Re:Tell HN: Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) is now blocking Tor
by technion on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @06:40AM
(#30257298)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Tell HN: Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) is now blocking Tor
by Godel_unicode on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @10:16AM
(#30259342)
> ...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?
Re:Tell HN: Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) is now blocking Tor
by technion on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @07:29PM
(#30266910)
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.
Re:Tell HN: Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) is now blocking Tor
by spupe on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @07:13AM
(#30257516)
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.
Re:Tell HN: Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) is now blocking Tor
by redwall_hp on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @01:59PM
(#30262822)
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.