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Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's worse than that. The whole schtick is that it's only pure, real content by folksy people like us. The top reason to use it on the about page is:

Indexes only user-submitted sites with a moderation layer on top, for a community-based approach to content curation, rather than indexing the entire internet with all of its spam, "search engine optimisation" and "click-bait" content.

So I tried searching [kotlin] and got 123 results ...

https://searchmysite.net/search/?q=kotlin

... of which the 9th result is SEO spam! It reads:

PersonalSit.es | Yes we got hot and fresh sites https://personalsit.es/ ... Shandilyahttps://msfjarvis.devTagsandroid, kotlin, rust Go to feed Go to siteradoslawkoziel.plradoslawkoziel.pl ...

That looks like junk to me. How is that possible if what the developer says is true, that it's all verified and pre-moderated?

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Thanks for your feedback. It is just the home page which is moderated before indexing (and reviewed annually). When https://personalsit.es/ was listed it looked legitimate, but agreed the results for that site look infected with spam now. I've found at least one other site today where the home page and blog look genuinely legitimate, but which has a complete spam subdomain, quite possibly the victim of a subdomain takeover attack by spammers. I've delisted both. Unfortunately it isn't an easy task trying to defeat a vast army of well funded spammers in your spare time!

Your problem is that SEO are under no obligation to be truthful with you, and will likely pull bait and switches as far as making accounts if it ever seems like your site will catch on.

Note, I nearly spit my food the first time I was at lunch and someone was talking about SEO a few tables away...oh a decade or so ago now. It's sad it's gotten this bad.

As someone that has a few sites that can get user generated content - I must say that it saddens me that spam stuffing would get the main domain and site delisted - and likely never re-listed.

A couple times a year I get hit with a bunch of spam blogs / user profiles and when I discover and clean them up, I assume that at least google/bing see that the spam-to-real ratio has been fixed and rank it higher again.. but I'm not sure really, especially since google took keywords out of click traffic.

What would be nice is something like the 'site has been hacked page' that I've unfortunately seen a few times for sites - that lets you clean it up and submit a re-check it's clean now button thing.

I've also suggested that google make it so you have to vouch for links which would expose people using the spam stuffing techniques.. kind of the opposite of the disavow tool - but they never read any of my disavow submissions.

Sucks to get spammed, fight spam, and then be penalized for it more ways than one.

One of my older buddypress/wpmu sites I recently turned off blog creation for users because it's just so tiring fighting the spammers - which are only doing what they do because google - meh.

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