5y ago

SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.

topicseed 5y ago
True to some extent but it is improving with Google updates. Now, there is a way to go still, and some legit websites get hit by updates unfortunately, but overall fewer and fewer scams pass through. SEO used to be extremely gameable (seniority of site, keyword stuffing, backlinks), but these levers aren't as obvious now, if at all.
- shmiga 5y ago
  That is great, but can google change their algo to some point where it works differently? Their ad business is there in the web.
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    Google changes their algo frequently. It's a cat and mouse game. Sometimes Google have the lead, and sometimes the Blackhat SEOs do.
    - 12ian34 5y ago
      the game doesn't change ... only the players
mrtksn 5y ago
If you Google stuff like "opening hours of ..." in Turkish(probably in other languages too), since many years the search results are only news websites spamming google, including the Turkish franchise of CNN, the CNN Turk. The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To find out continue to read our article. Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords(in sentences that don't make sense), if you are lucky there would be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere down the text. But that doesn't stop there. Even actual news articles are written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences often don't make sence, they are repeated multiple times with the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy article that doesn't have any meat beyond the title. I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics, the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts don't do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then Google pays those who generate the eyeballs. Isn't it better for Google and everyone involved if you can't find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings more eyeballs? It's not like you are going to switch to Bing? You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a library.

ra33o 5y ago

Begin to make your own content and make it public... Oh, like a blog. Like in the old days.

cybice 5y ago

As webdeveloper I have a strong feeling that we are writing web for google bot and not for people. For any website I created I have a list from SEO what to add. Like 200 links at each page bottom, different titles, headers, metas, human readable urls without query params, all that canonical urls, nofollow rules etc. Most of this things invisible to users and created only for googlebot.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
On the other hand, Google over the years has tweaked their algorithms and recommendations to match up with what makes a good site, in terms of content and markup.
pjc50 5y ago
Well, yes, because googlebot is the gatekeeper of popularity and income for websites. Got to appease the decision maker.
hyperhopper 5y ago
The problem is, is that the internet at its conception was just a way to host content, not a way to discover content. When discovery was done via word of mouth or extra-internet means, the websites themselves were just for the people that viewed them. Now, when the website needs to not only contain content, but also be its own advertisement, writing it in a way that will maximize virality is the natural course of action to make sure the site actually gets seen. This will likely be true until a method of finding webpages that is not based on automated scraping or the page itself.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  On the contrary, the Web, being a hypertext system, was definitely always about discovering content. If you found an interesting website, it would typically link to other interesting sites. There used to be ways to systematize these ad-hoc linkings, such as Web rings. And the first attempts to catalogue and categorize the contents of the (then tiny) Web were in the form of human-curated directories à la Yahoo. It’s just that in just a few years it became apparent that this approach could not scale, and search engines based on automatic crawlers became the norm – but again, critically, these too are of course fundamentally dependent on the Web’s discoverability by following hyperlinks!

31tor 5y ago

Google is getting worse and worse. It's harder than ever to find real information. All you get is seo scams trying to lour you in and sell you stuff. It's tragic. I miss the old internet.

