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A while ago I was doing research on guitar products. I did what I usually do, open the first 6-7 websites in google, look at the quality of the website, and ma

A while ago I was doing research on guitar products. I did what I usually do, open the first 6-7 websites in google, look at the quality of the website, and made a call which one looked the most reputable. Only, here is the thing: All of the websites had different names. They had different domains. But, they were all very... similar. And then I started to compare them, and I came to a realization: They are the same website, with the same content, with a different domain and slightly tweaked front-end. SEO has hit so rock-bottom, it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10. Similar story researching fishing equipment. Different domain. Same website. Same 10 products. In both cases, I found a discord server and asked the enthusiasts on there for advice.

Volker_W 5y ago
Can you tell me the exact query?
Traster 5y ago
This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but you're going a lot via a small increase in share.
- vecter 5y ago
  It’s more profitable to run identical clones of the same strategy N times?
  - Traster 5y ago
    Yes, it costs you $5 to run a website so just run tonnes of them and hope 1 wins. Or $500 to run a trading system, but the difference between payoffN/T and payoffN+1/T+1 is greater than 500. Assuming obviously that you have a trading system that is more or less as good as everyone else’s and N is the number of systems you’re running and T is the number of systems in the market
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Day one of "writing a reasonable search engine" would be to kill sitespam, no? Any time you see N sites with the same or very similar content, you should assume immediately drop the rank of all but a small slice at the top. You can choose to keep the one with most trusted incoming link (regular pagerank) but also you could just trust the oldest one in your index! For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow? You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.
  - Volker_W 5y ago
    > there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites I never saw a single StackOverflow clone site in my life.
    - chakkepolja 5y ago
      I think it depends on location, browser config and other things. As a another comment said, I generally get SO pages at top, but these pages with same title appear next. I thought they were different forums where there were different answers but they were just SO clones.
      - Volker_W 5y ago
        That would explain why I cannot reproduce most of the problems here.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      These days I see more clone results than actual SO results for some queries. It’s been a thing for years See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 But lately (last 6 months maybe) it exploded.
cheschire 5y ago
Yep. I lookup advice on things, find links to forums and discussion threads... the next search result is a different site with all the content from the previous site ripped off and filled into a new site template with different ads. And this is discussion threads!!
- propogandist 5y ago
  once upon a time there was a discussions filter/tab on Google and it was invaluable for researching products, places and things. Google got rid of the feature a long time ago and it's all optimized for SEO spam or Ads. Discussions and forums have also been declining, as their discoverability has decreased dramatically due to SEO spam optimizations
mcv 5y ago
I've seen that sort of thing a lot too over the past decade or so. These content farms aren't new, but still surprising. I can't imagine Google likes them, and they seem trivial to prevent: just compare the contents, and only show the best/most popular/most reputable site.
gsjbjt 5y ago
What are the usual ways to discover discord servers (also through search, or some other means)?
ehnto 5y ago
I notice this in car parts, 5 different websites all with the same catalogue. I think it's also how a lot of "influencers" start online stores. It's their face and brand but it's not their catalogue or inventory. > it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10. I don't blame them, a lot of online store's business model hinges almost entirely on SEO, and Google can change their ranking overnight for just about any kind of arbitrary decision on ranking signals. Building in some redundancy is a smart move, but it's a pretty big red flag that the ecosystem and incentives are all twisted up.
jmcgough 5y ago
I notice this a lot - when I'm search for information on a specific topic, or discussion around a specific error message from a library, there's several sites that scrape someone else's content for the purposes of displaying ads, and google doesn't always do a great job of delisting them. The other thing I hate is "top 10" lists or "is x healthy" articles etc made by a writer who has to churn out x number of articles a day. They end up doing no more than surface-level research on said topic, the site or blog makes money from ads or referral links, and I waste a minute in figuring out that the blog is low quality. Online ads have had such a negative impact on the quality of web content.
gombosg 5y ago
For non-English content, it's similar, with auto-generated Google Translated trash content treated as more relevant than content originally written in the same language. I used to struggle sometimes with DuckDuckGo but 90% of the time it now serves the same or better quality results.
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  On the other side, DuckDuckGo is bad at giving me results in Polish - so I use it only with English content. :|

Volker_W 5y ago

Can you tell me the exact query?

