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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

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jasonhansel

This is the sort of article you expect to find on a "best reviews" website full of Amazon affiliate links.

edit: As intended, when you Google "best open source helpdesk 2021," Google now just shows the following excerpt:

> Top 10 open source helpdesk ticketing systems

> • Zendesk.

> • FreeScout.

> • osTicket.

> [...]

View on HN

There's another misleading "google featured snippet" if you search google for:

is zendesk open source?

"Unlike other open source ticketing systems, Zendesk software offers all the advantages of open source ticketing without your team having to build a system from scratch"

So, somebody at ZenDesk appears to be flexing their SEO.

This page also seems to toy with associating Zendesk with Open Source, without stating whether Zendesk is or not open source:

https://www.zendesk.es/service/help-center/open-source-porta...

Thanks for pointing this out. I just used the Feedback link in that Google search result page to specify that Zendesk is not open source. If enough people do this, it will completely negate (or even penalize?) Zendesk's misleading marketing attempt.

What is "enough"? Must be a lot to outweigh the risk of pissing off Zendesk and losing their ad spend...

Some Zendesk buying Google ads is several orders of magnitude more important to Zendesk than to Google. They're not really in a position to act pissed off about anything, when dealing with Google.

And this after the edit is the main purpose here. Tricking Knowledge Graph into regurgitating bad info, and then claiming that their site never states Zendesk is open source, and Google just misunderstood.

Time to write an article "Top 5 Best SEO Strategies 2022" with the following list:

1. Lie to people

2. Get Google to lie for you

3. Maintain plausible deniability

4. Hope nobody notices

5. Offer token apologies if you get caught

February 2022*

Those fake review sites are a blight upon the web.

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