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I had this topic brought back to my mind yesterday as I was doing some research using the Ahrefs keyword tool. I do believe it would be possible to create a ver
by skilled 4y ago
I had this topic brought back to my mind yesterday as I was doing some research using the Ahrefs keyword tool. I do believe it would be possible to create a very large dataset of these copycat sites (using Ahrefs) to be used as a blacklist in various filters/extensions.
But the crazy part is that, for example - Ahrefs says that StackOverflow has "Organic traffic" in the range of 22 million per month. A lot of these copycat sites, at least the ones I saw - have a traffic range anywhere from 10k to 500k per month.
I mean, it's pretty insane just how well such sites can rank in Google, and you bet those copycats are making absolute bank from ads even if the majority of developers immediately close the site.
There's a lot going on with Google Search these days, a lot of people are complaining that sites that scrape content can easily rank really well for long-tail keywords. One case in particular, a site will scrape Google to collect "featured snippets" and "people also ask" - then combined anywhere from 20 to 40 of these answers and publish them as a blog post.
None of the words are changed, all questions/answers worded exactly the same. And Google puts these sites on page 1.
What a joke.
- SheetPost 4y ago> bet those copycats are making absolute bank from ads even if the majority of developers immediately close the site I bet the majority of developers block ads
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago> I do believe it would be possible to create a very large dataset of these copycat sites Would they just move to creating and using new domains with the same content as soon as traffic to the old becomes drops? (What looks like the spammers in the original post are doing) But something does need to be done to these sites.
- fragmede 4y agoFingerprint the site’s content so the new domain name isn’t able to SEO a good score.
- gary_0 4y ago> move to creating and using new domains This is a decades-old spammer trick. Google used to not rank brand new domains very high for this reason. It's hard not to think that the only reason Google abandoned most of its old site ranking heuristics was that they were filtering out too many sites with lots of Google ads. The spam sites now infesting Google's first-page results don't look very different from the spam sites I saw back in the early 2000's. (There's more JavaScript, but modern search spiders run every page in a VM before reading the DOM, so that doesn't fool anyone.)
- ben_jones 4y agoFor all we know the sites have better internationalizations and cater to audiences invisible from a US-based perspective.
- bequanna 4y agoThese sites are just scraping SO and dumping the text from the question+answers in a blog-style format. I don’t think this is a cultural issue, I fail to see how this can be considered value add by anyone.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoI found that Google will even rank a quote from an issue tracker on one of those "clones with advert/malwar overlays" higher than the original.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoAlso sites that scrape mailing list archives and cover it in ads rank higher than the actual archive site.
- ipaddr 4y agoA/B tests can show datapoints where these sites convert better on average. Sites aren't chosen for cultural legacy but based on hitting the correct kpis.
- lamontcg 4y ago> then combined anywhere from 20 to 40 of these answers and publish them as a blog post. yeah i've been hitting a ton of those lately.
- chewz 4y ago> What a joke. It is simple. Google is making more money from copycat sites then from original content...
- unglaublich 4y ago… on the short term.
- pixl97 4y agoDoes the market care about anything else?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dan-robertson 4y agoI think this just isn’t how Google work. I would expect to see a lot more spam if Google were happy to collect money from advertising on spam sites.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI think that as Google became more complicated, bigger, and ML based the average Googler begins to understand the system less and less well. At a certain point a problem comes up and they just don't know how to solve it that well or their bureaucracy makes solving it to painful or the people who solve problems quickly have all gone to companies where they can do that.
- cyanydeez 4y agoI'm sorta happy Google is turning to garbage. Actually forcing a search engine back into the reliable index of valuable sources would be great. Imagine you to a white list approach to a search engine where a human or AI does an approval first.