Johnythree 5y ago
This: As an electronic engineer I would often search for component data sheets. Usually the sheet I wanted would be the first hit. These days however I get pages and pages of crap sites that want to sell me the data sheet. Or even pages that say that they don't actually have it.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  To be fair, this is how the web has changed too. High-value content has been duplicated and hidden behind pay walls when in the early days (ie my early days on the internet/web) everyone seemed to come with their own content and share freely.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    There's an inverse to this, too: Low-value content is far easier to distribute because distribution is now effectively costless, a situation deliberately created by online platforms that want bottom dollar works. This effect isn't limited to web searches, either. Social media is way worse - at least Google pays you in presumably useful web traffic. Facebook and Twitter want to trap you on platform as long as possible. Even platforms like YouTube which pay their creators have this problem. So does Amazon, which encourages dropshipping cost-optimized products from China under weird, fly-by-night brand names. Their business model is to outsource the financial risk of creating new works to someone else so they can get "content" (or in the case of Amazon, actual products) for cheaper. In the olden days, a publisher was a corporation that took on the financial burden and legal risk of publishing your work; with the caveat that only a limited number of things would be published. Thanks to a number of 90s era liability limitations, online service providers were given broad leeway on pretty much everything a traditional publisher would need to worry about: defamation, product liability, copyright infringement, and so on. This flipped the publisher model on it's head, creating the "platform model": one where you publish everything with no up-front cost or prior restraint, monopolize your creators' audiences, and make your money by taking cuts of whatever revenue streams your creators happen to establish after-the-fact. Publishers had financial incentives to make their creative works more valuable. Platforms do just the opposite: their financial incentive is to devalue content. How do they do this? First off, they call it "content", as a generic catch-all term for anything their users publish. Second, they have no quality control mechanism, allowing literally anyone to submit content and have it promoted by their platform. Third, they run their platforms off of algorithms that use user-submitted feedback (reviews, upvotes, and so on) to judge group tastes in lieu of actually having taste. And finally, sometimes they'll just outright take money away from their creators in favor of their own stuff. The reason why people were even putting high-value content on the web for free was because nobody knew how any of this would play out. Advertisers were paying far too much for banner ads, so it made perfect sense to just put all your content online, make sure people could see it, and get a lot of money. You used to be able to run a whole YouTube channel purely off of AdSense revenue! That's all gone away, now. Advertising networks pay out a lot less than they did even a decade ago, and at least in the case of Google, are also competing against their own creators for ad space to sell. (This also implies that we will never actually go back to "the web as it used to be" until everyone alive has died and we can repeat the mistakes of the past. Hell, if you ask the copyright maximalist nutters, we've already repeated the mistakes of the past - publishers of centuries past acted a lot more like Internet platforms do today than modern publishers did pre-Internet.)

Giorgi 5y ago

Ok, that's ultra-smart. Something you would think "how come I never thought of that?"

progx 5y ago

google search is garbage, that's it. We had a compititor who spams his page full with SEO garbage Words, our Software is used 100 times more than his software, more people search for our software, click it and use it, link it, but who is on 1st place in search results? Right, the SEO spammer, with the slower page, full of shiny SEO words that has nothing todo with the software. @google i wait for working AI that detects such garbage sites!

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

What I don't understand is why does Google continue to use metrics that are so easy to fake and game. Surely some kind of fairly trivial NN/Not very deep learning system can classify HTML content so that out of context links (like "Learn how to solve a Rubic Cube" in a Seventh Day Adventists sabbath lesson) and content that is copied is ignored or marked down. Whilst I'm sure GPT-3 could be used to create more realistic looking fake content - this would eliminate 99% of the script kiddies creating low value SEO spamming sites.

nickodell 5y ago
Are non-sequiturs always malicious? For example, suppose you have a news site, and it has a story about Ukraine, followed by a story about school shootings. Even if two links next to one another are unrelated, that doesn't prove that they're not genuine.
- csunbird 5y ago
  but, in your example, the context is "news" and both examples that you have provided do fall into that context.

dalbasal 5y ago

This is apropos... Google's old link-based authority algorithm, pagerank, isn't alaysing the same web anymore. I think there's barely any signal in links these days. The first major event was Google itself. Once you use something as a metric, it becomes currency. SEO vs anti-spam became a defining cat and mouse game. This kind of stuff was born then, and antispam was meant to curb it. The second major event was user generated content. The old link pages and blogrolls die slowly. Comments, twitter, and such become the way links are shared. High signal, but extremely spam prone. Google tapped out of this early, and mostly ignore user generated content. The third major event is facebook, and facebook like ways of doing things. This made most regular people's content unindexable. Search for esoteric keywords used to return a lot of forum results. Still does, to an extent. The thread is usually years, or decades old. What's left on the open web is a subset, a non random subset. Wikipedia is one of the last sites that does "hypertext" the way pagerank assumes the web works. In any case, I feel like search (or what search used to be) is in decline. There isn't as much web to search anymore, in a sense. The broad brush way of doing antispam (eg user generated content is just ignored) makes more sense. Why deal with all that noise/spam, just to search what's left of the old web. What's left? User behaviour, a la analytics. That's makes for more feedback loops and winner takes most dynamics. Localisation became localisation to your bubble. Meanwhile "officialness" measures aren't against google's ethic/aesthetic anymore. They got burned by the "fake news^" crisis, and the quick fix was officialness. In for a penny. In for a pound. Meanwhile, web search is increasingly just another thing that google search does. It searches "your" data, content of your devices, search history and NN generated whatnot. It searches news, ads, returns answers to questions, does math... There's nothing new about seo scams, antispam just isn't Google's primary solution anymore. Just default to other ways of returning results. I'm calling it. Web search is dead. Long live the new websearch. ^Circa 2015 usage, not the current