Traster 5y ago

This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but you're going a lot via a small increase in share.

vecter 5y ago
It’s more profitable to run identical clones of the same strategy N times?
- Traster 5y ago
  Yes, it costs you $5 to run a website so just run tonnes of them and hope 1 wins. Or $500 to run a trading system, but the difference between payoffN/T and payoffN+1/T+1 is greater than 500. Assuming obviously that you have a trading system that is more or less as good as everyone else’s and N is the number of systems you’re running and T is the number of systems in the market
alkonaut 5y ago
Day one of "writing a reasonable search engine" would be to kill sitespam, no? Any time you see N sites with the same or very similar content, you should assume immediately drop the rank of all but a small slice at the top. You can choose to keep the one with most trusted incoming link (regular pagerank) but also you could just trust the oldest one in your index! For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow? You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.
- Volker_W 5y ago
  > there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites I never saw a single StackOverflow clone site in my life.
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    I think it depends on location, browser config and other things. As a another comment said, I generally get SO pages at top, but these pages with same title appear next. I thought they were different forums where there were different answers but they were just SO clones.
    - Volker_W 5y ago
      That would explain why I cannot reproduce most of the problems here.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    These days I see more clone results than actual SO results for some queries. It’s been a thing for years See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 But lately (last 6 months maybe) it exploded.

cheschire 5y ago

Yep. I lookup advice on things, find links to forums and discussion threads... the next search result is a different site with all the content from the previous site ripped off and filled into a new site template with different ads. And this is discussion threads!!

propogandist 5y ago
once upon a time there was a discussions filter/tab on Google and it was invaluable for researching products, places and things. Google got rid of the feature a long time ago and it's all optimized for SEO spam or Ads. Discussions and forums have also been declining, as their discoverability has decreased dramatically due to SEO spam optimizations

mcv 5y ago

I've seen that sort of thing a lot too over the past decade or so. These content farms aren't new, but still surprising. I can't imagine Google likes them, and they seem trivial to prevent: just compare the contents, and only show the best/most popular/most reputable site.

gsjbjt 5y ago

What are the usual ways to discover discord servers (also through search, or some other means)?

ehnto 5y ago

I notice this in car parts, 5 different websites all with the same catalogue. I think it's also how a lot of "influencers" start online stores. It's their face and brand but it's not their catalogue or inventory. > it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10. I don't blame them, a lot of online store's business model hinges almost entirely on SEO, and Google can change their ranking overnight for just about any kind of arbitrary decision on ranking signals. Building in some redundancy is a smart move, but it's a pretty big red flag that the ecosystem and incentives are all twisted up.

jmcgough 5y ago

I notice this a lot - when I'm search for information on a specific topic, or discussion around a specific error message from a library, there's several sites that scrape someone else's content for the purposes of displaying ads, and google doesn't always do a great job of delisting them. The other thing I hate is "top 10" lists or "is x healthy" articles etc made by a writer who has to churn out x number of articles a day. They end up doing no more than surface-level research on said topic, the site or blog makes money from ads or referral links, and I waste a minute in figuring out that the blog is low quality. Online ads have had such a negative impact on the quality of web content.

gombosg 5y ago

For non-English content, it's similar, with auto-generated Google Translated trash content treated as more relevant than content originally written in the same language. I used to struggle sometimes with DuckDuckGo but 90% of the time it now serves the same or better quality results.

Claude_Shannon 5y ago
On the other side, DuckDuckGo is bad at giving me results in Polish - so I use it only with English content. :|