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There’s quite a lot of dark patterns to watch out for. One is including text on a page meant to be read by your crawler but which is hidden from users by variou
by chongli 2y ago
There’s quite a lot of dark patterns to watch out for. One is including text on a page meant to be read by your crawler but which is hidden from users by various CSS tricks. To get around this you’d either need to specifically blacklist certain CSS / DOM structures or do something very radical: render the page and then attempt to OCR it back into text to match against the original text.
- theturtletalks 2y agoRemember when Google said they would penalize websites that use dark patterns like Quora, Pinterest, Twitter, etc? Google can easily penalize those websites for their dark patterns so websites and blogs by actual people rise to the top but they don’t.
- chongli 2y agoI think they actually do that but then specifically white-list those sites. It’s really annoying!
- theturtletalks 2y agoThat’s even more damning. So the established sites are playing by different SEO rules altogether?
- chongli 2y agoI don’t have any proof. I’m just taking it as a given that this is what they’re doing because those sites are still engaging in cloaking despite Google making it clear they have a policy against cloaking.
- theturtletalks 2y agoIs their cloaking policy still active? Felt like they enforced it at the beginning, but when big sites started using the same dark patterns, they stopped? If it’s an official policy still, would love to hear why they selectively enforce it.
- lelanthran 2y ago> One is including text on a page meant to be read by your crawler but which is hidden from users by various CSS tricks. Shouldn't matter too much, I think. If the score starts off perfect, and can only go down with each thing found (i.e. get penalised), then the problem with adding human-invisible content is irrelevancy, whcih you are letting humans score anyway.
- chongli 2y agoHumans aren’t going to be there to score your content for you at the beginning. You need to deliver useful results first.