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It has long been a mantra in SEO land that user generated content sites in general and forums in particular are to be aggressively down ranked. The reason for t
by mountainb 3y ago
It has long been a mantra in SEO land that user generated content sites in general and forums in particular are to be aggressively down ranked. The reason for this is that industrial strength spam farms otherwise spin up tens of thousands of forum domains to pass link juice to what they are targeting. This naturally penalizes real forums, which often contain the best content for a query.
This is why Google has basically surrendered and why so many search result categories are now dominated by whatever sites Google has arbitrarily declared the winner through editorial decision making. In many search categories, we are effectively back where we started with Yahoo directories and hand-picked search rankings. What you see on the first page SERP is the best that they can do under the circumstances based on the fundamentals of how search works.
The web was a fun idea while it lasted, but if you are using it as a primary information resource, you are wasting your time.
- wiz21c 3y agofunny, I just rented an introductory book about signal processing and was (re) amazed to see how much the information is well explained, with tons of example, and a real plan to guide you in the ton of knowledge you have to master. I for one welcome back our new library overlords.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI think there are a number of things that could be done to improve this, but I'm sure Google won't do: 1. Heavily penalize presence of ads. The content farms makes their money with lots of shit ads. This will wreck their business model. 2. Just manually block out heavily penalize content farms and boost known good sides like SO and MDN.
- Xeamek 3y agoExcept those adds are often provided by Google itself. So penalizing them would be self harm for google revenues
- Fanmade 3y agoWell, those sites are often running ads probided by Google, so it's understandable why Google doesn't really have a good incentive to follow your first suggestion.
- mountainb 3y agoThey do penalize heavy ads. There have been shenanigans on this front also (penalizing non-Google ad networks and favoring Google ad networks). They do penalize some content farms and favor others. The issue they are concerned about with SO and MDN among other user generated content sites is covert seeding at scale for the purpose of manipulating search results. There's just a lot of fraud on the internet related to search and advertising manipulation, but it's under-policed in part because of the internationalized nature of it and because it is hard to bring fraud cases in the United States because of the particularized pleading standard. That should not stop the feds from bringing criminal cases, but generally the feds care about large dollar value frauds (as they probably should be) rather than on policing very large numbers of small dollar value frauds that have a major aggregate impact on the online economy. They like going after the guys who steal $100 million from deaf children with Lupus rather than doing 200 $500k fraud prosecutions.