ricardo81 5y ago
>first major event IIRC with PageRank there were very specific values associated with 'toolbar PageRank', e.g. a PR7 link could be sold for $1K a month. Understandable because at that time there was no context to PageRank at all, it was simply about being linked to by an "authority". This was 20 years ago though.

napolux 5y ago

Worked with SEO until 2020. It's really a scam. I know people making 1000$ per month by just generating a bunch of interlinked domains with semi-random text like: 'phone number $randomNumber'.

raverbashing 5y ago

So people edit html using these "online tools" (because <p> is hard apparently) and then nobody cares to proofread, and even whole paragraphs are added without anyone noticing. Great. Nobody cares about the content apparently. Nobody checks if the generated HTML makes sense. It's all about spinning the wheel. Sigh.

billyharris 5y ago

This isn't the only website which is ranking on first position using such blackhat SEO tactics but if everyone mention them like you do, then they will surely not going to remain at top for long.

dmje 5y ago

Every time I think about developing a product I'm put off by the hell that is SEO. The whole landscape is just horrible, full of snake oil sellers. It's not like the end result is any good either: man, Google results are so fkn bland these days. You stand zero chance of finding anything interesting, it's all just MONETIZED in such a boring way. Yes, I want the old web back.

aembleton 5y ago
Ignore the SEO and concentrate on the product. You can worry about SEO later, there are even specialists that can help you with that.

RileyJames 5y ago

Totally agree with all the comments here, seo broke google, and they don't care. Probably sells more adwords in the end. I found uBlacklist from this thread, and the subscription functionality enables some collaborative effort. So I've started making a list, but unfortunately there aren't many uBlacklist subscription lists out there yet. Be interested to see how far this could go: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist/ https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist/

Mauricebranagh 5y ago

WTF is a html cleaner and why would you use one.

aembleton 5y ago
It can be used to simplify HTML, removing comments, attributes, classes or anything you like. You would use it to simplify and shorten your HTML. Here's an example of one https://html-cleaner.com/ https://html-cleaner.com/
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  That's Minifcation and you'd normally thigs like https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier https://github.com/kangax/html-minifier I am not sure what you'd use this tool for possibly for scraping work but beautiful soup is probably better for that

ricardo81 5y ago

On the positive side I suppose, at least it was just regular HTML, could've been injected JS.

thar327 5y ago

How does ahrefs.com get the information of any websites backlinks? This is more interesting than the original article itself

aembleton 5y ago
With web crawlers. They index the web to give you this information: https://ahrefs.com/big-data https://ahrefs.com/big-data

clydethefrog 5y ago

I have been thinking, it almost seems we are going back to the old way you would browse the web - with homepages and a page with relevant urls to other places of the web. Except the homepage is now your instagram account and a linktree in the bio.

HelloNurse 5y ago

Lately I've seen many automatically generated trash pages in high-ranking Google results, typically copied or "AI"-generated plausible text and spam links, suggesting that gaming Google ranking algorithms is a solved problem.

b0afc375b5 5y ago
Yes, those stackoverflow clones and github clones are really annoying. You think someone might finally have an answer to your problem, but it's just a copy-paste of the stackoverflow you've read previously.

