Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam.

"But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites.

And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless.

But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder.

And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response.

You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care.

Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?

> There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam.

This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals.

Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly.

Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.

If you target the spam business model, it won't route around it.

But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.

I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.

If there is a numbered list with referral links. 99% it's low effort referral spam trash. How they don't already filter this must be some sort active sabatague

Such links are relatively easy to hide from Google (obfuscate behind a redirect or inject with JS on user action), so if Google started using the links as a signal, spammers would hide the links, and invert the signal — only non-spammers who don't want to risk being delisted for cloaking would be left with the links, and penalized for them.

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