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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this?

It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

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~2 minutes of pro-bono work:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Put in name of the bad guys. Find the blogs who blogged about their sites.

http://webylife.com/design/top-10-brand-logo-mistakes/commen...

http://www.dragonblogger.com/entertainment-television/

etc, etc. Contact them, ask them to change the link to the spam site with a link to your site.

It's stupid gruntwork, you'll need lots of it, and it will be like playing whackamole -- but it will probably work at getting them off the front page.

The other alternative, rather than de-ranking their sites, is to rank more of your own, or parasite off of high authority sites. For example, notice Wikipedia ranks for VLC right now? You know who else would rank for VLC with a trivial amount of effort? Github (&etc -- just has to be on any domain other than yours). Is there an OSS industry mag that you guys like? Have they written a review of it? Get your community to link to that review, with whatever anchor text you're having trouble with.

OSS projects shouldn't have really serious SEO issues for branded keywords -- you practically swim in link equity -- and wouldn't if marketing were treated as a priority worth addressing.

Sure.

Still, adwords, adsense or bing ads get ranked over the highly ranked website.

VLC has been linked by high profile sites for many years now. Adding yet another link from "linuxmag" isn't going to help.

The real issue is that the SEO guys are just too good and can poison the well with impunity. I feel only better competition can help this. Maybe the Bing guys can do a better job and eat Google's lunch. Quick search on Bing shows the first few links are legit but the last one isn't (and is identified as adware by our Sonicwall). Also, the ads Bing produces are fake too. Guess no one is doing a good job in this regard. I suspect shit like this is why PC users are clamoring for an "App Store." They need someone to help them properly install software.

I think the point is to remove the links from linuxmag to the bad guys.

LinuxMag is hardly high-profile. It's audience is pretty focused and limited. I imagine the audience size of the referring site influences Google's rank on the SERP.

The point isn't to increase the number of high profile sites that link to VLC, the point is decrease the number of high profile sites that link to your spammer.

I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

The difference there is "I want a link back from your site to my site." That's the point at which the offer loses all possible shreds of credibility.

That's not SEO. That's spam. SEO is about optimizing portions of your website for people using a search engine. Lumping all SEO together is akin to lumping all hackers together as criminals. I equate the techniques to those used in journalism. You want to front load the article with the most important information. The least important information should be at the end.

...or lumping hackers and crackers together as "all hackers."

Congratulations! I knew someone was going to call me out on that when I wrote it. Much easier to make pointless observations than to actually contribute, after all.

In my experience it's quite difficult to offer any web assistance for free online, I guess people are too wary of unsolicited help.

hi guys, I am the owner of the blog, webylife.com if you have any problem with the any link just get in touch with me would be happy to help you out you can shoot me a mail at nikunj.tamboli @ gmail .com

They can create their own versions of those spam sites that offer the genuine product. That's what I would do, and they should have bought up some of those domain names earlier. The URL gives a lot of hints and definitely helps SEO.

This takes a huge amount of time to do, especially when people behind VLC are doing it as a volunteer work...

it wouldn't take that long and they should be getting paid for their work as well. why not ask someone to volunteer and do this so they can get back to work on VLC itself? why not ask for some donations?

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