LoveMortuus 5y ago

I personally think that SEO is kinda a waste of time. Because why would we have to adapt to a bot, a program. When the program should have to adapt to us. The problem is that people will always try to game the system :/

lopatin 5y ago

Sorry in advance for off topic, but seeing as how both this website and Reddit is currently down with the same 503 Varnish cache error currently, I wanted to ask how that would be possible? Surely Reddit uses their own infrastructure and not some shared hosted server where this could happen across the board? Edit: Wow, this is much bigger than just those two sites. Looks like half the internet is down. https://downdetector.com/ https://downdetector.com/

fluential 5y ago
Terraform.io Reddit.com same error msg, looks like CDN issue ?
- lopatin 5y ago
  Looks like Fastly is having an outage.
Wronnay 5y ago
Seems like this is connected to the https://fastly.com https://fastly.com outage ;-)

diveanon 5y ago

Easiest and most effective google SEO is to just buy ads.

Wronnay 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210608085551/https://casparwre.de/blog/seo-scam/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210608085551/https://casparwre...

przemub 5y ago

I am a programmer but it gets harder and harder to find good results for anything outside my niche, not to mention outside programming. Maybe there are any alternatives being worked on? Googling increasingly feels to be a complete waste of time.

joeyoungblood 5y ago

SEO professional here, I can't see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool's admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00's used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against "widget links", which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder-about-widget-links https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder... A year later Google's John Mueller, a trends analyst who often also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster community, stated that Google might automatically apply a 'nofollow' attribute to these types of links, effectively killing their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-links-23869.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-lin... We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized, including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links has changed quite a bit over the past 5 years and there is a chance they no longer penalize for widget links (unlikely) OR that their ability to detect them has degraded significantly (my guess is the later). One thing is for certain, Google absolutely retains the ability to manually devalue links and penalize a website for violating their guidelines. They do not enjoy negative press or communinity discussions on search quality like this one and in the past have taken swift action when such issues arised in the media. At our agency we advise clients against this type of link building as it has no long-term value for a brand and could cause long-term pain instead. SEO should be used to help new brands gain a competitive advantage against more established incumbents such as a startup taking on Amazon or a new SaaS tool providing valuable data to an industry.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

Scummy but pretty smart setting up such a network of sites. Even more reverse figuring it out. Bravo to the author.

CR007 5y ago

I believe that Google search quality has degraded a ton. Not surprised here. By the way, I develop proprietary software. Hope that someone reads at Google and stop indexing all those pirate websites where people steal from others. Not torrents, talking about those websites where they even sell you paid access to stolen stuff. Serously Google? You can't filter "nulled"?

linuxfan2021 5y ago
That must suck. All my life I've developed open-source software so I don't mind about people sharing it, but to think that people would not only take it, but actually SELL it for their own profit? People are lame.

kaltuer 5y ago

Google cannot see these frauds, and even warning works. There are ten sites on the internet and have separate domains with every term in the sector. In a SERP, you may thus observe all of its web pages that practically replicate and rephrase each other. I reported these websites, and I didn't even receive a single response.

kontxt 5y ago

Summary: https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/9LogKuJbXwihQd6nj0Y0iSP8h8tohg_MVdCI7CqYkcXqG/summary https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/9LogKuJbXwihQd6nj0Y0iSP8h8t...

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

so lazy/terrible developers were using random tools online and not noticing injected spam links into their pages. Whatever man, you're getting beat because of it, better find a new strategy. There's tons of link spam and stuff out there but google's results are still good for real content for the most part if you build it up

tartoran 5y ago

Do away with google. Problem fixed

trungdq88 5y ago

Sorry for the plug, but this is the exact reason why I build https://devutils.app https://devutils.app Developers paste their data to online websites too frequently these days.

codehawke 5y ago

We need an open source Google, yesterday.

tcarambat1010 5y ago

The site has been hammered down by google now and will be unranked since this story broke. https://html-online.com/editor/ https://html-online.com/editor/ In case you cannot view it the banner across the site says now "Goodbye! This site has been penalized for unnatural link building and will be removed from Google Search Please bookmark if you wish to continue use of the site. We are sorry and are working on fixing the problem to recover from the penalty. " They are only sorry they got caught

vagab0nd 5y ago

This sounds like something a reinforcement learning agent would do to maximize income.

joeyoungblood 5y ago

This HTML editor site has now been penalized by Google for unnatural link practices as I had assumed they would be.