Comment by alvah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alvah | Hacker News Reader

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This. Google has had it in for affiliate sites for as long as I can remember, and they specifically dislike thin content. While the site has ~250 words of value editorial at the top of the pages I've looked at, the descriptions of the products themselves are extremely thin (~30-50 words), and would likely fall foul of this Google policy: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

"Pages of product affiliation where the majority of the site is made for affiliation and contains a limited amount of original content or added value for users."

Also, the site may not comply with this policy: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

"Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it"

While I have seen much poorer quality affiliate sites than this ranking in Google, IMO this model is on borrowed time. I think the way to survive in this market is by increasing the value:affiliate ratio, and diversifying income sources, so affiliate revenue isn't the sole focus.

Agreed. I used to loathe the experience of trying to Google an Amazon alternative, and the first fifty links would be Amazon affiliates. I'd pay Google a subscription to simply block all affiliate links. I'd call these changes in Google's algorithms progress.

This could be handled locally, like uBlock. I'd like to have such a browser extension to re-filter and re-rank the search results, where I could simply ban/boost a keyword or a topic. The same extension could be applied to FB and Twitter as well - they too generate feeds that could be re-filtered and re-ranked.

Fair points. I don't scrape/spin any content, and I would argue that it's easier to write 500 words than 50, but I can see how my content might run afoul of an automated system. Plenty of the comments on this thread make similar points.

Ironically, I know of a scraper site that mirrors Amazon's bestsellers list, reformatted as blog posts: https://gistgear.com - and it's growing like gangbusters.

> it's growing like gangbusters

For now...

Is this the reason why top recipe results always contain the poster's entire life story before they ever show a list of ingredients?

This. I keep telling my wife how much I hate recipe websites. There has to be a better way! And yet, you're probably right that this is the reason. It's insane how much they have favored this anti-pattern.

That plus you can’t copyright a recipe but can copyright a story. So it thwarts scrapers.

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