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Comment by technion | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how these crawlers even work. Last week I published a PoC for CVE-2022-0316. The next day you Google that CVE, and a whole bunch of foreign language sites with an exact copy of my blog would show up. My own original content wasn't on the first two pages. I hadn't linked it anywhere at all and Google Analytics shows literally 0 viewers. Yet they found it, scraped it, and had winning SEO. Seems fixed today.

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> ...Google Analytics shows literally 0 viewers.

This at least makes sense, why run the JavaScript in your scraper? It's easy to identify. What do your webserver access logs say?

Oh I get that bit, I just meant that was surprised they were able to find it basically immediately. It's not like my blog is high traffic.

That's pretty crazy. I think Google is currently losing vs these SEO exploiters, at least for some domains such as programming. The fact things switched within a week suggests they are trying to finetune their algorithm to make it less exploitable again.

Link farming, probably. If you have a network of scraper sites already, you inject links to the posts into other posts. That's one of the motivations behind comment spam as well: it builds links pointing to a site, whether people look at the spam or not.

I don't know how much Ye Olde PageRank still factors into Google results, but I'm assuming it's still a significant factor.

Your page got "fixed" because probably got some backlinks.

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